Schrodinger’s Salt-Sucker

or: Tabletop roleplaying when real-world meets weird

There’s a very specific problem I am having with a very specific sort of tabletop roleplaying game. At least, I think it’s a problem; it may just be me. Let’s face it, of course it’s just me. But let us assume for the sake of argument that while it is just me, there may be at least one other just me out there who might benefit from the two of us considering the problem.

Here’s my problem: roleplaying characters that don’t believe in weird stuff in a game where weird stuff happens.

Or more specifically (I said it was a very specific sort of problem): playing ‘normal’ characters in their first encounter with weird stuff.

That is to say, playing a regular human being from the (ostensibly completely normal) real world, though not necessarily modern day (in fact, as we will see, much of the very specific problem seems to occur in the 1920s, for reasons some of you will already have anticipated) who in the course of the tabletop roleplaying session will encounter things that are out of the ordinary.

And by out of the ordinary, I am mainly thinking magic, ghosts, monsters and other weirdnesses, particularly stuff which in popular fiction is meant to unnerve or unsettle the characters. The sort of elements that you get in a horror story for example, or a wacky comedy-action film where a bunch of drop-out scientists go around busting ghosts, or where a smartass trucker encounters supernatural trouble in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Example of play – Wail of Wazuzu

Maybe it’s better if I describe a hypothetical gaming session, to illustrate my very specific problem.

A group of friends sits down to play a popular roleplaying game with a horror/investigation slant. Let’s call it Wail of Wazuzu, Wazuzu being an in effable entity of supreme cosmic madness. In Wail of Wazuzu, the friends play ordinary people (probably, but not exclusively, from the 1920s) who are drawn into a story of mystery, death and horror. This is the first session, so the characters that the players create, with the referee’s help, are all ‘ordinary folks’, albeit capable police officers, scientists, reporters and so forth. None of them are psychic wizards or paranormal investigators. In fact, this particular session of Wail of Wazuzu (I want to shorten it to WoW but now realise that that might introduce an element of confusion) is predicated on the fact that the player characters are ordinary folks with no inkling or prior knowledge of strangenesses like monsters, ghosts or cosmic entities, because much of the game’s allure is ‘ordinary meets the extraordinary’.

Thus in the first session of WoW (screw it, I’m going with it), the characters are almost certainly going to encounter something out of the ordinary. A body drained of salt perhaps, or footsteps made by no known animal, or someone claiming to be haunted by the ghost of a 12th century sorcerer. Whatever. The main thing is that the people from the real world are going to be presented, probably at first with hints, of weirdness afoot.

As the game progresses, they will be presented with increasing evidence of weirdness until at some point, they are going to be standing in front of a spectral hound or someone in a robe raising the dead or an invisible lamprey monster attempting to suck out their vital juices. At that point, presumably, the characters will be unable to deny the evidence of their eyes and will have to accept that, to quote an overused quote, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy’.

And presumably, most of the time, the characters accept that weirdness is now part of their new normal and respond accordingly by sensibly running away, desperately shooting at the weird things or rapidly consulting a dusty old tome in the arcana aisle of their local library for a spell of banishment.

SIDEBAR – Sanity Mechanics

Of course some games, perhaps even Wail of Wazuzu itself, have ways of describing those situations using rules that codify each character’s ability to deal with weird or horrifying encounters. Frequently they use some sort of ‘sanity’ rule in which players roll dice to see if their characters are able to function in the face of this new creature or concept. Sometimes they pass the test and can get on with running away, firing their gun or reading from their spell book. And sometimes they fail, and end up being told that their character has frozen in a catatonic state, started blubbering uncontrollably or has curled up into a ball and started humming to themselves.

Such mechanics are what they are, and serve a valid purpose within the roleplaying games. And I do not have a problem with them as such. My problem is in the roleplaying a character’s attitude to the weird right up to the point where a ‘sanity test’ is such exists in the game, is required. Outright denial, glib acceptance, or a tricky middle ground?

In Limbo

It’s the period between the start of the game and the ‘undeniable weird thing’ that I am struggling with. The period when your supposedly normal character from the normal world is presented with a situation which you the player absolutely knows has a weird supernatural origin – because hey, we’re playing Wail of Wazuzu y’all – but your character is not supposed to know about. Because they’re a real person and they have never heard, dreamt or thought of whatever weirdness is waiting in the wings. Sure, we the players know that we are playing Wail of Wazuzu, ‘the game of paranormal peculiarity’, but our characters in this instance are not seasoned psychic investigators with a few spook-busting cases under their belt.

So I, being a neurotic player who worries about stupid things like this, find myself in an odd position from a purely roleplaying standpoint. Which is, “I know that we are playing a game with spooky monsters in it, in fact I might even suspect which sort of spooky monster it is in this case, but my plucky marine biologist character has no idea that they are in Wail of Wazuzu. As far as they are concerned, that corpse drained of salt is a freak medical condition which they are sure science will be able to explain eventually.

So there is no earthly reason for my character to go off and start reading up on local folklore just in case they might turn up some useful tales of the legendary Salt-Sucker to be found. Furthermore, if any non-player character shows up and claims that this is the work of the Salt-Sucker, there is no good reason for my character to accept their word about such a preposterous notion. Therefore I am going to play this all just like a normal person would up to the point when a dirty great Salt-Sucker actually rears up in front of my character and proceeds to suck of the salt.”

In other words, I think there’s a risk of a strange limbo-like period in games where normal folks encounter the weird for the first time. The period of indeterminate paranormal belief between ‘this is the real normal world with no weird things’ and ‘there are weird things in the world that I accept exist’. Let’s call this period Schrodinger’s Salt-Sucker. Your character has no good reason to go haring off down avenues of investigation that point to weird things, and if you are a fan of Occam’s Razor, then your character would surely cleave to the most rational explanation for as long as is possible, even if this means balking at the referee’s secret wish that you just pick up some holy water and a wooden stake.

From real world to real world + weird

I have played in more than a few games like this, both tabletop and live action (again, frequently set in the 1920s). It is only a problem for your character ‘the first time’. But given the frequently lethal nature of some of these games mortality rates are high, and that turnover of characters means that there are many games of ‘first time investigators meeting the weird’, and many periods of the limbo between ‘real world’ and ‘real world+weird’.

Now, many people will not have encountered this problem in their games, because it is a phenomenon peculiar to the genre of ‘normal meets the weird’. You don’t get this problem in fantasy games like Dungeons & Dragons, because the characters knowingly exist in a world of strangeness and magic. You don’t get a party of D&D players struggling to convey their characters’ belief in a werewolves. “A man, who is also a wolf? The very idea!”.

Nor do you get it in sci-fi space games or superhero games or in fact any game where it is generally accepted that the population of that world or setting knows of the weird and accepts that it is a part of their reality.

And even if you do play some sort of ‘investigation into the weird’ game like Wail of Wazuzu, you as players may simply choose to gloss over the limbo-like period of Schrodinger’s Salt-Sucker and get on with the plot. Perhaps it was established, prior to starting the game through discussion with the referee, that your characters already know that the world is bigger and stranger than most people believe. Or perhaps you are simply not neurotic players like me and can’t be arsed to fret over your characters’ internal belief systems and just want to get to the bit where you open up your tommy guns on a bunch of cultists. But for those of us, and again this may simply be me, who do fret over such things, the struggle is real.

SIDEBAR – roleplaying extremes

Of course, like I said this is a very specific problem that not every roleplayer will encounter, because it’s not how they play that sort of game. I’ve been in a few games where players use one or other of the following approaches, which skirt the problem but have their own potential drawbacks:

Total acceptance from the get-go

This player’s character is by default completely down with whatever weirdness the game throws at them and takes it in their stride. There are no moments of shock, disbelief or revelation with this one. They simply take whatever out of the ordinariness the game sends their way and plunge on regardless.

This has the effect of nerfing any potential roleplaying fun the players and referee might get out of playing with the moment, or moments, of ‘ordinary meets the extraordinary’, which might be one of the major attractions of putting the game on in the first place. “Yeah, it’s probably vampires. I’ll get my flamethrower. How do I know it’s vampires? Well, it’s gotta be, hasn’t it?”

Dogged disbelief in the face of overwhelming evidence

This player’s character is the arch-sceptic or rationalist. The Scully to the believer’s Mulder. They continue to find a mundane, grounded explanation for the weird goings-on, whether it’s freak weather phenomena, gas leaks or that old chestnut ‘mass hysteria’.

They can be fun to play at first, and make for fun moments when believer and disbeliever characters clash, but there comes a point when this style of play starts to derail the plot by refusing the call to adventure that the referee has laid before them. “Vampires? Bullshit. You are all clearly delusional so I’m calling the authorities to section the lot of you. And put that flamethrower down.”

Column A, Column B

A little bit of either approach in a game is fine, and can add some interesting roleplaying friction to the character group. But total acceptance denies the game’s sweet moments of disbelief followed by shocking revelation and finally acceptance, whereas dogged disbelief eventually becomes a lead weight around the plot’s neck, slowing it all down unless and until everyone gets on board.

The challenge that I am struggling to illustrate here is one of roleplaying a character that sits between these two extremes, and knowing how to satisfyingly pace their journey from disbelief to acceptance.

Getting Round The Problem

Now, I love a good investigation game, and I love ‘real people encounter the weird’, so how can we make it so that I do not have this problem in the future? Here’s a few thoughts, some for players, some for referees and some for both.

Player – play a character with experience of the weird

Games like Monster of the Week have this concept baked into their system, so that even if you are playing a one-shot session sending your team of ‘new’ characters to investigate disappearances from a charming Scottish town, the mounting evidence that a family of medusae are behind it all (actual example, copyright G. MacLachlan) should not be beyond the characters’ credibility, even within the confines of the game’s real-world setting.

You are playing experienced monster hunters. Monsters are real. You may not know exactly which monster this is, but you are able to conceive of the possibility that it is something out of the ordinary. Although see the sidebar on roleplaying extremes for possible drawbacks with this approach.

Player – play a character with an innate acceptance of the weird

They may not ever have encountered monsters before, but they are going to be just fine when they realise that strange things are afoot. Perhaps they are ‘a bit psychic’ or have a belief system that already encompasses people returning from the dead, having encounters with aliens or simply believe the Bigfoot footage.

For whatever reason, they are not going to blink much at the concept of strangeness, and thus they will be able to instantly circumvent the belief/disbelief limbo and get on with the adventure. Again though, see the sidebar on Roleplaying Extremes for possible drawbacks with this approach.

Referee – get through the limbo period of disbelief/belief as quickly as possible

One way is for the referee to confront the players with undeniable evidence early on, but this runs the risk of undermining any mounting mystery that you might want in an investigation game. In a sense, this is what the film Ghostbusters does with a great deal of success. They have an early encounter in a library with a ghost, which is followed by the three ‘player characters’ effectively saying to each other “OK then, as some of us suspected, ghosts are real. Now let’s get on with the adventure of busting them.”

There is still plenty to investigate (and terrifying challenges for their characters to encounter), but the basic premise of ‘ghosts are real’ is a hurdle that has been neatly negotiated very early on.

Referee and Players – give the characters drives to fast-track their ‘road to belief’

The characters all start off as real-world people with real world beliefs, but it is agreed by the referee and players that all the characters will have good personal reasons for moving steadily through the limbo of disbelief to belief, and in turn towards the plot, not away from it. It helps if your characters are built with core motivations which propel them toward both the adventure as a whole and the acceptance of weirdness specifically.

Games like Trail of Cthulhu have this concept baked in with their Drive characterisation, although some drives, like Bad Luck and Arrogance are a little weak in this regard. Drives like Curiosity, Thirst For Knowledge and In The Blood – essentially ‘weirdness investigation runs in the family’ – are all excellent for reminding players to drive their characters toward the weirdness, not to ignore it.

Referee – have a The World Is Stranger Than You Think scene

Movies have these all the time, as do the pilot episodes of supernatural TV shows. Effectively the main (player) characters are gathered round and given a little talk by an authority on the subject of the weird, who – and this is crucial – is someone the players have agreed that their characters respect and thus cannot dismiss out of hand. It might be Egg Shen telling Jack Burton about an immortal ghost sorcerer, or Nick Fury presenting a slide show of documented gods and monsters, or Rupert Giles flipping through a history book of slayers and vampires.

The players have agreed to respect the authority figure in this instance, which allows them (through the referee) to ease their characters collectively from belief to disbelief in a single, managed scene. This still allows for some great roleplaying of the “Wait, so you’re saying this shit is real?” variety, but then positions all the characters on more or less the same page and allows everyone to get on with the adventure in hand.

Referee and Players – play a ‘genreless’ game system

One of the very particular features of this very specific problem is that you the player know that you are playing Wail of Wazuzu, while your character does not. By using a genre-free game system, perhaps one cooked up by the referee, you avoid any expectations of weirdness, because the players do not know that they are going to be playing in a horror game, until the actual horror hops up and starts sucking out their salt.

I myself have run and played several one-off tabletop games like this, using a home-brewed variant of the old Marvel Super Heroes system. Each session had a bland title, if any at all, like ‘The Hawaiian Storm Game’ which did not give any indication if the players should expect to encounter horror, magic, time travel or robots (though in that particular instance there turned out to be all of them. Plus the Highlander). Thus their characters were free to react however their players wanted them to react, with no expectations that they should jolly well get on with accepting the weird and break out the flamethrowers, because in this sort of game, the meta-game of discovering the genre is as much fun as the in-game plot and their characters’ individual roads to belief in whatever brand of weirdness that particular game presented them with.

It is also total legit to use this genreless approach to run a perfectly mundane game with no weirdness elements, which can be fun for wrong-footing players who have fallen into the habit of ‘it’s always vampires’. Playing a Scooby Doo-like game where the monster really does turn out to be old man Higgins in a rubber Dracula mask can be just as fun, especially when the characters have taken refuge in a church and the supposed ‘vampire’ just waltzes right in.

In Conclusion

Have I managed to get my very specific problem across? Have I over-thought it? Does the problem actually exist outside of my head? Perhaps you have encountered this problem and have some ideas of your own. Let me know.

The Liquorice Guillemot's Perch

I recently came across a character calling him/herself the Liquorice Guillemot, a blatant rip-off of your own correspondent. Rather than getting mad, I engaged this evidently bitter, angry little person in conversation and eventually drew them out on a matter close to their mean, flinty heart. To wit, their opinions on the correct use of social media, which I have reproduced below, unedited.

The Liquorice Guillemot's Promise:

I will not post up scornful broadside attacks on films, TV or other productions which other people clearly take delight in, in great numbers. If they enjoy it, fine, even if I find their facile lowest-common denominator celebrity dancing contest / Irish drag act / reheated old sci-fi franchise to be mere opium for the grunting masses. After all, it's just pretend.

Conversely, I will not post up preemptive 'Well I liked it, so there all you haters' posts, as they are also disproportionately aggressive for something that is just pretend.

I will not post up passionate commentary on sports games, either minute by minute as they occur, nor after the fact. There are plenty of professional sports journalists already doing that for us. I will especially not do this for American Football as I am tragically and irrevocably British, and there is something faintly desperate about a pasty Brit from the Home Counties waxing dramatically about the Steelers' or the Browns' performance.

I will not vaguepost. It is both needy and maddeningly uninformative.

I will not virtue signal. One's good deeds should be reward unto themselves.

I will not propagate memes which invite codependents to post up shared memories of good times, even if we only speak once every 6 months. Especially if they relate to live roleplaying games. My ego is not that fragile that it requires other people to say 'hey you did that cool thing once when you were pretending to be the archduke of Elbonia' to shore it up.

I will not address a diverse group of real human beings as either hivemind or intarwebz. You are all individuals.

I will not not post up my every inner bloody thought on subjects which are of no consequence to anyone else, nor will I exceed 3 posts per day, no matter how thrilling a picture of my newly painted spare room may seem to me.

I will not overstate any minor claims to fame that I may have by tagging in my more famous friends, or by accidentally-on-purpose mentioning a fabulous media event or celebrity that I have a moderate connection to.

I will not swear on posts, save for the odd feck, which is curiously acceptable thanks to Father Ted.

I will not post up photos of beheaded elephants.

I will not rush to be the first to announce the death of someone famous. They won't get any more alive or dead just because I blurted out 'RIP William Shatner' before anyone else and then changed my online avatar to TJ Hooker. I am not one of those people who wishes Bowie could die all over again just so I could use the Ziggy Stardust overlay.

I will not share any personal mental health issues online. The charity Mind suggests that approximately 1 in 4 people in the UK will experience a mental health problem each year. I do not need to know about the battles with depression of every fourth person I know online. By all means seek help and discuss it with close friends and family, but do so in person rather than the equivalent of shouting it across a crowded room of your entire social circle.

I will not talk politics, nor assume that everyone in my online circle is of the same mind. This merely reinforces echo chambers and forces meeker acquaintances of legitimate differing opinions to keep their heads down. This is also something to discuss in person.

Before clicking on Post, I will always ask 'Will I sound like a dick?'

I will occasionally post up funny material of my own invention which mocks only myself or made-up people. 

I may also cravenly adopt a new online persona purely to vent my frustration on the state of social media usage.

Causal Sexism

A teeny little thing happened recently and has been niggling away at me ever since. It's not even a thing that happened really. It's just something someone said. A single word in fact. A throwaway single syllable that has left me in a state of… I don’t know what ever since. See what you make of this.

I've been trying out a new garage recently. Or should that be motor mechanics? Garage is a weird one for Brits; it's the little room where you put your car, it's the place where oily people in overalls make your car better and it may even be a place where petrol and/or diesel for your car is obtained. And even some sort of music, I am given to understand.

Anyway, this is beside the point. I took my car to a new garage for to get it serviced and MOT'd. MOTted. Motted. Signed off as roadworthy. The main person there, we'll call him John, was friendly, did a good job on the vehicle and didn't charge me a fortune. So far so good. But he did also call me love.

Now, whoa there. Easy. Before you jump ahead, this isn't your common or garden casual sexism article here. Though it may well include casual sexism, and probably does, that's not the whole of the story. So let's return to our tale.

Yes, so he called me love a few times. Just casually in that sort of way he almost certainly says mate to other sorts of people, naming no names and gendering no genders. It was delivered, I have no doubt, with absolutely no thought of perpetuating the patriarchy, keeping the sisters down and or even a doomed attempt to flirt with the customer. The Ocelot is not at home to Dame Flirt in any case. It was just a throwaway term that he probably uses on lots, if not all, female humans.

Now, standard practice would be for the recipient of the aforementioned love, in these days of zero tolerance to casual sexism, to dwell upon John's love as the tool of oppression it is, and rightly so Maybe have a word with him about what century this is. Maybe quietly seethe about it to friends later. Maybe write an overly long self-regarding blog, I don't know. But your friendly neighbourhood Ocelot was momentarily pleased, for the Ocelot is differently gendered from the vast majority, and thus constantly frets about being accepted as female in day-to-day transactions, and not chased across the moors by outraged citizens wielding torches and pitchforks. And for someone who is regularly 'sirred' on the phone (usually by overseas call centre operators) it was thus a strangely validating incident, and yet one that was also, of course, a bit sexist.

So I am, much like Natalie Imbrugliuglia, torn. I should be irked and annoyed and peeved at John's sexosity, but I am also a bit grateful that at least one stranger that day accepted me for my apparent gender. Of course, one cannot possibly know how others see oneself in terms of gender identity, not without engaging the services of a first-year psychology student with a clipboard and a questionnaire who constantly follows one around at a discrete distance and asks anyone that one has encountered on the street or in a shop what they made of one, genderwise. Incidentally, I have no idea why I have started using one all of a sudden. It may be in an attempt to use a gender neutral term that avoids the foulness of it, the plurality of they and bonkersness of zhe.

Many among the differently gendered strive for total transition. 100% confirmation of the gender to which they identify. Sometimes this is called passing or going stealth or simply fitting in. Some folks achieve this goal with great success, either through luck of genetics and physical features, transitioning at a young age (something increasingly common, though perhaps a bittersweet pill for older folks who switched sides later in life after the ravages of puberty had left their mark), or simply through massive amounts of practice, therapy, medication, surgery and ongoing cosmetic treatments. Some others are happy to exist somewhere in between the monolithic poles of M and F, and this self-identification as gender non-binary is an increasingly acceptable option in recent years, and rightly so.

But for a lot of the differently gendered, an occasional confirmation that society accepts who one (there I go again) wants to be is a welcome pellet of encouragement. In a life where one may be constantly fretting about walking funny, talking funny, looking funny, it's nice every now and again to get a bit of a thumbs-up from someone, though they know it not, who says yes, you're fitting in. Even if it is a bit of casually sexist chitchat from an oily fossil who's just been fiddling with your sparkplugs.

It's a weird situation. I am literally holding two opposing opinions of the incident at the same time. Which might make me some sort of philosopher. Or nut. Or vacillating wuss. It's like Schrödinger's Casual Sexism. Or maybe Causal Sexism. It both is and is not insulting. Both is and is not validating of different states of being. Or transition. Or identity. Argh.

I do know it's bloody confusing though.



Actually, now I come to think of it, he may have called me sweetheart. Is that better or worse?

Writing a block buster

WARNING: contains self-regarding nonsense

I've been trying to get a game down on paper – on digital I guess – since the weekend and am completely tied up in knots and stressed to fuck about it. Which is completely stupid because a) it shouldn't be this bloody hard and b) nobody asked me to write this, nobody's paying me to write this, nobody knows I want to write this. I made up a rod for my own brain and am now beating myself up with it. I can't move past it and can't resolve it, being a monotasker of singular intensity, which is great when I'm on top of the task at hand – nobody can clear moss out of the paving blocks on a driveway like me – but a complete fucking crippling deadlocked disaster if I'm unable to complete the task. In this case, unable to even bloody start the task. It's in my head, swirling and crashing against my forehead like a scratched CD or the Tasmanian Devil, and I can't resume anything like a normal mental life until I get this sorted. Somehow.

Arse.

Write what you know, they say, so instead of trying to write the thing that I want to write, I'm going to attempt to use a loophole in my brain's stupid monotasking rules and write about writing about the thing that I want to write. I think meta-writing is allowed. Perhaps by just splurging out every thought I have about my problem I can get this bastard problem out of my head, maybe get the actual thing I want to write about sorted and done and dusted or failing that, at least express my frustrations here in a way that maybe gives me some insight into a way forward, or failing that even, gives me some small satisfaction that I've written something even if it is just this meta-flagellation. Sometimes I think I just need to get a certain word count down and recorded to stop my head from filling up and harming itself. Maybe that's why other people keep diaries and proper writers write. It's not for the fame or to get an idea across or to entertain others. It's to stop their brains from filling up. So I'm just going to start squeezing my mind and get all the idea-pus out and keep squeezing until it all comes out in a jumble and my brain bleeds clear and true. It might empty my brain with no clear useful thoughts set down here, but It Will Be Out Of My Brain, and that is a good thing. For as long as I can remember, I have feared forgetting things. Whether it’s the name of an actor in a TV show, the secret identity of a superhero, or a cool idea for a game I once came up with, the thought of losing that thought is terrifying. Like Dr Hans Zarkov, formerly of NASA, once said: don't take my mind – it's all I have.

So – and I apologise for the overuse of so in this – let's call the problem what it is – block. Writer's block I guess, but that is probably a self-aggrandising term considering I've hardly written anything to get bloody blocked in the first place. It's more like thinker's block at this early stage. It's not like I'm stuck at chapter 7 or anything. How to describe what it feels like? It's like… it's like I have something, part of an idea for a book/game, but not all of it. No, that's a rubbish description. First off this book/game is a Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) thing – a very particular sort of writing, which probably doesn't help. A strangely structured story with multiple paths to the ending or multiple endings. It requires story writing skills plus game writing skills and a very particular approach to structuring and balance, as the reader has agency when reading it – they choose to go left or right and are thus invested in the material in a way that differs from passively reading a conventional fiction book from start to finish. It must feel fair to them, like they had enough information to make the right choice or at least feel as if they had a chance of 'winning', if indeed winning is an option, and if it isn't I suppose that I ought to state that in the introduction to the CYOA.

But I'm straying here – what I'm supposed to be doing it describing my thinker's block. OK, so I've an idea for a CYOA. I got this idea at the weekend, possible on Sunday. Probably in the bath, which is a terrible cliché but it does work for me sometimes. As does going to the loo or doing the washing up. Enforced 'creative thinking time sat in front of the laptop' is sometimes the very last thing I should do. Anyway, it had been a semi-unsatisfactory weekend for various stupid reasons; hours spent searching for a computer security reader so that an online game could be played, guilt at not organising my time enough to visit my family for a couple of hours, frustration at trying to do some relaxing model painting only to discover that some of the paint had dried up and the brushes were manky, and sadness that someone seems to have replaced my formerly excellent close-up eyes with old person's eyes which go all blurry when I bring a model up close to paint. In many ways I am the opposite of Colin the Forger from The Great Escape played by Donald Pleasance. I can't see close up to work and people six feet away are not a blur.

So I was frustrated and feeling unproductive. Unproductive is bland word. Maybe worthless. Stupid, right? But if I haven't achieved useful things every day I feel rubbish and black sadness starts to creep in. I refuse to name it the D word because I think that makes it real. Also I dislike the metaphor of the Black Dog because I like dogs and it in no way feels like a dog to me. If I had to describe or characterise it, I would call it the Tar Pit, sans woolly rhinos (a reference which will only make sense if you had an Aurora model kit in the 70s), because it's deep and cloying and sucks me in and makes it hard to breathe.

Actually that's probably worth mentioning – I'm finding it hard to catch my breath. The air quality this summer in our area has been shite. I'm on the Ventolin several times a day which is very unusual for me. It occurred to me this week that being slightly short of breath all day is almost certainly a sure way to experience constant low level anxiety. The perfect breeding ground for other problems.

Sorry, I still haven't described the block. What it's like… It's like there's an idea or a bunch of ideas crashing around in my head, but they're all only partly formed. I can't catch onto to one without it melting away the moment I turn my attention to it, like trying to grab your reflection in water – a lazy metaphor I must have pinched from somewhere. I am unable to focus, to concentrate. The sheer, sheer pressure of wanting to get it down on digital and out of my head is interfering with my ability to calmly organise it mentally. I simply can't hold a thought about the CYOA long enough to get it all out. Sure, I've made an attempt – I've got a small 2-page word doc knocking around that I started to write this week, and a 3 minute voice memo on my phone. I guess they indicate some sort of progress, but it's nothing like the coherent 'story ideas' I've seen written down in – I dunno – Alan Moore scripts.

That's another thing – I get very depressed that (shit – sorry – I used the D word) as soon as I have an idea of an idea I think that it can't possibly be as good as something Alan Moore or indeed any professional writer could write, and I get very intimidated and the spectre of failure creeps in. I mean, there are so many writers out there, people who wrote their first Victorian detective story at the kitchen table before getting the kids off to school, or down the pub in the evenings. How come those people can do it, and I can't? I don’t have kids to worry about or even a very demanding job. Christ, I've hardly had anything to do at the office the last two days and could easily have skived it, writing the CYOA right there in the office quietly, but no - I couldn't. I'm too caught up in the block and panic about the block and frustration and Tar Pitness - Tar Pity? - about the panic.

What is the block like? It starts off not as a block but as the initial surge of the idea in the bath, something that is a feeling of an idea that could be a cool thing to write – a general emotional impression of the sort of thing I want to do (a choose your own dinner party, if you can believe such a ludicrous thing). It's like a surging fire inside, a wave of Feeling and Idea that if I can just surf the crest of and think it through to its complete shape, I can get it down on paper and out of my head and feel happy about it. Christ, I think as long as I got the idea out of my head and on digital, I would probably be OK if I didn't actually write the whole thing out properly, just a structure from start to end and the characters and so on. So I was surfing this wave of creativity, feeling it inside me, getting out of the bath and then, I dunno, I lost it. I fell off the wave and it rushed past me and I've been trying to catch up with it ever since. The wave is in me and rushing past me. It's like a merry go round spinning far too fast in front of me. When I was on it, it was fine, I was going at the same speed as it and it was all good, but then I fell off or threw myself off and now it's far too fast for me to jump back on. I keep trying and reaching out my hand and I cling on for a few minutes and start to get up to speed but then I slip off again and the merry go round keeps rushing around and around in front of me. I can't turn away from it or turn it off. I need to get back on it or I need it to be gone like it was never there.

Now I could at this point mention how I have trouble knuckling down to work on things like this. How the washing up and sorting out my comic boxes and watering the plants seems like being productive. Hell, it is productive, just not productive on the thing that is most important to me – writing something, creating something. I will leave nothing else in this life but the things I write. I don't build buildings, or make movies or save lives or have babies. When I am gone there will be nothing left of me but words and ideas. And if I don't get them down then I will limp through life knowing that I have wasted my time and added nothing, left nothing. My mind is all I have. But sometimes I think it hates me.

Sorry, that all got a bit dark. So, the block. It's whirling and bouncing and yelling in my head. I have bits of ideas for this fucking CYOA but I can't get it sorted and coherent enough to the point where the merry go round runs smoothly to its conclusion, slows down and goes quiet. So let's call a temporary halt to all this navel gazing and meta shit and look unblinkingly at the idea and try to get it down. I'll just bung it all down in any order so that hopefully a lot of the jigsaw puzzle pieces are at least on the table. Then maybe I can see them all in one go and start to rearrange them, find the edge pieces at least and maybe make up some of the missing corner bits.

Oh lookee – I've written over 2000 words of whiny crap in 58 minutes. Yaaay.

I really should have ended this on the 'I think it hates me' bit, as that is kind of cool, but I really did go on to write another 3000 odd words on the actual game, which I have not shown here, just in case I get the bastard thing written. At the time of posting this up, it's still not written, but I have at least started it. The Tar Pit still has me in its clutches, but I am reaching spastically for a handy vine to pull myself out. Or is that a quicksand metaphor?

Half-Remembered Telly

In the dark days before DVD boxsets and cable and satellite and YouTube, between the fall of Betamax and the rise of the sons of TiVo, there was just telly. Three and a half channels of terrestrial British TV (Channel 4 didn't get going until the afternoon episode of Countdown in those days), pumping out any old material they felt like - coz what else were you going to watch?

In this shiny and glorious modern age of instant televisual gratification, with repeats of old Only Fools and The Sweeney eternally circling the plugholes of Dave Ja Vu and ITV4, it might feel like everything we've ever watched, everything that was ever made, is now available for us at the click of a mouse or the touch of a remote (or the fiddly swipe left - hold - tap twice manoeuvre of a tablet or smart phone). But I don't think that's so - I think there are countless shows that were made, shown the once and have since languished nearly forgotten, naught but vague memories treasured only by social inadequates who rarely left the house between 1985 and 2001 (ahem).

But fear not, for I have undertaken - for once without resorting to IMDB for obsessive fact-checking - to dredge the deep dark recesses of my memory, like an Adventure Game contestant consigned to the black hole of the Argonds, with only the voice of Johnny Ball and Leslie Judd to guide me. Here then are my half-remembered telly shows.

Oh, quick disclaimer: I'm not saying these shows are necessarily any good. I bet they've dated really badly. In fact a lot of them were well ropey at the time. Best filtered through the rose-tinted lenses of a failing mind.


The One Game
A bloke who invented a popular board game is hunted? tormented? by his old business partner, played by Inspector Chisolm off Minder. The main bloke is utterly forgettable. The theme tune is a bit like the Clannad music from Harry's Game (not disappointing radio 4 sitcom Old Harry's Game). I remember really wanting to own a copy of the game, and always assumed the main characters were based on distorted versions of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone of Warlock of Firetop Mountain fame.

Knights of God
A sombre dystopian drama starring an utterly forgettable teenage lad, not unlike him from Merlin or one of the teenagers in The Tripods. It's Future Britain and it's gone really religious and police statey, like with armed monks and cool swords and black helicopters full of blokes who look like Federation troopers from Blake's 7. It's a bit like a non-drag version of the Two Ronnies' The Worm That Turned. And it had the excellent John Woodvine as the father-abbot and the second Doctor and even Blake himself. The theme tune was a stirring medieval Monty Python and the Holy Grail type affair. SPOILER: the boring lad turns out to be the true king of Britain or something.

That one with the evil computer game about killing people
Oh you know. It was probably another 3-parter. There was a CD or DVD that you put in your PC and a (possibly bald) man's face came on the monitor screen and talked you through doing bad things. And then people in real life started getting killed. A bit like playing Atmosfear with terrible consequences. It was probably called Killgame or murder.com. It wasn't great. Play 7th Guest instead.

Pulaski
This one was really quite good. Even though I can't remember any of the actors who were in it. It starred an American (I think. He may have been Canadian or a Nicola Bryant fauxmerican) actor playing an American actor playing a fictional detective-priest called Pulaski. The hook being that members of the public confuse the callow actor with his heroic character, leading to him and his entourage becoming involved in all sorts of investigative hijinks. It felt a bit like Lovejoy with less antiques and saucy posh ladies. Cool thriller theme tune.

The one with the alien invasion with the bloke from Remo
Oh, it's on the tip of my tongue. It's all British apart from Fred Ward as an American military guy - presumably Michael Brandon was busy being the token American somewhere else. There were aliens and... other stuff. It was ultimately disappointing and evidently eminently forgettable. Thinking about it now, it feels like an episode of Nu-Who without a smarming know-it-all Doctor taking a pop at anyone in a uniform.

Chimera
In which the most exciting and spooky thing happens at the end of episode one and it all dribbles away after that. There's this woman investigating something and there's these kids who have a secret friend called 'Mister Scarecrow' who hides near their remote farm and he turns out to be a Murderous Monkey Man armed with a blade who SPOILER kills the investigative woman at the end of episode one, leaving some boring bloke to follow it up. Gets mixed up in my head with First Born, The Nightmare Man and inexplicably Law and Disorder starring Penelope Keith.


Okay, that's it. Brain scoured.

Must... resist... scouring for clips of... Call Me Mister on... YouTube...

The Rupert Affair

WARNING! CONTAINS SHOCKINGLY FRANK TRUE-LIFE CONFESSION OF FORBIDDEN LOVE

Living in an apartment block can be an oddly isolating business. Despite having neighbours above, below and to either side of us, we rarely see them. It’s odd to think that your bedroom must be within 30 feet of at least 4 other bedrooms full of other people sleeping - and doing other stuff - but you could go days or weeks without seeing those people. And if you live in a modern - by which I mean ‘tissue-thin walled’- apartment, you might hear your neighbours but you won’t often see them. The dull distorted bass of a TV next door, the patter of a toddler’s feet above, the slam of the front door a few floors below, might well be the extent of their impact on your life.

Good, you might say. The last thing you want is to be aware of your neighbours’ comings and goings. Their late-night rows during summer when the windows are open, their horrible boiled cabbage cooking seeping up through the extractor fans, their nasty chain-smoking out on the balcony just below your busy lizzies. This is true; those are all unpleasant aspects of living cheek by jowl, but it can be just as weird when you just don’t see your neighbours at all.

You know they’re there. Cars appear and disappear outside. Apartment doors open and close. Washing machines vibrate and drains gurgle. But you never meet, you rarely even see your fellow rezzies. Oh, maybe a fleeting nod of acknowledged existence as you pass in the car park, but that’s practically it. Without front gardens and drives, there’s no common area; no reason to linger or potter. We all trot smartly from our cars to the front door, up the stairs and into our hermetically-sealed broadbanned habivirons every evening, only to reverse the process in the morning on our way back out into the world.

The only folks with a reason to bump into other people are the dog-walkers. A couple of times I've tried to join in on one of their impromptu gatherings in the car park, idly passing the time as their respective pooches get down to some serious mutual bum-sniffing. But it always feels weird if you haven’t got a dog yourself, like being the only single person at a dinner party or some kind of pervy dog-hag. I have honestly considered walking around the estate with a realistic toy dog on a lead just to give me the excuse to hang out with all the cool dog people.

* * *

But all that changed about a year ago, when this new guy moved in upstairs, and we just started sort of seeing each other.

At first Herself and I didn't know his name. We just called him 24, after the number of his apartment. He moved in with some other folks, but he doesn't seem to be that close to them, spending a fair bit of time out in the hallways and stairwells, just hanging around. But not in a threatening way. He just has that kind of look, you know? Like he just enjoys his own space. After a while we learnt that his name’s Rupert.

He’s often coming in as we’re going out, or vice versa, so it was just natural that we've got to know each other. To start with we wouldn't really talk as such, just say hello as we went about our days. But that was enough, at first. Just that simple contact with someone else.

Of course it didn't stop there. It couldn't. He’s come into our place a couple of times now, curious I guess to see how it compares to his own apartment on the floor above. Would you believe the first thing he did was run into the bedroom for a look round? Amazing. He seems to have no concept of privacy, but for some reason he gets away with it. He has that kind of a face, I suppose.

What’s grown over this last year is an odd, episodic sort of relationship – sometimes just him and me, sometimes him and Herself, sometimes all three of us. Whatever; it all feels fine, comfortable with each other. Just a few minutes of brief contact out in the corridor, rarely speaking. A few minutes of physical contact, perhaps a few nibbles or some simple stroking and nuzzling. That’s enough for all of us, and then we get on with our respective lives. You might say that sounds cold, mechanical, almost business-like, but it’s really not. Just uncomplicated. Wonderfully uncomplicated.

And so this strange affair with Rupert carries on to this day. The only dark shadow in our little world is his family upstairs. They don’t know about us, about what we have together. I don’t think they’d like it if they knew. It’s been close a couple of times, the sound of their apartment door suddenly opening above, giving us just seconds to break off and scamper back inside our own flat before they come down and see us in the hallway with those tasty fish-flavoured Dreamies ™ in our guilty, guilty hands. Rupert probably wouldn't care though. He’d probably just give us all a look and start licking his back leg, like he always does. The little scamp.

Don't judge our love

A Trader Among Us

Spring is here, and for me at least that also means the start of the show season, after my long winter’s nap. I was at my first wargame show of the year only last weekend. Perhaps you were there too and we chatted, but quite possibly not, as I fall into that peculiar category of Non-Male Gamer.

To spare blushes all round, let’s call this particular show Fracas ’14, following the tried and trusted formula of ‘something fighty + the year’ (which raises the dire spectre of a show called Combat 18 in four years’ time). If there really is a Fracas wargames show somewhere in the world, please let me apologise now. At any rate, this show took place in a school or sports centre somewhere in the UK, and I was there in my official capacity of ‘trader’s hanger-on’. This means I get the tea and bacon sandwiches, bang on endlessly about Doctor Who, and occasionally hand small metal figures over to customers in return for money. My time as anything remotely resembling a booth babe are sadly several years, and pounds, behind me.

The first thing that happens as I walk into the show hall is that the folks on the entrance table won’t let me pay. It’s under a fiver, but they tell me women and children go free. Try as I might, the ticket chaps won’t take my money and just wave me inside. Why complain about that, you may well ask? You just got in free – surely that’s a result. Yes, true, but I really would like to pay my way. I’m not in financial difficulty and I don’t need ‘ladies night’ style inducements to come into this predominantly male domain. I know about pillboxes and tanks, for goodness’ sake! I know sculptors and painters and scenery designers. I’ve written combat rules and can measure the blast radius of a mortar attack in inches at a glance. I’ve even read Anthony Beevor’s phone book-sized Stalingrad from cover to cover and only very occasionally nodded off.

What I’m trying to say - with possibly a hint of stereotypical hysterics - is that it is conceivably possible for persons of the female persuasion to actually want to come to a games show. Not all women are there simply to be dragged around a hall full of demo games and trade stands on a Sunday afternoon by their husband/boyfriend/sons, helpfully carrying a large bag full of recently-purchased polystyrene scenery while their menfolk root around the bring and buy for an old box of Descent On Crete. Some, like me, might want to be there in their own right.

But here’s the really funny thing about going to a show that I’ve noticed. Women develop the super-power of invisibility the moment they walk into the hall. Other women can see each other - they wave hello from behind trade stands to familiar faces in a ‘fancy seeing you here again isn’t it a bit chilly’ sort of way. But for many men, women are evidently invisible or see-through or, I don’t know, cloaked like the Predator. I know this is true because I’ve experienced it on countless occasions myself.

I’ll be stood there behind the trade stand with my male chum, playing the delicate cat-and-mouse game of customer engagement: say hello too briskly and you may spook them off, say nothing and they may drift away unloved and unenhanced by our fine products. It’s like fishing for skittish human beings. One or two chaps are loitering around the stand, eyeing the goods in a potentially purchasey manner. One of them is already talking to my chum, possibly asking him when we’re bringing out a heavy weapons crew for our range or asking for a rules clarification. And I’ll be stood there right next him, trying to catch the eye of one of the other guys on the other side of the table, giving the half-smile and raised eyebrows of the time-honoured non-verbal ‘can I help you’ opening.

But do they notice? Do they make eye contact? Do we chat about release schedules and rule supplements and ranged attacks? No, not very often, to be honest. I’m knocking on six foot tall and  wearing my ‘hello my name is Helena please talk to me’ t-shirt, which I got specially made as an ice-breaker, so by all rights, they should be able to see me. But apparently not. They would rather mill around waiting for their chance to talk to the chap next to me, so I can only conclude that my mysterious invisibility powers - which would be frankly awesome if they worked at any other time - have kicked in once again.

Now, I’ve exaggerated for comic effect of course. But not by much. Some guys will quite happily come over and engage with me. Some will converse about the agony of dry-brushing Skaven fur or the relative merits of the Liberator vs Scorpio. Some offer me fudge. And a few have been hilariously unable to raise their gaze from a point approximately twelve inches below my eyes. But hey, at least they can see me, or at least a part of me.

This sounds like a big long whine, but it’s really not intended as such. I’m just saying: do come over if you see me behind the stand. I’m the tall strangely-shaped one. Do not be afraid. Talk to me. I will talk back to you. Perhaps you will buy something from me and we will emerge from our brief encounter satisfied (you) and enriched (me). At the very least I will know that I’m no longer invisible.

But you know the best bit about being a woman at a games show? The loos. They’re always empty! I was talking to another woman after Colours at Newbury racecourse last year and we realised that we practically had the ladies to ourselves for the entire weekend. She had all the ones on the left, I had all the ones on the right. Luxury.

An edited version of this article first appeared in Miniature Wargames #372, March 2014

The Night My Parents Came To Kill Me

Here’s something I wrote for a creative course a few years ago. The assignment’s brief was something that deeply affected me. Do read on.

* * *

I did try to think of some nice incidents in my life to talk about, honest I did. It’s not that there haven’t been any beautiful moments; there have. But I think I’m a bit embarrassed when it comes to the mushy stuff. Now, funny, embarrassing and/or terrifying moments from my personal history, those I can do. So this is about the night my parents came to kill me.

It must have been sometime around 1982, which would have made me twelve or thirteen years old. I was at the age where my parents had begun to let me stay up quite late to watch television. My brother, two years younger, would have been packed off to bed an hour or two before me, so I was able to enjoy one of those great privileges of being the older child. I could watch things he couldn’t, and then tell him about them in the morning, mainly to show off. I loved it.

Sometimes I saw some real gems of the early 80’s, like Soap, which spoofed American daytime dramas I had never seen. It was this funny programme about two feuding families, but here’s the weird thing, and just goes to show how the age of the viewer totally affects how they experience something. For about four episodes, Soap terrified me. It was a subplot about a baby being possessed by the Devil. It boiled down to this one scene: a lavish child’s bedroom, with a cot in the centre. The child itself is unseen, the crib facing away from the audience. The lights in the bedroom flash on and off spastically, the windows at the back blow in from a sudden gale, and all the toys start to fly about. The worst bit by far was the baby’s voice. This deep man’s voice laughing like the Devil. Now, more than two decades on, I can laugh at the silly voice and talk about how it’s just a spoof of Rosemary’s Baby. But at my tender pre-teen age, it scared the life out of me.

I must have hidden my fear well though, because my parents continued to let me stay up late and watch all sorts of things that, in retrospect, were quite unsuitable. I think I saw more horror films before the age of thirteen than anyone else at my school. My dad was a bit of a horror film fan, and had often regaled us all with his renditions of masterpieces like Les Diaboliques, Onibaba and Das Totenschiff. Looking back on that list now, I think it’s just as likely that he was into foreign films, some of which inevitably happened to be horror. But it was the spooky stuff he told us about, and infected us with. He certainly never let me stay up late to watch Jules et Jim.

So horror films were a fixture in my young life. I loved those nights when I was getting ready for bed just as something good was starting on the TV. In my mind, I see myself looking intently at the screen over my shoulder as I take my sweet time getting up off the sofa and inching towards the stairs, hoping that Mum or Dad would get the message and let me stay.

On this one particular night, there was a new film on BBC1. It was Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. I’d heard of it already, because there was had been an advert for the film on the back of the American comics I collected. The picture hadn’t given much away, but the fact that it had been advertised on the back of an issue of the Fantastic Four and was now here on British telly was good enough for me. I had to see it. This was the 1979 version of the film, by the way, not the black and white original with, crucially, the slightly upbeat ending tagged on. This was the bleak remake with Donald Sutherland. If you’ve not seen it, look away now, because I’m about to spoil the end scene.

Previously, a handful of men and women have discovered that people are being replaced by alien pod-creatures as soon as they fall asleep, and so are forced to spend a terrifying night on the run from the increasing numbers of body snatchers as they are gradually whittled down one by one. In the last scene it is finally dawn and one of the survivors, a woman, stumbles down a city street trying not to betray herself to the emotionless clone-people walking by her. She sees a fellow survivor, played by Donald Sutherland, and staggers over to him, gratefully blurting out her story. He stares back at her impassively, then raising an accusing finger, lets out the trademark howl of the body snatchers, alerting his fellow pod people to her presence. And that’s the end of the movie. The pod creatures take over the world and everybody dies.

Hell of an ending.

I was shaking in my pyjamas. This was much worse than Forbidden Planet or any of the Hammerish horror films I’d seen, even the one about the zombies on the trans-Siberian express. As the man from the BBC announced closedown and the national anthem started to roll, Mum sent me upstairs to brush my teeth and go to bed. And this is where it gets really scary.

We lived in a big detached house in the woods. A great place in daytime, with a massive garden to play in and a tree house down the bottom. But at night, it felt different. There were no street lights outside. The other houses were hidden from view by screens of trees and thick sprawling rhododendrons. Inside was little better. My parents, ever conscious of the electric bill, insisted on lighting being kept to a minimum at night. So there would be one 40-watt bulb for the upstairs hallway, just enough to get you from your bedroom at one end to the bathroom at the other. And there was another problem; there was another floor above ours. The stairs leading up there were curtained off by a thick blanket, mainly to keep the heat in, but it also meant that there was this concealing but all-too flimsy screen that I would have to navigate past if I was to make it to the bathroom and back.

So that was the situation: gone midnight, post-Body Snatchers, I was stood at the top of the stairs, the reassuring lights of the living room below terminating at my feet. Ahead was the dimly lit hallway, with the spooky blanket hanging down halfway along. At the end was the bathroom, and beyond, my parents’ bedroom. They were still downstairs, doing all the ritual locking-up tasks my dad insisted on every night. My brother was already safely asleep in his bedroom at my back. If the body snatchers got him now, he’d never know about it.

I trotted quickly to the bathroom, the left side of my body tingling in anticipation of something jumping out from behind the blanket. It hadn’t happened so far, but every night the danger was there. Having reached the bathroom, all I had to do was brush my teeth and I’d be halfway done. I stood at the sink, one eye on the mirror so I could see the open doorway behind me. The fact that this precaution would be no good against a vampire was ever present in my mind. And still is, if I’m honest, every time I look in the rear-view mirror of my car at night. I hadn’t closed the door; the reasoning being that I preferred to see monsters coming, rather than opening the door and having them right there in my face. I suppose I feared surprises just a little bit more than any actual creature.

Unmolested by vampires, I finished my teeth and stood at the bathroom doorway, one hand on the light switch, as it was forbidden to leave extra lights on. All that was left now was to get back down the hallway and jump into bed, where I had my own bedside light and a massive torch from Tandy’s that doubled as a deadly club. It was at this point that my parents came up the stairs to kill me.

Just like in a classic horror film, I first saw the elongated shadows coming up the stairs, accompanied by a dreadful creaking beneath their feet. I was frozen at the bathroom door as my mum and dad marched slowly upstairs and turned woodenly toward me. And then I saw what they were carrying. It was a pod. One of the long green marrow type things that the body snatchers used to shrivel you up and grow an alien replacement that would howl. They stepped toward me.

Almost exactly like this. But in colour.

I think I slammed and locked the bathroom door on them. Thank God that this was the only room upstairs with a lock, ever since my second cousin Marcus had come to visit and been funny about using a toilet you couldn’t lock. I backed away from the door as far as I could. Not like in those films where they put their face right up against the door so the monster could just stick its clawed fist straight through and rip their face off. My body had gone all hot and cold at the same time, and the skin on my shoulders, neck and head felt funny. This was it. In the time it had taken for me to brush my teeth, my parents had been taken over by the body snatchers and now they’d come for me. I would eventually fall asleep in the bath and be shrivelled up.

It probably took my mum about ten minutes to convince me it was all a joke. I think I looked through the keyhole to make sure, which is when I saw that the ‘pod’ was in fact my brother’s toy marrow, a big plastic vegetable with a friendly smiley face and antennae. They didn’t sound all that emotionless, so I eventually relented and unlocked the bathroom door, wiping snot and tears with my sleeve, and trying to make out that of course I wasn’t scared. I thought they were burglars; that’s what it was. Not body snatchers, that was stupid.

They did then start to feel a bit bad. Possibly they saw through my façade of coolness and suspected that perhaps I was still a bit too young for that sort of film, or at least too young for a practical joke about them being taken over by alien pod people and then coming for me. I think that was the last horror film they let me watch for a while.

* * *

The Mighty World Of Me #3

Another comic effort. A bit longer than usual.

The Mighty World Of Me #2

Another comic effort.

Dead Man Talking

Heard an incredibly depressing interview on my drive to work this morning, in the grim wet gloom two days before Christmas.
Totally bummed me out, so I've squeezed it all out of me and onto paper. Keyboard. Screen. Whatever.


I listened to death today.

Not Death with a capital D.

No dour Discworld reaper,

nor gamine Gaiman goth girl, no;

I listened to a dying man,

who exuded his oncoming death

with each emphysemic, leukemic breath.                          

For half an hour in my car

I listened to him breathe his death

on Start The Week with Andrew Marr.

A man so near the end

you could feel the mortality

seeping out of the radio.

Blanketing me in the bleakness

the blackness

the sadness

of his poetry.

You're not dead yet Clive,

but I'm mourning you now

and thinking back

to the funny fat-faced man on the telly

saying 'Meanwhile, on Endurance…'

and showing us clips

of silly people from around the World,

and writing what is was like

falling towards England

with only a cardboard suitcase,

a Singapore suit

and mushy slushy Chelsea boots.


Normal light-hearted hijinks will resume in due course.

The Mighty World Of Me #1

Thought I'd try doing a webcomic. This is my first effort.

Roleplayer! the Comic Strip

Some 10 years go, a chum from the world of Rolling Dice And Running Around With Rubber Swords phoned me up and asked if I wanted to do a little comic strip for a magazine he was working on for a newish roleplaying company.

Now since 'Do your own comic book' had been on my To Do list since the age of six, I readily agreed, and began sketching out - literally - my ideas for a series of 3-panel strips, not a million miles away from Yamara and Knights of the Dinner Table. Only more bitter in tone and drawn by a palsied homunculus.

The result was Roleplayer!, the prototype of which follows below. Since I am a) not a very good cartoonist, b) rubbish with Photoshop and c) lazy, it involved an awful lot of photocopying a handful of basic images, cutting them out by hand and overwriting (poorly) with Tipp-Ex and felt tip. Still, I thought it was funny.

Roleplayer! Playtesting a new system

"Great," said the friend from the magazine, "only we're now thinking we'd like a full-page comic. Can you manage that?"

Um, OK, says I. Since I like rilly wanted to do my own comic strip. So back to the drawing board I went (dining table, actually), and came back with this next effort. You may recognise the theme from the Player Archetypes article I had written around the same time (Module G4 - Mock-Tudor Coaching Inn of the Stone Giant Voivode).

Roleplayer! Petz

"Great," says the friend again, "only now we've got this fantastic new idea for a story about three games developers and a talking rodent, sitting around a table talking about their new company. Do you think you could draw that for us?" A script was duly sent to me. It read like a self-indulgent portrait of the actual games company guys. And worse, it wasn't very funny.

So now I had gone from the writer and artist of my own little 3-panel strip to the artist of someone else's not-very-funny script. And after a week of trying and failing to draw a funny talking rodent, I contacted my friend and begged off the entire deal. There endethed my glorious career in RPG satire comics, thus leaving the field wide open for Rich Burlew's The Order of The Stick...

But I like to think that in alternative dimension, things went a little differently, and I am even now closing the deal on the fifth collection of Roleplayer! graphic novels, and reaping the royalties from the associated gaming spin-offs and Lego figures.

(I still think Spumebeak is a great name for seagull familiar).

On Spoilers

SPOILER ALERT

Do not read further if you don't like to know about things that you haven't read or watched. Plot twists are spoken of, events are revealed, deaths are divulged.

A year or two ago, just before the first Game of Thrones TV programme came out, I was lambasted on an online forum - that bastion of civility and restraint - for spoiling; that is, giving away as yet unbroadcast - or at least unseen by some people - plot. Bear in mind I hadn't even seen the show yet myself, nor had I read any reviews, sneak peaks or indeed any spoilers. So what could I have said that so upset the pseudonymous forumite so?

"Sean Bean's character dies."

(or words to that effect)

You know what I based that statement on? The fact that Sean Bean was in the show and the show wasn't called Sharpe's Dragons. As we all know, Mr Bean (not that Mr Bean), has a habit of playing characters that peg it before the credits roll. And we love him for it.

"All you've got to do is stand, and fire three rounds a minute. Now, you and I know you can fire three rounds a minute. But can you stand?"

Anyway, even though it was meant as a knowing joke about the pigeon-holing of a certain actor, it didn't go down well with at least one person on the forum, and I was duly upbraided for spoiling the forthcoming Game of Thrones TV series for him. Fair enough, you might say, my words were ill-chosen.

But wait a minute, isn't Game of Thrones the TV series based on A Song of Fire and Ice, the best selling book series? And wasn't the first volume, A Game of Thrones, first published waaaay back in 1996, some 15 - count 'em - 15 years prior to the telly series going out? Wasn't it reasonable to assume that the events of this first book at least might well be fair game by now? Especially on a geektabulous forum like this one (frequented by gamers).

So here's the thing - can you spoil something that's already been out in the public domain for 15 years? What about if something's been out in book form for 15 years and we've (I say we, y'know, geeks) been happily discussing it for ages when all of a sudden a TV adaptation comes around, opening it up to a wider audience? Do we then shut up as the work is now available to a whole new demographic (who presumably have not visited the fantasy section of Waterstones or other leading book sellers for a decade and a half)? Is there not a statute of limitations on spoilers?

Then what if they suddenly announce, I dunno, a TV series based on Iain M Banks' Culture books? Apart from that being an awesome idea, do I have to suddenly refrain from discussing the books, in case somebody who A) wants to watch the series but B) hasn't read the books, is listening?

What about the forthcoming Amazing Spider-Man 2 movie, featuring love interest Gwen Stacy? Am I supposed to not say that in the comics Gwen died in 1973? 

The inherent dangers of sudden weblash

Should I pause and consider, before mentioning any work of literature (and yes I bloomin' well am including books and sci-fi, thankyouverymuch) that may be adapted to a visual medium at some point in the future, if anyone present considers themselves to be a member of the set of elements A intersection B (see above)?

Or should I just, like, never talk about anything that might be on TV or film that may have been based on something else? Coz, I'm telling you, if you take comics and sci-fi and TV and films away from me, I'm pretty much a conversational vacuum.

By the way, Vader is Luke's dad, Verbal Kint is Keyser Soze, Bruce Willis' character is a ghost, that's Gwyneth Paltrow's head in the box, and Zakalwe was actually Elethiomel all along. Ha!