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The Inexorable Temptation of the Forbidden Plot Device

The is a vexing contrarianism that happens when someone working in a shared setting seems to be ineluctably drawn to come up with premises that bend if not break rules set up by previous creators.  So perhaps the high elves of Lindaria were killed off to an elf during the Demon Wars and their power and wisdom lost forever.  Except for this one in hiding for five hundred years.  And this other guy.  And this one is technically sort of undead.  Ooh, and there’s a secret magic interactive library in these caves, and the user interface is totally a hottie.  Did I mention my protagonist is actually one-sixteenth Lindarian high elf?

I’m not saying you should never do it, but it seems more prevalent than seems sensible to me.  I want to see more “Yes, and” in collaborative worlds and less “Well, actually…”  For example: if you want to write about the aforementioned high elves, set your story before the Demon Wars.  Or do something exploring in more depth what killed them, and why.  Or set a story in one of the dendropolises they left behind.  You can explore what’s interesting about the elements of a shared setting without undermining them.  And you should.

Adapted from an essay originally published on Google Plus
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Necromantic Checkers

Playing games with my son is always a bit of a Calvinball enterprise.  However, when he insisted this weekend on playing checkers, the result was actually kind of interesting.  (The following, like its predecessor the 94-penny pie, is edited for coherence.)

The game begins like an ordinary game of checkers.  However, once a player has captured any of her opponent’s men, she may use her turn to place a captured man on any light square of the row nearest her (assuming that square is presently empty).  A man captured on a light square is removed from the game permanently. The interesting thing about this variant is that you wind up playing two overlapping and interlaced games of checkers, playing both colors at once.  It becomes much more challenging simply because the state of play is much more difficult to evaluate.

Originally published on Google Plus
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Cartography for preschoolers

Lately, my older son has decided that his favorite game is for me to draw maps for him.  After a handful of treasure maps, he decided that we should draw a “regular map”, and we collectively improvised the map attached here.  I drew a coastline, and then he would suggest things, and I would suggest other things, and the map just sort of filled itself in, along with accompanying backstory.  This may be the most fun game I have ever played with Jack.

The main geopolitical issue in the mapped area is how the various human towns near the great swamp seen in the center right defend themselves against attacks by the Serpent Folk, whose fortress can be seen in the middle of the swamp.  The kingdom which lays claim to the entire area has nominal responsibility for the towns’ defense, but in practice the towns on the far side of the swamp from the capital (the circle-with-star at the top of the bay) are defended by towers manned by the Order of Assassins, whose fortress can be seen at the edge of the desert in the lower right.  A town along the north edge of the swamp, meanwhile, depends on the elves of the forest for its defense.  The Great Tree of the elves appears in the middle of the forest (and is not drawn to scale).

Other notable features include the two mountains north of the human capital, each of which houses a mighty dragon.  There is a royal fortress in the valley below to keep an eye on the beasts.  There is another, larger double mountain in the south, west of the Assassin fortress, which has a mysterious cave near its summit, at the end of a long and winding path.  There is also an inexplicable tropical island off the coast.  We know little about it, other than that it definitely has monkeys.

Originally published on Google+
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Irish stories

Lately my older son has been demanding “Irish stories”, which is where the whole salmon leap incident came from. This is, in itself, all well and good, but I had forgotten just how much of Irish folklore and mythology is extremely, extremely violent.

As a result, I’ve been doing sort of a on-the-fly bowdlerization of the Mythological Cycle, which is working out OK so far; we had a multi-night rendition of the Sons of Tuireann in which they found relatively peaceful ways of gathering all the random magic items, and Lugh was not in fact an enormous dick at the end. Of course, sugar-coating the violence doesn’t really work that well; the story I told was that the Sons of Tuireann had “hurt Lugh’s father really bad”, but in future installments my son was asking questions about how they killed him.

You can’t really get around Balor taking a spear to the eye, either; in the bedtime version Lugh used the spear that the Sons of Tuireann recovered which has to be immersed in water when not in use, because reincorporation is awesome.

He is freaking fascinated by Irish mythological spears; we had to talk at extreme length about the episode where Sreng of the Firbolg and Bres of the Tuatha de Danann meet on the field of potential battle, size each other up, and say, “Dang, son, where’d you get those sweet spears?”

I already used up the bits of the Ulster Cycle which are not tragic tales of honor and revenge, which turns out to be not very much of it. A 4-year-old with a younger brother does not need to know the tale of Cu Chulainn and Ferdiad at the ford.

Originally published on Google Plus

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A very small flu

This morning, my older son pulled one of his stock shenanigans by deciding that he no longer wanted to eat his carefully planned and negotiated toast sticks with butter and jam because I was also going to make some for his brother, and indeed that he was no longer going to eat anything at all for breakfast. I told him that it is extremely frustrating when he launches his impromptu breakfast boycotts, and I wish he wouldn’t do it. He looked pensive for a moment, and then explained that during the night, a “very small flu” gets into his brain, and makes him act that way, but that after some exercise, he would be all right. He then did a few rounds of calisthenics, proclaimed the flu defeated, and agreed to eat his toast.

I assume that pleading the insanity defense is some kind of development milestone, but I can’t imagine where it would be listed.

Originally published on Google Plus
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Ghulhunds, and other dungeoneering breeds

Today, as I was unsuccessfully trying to get my dog Finn’s attention to get him out from underfoot, my wife tried to observe that Finn “was interested only in leash”, but it came out “was interested only in lich.” It made me wonder what sort of specialized monster-hunting dog breeds exist in heroic fantasy worlds.

Does the city watch descend into the sewers with a pack of ghulhunds, bred to root out undead in close spaces? Are there wyvern-tolling retrievers? Are dungeoneers perilously close to a TPK ever unexpectedly rescued by a St. Bernard/blink dog hybrid with a cask of healing potion around its neck? Do some parties bring along specialized trap-sniffing dogs?  (If for no other reason than to be able to say “What do you mean we didn’t say we check for traps?  The f&$(%ing dog always checks for &#)(%ing traps, it’s literally the meaning of its existence!”)

Inquiring minds want to know.

Originally published on Google Plus

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Jack and the Mountain and the Stinky Cheese

One of my angsts over the last year or so is that my son demands a story before bed every night, and I dread it, and this is deeply at odds with my sense of myself.

I discovered today, however, that this is because he demands stories “of when you were a little boy”, and I went through all my good stories long, long ago.  Also, life stories from memory are not that fun for me; I have an unreasonably good memory, but the indexing is crap, and trying to call stuff up from thirty years ago is difficult at the end of a long day.

Tonight, however, he wanted a story about “monsters”, and so I got to improv a story on the fly for the first time in many, many moons, and that was a lot of fun.  And so I record it here, because why not.

–Once upon a time there lived a young boy, and let’s say his name was Jack, because boys in fairy tales generally are called Jack, it’s a thing.  He lived in a village, and it was extremely boring, because the thing about living in a village is that like twenty people live there, and you’re related to half of them, and nothing ever happens.  So Jack said to himself, “I will See The World!”

–Jack looked out from his village and he saw a far-off mountain at the edge of the world, and he decided that he would climb that mountain.  So he walked and he walked and walked through the woods, and he crossed a river, and more woods, and he came to a town, and it was HUGE, there must have been like a hundred people living there.  And they had an inn, and Jack had lunch there.

–Do you know what his lunch was?  It was a bowl of soup, and the soup was made out of goat, and he had a big chunk of brown bread, and a lump of cheese, which was very good but also very stinky, and finally an onion.  And he ate his lunch, and then he kept on walking.  And he crossed more forest, and then a big wide grassy place, and then into the hills, and then the grass stopped and he was just climbing rocks and then he FELL
.
..
…
but he landed in a pile of straw, so that was all right.  He thought to himself, “What’s a pile of straw doing here in the mountains, that’s odd.”  And then he thought to himself that he felt like someone was watching him, so he decided to start climbing again.

–Jack kept climbing up the side of the mountain, and he thought again that he felt someone watching him, and so he turned to his right, and several yards away he saw
a Big Pair of Eyes
and a Long, Long Nose with Greasy Nostrils
and Whiskers
and a Big Mouth with Sharp Teeth
and a Big Long Tongue going Aaarhhlllaaughhlllh!

–And Jack thought to himself, “OK, that’s a monster, I think maybe I’ll go over here,” and he turned to his right, but right there in front of him was
another Big Pair of Eyes
and a Long, Long Nose with Greasy Nostrils
and Whiskers
and a Big Mouth with Sharp Teeth
and a Big Long Tongue going Aaarhhlllaaughhlllh!
and the Monster said RRRAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

–Jack did not know what to do.  He did not have a sword or a shield or a bow or a suit of armor or an airplane or a giant fighting robot that he could use to defend himself from the terrible Monster, so he did the only thing he could think of.  He roared right back RRRAAAARRRRGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!

–And do you know what happened next?

–Do you remember how back in the town Jack ate the onion and the goat stew and the stinky stinky cheese?  Well, all of that gave him stinky, stinky breath, and so when he roared RRRAAAARRRRGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!! the Monster said ACK-KOFF-KKKKKK-thppth-thppth-wubba-wubba-wubba-koff-koff-koff-WHEEZE – <<two thumbs up>>

–Jack’s breath was so stinky that all the Monsters of the mountain had to pay him respect as a stinker after their own hearts, and they left him alone while he climbed the rest of the mountain.  So Jack climbed to the top of the mountain, and he Saw The World, and then he went home.

–And no one believed him.

–Well, because they didn’t have Monsters in his village.

–And also his breath wasn’t so stinky any more, because it had been a while.

–Now go to sleep.

Originally published on Google Plus

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Not ink you want to get from a four-year-old

This evening, my older son approached and asked, without provocation, whether I wanted a tattoo. Being a game sort of dad, I said OK, and he promptly went to town making tattoo noises on my forearm. I asked what the tattoo was of, and he immediately said, “People with wolves.”

“People with wolves?”

“Yeah. They are fighting a MILLION trolls.”

“Really.”

“And they have spears, and shields, and the trolls fall into the river. See, here’s the river, it goes all the way down to here.” <points to second knuckle of my pinky>

Frankly, that would be a pretty bitchen tattoo, if somewhat unprofessional. (And also not ink you want to get from a four-year-old.)

In retrospect it occurs to me that his vision is basically a mashup of Elfquest and 300, which is staggering in its ill-advisedness.

Originally published on Google Plus
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Social Science and the Popular Kids

OK, this has now annoyed me enough to pontificate.

There is a study going around which commentators are discussing under titles like “The Popular Kids Who Tortured You in High School Are Now Rich“, and “Sorry, nerds: Popular kids earn more in the long run“. The study finds, using data from a 1957 longitudinal study of white males, that the high school students who were most popular at graduation were more financially successful over the course of their careers.

Now, other people have flagged the “generalizing from the experiences of 70-something white men from Wisconsin is sketchy” thing. I want to kvetch around the problem in social science of “operationalization”, which is social-scientist for “We want to study X, but that would be too logistically difficult (or impossible), so instead we will study Y and pretend that it is totally the same.”*

Specifically, the study examines “popularity” using “an objective measure of popularity derived from sociometric theory: the number of friendship nominations received from schoolmates” — i.e., who is named by the most people as one of their three closest friends.

Now, it’s not unreasonable to describe this measure as “popularity”, but it has very little to do with what “the popular kids” means in mainstream American culture (see above, “The Popular Kids Who Tortured You in High School.”). “Popular”, in the American high school context, is a measure of status. That may go along with being well-liked, but some high schools have more of a “let them hate, so long as they fear wedgies” culture.  “Popular kids” act the role of power in social situations, and thereby have power.

(I note in passing that I think popular kids get an unfair rap in many people’s memories because people resent that kind of social power whether or not it is abused.  Even if the popular kids are no more cruel than anybody else, the fact that they could torture you if they wanted is a source of pain.)

By using “popularity” to describe the property the authors examined, they guaranteed themselves a mass audience, but also guaranteed that most of that audience would inaccurately understand their findings. They also positioned their findings as counter-intuitive (“You mean the nerds will not inherit the earth?”) rather than pedestrian (“People with lots of friends do well in life, huh? Thanks for coming in”).

This is a semantic dodge which displeases me.

*OK, that’s not always what they mean by operationalize, but it would be inconvenient to distinguish more finely.^

^Irony!

Originally published on Google Plus
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The Problematic Ethnic Stereotypes Are Coming

I’ve been reading Where the Sidewalk Ends to my son, and I noticed a change in the poem about people coming to town to buy various sorts of children at various rates. It is called “The Googies Are Coming.” I’m fairly certain it was called “The Gypsies Are Coming” when I was a tot.

I can understand why one would want to change it, but the publishers kept the original illustration of a hook-nosed babushka with a big sack full of children. The net effect is that now the poem slanders some indeterminate Eastern European ethnicity. Possibly the good people of Guzhe, Lithuania.

I mean, what, “goblin” was too fantastical for a Shel Silverstein book?

Originally published on Google Plus