1 Corinthians 13

"If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails."

I just came back from church. It was a pretty okay sermon, although I couldn't hear much, being seated a little too far away. The hymns were also somewhat weirdly chosen, but the finale was great. The above passage wasn't really mentioned, and has little to do with Christmas really, but it's a nice passage, one of my favorites. And the message is not a bad one.

I had a good Christmas eve. I spent the day with my family, eating food, fighting with my brothers, and holding conversation. I also received communion from the hands of a real Bishop. Oh, and we solved anagrams together, the whole family. Me and my brother won, having solved them the fastest.

What did you do?

Dark Kent

Tonight I had a bizarre nightmare. I dreamt I was Superman.

It was not the scariest nightmare I've ever had as such, but the ending comes close, and the whole thing was really damn unpleasant. Why? Well, the flying, the superpowers, all of that was of course nice, but it was painful and frightening because, I realized, I think a lot like Clark Kent. And thinking like Clark Kent is pretty self-destructive.

So I was hanging around in a community in a forest, somewhere in Canada I think. I was there to do some reporting on a really old festival the locals celebrated. It was a kinda small job for star reporter Clark Kent, but whatever.

I don't remember the beginning of the dream, exactly - but I remember I stayed in town for a while, making friends and really starting to feel at home there. Real friendship, and it happening two to three times in a single day. It rocked. Then, a disaster of some kind struck on a mountain, and off I go, just in time to miss the festival itself and to disappear from a friend I had promised to help practising crossbow-shooting for some competition, and just bail out on some old people who had really wanted to meet me. Feeling really bad about letting everyone down, I fly off to the mountain and meet another superhero - a superheroine, rather; and promptly fall in love. This woman doesn't bother with secret identities, she just kinda saves people from afar, using various distance-based powers like controlling gravity. She's much more free and less worried than stuck-up Superman, who feels responsible for everyone, everything, all the time - and worse, she doesn't need the affirmation of peoples' thanks and admiration, in that empty, hollow way I do myself; as if a medal or a statue to my commemoration could somehow fill that empty hole inside. Nope, she just saves people if she happens to stumble across a problem, and lives a normal life - irresponsible, and without any need for affirmation from the media or the like. Nobody's even heard of her, it's just thanks to my super-senses that I discover her at all.

Not only do I fall in love with this woman on first sight, I also envy her. And the envy turns almost to hatred, because someone can be so free, so happy - someone born to the same responsibilities as me, but who can just carelessly ignore it and don't feel even a twinge of guilt. No longer needed at the mountain, I fly back to the community -

- to find that nobody wants to talk to me any longer, because everyone's all excited that Superman was seen over a nearby mountain, and that's so awesome. I go on with my day, crossbow-practising and all, thinking about this superheroine I've met. It distracts me so much that I don't even notice I've been careless, and a family in the town start suspecting I might be Superman. Strongly.

So they let loose a circus bear, hoping that I'll slip up and reveal my identity to them (this plot is probably straight out of the comic books, actually). So sure are they of this theory, that the mother in the family locks herself with me in a small flimsy trailer close to the bear, so that I'll have to make a mistake - I can't leave the trailer, because I'm supposed to be timid Clark Kent, who would never go outside to face a bear. Normally, Superman can deal with this. Just use one of your myriads of undetectable powers, or blow a curtain in the woman's face for a few seconds, or something - but I'm distracted, frustrated and frightened, so I just punch the bear in the face and kill it. The woman triumphantly goes "A-ha! You're Superman!"

...and it's this part of the dream I remember most vividly, because it was terrifying. In this dream, about Superman - and I know how utterly stupid and ridiculous this sounds - I went through a register of emotions so powerful that I have never experienced anything near it in real life. It was the guilt-and-self-loathing version of running and running and never getting anywhere, and waking up sweat-soaked and panicking. On the one hand, I don't want to hurt anyone. On the other hand, I'm really really angry and frustrated with the superheroine I met earlier in the day, who I both lust after and really hate (and, mind, I was still actually dating Lois Lane in this version of the dream, so there was guilt attached to that too). Also, I've realized just how much I need Clark Kent, because he's the only version of me that can actually make real friends, that can actually have functioning relationships of any kind. Superman is a god, and I don't want to be a god. And here is this woman who's basically threatening to kill Clark Kent.

So I hurt her. I hurt her bad. Holding back on most of my infinite strength, I manage not to kill her, but only barely. My dreams are normally not very graphic, but this one was. Snap. Crunch. You get the idea. And then, when I regain control of myself, I realize I can't. For all my anger, for all my despair, that's making me want to throw up, I can't bring myself to kill her. She's crippled, crying, reduced to a wreck of a human being, and it would really be the merciful thing to just end her life. But I can't.

This is the point where I woke up, flailing around, powerless against my own neurotic hangups. Power enough to smash moons to pieces, and I can't kill one woman to save my own sanity. It took me several minutes just to wind down, and remind myself that it was all just a dream. I hope it was all just a dream. If there's any dream I really don't want to be meaningful, it's this one.

(Also, please don't take it as such. If you take this dream to be deeply meaningful, it makes me seem utterly fucking nuts. I don't want you guys to think I am nuts. That would be unpleasant.)

Angry

I should stop reading newspapers. At least, I should stop reading the letters that are printed in them. I am angry.

Not just irritated, actually angry. If I had the writer of the letter before me, I'd probably not punch them, but maybe spit them in the face. Let me explain.

When I was very little, I read a story. It has left a profound impact on me, and may, indeed, be a big reason why I still consider myself – at least in part – Christian. I think I found it in my grandmothers' old schoolbooks. It's about an ox. The ox begins every day by thanking God. He thanks God for the grass he eats, for the sun that rises, for the wind on his face. He's a goddamn ox, a castrated, miserable creature who spends all his time hauling around carts and will eventually end up in a soup. But he's grateful for his lot in life; he's grateful that he's alive. I took this story to heart. Being grateful to God, specifically, is perhaps not really important. But being grateful? Absolutely. Appreciating what you have is, to me, the absolutely most important aspect of being a decent human being.

Maybe I would think differently if I wasn't actually privileged. Which I am. I have more food than I could possibly eat. Assuming the welfare state of Sweden continues to exist in the way it does, I will probably never seriously starve. Now, I'm not morally perfect, I realize that. I don't donate money to charities. I don't contribute to society. I don't really even educate myself to become anything particularly helpful, like a teacher or a doctor. But at least, at the very least, I'm grateful for what I have. Which brings me to that letter.

I read it in the most recent student magazine, and it made me angrier than I have been in a very long time. These people, these wretched, wretched people, are actually delusional enough to believe that they, as students in the Swedish university system, deserve pity. They have the sheer arrogance to demand that they get something better. They are dissatisfied. Even worse, they are ungrateful. They are given an education, free of charge, and beneficial loans to give them an education. An education which, they claim, is no longer an advantage in modern society. Maybe so. Maybe it will do no good, and you'll end up owing the state money for the rest of your life. Money which the state will use to buy you medicine, to pay policemen, to keep you alive in case you lose your job.

Don't get me wrong – of course one can be miserable in a modern welfare society. One can be lost, depressed, lonely, confused. One can be homeless, yes, even starving. But this is not what they are complaining about. The people who wrote this letter believe that they are being exploited, and that they are somehow eating and living badly.

No.

No, you are not poor. You have a home. You have food. You can bleach your brains in alcohol every Friday and still have money left for peanuts to go with it. Society demands work and study from you so that you – and other citizens of our country – can continue to lead decent lives. This is not exploitation.

There are few things in life I can't tolerate in another person, but more than anything else, this is it. This is what makes me positively want to puke with revulsion. When other people make an effort for your sake, you do not complain. You can criticize, you can refuse the help, you can accept it but tell them how they might do it better – but you do not. Fucking. Complain. You thank them. I think this is something everyone should adhere to. You may not believe in a God, so you have nobody to thank for the sunshine and the grass, but what the hell, be thankful for it anyway. Appreciate it. When the zombie apocalypse comes, you may no longer be able to.

2005: Survival in Moscow

Long time since I wrote one of these now, sorry about that. Anyway, I'm not yet done with my anthology of past adventures, and since I for once have nothing particularly important to do, here goes another one...

With the disappearance of Drake and Bob, as they departed to faraway lands, the group underwent a major change. The only player left from last years' group was Kennedy, and since Luke had been playing with us during the summer, he jumped on board the group as well. That left me with two players, since Solomon and Alastair quit the group. However, during my first (very busy) year at the new school, I had been meeting a lot of new people, and as fate would have it, two of these would come to join the new group.

I will explain their identities shortly. But before I do so, it should be pointed out that 2005 was an interesting year for me personally, because it was a year of broadened horizons. I had been dabbling in some other games earlier, with previous groups - Mage: The Ascension, Aki, GURPS, and so forth - but this year would be marked as a year of experimentation. All in all, the new group of four players participated in four different games, using four different systems: Survival in Moscow, a Vampire game - Trigonometry Fandango, a spiritual sequel to Parallel Fandango, which was a rule-less free-form game - Winter Death, a highly unsuccessful AE game, and Angels, using a weird hybrid of d20 rules. Previously, I had always regarded the d20 system as the "default" system, the one I would always be coming back to - but this year, I started exploring the world of RPGs to discover the vast array of strange games that can be found out there. I was already familiar with the idea of playing games that deviate from their mechanics - of running political intrigues in systems chiefly designed for bashing in heads, of running mysteries in systems chiefly designed for bashing in heads, even of running romance stories in systems chiefly designed for bashing in heads - but I had never really reflected on the idea that a rules system could be designed around a particular style of play.

Let me address this point for a moment. Of course any kind of story can be told in any system (or with no system at all). But the existence of game systems explicitly designed for a given type of story allows, I believe, a much better venue for exploring that kind of story. A game system should never be more complicated than it has to be, yet at the same time, if it isn't complex enough in certain areas, you get a needless amount of gloss-over. It isn't very interesting to play a swashbuckling adventure in a game system where all the rules come down to "Roll dice. You rolled the highest. Therefore, you win." Of course, one can always elaborate using ones' imagination, but that takes away the exciting element of gambling and taking chances, which is - for me, anyway - one of the greater kicks in playing RPGs, as opposed to just writing a story. So, a game system needs to be complex in just the right places. This is why I obsess so over new game systems - because they encourage you to think in a certain fashion, which may be different from how you've been thinking before. If the game system makes combat very deadly, that will reflect upon the players' decisions. If the game system is geared towards social interactions, that will cause the GM to consider NPCs differently - if Joe has "resistance to Seduction" or "vulnerability to Flattery", what does that say about Joe?

Apologies for the brief essay there. Back to the topic at hand: The new group, and the new games.

Two new people joined my group this year, Dakota and Jason. They were friends from since before, and already had some experience playing RPGs together. Jason I didn't know very well when we started to game, as I had gotten to know him through the Japanese classes, but we quickly became friends. Dakota I had been having drama classes together with for over a year, so we were quite familiar.

As mentioned above, this group of four played in four separate games, with varying degrees of success. The one I spent the most effort on, and the one that (to me) stands out as the "main" game, was the Vampire: The Requiem game. Survival in Moscow revolved around a group of three vampires and a mage (Take a guess who played the mage), trying to, well, survive in Moscow. I don't remember the particularities of the plot very well, but chiefly it revolved around the Sheriff of the local vampires going insane and crucifying himself in a warehouse. This triggered a long chain of strange intrigue, made all the more complex when the Sheriff returned from the dead after three days. The game was spectacularly bloody, and although no player characters died, there was a lot of backstabbing and misery involved. In the end, Kennedy and Jasons characters had both lost everything they held dear, whereas Dakota and Luke managed to come out much more prosperous than they had been at the start. The game essentially ended because the group tore itself apart.

The other game of note, would be Trigonometry Fandango. It was a spiritual sequel to Parallel Fandango (and, as it turned out, an actual sequel as well), which I had been playing with Kennedy and Bob the year before, while Drake was in Spanish class. Both games were entirely free-form and ruleless, something I had been itching to try but never really done before these games. They took place in a Weird West-sort of setting, with cowboys, ninjas, and Arabic cities dropped smack-damn into the desert for no apparent reason. The first game revolved around the escort of a Japanese princess, the second about a hilariously complex scheme of techno-magicians who had been messing with every single player character in ridiculously convoluted ways. The two games were unrelated storywise, but there was a slight narrative connection as it turned out Jasons character in the latter game was actually the son of Kennedys character in the former - under a fake name.

This is getting really, really long now, so I'm going to wrap it up. The other two games were a brief AE game set in a forest, which ended because the PCs killed each other, and a hybrid game revolving around angels hanging around on Earth and trying to solve a mystery led by a villain who was invisible to God and all of the angels. A memorable chase scene involving a web camera and a mortal friend halfway across the world shouting instructions was involved.

Notable Characters: Remembering all these characters is a little blurry for me, but I should at least mention Kennedys' "Angel of the Internet" from the Angels game (he was the one responsible for the webcam stunt - his angelic power involved getting a flawless Internet connection, anywhere), Lukes Fat Black Ninja from Trigonometry Fandango (A ninja who behaved more like an overweight rapper) and Dakotas "Angel of Healing, Also of Missing Everything and Being Totally Maimed By Enemies". Seriously. She had the worst luck ever in that game.

Actually I think the Angels game may have had the most interesting characters overall, even though the story wasn't very interesting. I also fondly remember Jasons' "Angel of Pigeons and Weird-Ass Weaponry", which actually was a purview suggested by the corebook, although Jason sort of twisted it to his designs.

Crowning Moment of Awesome: The ending of Trigonometry Fandango was pretty massive, as every single character suddenly came to confront their past in the same place at the same time. It ended with Kennedy and Dakotas characters both reverting from monsters into humans, and recognizing each other as past lovers - which was a bit of a shocker - and it also involved Jasons character coming to terms with his daddy issues. And, of course, it's not over until the fat man sneaks.

Next Up: 2006: Arcana Evolved, in which I will discuss the main storyline of Arcana Evolved, and, if I have time, I'll also explore what Bob named the "Arcana Evolved Doujinshi", an epic tale taking place in the same world, but with radically different themes and characters.

Wanting and Fearing

Desire is a strange thing. On the one hand, as the Buddhists say, desire invites unhappiness; we can never have the things we want, and even if we do, the act of receiving extinguishes the desire we felt and leaves us empty and suffering. On the other hand, desire keeps us going. Desire is what makes us get up in the morning; I want food, I want to read, I want to learn, I want to sleep.

Way back somewhere on this blog, I quote Ray Bradbury when he talks of wanting - of wanting a donkey, of wanting jewels, of wanting a woman, and, finally, wanting sleep. Sometimes, I think, all of us desire that final sleep. But then we snap out of it and recognize this desire as a vain and foolish desire. Why? Because it interferes with our other desires. A dead man can't eat or read. We're further kept away from death by the twin of desire - fear.

Sigmund Freud thought people were motivated by two forces: Eros and Thanatos. How to interpret these forces varies from person to person, but one possible way to interpret them is as desire and fear. We want, and we fear. Without desire, without fear, we would come to a standstill. The only reason why we keep going when our desires are fulfilled is that they invite fear of losing what we have found. The only reason why we keep going when our fears come to pass is that they invite a desire to undo that fearful, undesirable event.

There are many who say one should live ones' life according to ones' desires. Do what you wish shall be the whole of the law. I do not object to this philosophy - it is a good thing that people are allowed to pursue their desires. But why is it so, that fear is seen as inferior to its twin, desire? Why do we see the pursuit of happiness as more important than the escape from unhappiness? They are not necessarily the same thing.

Desire is no longer shameful, as it once were; if I want to love a man, it is nothing I should be ashamed of. If I want to stay home and play video games, it may be shameful in certain circles, but overall, society is tolerant of most desires so long as they don't bring harm to others. Fear, on the other hand, is deeply shameful. It is true that fear can limit people, even cripple them - but this is also true with desire. Greed is just as dangerous a shackle as is cowardice.

They key with desire, of course, is to desire in moderation. Your life will be unfulfilled if your only desire is alcohol. It is shameful and unhealthy to be addicted. A man who sleeps with other men is healthy in society's eyes, but a homosexual man who is addicted to sex is unhealthy, because it ultimately hurts him. Could it not be so with fear, as well? Fearing insects is not bad; fearing them so much that you can't sleep for fear of a single mosquito is bad, because it hurts you - it deprives you of sleep.

Wanting and fearing, it seems to me, are yin and yang of human behaviour. Why, then, am I ashamed of my fears?

Optimism

So today I got up early - at six - to prepare for going to school. I woke up in high spirits, turned on the television and caught the weather forecast. What I saw can basically be described like this:



It gives the impression that today is going to be a fun day.

The Male Gaze and RPGs

Caution: What follows may cause reactions of “Well duh”, particularly if you are a woman.

A long time ago, I had a discussion with Nightflyer in which she mentioned that she found it easier to make male characters than female, because a female character felt like it had more assumptions built into it. I understood what she meant, but thought it a little bit ridiculous – sure, I thought, Hollywood women are always a certain way, but how does that restrict you from making any kind of female character you want?

Then, a few weeks later when I spoke to S. (whom I unfortunately don't have a secret code name for) the womanizing swordsman, he mentioned how it was more difficult to put yourself into the mindset of a female character, and I thought that this is perhaps true – as a man, I have absolutely zero knowledge of some aspects of a woman's life. I thought back to my conversation with Nightflyer, though, and wondered why the reverse wouldn't be true – after all, a woman has absolutely zero knowledge of some aspects of a man's life.

Then today, for unrelated reasons, I decided to do some deeper research of the concept of the Male Gaze. I had heard of this concept before, but I thought it boiled down basically to “women are sexualized in most works of art, because the artist expects the viewer to be male”. This is of course old hat, but the theory actually runs deeper than this. It essentially states that “most works of art are created from the point of view of a heterosexual male, even if the artist isn't a heterosexual male”. The fact that women are sexualized in art is just a symptom of this deeper undercurrent; if the artwork is made through the lens of a heterosexual male, it's natural that women would be portrayed as sexually desirable because to a heterosexual male, they are. The work of art is designed to appeal to a heterosexual male as well, of course, and for this reason women are made more beautiful – but it also serves to reinforce that “You, the viewer, are supposed to be a heterosexual man.”

That is, the Male Gaze theory doesn't just state that “Most writers are male”. It actually states – to artist and reader alike – that most movies, books, et cetera are written with an implicit message of “even if you are not a straight man, you should think like one.” I won't go into further detail explaining the theory – there's lots to be read about it all around the intarwebs – but there are numerous examples. If there's no particular reason for the main character to belong to a particular sex, you make him a straight male as a default. This helps the viewer think like a straight man, irrespective of whether they actually are one or not, which is the “goal” of a lot of fiction according to this theory.

I guess you can see where this is leading: My hypothesis is that the Male Gaze applies even in roleplaying games. What Nightflyer said basically translates into “It's difficult to make a female character, because female protagonists in fiction are not the default, so there's just so little material to take from.” Essentially, a woman has more experience being a man, even if she's never pretended to be a man, because there's just so much fiction written from that perspective. Even in roleplaying games, women are “the second sex” - the alternative rather than the default – even if your own sex happens to be female.

What do you think?

The Anatomy of a Choice

Trying to figure out whether or not I want to go to China for six months has taught me a lot about myself and the way I reason.

To many of you, no doubt, the answer to the question "Do I want to go to China" is very clear. Some of you would do it without hesitation; others would not even consider it. I'm pretty much right in between, though - I lean in no particular direction.

The more I dissect the question, the more questions I come up with. For instance - one reason I would want to go is that it's something I could be proud of afterwards. "I had this experience" would be something that would make me a little more special, a little more interesting, a little more worthy of love.

See what I did there? You cut a little in the question, gently remove the ligaments one by one and suddenly, you discover you've accidentally cut up another question entirely. Why would I need to do something to be a little more worthy of love? Isn't that a pretty unhealthy viewpoint? Either it is, in which case it shouldn't be a contributing factor, or it actually isn't and it's just normal human reasoning, in which case I've just discovered that my desire has a base root, no more ephemeral or sophisticated than the desire for food - making me not so special after all. The desire to be special, by definition, means that you're not actually special. It creates a sort of interesting paradox, which I've been pondering as a bit of a tangent to the main question.

This is by no means the only contributing factor; I've considered very many reasons to go. I pretty much only have one reason to stay, but it's a pretty convincing one: I like it here. Sometimes I think that's a good enough reason. Sometimes I think it isn't.

And so, I continue to cut my mind into smaller and smaller pieces, hoping that somewhere I can find an indivisible argument, the atom of choice, a fundamental building block of my own psychology. I don't seem to be able to find one.

2004: Arcana Unearthed

It began, as I recall, with the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy. I had just started the school which I, for simplicity, will refer to as high school, and entered a conversation with a man that I, for simplicity, will refer to as Drake. We were talking about Douglas Adams' book, but somehow the conversation wormed and wriggled, as conversations are prone to, and eventually came onto the subject of role-playing games. To my great surprise, Drake was already familiar with them – which was a bit of a surprise to me, as prior to this encounter, virtually all my friends had been introduced to the hobby by me.

Enthusiastically, we decided to start up a group; no, more formally, to start up a club. It would be the school's RPG club, and its official language would be English; something which, for the first time, would allow me to circumvent the linguistic hopscotch which is trying to play an English-language game in Swedish. Teeming with excitement about all these new things and all the changes, I suggested another change – let's not play Dungeons & Dragons, I said. Let's instead play this strange little game I bought a while back called Arcana Unearthed.

I had unsuccessfully tried to play Arcana Unearthed with my previous group, but somehow they hadn't caught on – we'd run one small, unsuccessful game whose only identifying characteristic was my brothers' bizarre Sibeccai with a badger that could drive a soapbox car, but nobody really liked it. Now, however, was an ideal time to give the game a second chance. I started digging back home for my notes on the game I'd ran with my old group six months earlier, and recovered them – they were decent, a plot about an Iron Witch causing mayhem in a small village in the north. There were some suitable enemies – goblins, bandits, the witch herself. I liked the setting, too; a mysterious forest in the far north, isolated from all sides, accessible only if you had a horse or cart, or were prepared to trek for a long while through dark, dangerous forests. It even had some useful NPCs that I could salvage. But, somehow, I felt that something was missing. This new group was clearly so much more invested in the game – there was a whole lot of creative force here, force that I didn't want to see go to waste. I needed something beyond the usual hack-and-slash adventure. Some element was missing. So I started digging deeper, and found the in-character diary of my old cleric, from four years back – mentioning a strangely scented tea. Recalling a discussion I had with Drake a while back regarding tea as a magical potion, I thought, why the hell not? So I took a blank sheet, and wrote “Plot: Our tale begins when a trader arrives carrying with him mysteriously scented vanilla tea...”

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, though. Before I can move on to the plot, there is the discussion of the who, and almost more importantly, the where. I don't think there is one reader of my blog who has not at least seen that tiny room, with its coffee machine, picture of an old Chinese man, and self-adhering Darin poster. We were initially meaning to call it something with suitable geeky weight – something like “the Dungeon” or “the Fortress” or “the Lair” but, it appears, Fate named it something else. I don't know who first mouthed the term, but one day the name was just there; one day, the room ceased to be a room, and became the Hole. There's not much more to say about it, because I couldn't possibly capture its essence in words - but I will drink a toast in Blood of the Living to its memory.

The game had moved to a new location, and it had also moved into the minds of completely new people. The initial Arcana Unearthed group had five players, and five characters – none of whom I had even known just a few weeks ago, and only one who I had ever met. From the years above me, there was Solomon and Alastair, and from my own year Drake, Kennedy, and Bob. I had known Bob by reputation because we had previously attended the same school, but I had never really spoken to him; all the other people were entirely new to me. In part because they were entirely new to me, I made sure we spent a lot of time preparing for the game. The characters of Arcana Evolved were not just rolled up and fired off; rather, they developed over time, in discussion on buses, in classrooms, and over lunch breaks. In the beginning, there was Beo, the unwilling mohj. Then there was Ling, the paranoid faen. Shortly, the wild man Nasef (alternatively spelled Naseef, I was never really sure) and the Dynamic Duo Sibzo and Euvortacian, a.k.a Vortoc, were finished too, and only then were we ready to begin. Now, where was I? Ah, yes... I remember.

Our tale begins when a trader arrives carrying with him mysteriously scented vanilla tea...

What followed was an adventure that slowly unfolded, blossoming from an evil witch plaguing the north, to the most insanely epic tale I have ever ran, where the fate of the entire Universe hangs in the balance. When we return to the Arcana Unearthed game, it has become Arcana Evolved, and while the first year was based more on “What is the self?”, the finale of the game would expand radically in scope. The Arcana Evolved game would come to incorporate almost every topic I studied during my two years of an IB Philosophy course, ranging from ethics to epistemology to the fundamental question, “What is a human being?”

But of course, there are still two years to go. For now, the five heroes are simply trying to deal with the wicked witch, with the corrupt sheriff she controls, and with the mysterious and inexplicable memory loss that Ling is suffering. Yet, something beautiful has begun – something I couldn't even begin to guess at when I first sat down in the Hole to draw the map of the region. I had no idea then what would happen – that the story would spread a pair of beautiful wings and fly away beyond anything I could have ever imagined.

Wait a minute – how can something that exists only in imagination go beyond what I imagined? The answer is simple.

I didn't imagine it. We did.


Notable Characters:
Beo, the Badger-Killer and Master Planner.
Nasef, the Vampire (nom nom).
Ling Tem'Enneth, the Zero Hit Point Energy Field Manipulator.
Euvortacian, the Womanizing Axeman.
Sibzo, the “Hero”.

Notable Characters (for real this time):
Beo, the Dragon's Prison.
Nasef, the Man Who Should Be Dead.
Ree Kaspathodex, the God of Paradoxes.
Euvortacian, the Idiot Savant.
Sibzo, the “Hero”.

Crowning Moments of Awesome:
Naseef died in the middle of the chronicle. His heart stopped. Beo brought him back, and for a moment, his power to screw with Fate made itself apparent – something I hadn't actually planned for. Beo spent a hero point, hero points achieve the extraordinary. But it became impressive foreshadowing for the rest of the game.

Ling also died, and was reborn as Ree Kaspathodex, the God of Paradoxes. His return as the King of Kaspathodexia took everyone by surprise, I should think.

Next Up:
2005: Survival In Moscow, in which I take the task to lead a Vampire game, and various other games. Three new players are introduced, and I will also take a moment to discuss small games played across all my three high school years – including Parallel Fandango and its sequel, Trigonometry Fandango.

2002-2003: The World of Greyhawk

The World of Greyhawk: Raiders of the Lost Knark

Of this campaign I simply cannot write enough, because I still have the journal I kept of the first two-thirds of the story. It's several dozens of handwritten pages, meticulously noting almost everything that happened in an eighteen-month game. I can hardly even summarize it without writing several pages, but I'm going to give it a try.

When the World of Gnomon ended, I had already begun to dip my toes into playing D&D online via forums, and that way become introduced to the World of Greyhawk. To be able to keep up with the online game, I had purchased the sourcebook for the Greyhawk setting, and I was pretty eager to try it out my own way. So, I told my players about it and they were pretty enthusiastic, but they were not tired of their villainous antics – yet. Through the course of the game, though, rather a lot of development took place. Before I get to the development, though, it's time to introduce some new players: My younger brother Jack, and a new recruit from the schools' other roleplaying group, the one my readers are most likely to recognize: Luke. It would take some time before he joined the game, but this didn't in any way lessen his impact on the story, because of the huge turnover of characters: the campaign had only five or six players, but featured 20 player characters before it ended. The sixth player, Chris, joined even later than Luke and stayed in the game for a few levels.

Probably the most eccentric game I've ever ran, the Chronicles of the Raiders of the Lost Knark are full of twists and turns. The characters are now thieves and liars, now honest saints delivering aid and hope to the world, and then go back to being thieves and liars. Despite being very incoherent, the story did have some recurring elements – the characters always seemed to have run-ins with a family of criminals named Om, who were distinct in that they always had “normal” names (Anna, Magnus, and so on) in a world where people otherwise only had fantasy names. This criminal family was perhaps not so much a main antagonist as it was the Team Rocket of the storyline – they kept turning up trying to steal whatever the PCs were trying to steal, or kill whoever the PCs had to negotiate with. Later in the story, the Om family turned out to be connected to an evil cult of a horned God, and in the epic final battle, the characters got to do battle with that God in person... and members of the Om family, trying to defend their deity.

As antagonists go, they worked very well: They went from being foils and rivals, to being mercenaries for the bad guys, to being direct lieutenants of the big bad evil guy of the game. If there's anything I'm proud of, it's that the Raiders of the Lost Knark always knew who were the enemy (and the pained look of “aw shit” I could generate just by dropping a normal name like Henrik).

The actual plot of the campaign is so convoluted that I can't easily describe it. There were, for most of the time, three layers of plot going on: The personal hijinks of the player characters, the adventures and suplots they encountered, and the actual, ongoing plot. The characters traveled this way and that across the campaign world, and the magnitude of their journey can't really be described without a map (this is the one we used). To give some idea of the travels undertaken, the players fought demon cultists in the Burneal Forest (right under the word “Living”) and bartered with strange wizards beyond the Amedio Jungle (straight down from Burneal) – they explored an ancient temple by the shores of Lake Udrukankar (above the minimap in the lower left) and served under Pirate King Arkadin in the Relmor Bay (straight down from the word “Greyhawk”). They traveled to all these places and more, all the while having their base of operations in the Free City of Greyhawk, right where the folds of the map meet at the center – and the journeys were rarely without incident, in a world of dishonest innkeepers, far-reaching criminal families, bandits, monsters, and intriguing nobles.

Merely talking about where isn't very interesting, though. I imagine if you're reading this, you also have some interest in the what. There's almost no end to it, particularly because of the complex intricacies of plot, subplot and sub-subplot, but I can give some examples: They snatched a magical compass from under the fingers of the Om family and used it to find great treasures, but it eventually led them to a strange floating island where a dead goddess was held; they resurrected her through prayer and were hounded by the minions of the assassin who killed her. They singlehandedly turned the tide of a war by defeating a demon and his evil druid minions, and later discovered this was just a small fraction of a vast demonic threat. They infiltrated the secret base of a cult of racist psychic ninjas, who practice the ancient and deadly art of Glue Fu. They crept into a castle in the sky belonging to the settings' most powerful witch, and rescued half a dozen heroes from her magic. In addition to this, there were countless personal subplots: They rescued a characters' father from being falsely accused of a crime, they freed a kidnapped sister, they foiled the plans of an evil older brother, and so on. A lot of NPCs came and went, though very few were actually recurring – mostly because the characters traveled so wide and far.

Earlier years had seen pretty massive conceptual leaps – from game to story, from story to setting, from setting to overarching plots – and although the step was smaller and more subtle in this campaign, it was nonetheless important. Previously, there had always been only one story going on at a time, with some minor frills around it. Characters had their own lives, but they were rarely involved directly in the story, the backgrounds and families were just window-dressing. The Raiders of the Lost Knark introduced the idea of interweaving plots. There were stories based on a characters' background, stories that intersected other stories, stories that only concerned one character that happened simultaneously with stories that concerned the whole group, and stories that the players invented which were then woven into the overarching plot; it was the players who came up with the idea of stealing the magical compass, for instance. Overall, this gave the campaign a very genuine, organic feeling: Nothing existed in a vacuum. What the characters did mattered, both to the setting but also to the growth of new stories. The turn-over of characters actually helped to support this organic feeling, since many of the stories quite naturally involved new people. Some characters reached their goals and retired; new ones then stepped in that were more connected to the task at hand. On the other hand, some characters stepped in that had no connection to anything, just a random happenstance, which sometimes got stupid (“I have been rowing here in a boat, that is why I am so strong!”) but occasionally just felt natural (“I deserted from the army and have no money. There are probably people looking to execute me. Can I come with you guys? That'd help.”).

Perceptive readers may note that I have not yet mentioned any characters' names. I'm getting to that; in fact, I'm actually going to list them all. While there were perhaps ten characters or so who were the real main characters with the most influence over the plot, I figured it gives a better picture of the campaign as a whole to mention all of them. Before I get to that, however, I'm going to mention two small side projects I did with this same group, at roughly the same time. They were the ones in which Jack truly got to shine.

The first one was (informally, as in, only in my notes) called “Two Houses” and took place in the same world, and at the same time, as the Raiders of the Lost Knark game, but revolved around political intrigue between noble houses in Ahlissa. Based loosely on a similar game I had ran on-line, it was supposed to be a game of politics and scheming, but it seems only Andy took any real liking to it (I don't think Luke participated). This game is mostly notable because of Jack's number-one fantastic character Gurgi the Goblin. The other characters were all scheming, manipulative noblemen; Gurgi was a goblin. Not even a particularly noteworthy goblin – he had class levels in Rogue, and that was basically it. Gurgi essentially became the heart of the game, since the most interesting story revolved around the other characters trying to manipulate the naïve, innocent, and ultimately good-hearted goblin into doing their dirty work and taking their falls. He was thoroughly tragicomical – naïve enough to be funny, but also innocent and pure compared to his cynical “friends” - whom he considered his friends right until their political machinations eventually got him killed.

The second side game I want to mention is the Storybook game. This game was ran on the premise “fairy tale clichés”, and as such the group consisted of a princess in men's clothing, an old wise druid, a blue-eyed young hero (uncharacteristically played by Bjarne), a mysterious elf from distant lands with strange customs, and a ridiculously strong brick of a dwarf. The combination was pretty much the perfect five-man band, and the story developed beautifully. It stands out mostly because it was a bit more deep and serious than other games we'd ran up until that point, with more long-spanning story and some serious themes – a pregnant player character, a deal with the devil (in the form of a witch) and some classical fairy tale elements played totally straight, like the troll who can't be defeated, only tricked. Jack played the muscular brick-dwarf, and made the most insane display of stubbornness and bullet-headedness by spending almost all of his feats on swimming, which led to his subsequent fantastically awesome victory in the final battle scene; he also did a good job of roleplaying the Big Guy perfectly straight, and managed to portray something very much like a cross between Gimli and Hagrid.

And while we're on the subject of notable characters...

Notable Characters:
Here's the complete list of the Raiders of the Lost Knark, with the six most iconic characters first.

Arthad af Vaughn / Arthad Aliaster (Charles) – Evil human fighter, later converted to the cause of good. Killed an evil god (with a lot of help from Craven the Raven). Remained in the group until the end of the game.

Kråkmåns Höghatt (Bjarne) – Dwarven cleric, tricked the God of Lies by tricking the GM. Strict and fair, but greedy. Killed by the Scarlet Brotherhood at level 10 and remained dead for a long time, but came back through a miracle before the end of the game.

Todd Ark (Andy) – Human druid with a deadpan attitude. Seduced the Unseelie Fey Queen and became her consort, but was eventually killed by Arthads' hand because the dark god's power was pouring into him. Was the longest-lasting character in the game, and survived from level 1 to 14.

Aust Galanodel (Luke) – Elven wizard, made a powerful artifact hand out of a fist-sized ruby. Calm and controlled, but slowly grew obsessed with power since he always needed more to achieve his goals. Retired very, very shortly before the end of the game to build a flying city.

Vackeria (Jack) – Elven ranger with a giant, evil, intelligent, bloodthirsty mace for a weapon. Was captured by the Om family and implanted with a weird parasite, but managed to turn it to her own ends. Vackeria temporarily retired at level 6, but came back – only to later become imprisoned by the Scarlet Brotherhood. Reached level 10.

Fenith (Chris) – Elven mercenary who loved showing off with his weapon of choice, a glaive. It was hinted that he had a connection to the enigmatic Valley Elves. Was eventually killed by the Scarlet Brotherhood at level 10.

And as for the remaining cast:

Crayloon (Charles) – Gnome wizard, formed the Raiders of the Lost Knark. Retired at level 4.

Brad Rost (Andy) – Human paladin. Not very noteworthy. Remained in play until the end of the game.

Moano (Chris) – Tattooed human monk from the far South. I'm not entirely sure what happened to him, I think Chris phased out of the game and Moano just kind of disappeared, but I don't remember.

Jacarsin (Luke) – Human sorcerous barbarian. Great liar, proficient mountain man. Retired at level 4.

Zok-Hoba (Luke) – Fallen Incubus demon who became good (so he fell upwards). Sacrificed himself at level 6 to show Arthad the Light.

Liam Tindarellion (Luke) – Halfling acrobat and knife thrower. Retired at level 10 to form her own thieves' guild.

Salazar (Luke) – Human monk with arabic features. Could jump like crazy. Was only in play for a few sessions.

Arkas Hörntand (Bjarne) – Greedy half-orc. Picked a fight with the city guard and died at level 1.

Raistlin Långskägge (Bjarne) – Greedy dwarf. Killed by a bear at level 3.

Tikas Svarthorn (Bjarne) – Greedy tiefling. Killed through no fault of her own by a shapeshifter at level 6.

Furkman af Vaughn (Bjarne) – Aggressive half-orc. Killed by the Scarlet Brotherhood at level 10 while trying to avenge Kråkmåns.

Noja Lilltå (Bjarne) – Halfling dragon rider. Sacrificed herself for the greater good at level 10.

Pluppinia av Oljin (Jack) – Halfling who thought she was a dwarf, sister of Plupp. Killed alongside Tikas by a shapeshifter at level 6.

Malefe (Jack) – Female yuan-ti (snake people) who seemed very confused. Killed when a church bell fell on her at level 8.

Minifenix (Jack) – Weird twelve-year old kid with a giant spider. Walked in through a door, out through a door, and promptly died. Gained 0 experience points and died at level 7.

Ymer (Jack) – Gnome cleric/pirate. Looked a lot like Charlie Brown. Retired at level 11.

Crowning Moments of Awesome: Either none or too many to count, depending on where you draw the line. This was the most gaming-intense year of my entire life.

Next Up:
2004: Arcana Unearthed, in which an entirely new group is introduced, and a very complex story begins to unfold. Once more I undertake the prospect of world-building, and proceed to only use a few percent of it. In the next year, complicated literary analysis enters the equation, and we embark on a journey exploring themes, moods, motifs, and other such pretentious things.

2002: Dark Hearted Heroes

Memory betrays me, and I'm not sure when and exactly how these new players were introduced to me. I know that I moved to a new school, and that I somehow made some very unexpected friends. I think me getting involved so much in church work helped turn them from acquaintances into friends, and it was through involvement with the church that I came to introduce them to Dungeons & Dragons. How I came to make acquaintances in the first place is a mystery to me, but I think it was mostly Andy's doing. Anyway, I quickly met a lot of people who were interested, and at one point I ran a game for – no lie – eight people: Linus, Bjarne, Andy, Charles, Eric, Lawrence, and two random girls whose names I honestly didn't catch. It says a lot about the crowd I was hanging with that I didn't catch their names because the rest of the group referred to them as “the bitches”. I know one of them was someones' sister, maybe Linus'. I'm not sure.

Anyway, out of the many new contacts I made, only the ones involved in church business became in any way close to me – Bjarne and Charles. These two players and Andy would form the core of my new group, but it took a while before we got to that point. We played a lot of one-shots, often involving contacts or weird friends of Bjarne, and in the early days it happened often that I unpacked my briefcase and declared “today's adventure is about a goblin-infested ruin” without having much clue about who the hell all of the players were.

Before I go on, I'm going to wax nostalgic about the locations of our games for a bit. We seldom played at my house in the early days, mostly since there were so many almost-strangers – instead, we ran games in the most bizarre locations. Usually, we hung out at the church-sponsored youth center, but we also ran games in Linus' garden shed, outdoors in the school yard or on picnic cloths, in Charles' garage, and even in Andy's kitchen (where a gruesome torture took place, and me and him alike were, I think, pretty scared his parents were going to hear us).

And on the subject of gruesome torture, I quite naturally arrive at the titular Dark Hearted Heroes. I don't know what made us stick to them. Perhaps they were mechanically well-designed, or perhaps it was the sheer glee of villainy that appealed to the players – I honestly don't know – but the main game of this year became the chronicles of Tjocka Bombadil Salabim Potter af väldigt mycket fetstryk, Lord över gläntorna i skogen, helgon av Furyondy och dotter till Tjock and Erok the dark elf. The former was a male halfling druid for the first five minutes of her existence, after which she promptly grew “Dolly Parton breasts” and became a female halfling druid. The latter was a dark elf assassin with some backstory – he was basically such a terrifyingly evil bastard that the other dark elves kicked him out.

The third character was the mild-mannered, kind-hearted half-elf ranger named Amsirac Parwyn. He was chaotic good, liked birds and music, and fit in with the other two about as well as Tinky-Winky would fit in the Inglorious Basterds. They would surely become the best of friends.

I should probably stress, at this point, that by no means was there a lack of roleplaying – at least not by the standards I had then. Sure, they made powerful and optimized characters, but they also did a lot to portray their characters. Charles spoke with a much darker voice than usual and often with in-character language, and although it was somewhat hilarious to see a 2-meter tall man trying to portray a woman less than half his size, the squeaky voice did give a lot of feeling. Furthermore, while two characters were evil, they were not just cardboard-cut-out villains – Erok wanted people to respect and fear him, whereas Tjocka was driven by a combination of greed and religious zealotry. Amsirac was also very well portrayed, almost a little overzealously sometimes, and also had a well-defined goal, namely to settle down and raise a family. On their own, each character was perfectly sensible. Together, only the law of We Are Player Characters kept them from killing each other, and even that eventually failed.

I don't remember how the game begun; I know that Bjarne, for about a session, played a half-orc but grew tired of that character almost immediately and retired him – said half-orc was probably his only character that didn't end up dying horribly. I know that Erok and Amsirac hated each other from the very start, but that they initially kept this hatred down to a tolerable, Gimli-and-Legolas level. The story was set in the Gnomeworld, in Glorywell initially, but of the early adventures I recall almost nothing except that a lot of them were bank heists and that the phrase “I look for the richest house in town” was used a lot.

The unique flavor of the game was of course readily apparent already then, but it didn't get truly crazy until Amsirac haphazardly became the mayor of a nearby city. The storyline centered around a lost ring that was the symbol of office for a city called Hyboria (I was terrible at coming up with names back in the day – Hyboria is from Conan the Barbarian), and whoever held the ring would become mayor of the city. The plot was for the players to be given copious sums of money for returning it to the rightful owner, and I thought money would interest the PCs more than power since money = magic items, and power just means having a lot of peasants.

Unfortunately, the players were smarter than that, and double-crossed me; only to be promptly double-crossed by Amsirac. Through a complicated series of diplomatic deals, both within the party and outside it, the ring wound up in the hands of the good player character, who took it to protect the city from the onslaughts of his two terrifying companions. Amsirac then decided to settle down there, took a wife, and had three daughters. His two companions were furious, and traveled back to the dark elven kingdom to kill Erok's elder brother (who had just killed their father) in order to have his estate fall into their hands. Finding the estate too small and too far north to be pleasing, they kidnapped all the homeless people from Hyboria (because no one else was stupid enough to waltz onto a ship to be sold into slavery, basically) and established their own kingdom, then immediately declaring war on Amsirac. Almost immediately thereafter, they decided that one kingdom was too small for the both of them, so Bjarne arranged to become the ruler of Gnomeworld's equivalent to the Shire, which he immediately turned into Soviet Mordor.

From here, the story really, really took a gleefully suicidal turn. Erok wrote a pact with the Demon Lord of Lust, Graz'zt, in exchange for great powers. Then he also made a pact with Nerull, the God of Death, in exchange for immortality. Then he also made a pact with Erythnul, the God of Slaughter, to become a terrible and dangerous fighter. So then, to one-up him, Tjocka willingly became a vampire, and also made a pact with Tharizdun, the Ultimate Evil God of Being Such A Massive Psycho Even The Other Evil Gods Are Afraid of Him, Also God of Madness. Then she turned into a pig.

For those who haven't heard this story already, the explanation is that druids in D&D can't cast resurrect, but they can cast a spell called Reincarnate, that allows the recipient to return in the form of an animal. Tjocka had died at one point, but through favors with an NPC druid had managed to reincarnate in the form of a piglet. Fortunately for her, druids can always shapeshift into their own true form (which is explicitly counted from before the reincarnation), so she could turn back into a halfling more-or-less indefinitely, needing to reflexively reactivate the power every 36 hours or so. However... druids whose alignment shifts so that it no longer has “neutral” in it (in her case, to Chaotic Evil from Neutral Evil) immediately lose their shapeshifting powers. Meaning that, when her 36 hours were up, she couldn't reactivate the power, and so reverted to a pig. A vampire pig.

At this point, the entire campaign world was basically going to hell. The three player characters were among the most powerful beings in the setting, and had sort of as a byproduct of trying to become rich defeated the most dangerous villains around (villains that my father introduced when he ran a brief game based on the Wheel of Time series with me and Alex). Now, Charles and Bjarne were raising the stakes.

Erok and Tjocka set out on a quest to find the legendary Sword of Kas, a blade used by a vampire to backstab the God of Lies. The ultimate in traitor accessory, the sword is an artifact and unrivaled in power, but getting to it required asking demons to find out where it is. So, naturally, they summoned a couple of demons and let them loose on the countryside, finding out that they would have to travel to one of the Nine Hells to ask more questions there. They used Tjocka's magical cloak to open a portal there... and sort of casually left it open.

Some explanation of my reasoning here is in order: I was, by now, pretty tired of the Gnomeworld. It had already been entirely bent out of shape by the mad antics of this group of three, and I'd also started playing in several internet games, taking place in the World of Greyhawk. To this end, I'd purchased the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer, and suddenly had 200+ pages of pre-written campaign world, plus 25 years of experience from my new online friends, since the setting is one of the oldest RPG campaign settings around. So I had decided to let the Gnomeworld go. The heroes had already travelled beyond the Impenetrable Mountains of the West, seen the King of Glorywell die, founded three separate kingdoms and generally turned the setting into something quite different from what it had initially been. So, when the two evil players gave me the opportunity, I ended the world.

Through the casually-left-open portal, the demonic forces of Hell poured out, spurred on by the evil gods who now reaped their end of the bargain with Erok and Tjocka, turning them into their helpless pawns. The forces of evil marched against Hyboria, where I allowed Amsirac one last hail-mary solo adventure to summon the forces of Good. The resulting cosmic cataclysm tore the Gnomeworld to pieces, and when the dust had settled, Tjocka the Vampire Pig was imprisoned in a magical coffin at the bottom of the deepest ocean, Erok the Assassin had become some kind of utterly insane demon, aimlessly wandering the ancient deserts of the South, and Amsirac had managed to save his family and a small fragment of his kingdom. With that, we took a final farewell to the Gnomeworld, leaving the world in ruins – except for Amsirac's beloved Hyboria, which stood as a last, flickering beacon of hope.

Notable Characters:
All three were of course notable, but Amsirac gets the special mention here. Playing the good guy when both of the other characters are explicitly evil is a dangerous move, and I wouldn't allow it in a chronicle run nowadays. However, Amsirac became an interesting character, acting as a damper on his villainous friends' behavior. Often ridiculed as wimpy and spineless, Amsirac was actually the direct opposite – and I let him survive the end of the world for a reason other than him being sympathetic. Amsirac was, actually, pretty damn smart, and had countless times managed to counter the onslaughts of his friends through careful applications of diplomacy, strategy, and the right choice of spells. His most clever move was probably getting a hold of a crystal ball – which his character couldn't use – and then doing small solo missions for a friendly wizard in exchange for the wizard spying on his enemies. Bjarne and Charles never figured it out, because they still thought inside the box of game rules – rangers can't use crystal balls, so how could Amsirac possibly be predicting their moves?

I should also mention three characters that were in a humorous side-game: Bjarne played a combat chef, Andy played a stoner wizard, and Charles played a monk who had seen the Matrix film in a vision, and sought to mimic it. Very badly. They made a great gang, who ran a delivery service together, and ferried absurd cargo to even absurder recipients. Although it was short, it was very, very fun.


Crowning Moments of Awesome:
Ending the world was a lot of fun.

There's also: Tjocka throwing herself off a tower to seal the pact with Tharizdun through her own death. Erok's return from the Abyss after his first demonic pact, now in the form of an ebon demon with blazing red eyes. Amsirac's ascension to the throne of Hyboria. My favorite, though: That one time when Tjocka and Erok blew up a bar for no goddamn reason at all, and then fled the explosion by turning into a rhinoceros with Erok riding on its back. Amsirac was right outside, trying to persuade some NPCs to help their cause when the rhino and its maniacally laughing dark elf rider burst out of the wall.

Next Up:
2003: The World of Greyhawk, a.k.a. Raiders of the Lost Knark, in which four villains and Todd set out to gain riches and respect, but come to discover the errors of their ways, and eventually gravitate to the forces of good – becoming champions of all that is right and just in the world – until they eventually meet their tragic demise. A full story, with beginning, middle and end, continuity, and an impressive main villain, this chronicle took the good pieces of the previous games and put them together into a beautiful whole. Also: People die. A lot.

2001: Gnomeworld

I'm not exactly sure when the Gnomeworld game started and finished, and what else I did during this period of my gaming life. I am sure, however, that the Gnomeworld project was absolutely enormous compared to other games I had done when I started working on it.

Gnomeworld began quite simply; we were looking to run a new game, with new fresh characters. So we did; me and Lex created two new characters called Gelbon and Shamila, and ran this more or less exactly in the same style as the previous games. In the third session, though, something interesting happened – the adventure called for going back to a place we had already visited. I hadn't planned for this – it just happened – so we took a break in the game to make a little map of the area north of the city based on what we could remember of the first session. Since the first adventure in the area mentioned it being close to the country's borders, I ad-hoc made up “Glorywell”, a name taken straight out of Heroes of Might and Magic, and marked it as being the neighboring country. This left us with the left and right side of the map looking very empty, so just for the sake of good measure we drew all of the kingdoms' borders, and were left with a circular kingdom with one city in it, occupying exactly one A4-sized sheet of paper.

We went on with the adventure and left it at that; to the north of the mountains is another kingdom. Pretty soon, though, we got curious about Glorywell – what was it like, actually? So, on a whim I decided that the bad guys had fled the country, and turned the adventure into an exciting mission of exploring foreign lands. Taking a new sheet of paper, we drew out the kingdom of Glorywell as we went along; when the characters passed a river, we drew a river. When they saw a mountain, we drew a mountain. Pretty soon, we were both so curious about this strange new kingdom that we stopped playing altogether and just drew more of it, and by the time the evening came, we had mapped out our home country – Gnomon, the kingdom of the gnomes – and Glorywell, which we decided to be the kingdom of the humans.

I say that we were both curious, because the entire thing just sort of grew organically. I didn't plan for Glorywell to turn out at it did – we just played the game as we had always done, with obstacles and monsters, but we did do one thing different: We carefully documented everything. When we stopped playing to draw, it wasn't organic any longer, but I was still curious – for having a map added a whole new sort of excitement, a strange sort of anticipation: It was quite far to the capitol of Glorywell (creatively named Glorywell) and surely, it must contain a lot of cool stuff, right? I mean, it wouldn't be such a big, important city if it didn't, would it?

Sometime at this point I had to go home, and – filled with anticipation at what would happen in Glorywell – I began plotting and scheming for serious.Previously, I had done one adventure at a time and been happy with that – when the Gnoll King dies, the adventure is over and I'll make up a new one. Now, however, I was planning ahead, and really far ahead at that. “The king is sick; he needs medicine from the land of the elves. The elves are plagued by evil ogres and will need someone to kill them. When the king is about to get cured, his evil brother will try to kill him. When the evil brother is captured, his necromancer allies will try to get revenge.”

Strangely, as an outcome of this long-term planning, a spectacular villain emerged. I don't remember where he came from at all, actually – in all likelihood he was initially just some run-of-the-mill villain that was bossing around goblins – but what made this villain unique was that, after he was defeated by the PCs (or PC, as it was with Lex), he somehow managed to survive and get away. I don't remember how, or why, because I don't think it was really intentional – but he got away, and I remembered him when I was writing my plans. Then, I brought him back.

So it was that Shamila the Barbarianess got a nemesis – the menacing Baron, who was quite an extraordinary villain, probably one of my best. Throughout the chronicle he returned I think five or six times, each time with even more powerful minions and even more villainous plans. He grew alongside Shamila, both in power and in influence – initially a mere nameless, evil fighter with some goblin minions, but at the end of the campaign a megalomaniac demon-tyrant with hordes of monsters at his beck and call. The most spectacular thing about the Baron, though, was that despite being repeatedly defeated, and despite being killed twice (yes, he came back from the dead too) – he was never unmasked. He wore a black and red helmet with a visor, and it was never, as far as I can recall, removed – throughout the entire game. Nor was his backstory ever revealed. The Baron remained a mystery, and because of his megalomania and cruelty coupled with his inhuman nature – faceless, nameless, friendless – he became a very compelling bad guy.

I am, however, getting ahead of myself. When we first encountered the then-unimportant Baron, the entire world still consisted of only two nations – one big, one small. When me and Lex met again to play more, the first thing we did was to make the world bigger still. We elaborated the kingdom of the elves, the kingdom of the dwarves, the wild lands of the orcs, and so forth. Far to the west, we placed an impenetrable barrier of mountains, to put some sort of limit on our crazed world-building; the rest of the world was surrounded by endless ocean. Later, we added more nations with a bit more flavor than just “elves” or “orcs”, and in an unusual moment of creativity we even made two distinctly different dwarven nations.

By the time we began playing again, we had a world map spanning 36 sheets of paper, held together with sticky-tape and folded together with the utmost care to show only the relevant location. I would later use this world for a lot of stories, but for now, all we had was a map; a huge drawing, a geographical skeleton of a more or less empty world. Me and Lex had finished drawing the big picture – now, we would focus on drawing the small picture.

There was a craze of creating, inventing and detailing during this period of my roleplaying life – we would sometimes stop mid-adventure to ask ourselves “What food do our characters like?” or “I think my character was taught magic by his grandfather” - and we'd also take long pauses between games to draw a lot. We had drawings of our characters, of our characters in alternate outfits, of their family, of their extended family, of every single piece of equipment they carried with them, of their shared house (that they bought for honestly-earned adventuring money), of their respective bedrooms, et cetera. Of course, since neither of us was very good at drawing, they were simple pictures and they took virtually no time to produce, but it was the documentation that was important. Every detail, no matter how small, added to our world and to our characters. We had no way of knowing what would be important, so we took note of everything, from food to relatives to pointless customs of distant lands. We also started fiddling around with the rules, changing stuff we didn't like. We were terrible at it.

Shamila started out as a barbarian, but since that made the group consist of a barbarian and a wizard it meant we had no source of healing power, I put together a home-made “barbaladin” class for Shamila, which was basically a barbarian and a paladin, simultaneously. It was horrendously broken and meant that Shamila was much, much more powerful than my character – but on the other hand, Lex was strictly speaking the only player, so it was never much of a problem.

As I mentioned in the previous post, Shamila and Gelbon both made it to level 20, and that was with by-the-book experience points awards. They even made it beyond level 20 – although the actual story ended before that (the Baron was finally, definitely defeated for the last time around level 18, and with that the real story of the campaign ended. After that, we ran a bunch of unrelated adventures). The campaign ended with the two lifelong friends parting ways; Shamila married the God she had been devoted to ever since she became a barbaladin, and Gelbon waved goodbye to her and disappeared off into the Infinite Worlds, and with that we formally leveled them up to 21, just to have it done.

Aside from being a good-bye to a much beloved story, this was also a sad moment because it was the last serious, big game me and Lex had together; although we continued to play for a long time after that, my focus had shifted to players back home... players who initially were of a much more sinister bent than Lex or, indeed, the Baron.

Notable Characters:
Both Shamila and Gelbon. They were zealously detailed... and that's about all the cool that was to them, really. They weren't very interesting people; they were, however, not very interesting people that we knew almost everything about.

Crowning Moments of Awesome:
“The Tyrannosaurus Dragon uses its +26 Intimidate skill and roars. All your soldiers and followers pee their pants and collapse into whimpering balls of fear. What do you do?” - “I intimidate it back. Natural 20, and I have +28.”

Aside from that little gem, the Barons two deaths were really cool, cinematic moments. The first time, he was thrown into a deep pit full of fire, and messily burned to death. The second time, he had been reborn as a powerful demon prince, and was thrown into a planar vortex and destroyed. While such battles are simple and the staple of B-movies everywhere, they are also awesome. Such power is not to be disregarded.

Next Up:
Dark Hearted Heroes, in which a vile force of darkness arrives in the Gnomeworld, bringing with them murder, betrayal, evil pacts and utter despair. Kings and heroes fall by their hands, wicked beings kneel before them, ruin and death follows in their wake. They are the new player characters, and the world trembles where they walk.

Food Quotes

A disclaimer: I'm really not all that terrible at living alone. But, during my two weeks of being by myself in the apartment, I have said some of the following wonderful lines to myself:

"Well, this is technically bread, and what I'm putting on it is technically cheese... so I have myself a cheese sandwich. Technically."

"Hm... I suppose milk isn't really food as such, but it still counts as lunch. I think."

"I could eat the paprika... but I'll need that for the chili. I could eat the beans, but I need those for the chili. I could eat some carrots... but I need those too for the chili. So what if I just boil crushed tomatoes? Wait... I need that for the chili too."

"Right, I can't use the mixer to mash the potatoes in a teflon pan. I'd better put them on a plate and mix them there."

"Wait, is this breakfast? Is it... lunch? When the hell did I wake up? If it is breakfast, how come it's chili?"

2000: The Crossdressing Crusades

In the year 2000, the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons was released. I got it pretty much fresh off the printers, though I had no idea how new it was; all I knew was that I was switching from something old, to something new. Pretty much simultaneously, AD&D celebrated its nineteenth birthday (The early D&D, which I never played, turned 26 that year).

The same year, a few months before I got the new books, I had managed to recruit two new players who came to form the basis of the first group I ever seriously ran adventures for. It consisted of my friend from school, Andy, and his little brother Benny. While Benny would only be in the group for two years, Andy formed the core of my long-running chronicles to follow. He spent a lot more time on his character than me or Lex had done before, detailing such things as family, education, habits, personality and wardrobe. While he was a bit overzealous at times, and he absolutely detested any form of harm befalling his precious, well-crafted character, Andy taught the rest of us that the sky's the limit when it comes to character creation. While my father still ran adventures for this group as well (the Tower of Power adventure in the previous post actually included them), I took my first staggering steps as a GM designing simple "kill the monster" scenarios for these two players.

Andy was also the one who gave this blog post its title. He introduced a novel new concept that neither me nor Lex had previously considered: his character was a girl, a stunningly gorgeous elven paladin named Gondriel. With that, he sparked somewhat of a trend, and when we eventually got the third edition books, three out of four people made female characters. At this point I still had my own characters in all the adventures, and was more or less the inofficial GM only because I owned the books – and my first 3rd edition character was Wendy, a half-elf druid. Lex followed suit with the ranger Wanda, which left Benny as our only male – Bruno the Bard.

For practical reasons we later split the group, and along with Lex I created the first real “campaign” or “chronicle” I ever made, unimaginatively named “Wendy & Wanda” which really sounds a lot more like a daytime TV sitcom than an exciting fantasy adventure now that I look back at it. Nevertheless, it was the first thing I played with a coherent, sensible storyline – and more importantly, it was the first time I got to work crafting NPCs. I made a lot of them for this game: Recurring villains, sidekicks, the quirky store owner Thorin, even a romantic interest.

I know what you're thinking, and let me stop you right there – yes, we were two teenage boys playing female characters in a story with a romantic side plot. This couldn't possibly end well, could it?

Surprisingly, our minds weren't in the gutter nearly half as much as you'd expect. While there were a few “Tee hee, I have boobs” moments, and our characters probably took a few more baths than what was strictly necessary if you're out adventuring, the romantic storyline actually developed relatively sensibly, and ended in Wanda being married to a handsome samurai with graying temples. You might wonder what a female Aragorn was doing marrying a samurai who probably belongs in a different quarter of the world altogether, which brings me to another interesting viewpoint: While we had a story, we still didn't have a setting. I made up the scenery for the adventures more or less on the fly, and aside from one town called Freeport which served as our base of operations, nothing was really coherent between our adventures; the town was simultaneously by the sea, in the middle of the forest, or next to an evil empire, as appropriate for the adventure.

We would eventually come to deal with this issue, but for now we were happy just to go on adventures. The stories were simple, but the adventures usually were at least vaguely linked together, and because of the recurring NPCs it did have the feeling of being a single, distinct campaign to a much greater degree than anything we had done before. We looked back at our adventures, and I loved what I saw; the simple mud of dull die-rolling had been fertilized, and out of it was spiring something beautiful, something none of us had expected to be there. Out of random encounters, survival rolls, and spot checks, a story was growing, a story that somehow was more than just the sum of its parts. It was a simple story, a crude, primitive tale of man (or woman, rather) facing monsters in harsh wilderness, but it was alive, and more importantly, it was mine.

This is when I became truly passionate. I started writing down what had happened in the adventures, sometimes from the point of view of one of the characters. I started reading the books thoroughly, scanning for new interesting monsters, traps, or other obstacles. I plowed through novels solely to get inspiration. I counted the days until the next game session. I was hooked, and hooked bad.

In just one year, I had gone from stringing together random encounters for Bruno and Gondriel, to fashioning characters, plots, and all sorts of challenges falling outside the scope of the rules. Now, only one thing remained: A setting.

Notable Characters: Gondriel, who was the first character to really be a character in her own right. Paradoxally, she wasn't in the first chronicle, as it was a while before I made real “stories” for the group in my hometown, but it was Andy's design of Gondriel that really showed me and Lex how to make your character more than just numbers on a sheet of paper.

Crowning Moments of Awesome: Yeah, we had a few. One of the best one was sneaking off from a school dance to run a session in the coat room, using our first-edition sheets made on the backs of old homework (Gondriel and Bruno remained 1st ed characters for most of their existence, for some reason I remember mostly playing 3rd ed with Lex). We also finally beat the first dungeon that my father ran for us, which I ran straight out of the book with some added quirks of my own. While I was the GM and probably biased, Bill and Sain (with the addition of Gondriel) finally did manage to make it to the treasury of the ruins and got their reward (not that they needed it after killing the kobold banker, but still).

The true Crowning Moment of Awesome, however, was in that magical moment when the game became a Story. I've spent my entire life since then reliving that moment in many, many, many different games, and it keeps getting better.

Next Up: Gnomeworld, in which I create a full-scale world, learn how to plan ahead, and things begin to take a darker turn. Also, a character actually climbs from level 1 to level 20 – to date, a feat I've only seen done once.

1999: Kobold Soup

“You're sitting at a dark, dank tavern in a small town, when an old dwarf approaches, saying he knows of a ruined monastery where, supposedly, a great treasure lies hidden...”

In -99 I was introduced to roleplaying games, and spent most of that year on the player side of the table. Me and Lex (notice the cunning nickname) started out in an adventure as classically D&D as they come. Whereas we started out with a bang and a critical hit, the adventure didn't actually go so well and gave both of us nightmares because of the creepy thing sneaking around in the dungeon – we didn't actually find out what it was in-game, ever – but even in the first adventure we had some of those classical things that make roleplaying games so great, like the GM-Player miscommunication (“The door doesn't open when I push it? I bash it open!” - “It- it opens outwards, but okay?”), insane streaks of hateful, evil dice (“I missed the goblin six times and I needed to roll an 8?”) and even the tiniest bit of character backstory (“My parents were killed by dragons! Then I got adopted by my grandparents, but they were killed by dragons too!” - Hey, I was 11!).

After that initial adventure, we played occasionally under the guidance of my father, notably in the Tower of Power adventure, written and designed by one of my fathers' friends way back before I was born, but we also spent a lot of time just randomly fighting stuff from the monster manual, sans GM; it gave us the opportunity to try out how the game worked, and ignited those first few sparks of true creativity in us both – when we would actually stop and discuss for a moment where and why we were fighting the three gnolls. Somewhat surprisingly, Lex stood for the gamemastering before I did, in the adventure that gives this blog post its name: Kobold Soup. The plot: A man really, really likes kobold soup, but he has no kobolds to put in it. The mission: Kill lots of kobolds and feed the man. The twist: One of the kobolds owns a bank, and has at least one item from every treasure table in the game. The happy ending: We run out of shit to spend the money on, and build a giant church for the rest of it.

The Tower of Power was the most interesting adventure story-wise, one which I'd be glad to run again even though I've both played and ran it many, many times. Unfortunately we never finished it back then, because we either died or my father was too busy to run it for so long that we forgot what we were doing. The adventure revolves around a mysteriously scented tea, which players from my AE games probably recognize.

Notable Characters:
None really, but I'd like to give myself a pat on the back for at least giving my cleric a backstory of some kind.

Crowning Moments of Awesome:
It didn't get a whole lot better than instantly killing the first monster – a giant spider – I think. We did kind of accidentally kill a dragon because we misinterpreted the rules, but it wasn't very exciting because it died instantly (again because we misinterpreted the rules) and it was just one of those “let's fight random stuff!” bouts.

Next Up: The Crossdressing Crusades, in which we introduce two new players and four new characters, and I make my debut as a gamemaster.

Eleven Years of Adventure

I've had another Random Idea (tm). This idea spired out of my Half-Life Idea, because I realized that I pretty recently passed the limit where I've been doing roleplaying games for half my life, and I got all nostalgic and stuff. So, in another bout of sleeplessness, I went through my gaming year-by-year in my head, and I realized that it might be fun to write some of it down.

Since I inevitably lose anything I write down on a note, I figured I might as well use my blog. It's a neat place to keep shit, and it also means that if people are bored, they can read it and maybe become even more bored, so that's good. Furthermore, it gives me something to do with my blog during the summer.

What I'm going to do is, I'm going to primarily write about the “long-term game of the year”, since I've done one big project every year, and then maybe mention some smaller chronicles that deserve attention. I'm also going to gossip a bit about various players, so woo gossip I guess? Chances are you will be mentioned if you have played with me, but don't worry, I'll do my best to protect everyones' privacy by giving them cunning nicknames. Posts will be extremely long, very self-centered, and in all likelihood, not very entertaining. You have been warned.

The first entry is called “1999: Kobold Soup” and will be up shortly.

Blog Challenge: Half-Life

So I couldn't sleep, and came to count various mathematical conclusions in my head. This is one of them.

I am now approximately 22 years and 46 days old (roughly). This means that, half my life ago, I was 11 years and 23 days. That was the 9th of May, 1999.

Half my life ago, I was in fifth grade and had just fallen in love with Linn J, a girl in my class. I had not yet awakened sexually, but I had discovered roleplaying games and programming in the form of the Klik n' Play game maker. I had also discovered the Beatles and hung out in Andreas' house listening over and over to Rubber Soul. I had done some acting in school plays - playing an old grandfather-guy and something involving a black top hat, as well as put up my very own mime show with some dude I barely knew.

Half my life ago, I had visited the United States but not (if memory serves) Norway, and the most important things in my life were second-hand stores for comic books and video games. I was fiercely loyal to Sega despite the losing battle against the N64 and my MegaDrive was my most prized possession. Half my life ago, I was just about to read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for the first time, and I had just about beaten Sonic 3. Half my life ago, I outsmarted a teacher for the first time in my life, and realized that older people are not infallible.

Of the people I knew half my life ago, I now only keep contact with those I am related to. I barely know what has become of the others.

Now for the challenge: Who were you half your life ago? What was important to you? Who did you know? Use your blogs, people. I'm curious.

Nightbrain

This morning I woke up and couldn't remember who I was. It took my brain a little while to catch up, and for a few seconds - thirty or so - I was just left reeling in confusion at how to interpret all the visual impressions I got; I remember focusing on an alarm clock and wondering vaguely if the alarm clock was mine, and if so, what I was supposed to use it for.

I wish I could say it was cool, but it really was just confusing and frightening. Even more so, it was kind of depressing because when I finally remembered who I was, my instant reaction was to be disappointed. I don't know what that says about me.

It's Official!

I have nothing more to add.

Up And Down

I've practically been manic-depressive lately, so much that I'm wondering if I should go see someone just to make sure there ain't nothing wrong with me. I really switch between passionate enthusiasm locking me up in a single task for an entire day, forgetting to eat and refusing to sleep... just to crash the following day in a puddle of lethargy and do nothing.

I have a feeling they're due to stress from school, so maybe this'll all clear up once summer arrives. I think what I need is simply uninterrupted boredom for long enough that I won't have anything left to spazz out and spend all my energy on.

I know I should technically be able to control this myself, but it's really, really hard. I can get up from the depressive spells, but I can't seem to stop myself from those crazy spasms of absolute devotion.

Anyone got advice for how to contain enthusiasm?

"Rik McUristsson (Gamesmith) has been taken by a strange mood."

Futuristic Linguistics

Rappers are pretty amazing. Modern-day rappers can perform linguistic stunts that would baffle the old bards and poets, I'm pretty sure; I've seen numerous examples of rap that contains real literary quality, and many of the best even improvise it entirely.

Question is, why does nobody in "higher literary circles" pay attention to this? I've seen rap lyrics that I'm pretty sure would make Shakespeare impressed (if he could understand them) because they have a nice rhythm, good rhyming, and are peppered with similies and metaphors. Take a look at this, for example:

"When I punch ya, I rupture all your ribcage in a rage,
and I turn you into a cartoon too and erase the page."

The above two lines have some pretty good rhythm, and we've got at least one pretty advanced metaphor ("turn you into a cartoon and erase the page") and one somewhat more crude one (assuming the rapper isn't literally threatening people with crushing their ribcages, which rappers aren't prone to do). This isn't bad poetry - it's pretty advanced poetry. Its message might only be "I am awesome", but poetry has never concerned itself much with message - what makes poetry poetry is that it has literary quality, and it can't be argued that rap does.

Here's another example from some guy called John Cena (he's probably famous, I never heard of him before):

"Cause I'm ill like a sick metaphor,
got the crowd shouting Cena cause they want some more
[...]
hold your hands up, hold 'em high,
that was a nice diss, but it was a wack-ass try."

Not perhaps remarkable mastery of language, but he made this up on the fly as one dude in the audience insulted him. And still, the guy manages to fire off "ill like a sick metaphor" which is a pretty advanced similie and something that, I'm quite sure, literature professors could spend a few hours poring over its hidden depths had it appeared in some musty old book on poetry.

Why aren't rappers given the credit and respect they deserve? They're doing massively impressive things with their language, sometimes in advance, sometimes on the fly as they stand there. What with the speed a rapper usually keeps up, this makes many of them way more advanced than many poets. Granted, the message might not be so deep, but should that really matter? If an artist only paints angry dogs, but does so amazingly well, is he any worse of an artist just because the motive isn't deep and inspired?

Whining

Blogs are good for whining.

Stumbled upon a video on YouTube which was from a Christian group going "Hey everyone, tolerance is real neat, God approves of gay marriage and everything, love each other and be happy."

The comments for the video was endless spamming from people going "Religious retards, you all suck."

Granted, this is YouTube comments we're talking about, so it's inevitably made by the absolute dregs of humanity, but still. You'd think we could agree about "Being nice to people is a good thing."

The Small Awesome Things

So the other day I was changing sheets in the bed, and I'd moved it out from the wall to be able to put on the sheet properly. Then, without really thinking, I tossed a pillow onto the bed - and while it was mid-air I realized that it was going to fall between the bed and the wall on the far end. Acting with super-fast thinking, I pushed the bed with my knee and managed to pin the pillow against the wall with the bed.

I gave myself a stunt bonus.

Intelligent Gay Design

Here's an interesting observation:

Men can achieve orgasm through anal stimulation, because of the positioning of the prostate. Women usually can't achieve orgasm through anal stimulation (exceptions exist) because, well, they don't have prostates.

Conversely, women can achieve orgasms without penetration (well, duh).

What does this tell us? It tells us that God has actually equipped men to be able to enjoy both aspects of anal sex. It also tells us that God has equipped women to be able to enjoy non-penetrative sex, as in, sex where no penis is involved.

Conclusion: If Intelligent Design is indeed true, God has purposefully equipped humans with features that serve no other purpose other than making it possible to have gay sex.

Pokémon Tabletop Adventures!

Okay, so I'm pretty sure I've told everyone about this already, but I'm going to blog about it anyway cause, hell yeah.

Pokémon Adventures! It's a tabletop roleplaying game where you play Pokémon trainers! The rules for putting together a trainer are, as of yet, not complete - but the rules for designing, catching, and duelling with pokémon are finished! Trainers are easy, you can use almost any game system to cobble together an ordinary dude - so it's basically playable with a bit of conversion work!

I already tried putting together a Squirtle, it's easy as pie; just look up a Squirtle's statistics, adjust for personality, and then when your pokémon levels up you have to observe certain rules (like, Squirtle, Wartortle and Blastoise must always have Defense as their highest stat) - otherwise you're good to go! Pokémon duels follow the same basic rules as they do in the Gameboy game; attacks almost always hit, and deal damage or inflict certain special effects on enemy Pokémon. When rolls are required, they're handled with d20s or d100s. As usual, the most difficult part of strategizing is choosing which pokémon to use.

This rocks and as soon as there is free time for it, I am going to design an adventure. The only problem I can foresee is what happens if you should ever need rules for Pokémon vs. Human or Pokémon vs. Environment, as they never really address that in the game, and not much in the TV series. Presumably, though, humans are just plain screwed against even a basic Pokémon, and the environment causes serious problems for any Pokémon without an affinity for it (like, don't try to make Diglett swim, and don't leave your Bulbasaur in a rockslide).

When (not if) we eventually play this, I will only use the basic 150 Pokémon, and starting trainers will get to begin with one of the following: Bulbasaur, Charmander, Squirtle, Geodude, Machop, Abra, Pidgey, Caterpie, Gastly, Zubat, Oddish. For balance reasons, the game doesn't allow you to start with Pikachu, only Pichu - but Pichu is not part of the original 150, so sorry dudes.