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.