Smoking Lizard Media

Inspiration? Perhaps…

© 2017 G.N. Jacobs

Yeah, yeah, even I’m already tired of bragging up my various RPG characters. But, if you read further there ain’t no braggin’ here. Si-Yun the Fighter…well, he’s playable, but I quickly tired of his motif after one session. Why? The concept that sounded so good between my ears just seemed ridiculous laid out on a gaming surface. What does he do? He throws rocks and baseballs at your head. 

So there I am on my periodic Meetup expeditions trying to find a game that doesn’t require that I A) give up my sacrosanct Wednesday night writing session or B) drive long ways in unfamiliar traffic. I find a Culver City game. I sign up. We meet at a gaming store set in the mushy spaces on the map between Culver City and Fox Studios. The DM tells us to use the point allocation system buried on the last page of the character creation section in the current Player’s Handbook where the player starts with average stats and applies a set number of points to get the results he or she wants.

I take a few days thinking up the concept sure to kill every freakin’ monster in the room. I wasn’t even watching any baseball when I had this brainwave to go for a rock thrower. Suddenly, I’m goofing around with baseball players, specifically pitchers. Si-Yun…Cy Young. Yeah, heavy-handed metaphor is one of my fortes when developing certain types of characters.

Once Cy Young becomes Si-Yun, I’m not going to spoil the concept by actually looking up the pitcher for whom the pitching award is named on Wikipedia. I think he’s a right-hander but why spoil a character with too many facts? Doesn’t matter, I’m a righty with a marked sense of wonder for the few southpaws among us as in – “How the hell do you throw stuff without getting all disco-bobbed in your shoelaces?” So I play righties. Always have.

Naturally, choosing a rock thrower with a folk hero background, probably means I’m world famous in Poland (or local equivalent) for being the guy that hit the scary crows with a rock during the bird invasion. It means optimizing my stats for three fifteens (Strength, Constitution and Dexterity) and three elevens including race bonuses for human. And double specializing as a fighter in rock throwing, along with quarterstaff and dagger.

So have a bag of tennis ball sized rocks will travel. Designing a pitcher as itinerant hero still seems a good idea to me. I’m making jokes about being a four-weapon pitcher. I have a rising four-seam fastball signaled from the catcher as Number One. I have a sinking two-seam fastball as Number Two. A big curveball as Number Three. And a hard slider in the Number Four slot. Fancy blovius for “I’m throwing at your head Mr. Ogre.”

It wasn’t until a little later that my dark imaginings about a baseball character motif naturally led to some funny, in the abstract, thoughts. You throw at the ogre (orc? Whatever). You miss close moving him back a few feet from the inside corner. Now, if we really dive deep on the baseball metaphor, does this now mean the ogre must now whistle to his buddies for a bench-clearing brawl in which they curse your parentage as they swing with ejections, suspensions and fines to follow? Oh, right, it’s already a fantasy RPG us or them pub brawl. Who would notice? In all cases, better get him in the ear, Si-Yun.

I must’ve also imagined the real world results of too many bean balls inflicted upon batters or the similar ugly results of the frozen rope shot straight back to the pitcher’s mound. They’ve listed pitchers getting hit in the head as a risk factor for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). I remember players and base coaches on my team, the Dodgers, taking fearsome shots usually just below the ear that messed them up for a long time.

However, real world head trauma isn’t exactly well reflected in the mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons. A sharply thrown rock has really always been a mere D4 in damage. True, I throw my fist-sized rocks and replenish by searching the riverbeds or back alleys for new rocks, brick chunks, road pavers and actual baseballs so ammunition is free everywhere. And equally true, there are really good reasons to have at least a few of the steely-eyed missile men in the party throwing stuff that specifically deals out blunt force trauma: skeletons, zombies, or Giger’s alien xenomorphs. I’ve been in parties that have fought all three.

Maybe you want to break bones for double damage (is that still a rule for skeletons?). Or the monster is basically contagious (I’m looking at you Abercrombie the Zombie). Lastly, the beast might’ve been built by a dungeon master on a bad no coffee day to wipe you out in a spoilsport acid bath after the fact. Blunt force missiles do help the party survive.

So after one play session, why did I suddenly walk back Si-Yun from being a great idea to an okay, playable concept? I’m not sure if it’s my natural ADHD fickleness with characters (I have switched out characters in the past to the groans of certain DMs). Or, perhaps, with a folk hero background that likely says I’m an ambassador for baseball in whatever campaign world I find myself with Si-Yun, that I just didn’t want to talk like a baseball player turned adventurer at the gaming table. How many ERA stats can I bloviate about? Quite a lot if I care, which truthfully isn’t much except when it’s November ball and the Dodgers have survived their traditional August slump.

 And let’s not underestimate that at D4 blunt missile damage throwing rocks just doesn’t do damage quickly enough for the average bloodthirsty RPG player. I’ve played with out and out bloodthirsty (Set Phasers for Deep Fat Fry!) characters in the party. More often than not the bloodthirstiness, even among good characters, is simply the basic survival instinct of – “Maybe the idea is to be the guy that always brings a shotgun to a pistol fight.” Peace through superior firepower, indeed.

So there you have it, a small piece of my character generation thought process…for what it’s worth.

© 2017 G.N. Jacobs

When we last left my ongoing commentary on my friend, Francis Joe Burns, and his recent creation Danica Shade, I pretty much raved about her prose introduction story This Party’s Sooo Dead (see post). I had a lot of fun watching a purple skinned, pink haired deadly cutie of a dark elf (Drow or D’orch’A in the D&D Monster Manual for those who care) chop-socking her way through a variety of mostly undead people at a Hollywood house party led by a lich needing killing. In the main, now that Danica has jumped into the comic book character she was always intended to be, I’m still enjoying the experience. 

This time around in Nevertheless She Persisted our favorite dark she-elf assassin, counter-terrorism agent, pseudo-millennial gamer girl and all around metaphorical standard bearer for modern decency simply needs a job. A ‘normal’ job that in Danica-verse means a security consulting position. Wearing what is likely to become her signature out fit of a purple and black skirt mated to black metallic armor pieces that give her an odd sexy but still subdued Ren Faire bondage mistress vibe she goes for an interview.

In this short comic book with no interior color, Danica waits in a large office waiting room making mental notes about what it is the Boss might be compensating for. The ladies in the office, all of them beautiful completely out of proportion to the normal distribution of such pulchritude, really don’t like working in this office. The Boss-man assumes every woman walking in the door is a secretary and he grabs asses whenever he can. Danica fumes and leaves about halfway through the interview. She later interrupts a Dungeons and Dragons session to do something about it, break into the office.

As someone who must admit that I knew this story was coming because it is my privilege to sit across from Joe most Wednesday nights working on projects, I must say that how he pitched it gave a lot of expectation compared to how this first story came out in black and white comic book form. There is a totally awesome story in here that might not play as well to new readers, but Persisted serves as a good interim story to keep a fun character alive, until Joe either writes a novel or a full size comic book/graphic novel with colorist attached.

With Persisted, I really want to see Danica either make the Acapulco cliff diving splash into full color comics or retreat into prose where Joe’s words do amazing amounts of heaving lifting describing scenes, characters and dramatic situations. I didn’t hate the pencils provided by Ali Toglukdemir that gave Danica a black and white pseudo-anime look with wide expressive eyes. On most pages, I really enjoyed how pencils and inks worked out, but there were a small few where the narrative got mushy because I’d lost a bit of my ability to tell people apart.

Most noticeably, when the ladies in the office were sent to a harassment seminar as a distraction for Danica to enter the evil handsy Boss’s office to fight for the job she should’ve had in the first place. I had trouble telling if the people sitting around the conference table were the women likely to gain strength in numbers or if they might be the old crony dudes in the boardroom that would then have to deal with the newfound uprising among the steno pool.

Part of this is reflective that Joe really pitched the hell out of this story when we sat together like five-year-olds in study hall, but Persisted for me has been a good solid read that put me in a state much like doing lime shots without chasing it with tequila and salt immediately after. Limes are good if a little sour. Tequila is always good. And the salt chaser has its place. The assumption is that we follow the recipe and do these three things together.

Maybe Nevertheless She Persisted is really a 24-page (full size) single-issue story needing the extra twelve pages of chop-socky, snark and all around attitude to develop Danica’s world and what happens to the crappy Boss-man that many women must’ve worked for at one time or another? Especially considering the chosen ending, the twelve pages presented feel too short (a rare thing in storytelling).

These extra pages that were omitted due to Joe having the usual independent creator woes of having to balance keeping Danica in the market in time for key conventions, knowing that artists don’t work for free and the almighty budget. Sadly this is how well pitched should be 24-page one shots become truncated 12-page reads that leave so much on the table.

What do I want to see in these missing extra pages? Mostly, we should see that the Boss is powerful enough to retaliate against Danica forcing her to up her violence game. And a big climactic monster at the end of the video game level: Ogre, Bridge Troll, Werewolf…pick one.

What really gets left on the table even in the truncated version is the feeling of schadenfreude we want to feel towards the handsy Boss as he gets the shit kicked out of him by a woman that just ain’t takin’ it no more. Even with the presented ending that goes for let’s make a deal, Jerk, much like how Cardinal Richelieu makes a deal with D’Artagnan at the end of Three Musketeers, I really would’ve liked this asswipe to twist for a few pages and need to beg Danica to help fix the damage. I have a feeling that Joe really did this story justice in a prose outline draft that got slashed up translating it to comic book form. These things happen.

Most of the rest of my griping comes from Danica just isn’t a black and white character. Even with the pencils and inks as they are (mostly good but with a couple pages the artists want back), I really believe that color will make our favorite femme asskicker pop off the page. Dude, she wears purple and black dress armor with spandex underneath and at least with this art team it didn’t move me all that much in black and white. Hopefully, Joe will take heart and pay for a good colorist next time around.

After reading both extant stories, Party and Persisted, I wondered if I read them in the wrong order. Danica’s normal career path is to be destined to wipe out really big bads like undead necromancers and other things that go bump in the night. Basically, she should invite Buffy, the Charmed Sisters and the entire cast of the all-female Supernatural spin-off for dinner and shared mayhem. Taking a few minutes to chop-socky disposable goons in an office break in seems like a come down leading me to wonder if Joe gets a little more out of both stories by arbitrarily asserting that Persisted happens before Party, a warm up for the Halloween zombie/lich fight.

At the level of script, I felt that Joe had a mixed bag using caption and interior monologue boxes to drive the narrative. Really good for narrating Danica’s reactions and thoughts seeing this impressively sexist workplace needing an ass-whooping, less so for explaining the sharp cuts between scenes (job interview to interrupted RPG session to the break in to gather evidence). A character introduced in This Party’s Sooo Dead, a gnome hacker that acts as Danica’s Tom Arnold (support team on the headset) might have needed a caption box to tell the reader who she is.

But, I really want to highlight some of the earlier caption boxes that give the reader insight into Danica as an investigator and open can of whoop ass. She walks into the cavernous waiting room and makes a point of seeing the many impeccably dressed beautiful human women with slumped shoulders and downcast eyes. She immediately understands she has walked into a lion cage where the tamer hasn’t fed the performers properly. And when her suspicions prove out with the first ass grab, we get to feel her anger, snark and determination to do something. This part of the comic book just really worked so well, there’s no bashing it. Truncated story or not, Joe clearly hears Danica whispering in his ears as she reaches out from her world far beyond our observable stars. We should all be that way with our characters.

Also in the vein of closing out my thoughts on a high note, I can’t say enough about the additional art provided by cover artist Don Walker and the exposition/title page provided by Paola Carbajal Kerr. Don, another friend from the Wednesday scene, imbues his cover (see above) with the depths that we know Danica will find when Joe finds her true stories and a good artist for the character. The cover gives Danica a sensuality missing from the interior art and quite frankly is the real reason for my ‘spring for color or just write a Danica novel, but don’t let her languish in black and white’ comments. The juxtaposition is just that stark.

And Paola, also a friend from our comics scene, busted out one of her funny and charming Chibi style drawings of Danica, as she acts like Basil Exposition explaining all the parts of the universe that just aren’t going to show up in a simple story of Danica taking down a sex harassing douchebag Boss: magic, magical races from RPGs and the racism therein. This deceptively simple art delivered with a smile helps me want to turn pages and keep saying as many nice things about Danica as possible.

So far that’s Great In Prose, Fun but Could Be Better in Black & White and Will Blow Socks Off in Color.

© 2017 G.N. Jacobs

Perhaps you listened to the previous Dungeoneer’s Diary post for the constant refrain of “and then the game broke up due to life and reasons?” Well, that has also been a constant in my RPG life since high school, largely my college play with a long layoff because at this point life (24 and flamed out from school) people really into tabletop RPGs should basically be channeling that creative energy into a script or a book. You know, chase money. But, I do get to remember the time when a game lasted, what it taught me about RPGs and remember fondly the characters that made it possible. 

Picture, if you will, a sophomore fighting his way back from Academic Probation (GEs kill the arrogantly unprepared who never fully understood school, except as a life experience). I need something to do on Saturdays. I get to talking with my buddy, Steve, who has forgotten more about anime than I’ll likely ever learn. We like Star Wars having met at the Death Star trench run video game in the lobby of our dorm. We like that Star Trek: The Next Generation is on TV even if it’s the silly first and second seasons. And we like Dungeons & Dragons.

“Steve, it’s been a little while since I played.”

“There’s this really cool game that I just got into through the Gaming Club on Saturdays,” Steve says. “We still need a few people, so it should be okay.”

“What do they need? I kinda want to play a thief or an illusionist.” (In hindsight, dumb. Never ask what the game needs. It’s your playtime.)

“I think we need more guys that swing swords, fighters maybe a ranger,” Steve continues.

So I come to the table and roll up a ranger. Kalgon, a half-elf ranger named after the bath soap brand. Away we go as the Heroes of Tharsis, a sleepy village about a week’s wagon trek from the capitol. Kalgon lasted maybe four months.

We started out with a human wizard, an she-elf sorceress, a female dwarf fighter, an elf thief, a half-elf cleric, my friend’s half-elf fighter and a female human fighter maxing out the new weapon specialist rules added to the First Edition rules (2nd Edition just added to AD&D) to be the archer that Legolas is and always will be. Kalgon largely bored me. Yeah, I tracked in the forest and added to the mayhem of the party. Reflecting my life in college at the time, the ranger drank too much (think Bluto from Animal House).

We reach near 3rd Level ambushing kobolds and then forcing the goblin in charge to come to Panmunjom, so to speak. Steve lowered a shoulder and dropped a Minotaur off a high ledge. Orcs, several times. The normal humanoid monsters Tolkien taught us to hate and the game reinforced by not making them playable races. And there are no dragons…until there were. And Kalgon is still massively boring as the beer swilling ranger getting yelled at by the wizard for shooting at the wrong target in a big fight.

With the agreement of the Dungeon Master, I change characters. Durkheim Weber Zarathustra, a gnome thief-illusionist (both of my first choices). Now, you had to see this little guy; I repurposed a cool dwarf battlemat figure – The Dwarf with No Name (figures were lead back then). Basically, Clint Eastwood just walked into the house ready to shoot everybody in town, except the undertaker – “My mistake, four coffins.”

And now the Heroes of Tharsis are cookin’ with gas. First off, I sit down with the wizard and figure out how to use my first level Illusion spell to make him look deadlier than any dude with just one Magic Missile is ever going to be. I give him two sticks taped together. One is for the Fireballs he can’t cast yet. The other for the Magic Missile he can cast but runs out of too quickly. As long as I maintain the illusion I can shoot off much of this imaginary mayhem as I want, subject to Intelligence saving throws if you got hit. It worked and the guy playing Merlin even went home to make the prop out of 1-inch PVC and a candle.

And the game lasted another year and a half. A highly regimented killing force. The dwarf, the fighter and the cleric (when necessary, clerics many times should hide behind the Flying Wedge) formed the front shield wall. The lady archer shot over the dwarf’s head scoring for all the points. Meanwhile, the two spell casters (the class of Magic User hadn’t fully diverged into the many flavors available since) and myself cast the spells. And the pure thief, Zell, either joined the shield wall, the archer with a sling or tried to find opportunities to make use of his prodigious backstab bonus.

Massively good times. Nothing stood in our way. Durk contributed smoking up his ever-present cubanos (Churchill-sized Montecristos, because why not? And yes, I’m aware that Clint smoked something smaller in the movies). Drow. Giger’s Aliens. A white dragon (no one believed us when we told the tale). Giants. Ogres. Haitian type zombies (no aiming for the head). And a high-level fighter with a penchant for rape and possession of magic armor.

Cool magic stuff we appropriated all the time. By the time we ended I had a Ring of Invisibility, a magic knife that spoke in a hot sexy southern accent and some other minor doodads. The ring came in trade for stealing the rapist’s +4 suit of full plate armor and giving it to the fighter.

I remember sneaking off to break the bastard’s house because I wanted to fuck up his shit more than I could bulking up Merlin with my illusions. Durk is breathless alone in the dude’s three story house. I’m breathless trying to get stealth rolls under my percentage (48-percent) for each of eight pieces of armor. I went for candlesticks, a symbolic fuck you, and walked out with the local equivalent of an Abrams Main Battle Tank. A good day. And bringing said armor home is a good way to avoid having the rest of the party play Smear the Queer on my head for leaving without telling them.

So what became of Durk and the gang? We fought gods. The archer married the NPC I created as my mentor during character creation (Clint Eastwood being a powerful archetype). We fought more gods. And Durk took a Alignment Curse on the chin coming out the other end as Lawful Good. Yikes, time to retire just in time for the DM to graduate.

There it is, that magical game that went as intended for two years. You showed up hungover from Friday, if necessary, and you played. Most of the names IRL I’ve lost in the blankness of just being on the tip of my tongue. I had a few more years at school.

I played other games, some with members of this game. I shifted over to GURPS and played with other subsets of the club. I went to cons, but every game fizzled after a few sessions and we’d try something else. And then when it was time to leave school to be a writer, I never looked back for more than twenty-five years. It was a good game.