moments and years

I missed the chance to commemorate the true birthday of this little blog, last Monday. but today, January 19, 2025, marks exactly 20 years since the first actual, fully-fledged post: a response to our first key reading assignment about webdesign and such.

what a different world. such a different place it was. or maybe twenty years ago wasn't so very different, and it only seems so because I and my perspective have changed so much since then. 

what happens if I stitch together a few snippets from all the blogged Januaries of each year since 2005? what new montage will spill into this digital page in between them all?

I tried my best to pull from sections nearest to the 13th and 19th of the month (a thing much easier to do from the posts before 2014ish, when the apex of graduate school + its aftermath slowed down my writing here so much).

what I notice amongst these snippets and what you notice will be different, I imagine. I notice the unending pulse of learning and academia. books and thoughts chasing each other in circles. comments about the weather seem to sit neatly in the background with questions of identity and all its tangly unspooling. these words always have been for me more than anything. does all this pontificating from past amelia still sound like useful advice? mostly yes, I think. but I would say that, wouldn't I?

2006

the fact that energy is behind it all is somehow unifying. simple

...

linguistic structures will be a low-key class. it is full of people i don't see in my other classes. the other english majors. non tech writing people: the lit majors, the teaching majors. it's weird.

2007

get used to the fear and the doubt. get used to being faced with new facets of your own ignorance. get used to the pain. embrace humility. you can't always feel in control.

but really, how comforting is that?

I don't know. I'd take humility over false confidence anyday. but then the humble rarely get much respect.

2008-2009 (a pause.)

2010

the world is big.

there's a lot going on in it. even in this mostly empty house, there's me sitting at the table, typing, stretching a bit of CSS out over a half-built website skeleton, scribbling a few what-ifs, listening to Radiohead. and I made banana nut muffins this morning.

2011

in the beginning, this blog was just a place for all my first impressions--all my doubts and worries about the usefulness or meaningfulness of all the stuff I was learning. after that semester, I decided to keep blogging--mainly about writing (Starcustard and random short stories), school (rhetoric, more webdesign, and Isotope), and life (philosophical thoughts about my job, vague complaints about boys, and so forth). and so it continued. I'm still here. I still blog.

...

what do those stories say about me?

I'm thinking about all the texture of my life. all the patterned and patternless history I've collected so far. telling stories is one way to remember it. and on the other hand... telling and retelling and re-remembering these stories is one way to completely revise the past. after a few months or years, it becomes easy to bend the details. to emphasize the funny parts. to leave out the things that make you look like a bit of an idiot.

how I envision myself is pretty complicated, I guess. perspective is weirdly limited like that.

2012

 

which we am I talking about, anyway? and when? and where? 

2013

it may not make any huge difference in the long run, but even so, the ultimate pointlessness of things should not be dragged up as an excuse for us to stay in bed all day. at least not more than once or twice a year, anyway, right?

2014

this seemingly misnamed semester will inch along to spring in due course. and when that happens, finals and stress will no doubt prevent me from enjoying it as thoroughly as I could, but for now... well for now, the semester is glowing with warm, cozy pillows full of insight and excitement. this might be the best January ever.

2015

I have spent much (but not enough) of this long, mostly-pleasant weekend sitting by the window, trying to focus on readings for classes. 

.... 2015 is here, still all new-feeling. gradually we'll get to see both how it changes my life and how it doesn't.

2016

today it is raining in spurts, like a chilly and unkempt spring. Tuesday's snow is long since melted. it'll be back this weekend. the universe is giving us yo-yo-ing seasons, somewhat drab all the way through, with occasional bright sunset smudges.

the trees are bare. my apartment windows open onto more distant views than they did in summer and fall. at night, more and more streetlights perpetually leak into my bedroom under the edges of the blinds. I notice the faces of buildings I have never seen from such an angle before.

2017

it's empowering to reflect on the background structure of your whole life. to actively participate and acknowledge your role in either accepting/reinforcing or resisting/revising the culture you swim in. and that seems important. that's what it takes to make all of that power and structure more open-book, more readable, more transparent and less like a vice.

2018

if I had the brainpower on this Friday evening to make some additional academicalish comments on how these beautifully-commentated marble races and our fascination with them could link up interestingly with some of the tenets of object-oriented ontology, I would. but I don't know all that much about object-oriented ontology myself, and should probably not let it distract me much more than the Marblelympics already have from writing up nicely finished dissertation chapters about digital ethnography and distributed commons-based peer-production and what that all may mean for technical communication and human culture and such.

2019

and then the speaker said something about facebook hopefully having a major role in someday establishing some kind of global online government. after that, according to my notes, I typed out this:

"eeeeek."

does the world want and need to be connected by a central online platform, really? is the capitalist interest that facebook has in being the medium by which everyone is connected anything we can trust?

2020

all this potent potential meaning curled up in to hold. and then there are all these phrasal verbs, too: hold back, hold up, hold out, hold off, hold against, beholden to...

to be held as a parent holds a young baby is to be safe. comfortable. cared for. right?

to be held is also to be restrained. controlled. and to be restrained isn't usually considered comfortable, though... right?

or is it?

2021

and when I listened to this recent episode of So Many Damn Books with George Saunders I felt more affinity for Saunders's love of teaching writing than perhaps I might once have felt. his advice is to remember that you're never just teaching 20-somethings who barely know what to do with their adulthood when you meet them-- you're also teaching the 40-something-year-olds that they'll become. I like that. (not all college students are 20-somethings, but the concept holds. we are all humans-in-progress.)

2022

why does this small saga of knitting woe and triumph deserve documentation in this little blog of mine? I don't know if there's an answer, other than my typical interest in capturing bits of experience and emotion in as vivid and accurate description as I can. I like to write these vignettes of where and when and how, with all the metaphor and adjectives they need to vibrate satisfyingly from my imagination to yours.

2023

I trust that learning is happening, little by little, in all of our spongey-curious brains.

2024

January, perhaps fittingly, seems so very long. all the transitions it spans-- all the shifting, deepening of the dark season, the post-holiday recoveries, the shiny new beginnings of a calendar year and of an academic semester-- all of that is a lot for 31 average winter days.

I don't know if it really did feel longer for me this year, or if I'm only saying that because it seems like an appropriate thing to sigh into this semi-bleak and impermanent world.

- - -

and now what? do I still blog? 

time will tell. if you'll indulge me, I have one more excerpt, this time from May of 2014, when so much of me was so unsettled and rearranging itself and I clung to my love of writing as if nothing else mattered:

from time to time I wonder what it is I'm trying to do here. does it matter what I'm trying to do here? I write. our reasons for enjoying things are seemingly inarticulable. is there irony in that? I claim that words can make everything better. is that true even when the words crumble into meaninglessness as they fail at encompassing feelings? do I mean that even crumbled words are worth something?

yes. crumbled and halfhearted attempts at capturing it all still beats blank silence. I know only so much stuff fits into one life. there are only so many live possibilities. this is the way it needs to be, I guess. but the way everything is carved up now isn't how it'll always need to be carved. our crumbled communications don't stand still; they change.

.... and even if I can't really say I know exactly what writing means, I can try to explain what I like about my practice of it.

I like the pausing and sifting through potential descriptions and the shuffling of parts of speech. I like the dancing of clauses and punctuation and space. I like the starts and stops and backtracking, the meandering fragments that stretch so subtly for their finish. I like the way these little symbols can twist and mold intangible thoughts into a dozen differently shaded shapes. I like unknotting a tangly draft, picking out the pieces that don't belong and pulling away each piece that does, tidying it all into a hopefully-clean curl of interesting prose. sometimes I save the scraps for later. sometimes I can't. .... I write for the writing's sake. I sketch and wonder and experience plenty of other things for the same reason. they don't have to be means to some other end, these creative processes. maybe all the best things are their own ends, or at least neatly wrapped around something like one.

after twenty years, does this blog count as art? as an end in itself?

doesn't matter. it's here. I'm here. for now.

sidewalk-henge

at a certain time of day, the shadows that fall from the southeasterly sunrise across the somewhat-elevated sidewalk behind our house line up just exactly right with the angles of wide concrete pavement and granite-pebble landscaping and the gully on one side. and for however long the sun and earth match up that way, we get to watch a shadowy parade of me with the pugs, walking with perfect balance on the top of the shadow of the earth against itself. 

I suppose the conditions for this must happen at least twice in a day, whatever times those may be depending on the time of year and the slant of the earth's axis. in the mornings, lately somewhere near 8:00 a.m. or so, the shadows slant northwest. we don't often walk that path during the other half of the day, but I imagine in the early evenings the shadows must slant more to the northeast.   

so what? 

 

it is a thing to notice. a small event-thing among many other variously-shaped event-things. 

I haven't bothered photographing our shadows. it's nice enough to just notice it when we happen to be out walking at the right set of moments. 

the morning pug walks require more layers this month. hats, gloves, fluffier scarves. I crocheted a new puppy pug coat in red and beige for the skinny little Faramir. his old grey pug coat still barely-kindof fits, but it didn't look as warm all stretched out of his lanky body.

these photographed trees and their shadows are not trees near us (we are quite starved for trees in this neighborhood). but they are very autumnal, aren't they. I took these photographs some years ago, mostly in Chicagoland and perhaps a few in a town near the Wisconsin–Illinois border, October 2022. 

bunny vs. fence

the other day, this lengthy stretch of fencing (branded nicely enough with so much black, white, and red to represent the construction company Sundt, whose slogan seems to be three standalone words, "Skill. Grit. Purpose.") went up all along the drive that goes between my academic office building and various parking lots between here and places off-campus.

I'm told that they'll be building a new dormitory somewhere on top of the rocky, scrub-filled gully on the other side. it'll have more student housing and more classroom space. so cool. so necessary. 

some of us in my academic office building are mildly worried that this new construction will block our most excellent west-facing views of Granite Mountain. we shall see, I guess. I remain hopeful that the slope of this gully will mean the top of the new dorm will be low enough for us to look over from our third floor offices.

as I walked back out from my office to my car last Tuesday, I noticed a little grey-brown bunny frantically searching for a way through the fence, up and down the hill in short bursts, back and forth over the blaring red curb, every so often sprinting for its life all the way across the road back to the unfenced rocks and bushes to the east.

I watched it for a solid few minutes. it hopped away in panic from my slowed footsteps, then dashed in further panic across the path of someone's big white SUV driving up past us both. 

I didn't see the bunny come back that evening. so I studied the fencing as I walked. surely one little bunny would eventually find a gap to squeeze under, I thought. (the creatures seem to squeeze through pretty tiny gaps in our back garden gate, after all.)

if the chainlink were bare of this black branded tarp, then could a little bunny more easily get through? or if the corners of each fence panel were less square and more rounded, that would surely help.

I wonder if any of the planners and facilities and maintenance people worried about the impact of this construction project would have on the non-human critters in the area. hopefully at least a little bit. probably not as much as they worried about other aspects though-- the costs of labor and fencing and other materials; the design and the blueprints and the building's whole physical footprint; and the timing and logistics and how soon they can start selling spots in the new dorm.

at the bottom of the hill, the fence merely ends,. for now. the sidewalks remain open and the parking lots in regular use. for now. if the bunnies are persistent enough, they will find their way back into their hideaways in the scrub-filled gully. 

and hopefully they will all find new hideaways once the gully is dug out and filled with a bunch of concrete and whatever else dormitories are made of.

and if not?

they're just bunnies. some of their cousins, whichever side of whichever fence they've ended up on, will replace them soon enough.

three sisters

over the past few months I've been devouring audiobooks on the weekends. I basically listened to Stardust in one long stretch on a Sunday, knitting and gardening and crafting and tidying the house as I did so. (in the meantime, my backlog of podcast subscriptions is somewhere close to 100 hours. trade-offs, eh?)

there was plenty of Tana French and a bunch more Barbara Kingsolver too. and then, friend Michelle recommended Alix E. Harrow's Starling House somewhere around the end of August. I loved this book, despite its few melodramatic tendrils of YA-ness, which honestly I cannot really fault it for anyway. the ending was excellent and poignant and deep and gritty. so, so good.

I'd heard of Alix E. Harrow quite a bit, so I somehow assumed she'd been around for many years and that I was super late to the fangirl party... but nope, her first novel was published only five years ago. (I just finished listening to that one too-- The Ten Thousand Doors of January. it's a most adorable and fun adventure indeed.)

by the grace of my library audiobook app, I ended up making my way through Harrow's novels in reverse order. her latest, Starling House, first, with its echoes here and there of Kingsolver's Appalachia, sketched in words as vibrant, shadowy, heartbeatingly real and more-than-real. 

then Libby handed me The Once and Future Witches.

a fairly trite title with many echoes of its own-- will we get any scraps of Aurthurian ledgend here? 

I wasn't sure what to expect but this story drew me in completely and I was marvelously invested in all of it pretty quick. the book rotates among the points of view of three sisters. eldest, middle, youngest-- maiden, mother, crone-- each with her own ferocious sense of how the world could be, if only... 

and there is real magic. witching. spellcraft bubbling all through this alternate New England at the end of the nineteenth century. so cool. the story as a whole pulls and pries and re-weaves so many other stories into itself. I loved it. and before long it made me think of my own sisters.

I have two sisters. I don't often consciously think about the fact that two sisters means there are three of us. 

I've given us epithets before though, not realizing the cliche of it. one of us is the fearless one. the popular one. the clever one. the pretty one. the smart one. the nice one. or at least it's kind of neat to boil our essences down like that, sometimes.

The Once and Future Witches leans a fair bit on this concept for its central three sisters, and to some extent for the other trios of women who show up along the course of the plot. Bella is the wise one, the scholar, the librarian, the eldest. Agnes is the strong one, the independent one, the middle child about to have a baby of her own. and June, the youngest, is the wild one: rebellious and untamable, and most naturally talented with witching. 

three witches. such a ubiquitous trope. three itself is practically a trope, right? the rule of three. beginnings, middles, and ends. it's a sturdy, solid, sustainable prime number, lending its lovely balance to three-legged stools, three-corner hats, three primary colors, and a bunch of other things. witches. sisters. bears. pigs. amigos. stooges. musketeers. branches of government.

does one of the three being wise mean the others are necessarily less wise? or does the beauty of one necessarily outshine that of the other two? cannot three sisters be more or less equally strong?

yes and no. maybe. maybe not. it depends on how you measure these things, I suppose.

of course I also thought of Pratchett's three witches-- Esmerelda Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and young Magrat. perhaps I should reread their books to see how his version of the trope look to my 20-years-older perspective.

what would my sisters and I do if we had magical powers? so many things, I imagine. our circumstances aren't so neatly intertwined and story-arced as those of the sisters in this novel, but I do like to imagine we each have our own ferocity for changing some little segment of the world. 

and I've got brothers too. four of them. how does that change the math and dimensions of the trope, I wonder?

 

unknown or reknown

thinking about my grandmother lately, off and on, I sometimes puzzle over how close and also how distant she seems. her birthday is coming up in a few days.

this painting (well, this print of a painting) hung over grandma's nice upright piano for as long as I could remember. and now it hangs in my office/craft room/guest room. 

I feel so grateful to have inherited this art, and I do not care one bit that it is a relatively commonplace mass reproduction. the light and shadow and movement of it say something-- something too immediate for words. I don't think my sense of this is just nostalgia, though there are indeed decades of memories sprinkled on whenever I look at it. 

today I looked up the name and artist engraved on the little plaque, for the first time. Moonlight Sea. Peter Ellenshaw. he did a lot of these beautifully peaceful ocean horizon paintings, apparently. prints like mine seem to have been pretty popular in the '50s and '60s. 

before then, Ellenshaw also worked as a matte artist for plenty of old films, inncluding 1959's Darby O'Gill and the Little People and Mary Poppins too. did grandma know that, I wonder? I only know it because the internet and Wikipedia exist at my fingertips. 

but I'm sure my grandma had so many other ways of knowing things. 

it's funny what our brains remember or don't. or think we remember. 

this grandmother was the first person to wink at me, as far as I recall. the full conspiratorial meaning of it was likely lost on me as a child, but it felt fun and silly and made the moment into a story. 

my other memories of grandma are a montage of bright and faded. so many quilts for the chilly basement bedrooms. green grass and a clothesline. frozen whole wheat waffles. cereal on the top shelf of a gaping deep dark pantry. sitting on the cement steps for photographs. plastic toys on a thick, round, stripey rug. and her voice piping up if anyone looked at any corner of that piano--a little raspy but bright and cheerfully insisting-- 'play us a tune, won't you?' 

and usually someone would. 

perhaps the strongest, deepest memory I have of that house, just a stride or two left from the piano and its painting, is the narrow closet full of toys and games and books (among them, this old woven fairytale). 

maybe the closet still has books and toys in it. newer ones, if any. the whole house looks hugely different now from how it did when I was young. there are no photos of the closets in the listing... but a closet of games and books for visiting tourists could make sense, couldn't it? 

I find myself wishing that I knew more about what my grandmother thought of this painting. where did she get it? was it bought, or a gift? did she see the same things in it I think I see? would she have better words for its movement and shadow and light?

she would have been 96 this autumn. 

if I live that long, I'll get at least 56 more autumns (hopefully, anyway. I hope I always live somewhere with a proper autumn.)

.

in other news, there are twenty standard weeks until this little blog turns 20 years old.

and then what?

Kingsolver and current events

almost six months ago, my attention was drawn to all the conflict in Palestine more than it ever had been before. a house down the road from us began flying an Israeli flag all of a sudden. half of all the social media posts are still imploring everyone to speak up, to choose a side or else by default choose complicit cowardice. the news of October 7 and all the terrible news since has been rightly hard to ignore.

since December, my old land acknowledgements post from the summer of 2020 has been oddly popular. the basic stats in blogger tell me it's gotten more than 100 views within the last 30 days. by comparison, a typical post here in this random collection of internet musings gets fewer than 20 views and that's it. but this old post has consistently seen around 30 hits per week for several weeks now-- I'm still not sure why. is it because phrases like "colonial ruin" "violent displacement" and "racist horribleness" are highly topical these past months? I've let my proper Google analytics account languish without updates for too long, so I don't really have a way to find out.

also about six months ago, I was reading Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer. a lush and lovely novel--a braid of stories all about our relationships with land, trees, animals, nature, and each other. biology. ecosystems. extinction or conservation, and all our efforts inbetween.

there is plenty I've so far remembered about this novel, but the thing I've most wanted to blog about here is a pair of sentences in the middle of it. they are sentences about Jewishness and prejudice and history.

Lusa, one of the three point-of-view protagonist characters in this story, is half Polish, half Arab. she marries blissfully into a struggling-but-resourceful family of appalachian tabacco farmers, too soon loses her husband, inherits his parents' old farm house, and faces various tensions and pressures from her local, white, rural in-laws as a result. 

I keep thinking about this line of dialogue from one of Lusa's chapters. she's talking earnestly with the one in-law, a nephew, she feels closest to. 

"That's what I was thinking, too. Families lose their land for a million reasons. My dad's parents had this wonderful farm in Poland, which they lost for being Jewish. And my mother's people got run off their land for not being Jewish. Go figure."

this pair of contradictions struck me, as I read it for the first time in fall of 2023, so much more definitively and potently than it might have at any other time.

and when did Kingsolver write this? my idle curiosity is easily answered: Prodigal Summer was published almost a quarter-century ago. in October, 2000. 

from devouring her other early novels (Pigs in Heaven, Flight Behavior, Unsheltered), I know Kingsolver has a deft way (sometimes subtle, sometimes less so) of commenting on potentially controversial political realities-- like this seemingly endless conflict in the middle east, or like the relative failings of public education, or like the impact of settler colonialism on indigeneous families, or like the nonsensical state of US healthcare systems. 

in October of 2000, I was an almost-17-year-old. what on earth did the words "Israel" or "Palestine" mean to me then? the first I only knew from a bunch of biblical prophecies and hymns, the second from Laurie R. King's A Letter of Mary (1997) and O, Jerusalem (1999), if indeed I'd really heard of Palestine at all. in neither context did I think very critically about what these stories meant. honestly, I was probably quite detached from both versions of the place. their respective peoples. they all may as well have been equally, ineffably, untouchably fictional.

halfway between then and now, I must have seen this rather haunting animation make the rounds on the internet. you've probably seen it, too.

unsurprisingly, there are dozens of new comments on that page since the events of last October.

looking into the piece again this past week, I realized that a full-length film version was produced and likewise donated to the public domain in 2018. do I have the time and spiritual energy to watch it? hopefully someday. (I've also now realized that the artist, as generous as she has been with her artwork, seems to have some not so cool opinions about the social construct of gender, so there is that to grapple with too.) 

{ the Palestinian flag, as if made of butterflies, borrowed from this kind soul on deviantart }
 

being Jewish. 

not being Jewish. 

we might say Lusa's ficitonal comments here are oversimplifying things.

and yes, I'm usually the first to say (to myself if nowhere else) there must be more to it there's so much we don't know how can anyone have a truly worthwhile opinion what's the use in trying to fully understand it anyway it's so complicated and what can I do about it or about anything, little me with my little blog and my little comfortable life?

what's truly oversimplified is any inkling of a thought that this single roundabout post regarding my country's rather terrible, rather unconscionable involvement in the horrors of this geopolitical situation is anything like enough to counter my general day-to-day silence on the topic. 

no matter how many times I might ponder bringing it up to my students or asking all the ROTC cadets how they feel about Aaron Bushnell or posting something to instagram with a hashtag like #CeasefireNow or #GazaWillBeFree... thinking about a few lines from an old Barbara Kingsolver novel and mentally wringing my hands about all the knotted historical roots of this conflict aren't enough at all. 

I don't know what could be enough. write to congress? to the president? just once? or every month? every weekend? with a few pleading letters or phone calls to these more-powerful-than-me people, can I then say I've done my part? 

I don't know. it doesn't seem like it. no number of letters or public protests, and certainly no ocean of hashtags, no matter how many, seems like enough.

so for now, current events continue to sweep across the world, sort of but not really dragging me with them. even so, we are all connected. we are all somehow jointly creating this world. the fact that I'll never be able to single-handedly fix anything on the other side of the planet doesn't mean I can safely give up, right? even if I don't-- or can't-- truly know if my impact on the sprawling web of the universe is leading to more preservation and less extinction of light and goodness, I have to keep trying. 

is it up to me to decide which side of the scale my feet are on? to judge my own quotas of light vs. dark?

for now, it is. I'm the only one who can. am I doing my best?  

tournament of TTRPGs: opening round review

here we are, at a midpoint in this somewhat random tournament of roleplaying games. in this post, I'll summarize the opening round matches and finally, unequivocatingly, declare winners for each.

this all started almost six months ago with a tournament introduction. since then, I've played half a dozen new RPGs and tried to articulate my opinions about them all. it's been fun. 

Jeremiah asked me which of the new one-shots we played were most enjoyable, and at the time my answer was Cyberpunk RED. looking back now, I'd want that one to share a three-way tie with The One Ring and A Song of Ice and Fire. Cyberpunk was certainly the most fun in a wild hijinksy way. The One Ring was fun in a simply beautiful and heroic way, and A Song of Ice and Fire was fun in a  sweeping, majestic way.

the others were fun too, in their ways-- just a little bit less for me: Exalted in an almost frighteningly epic way, Werewolf, in a mystical have-we-bit-off-more-than-we-can-chew sort of way, and Scion, in a extremely bombastic and colorful way.

making final decisions about all these pairs has not always been so fun or easy. a few were really very hard to choose, but I had to. for the tournament. so without further ado, here are the winners--

match #1 "Dark vs. Grimdark"
(World of Darkness vs. Wrath & Glory)
I haven't changed my mind about this one-- World of Darkness still wins for its artsy storytelling approach and flexibility. but I will say, we've played a bit more Wrath & Glory since May, and it has grown on me a little.

match #2 "Power Fantasies"
(Dungeons & Dragons 5e vs. Werewolf: the Forsaken)
I thought this might be a close one, and while Werewolf was a great experience and I'd love to play more of it, the thrills of Dungeons & Dragons pulled ahead for me in the end. is it still unfair? yeah, it kinda is.

match #3 "So Much Potential"
(Pathfinder 2e vs. Mage: the Awakening)
given than neither of these systems left me with the greatest first impressions, it was hard to choose between them, but Pathfinder wins out for thus far having provided more enjoyable gameplay overall.

match #4 "Fatefully"
(Changeling: the Lost vs. Star Wars: Force and Destiny)
this one was absolutely the most difficult. the enchanting style of Changeling still holds plenty of sway over me, but ultimately I couldn't let it win just on vibes and potential; thus, Star Wars takes it.

match #5 "Two Flavors of Epic" (Scion vs. The One Ring)
at least we can't say this one is so very unfair-- as limiting as first impressions may be, The One Ring wins for simply being so thoroughly cozy and inspiring and marvelous.

match #6 "Masked and Unmasked"
(Vampire: the Masquerade 5e vs. Exalted 2e)
not many RPGs, in my view, could stand up against V5 and expect to do all that well. both it and Exalted are intense games with some complex elements, but I find Vampire more engaging.

match #7 "Once and Future Risks" (7th Sea 2e vs. Cyberpunk RED)
this one was so, so close as well-- I had the hardest time weiging the epic historical adventure against the flashy futuristic excitement, and 7th Sea does kind of win for mere stylistic preference, all else being way too even.

match #8 "Here there be Dragons"
(Shadowrun 5e vs. A Song of Ice and Fire)
A Song of Ice and Fire truly does deserve to win here for deftly evoking a really neat and engaging world and providing mechanics for a truly sweeping game; I promise I'm not only using this as a chance to snub Shadowrun.

and a few honorable mentions:
Changeling and Cyberpunk RED earn my top tier honorable mentions. I love them both quite a lot despite the less-than-perfect-fit I feel with their mechanics. one tier down, Exalted and Werewolf earn some brownie points for just feeling really cool to roleplay in. it is not their fault that they got matched up against the two games I've played the most and have the fondest memories of.

and so we continue on into a new round. here are the new match-ups--  

Dungeons & Dragons 5e vs Pathfinder

7th Sea vs Star Wars

Vampire: the Masquerade vs World of Darkness 

The One Ring vs A Song of Ice and Fire 

I almost do want to play them all again for the quarterfinals. wouldn't that be fun?

for the sake of time, however, I'm afraid we'll have to imagine all the gameplay we can and work with the experience I've been able to glean so far from these 8 potential champions. only one pair of the lot includes systems that were brand new to me when I started this thing. those two being matched together seems fair enough. 

how will I approach this second round? I think I'll revisit each book directly and reconsider aesthetics, mechanics, and approachability in context of the new contrasts of each match. I'll likely draw on my prior reviews a bit as I do so, but I'll avoid as much repetition as I can possibly avoid.

here there be dragons

opening match #8: Shadowrun 5e vs A Song of Ice and Fire 

this final opening round match-up review one has taken me a bunch of extra time for many reasons, firstly being that our mini-campaign of A Song of Ice and Fire spanned 5 whole weeks, plus a delay or two and a good session zero. thank you very much to friend Caroline for joining in on that game-- it was a most intriguing whirlwind of an adventure!

secondly and thirdly: I had been rather intimidated and hesitant about grappling with the notoriously labyrinthine Shadowrun book again. and I am a tad busier now than I was in August.

I last played Shadowrun many years ago now-- 2018ish I suppose? we and some friends ran through a short 3-session arc once in Indiana and once again in Louisiana; both were quite fun. and since 2019 I've been a fan of a narrative podcast performance version of Shadowrun called Fun City. it's good stuff. Mike Rugnetta is awesome, as are his roleplaying friends, and their voices plus marvelous sound design all come together to make the system look impressively manageable, somehow. (sidenote: I also found their Float City story arc, a pandemic side project using the indie RPG system Stillfleet, extra extra cool. someday I may need to check out Stillfleet properly. I notice it calls itself "grimdark," too. interesting.)

anyway, along with all that in-person and vicarious storytelling fun, I remembered Shadowrun being supremely complicated and overwhelming. it took me a while to work up the energy to face it again with a (hopefully, sort of, somewhat) more open mind.

the A Song of Ice and Fire RPG, conversely, was totally new. I've watched the HBO show (much thanks to all the friends who ever shared their HBO subscriptions and/or couches and homes to facilitate that endeavor), read three of the Game of Thrones books, and this past summer we watched House of the Dragon, too. there is much about Mr. Martin's world that is utterly vivid and iconic. I'd say it deserves its fame. Jeremiah and I were excited to have this tournament as an excuse to actually try out the RPG system based on it all.

once more I've kept the same outline of sorts for this review: a tidy table of metadata, summaries of the few characters I've made in each system, and then thoughts on their aesthetics, mechanics, approachability, and preliminary(ish) judgements.

SYSTEM	Shadowrun (5e)	A Song of Ice and Fire
tagline =	"Everything Has a Price"	"Adventure, war, and intrigue in George R.R. Martin's World of Westeros"
publisher =	Catlyst Game Labs	Green Ronin Publishing
pub. date =	2019	2014
cost =	$59.99	$49.95
length =	11 major sections / 496 pages	13 chapters / 320 pages
my exp. level =	some	none prior

---

previous characters

sadly, I have very thin memories of my two prior Shadowrun characters. both appeared in different renditions of "Mr. Sandman vs. the Dragon," Jeremiah's tried and true 3-session adventure. and I know both were riggers, created as such on recommendation from my husband GM, for the sake of that character type's relative simplicity.

one was named Kitza and I think her character sheet is kicking around somewhere in a box... likely buried beyond any easy reference. the other was a dwarf, I think? maybe named Pablo... or something like that? I remember something about some family of his being trafficked by a megacorporation and somehow, for better or for worse, were able to crawl free from a shipping container on some crowded docks at the end of the story. maybe. 

all in all, not much to reminisce about here. onward to the fun new stuff!

new characters

when I (finally) got around to re-reading Shadowrun and wading through its differently-unique character creation system, I came up with a mystic adept half-inuit half-Japanese elf chick named Ingyaka. she's sort of secret agent-y in my imagination-- like a stealthy, nature-loving, spirit-whipsering Jason Bourne or something. since we didn't plan a Shadowrun one-shot for this tournament, I have no idea how she'd show up in actual gameplay, and indeed I confess that I called her finished enough once I'd chosen her many magic spells. the tedium of figuring out what gear and eqiupment to purchase with even just six thousand nuyen (6000¥)--the lowest amount you can possibly start with-- didn't seem necessary just to write about it for this review.

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character creation in A Song of Ice and Fire is much less an individual affair than it is in most other RPG systems where one expects to play as a member of an adventuring party. in this particular game, players first collaborate in creating a noble house-- perhaps one as great and powerful as the Starks or the Baratheons, or perhaps one of lesser renown, one bowing at the feet of some grander pillar of Westerosi history. ours was built along these lines-- a smaller house under the protection of and bound by honor to the great and wealthy Lannisters.

we called ourselves House Portayne, a wealthy house ruling an island of silver mines just off the west coast of the Reach, south of the Iron Islands. Caroline primarily played Lady Alasta Portayne, and I primarily played her second-born child, Tobytha. we had some input on the Lord (the chaste and humble Elrin Portayne) and other children (an older brother, Ethon, and a younger girl, Joryssa), as well as some side characters associated with the family. together we came up with a name and some basic info for our family's maester, Maester Bridon (hailing from house Wylde). later on, for my second official character, I created Gwenna Fallside, a rough castle guard who quickly earns the family's trust and becomes castellan of Silverfont Castle. for a few highly intense B-plot scenes inbetween the primary roleplaying action, Caroline and I played as Gwenna and the Maester. one of us may have gotten forcibly tossed out of a tower window to their death. very Game-of-Thones-y, isn't it? the B-plots were all very neat, adding to the deep and expansive feel of the game. 

our mini-campaign was set to span the reigns of Aegon the Conqueror and Maegor the Cruel, and we knew ahead of time that House Portayne would not survive. it turned out that we were all utterly doomed to be poisoned by jealous Lannisters and chased down by pirates trying to escape the inevitable seige of our island. little Joryssa did grow up and get married off to a son of House Reed, so maybe she and her line will survive to remember her origins. exploring the long-ago past of the Song of Ice and Fire universe like this was incredibly cool, even if all evidence of our House was hopelessly erased in the end.

aesthetics

these two games both come with quite intricate worlds-- one explicitly grown from the richly detailed, sprawling civilizations in Martin's novels and the other from the remix of almost everything else a person could want to tell a story about. both are alternate versions of something like western civilization, in a way. in A Song of Ice and Fire, we have an alternate history of European geopolitical conflicts, with zombies and magic and dragons and extra murder on top. in Shadowrun, it's an alternate near-future, with ruthless megacorporations and magic and dragons and cyberpunks all the way down. 

A Song of Ice and Fire, as an RPG system, seems to me like a vast, ornate, and orderly library of fairly traditional fantasy ideas-- spacious yet organized, and more or less tidy. it may have dozens of secret passages and a skeleton or two hidden in the corners, but generally it's presentable and logical, even if there's a lot going on. its illustrations have a soft realism, not lacking in the violence you'd expect from this particular setting, but lit by torches and candles so it all seems not quite mundane, but not quite so shocking or garish either. the book's design feels monestarial, with a tinge of rennaissance, maybe a little bit fancy-Shakespearean on the edges. there is a lot of all-caps, angular and serifed, strong and delicate at the same time, perfectly high contrast and comfortable to skim through.

conversely, the Shadowrun system feels like a massive kitchen sink full of influences. some of the art reminds me of Paul Kidby's style, which does seem fitting somehow (he's the artist who illustrated plenty of Terry Pratchett's work). other pages and spreads are more evocative of comic book and/or videogame art. like I said-- it is a mishmash. in a good way.

if this system were a physical room it would be a somewhat grimy, mostly abandoned, very magical attic full of random knickknacks, old photo albums, broken electronics, weird porcelain figurines, and wildly colorful posters, all collected over many decades and now surrounded by a tangled sea of wires and cables and spikes and jewelry. it's got all the neon-and-fishnets and glossy high-tech punk style of Cyberpunk mixed in with an animistic spookiness. we could say Pathfinder and Mage and Werewolf got put in a compost heap with all the other urban, cyberpunk techno-fantasies you've ever heard of, and Shadowrun is what crawled out, dripping with lightning and breathing fire. here, orcs and elves and magic and machines coexist with normality just like anything else that ever might have evolved on the planet Earth.

funnily enough, dragons and dragon imagery show up far more prevalently in the Shadowrun book-- little tattoo-ish line-art dragon symbols glow red in the bottom corners of every page, next to blocky page numbers and footer text-- than in A Song of Ice and Fire. Shadowrun gives us 8 lines of index entries under "dragon(s)," whereas "dragon" doesn't even show up as a unique entry in A Song of Ice and Fire's (much shorter) index; over there we only see Dragonbone, Dragonglass, and Dragonstone. that's interesting, eh? what if we wanted to play Targaryens?

mechanics

summing up the game mechanics and rules for these two isn't going to be easy. but I'll do my best. at least they have one wonderfully simple thing in common: rolling a bunch of d6s all at once based on your rating(s) in whatever skill.

for character creation, Shadowrun gives you 5x5 grid of options, across which to prioritize various character elements: metatype, attribute points, skill points, magic abilities, and extra funds for gear/equipment. for each column, you can only choose from the options included at one of the 5 priority levels. 

{ the Shadowrun 5e priority table. choose one option per priority level A-E }
 

within the basic constraints of those priorities, you'll then assign ratings to 8 core attributes, a few derived stats (Edge, Essence, and Magic) that I still don't totally understand very well, and however many relevant skills you can afford. and good gracious it seems like there is an almost infinite list of skills. the actual rules even allow for making up your own skills if you find that the pre-written lists don't fit what you want to do. so how's that for flexible? if your character uses magic, a you'll also take a magic ability rating and choose some related skills and spells. there are plenty of spells to choose from, too, and they can be learned in any order.

finishing touches for your character will involve choosing qualities and spending some of the 25 Karma you start with. Shadowrun qualities work kind of like the advantages, merits, and flaws in World of Darkness-- adding positive qualities costs you a few Karma, but adding negative qualities (like addiction, a bad reputation, etc.) can earn you some of it back. Karma is one way you'll level up as your game progresses, so you don't have to spend it all at character creation, but you have to spend at least some. 

once gameplay gets going, it's pretty action focused. the whole concept of Shadowrun is that you and your party get hired as Shadowrunners-- fairly unscrupulous folks taking on dangerous semi-legal jobs on the fringes of society, hoping to get away with it every time, earn an excellent reputation, and rake in millions of nuyen (¥ = the currency of this particular dystopian future). no matter how sneaky you might be, things are bound to go wrong.

combat works using very short "combat turns" of 3 seconds each, during which each player acts according to their initiative score. for some reason, there are also 6 types of initiative depending on what kind of combat is going on-- are we in the real world, or in the matrix, or in the astral plane somewhere? the various initiative options provide different numbers of d6s, so you'll roll that number of initiative dice, add your initiative attribute rating, and that total is your initiative score. whoever has the highest score goes first, and so on, til the end of the round. then everyone subtracts 10 from their score, and those who still have a positive number can act again.

actions are divided up into free actions, simple actions, complex actions, and special "interrupting" actions. very Pathfinder-esque, overall. whatever the action or test, you'll add your ability and skill ratings, then roll that many d6s. a 5 or higher is a hit, and depending on the task difficulty, you'll need some number of hits to succeed. rolling a 1 means a glitch in whatever you're trying to do. and usually that's bad.

as your team completes shadowruns for all their shadowy clients, you'll earn cash rewards and Karma, with which you can then purchase more gear and any upgrades that make sense for your story, according to whatever you can afford.  character progression is all quite customizable. 

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I've briefly mentioned the group House creation aspect of A Song of Ice and Fire already. once you've created your House, each player creates a character, either working from scratch or starting with one of the provided archetypes. the system here reminded me a lot of the Wrath & Glory character creations options, except there are more of them available. I do think having a good range of pre-made templates to which you then add your own flavor is really nice. 

I want to say the individual character sheet for A Song of Ice and Fire is one of the simplest I've ever seen. rather than attributes + skills, we just get one list of 19 abilities, nice and alphabetical all the way from Agility and Animal Handling to Healing, Languages, and Marksmanship, and on to Warfare and Will. scores for each normally start at 2 and go up from there. most abilities also come with a range of specialties (skill with a certain weapon, or a certain approach, etc.) that can grant you bonus dice on relevant rolls.

your characters' age will also play a major role in some of their other stats. younger characters have fewer points to spend on ability ratings, but more destiny points to start with. destiny points can be spent for bonus qualities, or they can be used in various ways during gameplay to add bonus dice or change the outcome of a scene in particularly dire circumstances. as your character ages, they'll gain more experience but also more flaws.

the system allows for free creative decision making with some things, but also gives you fun tables full of options to roll for with others. the dice may dictate which part of the continent your House is from, how established or respected they are, how much land, population, defense, wealth, and influence they have, and whether or not there's an heir or a maester or an army at your disposal. as your game progresses, you'll make House Fortune rolls fairly often to see how all those stats change over months and years of in-game time. this was some of the most fun we had storytelling the big picture-- coming up with the story of a new resource or alliance that could explain the increase of wealth for our House, or imagining the crimes or plagues that would explain a drastic dip in population added to the pure fun of rolling dice for the quantitative stats. 

on the smaller scene-by-scene scale, gameplay in A Song of Ice and Fire involves combining your ratings and speciality bonuses for each ability, rolling that many d6s, then adding up all the results. it's more math than just recognizing the 5+ dice as successes and ignoring the rest, but it also feels a little more dramatic that way too. even if you roll low numbers, if you're rolling enough dice, it might still add up to a success. difficulty levels range from "automatic," requiring no roll at all, or "easy," requiring at least 1, all the way up to "very hard" at 18 or "heroic," requiring a total of 21 or more.

critical successes are a thing only if your total roll when attacking is double the total of your opponent's defense. fumbles are optional, only if your game table is into the higher stakes of something unexpectedly awful happening when all your dice land on 1. 

there are some special rules and procedures for tournaments (jousting and other non-combat contests), battlefields and warfare (large-scale multi-unit combat) and intrigue (social combat in simple, standard, or complex modes)-- most of that is laid out in a pretty clear way as a reference.

for character advancement, A Song of Ice and Fire is an XP system, though you can also earn coin and status through gameplay. during our game at least, leveling up seemed a very gradual process. there are only three ways to spend XP in the book: it costs 10 to add or improve a specialty, 30 to upgrade an ability rating, and 50 to buy an additional destiny points. it seems somewhat limited (and expensive), but not inappropriately so.

 

approachability

neither of these games sits firmly in a category of those with cozy, simple RPG mechanics. beyond the nice, clean familiarity of the stalwart d6, there are layers of rules and exceptions and variations that make both systems at least a little more daunting for the average player. but with a good GM to guide you through it, the struggle can be minimized a great deal.

the first chapter in A Song of Ice and Fire is a primer on the world of Westeros. the book doesn't assume readers are intimately familiar with the world and in fact rehashes a good amount of the history, the map, and the vibes for us. there's enough here that you could get by without much prior knowledge of the books or show if you had to (though why that would ever be the case is a separate and valid question). 

I found it quite odd that the book uses SIF and SIFRP as its chosen abbreviations, rather than the ASoIaF that I've seen way more often out in the sea of internet discourse about the books. perhaps the 2009 publication of the first RPG edition pre-dated the rise of ASoIaF as the more ubiquitous acronym? or perhaps leaving out the articles and prepositions and conjunctions seemed more official? I have no idea, but so it goes. however odd it seems to me, I suppose it doesn't matter so very much.

the order of things may matter a bit more. the introductory chapters make sense enough-- setting, rules, character creation... but after that we bounce back and forth a bit-- chapters 4 and 5 go over general abilities and specialties, then destiny points and qualities. only then do we get into the chapters on house and lands, with all the procedures and tables for creating our house and determining its history and fortunes. that seems backwards, but I suppose the beautiful affordances of a codex mean we can reference any of its contents in whatever order we like. good crossreferences and wayfinding and beautiful visual hierarchy all make that easy enough, here.

if, despite my general pickiness about the ordering of things, I can forgive the A Song of Ice and Fire RPG book for a bit of wonky ordering, it appears that I (still, these five years later) cannot forgive Shadowrun for similar crimes. 

I hope I'm not belaboring the fact that Shadowrun is pretty intimidating as a book and as a system. the fact that there is so much detailed content pulled from fantasy and sci-fi means that it really ought to be handled and designed as carefully as possible for its readers... and perhaps they did their best? who knows. almost since I first touched this game book I have harbored persistent gripes about the mismatched non-parallel lists here and there and everywhere. on any given page, a trio of stats may be listed out A, B, and C, only to have the same stats or categories printed on a standard character sheet in the opposite order, or scrambled to B, A, C instead. why? for the sake of all the dragon-hoarded treasures in all the universes, why would anyone do this?

adding to that the relatively small text, plenty of jargon, and so many options for customization among various slightly-different categories and subcategories, I'd wager a brand new player would need to fall very deeply and very hard in love with this setting to want to tackle the complexity of learning the system from scratch. or maybe it just takes confidence to bend the system to your own creative will?

preliminary verdicts

Shadowrun, upon my revisiting it this past month, really was a lot cooler than I remembered it. one must appreciate its ambitious scope and uniqueness, if nothing else.

I found A Song of Ice and Fire quite unique as well. I'm less a fangirl of its base media, but I still think it's fair to say this game evokes Martin's novels just as well as The One Ring evoked Tolkien's for me.

my experience levels with both systems are pretty even here. both were fun gameplay experiences, both are interesting, and both are significantly different from some of the more popular or mainstream RPGs I've covered so far.

so... do I let my annoyance at Shadowrun's inconsistencies of arrangement knock it out in this first round?

yes. 

yes, I do. while I recognize my response to these things as (perhaps more than) a little bit nitpicky, those issues have frustrated my practical experience of the game in a real way. and it all could have been avoided with even the merest ounce of designery forethought or technical editing attention. that this version is the 5th edition makes it even less excusable. 

congratulations, A Song of Ice and Fire RPG. for what it's worth, I think most poeple would agree with me on this ruling, even if not for the same reasons.

what's next?  

I'll summarize my 8 quarterfinalists and articulate a few final reasons why they win in a recap post next week. after that, dear Jeremiah can help me match them up for a new round. since all the most extensive exploration and research has already been done, future rounds will probably involve much shorter, broad-strokes reviews for comparison purposes. ideally I'll cut 8 down to 4 before Thanksgiving, and from 4 to 2 shortly thereafter, so perhaps we'll crown a first ever TTRPG champion by the end of the semester. fingers crossed. 

and after that? I'm not sure. there are still so many more RPG books. maybe we do a tournament of expansion content, setting books-- like the new Tal'Dorei setting book I have barely looked at, or individual published campaign adventures? I could explore Stillfleet properly. Coyote and Crow surely deserves some attention. or it could be fun to invite a whole roster of judges besides little old me, but that would also involve a bunch more structure and planning and logistics. we'll see when and how anyone has time and energy for that sort of thing.

in the meantime, let me know-- how would you rank these 16 games if you were the tournament judge?

two flavors of epic

opening match #5: The One Ring vs Scion: Hero

the meanings of the word epic have evolved a fair bit, as meanings and words tend to do. this word gets used in all kinds of ways to evoke the scope of a thing itself, or the scope of our admiration for the thing, or a little bit of both. anything might be epic if it finds the right audience.

I see these two games as epic in more ways than one, but also in very different ways. different flavors, we might say. one is all about epic stories and songs recounted in verbose detail, with plenty of space for lightness and heaviness and realism. it tastes like rich dark chocolate. the other is all about epic stories told in punchy, extravagant colors, with larger-than-life characters and nobody looking too closely at any collateral damage. it tastes like extra-seasoned popcorn or chips. you can probably guess which one is which already. read on to allay what uncertainties may remain.

Scion: Hero takes as its foundation perhaps the most ancient source texts in existence (if we are allowed, out of convenience, to label such pre-textual constructs as texts) and drags their mythic elements into an unsuspecting contemporary setting.

conversely (and symmetrically?), The One Ring is based on one of the greatest fantasy epics of the 20th century, set in the glorious pre-industrial expanse that is Tolkein's Middle-earth, reveling in all the beautiful intricacies such a setting could possibly inspire.

sprawling mythoi and grand conflicts crisscross through both RPG books in exciting ways. neither of these systems is dealing in small, homey stories. whatever might begin as small or homey in them must be called into larger, higher, more treacherous territories-- the fate of the world may depend upon it.

but there is still room for small stories to matter within all the dire "fate of the world" context-- and indeed those stories may matter more poignantly as a result. personal character growth and interpersonal connections shine all the more brilliantly against the fire and ashes of Mount Doom.

in a roleplaying game, of course, the balance of broad-strokes grandeur and vivid vignette all depends on your storyteller and the players and all the variable dynamics of your game table. I think plenty of both is ideal. Samwise and/or Odysseus should have space to pine for their loved ones and all the normalcy they left at home so many months or years ago. and we should be able to squabble over rations even while we choose to sacrifice our entire futures in the struggle against evil, right?

for this most epic review, my formulaic outline continues to serve us decently well: a table of metadata, summaries of characters I've made in each system, then thoughts comparing the aesthetics, mechanics, and user-friendliness of each.

SYSTEM	The One Ring	Scion: Hero
back cover tagline =	"Enter the world of Middle-earth..."	"Find your Destiny."
publisher =	Free League Publishing	White Wolf / Onyx Path Publishing
pub. date =	2020	2007
original cost =	$49.85	$35.00
length =	10 chapters / 240 pages	12 chapters / 334 pages
my exp. level =	none prior	barely any

---

previous characters

I often imagine myself as a hobbit, or at least a creature with plenty of hobbit DNA... but technically and copyrightedly, no other brand of rustic, laid-back, food-loving halfling character from any other system can actually count as a true hobbit. before this tournament adventure, I had zero experience with The One Ring system, and surprisingly enough once I picked it up I didn't make a hobbit character for myself. but I could have!

for Scion, once upon a time I created a hero from the Egyptian pantheon for a potential game we almost got going in Louisiana. her name was Yasmin, a scion of Bast-- she had bronze skin, straight black hair, and many golden bracelets, approaching the world all pantherlike and sneakily inquisitive. I think. those sketchy details and a vague sense of the interesting combat turn-taking system are pretty much everything I remembered about the game-- the one session we played was pretty neat, but it didn't go anywhere after that.

new characters + one-shots

for The One Ring, I created two new characters using the amazingly simple process outlined in the book: Fauna Briarhawk (a wandering woman from Bree, seeking treasure and hoping to prove herself more than a mere thief) and Moruthiel Gorlindir (an Elf of Lindor determined to protect those less fortunate after failing to save their best friend from an orc attack). 

we gathered a few friends (thank you, friends Jon and Jim and Angela, for joining) around our table one Friday afternoon to explore Middle-earth and do our part in the fight against the deepening shadow. in preparation for this one-shot, husband Jeremiah created three more character concepts to round out our potential party, and then, after a wonderful frame narrative introduction (in which a younger-ish Bilbo Baggins is having far too much fun telling stories to a much younger trio of Frodo, Merry, and Pippin), we chose our characters and settled into the world of the game: braving a cold winter, traveling north on Gandalf's directions, meeting around a campfire, fending off evil wolves, finding our way to a ranger's shelter to rest and feast before reaching our true destination and defending the Shire from beasts possessed by Sauron.

it was so, so much fun. a short and simple story arc, but so satisfying. I want to draw portraits of our little burgeoning fellowship: Halfred of the Shire, and Fauna of Bree, and Berúthiel of Rivendell, and Luindis of the North, and their mounts too. maybe we will all find time to continue the journey someday. after all... it did end with some mysterious clues and lingering questions of the sort that often seem to promise sequels.

- 

since I barely remembered Yasmin in any useful way, I created another two new Scion characters as well-- one in the Japanese and one in the Aztec pantheon. 

Tamiko, a scion of the goddess Amaterasu, is an artistically talented and fiercely ambitious perfectionist. she aims to honor her mother with flawless performances in all aspects of her life, no matter how long it might take. 

and Carmen, scion of the Aztec water god Tlaloc, has a talent for teaching and storytelling, reeling listeners into the webs of her supernatural influence. I gave her a companion Coatl (a brilliant flying serpent creature) named Sammy and a tiara made of shark teeth with which to summon him.

for our Scion one shot, these two teamed up with one other fledgling hero to track down an ominous threat called "The Sword of Japan." there were high speed chase scenes, a battle atop the Statue of Liberty, and confrontations with ghosts in the shipping lanes of the Pacific. for much of the session we all rolled terribly, cursed our dice, and struggled to live up to our characters' truly epic potential, but in the end there was a sufficiently dramatic show-down with one giant kaiju beast in the middle of the ocean.
 

aesthetics

The Lord of the Rings, with its lovely, poignant blend of quaint + epic, has been an undeniable classic for ages now. the world that Tolkien built with such passion and detail seems practically real, and so much of it has bled into our cultural consciousness that it almost feels impossible to talk about it as a separate entity. thankfully, I don't really need to-- this charming RPG based in Tolkien's world is not meant to (and indeed cannot) stand in for the entirety of Tolkien's oeuvre.

yet it seems to me (not that I've even read more than three lines of The Silmarillion) that the spirit of Tolkien's stories is represented thoroughly and well in The One Ring. plenty of sprawling historical, geographical, linguistic, and cultural detail shows up here, distilled just so into potent but practical homage. the world and the vibe are evoked across every inch of in the game's materials-- from its serious, hefty hardcover and gorgeous maps down to the runic borders and faux-foxing at the edges of each page. there is a coziness to it all, tucked in just right amid all the grandeur and drama of dark lords looming over the world. in context of what you already know about The Lord of the Rings, everything in the RPG has as much depth as you could ask for-- the history of the setting, the complexity of the canonical NPCs, and the possibility for epic engagement with both. and there are custom dice, too (more on those later).

I sense so much simplicity and quality craftsmanship in it. the game carves out a sturdy, down-to-earth core of hope and bravery and love, all strong enough to outlast ages of darkness, conflict, or corruption. such an optimistic mythos if there ever was one.

I will gush even more than I gushed about the chapter spreads in Star Wars: Force and Destiny about those in The One Ring rulebook. the book design as a whole is just superb: lovely columns (especially for the table of contents!), nicely spaced lines and paragraphs, welcoming little text boxes here and there. most of it is simple, cream and sepia-tones with red for contrast. the chapter breaks stand out (as they should for wayfinding, but also for beauty) with richness and drama, their style somewhat ethereal. thirteen different artists are credited in the frontmatter, along with two graphic designers. to whichever of them worked in whatever ways on the chapter break art, thank you. it's gorgeous.

final design-nerd comment about The One Ring: that horizontal table of contents is undoubtedly some of the most satisfying book design ever. just look at it. thumbnails of each chapter spread design show up again at the head each column, with details and page numbers for every chapter, section, and subsection. I could very well gush even more about that than the chapter spread art itself, if you let me.

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it may be a bit unfair to describe the aesthetics of Scion as collage-like or patchwork, but the way it draws on all these well-worn mythologies and mashes them together seems to warrant the labels. thankfully the introductions to and distinctions between pantheons are more than cosmetic-- each family of gods is considered and described in depth, each given a bit of ideological grounding and various unique approaches to the timeless war against the recently-escaped Titans. we get chains and webs of symbolism, icons from classical-ish mythologies imbued with extra power because they feature in so many tales. a scion of the Greek pantheon might carry with them the actual Golden Fleece of legend, using it to access powerful birthrights with which to re-twist the very threads of Fate.

in this game, villains and heroes come at each other like magnets, almost without agency of their own-- Fate (or we could call it narrativium, if you like) pulls at them like a tidal force, catalyzing the kinds of epic battles that spawned the old myths in the first place. Scion wants to deal in sets and scenarios that feel huge and expensive-- like an Avengers movie on steroids. it's a splashy system, with mechanics to incentivize the splashiest of character actions. you are a divine being, chosen by gods to fight for all of reality, after all. you'd better act like it.

with all this talk of Fate and birthright, Scion seems more urban high fantasy as opposed to the grittier, darker, low fantasies of World of Darkness games. the urban darkness and tragedy in the world of Scion feels less shadowy, like the dial was turned way up on romance and drama, but way down on most of the angsty noir elements. the line art is cleaner, clearer, like polished china on display. husband Jeremiah likened its vibe to that of many golden age comicbooks, which makes sense to me (not that I've read more than 3 pages of any of those particular early 20th-century texts either). in this world, scions cannot escape their divine identities. once we're past the prologue, they know where they came from and must confront the burden of that legacy. it's very "with great power comes great responsibility," at its core.

mechanics

to play The One Ring, you'll create a character from one of 6 Heroic Cultures, give them one of 6 adventurer's Callings, then choose a few other features, useful items, and weapons. each choice begets a small handful of other choices and a very small handful of calculations for attribute ratings, target numbers, and the load you're carrying. there are just three main attributes-- Strength, Heart, and Wits-- with nine skills under each of those classic physical, social, and mental categories. your Culture will give a range of possible stats to choose from for all of these values-- no math or point-buy-ing needed. Hobbits of the Shire will typically have plenty of Heart and Wits, but lower stats in Strength; Rangers of the North will be strong and full of heart, with medium Wits. from your Culture you'll also get one "favoured" skill, and two more from your Calling-- these are skills that you'll always get to roll twice for and take the better result. 

but not everything comes with a numerical stats value-- some features are just listed, almost as mere flavor, and whether the dice get involved for those things is purely a matter of narrative justification. 

for example, a Hobbit may be Eager, Fair-spoken, Faithful, Honourable, Inquisitive, Keen-eyed, Merry, or Rustic. during character creation you'll pick two features from this list, and then, during gameplay if your character being Fair-spoken or Keen-eyed becomes relevant to any skill check, then you'd add another d6 to the roll.

the dice for this system are simple but unique-- you can get away with using any old d6s and one d12, but it might be more fun to get the custom LotR-themed dice, might it not? the only differences are that the sixes on the d6s (Success Dice) include an Elvish success symbol, and that instead of an 11 and 12, the custom d12 (the Feat die) displays the eye of Sauron, to signify automatic failure, and a glyph of Gandalf, to signify automatic success. we used mostly regular dice for our one-shot, but Jeremiah did paint two sides of a spare d12 red and white with the corresponding eye and glyph designs, so we had that extra special touch.

for each skill test, players will roll the custom d12 and a number of d6s equal to your skill ranks and any bonuses, add all the results together and if it beats your target number for that skill category, that means success. a successful roll that includes one or more sixes is an extraordinary success in some way.

the action of The One Ring is organized into alternating Adventuring phases and Fellowship phases. during the former, all the exciting journeying and decisions and combat happens. during the latter there is time for recovery, healing, character advancement, and various other downtime activities. there are structured systems in place for how the Company of player characters will Journey (everyone will share the various responsibilities involved in traveling), Council (some characters may be more skilled at influencing how NPCs will respond with regard to highly important matters), and of course, Combat.

I really like the combat system in The One Ring, though it did seem strange at first. each battle begins with "opening volleys"-- at least one round where all combatants may employ a thrown or ranged weapon as each party approaches the central field of combat. after that, everyone moves to "close quarters" fighting. during these rounds, each player chooses a Stance, engages with (or is engaged with by) at least one opponent, and then resolves their actions accordingly. we have four Stances to choose from: Forward, the most aggressive; Open, the most balanced; Defensive, the most careful; or Rearward, for ranged attacks. the Stance you choose will dictate the order in which you'll resolve your actions and whether you (or your opponents) get bonuses to offense or defense. all player characters act, those in Forward stance first, then Open, etc., and then all enemies will act, in similar sequence. 

in between combat scenes, our one-shot did include a very short Fellowship phase in which we recovered Hope points (very useful for adding dice to skill test rolls or for aiding your fellow players), but we did not touch on character advancement. for each game session you attend, you'll earn 3 Skill points and 3 Adventure points-- the two flavors of XP. you'll also earn 3 more Skill points at the end of every Yule Fellowship phase. Skill points are used for increasing skill ranks, naturally, and Adventure points can purchase new ranks in Valour or Wisdom. starting characters begin with 1 point each of Valour and Wisdom, with an associated Reward and Virtue for each. increased Valour leads to added Rewards (upgrades to equipment) and increased Wisdom grants new Virtues (increased abilities or proficiency).

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Scion shares a few of the same underlying mechanics as other White Wolf RPGs-- we're using d10s again, rolling however many dice our Attribute + Ability stats dictate for each risky action within the game, but this time, because we are descendants of mythic, godly beings, results of 7 and higher will mean success.

much of your character is shaped according to the pantheon and patron parent you choose to be descended from. there are six pantheon options in our edition of Scion: Egyptian, Greek, Norse, Aztec, Japanese, and Voodoo. in line with whichever backstory stems from your character's parentage and divine Visitation, you get to choose a range of favored abilities, epic attributes, birthrights, knacks, and boons to enhance your godly powers even further.

you'll start the game with a certain number of Willpower and Legend points. Willpower measures the character's discipline and determination, but in Scion it works a bit differently than in the Word of Darkness games I've written about so far. rather than using it to buy more dice for your rolls, you'll trade Willpower to gain automatic success, resist mind-control if needed, or manage your actions with regard to your character's Virtues.

each pantheon comes with a set of associated Virtues (no vices this time, although each virtue does come with a downside when taken to extremes). channeling your virtue and spending one Willpower point during gameplay lets you add dice equal to your virtue rating to the roll, which is pretty cool.

speaking of cool, there is a mechanic for gaining extra dice on any given roll if you can describe your character's actions in an impressively cinematic way. this is called "stunting," and at the storyteller's discretion you might earn 1-3 extra dice depending on the epic-ness of the stunt you describe. I'm not always good at this sort of thing in the moment during roleplaying, but I think the idea of it is very fun.

the most different thing in Scion is the combat system. it's somewhat more complex while still using a familiar-enough turn-taking system. however, instead of following an initiative order or more abstractly sorting out phases of simultaneous action (as with stances in The One Ring), combat scenes use "ticks" to measure the passage of time, and characters or NPCs spend some number of ticks performing their actions. the speed rating of your chosen action dictates how soon you may act again-- a speed of 2 means you'll act again after 2 ticks; a speed of 5 means waiting 5 ticks. (that this value is called "speed" even though higher numbers mean slower/more spread-out action does throw my inner pedant into a small fit, thanks for asking, but so it goes.) add all the math and dice-counting of dodge values, parry values, armor, soak, health penalties, etc., and combat scenes can get pretty involved. 

and did I mention that Scion: Hero is the first book in a trilogy? character progression in this game is mainly measured in Legend points. Legend increases for every epic deed your character does, causing Fate to swirl magnetically around them more and more strongly. and once your Legend exceeds a certain number, you're not just a hero anymore, but a demigod. Scion: Demigod and Scion: God are the next steps in the epic journey. I've referenced the lore of those books very briefly as context for this review, and I imagine the system isn't different other than in epicness and scope, but I don't know for sure.
 

approachability

these books frame themselves very differently to their readers. The One Ring leans on its original source material a fair bit: copious quotes and epigraphs litter its pages-- at least I assume they are Tolkien quotes-- if they aren't, then they are rather wonderful homages. when they're attributed, if they are at all, it is to their in-world speakers rather than to whichever book, hence my uncertainty. in any case, the book trusts its audience to follow cheerfully along with this subtly immersive tactic. I think it works. 

mythology being the stringy mess of oral history and creative retelling that it is, Scion has no actual source texts, which means it can make its own. within this system, we are invited to remake and retell our own versions of the myths. the book spends plenty of time providing vivid, extended examples. before we can even turn to the table of contents for this rulebook, there are 40+ pages of an opening adventure-- a full-on short story-- following the sample character Eric Donner, a young scion of Thor. that's either really cool for setting the stage and illustrating character possibilities, or it's in the way of us figuring out the actual game.

character creation (and practically everything else) for The One Ring was almost dazzlingly simple-- an elegant flow chart of options without too many nooks and corners to get lost in. once I'd filled out everything on the character sheets for Fauna and for Melenthiel I just kept thinking to myself, "is that everything? it seems like there should be more."

even so, the process is a flexible one and the gameplay similarly flexible. that's the power of "limits are possibilities" at work, I suppose. the details for each Heroic Culture are described in exactly 2 pages. the list of Callings takes up less than 3 altogether. is that not impressive? 

I like that this book is organized with the specifics of gameplay before the step-by-step of creating an adventurer. that seems atypical for an RPG book, but for this it works quite nicely. character creation is still early in the book (starting on p. 27), so it all seems very simple and straightforward to get started.  even the parts that on paper look like they could get unwieldy, like the rules for Journeys and Councils, felt very smooth and easy during the game itself. I credit our Loremaster, Jeremiah, for a large part of this smoothness, along with the game's design. 

overall the cultural ubiquity of The Lord of the Rings + the beautiful, usable design of the book and the system itself makes The One Ring something I'd enthusiastically recommend as a marvelous place to start for new roleplayers. the flow-chart-esque processes of character creation might not be everyone's cup of tea, and I imagine not all GMs will be totally happy in a pre-made, relatively constrained setting, but that's okay-- you can't please everyone all the time. GMs and players who want something more home-brewed have plenty of options to choose from.

despite its pages of scene-setting narrative and its very cool example characters from each pantheon, Scion is less simple both mechanically and storywise. the terminology alone (we have boons and epic abilities, which are purchased with the same pool of starting points you can spend on boons, but aren't boons themselves, and also birthrights and knacks and virtues and what else is there?) and the rules for which particular relics unlock access to which awesome birthright abilities under which particular purview were not easy to suss out during my character creation processes. I found it somewhat fiddly.

and maybe it's that I wanted more and broader context for my own brain to put it all in, but I also had a hard time settling into the game's core conflict in a meaningful way. we get exactly 8 paragraphs introducing us to the world of Scion, the history of gods mingling with humans, warring against the Titans, "the progenitors and ancient foes of the gods" (p. 44). I found myself wanting more about just how the stated threat of Titanspawn might actually manifest in this setting.

but perhaps it can be enough, sometimes, to label one side productive and good and the other side destructive and evil and just go from there. plenty of stories come with vaguely-defined antagonists.

preliminary verdicts

these two are both competing on basically first impressions. does that make it more fair than some of the prior opening rounds?

I'm into mythology as much as any nerdy millennial who may or may not have prided themselves on identifying all the background extras hanging around Mount Olympus in Disney's Hercules. and the prospect of fighting insanely far-reaching battles with monumentally high stakes using epic, flashy powers is, on paper, pretty thrilling. but in practice, I find it intimidating to roleplay such thrilling stuff. Scion players need to be in a fearless and collosal frame of mind to do this game justice, and being improvisationally epic doesn't often come easily to me. describing stunts in writing after I've had some hours/days to think and carve out just the right words for it = yep, no problem, I can do that. describing stunts in 20 seconds or less, on the spot, while three or four other humans listen and wait for their turns? well, um, I probably need more practice with that one.

against any other RPG, Scion may have had a stronger chance. mythology is always pretty cool, and Scion does plenty of fun and awesome things with it. it's got potential.

but I'll be honest, The One Ring has pretty much swept me off my feet. it's not just the book design, I promise-- the charm and simplicity of it was just so delightful to interact with, from beginning to end. I want to play it again as soon as possible.

next new one-shot (and which William-Gibson-obsessed friend would perhaps want to join in for this one, I wonder?): Cyberpunk RED

next match-up review: Exalted vs. Vampire: the Masquerade (5e)