certain shades of darkness

quarterfinals match 3:
World of Darkness vs Vampire: the Masquerade 5e

since opening match 1, our zombie-plagued World of Darkness chronicle has ended. my stubborn, workaholic Andi Garcia did survive, somehow. in the end, wrapped in a metaphorical shroud of mourning and dampened ambitions, she held on to just enough hope for teaching the younger survivors everything they could want to know about the technologies of the past. given the campaign's Lake Michican setting, Andi's epilogue has some real Station Eleven Museum of Civilization vibes-- in my imagination anyway. a little bit like that. but different.

sadly, I have not played any more Vampire this year. but I do think about the world and the system fairly often. driving past a self storage compound on the highway, I wonder how Anarch vampires could use such a space for hiding their renegade plans and secrets. hearing news snippets about a rapper on trial for drug trafficking, I wonder what kind of vampire story that might be, if the drug dealers were in thrall to vampires, or if the rapper himself were undead, using a late-night partying lifestyle to disguise his sun allergy. it would definitely be depressing to be a vampire in real life-- but isn't it interesting to ponder the logistics of living in darkness for decades on end? I can't be the only one who thinks so.

mechanically, these two games are almost identical. the one system encompasses the other entirely, pretty much, and the other is a sharply focused specialization of the first. on that point of my rubric, I cannot really distinguish them. 

in terms of relative approachability, there are perhaps some differences but not substantive ones, for me. World of Darkness can stand alone, just as this version of Vampire can. the possibilities for branching out or remixing other subsets of the world don't take away from that.  

so does that mean my only meaningful axis of comparison, other than past gameplay experience, is aesthetics?

I initially summed up the vibes of World of Darkness as "film noir–artsy" and "alternatingly grunge/emo/punk," with a heavy tinge of romance and mystery. then, in Vampire's opening match 6, I wrote, "let's take everything I said about World of Darkness in opening round #1, but add a few gallons of flawlessly immortal elegance and deep red, viscous blood."

so... which is more worthy of this arbitrary prize? the artsy black-and-white film noir? or the highly polished, classic gloss of black-and-white-and-blood? which one looks best posed against the backdrop of a perfectly staged alleyway at night?

 

SYSTEM	World of Darkness	Vampire: the Masquerade 5e
back cover tagline =	"Your greatest fears aren't make believe; they're real."	"Death is not the end."
publisher =	White Wolf	White Wolf
pub. date =	2004	2018
original cost =	$24.99	$55.00
length =	8 chapters / 223 pages	13 chapters / 400 pages
my exp. level =	more than some	lots

---

 

it is a difficult choice. both of these styles please me. both games and gameworlds have helped me experience visceral, intense struggles and tell sweeping, tragically beautiful stories. 

my decision comes down to a fairly small nuance, I guess. for all that these two systems share, the one is by design very broad and open-ended, accomodating of plenty fairly typical man-vs-monsters adventures. World of Darkness will most likely have you roleplay a communal struggle against encroaching supernatural evils from who-knows-what great beyond. and while that is is awfully heroic and awesome, it is a bit less unique. 

to instead struggle against a persistent, internal, irreversable corruption inside your own blood... that is different. it feels... more, somehow. less trite, less bounded by the rules of a proper hero's journey and all that. the focus of it, the individuality of it-- it makes the struggle a lonely, desperate, mostly hopeless one. how much more romantic can we get than that? and with the focus of Vampire, we get to fight-- for whatever idealistic or misguided or prideful reasons-- against something our own fallen selves have become. that dark conflict gives this game a more unique and interesting trajectory for stories than any other game I've ever played. so far.

 

next match-up review (the last before the semifinals!): The One Ring vs A Song of Ice and Fire

masked and unmasked

opening match #6:
Exalted 2e vs Vampire: the Masquerade 5e

here we have two games where the nuances of managing one's appearance and identity might matter more than anything else. what becomes of a soul exalted by the glory of an actual sun-god above all other mortals? what becomes of a soul damned to avoid every shred of sunlight for the rest of its unholy existence?

thus far I have not fussed very much over why my tournament has featured which edition of which RPG book-- it's all been dictated by what we had in our collection and nothing else mattered. we happen to own the second edition of Exalted, so that's what I'm working with. 

in the case of Vampire, things are a tad more complicated. this time, as we come to the last of the World of Darkness-adjacent gameworlds I will cover, I must note that I did have a choice. the others I've written about so far-- Werewolf: the Foresaken, Mage: the Awakening, and Changeling: the Lost-- all come from a certain line of White Wolf RPG offerings, and while we do own the fourth piece of this little quartet-- the version that would more properly complete the whole series, Vampire: the Requiem (pictured below)-- that is not the edition I'm writing about here.

{ our very red and shiny, 2004 copy of Vampire: the Requiem that we own. its tagline is: "a modern gothic storytelling game." }

I will briefly mention the older version in my account of prior vampire characters, because I have played a short mini-campaign of Vampire: the Requiem with dear friends in Indiana. however, my main focus will be on the more recent 5th edition of Vampire: the Masquerade-- the latest in a line of game systems that actually predates the early-2000s versions featured in my prior opening matches. since almost the very moment this 2018 edition of Vampire came out, I've played many more and longer campaigns in its very similar setting but fairly different game system. so despite the incongruity it adds to my set of review matches overall, we're gonna roll with it.

I've switched up the usual outline a little bit here, diving into aesthetics and mechanics first, then overall approachability, before finally summarizing past and present characters and their stories. the preliminary verdicts for this one are perhaps the most unfair of all the opening rounds so far.

SYSTEM	Exalted (2e)	Vampire: the Masquerade (5e)
tagline =	"This is the story of the Exalted."	"Death is not the end."
publisher =	White Wolf	White Wolf
pub. date =	2006	2018
original cost =	$39.99	$55.00
length =	8 chapters / 400 pages	12 chapters / 400 pages
my exp. level =	none prior	lots

---

aesthetics

Exalted reminds me of nothing so much as the Mortal Kombat franchise. its colorful comic-book style overlaps with that of Scion a fair bit. and all three feature high-powered, more-than-human characters, with tons of lore and a sense of history inexorably iterating and perhaps repeating itself; but for style and presentation alone, Exalted exceeds Scion on almost every level. the colors and contrasts are richer, the paper is semi-glossy, the page numbers backdropped with stars, and the margins printed to look a little bit like marble. across every spread is a narrow little montage of epic fight scenes to serve as a letterhead above the rest of the contents. between every chapter we get to read mini comics following the exploits of various sample characters and villains. I almost can't overstate how shiny and dynamic it all feels.

perhaps because the world and setting of this system draw on everything that is not Tolkien, everything not already over-represented among typical classical western mythology and heroics, the book cannot simply rely on readers' general familiarity with existing mythology and mythic tropes. instead, it builds everything from scratch, new and intentional and intricately detailed. all of that gives Exalted a richness and diversity I haven't seen in any other RPG thus far. I was struck, for example, by just how many women are featured as main NPCs. that shouldn't be so remarkable, perhaps, but I think it's cool. 

aspects of this game seem quite anime/manga-ish, and other aspects remind me very much of the dark fairytale destinies of The Witcher, the cut-throat vibes from Game of Thrones, and even the razor-sharp whimsy of Discworld (mostly because the setting consists of a huge flat plane of earth, but also because the gods are referenced as playing endless little "games of divinity" with the world). it all seems very robust and crunchy, like shards of lava and obsidian rocks glinting dangerously in the sun. for all the outlandish, colorful extremes, the world needs to be taken seriously. 

-

you'd expect a game called Vampire: the Masquerade to be sexy, eh? and this one certainly channels as much sexiness as it possibly can into the pages of its rulebook. glossy pages, tons of full-bleed photo-realistic art, classy serifed type in black and white and red. glints of temptation at the edges of your vision. all the angular imagery of cities. skyscrapers. crowds. bodies in motion. techno. neon. teeth against a bottom lip. stalkers or soulmates? overstimulation. stars drowning in light pollution. the scent of old money. roses. silk. touch. adrenaline. diamonds. fangs. alleyways. the taste of unknown spices in the air. leather boots. mind-control. catacombs. castles. mystery.

for me, this is a game of intense moments layered together like leaves of fine vellum, each calligraphied with dreadful secrets, risks, bonds, and sacrifices. let's take everything I said about World of Darkness in opening round #1, but add a few gallons of flawlessly immortal elegance and deep red, viscous blood. the word masquerade itself conjures so much decadence and intrigue, artifice and uncertainty; all RPGs are games of pretending, but this one leans in as close as it can and gets really meta with what that can mean. 

you cannot play this game as a good guy. it's too late for that. you'll see. once you've been Embraced (that's the polite term for what happens when your greedy vampiric Sire takes all your mortal blood and replaces it with some of theirs), you might struggle however much you want against the Beast of your inhuman blood-- but that part of you won't be silenced and it won't be controlled. your soul is Damned. what will you do with that inescapable truth?

 

mechanics

bring out the d10s once again. you'll need plenty for Exalted, and you'll need two distinct colors, at least five of each, to properly play Vampire.

Exalted's mechanics match up with those of Scion to a large degree-- similar stats, similar types of rolls, similar Willpower and Health tracking systems, similar bonuses for describing your actions as epic stunts-- but of course there are key differences that make Exalted its own thing. instead of Legend, the exalted are powered by Essence. and instead of skills in the basic categories of physical, mental, social, skills are divided up into sets of 5, each set favored most by a particular Solar caste.

creating an Exalted character is decently involved, but once you've done it a time or two it isn't so intimidating. first you'll choose a concept and a caste. there are five castes to choose from: Dawn, Zenith, Twilight, Night, and Eclipse. the Dawn caste exalted ones are fearless warriors, Zenith caste shining, charismatic leaders, and Twilight caste the bringers of wisdom and champions of scholarship. Night caste are the clever, stealthy bodyguard types, and Eclipse caste are the most political, interested in diplomacy and balance.

once you've chosen your caste, you get a certain amount of points for skills, advantages, and Charms, plus a few bonus points to spend on upgrading any of these things a little bit further. choosing Charms is the trickiest part. these are your magnificent heroic powers, setting you apart from any other semi-divine creature that might think it can tangle with you and walk away unscathed. you start with ten Charms, half of which must be from your favored skill domains. ten sounds like a lot, but every Charm comes with strict prerequisites for Essence level and skill level. your character will start with the basics and level up from there, just like in any good kung-fu training montage. (not all Charms are combat-related, but still.)

to use Charms, you'll spend points of Essence from either your peripheral essence pool or personal essence pool. these regenerate pretty quickly in game, so there is no excuse not to use them. the only side effect worth considering is the possibility for your character's Solar anima to manifest in more and more obvious forms. if you spend more than a certain amount of your Essence pool before it can regenerate (especially the harder-to-control peripheral Essence), the glorious light of the sun will start to leak through your skin and betray your exalted identity to anyone who might be watching. 

-

the gameplay mechanics of Vampire work very much like the other World of Darkness systems, with relatively small differences. the nine core Attributes are the same, but this time we get 9 skills per category (physical, social, and mental) and a more flexible approach to allocating points to those skills at character creation. however, the available advantages and merits are more limited here. a few are general (like linguistics or resources) but many are specific to vampires only (like a folkloric bane that makes one sensitive to garlic, or pickiness about sources of blood). 

crucially, vampires in this game are not lone hunters, slaking their hunger as they may and enduring a deathless eternity. unless they don't care too much about preserving their un-life, a vampire will be subject to the ancient bureaucratic traditions and structures of a Kindred society. the Camarilla is the ancient hierarchy of most remaining Kindred clans. in recent times, rebel Anarchs have tried to pull down what they see as the oppressive and unnecessary aspects of the Camarilla. which side of this conflict you find your vampire character on will likely depend on the game your storyteller wants to run. in either case, the political frictions within Kindred society can greatly add to the basic horror of waking up as an undead monster.

first step for character creation is to choose a Clan into which your character will be (or will have been, depending on you storyteller's timeline) initiated. there are seven playable clans, each with a particular vibe, in this core book:

• the Brujah, rebellious but down-to-earth scholars, poets, punks, and rabble-rousers 
• the Gangrel, most animalistic, wild and fierce as nature
  
• the Malkavians, touched by madness, derangement, and absurdity
• the Nosferatu, classically stealthy and strange, deformed by the curse
  
• the Toreador, those obsessed with beauty and hedonism,
  
• the Tremere, blood alchemists who stretch past the edges of magic and science in their search for power
• and the Ventrue, aristocratic and manipulative, thoroughly convinced that they deserve to rule the world.

there is a "clanless" option too. the Caitiff wander among Kindred society without the protection of a clan; perhaps there are pros and cons to that sort of undead lifestyle, but I have always found it kind of boring.

separate from your clan is your coterie-- the group of other player characters in the game, usually vampires of similar age, thrown together for some convenient but also compelling in-game purpose. and along with the bloodline of your clan, you'll gain access to a few Disciplines-- superhuman abilities granted by the vampiric blood in your veins. these are what let you effortlessly crush an enemy's throat, leap from balcony to gutter without a sound. this is how you read others' thoughts or intensify your charm to the point that mortals find your seductive glances impossible to resist. 

rolling anything higher than a 6 on your d10 equals success this time: nice and simple 50/50 odds in most cases. but 1s and 10s have the possibility to shake things up in very exciting ways. mostly you'll be rolling the typical Attribute + Skill combination (sometimes adding dice for Disciplines), but with some of those normal dice replaced with Hunger dice. those are the handful of whatever different color (red, the book cooly suggests). Hunger is a stat tracked during gameplay along with health and Willpower and XP. the higher your character's Hunger levels, the greater the risk for totally uncontrolled frenzy. at Hunger 4, any perceived threat or scent of blood will trigger a dice roll which if failed, may result in the storyteller taking control of your character and leading her to act out whatever monstrous impulses fit the scene. even for regular skill checks, the more Hunger dice in your pool, the more risk there is of either bestial failure (when you roll a 1 on any Hunger dice) or a messy critical success (rolling 10s on Hunger dice). in either case something unexpectedly bloody, cruel, or tragic is about to happen. 

unlike the other World of Darkness games, this one does not use Virtues and Vices-- what virtue could a blood-sucking demon find within themselves, after all? we use Ambitions and Desires as storytelling structures for each player character, instead. an Ambition is something to guide the overarching story of your game-- an ultimate goal to work towards. maybe your vampire wants to enact revenge on the one who created them, or to get permission from the Prince to Embrace a mortal loved one. smaller than Ambitions, Desires are like the stepping stones that may help you get closer to that larger goal. ingratiating yourself with the older, more powerful vampires by doing favors for them, or tracking down resources to better secure your coterie's haven, for example.

Willpower functions almost the same, but instead of adding dice to a roll, you spend Willpower to re-roll up to three from your pool. instead of Morality, Vampire works with a Humanity mechanic. a brand new vampire may start with decently high Humanity (6 or 7 out of 10), but it's likely they won't keep it unstained for long.

approachability

Exalted and Vampire both do a nice job of presenting their systems to readers in an organized and accessible way. they both have quite a lot going on, but it's all divided up into pieces and labeled pretty clearly for us. applaudable book design all around, I say.

despite being just as old as Mage and Changeling, Exalted doesn't suffer from the "let's cram our rulebook full of stylish-but-less-readable typography choices" issue. they save the stylishness for the interstitial comics and art bits, it seems. however, it is quite a dense book, with so much interesting lore poured into practically every section, you might get lost in it. I found it tricky to navigate at first, and very tricky to remember where exactly I first read about that one important NPC or that one city's specific political conundrum. because the lore is somewhat spread out among all the other information in the book, it can feel a little mushy. 

on the other hand, I appreciate how much that lore contributes to a full and logical sense of the world. it seemed a little strange that much of the introduction delves into the lives and culture of the Dragon-blooded, or Terrestrial exalted, when players can only create Solar exalted characters. but in any case, there is a great amount of detail and nuance to build on and to hook your character concepts and plot ideas into. your Exaltation isn't random or without cause-- your Soul, chosen and empowered by the Unconquered Sun in a long-ago age, is now escaping its prison and returning to a new body, transform that body with power and glory and intense purpose. it's fun to think about how your character's original form as a Solar exalted in the First Age might inform their new incarnation.

-

the lore of Vampire is a little less overwhelming. the game has the luxury of decades-worth of tropes and vibes from existing vampire media to lean on (sidenote: Only Lovers Left Alive is the best vampire movie, if we must pick one). the book lets any potential wordiness in its exposition breathe among generous amounts of negative space and provocative art. I was intrigued by and quite pleased with its three-column layout. the shorter lines thus created by such formatting makes the text content itself nice and quick to skim, so finding things throughout the book is way easier.

perhaps most notably, for a World of Darkness property, this particular Vampire rulebook can function entirely on its own. there are mentions of the World of Darkness as a setting, and this Vampire is as compatible as its older cousins with the wider gameworld (I know our prior Vampire games have featured Mages as antagonists, at least).

I should say that the gritty gothic horror and unavoidably bloody content of Vampire might not be for everyone, either. the sexiness may not be inherent to the game, but violence in some form or another is. even so, any good storyteller should be able to balance story details against what everyone is comfortable with. every game and every gamer is different. find some that you like and let everyone else do the same. 

 

previous characters + stories

other than a vague and nameless concept I once outlined for a fame-hungry Zenith caste character, I have no prior character for Exalted-- only my two new tournament characters whom you'll meet in the next section.

there are a good handful for Vampire though. ready?

very first was Eve Richards, who technically existed in Vampire: the Requiem. not the same system, but still a vampire. we played that game for just a few awesome sessions in Indiana as I was finishing gradschool. Eve was a Gangrel, with a found-family of biker chicks. I remember her drinking pigeon blood and ultimately adopting a good and loyal (and yes, okay, blood-addicted at this point) bulldog named Winston. so cool. 

in Louisiana, a Vampire game was one of the RPGs we were able to stick with for quite a while. friends Frank and Daniel and Oona and Andy and sometimes Emily would join us every two weeks to play as Seattle-based vampires figuring out their afterlives amidst overlapping alliances of older, more powerful Kindred all trying to use them as pawns. I played Sierra Adler, a Malkavian artist/photographer with a deep strain of sibling rivalry. so many things happened in that game-- too much to even try to summarize well. near the end, Sierra confronted a shapeshifting hippie-chick Mage named Thistle and mostly failed to do anything very useful against her blatant threats. our final session came somewhat suddenly and in hindsight feels comfortably ambiguous. there was a gathering. chaos. combat. flames. death. regardless of what really happened, in my gentle rewrite of Sierra's ending, she and her sire (the deeply morose Orla Grace) both met their Final Death together, each flailing to save the other from Mage-hurled fireballs.

next we have one of my most favorite characters out of all the characters I've ever played: Ms. Victoria Abigail Evanston Bell. for this game, set in 1920s Chicago, we played a few prologue sessions as mortals before falling into our fates as vampires. I styled Vic as a high society heiress trying half-heartedly to hide her tomboyish, absinthe-drinking flapper side from the newspapers. she was so much fun. our small coterie (a Gangrel Celia and Malkavian Doyle, later joined by a techie Nosferatu Ethel) helped her recognize and fight back against Vic's awfully controlling Toreador sire and survive the Valentine's Day massacre all in the same weekend. she obviously had to give up her high society life, but as consolation she opened a little back-alley cinema and dabbled in producing films herself. at one point, Vic's hunger got the better of her (see my notes on frenzy, above) and she tore apart an entire speakeasy of gangsters almost single-handedly. many nights later, as the coterie was just about to uncover more clues to the whole deadly underworld conspiracy of it all, a pack of rogue Gangrel in coyote form ambushed them in a city park. none of her friends could save Vic from being torn apart herself. so tragic.

for the same campaign story, now time-jumped into the '60s, I drew up the character Maeve Wells, an eager young Tremere whose curiosity outweighed her sense of ethics even before she was bitten. she was interested in the effects of psychotropic drugs in combination with vampire blood. the clan leaders had all kinds of ideas for experiments she could run, and Maeve was quite prepared to impress them as much as possible. unfortunately the campaign dissolved a little while after that, so we'll never know just how depraved she may have let herself become.

and finally, in addition to those three, I've got Margo Wallace. she starts out as just a teenager cocooned in a tight-knit group of wannabe-enlightened friends, bemoaning the death of the local mall and dreaming off and on about fashion design school or something. she was also destined for clan Tremere, but this campaign barely got off the ground either. maybe we'll pick it back up one of these days... 

lastly for this section-- I also dabbled in running a Vampire story for Jeremiah once upon a time. I still have pages and pages of notes and maps, tracking my ideas for the Kindred who might sneak around drinking blood and manipulating the world of Salt Lake City after dark. there were going to be secret backroom hideouts downtown and ancient cultish libraries and child trafficking rings and the ruthless redirection of refugees into very particular households... but we only played three or four sessions before I just got too intimidated by the prospect of engineering that much darkness.

new characters

I created Zaya Greane, Eclipse caste, to play in a simple one-shot session. she's a mash up of Varys from Game of Thrones, Gus from Breaking Bad, and Madeline Stillwell from The Boys, with some sprinkles of Lorelei Gilmore from the seasons where they're running the charming little Dragonfly Inn. prior to our short one-on-one session of Exalted, we spent a good amount of time developing a setting and context for Zaya. she was ambitious and very skilled with business, negotiations, and managing people even before her Exaltation. after, she would be unstoppable.

and she was. almost. in a world where Solar exalted are seen as dangerously overpowered and in urgent need of annihilation, she faced her fair share of threats. playing her had me tapping into the most determined, fearless, un-intimidatable version of myself. I unlocked secrets, forged alliances, generally struck fear into all the underlings in my service, and succeeded in humiliating Zaya's ex-lover in battle. it was great fun.

for a second Exalted character, I made a Dawn caste gladiator named Canessa. after her Exaltation she is suddenly burdened with far grander ambitions than to win every fight, battle, or war. instead, how about we take down the Empire by infiltrating the mystical center of its powers? why not? Canessa is sure she's powerful enough to find and topple the Imperial Manse. perhaps she'll find the Red Empress there and be the one to finally supplant her. that would be suitably epic, I think. 

as promised, I've taken little Briella Jameson, rock-climbing activist, and complicated her life by throwing mystical alternate realities at it. she will not have a good time as a vampire, I imagine. but anyway-- clan Brujah immediately seemed most fitting for this idealistic activist and advocate for the unhoused that I created. I did toy for a moment with making her either a Nosferatu or a Ventrue. her willingness to work in proximity to the dirt and ugliness of the street might put her in the path of a sewer rat Nosferatu, and such a transformation would be quite interesting storywise. conversely, her political connections would make her attractive to the aristocratic pullers-of-strings that are the Ventrue. but the Brujah vibes were just too perfect, so I went with it. Briella will fit right in with them, eventually. but at the moment she is too squeamish to drink from humans, too confounded to know exactly how she'll survive. perhaps she and her raccoon companion (what should I name it? hmm) will run into Eve and Winston hunting pigeons and stray cats and such, one of these evenings.

preliminary verdicts

someone asked me, as I was explaining this tournament project back at the very beginning, which game might win if I had to pick a champion right that moment, without any of this everso rigorous process. it didn't take much time at all for me to think and answer: Vampire: the Masquerade. it can't quite compete with D&D on number of characters or total hours played, but there is something about the setting and the tension and the way dear husband Jeremiah runs this game... maybe it's the mostly modern setting, giving my brain a more relatable, more seamless set of connections for my roleplaying and storytelling muscles? somehow I find gameplay in this system the most intensely invigorating. all the sensuous and visceral details, the quiet scenes of inner struggle and the obscene moments of bestial ferocity, and everything in between. this game and its stories come alive in the best way for me, somehow. I guess measuring all the deepest, most horrible selfishness of an actual vampire against beautiful little shreds of hope and humanity is really cathartic, or something.

it's definitely not fair to judge one three-hour session of Exalted against all that, but I will say that it had an intensity and sensuousness of its own, and that fed my enjoyment of it quite well. in this case, some of the same reasons I don't mesh with Scion (huge, bombastic stunt descriptions are tricky) are also at work. but at least I felt very well-situated in the game's central conflict. that helped me bring Zaya to life pretty well, and it was very fun to watch her (us?) in action.

when I revisit my preliminary judgements at the end of the opening round, we'll see how everything shakes out for real.

 

next match-up review: 7th Sea vs. Cyberpunk RED

next (and final!) new mini-campaign: A Song of Ice and Fire

fatefully

opening match 4: Changeling: the Lost vs Star Wars: Force and Destiny

the last few weeks have been full of traveling and sunshine, so this halfway mark of the opening round is a little later than planned. will I get through the next 4 before summer is over? hopefully yes.

I've been excited to write about these two-- they're unique, and they make an interesting pair. on one side, the first (2007) edition of White Wolf's Changeling sits in all its alluring glitter. on the other, we have the somewhat more austere yet still very colorful and fun Star Wars: Force and Destiny, from 2015.

Changeling enchants me with its concept alone. all that old lore come to life, wrapped in the shadowy politics of World of Darkness-- it seems like a perfect combination, reminiscent of the fairytale retellings and urban fantasy novels I used to love from Robin McKinley, Holly Black, Liani Taylor and the like. in writing this review I also remembered the handful of chapters I recorded for a LibriVox edition of Mr. Wirt Sikes 1880 folkloric anthropology book, British Goblins:Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions. there are so many small and mystical stories wiggling around in the history and culture of every place humans have ever lived. the source material for anything based on fairytales is pretty infinite, I imagine.

and who doesn't love Star Wars, right? it's got equally enchanting heroism and adventure threaded grandly throughout a seemingly endless galaxy. it's a place where one might encounter shiny droids and rugged smugglers in equal measure. a chance to be part of that galaxy is gonna be pretty cool, in any case.

I've mostly followed the same outline for this match-up review: a quick table of metadata, summaries of past characters I've made in each system, thoughts on the books' aesthetics, mechanics, and approachability, and finally a note on my brand new/tournament-specific characters. the uniqueness of these two systems just seemed to warrant a discussion of mechanics before diving into details about new character concepts. and so, onward...

SYSTEM	Changeling: the Lost	Star Wars: Force and Destiny
back cover tagline =	"A storytelling game of beautiful madness."	"A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."
publisher =	White Wolf	Fantasy Flight Games
pub. date =	2007	2015
original cost =	$34.99	$59.95
length =	7 major sections / 349 pages	13 chapters / 444 pages
my exp. level =	some	a bit more than some

---

previous characters

I've created and played two characters each from these two systems. both Changeling games were short and sweet. for one, little Synthia Starling, a birdlike young woman with a Beastly seeming in the Winter Court, explored derelict buildings and made deals with otherworldly creatures in just a couple one-on-one sessions; and then, Liv, another Beastly seeming (this time snakelike), joined up with two other lost souls to bravely infiltrate the Hedge and take down a twisted carnival ringleader. this was around Halloween time, so the short three-session game had a lovely autumn coziness mixed with spookiness underneath.

my Star Wars characters were created for longer campaigns, though the first didn't last all that long in the end. a friend in Louisiana was running a sort of mashup of Stars Without Number using templates from the Star Wars RPG books for some things. so I made a pink Twi'lek-- very rich and spoiled (or at least that's what she wanted people to think), also a talented enough smuggler. her name was Luura'blen and she had a sparkly pet vulptex (one of those crystal-fox-looking creatures). designing her was pretty fun. pink skin, darker pink/red freckles at the ends of her headtails, lots of shiny, pearly jewelry, and silky clothing. technically I must have used the Age of Rebellion core book for her stats (Force and Destiny doesn't have a smuggler path in it), but we'll call that close enough; it seems relevant to write about her here anyway.

some years later, we played an online Star Wars roleplaying game specifically with the Force and Destiny book. all four of us created young padawan characters who would ultimately live through the infamous Order 66. mine was Yahla Sota, a Togruta with golden coloring and a strong Jedi heritage in her family. for young Yahla, it was a privilege to be sent into Jedi training. she wanted so badly to prove herself worthy of that privilege. but in the end, after all the suffering and loss she endured, she couldn't always hold onto that happy trust in the Force. everything got more complicated than she ever thought it could.

the whole story was epic indeed, following us through training, building our lightsabers, surviving shipwreck, facing betrayal, and eventually fighting against the Sith directly. I wrote out a few segments of our adventures, centered on Yahla's perspective, over on this other blog of mine. that campaign was one of the longer and most satisfying I've ever been part of. and Yahla was a character I felt (increasingly, over time) that I could play quite distinctly and purposefully different from any vaguely-alternate version of myself. she was braver, steadier, yet more impulsive and almost vengeful at times.

the Changeling games I've played were small in scope, with relatively tiny, cozy stories. on the other hand Star Wars is built for sweeping space epics, and that's what Yahla's story grew into. big or small, both systems have given me very neat opportunities to explore ideas and circumstances and reactions outside my own experience.
  

aesthetics

underneath its vibrant, shiny, mottled deep-green cover, the Changeling book evokes a bit of creepiness-- it's not a hedge of glinting leaves, but one of menacingly sharp thorns. splintered bones. spiky antlers. every interior page is bordered with a Celtic-ish chain of thorns or vines. fancy drop capital letters stretch and curl ostentatiously at the beginnings of the interstitial vignettes. the tagline for this game invokes the idea of "beautiful madness," and there is beauty indeed, tinted with World of Darkness grime. 

parts of it feel ancient and mythic. other corners are more Grimm, marked with the well-worn wheel ruts of once-upon-a-time. all of it is a little bent, a little rusty-- unpolished and unpredictable. the ancient clocks of this enchanted place are looming and wrong somehow. time in the fae realms cannot be contained or measured like the mortals pretend. nothing works the way a scientist might insist it should. and those untouched by the wrenching trauma of an otherworldly kidnapping couldn't know just how evenly, how deceptively the glitter is mixed with the shadow, the darkness with the sparkle. inbetween-ness is a big theme in this system. you've been taken, lost, and you can't ever really go home. you've seen too much. your soul and your skin will always be a little twisted. a line from chapter 2 says it rather succinctly: "To survive is to carry scars" (p 98).

this game is a blood-stained alley leading to a hidden courtyard, a gleaming estate with endless gardens, where the most intoxicating music drifts through the air, where beautifully manicured topiary might dance with you if you ask nicely... but the overgrown path and tiny doorway only appear on Mondays during a new moon, only if you come alone.

this game is a dusty old cobwebbed attic with antique lace handkerchiefs wrapped around mysteriously half-burned scraps of sepia photographs, where your eyes chase imps and pixies around your peripheral vision, where your weeping waxy candle in its old-fashioned brass holder could betray you to the monsters at any moment.

 -

the vibe of Star Wars is more straightforward, I want to say. the book is colorful but understated, its type and layout mostly boxy and tactical-looking. but it's also got marvelous art folded in at almost every opportunity. chapter breaks come with gorgeous action scenes across a full spread, each of them with dynamic and cinematic depth. the end papers are panoramic landscapes of Tatooine's desert, and in one of the later chapters is a very awesome map of the whole galaxy. 

as you might expect, dichotomies of light and dark pervade this system. good vs. corruption, honor vs. selfishness. these tensions provide the core of Star Wars generally and of this book, Force and Destiny, in particular-- it's all geared toward Force users like Jedi or Jedi-in-training. the art and the tone of the rulebook contribute to a sweeping sense of destiny: every decision may echo with epic importance. we're all connected, after all. the Force will guide you like steady stepping stones across a muddy field, if only you trust it.

this is fairy tales in space after all. it's dramatic in a futuristic way, but the brushstrokes of action, adventure, and fantasy form familiar shapes with comforting trajectories: everyday people touched by something marvelous and huge that changes their lives, heroes-to-be discovering their destinies while navigating seedy hives of villainy and drudging through some version of a dark, despairing swamp, holding on to their light as best they can. 
 

mechanics

the mechanics of Changeling build on the World of Darkness system with added twists of whimsy and magic. we're using d10s again, with the same basic stats, merits, Virtues, Vices, and your character's attributes and skills will inform most of the dice rolls made to measure success at any given action. on top of all that, a changeling comes from one of 6 "seemings"-- the archetypes of faerie-ness (Beasts, Darklings, Elementals, Fairest, Ogres, or the Wizened) that influence how their looks have supernaturally changed-- and one of 4 season-themed Courts (5 if you count the Courtless as a Court, I suppose). Changeling-specific advantages include Glamour and Wyrd, both used to fuel some pretty cool magical abilities, like manipulating luck or disguising your face as someone else's.

as you progress and learn to control the wyrd powers instilled within you as a changeling, you'll learn more and more powerful Contracts and forge useful Pledges with others in changeling society. at character creation you get a certain number of these, and thereafter use XP to purchase more. 

choosing Contracts and thinking up Pledges feels, to me, a little like the rotes (pre-made spells) and improvised magics (anything you can think of and describe convincingly) of Mage. thankfully there seem to be fewer Contracts to choose among, most of which are limited by the seeming and the Court you belong to, which makes things a little simpler. Pledges, though, still intimidate me. they seem pretty hardcore in terms of all the levels of binding and consequence that can be built into them.

instead of human Morality, changelings measure Clarity-- how strong is your mental hold on what is real? how much has your magic use degraded your sense of self and continuity? living with knowledge of both the normal world and the Fae can be treacherous, but changelings know that the thorny paths inbetween-- the twisty Hedge that grows and shifts around the edges of reality-- those spaces and paths are useful, too. finding safe(ish) ways in and out is part of cultivating and maintaining magical power. the Hedge and the thorns are in large part what irrevocably changed you; you may as well bend that to your own benefit, and your allies, if you can.

 -

to create a character for Force and Destiny, you choose from among 8 species (including human) and 6 careers, each of which offer 3 unique specializations. these options will grant custom bonuses to your basic stats, which comprise 6 base characteristics, not too different from those outlined in many other RPGs, and 34 skills in which you'll rank from 0 to 5. there's also a spot for custom skills, just in case there's something your character might know or learn that isn't already represented on the character sheet.

whichever career and specialization you choose will guide your character's progression along a skill tree, kind of like the ones they have in video games. all the Force powers have skill trees too, with prerequisite skills leading up to more potent or more efficient options for each type. there are Force powers involving speed and balance, some for mind control or sensing into the future, and others for telekenetics. it's all really fun to see these in actual gameplay.

the skill trees may seem overly structured, but there are enough options among the species, backgrounds, and careers to keep it feeling open-ended and full of possibility. you've got plenty of choices for what to spend XP on, and plenty of in-game story reasons to guide those choices.

the custom dice are the weirdest part of the Star Wars RPG system. you can buy a custom set along with your rulebook, or you can use regular d6s, d8s, and d12s in place of Boost dice (d6), Ability dice (d8), Proficiency dice (d12), Setback dice (d6), Difficulty dice (d8), Challenge dice (d12), and Force dice (d12). that is a lot of different kinds of dice, with not-so-normal symbols on all the different sides. during structured play (like combat or other risky contexts where you need dice to decide outcomes) it's common to roll a combination of all 6 of the main types for any given attempt. and the dice aren't just measuring success or failure-- they also indicate advantages and threats from the situation or environment, along with moments of triumph and despair. you can fail triumphantly, or you can succeed with a touch of despair. I like all the narrative possibilities of that, and the creativity it encourages. 

in addition to Force dice and the points of light or dark Force energy  they generate for each player to use, there's also the mechanic of Destiny points. at the beginning of each session, players roll one Force die and add its result to the Destiny pool. light side Force points are shared by the players, and dark side Force points are given to the GM. each time either side spends a point to upgrade their dice or trigger something beneficial for their characters, that Destiny point ebbs and flows into the opposite side-- light side points become dark side points, and vice versa. it's a pretty fun and dynamic way to represent the balance of the Force.
 

approachability

I rate the approachability levels of these books and systems as average, and just about equal. both books are neatly organized and consistently designed, though the newer publication has a cleaner style that seems easier and more accessible for the average reader. but Star Wars wins a few more aproachability points, simply because of its mainstream-ness and because the book is self-contained, rather than an extension of a larger set of RPG worlds.

surprisingly, I found that the core rulebook for Changeling barely mentions its World of Darkness base. there's a few lines about it, but it almost seems like they expect readers to know and already be in on that half of the system. maybe that's a fair assumption. if you're picking up Changeling and you don't have the core World of Darkness book already, you won't get too far with it. it's also fairly dense, just in terms of tight line spacing.

the popularity and ubiquity of Star Wars content in the media today does potentially make this RPG system a bit easier for the average person. but while its overall themes and stories may be more accessible, that may or may not matter in terms of the heavy levels of detail and technicality offered by this rulebook. it's got like a million tables and charts for everything, from a 100-point morality ranking system with strengths and weaknesses at each level, to fiddly weapon stats and dice conversions. there's a lot going on just with the dice, too! during our long campaign, we had a Discord bot handle dice for us and it wasn't so tricky to get the hang of... but you've still got to know which dice are for what and why, plus how to read the results. it's math with symbols instead of numbers, which some people might find more fun that regular math.

thankfully, the design and structure of the Force and Destiny book offset the nitty-gritty technicality of it for the most part. a detailed table of contents, headings and subsections in a really smooth Q&A format, plus the more relaxed and open page design make the towering expanse of the system feel pretty digestible.

 

new characters

given my prior experience here, I simply made one new character for each system as part of my tournament process.

starting with the base World of Darkness stats of Briella Jameson (outlined in opening match #1, in case you missed it), I had to remold her concept quite a bit more than I did for either Werewolf or for Mage. in those games, a fully formed person meets their magical transformation with their eyes more or less wide open, even if they don't have a choice about it. but in Changeling, there's no choice and much of the time no awareness of this transformation until it's already happened. the Fae steal away children, babies, and shape them into whatever they may want to play with in or control out in the absurd expanse of Arcadia. the child might not realize until eons later that there's something wrong, that there's a somewhere they were stolen from and could, with enough effort and luck, get back to.

so for Briella, I rewound the clock of her life and imagined her as a plucky 9-year-old on a family vacation. alongside her mom and dad and older brothers she goes out hiking, learns some basic bouldering, scrambles up red rocks without fear, all along the way collecting sunburn stripes and mosquito bites in total innocence... 

until she falls...

...and the malicious, arbitrary, hungering Fae spirits of a mirrored mountain domain push her down even further, through the plane of our reality and into another. they let her fall through the normal earth and into a broken alternate world. the Fae contrive to put a cobbled-together replacement daughter, lifeless, at the bottom of the trail for her parents to find, and Bri herself is trapped away from them, groomed by her Fae keeper to climb and climb and climb, up and up and up and up, endlessly traversing an Escher-esque mountainside that extends forever into the corroded sky. 

when she eventually, painstakingly, barely sane, crawls her way out again through a mere splinter-crack in that magical mirage, it's impossible for her to tell how long it's been. through the horrible purposelessness of endless climbing, she has become like the earth and sandstone, her skin baked into a bright tan, her eyelashes and brows the color of sagebrush, her pale hair like bleached desert grass. I gave her an Elemental seeming (earth, if you couldn't guess) and membership in the Summer Court. she's forgotten her true name, but the echoes of it bleed into what she calls herself now: Jamie Scree.

 -

for Star Wars, I created a Zabrak named Proxa Tonaullu. she's from the planet Iridonia, where in ancient times the Sith had close ties with Zabrak high council. she's heard these legends and wondered what they may mean for her once she feels the Force awakening in her own life. I made her a Warrior with the Shii-Cho Knight specialization. Proxa feels called to greatness, ambitious to the point of obsession, but also merciful and kind when circumstances dictate. she's just 18, strong in mind and body, with green eyes, bark-brown facial tattoos in her family's traditional design, and two small polished horns at each of her temples. she is still learning to channel and use the Force, but she knows she'll be an absolutely unrivaled fighter for the Jedi soon enough.

preliminary verdicts

this is another difficult one.

like I mentioned, our Star Wars campaign from a few years back was above and beyond one of the most excellent games. it's a unique system and it was hugely fun to play. largely that's down to the other players being marvelous and of course dearest Jeremiah being great at running such things.

but then I've always felt drawn to the intricate ins and outs of all the faerie magics and mysticalness in Changeling, and I get pretty excited about the character design aspects of the system. I could spend hours and hours daydreaming, imagining all the cool looks you could give a Changeling character with this or that seeming, sketching and spinning little vignettes about all those little details and how they show up. 

yet I'm highly aware that, just as with Mage, my enchantment with the concept and aesthetics vs my actual experience with the roleplaying system might not balance out in the most practical or fun way. character design is one thing, but cool imagery in my head all by itself doesn't mean much for roleplaying unless I can fit it into the world of the game. the actual playthroughs I have done came with more brightness and whimsy than I expected (though perhaps I should have expected more). the wild, improvisational nature of RPGs strikes again, I suppose.

I haven't played as long or as much within the world of Changeling yet, so I don't feel like I can properly measure how well it lives up to what I think I want it to be. someday... if we can find the right roleplaying group and the right stretch of months for meetups, I might try to run a Changeling campaign. I have half a notebook full of setting notes and NPC ideas already. when I started brainstorming, I took inspiration from the show Killing Eve mixed with the film Primal Fear... who knows if that'll still work out if I ever go back to it. I should probably aim a bit lower and run some World of Darkness one-shots first.

so if I had to finalize this judgement today, based on gameplay alone it would tilt towards Star Wars. simple and mainstream though it may be with all that overarching light vs. dark dichotomy, its lore and world do still make room for plenty of depth and nuance. and even if the dice are pretty weird, that's part of what makes it so fun and unique.

 

next new one-shot: The One Ring

next match-up review: The One Ring vs. Scion: Hero

affection, safety, and a puppy

I learned just today that the German word halten can mean in English to hold or to stop.

this seems profound for some reason. the sentence in my Duolingo German lesson was "die Eltern halten ihr Babies (the parents are holding their babies)" and when my first instinct was to translate that verb as are stopping, I figured I should check the app's hints for it first. they did show both options, but the context seemed to call for are holding instead. depending on the age of one's baby, there aren't that many things you need to or can stop one from doing, really.

if I stop to think for a moment about the same range of meanings in all the history and senses of to hold in English, does that make the whole thing less profound?

the word's etymology is a long one. some snippets that resonate this afternoon:
"to contain; to grasp; to retain"
"to possess, control, rule; to detain, lock up"
"to foster, cherish, keep watch over"
"to keep back from action"

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?

maybe it is.

paradoxically.

in a "limits are possibilities" sort of way.

I don't remember when exactly this photo is from. September 2016 when we went to the National Zoo? probably. it's been sitting on hold in a blogpost draft for at least three years or so.

to hold also has a sense of continuation. to hold a note. to hold your position. to uphold a ruling. to have and to hold.

sometimes all of that isn't comfortable either. but sometimes it is.

I've been doing this year's 30 days of yoga. it's wonderful even when I don't think I have the time or energy for it-- alternating movement and holding, centering body and mind and breath so all is balanced. not always easy. but it is enough.

I am enough. now is enough. I hope.

in other news-- last week we added to our household a new puppy.

his name is Hamilton.

or, if you're feeling extra fancy, Hamilton Chidi Chewbacca Chesley Alonzo. he's already learned to come when called and to sit on command. Wesley's still warming up to his rambunctious, half-tamed puppy energy, but they're getting along pretty well so far.

what good pugs.

word quartets

in downtown Lafayette, there is this new sculpture-statue-thing. it's tall and shiny. two metal figures on tip-toes are holding an interesting metal version of the city flag.

you can't see it very well in this photo, but their stylized metal thighs have word-shaped cut-outs on them. I will list them for you here and ask you to pay attention to how the list makes you feel.

Trust
Kindness
Love
Believe

if I could format them all vertically, I would. you'll just have to imagine how they look going up and down these metal thighs in all capital letters.

we could put them in this order instead:

Love
Believe
Trust
Kindness

do you have any preference? did you or didn't you cringe a little bit at the lack of parallelism? does it feel different to treat "believe" as the misfit verb in a list of nouns, or "kindness" as the misfit noun in a list of verbs?

now that I've done a smidge of googling research, I have learned that the artist behind this piece is named Robert L. Barnum. the words were chosen by children involved with the Hanna Community Center and they are also the ones who named it "We Rise Above," which is how it is listed here on this list of other local public art.

as much as the inconsistency niggles and pokes at my hyper-educated writerly brain, I of course can't fault children for choosing this particular quartet of words without thinking about which parts of speech they all function within. most people do not automatically think about such things. even if part of my hyper-educated writerly brain thinks they probably should.

but the more I think about this sculpture and is misfit verb and its misfit noun, the more strangely grateful I get about how mismatched the words are. had they all four been straight-up non-ambiguous verbs or nouns, with no funky Venn-diagram of just noun, noun-or-verb, just verb going on, then I wouldn't have stopped to pay that much attention. if you just gave me a list of sappy-sounding nouns like

Trust
Love
Kindness
Belief

then that's all it would be and my allergies to sappiness would have kicked in and dismissed the whole thing.

instead, the funky Venn-diagram that these words presented got me pondering. how interesting it is that love and trust, simple little words, are both noun words and verb words. commandments and descriptors, both. but the other two, they aren't. they have to be one or the other. and it's simple enough to flip the verb believe into a similar one-word noun. not so simple with the noun kindness, though. why is that? probably there are linguistical, etymological word history reasons for which overlapping functions and orthographic representations match up or don't. I haven't looked into that yet.

I walk past this tall, shiny sculpture fairly often. someday it may lose its thought-provokingness for me. but until then the hodgepodge of words stir up lots of lovely questions. is this art speaking imperatively, or narratively? is it reflecting something the artist and his consultants see in the world, or is it praying for something they would like to see? are these virtues the sculpture asks us to admire in the world? to nurture in ourselves? are they efforts and actions we are supposed to take up, or are they knick-knacks and baubles we should collect where we can? or both?

of course it's both, probably. if they'd all been cut out in noun form, that wouldn't mean love and trust would lose their imperative vibes altogether. if they'd all been in verb form, with kindness split into its English infinitive, be kind, that wouldn't stop us from noticing the moments where those verbs swirl and collect around us into warm fuzzies to hold on to. and maybe our parts of speech are only one limited and insufficient way of chopping up language for storage. these four cut-out words have no context, after all. there is no frame for the list that they seem to make up. there is no sentence for them to live in. nothing outside this sculpture of words dictates how one is supposed to read the thing. that makes the hybrid noun-verbiness of half of them even more exciting, almost. you can interpret these words in multiple ways! and the unwritten noun and verb forms of the other half can perhaps haunt this tall, shiny art, hovering in the gaps for anyone who wants to notice them.

usable pasts

one thousand blogposts. it would be cool to make a chart or map or diagram of them all.

I found these old sketches last week in old notebooks. the old notebooks will help me (presumably) study for prelims over the next six weeks.

the sketches are pretty much just there. not relevant to studying at all, really. I took photos of them and have thereby transferred some of their inky randomness onto the internet. I think they were drawn sometime late in 2013.

I keep coming across this phrase, "a usable past," in academic books, mainly, where authors use it to hedge around the reality that the true past is and ever will be inaccessible. our biases will always cloud our memories--personal and cultural. the biases of past peoples don't exactly help clarify reality for us either.

I wonder in another thousand blogposts how I will look back and read the things I'm writing here. already the ten years of this blog stretch off into foggy, familiar, fuzzy, foreign places. are they usable, now? will they be usable still in ten more years?

probably to someone. but it's hard to say what for...

twenty: image

before I left Kentucky, I visited a place called Bernheim forest. full name: Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest.

it was a lovely and interesting place. the photo I slapped up with day eleven's post is from the hike I spent the afternoon in that day.

this photo here is from just outside one of their visitor centers.

imagine a building like a tree. 

there are a lot of ways of imagining a building like a tree. 

there are a lot of ways of imagining most things. 

an old, old post of mine from 2006 came to mind today. I'm thinking about which self is which. which pieces of me are okay how they are, which need polishing, which to accept, and which to shelve.

there are a lot of ways of imagining myself. 

thirteen: unlucky

not even the heady scent of fresh-mown grass or the sweep of springtime clouds and breezes--not even a strawberry ice cream cone--none of it, nothing--has succeeded in lifting me up out of this well (deep, deepening, deeper than yesterday) of what if why not when where how not why which who why why not but why. I am choking on feelings. smothering.


there are no stories in this. no sense. the universe is sinking me.

voodoo blue and flame metallic

I still need to take proper photos of my new little apartment. but it needs a little more preparation than this thing did to count as photo-ready.

this thing, all "blue flame metallic" and shiny, is my new mode of transportation. it is less than half as old as my old car was when I acquired it five years ago. twelve whole years younger, now. and it runs, which in itself is a vast improvement compared to the status of my car last week. we don't even need to talk about the quality and quantity of paint here or the CD-player to realize I have massively upgraded.

before I trekked over to sign a good chunk of my savings away for this thing, I got to spend nine whole days in a carless (or car-free, depending on which sort of spin we want to put on the situation) cocoon. this wasn't as awful as someone so used to having a car around might expect. there's a sort of herd-immunity-esque entanglement to this modern, connected life I live. even if I ever did decide that from this day forward I would never again set foot in a regular four-wheeled sedan, I don't know that I'd be able to keep such a vow. there is too much that seems to expect and require us to use this mode of moving ourselves and our things around in the world. for nine days I didn't have a car to drive, and for a full seven of that I didn't even own a car at all, having sold the poor, dead thing to a junkyard for $200... but despite my being technically carless, my world was anything but.

so much infrastructure supports this car-full society. I was remembering this quite strange string of moments and thoughts from four years back. but for fossils and asphalt and rubber and traffic laws and assembly lines and departments of motor vehicles... well, everything could be so different. our footprints could be so otherly-shaped. my brain can't shake the shadow of all this privilege that lets me transform my carlessness--a very slight lack of freedom--a very slight inconvenience--into a shiny new(ish) blue Ford Focus within less than one week. one week of carlessness. it seems like nothing (though it isn't, and privilege comes with its own costs).

possibly my longest stretches of carlessness have included time spent in other countries. traveling abroad with a car is not a thing most people even think about doing. as an undergrad I didn't own a car. I let my driver's license expire while I lived in England. who needs to drive at all when you live on a small island with excellent trains?

before I came back from that island (ten years ago! ten!) I spent a long afternoon at a hair salon for the sake of looking a little more cosmopolitan upon my return to the states. it was copper that time. pretty tame, not too garish.

but this time it was blue. just at the ends. nothing too obvious, no, of course not.

and it's so non-obvious in most lights that I'm not even sure it shows up properly at all in most photos.

voodoo blue, they call this color. it is a color of hair dye that most people very happily do without. I could have, too, but maybe this minor, counter-culture-esque fashion choice will somewhat counteract the major, herd-mentality-esque surrender of buying a new car after one mere week without one...

me and mine

several weeks ago I had my students read and respond to these two online pieces: Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Cultural Appropriation by (which also has a part two) and But Why Can't I Wear a Hipster Headdress?

each puts up a different perspective on how the average consumer might consider and deal with instances where culture seems not to belong to the people who are making use of it. where it seems like these colorful, textural, symbolic wrappers we wrap our identities in get stolen. or at least thoughtlessly borrowed. to be bought and sold.

the boundaries between cultures and subcultures and groups are complicated. the beginning to a recently reposted episode of This American Life includes an interview with Jared Diamond (who incidentally is the author of a short essay my Texas Tech students had the option of writing about a whole year and a half ago) on the subject of groups and the costs of inclusion. and exclusion. no man is an island and all, so this stuff is important. belonging and contributing are both important.

the value of these things isn't exactly quantifiable. it's hard to measure all the tradeoffs and sacrifices and perks that get thrown around in any arrangement of human beings (or any living organism, come to that). these things don't have price tags, usually.

this fashion piece does. so do memberships to things and applications for citizenship.

membership and belonging don't seem quite the same though. and monetary costs are not the only kind. does wearing a fancy headdress make you a member of a certain group? or do a certain lifestyle and certain shopping habits even moreso? paperwork and legal distinctions might hold lots of weight, but can those things reflect the essence or core of any nationality?

belonging could be a matter of action rather than of paperwork or decree. yeah? but then I want to ask whether acting and being are the same. impostors and decoys and spies say of course not. Jared Diamond's bit explains that well enough.

so my next idea is that belonging, being included, is a relationship. nobody can belong anywhere without both action on their part plus a reaction of some sort on the part of the group. this of course seems pretty fundamental--a group defines itself through such relationships. members of a group have to be related somehow, even if only spatially or by the colors of their shirts. but I don't only mean that kind of relationship. we're all related some way or another through such abstractions. that's too easy.

the groups that seem to matter more are groups that make us negotiate our way into them. they ask things of us. they have conditions.

in a few hours, I'm going to join the group of people (how many are there, I wonder?) who are currently hanging out in the state of Utah. when I get there I'll sleep for a bit before being stolen away for a star-gazing camping trip down in the canyony, National-Park-ridden southern bits of the state. I have plenty of more thoughts to spin out about groups and requirements and ownership, but the conditions of my getting to Utah include getting in line to board an airplane just about now. we'll continue this blogpost somehow later on...

lunch date with Dublin

on Tuesday last, I landed in Ireland at something like half eight in the morning (also known as half three in the wee hours of what could almost still count as Monday five timezones back). I'd only slept a little on the plane, but since my flight from Dublin to Paris did not leave until six o'clock that evening, I had nine hours for adventuring. plenty of time.

friendly Irish airport staff pointed me toward the city, handed me maps and bus routes, and made recommendations. I sat sleepily on the top level of the bus, relishing so much green, wondering what I would find exploring Dublin.

first I walked around Trinity College.

there were beautiful, chained off grassy spaces and whimsically fat trees. I wanted to climb them, but: fences.

I saw this sign propped up against a wall, and big green ribbons tied around the columns of buildings. I guess it was green week, though I don't know what that means here. green as in College Green? green as in sustainable and eco-friendly? green as in Irish and St. Patrick and luck? not sure.

doesn't that look like the most glorious tree for climbing? in a few months, when (or is it more like if at this point?) summer returns to Indiana I will designate a 'tree climbing week' for myself.

I felt both like a student (like any other student) and not like a student. I am, of course, endlessly a student. an endless student. but I am not a student at Trinity College. that makes perhaps more difference than it seems to.

then I got hungry and made my way to the Temple Bar district for food. I peered at menus outside cafe after cafe until this one on Essex Street caught my imagination. Brick Alley Cafe in dark shabby slab serifs over the door, window-menus boasting dozens and dozens of hot chocolate varieties, a long narrow bar above which stood a really neat clock, tables covered with local indie-looking zines and cards and such--I should've stayed there all day reading the Aristotle I'm supposed to be reading.

this is the lovely white chocolate with marshmallow the shy-seeming barista served me. not pictured: an even-more-delicious-cuz-I-was-so-hungry-by-then tomato and cheese ciabatta sandwich.

I did not sit all day in the cafe reading Aristotle. I walked across and along and around the River Liffey, people watching and looking into shops every once in a while. I bought a few postcards.

I took lots of photographs.

I browsed a few awesome bookshops, considered buying a magnet with Oscar Wilde's quote "Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong" on it, decided against that idea, and then had a berry scone with butter on it while I wandered back to the bus stop on Dame Street.

I was no less sleepy on the top of this double decker bus. the sun was setting out there behind the reflected bus-innards. it kept setting as I skipped through short security lines to wait by the windows for our gate to open, and it kept setting as I found my window seat, and it kept setting as we took off for Paris.

I'll have to write about Paris some other time.