sheep shearing

I spent a little more than 48 hours in Flagstaff the other weekend. gorgeous weather. wonderful wool and fiber festival (even if my very favorite vendor couldn't be there this year). also, as always, the most excellent traveling companions. so grateful to those lovely humans. 

on Sunday, the last day of the festival, I spent 3 hours teaching a little lacemaking workshop and it was wonderful! just 6 enthusiastic students, plenty of time, plus friend Shannon helping out as unofficial assistant, and it all went so well. I'm so glad everyone came ready to learn and practice and struggle with the weirdness that is tatting and tatted lace. I hope they all keep going with it. and maybe some of them will join The Lace Coven too.

the days since then have felt like a dragging two-dimensional swamp, somehow. I think I need more rest.

since summer 2024 I've been prioritizing the whole weekend of Flag Wool, every June, for a getaway with fiber friends. (this year the festival dates conflicted with my favorite academic conference and I confess it was not quite a difficult choice even though I do miss Computers & Writing and all its fun community a good bit.) a different house rental each time. some shuffling of who attends. so much gratitude that I get to be included in the fun. 

at some point along the way I was handed a copy of this book, The Lost Flock, by Jane Cooper. a meandering autobiographical style, very well researched, and fascinating to read. will I ever find myself tending sheep on a remote Scottish island? highly unlikely. more than happy to read about it though. storms and mud and diseases and all, it sounds pretty romantic.

 

the book cover itself (not to mention the setting and the sheep and the land and all that too) reminded me of Pratchett's The Wee Free Men.

sheep and shepherds. cheese and fleece. community and stories. the books are not that similar at all but you can see the echoes across the two covers I'm sure. blue sky or sea. green hills. close-up on a fleecy sheep with beady ovine eyes. more fleecy sheep wandering the hills in the background.  

I don't reread books that often, but maybe I'll revisit these two again sometime soon. the whole Tiffany Aching series is splendid and poignant and worthy of deep attention. maybe I should acquire a boxed set of them. hmmm.

has anyone in the world of the wee free men considered teaching them how to perfectly shear a sheep? I can't remember.

sheep shearing is a dying art, they say. a strange little niche profession, so delicate and demanding. too bad we don't have any magical little dudes to help out with it. sometimes I wonder if I would or could ever learn. such a prospect feels almost as far-fetched though, most days. 

sheep need shearing. I'm glad that at least a few other humans out there still know how to shear them. the shearer who typically demonstrates at Flag Wool is Mick Hofmann. my guild friends who have fleecy animals hire him every spring to come shear for them too. 

 

there weren't many nice fleeces for sale at this year's festival. even if there had been though, I remain uninterested in acquiring any raw fleece to process myself. carding 6 batts of Finn two summers back was tedious enough, I promise. 

if the apocalypse arrives and all the industrial fiber mills become defunct and I need to process wool by hand, I'll get over the tedium and hopefully also make friends with someone who can teach me shepherding and shearing too.

summer in progress

if only I had known about Audio Flux when the semester began, it would've been great to challenge students to meet the circuit 7 criteria for part of our class. ah well.

my students did some great work anyway. here are a couple of their final projects: 

Social Upkeep 

Everything Breaks (episode 1 and episode 2) 

I hear that circuit 8 of Audio Flux is coming soon, at least, so maybe I can work it into something for English Composition (our first-year writing class) this fall. in my one 10.35am section I want to focus on listening and understanding and responding thoughtfully. I am not yet sure how, exactly, but hopefully the students will be open to it and cooperative with each other. part of me is skeptical about building real community within the deeply trenched constraints and stretched-out shallowness of classrooms. Dead Poets Societies are not and never have been real, right? but more of me is gonna try anyway. it is worth trying, no matter how slowly and incompletely each little classroom community seems to develop. 

my very intermittent course prep thoughts are mixed in among many, many other plans and ideas and projects and to-do lists. that is what summer is, usually-- a big mishmash of ambition and dreaming and doing stuff and lounging about.

I finished reading (and lazily annotating) John Durham Peters' The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media some several ages ago now. I keep meaning to send my marginalia-ed copy to friend Chris sometime. we'll see if I get around to it.

this week, I'm getting around to posting all the neat quotes and concepts from all the dogeared pages. they are a little grandiose and navel-gazey at times, but maybe that is okay given that all our navels are made out of the same dusty star crumbs anyway. 

as I compile and remix these quotes a little bit here, I'm thinking a lot about place. it's been 6 full years and a bit since we moved to Arizona. a new record for longest-time-in-one-area. and while I never really wanted to settle down much there is something nice about being known and being somewhat settled. 

still, we'll see how much longer we last in this scrubby desert land. I can only be in one place at once, physically. and there are so many places! media can bridge them somewhat (and times also, a little). but old postcards from California aren't the same as actual California. 

"We make meanings, but do not so in media of our own making; our bodies are embedded in climate history, fire regimes, the spin of the earth, north and south, and relations with plants, artifacts, and organisms of all kinds, especially each other. Whatever nonverbal communication might be, it is certainly richer than our bodies' hints and gestures, rich though they are" (p. 380)

"Real meaning is not fragile: it is exuberantly abundant, overwhelmingly so" (p. 379)

"Nature has meaning, but not for us" (p. 379)

"But the human condition is recursive; it is a conditional condition: our actions change the conditions they act in, especially since they change us; we speak and act, and as we do we change the conditions in which we speak and act" (p. 51) 

"Communication is deeper and older than language" (p. 133) 

(that bit reminded me of this little post by Ian Leslie, which I usually ask all of my students to read in any writing or communication class I'm teaching. the communicative force field around us all has an elemental nature, I suppose.) 

"The stars were both divine and cozy" (p. 386) 

"This is what the universe has yielded: another being in your same form, improbable and precious, with whom you may be able to contribute to the ongoing history of life. Love and beauty are the meaning of the universe, and such meaning is not a human fiat imposed on raw and unfeeling matter by the effort of our will, but rather the product of cosmic history" (p. 385) 

"Perhaps the past cannot be tapped in its full immediacy because the present is not fully immediate. There are vast patches of unobserved magnification, for different organs of sense, for minds quicker or slower than ours. Even for the most acute observer, descriptions might be incomplete, not only because of limited tools but because reality is lacking. Just as we often do not know what we mean when we speak, so the universe might not always be so sure of itself. The cosmos is structurally incomplete, as gap-ridden as its files. Such wonderful conditions these are! The universe generously accommodates our every new act, word, or thought. There is still plenty to do. It is open for new events; it is a container with a gracious void. A growing universe is a (retroactively) incomplete one." (p. 354)

"A phonograph record, tape, or compact disc does not really hold sound: sound exists only as pressure in time and space. Acoustic storage media hold recipes that, with the right equipment, can produce more or less the same sounds over and over, but they don't hold sounds the way a cave wall or canvas can hold an image. Everything that happens in time has to be started over and over in real time. The sound does not last, the word flies away, the vibration dissipates. The vinyl record can endure, but the music it plays on a stereo does not." (p. 311)

"All complex societies have media inasmuch as they use materials to manage time, space, and power. Kittler's point, that culture was always already a procedure of data processing, follows confidently in Innis's path. Kittler's word was Kultur, a term that can mean both "culture" and "civilization"-- and, never shy about grand claims, he certainly meant to include both." (p. 20) 

"For [Norbert Elias], the civilizing process involved three fronts in need of taming: pressures inside people, pressures between people, and pressures between people and nonpeople" (p.159)

"There is an old clash between the ethic of detachment, which calms the soul so well, and the ethic of commitment, which calls us to upsetting action." (p. 384) 

"Death can feel completely normal, dull, and expected, as blank as boredom, and also unbearably bitter and impossible, as hard as thoughts of falling. Death is a great revealer of infrastructures, and, like them, it partakes of the habit of coming out of hiding traumatically." (p. 383) 

"... but this blessed earth will live on, and the clouds and sun will continue to radiate for a season, and the beauty that pulses in our senses will continue to pulse to other senses or just to itself, and that will be enough. Knowing that this beauty will persist gives some comfort. When we go, natality might well bring something new forth. There might be long periods of anoxic oceans and arid wastelands, but something will happen and eventually wildflowers might sprout in the ash we left behind." (p. 387)

 

I will blog more this summer. so much has happened already and classes haven't even been over for a full month yet.

books books and more books

at the end of last summer, the family gathered on the edge of Idaho and Utah to see my paternal grandmother off on her journey from this world into wherever we find ourselves after. 

from among grandma's things, I was bequeathed an old 70s-style woven and leather bag (I have vague memories of grandma toting her students' papers and homework sheets and such around in it, once). most weeks now, at my house, it is a perfect home to my choir music and a bit of spare lip balm. 

but before I brought it home, more or less just as my dad handed it to me, I found a highlighter pen and a few scraps of notepaper in the bag's many pockets. one little note was a list of medications. the other was a list, in soft, properly-formed cursive pencil, of authors and a few titles:  

G.G Vandagriff
Lynn Austin
Thomas Perry
Linda Nichols - Not a Sparrow Falls 
Chris Stewart - The God of War 
Ted Bell - Nick of Time 
James Kunstler - World Made By Hand, The Long Emergency
Angie Sage
Jessica Richard Draper
Beverly Lewis

and then, in pen at the end, written slightly larger, 

Diana Crawford

when I got home and had a minute, I looked them all up in my local library catalog. of the available options they had for me to put on hold, only one author seemed interesting enough-- James Howard Kunstler. I've read three of his books from the World Made By Hand series now.

they're pretty neat. not all that earth-shattering, as far as post-apocalypses go, but well enough written and engaging. against the premise of oil-shortages and societal collapse, we have a tapestry of colorful characters surviving together. every horse that is mentioned gets described specifically by breed. every antique piece of furniture is given all the fancy labels an auction catalog could ever ask for.  

did grandma ever read these too? I'm not sure.  

I do know we both liked making things by hand from time to time. 

maybe I'll get my hands on some others from her list, eventually.  

more recently, I've been poking around at the short list for this year's Tournament of Books. I got my hands on Bunny so that We Love You, Bunny would have more context. not sure I liked the first-- its ending was pretty interesting though-- and we'll see how much patience I can muster up for the self-absorbed and anxiety-ridden MFA student collective that seems to be narrating the next one. at this rate I won't have time to read anything else at all in advance of the tournament, but so it goes. 

at dear friend Angela's house last month I perused her library for just a few moments and was tempted by a pair of slightly chubby fantasy novels by Naomi Novik: Uprooted and Spinning Silver. they were just the thing to offset the stress and chaos of a new spring semester. good, deep historical fantasy with rich cultural flavor and complexity of character-- I loved them both so much. the second especially so. it would look gorgeous in a video adaptation, I bet.

so of course now I am in a serious obsession with Naomi Novik novels. the other day I finished, too soon, the audiobook of A Deadly Education-- the first in the author's Scholomance trilogy. I loved it so much I think I'm having withdrawals from the world and the voices and the magic of it. it was all so vivid and gritty and perfect. please let the second and third audiobook copies arrive quickly via Libby, please. 

on paper, the series didn't sound that interesting. it is more than easy enough to think we've had enough wizard highschool stories, yeah? 

I'm glad I borrowed it anyway. it is a darker take on the international wizard school trope, but not at all trite or twee or annoying. I found it thoroughly enchanting, with superb world building and expertly balanced first-person narration. we inhabit for 13 well-paced chapters a snippy, mixed-race protagonist named Galadriel (El for short) who somehow, despite being perfectly stubborn and rude to all her classmates, is eloquently self-aware enough with her narrational monologues to come across as relatable and even likeable. I kept thinking of this as Kuang's Babel meets Harry Potter meets Wheel of Time. maybe. not the most apt comparison, I'm sure. ah well. 

books are awesome.

what have you been reading lately? 

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?

 

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?  

two more very unfair comparisons: the semifinals

the semifinals: 
The One Ring vs Vampire: the Masquerade (5e)
and
Star Wars: Force and Destiny vs Dungeons & Dragons (5e)

initially, I imagined this could be a short post, even with the two matches put together. I'll do my best to be concise. it may not be easy.

for most of the prior match-ups, I had decently strong feelings about the winners. all that changes now. these are the four best RPGs I've ever played. to decide between them is going to be an arbitrary, subjective, and pointless endeavor. that is what it means to model a summer-autumn-almost-winter writing project on the Tournament of Books. (sidenote: the 20th annual ToB itself is very nearly underway! the shortlist of 16 was just recently posted.)

as I pondered this next step in the tournament (inbetween grading final projects and exams and such earlier this week), I thought back on my approach during the opening round, to my not-really-a-rubric, and I tied my brain into knots figuring how to quantify my sense of these games' mechanics, aesthetics, and user-friendliness. while I'd sketched out the rubric categories, I never gave them a metric. am I measuring out of 5 stars? percentage points? some other nice round number of cute somethings?

I re-read my past reviews, hoping to distill the elements I most value in an RPG and build some useful yardstick out of it. obviously, design is important to me, both aesthetically and in terms of user-friendliness. overall style and world-vibes are important, too-- I clearly go more for fantasy than for sci-fi, more for glowing heroism than for grim dystopias. (Vampire seems a glaring exception on this though. hmm...) 

additionally, I value vividness, simplicity, and consistency (not just in games but in most art, now that I think about it). I have the most fun in games that gives me nicely-defined frameworks, clear rules, and then practically infinite freedom to invent within that space. is there a more apt way to describe that? not just the logistics of it all, but the feeling? a feeling of sinking all your imagination into a marvelous, immersive vision but also having the power to make it new and yours? I hope that makes sense to at least somebody.

RPGs are especially tricky to judge because they are more than the sum of their published material. they are not static boxes; so much depends on the storyteller, the game master, not to mention the other players. if I were to judge these four in terms of how much I loved my past gameplay in each system, that might be somewhat easier. but that's not exactly what I'm trying to do here.

nor am I comparing them merely on which story or world I might like best. it is interesting that three of these four are games live solidly within circumscribed gameworlds based on pre-existing lore. D&D is the exception, and even it has more than half its roots in the fantasy of Tolkien, so. that these four have come so far mean that such specific worldbuilding feeds into the sense of vividness and definition I value so much.  

alright, alright-- I'll quit stalling. here we go.

 

The One Ring vs Vampire: the Masquerade 5e

for months I have worried that Vampire would end up against The One Ring in the final round; both were strong contenders all along, but now here they are, one fated to force the other out of the running.

Vampire has years ago earned my steadfast affection, for whatever reasons (see its prior match-up reviews for more on that), and contrarily The One Ring is a newcomer in my life.

they are so different, aesthetically and mechanically. for approachability I'll rank them as equals. both have plenty of depth and complexity, all made passably navigable with lovely book design. isn't it interesting their covers match so well? black and white and red, with barely-there serifs on those elegantly bold all-caps titles. not many RPG books come with fancy bookmark ribbons, but these both do.

The One Ring sells itself as "rules-light," which is a point in its favor given my preference for simplicity. skimming the book the other day, I did question this label a bit though. there are plenty of rules and guidelines for an epic, detailed, highly-managed roleplaying campaign, even if those rules are designed to sit in the background and let narrative take the stage. 

the striking style of Vampire feels incomparable to me, which is a point or two in its favor. but you all heard me gush about The One Ring's design. that's what makes this so difficult a match. which artfully drawn style is the best one, for me, today? the glossy, bloody, immortal danger of the urban fantasy plot? or the warm, antiqued, semi-rustic valor of the high fantasy adventure?

I still can't decide.

-

now I've written the rest of this post and proofread it twice, still struggling to make up my mind. The One Ring is gorgeous, and simple, and it ticks so many boxes for the kinds of stories and worlds I love to consume. I really hope I get to play it again in the near future, to explore it more as a full game. 

and Vampire is so evocative and unique. as I've explained before, how often do we get a framework to fight against ourselves, to struggle for a lost humanity? it's so interesting and novel to me, despite (and because of?) the potential discomfort and challenge of its dark, gritty, violent settings.

in a truly infuriating Tournament-of-Books-esque manner, I think I'm going to give up on reaching a judgement via all these relevant, fundamental aspects of the two, and grasp desperately at something-- anything-- for which I can easily pinpoint an obvious preference. if I had to choose just based on the two books' covers, for example, Vampire would win. that faux marble look and the shiny embossed title-- it's perfect.

but doesn't that seem so cheap and superficial? I don't hate The One Ring's cover, even if its use of red strikes me as garish. almost to make up for that stark and somewhat depressing first impression, The One Ring has buckets of marvelously good art in the rest of its pages-- all those chapter spreads, the little ink-scraped edging around the call-out boxes, the sepia sketches here and there. it's so neat and fitting and cohesive.

so. 

I think that's it-- the deciding factor. after helplessly trying to compare blood-red apples to elf-grown oranges all day long, I'll choose The One Ring for its artistic and stylistic consistency. that, and the timeless allure of high fantasy.

 

Star Wars: Force and Destiny vs Dungeons & Dragons (5e) 

where to begin? I love both of these games. I've played the one more than the other in terms of hours at the table, but I'm tempted to say my Star Wars roleplaying took on a quality that could easily outpace the more casual kind I have often tended toward in my quantity of D&D gameplay.

how much does that matter? 

it matters as much as I decide that it does, I suppose.

in terms of aesthetics, neither of these games knocks my socks off entirely. the on-paper designs of each feel equally solid, good but nothing exquisite.

D&D has the simpler mechanics, I think: simpler character creation, fewer charts to reference, and more straightforward dice. altogether it's not more than a few fractions of a point simpler, but it's something.

on the other hand, Star Wars has the more defined world. playing as a Star Wars character has been some of the most vivid, immersive roleplaying I've ever done. perhaps the existence of all the films helps with that, providing my brain with so much visuality to remix. perhaps it's "limits are possibilities" at work once again. Star Wars is a certain kind of story with preset rules and rhymes. that framework and direction help my style of creativity a heck of a lot.

so how do we weigh the merits of a whole multiverse of magical realms and adventure against those of a vast galaxy full of pseudo-magical, destiny-rich alien interactions? which one, for me, today, should win?

relative simplicity and fantasy win again, it seems. if I must-- and in this case I must-- I pick dragons and treasure and potions and spells over any number of futuristic laser swords and spaceships. it isn't fair, but it is my verdict.

next up, the final finals:
The One Ring vs Dungeons & Dragons

gateway dungeons

quarterfinal match 1: 
Dungeons & Dragons 5e vs Pathfinder 2e

does the result of this one seem obvious?

it feels more and more obvious to me the more I think about it. honestly, as much as I keep saying to myself, 'okay let's revisit this properly-- fairly-- as evenhandedly as anyone possibly can...' it just seems to tip the scales further to one side.

after all, there’s a whole chorus of 7 years of games and beloved roleplaying characters on one side, with just a single, simple, half-finished duet on the other. what else are we to expect? 

I will say, however, that there is plenty I do like about Pathfinder. its flexibility and openness, plus the more-pleasing-to-me organization of the book’s sections all come together to give it a bit of an edge in this fight. if I'd met this version of Pathfinder sooner, before pandemic times, and had the chance to play even half a dozen more sessions of it, this match would be much less unfair overall. I can see myself liking the system a lot. 

unfortunately, all these alternate universes of what-if maybe possibilities are not the one I'm sitting in right now.

right now, in this universe, I miss the reliable, accessible fun of D&D. I'm intrigued by all the Baldur's Gate 3 chit chat flying around (including the chit chat from these colleagues of mine who have a podcast all about video games). I have epilogues of three or four past games percolating in the dusty creative sections of my brain. I'm seriously pondering the idea of wrangling friends and family in various batches to run or help run a short one-shot adventure during upcoming holiday breaks. 

so it just has to be D&D that wins. it's not so popular for no reason, even if its general popularity does seem like a fairly self-perpetuating engine at this point. if we need a particular RPG system to serve as a gateway into the hobby as a whole, this one serves fairly well. 

which of the other 6 quarterfinalists will D&D have to face next? we shall see.

SYSTEM	Dungeons & Dragons(5e)	Pathfinder (2e)
cover tagline =	"Arm yourself for adventure."	"Advance your game."
publisher =	Wizards of the Coast	Paizo
pub. date =	2014	2019
original cost =	$49.95	$59.99
length =	11 chapters / 320 pages	11 chapters / 638 pages
my exp. level =	very much lots	some

---

 

any predictions? I have plenty, but the rules say I have to keep them to myself for now.

as an end note here, I speculate that Nyva the half-orc paladin and Damlyn the snow goblin bard would make a very interesting pair. and their systems of origin are similar enough that we could have them adventure together easily enough, couldn't we? perhaps I'll write a little vignette about them one of these days-- a short story evoking some Good Omens meets Daredevil meets The Witcher vibes, where the pure-hearted tough one and the more cynical artsy one are mostly able to follow a shared vision, but not without plenty of amusing conflict along the way. 

 

next match-up review: 7th Sea vs Star Wars: Force and Destiny

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.

-

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. 

-

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?

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. 

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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.

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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