Not with a bang, but a whimper: thoughts on Swan Song

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I thoroughly enjoy stories set in the post-apocalyptic genre. Whether it’s nuclear MAD, alien invasion, killer plagues, or any one of the many other likely triggers of the End of the World, I enjoy watching the End unfold. Plucky bands of survivalists, roving mutant beasts, radiation-blanketed wastelands–it’s all good.

And so it was that I was pleased recently to stumble across a behemoth 1980s post-apocalyptic epic that I’d somehow managed to miss–Robert McCammon’s Swan Song, a nearly 1000-page beast of a novel charting a classic Good vs. Evil struggle in the radioactive wastelands of post-WWIII America. McCammon is one of those authors who is done a severe injustice by the propensity of his publisher to adorn his novels with the sorts of cheesy-horror cover illustrations that you roll your eyes at in passing on your way through the Horror section of the bookstore. I’d previously read one novel of his–Boy’s Life, which I enjoyed and have mentioned here before.

I plunked down a few bucks for a charmingly-tattered used copy of Swan Song. I started reading it on the car ride home from the bookstore, and I finished at 2:30 am this morning.

I enjoyed it greatly, and so I’ll talk about it a bit. Swan Song came out a couple years after Stephen King’s The Stand (another 1000-page post-apocalyptic epic from the 80s) and bears quite a few similarities to King’s book; McCammon acknowledges the clear influence, but maintains that his story is a unique one. (I think he’s right.)

The setup is a classic post-apocalyptic scenario: Cold War tension culminates in a civilization-destroying nuclear exchange between Russia and the United States. The first 100 or so pages of Swan Song introduce us to the assorted characters who will survive (through luck or providence), and who will soon become the heroes and villains of the post-apocalyptic world. In “the first shall be last” fashion, McCammon chooses some unlikely Heroes to survive the nukes and save the world from evil: an insane homeless woman, a washed-out show wrestler, and the young daughter of a “trailer trash” stripper. Those destined to become Villains hail from the opposite end of society: a respected retired military officer and a middle-class teenage boy who’s creepily obsessed with a video game he’s creating.

McCammon really hits his stride once the nukes hit and the various characters of the story begin their wanderings across blasted North America. There’s a really tense and brutal fight for survival in the depths of a Moria-style wrecked survivalist bunker where the colonel and teenage kid (Colonel Macklin and Roland, respectively) found refuge when the bombs hit; McCammon charts their degeneration from civilized humans to survival-obsessed monsters well. The heroes, meanwhile, begin to slowly converge on each other, running into a slew of inspired post-apocalyptic dangers along the way–mutated animals, a band of insane-asylum refugees roving across the Midwest, nuclear winter, the ruins of New York, and many others. And as they wander, they become aware that Something Else is roaming the wasteland as well–a clearly supernatural and thoroughly evil shapechanger who preys on the survivors, sowing death and despair wherever he travels. The Man with the Scarlet Eye (as he’s known) bears obvious similarities to The Stand‘s Randall Flagg–a demonic being of unclear origins who’s up to no good. His counter is a girl named Swan (the trailer-trash daughter), who has the supernatural ability to heal and restore the land. Macklin and Roland assemble a Mad Max-style army of armored vehicles and begin rampaging across the Midwest; the Good Guys eventually meet up and begin to organize the survivors; and the Man with the Scarlet Eye sets out to kill Swan through human agents.

The stage is set for a Good vs. Evil showdown, and that’s exactly what happens. For all the horror of its setting, Swan Song plays out like a classic fantasy or fairy tale–the Good are really good, the Bad Guys are really bad, and you just know that the heroes will pull through against impossible odds in the end. (If you’re having trouble figuring out who the Bad Guys are, McCammon helps you out a few hundreds pages in by having one of the villains don an actual WW2 Nazi uniform, if that gives you an idea of the sort of moral drama we’re dealing with.)

So yeah, it’s a very fun story. Some parts were more interesting than others–the pace bogs down a bit in the third quarter of the novel as McCammon sets the stage for the final showdown–but overall it kept me turning the pages. By using nukes to destroy the world (instead of a plague, as King did), McCammon is able to play with a lot of vintage post-apocalyptic tropes; everything from full-scale battles between heavily-armed factions to two-headed mutant beasts to a band of feral gone-native teenage boys crops up at some point. And the final confrontation is pretty good, although at least one Big Plot Revelation is clear to the reader several hundred pages before it actually happens. The book’s main weakness, in my mind, is McCammon’s tendency to get melodramatic and overly sentimental at points, especially once all the Good Guys meet up and start building their Happy Friendly Community of Goodness. Some scenes are so transparently and artificially set up for maximum emotional punch that they lose their impact. And an awful lot of the friendly people (NPCs, if you will) encountered by the Good Guys seem to be repetitive and annoying variations of the same Gruff But Lovable Down-Home Country Folk template.

But who can complain too much about the minor weaknesses of a novel that gets so much right? Swan Song won’t be displacing Tolstoy anytime soon, but it’s a fun and fast-moving story that’s worth reading if you’re a fan of the genre. It’s put me in the mood to dig out a few other good post-apocalyptic tales and give them a re-read. If you’ve got any recommendations on that front, let me know; otherwise, just keep watching the skies and keep your powder dry.

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Thanksgiving, King's Quest, and more rambling about my obsession with revisiting classic game franchises

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It’s the week after Thanksgiving, which means a couple of things. Firstly, it means it’s time to re-adjust to actually working every day after a long and relaxed holiday weekend that involved… well, not a lot of work of any sort. And it means that we’re forced to come up with increasingly creative ways to incorporate large quantities of leftover turkey and cranberry sauce into meals. All this to say: welcome back, those of you who celebrated Thanksgiving last week; and I hope you had as enjoyable and reflective a holiday as I did.

My wife and I aren’t really “born shoppers” at heart; neither of us minds running out for groceries or occasionally swinging by the mall to pick up a few items, but we derive no special enjoyment from the act of shopping. And so we were a bit surprised to find ourselves suiting up last week Friday–the day after Thanksgiving, an infamous celebration of capitalism and the free market–to brave the holiday crowds and do some Christmas shopping. Off to the mall we went, bracing ourselves for the post-holiday shopping mayhem.

The mall was indeed crowded. And as usual, I reasoned with my wife that While we’re in the mall, I really ought to stop by EB Games, you know, just to see what all the kids are playing these days. Fair enough, she said, eager to be free to wander the Bath and Body Shop (or something like that) without a dour-looking husband trailing her silently through the aisles holding a scarf over his face so as not to be knocked unconscious by the choking, overwhelming potpourri fumes.

So I went to EB Games, and that, in case you’re wondering, is what this rambling post is really about. While at EB Games I picked up a Sims 2 expansion for my wife (she’s an addict), and while walking to the register my gaze fell upon something interesting: a King’s Quest anthology.

Could it be true? Indeed it was–the whole KQ series, updated to run on modern Windows versions and bundled for $20. Next to the KQ anthology were Space Quest and Police Quest collections as well.

This is exciting stuff. The King’s Quest games were second only to the Zork series as far as my childhood game influences went. The early KQ games, like a lot of Sierra titles from that era, were really well-written and clever. I played King’s Quest 2 almost incessantly on my parents’ old-school Macintosh in junior high. I remember wandering all over the game world, mapping my progress with good old-fashioned pen and paper, saving the mermaid, outwitting the witch, and escaping the vampire. And I’d spent countless hours discussing the more difficult puzzles and challenges with my friend Raymond, whose love for the Sierra adventure titles exceeded even my own.

I can’t believe it’s taken so long to get here, but it’s just a terribly good idea to bundle up the old Sierra adventure game series and sell them. Some have aged better than others, but the basic puzzle-based gameplay works well even today, and as I’ve said before, I think it’s really important and inspiring to look back at the great moments of gaming history and remind ourselves that good gameplay can make you overlook even the crudest graphics.

There are so many excellent games that deserve to be revived in this fashion–dug out of the archives, tweaked so that they’ll run on modern operating systems, and bundled up with their sequels. It’s a real shame that the Ultima series, Infocom titles, LucasArts classics, and countless excellent Interplay games are so difficult to find; even those that were released in anthology form back in the 1990s often require massive hacking to run well on modern computers. You’d think that the companies that own these franchises could earn themselves a bit of extra cash by hiring somebody to update their classic DOS titles and make them available for online purchase through their websites. Maybe the re-issue of the KQ and other Sierra series is a step in that direction, although I’m afraid they won’t stick around on store shelves for more than a few months before disappearing into whatever abyss awaits Games That Are More Than Six Months Old.

I should note that one company which is doing this very thing–taking old titles, updating them, and re-releasing them–is Matrix Games, which is renovating an impressive number of aging computer wargames in this fashion. They’re helped by the fact that unlike other genres, good wargames tend to age relatively well since graphics have never been their main selling point. But here’s hoping that other companies with the rights to classic game titles consider investing a bit of money into renovating the classics.

And back to the topic of King’s Quest, I would be remiss if I did not mention the fan remakes of several KQ and other Sierra titles over at AGD Interactive. That sort of project can at least tide us over until game companies get serious about making their classic titles available again.

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In which I lament my failure to read a scary book on Halloween

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I happen to be quite fond of Halloween, and each year as October 31 approaches I try to single out a few appropriately spooky books, games, and movies to enjoy. This year I sort of missed the seasonal opportunity and didn’t settle on any truly good scary movies. No good terrifying game surfaced, despite my initial plans to revisit the very creepy Undying; and when Michele and I ventured out to rent a scary Halloween movie, even that went awry–the movie we chose was the unfortunate Dragonfly, which was about as scary as… uh… something that isn’t scary at all.

But I figure it’s never too late to try to get into the spirit of Halloween, even if the dread night of terror has technically passed me by. So I’ve started re-reading Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, which stands out as one of the few horror novels that has actually managed to creep me out fairly badly. I remember very few of the details from my initial reading of it years ago in college, but I vividly recall getting quite spooked reading it alone in the apartment late one night while my roommates were out on dates with girls or something.

The decision of which Halloween Book to read this year wasn’t easy. My initial instinct was to read some classic scary short stories (such beasts ranking among my favorite type of literature) but I was in the mood for something a bit more involved this time around. The choice boiled down to two books: Stephen King’s It or Straub’s Ghost Story. Both books are considered Andy Bookshelf Classics. But I opted to go with Straub, since his work gives off a somewhat classier Hawthorne-esque vibe that fits my mood at the moment. If I’m feeling ambitious after Ghost Story, I’ll take Mr. King up on those 1,000+ pages of It. We shall see.

I’m still a bit disappointed that I missed Halloween; reading an epic tale of terror and damnation as Thanksgiving and Christmas approach seems a little wrong somehow. At least Walpurgisnacht is only about a half-year away. I’ll be better prepared when it rolls around.

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Insta-dungeon

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Here’s a fun one: an automatic dungeon generator that creates not just a map, but also a complete list of encounters for a dungeon based on the parameters you set. The results are surprisingly game-able, in an old-school sort of way! File this one away for the next time you find yourself at the game table woefully unprepared.

No insta-generated dungeon could possibly be worse than a few of the completely-made-up-on-the-spot dungeons I’ve foisted on my players in the past. Of course, cobbling together random monsters and dungeon layouts is a time-honored D&D tradition, and is made easier by the fact that typical D&D dungeons tend not to be marvels of architectural logic. As long as the players think you know what you’re doing, it’s all good.

It would be a fun gaming challenge to auto-generate a half-dozen of these random dungeon maps and then play straight through them as one mega-dungeon, using the listed encounters as written and not worrying about internal consistency. I’d say that has about an equal chance of either being the most entertaining gaming experience of my life, or the experience that finally makes me consign my Dungeon Masters Guide to the flames and take up a normal hobby, like golf or LARPing.

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This game is terrible (I play it every day)

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A friend passed along a link to this amusing Wired piece on the whiners and complainers who populate game forums. It’s funny because it’s true–it’s really uncanny how many people spend their valuable time sitting in official game forums complaining about how much the game sucks. The offenses against which these forum warriors rage usually range from the petty to the insignificant to the outright delusional. If the game is that bad, I always wonder, surely there are better things to do with your life than rehash the point loudly in front of a bunch of strangers on an online forum? Clearly I’m missing something.

If you were to spend time at the World of Warcraft official forums (which I no longer do, for this very reason), you’d soon emerge with the impression that WoW is the worst-designed, most unplayable piece of trash ever to be released; and you’d almost forget that every day millions of people–including, most likely, the whiners–happily log in and have a good time playing it.

Whatever it is about the internet that fosters rampant and petty negativity is not confined merely to game forums, of course. It’s especially noticeable in gaming forums because the emotional investment of the whiners is so disproportionate to the real-life significance of the problems they’re griping about. There’s a good dissertation just waiting to be written on the Psychology of People Who Are Clearly Obsessed With Game X But Can’t Stop Talking About How Much They Hate It. And heaven help the PhD candidate who has to spend time in the forums doing research for that one.

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Why weren’t the Clone Wars cooler?

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The portrayal of the Clone Wars in the Star Wars Episodes 1, 2, and 3 has long bothered me. Long, long ago, when I first watched Star Wars and heard crazy old Ben Kenobi’s offhand reference to the Clone Wars (in which he had served alongside Anakin Skywalker, the best starfighter pilot in the galaxy!), my young mind conjured up images of an epic conflict that ravaged the galaxy.

The Clone Wars of my imagining were all part of a civil war in which brother fought brother, master fought apprentice, and hero fought hero. The schism started small but grew to engulf every known star system. There were true heroes on both sides, all struggling to fix a failing Republic: the Loyalists (who believed the dying Republic could be reformed from within) stood on one side and the Separatists (who believed that the Republic had passed the point of redemption and needed to be torn down) on the other.

The heroes of the Clone Wars were to the people of the Rebellion-era Star Wars universe what the heroes of Greek myth are to us today–they were larger than life, with power and might far beyond anything that would come after. And like the heroes of Greek mythology, their flaws were just as great. In time, noble ideals were lost beneath beneath monstrous egos; the forbidden science of cloning was tapped to make good on never-ending battlefield losses; and in the end, Jedi on both sides even turned to the Dark Side in a desperate quest for something, anything that would give them an edge and bring the devastation to an end.

And somewhere in the midst of all this, the Emperor came with the promise of peace. I never thought too much about the details, which didn’t seem all that interesting anyway, but as a young Star Wars fan I saw the Empire that grew out of the Clone Wars as a sort of populist movement. The people of the Republic may have hated the corruption of their government, but they grew to hate the hell of galactic war even more. The idealistic Jedi struggle looked more and more to the average Republic citizen like the squabbling of children with too much power. The Emperor, who had earlier fanned the flames of civil war, now tapped into this frustration. The details are lost to the passage of time, but when the bloodshed ended, the Emperor was in charge, the Jedi were on the run, and both Loyalist and Separatist found that they had lost the war.

That was how I envisioned the Clone Wars, at least. But the Clone Wars as portrayed in Episodes 1, 2, and 3 seem… well, pretty lame in comparison. Lucas’ Clone Wars isn’t a tragic clash of mighty heroes, but a battle between the Good Guys and the Goofy Evil Robots. Despite the extreme amount of boring detail we’re given about the state of the Republic, we never get even a mildly satisfying reason why the Separatists are trying to leave the Republic in the first place, except that they’re Evil. The Jedi aren’t mighty but flawed heroes; they’re utterly worthless bureaucrats who can’t even stop the Trade Federation from invading the Happiest, Most Peaceful Planet in the Galaxy. Despite the fact that the Republic Senate and the Jedi Council are both portrayed as useless, corrupt, or both, the films expect us to side with the Loyalists simply because the Republic is a Democracy. The battles of the Clone Wars are not tense, tear-jerking dramas in which former friends are forced to fight and even kill each other over their ideals; instead, they’re dull CGI engagements between faceless clone soldiers and droids with silly accents. Even the most epic battle scenes of the prequels, like the space battle at the beginning of Revenge of the Sith, manage to evoke only the barest scrap of emotional investment.

It was probably foolish to imagine that Lucas’ vision of the Clone Wars would match mine perfectly. And as frustrating as the prequels can be at points, Lucas has packed them with quite a few cool ideas. But the Clone Wars themselves–what should be the epic backdrop against which the fall of Anakin Skywalker occurs–are far more dull than I had hoped they would be.

I wanted the American Civil War in space, and I got a confusing and poorly-explained war between clones and robots.

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Playing Star Wars like it's actually, you know, Star Wars

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While browsing the RPG.net fora today, I came across a link to a great essay by Steve Darlington on how to run a Star Wars RPG in the spirit of the movies. Even if you’re not a gamer, the essay has a lot of good observations as to what makes the films so immensely enjoyable. (Now if only Lucas had followed some of this advice while making the prequel trilogy….)

Darlington’s main point is that a SW game needs to convey the epic, space-opera feel of the movies–the heroes must be at the center of everything, they should always be fighting against impossible odds, and the stakes should always be huge. Epic lightsaber battles against a Sith Lord (who is, of course, actually your father) over a lava pit, outrunning the entire Imperial navy in your junk-heap space freighter (with a few little modifications), suicidal trench runs to take down the Death Star with twenty seconds left before it reaches firing range to blow up your planet…. those things are all Star Wars.

Fending off random thugs while delivering spice shipments to a backwater planet for the umpteenth time… that, while it is more along the lines of a typical RPG scenario, is definitely not Star Wars–unless along the way to deliver your spice shipment you get attacked by Imperials, escape legions of Stormtroopers ordered to capture you and send you to the Spice Mines of Kessel, and end up singlehandedly blowing up a Super Star Destroyer seconds before it destroys the whole frickin’ universe.

I’ve run several Star Wars games, and none of them felt nearly as fun as they should have, given my love for the SW movies. Reading this article, I think I have a better idea of why those games didn’t work. Next time, I’ll try to make the adventure a bit more epic and exciting than “get through the Imperial customs station without being noticed.”

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A lifetime of roleplaying, or roleplaying a lifetime: generation-spanning RPG campaigns

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Many people keep a list of things they want to accomplish before they slough off this mortal coil. That’s a bit too serious a topic to address in a game blog like this, but I suspect that I am not the only gamer who has a list of game activities I want to experience before I hang up my gamemaster hat for good. One of the things I want to do is run or play in a generational RPG campaign.

By “generational campaign,” I am referring to an RPG campaign that spans a much longer span of time than do most adventures and campaigns. I’m talking about a campaign that covers events all throughout the life and career of a PC–and maybe even the adventures of the PC’s children, grandchildren, and beyond.

Most RPG campaigns cover a relatively short span of time in a character’s life. The longest adventures–and here I’m thinking of some of the truly epic D&D campaigns of yesteryear–might take your character months or even a year or two of his fictional life to fully complete. And a game group that plays regularly for a few years might see their characters age a few years, maybe even a decade. And that sort of campaign can be mighty satisfying.

But in all of those cases, the PC doesn’t really have time to evolve and develop like a real human would; most campaigns take place during the PC’s “peak adventuring age” and end not when the character grows out of adventuring age and into the next phase of life, but when the gaming group gets bored or decides to do something else for a change.

In a lifetime-spanning campaign, however, you’d play out the most important or interesting adventures and experiences spread throughout the character’s life. Assuming your character isn’t killed by 3rd-level goblins during his first adventure at age 18, you’d see him pursue long-term goals; you’d see the consequences of choices made in youth cropping up later in his career; you’d see his goals finally achieved or forfeited in old age. You’d see relationships come and go, enemies rise and fall, and values stand firm or crumble in the face of a lifetime of challenges.

I’m aware of only a few published generational campaigns like this. One is the Sengoku campaign Shiki, which spans an 18-year period in feudal Japan during which the characters safeguard an important heir from infancy until he is old enough to assume his birthright. Another is The Great Pendragon Campaign for the Pendragon RPG; it spans 80 years and allows the characters to personally witness and take part in the Arthur legend from beginning to end.

Going even further are campaigns that span not just a character’s life, but several generations of characters. In these campaigns, characters might be connected through the years by blood, loyalty, or chance; but whatever the connection, their lives all fit together to tell a grand story. As far as I know, outside of Pendragon, only White Wolf has published much of anything along these lines. The four-part Transylvania Chronicles for Vampire: the Dark Ages spans hundreds of years of history, beginning in the medieval world and continuing all the way to the modern day. And the newer Vampire Chronicler’s Guide contains guidelines for creating and playing entire vampire family trees–the sins of the father visited upon the children to the fourth generation, and all the drama and horror that implies. I’m not a Vampire player, but I’d jump at the opportunity to participate in one of these uber-epic campaigns.

So why haven’t I tried to run a generational–or multi-generational–RPG campaign yet? Mainly because I have enough trouble getting a gaming group together for more than two consecutive game sessions; the idea of committing a year or two of real life to play through the entire lifespan of our characters is logistically daunting. There’s also the matter of such campaigns requiring quite a bit more preparation than most short-term games, both for the players and gamemaster. But one day I will run a game like this, or at least take a decent stab at doing so. And if I don’t, perhaps my children, and my children’s children after them, will…

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Symphony of the night, again

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There so needs to be a heavy-metal rock opera based on the original Castlevania trilogy soundtrack–preferably by a European prog rock band with crazy hair, Ren-fair stage costumes, and a ridiculously melodramatic Goth name.

But until that day, I’m content to listen to this guy’s hard-rock renditions of the music of Castlevania. His in-progress “Unchosen Paths” album is an effort to rework the entire soundtrack of Castlevania 3, and let me tell you–I’ve been listening to it all day, and it’s a work of freaking genius. “Creeping Dusk” is an 18-minute metal epic that takes you on a whirlwind tour of every great tune from CV2: Simon’s Quest and CV3: Dracula’s Curse. And “Scourge of 1691,” in addition to having a darn cool name, covers what must be every song from the original game in one great Medley of Awesomeness.

Rock on, my Castlevania-music-playing friends. Rock on.

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