NINJA!

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We all know that ninjas are pretty awesome. But have you ever wondered exactly how awesome your ninja actually is? If you yourself are a ninja, this is much more than an academic question. Use this handy guide to calculate the awesomeness of any ninja. You begin with zero points and add relevant points as indicated by the chart.
Ninja:

  • is male: +1
  • is female: +6
  • has black, white, blue, or red ninja costume: +2
  • has ninja costume of other color: -1
  • is also a cyborg: +5
  • has more than 75 shuriken concealed in costume: +1
  • wields a katana: +1
       –katana cries out for the blood of foes: +1
       –katana cannot be sheathed until blood is drawn: +1
       –katana can cut people in half, but they don’t know they’re dead until the ninja stomps on the ground and their torso slides away from the rest of their body: +3
       –katana can slice through gun barrels and tank armor: +2
       –wields more than one katana: +1 per additional katana

  • has sworn blood vengeance against someone: +2
  • is an anthropomorphic animal: -2
  • is only visible as a blur of motion when leaping around: +2
  • wields nunchaku: +2 per nunchaku
  • knows nothing of good or evil–only the Way of the Warrior: +2
  • can battle multiple enemy henchmen at the same time: +1 per 15 henchmen
  • can kill people just by touching them: +4
  • can kill people without touching them: +4
  • leads a life of non-violence: -12
  • can be convinced to emerge from retirement to cut one last swath of bloody vengeance through the ranks of foes: +3
  • trained under the same mystical martial-arts master that his/her nemesis did: +3
  • is seeking revenge for murder of his/her master: +2
  • can run around on walls and/or ceilings: +1
  • can shoot fireballs: +2
  • dialogue:
       –no dialogue; ninja never speaks: +3
       –consists of poorly-translated subtitles: +2
       –is dubbed by lackluster English voiceover: +2
       –is spoken in fractured “Engrish”: +4

  • has total control over body systems and reflexes: +1
       –can feign death for long periods of time: +1
       –can breathe underwater for long periods of time: +1
       –feels no pain: +3

  • can catch arrows in midair: +2
  • is the last surviving member of his/her ninja clan: +2

    • What other items should be added to the list? And most importantly… how does your ninja rank in terms of awesomeness?

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    Cinemania

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    It’s been a while since I’ve talked much about movies, so I hope I can be pardoned for indulging in a “here are some movies I watched you should watch them too!!!!” post.
    I’ve actually seen a relatively large number of movies lately, as in Michele’s absence (and on her advice) I’ve been renting films that I suspect wouldn’t interest Michele much. Here are the movies I’ve rented and watched in the last several weeks, along with a few of my thoughts about each.
    Session 9: this is a relatively low-budget psychological-horror film that has spent quite a while on my “check it out one of these days” list. It’s about a restoration crew working in an abandoned mental hospital/insane asylum–a massive and incredibly creepy structure that seems tailor-made for this sort of film.
    Things start normally, but wouldn’t you know it, as the workweek goes on, Scary Things start to happen, one of the crew disappears, and in true psychological-thriller fashion, tensions flare and everybody starts suspecting everybody else. The movie works well to a point–several scenes in the depths of the asylum are very effectively scary. It also plays its cards very carefully as the plot unfolds, leaving you questioning whether the badness at work is the result of human action or the supernatural workings of the “evil” asylum itself. Unfortunately, the tension (and the movie) sort of collapses towards the end, as if the effort of ratcheting up all that suspense in the first half somehow exhausted the film and left us with a hurried and unsatisfying ending. A really silly gross-out scene ruins the use-your-imagination scariness of the movie’s first half, and there is an attempt at a “big plot revelation” at the end that fell flat for me.
    So Session 9 it wasn’t hugely impressive, but nor was it horrible. If you’re in the mood for a good “evil building drives inhabitants mad” movie (and have already seen The Shining, of course) it’s worth a rental.
    Pulp Fiction: yes, it’s true, I had never seen Pulp Fiction until about a week ago. Yes, it was amazing; I went out and purchased a copy to add to the Rau family DVD collection (and you know only the best movies make it into that collection). But I don’t know what else to say about the film that hasn’t been said by people more insightful than myself, so I’ll say that I loved it, but feel somewhat uncomfortable about liking it so much.
    Underworld: yeah, with Kate Beckinsdale. It’s a cheesy B-movie about trendy vampires fighting werewolves. It was pretty goth-tastic. It’s a summer popcorn flick at best, but I enjoyed it for what it was worth. I watched carefully for evidence that the film rips off ideas and plot elements from White Wolf’s Vampire roleplaying game (White Wolf has sued the Underworld creators over this) and concluded that, yeah, it’s a pretty blatant Vampire rip-off. Whether it’s enough of a rip-off to make for a successful lawsuit, I’d say probably not, but I shall leave that to the professional lawyers.
    Below: this one was a very pleasant surprise. It’s also a horror movie of the psychological bent (which I suspect got lost or overlooked in the wake of The Others, The Ring, and similar films). Its catch is that it’s a ghost story set on… a submarine. I thought that was a cool enough premise that I gave it a chance, and wasn’t disappointed.
    It’s not the best horror movie you’ll ever see, but I’d put it about on par with the two flicks mentioned in the preceding paragraph. The basic premise is that an American submarine in World War II picks up a handful of British survivors from a torpedoed medical ship, and it’s not long before Scary Things start happening. Like many other popular horror movies these days, it’s pretty non-gory, and relies heavily on the old “you turn around and AHHHHH there’s a pasty white corpse right behind you but when you look again it’s GONE!!!!” trick, which is a bit tired but still pretty fun. And Below features what I believe is the single creepiest mirror scene I’ve ever seen in a horror movie. Yikes, I’m getting goose bumps just thinking about it.
    Below also gets points for being the first submarine movie in the history of submarine movies which does not include a scene in which the submarine must descend below its design specifications–you know the scene, where everybody stands around tensely while somebody reads off the submarine’s ever-decreasing depth and somebody keeps ranting about “she’s not designed for this depth!” and mysterious rivets* start popping out and spraying water all over the place, and then we all breathe a sigh of relief as the boat remains intact. So Below gets an automatic +35% bonus for not having that scene.
    (*I’ve always wanted to know: do submarines really have rivets, and do they really pop out when the boat dives too deep?)
    Oh, and Below features a hilarious conversation between crewmembers (who are proposing theories about What’s Going On) that I suspect is a playful nod to Richard Matheson’s wonderful story “Death Ship,” or perhaps a light-hearted mockery of The Others and The Sixth Sense. That earned it a few Cleverness Points.
    So there you have it. Pulp Fiction is the only one of the four with lasting artistic merit, but they were all worth the rental fee for one reason or another. Which of these movies have you seen, and what did you think of them?

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    Nostalgic childhood horror

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    One of the smallest but most interesting literary genres I’ve read is what you might call the “nostalgic male childhood fantasy.”

    These are novels about, well, being a boy, and they chronicle with heartbreaking nostalgia the inevitable but painful process of growing up (a process they usually define more by the loss of wonder than by the gaining of maturity). But they differ from standard childhood memoirs or nostalgic reminiscing in at least one important way: they invariably take place in fantastic, magical versions of the real world. Dragons, monsters, magic, and every other fantastic element you can imagine lurk beneath the surface of these ordinary-seeming worlds. The protagonists, almost always boys on the verge of adolescence, can see and interact with this fantasy world; adults are typically people who lost the ability to enter the fantasy world when they “grew up” (and in some stories, adult males are given the opportunity to recapture a bit of this boyhood belief).

    Three novels stand out in my mind as covering this theme especially well. The first and best has to be Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, in which a boy battles the minions of an evil carnival that has moved into town. It’s a true classic and an amazing story, and it hits on all of the “boyhood nostalgic fantasy” themes. A second book that fits well into this genre is Robert McCammon’s Boy’s Life, also about a boy dealing with the magic creatures and people that lurk beneath the surface of his small all-American hometown, although the writing style is different than that of Bradbury’s novel. And a third book that exemplifies this theme is Stephen King’s It, perhaps the best novel he’s written and chock full of childhood wonder, fantasy, and horror.

    The “fantasy boyhood” theme really grabs me. The “wonder of childhood” theme is fairly common in literature, and books written for children are full of monsters and magic, but these novels seem somehow different in style from the “childhood memoir” and “children’s lit” categories. For one, they often feature a fair amount of horror as a part of the protagonist’s fantasy world (and all three of the authors noted above write, or have at least dabbled, in the horror genre). And importantly, none of the books mentioned above are written for children–they’re written for adults, and they appeal to a very specific sense of nostalgia for lost innocence and gone-forever childhood. Notably, none of them feature girls as protagonists (It features a girl protagonist, but she’s not a central character; the main protagonist is the typical near-adolescent boy).

    The last point in particular interests me. Is this type of story–boy sees wondrous and horrifying things beneath the surface of “real life,” has bizarre supernatural adventures, nobody else is aware–appealing mostly to males, or is it just coincidence that the best such stories feature boys as main characters? What about these stories makes them male fantasies–or do they appeal equally to both genders? Is there a female analog to this genre? If so, can you give me any examples? One of Michele’s favorite books about girlhood, Jane Gardam’s A Long Way from Verona, deals with the general theme of a girl coming of age and shares a fair amount in common thematically with the above books, but makes no use of the fantasy/magic/horror element at all. Is the “magic childhood”–and the heartbreaking loss than comes from growing out of it–a specifically male fantasy? Why?

    Or maybe I’m just overanalyzing things. At any rate, they’re wonderful stories–perfect summer reading, if you’re looking for something to dive into over the next few months.

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    Thoughts on a nearly-dead RPG

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    If ever there was a desirable roleplaying game property, you’d think it’d be the Lord of the Rings license. How could you go wrong with the Middle Earth mythos, which inspired (and continues to inspire) the Dungeons and Dragons game that started it all? You’d think that owning the rights to print a Tolkien roleplaying game would be a license to print money… but history doesn’t seem to bear that out. Iron Crown had a long and presumably successful run with their Middle Earth Role Playing game (MERP for short), but eventually went under and lost the license (due to either cutthroat licensing practices by Tolkien Enterprises or financial incompetence by Iron Crown, depending on who you choose to believe).
    More recently, the ears of MERP fans around the world perked up at reports that a company called Decipher had acquired the rights to the Lord of the Rings franchise and planned to publish a roleplaying game to coincide with the release of the Peter Jackson films. Like everyone else, I was skeptical that a new Lord of the Rings game could match up to Iron Crown’s MERP, but I dutifully drove down to the local game store when it came out and bought a copy of Decipher’s shiny new Lord of the Rings RPG to see for myself.
    Now, two years later, the Lord of the Rings RPG line is all but dead, and rumors are flying that Decipher–which hasn’t published anything for the line for quite some time–is going to farm out the license to another company, like Green Ronin or Games Workshop.
    What happened? How do you go wrong with a Lord of the Rings game?
    I have no idea what went wrong, obviously–it could’ve been mismanagement by Decipher, bad sales returns, lack of interest in the property, or some other reason. But while I don’t know why Decipher dropped the ball on the Lord of the Rings RPG, I do have some thoughts about their efforts–what I thought they did right, and what I thought they did wrong. Maybe my thoughts are representative of other gamers, and maybe not. I think there was both good and bad in Decipher’s Lord of the Rings game and the way they handled the line. I’ll start with the good.
    The Good

    1. The game looked good. I’m not normally one to put much emphasis on a roleplaying game’s appearance or production values–after all, it’s the content of the game that’s important, right?–but Decipher’s LotR rulebook looked really, really good. The core rulebook (and the followup books they published) was hardcover, solidly bound, and filled to the brim with full-cover illustrations and pictures (most drawn from the movies). The pages were colorful, and filled with nice little touches–even the fonts they used had a great Middle Earth feel to them. In fact, the game looked so good that I didn’t even mind that the images were taken from Peter Jackson’s particular interpretation of Middle Earth. I think Decipher really raised the bar when it comes to visual presentation and production values in games–only Nobilis and some of Wizards of the Coast’s books are in the same category, in my opinion.
      Looks aren’t everything. But given that the book’s appearance was the first thing you noted, the game certainly got off to a good start.

    2. It captured the spirit of the books. Fears that the new LotR RPG would be based on the Jackson movies and not on the original texts proved to be unfounded–despite the movie images that graced its pages, the RPG was based entirely on Tolkien’s writing. Where it particularly succeeded was in making the game specifically about playing Tolkien-esque heroes–that is, heroes who embodied both the noble ideals and the flaws exhibited by the characters in the novels. The RPG exuded a strong sense of moral good and evil–as in the books, it’s not always easy to tell at first glance whether a given choice is for good or evil, but the distinction is nevertheless present, and heroes are expected to do their best to identify it. Heroic roleplaying–as opposed to hack-and-slash, loot-and-pillage gaming–was strongly encouraged both in the rulebook text and in the design of the rules themselves. There are enough games out there featuring violent anti-heroes; I was pleased to see that no such postmodern, survival-of-the-strongest themes cropped up inappropriately in the LotR RPG.
      Other areas in which the RPG caught the Tolkien spirit were in its depiction of magic (which was based very closely on the subtle magic described in the books), its use of unusual but very Middle Earth-appropriate character types like sailors, loremasters, and scholars, and its emphasis on the corruption that comes from power (a theme that comes across strongly in Tolkien’s writings). All in all, the Decipher RPG captured the heroic and moral spirit of Tolkien well, which more than made up for the fact that the physical world of Middle Earth went quite under-described in the rulebook. In this respect above all, Decipher’s LotR RPG really outshone Iron Crown’s MERP–the latter had some amazingly detailed sourcebooks about the places and geography of Middle Earth, but the former really captured the attitude of the source texts.

    3. The rules were good. The rules system wasn’t anything amazing or hugely innovative, but worked well for what it aimed to do. The rules were pretty easy to pick up and played smoothly and painlessly during the games. Unfortunately, while the rules did their job well enough, there is a negative side to them, which I’ll address below.
    4. It was accessible. By this, I mean that Decipher’s game was emminently easy to find and play. It was on the shelves of just about every Barnes and Noble and Borders I visited, which meant I could just head down the street to the local bookstore and pick up a copy of the game and its sourcebooks–instead of ordering through the Web or special-ordering via my local game store (a painfully long process that, for me, ends about 50% of the time with the store staff never actually bothering to order the book… but that’s a rant for another time). Decipher’s game was highly visible compared to other RPGs, and actually had a decent chance at catching the notice of a non-gaming Tolkien fan who happened to be browsing the fantasy section of the bookstore.

    Those are some of the things I liked about the game. Here are some of the things I didn’t:

    1. The rules should’ve been D20. That’s a reasonably controversial thing to suggest (among gaming circles, at least), so let me elaborate. The Decipher RPG used its own, custom-designed ruleset–Internet scuttlebutt indicates that having a proprietary set of game rules was an important part of Decipher’s plans for the line. So far, so good, right? There’s nothing wrong with making a non-D20 game… unless your new game is just D20 with the serial numbers filed off. To be blunt, that’s what the LotR system is.
      The similarity to D20 was one of the first things that struck me as I read through the LotR RPG. It borrows a whole lot from D20–it’s got your six basic stats, saving throws, classes and prestige classes, the familiar skill ranks system, difficulty checks, feats, and the like… with the names changed. The rules system can be described basically as “D20, but you roll 2d6 instead of 1d20.” There are some nifty bits in the LotR RPG that aren’t in D20 (like Edges, Flaws, and rules for Corruption)… but they could’ve easily been simulated within the open gaming license. So in the end, we get a modified version of D20–different enough to make it incompatible with the gazillions of D20 monsters, adventures, settings, and rules out there, but not different enough to really justify its existence as an independent rules system.
      This was a disappointment. The rules are fine… but if they wanted to use so many elements of D20, they should’ve just used the D20/OGL license and made it easier for players to jump into the system, and easy for gamemasters to plug D20 and OGL material back into the fantasy setting that inspired all the rest.

    2. Lackluster sourcebooks. The sourcebooks released to support the LotR RPG were not bad… but they felt somewhat uninspired. Quite a few “fluff” books and materials–character folios, map sets, introductory boxed sets–were released, which is fine, but not when said fluff outnumbers the actual sourcebooks for the RPG. Of the four “major” rules supplements released–one on Fellowship, one on Two Towers, one a monster manual, and the other a Moria setting guide–exactly half were decent-but-not-great detailings of movies and books that everyone in the universe has seen multiple times. Do we really need full writeups and stats for all the characters in the books and movies? How often do those characters even appear in games… let alone how often are their stats actually important (“Tom Bombadil fails his Climb roll and falls screaming to his death!”)? Maybe I don’t play LotR like most other people, but the players I know prefer to create their own characters and forge destinies for them outside the established bounds of the trilogy’s events. Likewise, while we got a lot of detail about the sites visited during the events of the LotR trilogy, the most intriguing parts of Middle Earth–those areas that haven’t been exhaustively detailed in the books–go more or less unmentioned. Most players I know would prefer exploring the areas of Middle Earth mentioned in the source texts but not described in detail, rather than retracing the path of the Fellowship.
      A related issue is the incredibly glacial pace of new releases for the game. When The Two Towers was hitting theaters and everyone was talking about the massive battle at Helm’s Deep, the new LotR sourcebook arriving on bookstore shelves was… The Fellowship of the Ring Sourcebook. Be still, my beating heart. A year later, The Two Towers Sourcebook arrived just in time for The Return of the King to take theaters by storm. Decipher never released a RotK sourcebook, so we’ll never know how that would’ve turned out. Bummer.
      Perhaps these are gripes unique to the way I play RPGs in Middle Earth, but they nevertheless irked me a bit while playing.

    3. It was pricey. While it was nice that the RPG books were attractively designed and laid out, they were pricey enough that they couldn’t really fall into the “impulse buy” category. $25 for a 96-page hardback? Ouch. I have no problem paying that much for an RPG book if I’m going to use it a lot, but that had better be a darn good 96 pages if they want me to plunk down that much cash for it. Of course, I did plunk down said cash, so maybe I’m exactly the sort of sucker gamer they’re hoping will get hooked on the game.

    I hope my rants have not drowned out my praise for Decipher’s game; it’s a good system, admirably true to the spirit of the source material, and I’d love for it to be granted a new lease on life. The quality of the supplementary material was improving even as Decipher’s support for the game line petered out, which seemed to bode well for future releases. I hope that Decipher revives the LotR RPG and gives it more of a fighting chance to prove itself amidst the competition–or at the very least farms out the license to a company that will support the game line to the best of its abilities.
    We shall see. In the meantime, between Iron Crown and Decipher offerings, I’ve got enough Middle Earth material to last me for a while… but I’d love to see more. Come on Decipher, give it another try!

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    Another Michele update

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    Things seem to be going well for Michele at Ashkelon. She’s told me a number of pretty humorous stories (my favorite being an incident in which the excavation was closed down for a few hours because a “drunk Russian” was scaring people away from the dig site), but I’m resisting the urge to the post them in the hopes that Michele will write up a complete report when she gets back. It sounds like they’re finding some interesting artifacts there–the other day, they found an amulet with the insignia of the Egyptian pharaoh (is there any other kind of pharaoh?) Thutmosis III.
    It doesn’t seem that email or Web access is going to happen for her, unfortunately. And the postal connection between the U.S. and Israel is not proving to be exceptionally speedy. But she is receiving some mail and says “hi” to y’all.
    Two weeks down, five to go…

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    Ashkelon update

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    Michele is doing well and it sounds like she’s settling into the excavation routine over at Ashkelon. I just talked to her for a few minutes this evening, but I foolishly squandered most of the conversation complaining about the cats. Sounds like they’re working their student excavators pretty hard–work starts at 5 in the morning and continues through mid-afternoon. Fortunately, I sent her to Israel with this killer arctic camo hat (that’s me wearing it on the left) with which to ward off the sun’s harmful rays. Dang, that’s a cool hat.

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    Politicalamity

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    Where do you fall on the political compass?
    According to this quiz, I lean towards the right with a fairly even balance between authoritarianism and libertarianism. Here’s my chart.
    I wanted to answer “no strong opinion either way” to a lot of questions, but I think that’d just make me a wishy-washy fence-sitter.

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    Update

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    Talked to Michele on the phone this morning–everything went OK with her flight and she’s on site at Ashkelon now. Sounds like excavation work starts up tomorrow. She said the flight wasn’t too bad, as far as international flights go–no crying babies in the seat right behind her, that sort of thing.
    If you’ve ever been overseas for any amount of time, you know how great it can be to get letters and email from home. If you’d like to drop her a note (via email or snail mail), I know she would really appreciate it. If you’d like her contact information, just drop me a line and I’ll happily get it to you.

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    All that you can’t leave behind

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    Michele is off to Israel–she’s on the plane as we speak (a few hours out of Tel Aviv by now, if her flight kept on schedule). While the part of Israel in which she’ll be spending most of her time is relatively safe, your prayers for her safety are much appreciated. I’ll post periodic updates from her as I receive them.

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    Through the underworld

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    Tonight was Michele’s first shot at gamemastering an RPG. For several weeks, she has been hard at work researching and assembling an adventure for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game.
    I am of course quite biased, but it was brilliant. She incorporated a slew of Egyptian mythology, mingling it with the Cthulhu setting and sending our characters through the mythical Egyptian underworld. This underworld, however, was malfunctioning badly due to the ravages of Cthulhian entities. We had to find a way to escape the underworld by traveling through its guarded gates and facing the great serpent Apophis. I’ve never played a CoC game (or any game, for that matter) even remotely like it–Egyptian mythology, despite its popular appeal, is a surprisingly uncommon theme in RPGs–but by Hathor, it worked. After the adventure, we (the players) were just stunned, and immediately began grilling Michele about all the interesting Egyptian-mythology aspects of the adventure. It was also spooky as heck–travelling through the lightless underworld will do that for you–and our characters had their usual fun losing Sanity points left and right.
    I’ll try to convince her to post some of her notes, or maybe a basic summary, over at her blog. I hope Michele enjoyed GMing, because as soon as she gets back from Israel, she’s going to be roped into running a sequel adventure for us.

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