Taking a day off work for reasons, might try to get some writing in on Centennial Hills. Not sure how capable I’ll be; we’ll see. I’m feeling odd. Sometimes I feel inspired to create something, specific or in general, but the sauce to actually do that is a whole separate feeling that does not always coincide. One of the last things I did before I fell asleep was randomly think of an element for a story, but didn’t write it down. Let’s see if I can remember…
A video game where you can name your enemy, like in Pokemon, and the protagonist as a child accidentally uses their own name, playing the rest of the game opposing their own moves. Later in life, this connects thematically to something that’s going on in the current story.
Yesterday in the morning I was having some very specific and detailed dream about machinery. Back up, get out of the way of the guy operating the mechanical arm. No not there, there. Now in the back yard the red construction light got broken because the thing fell into it, and it’s your fault. This morning I dreamed I walked into a part of my house I never use and there was a toilet spewing water like a fountain, and a few other pipe leaks, and have these been going on for months? Calls to mind a time I dreamed the floor of my apartment was covered with moss and broken boards, and scorpions and eight-inch isopods were moving in and out of the heap at random.
The day before yesterday and the day before that I had slasher dreams. A hillbilly family like in Texas Chainsaw Massacre was going to kill this trucker, but they were shining him on like, just a minute, gotta do this thing for your truck before we let you drive away. Gotta chop everybody up and their trucks too. Heaps of body parts, just another day.
Another recent dream there was some kind of deadly competition with a lady as emcee. If we play the game right we all fight to the death, but if we defeat the emcee maybe we can leave. Were we undead in the vein of soulsborne game protagonists? There was a guy with dwarfism and a lot of guns, to improve his odds of defeating her I traded legs with him so he could get around faster. Left me with short legs, waiting for somebody else to win.
The RPGs I wasted the most time with as a youth were Palladium books, which are much scorned by most of the TTRPG community these days. Understandable, but their ads in Dragon magazine circa 1988 always worked so well on me. I sometimes get curious what people were saying about them online and it ain’t much. One time when I looked it up on tumblr, I found a person talking about their few meatspace RPG experiences were all with one of those games, either Rifts of the Palladium FRPG. Whichever it was, they had memorized the rules for a “mystic” character class with a combination of psychic and magic powers. Recently I thought of that, of the mystic character class, RPGs in general. What is the appeal in making your own little guys in somebody else’s world? Like a billion other dorks, I still have an embryonic fantasy RPG of my own laying in docs and on scraps of paper; maybe all of it is still chasing the weird thrill I got off of old Palladium ads.
Been listening to Maharaji’s Seward Park again. My boyfriend said it’s a novelty song. The casio dog bark effect? Come on. But I say no. It’s incredibly dated and corny, but for its time, it was a very legit hip hop song. So cool. Rappin’ Duke by John Wayne was a novelty song. Seward Park ain’t that.
Mish mash mush. These are all things that could be converted into new art, written or visual or something else, a video game, a poem, a song. Will it happen? Maybe this post is the closest any of the creative slurry gets to achieving expression. Almost certainly it will be. But u kno, all we are is dust in the wind, and our daydreams even more so. Take it easy.
Peace!
–
another random inspiration – felt like it would be fun to make a puppet animation. wtf, me.
One of the reasons so few people talk about Palladium online is that they were rather infamously litigious to a level that made even TSR look reasonable: they not only sued an early Wizards of the Coast to get the Palladium conversion rules taken out of the original Primal Order book, they insisted that magazines like Challenge Magazine not run any articles containing game scenarios for Palladium games. This resulted in a bit of a ‘cut your nose off to spite your face’ situation as a lot of gamers who might have otherwise found out about them through those channels didn’t. Insularity and tight control don’t help people outside the group find you.
Which is too bad, because for a while Palladium was also the king of the licensed tie-in RPG, having developed the Robotech and TMNT games, as well as lesser known properties like Justice Machine.
The fact that the continued new additions and power creep of Rifts made them easily mockable didn’t help either. (Steve Jackson Games even did a Murphy’s Rules comic of “Games that should never be played: GURPS Rifts” with a picture of the GM staggering under a pile of books taller than he was.)
random thought – horses have been hugely important through human history but that has ended, even if their psychic residue is still with us. read a book about mythological monsters and a huge percentage of them was “unattended horse is a valuable prize and temptation, but it is a monster and kills you in X way.”
putting this in a contemporary context, this is like finding a sports car at the side of an abandoned highway with keys in the ignition. get inside, and it drives into a lake and drowns you. wait, did angela chao get taken out by a kelpie? is that the real power source inside all teslas?
and bronies, you know, they had horse on the brain, that residue of which i spake. while they are at a disjunct from deeper cultural history like so many things now, lateral meme transfer is a thing, and could there be some profundity one could derive from trying to connect them to the history of human horse interest? idk. i should be writing about aliens now.
jenora – i’m catching hints of that history now; it’s darkly amusing.
dark fantasy novel with fake viking flavor achieved by randomly spelling english words like ikea furniture names. “get off your barstula ye fulkun drunkkards! thar be grendul in them thar hulls.”
why do I feel like that’s been done and pz had an article making fun of it