Crimson Sundown

Maybe we can bring back the light

For the past few years, LOST has been a staple show in my viewing rotation.  Many times, it has been the only thing that I felt was worth watching.  Now for some people, their intrigue for LOST is something that just spawned after watching the first season and seeing all the weird things happen and how people tried to deal with it.  Some might have even been enticed by the flashbacks and the connections that people had to other characters.  All fine reasons to like the show, but I know for me my obsession for the show was tied to one very specific moment.

Watching Terry O’Quinn in the first season was something that made everything click for me.  Honestly, the flashbacks and episode were fairly standard fare.  Here was a guy, with a boring job, no significant other, and someone that got picked on by many people.  Sucky of course, but by no means tragic.  That all changed for me, and my attention was cemented in place once the music kicked up in the background and the grand reveal was that John Locke was bound to a wheelchair.  This was the first of many “OH SHIT” moments that I have had with LOST.

Here was a man that was crippled in the real world, yet on this island he is able to walk.  Would certainly give faith and conviction to anyone put into that position.  Still to this day that scene envokes such emotion in me, that I can’t think of anything else overtaking it as my favorite scene ever, in any format.

Yet with the amazing, comes the down turn.  Locke has gone up and down as the series has continued on.  When Locke reaches his lowest, I feel defeated.  When he rises back up again, I personally feel like I overcame adversity with him.  I have had many opportunites to do this, because like a well written character, Locke has a weakness like anyone else, one that I can immediately identify with.

Locke spends so much of the series being told what he can’t do, that once he gains a bit of confidence in Season 1, it’s obvious that he won’t be taken down so easily.  Yet over time what you find out is that Locke has had some stable points in his life, before his crippling.  Exploiting and bringing Locke down is not a terribly difficult plan of action, as you simply need to fill him up with thoughts that he is someone of importance.

Like so many others in this world Locke just wants to be apart of something.  People will go up to him and tell him that he is special, that he is an extraordinary individual.  Once you have built him up to a certain point, that is when you can start having him do whatever you want for you.  After that, characters have simply dumped a now degected Locke because they know that he won’t do anything to them.  He’ll just crawl back up into his shell, waiting for the next person to build him up and crush him.

Why the long post about a fictional character?  Because when I watch LOST, John Locke stands out as a masterfully written character, one that I wish I could create.  What if there was a character that was just so abused and kept trying to believe in something, only to have it snatched away from him every time.  Now for John Locke in the show, each time his faith is tested, he gets one step closer to fulfilling his destiny.  Yet what would happen if a character who kept getting shit on decided to shun his destiny.  Would characters try and embrace him and put him back on the path of faith?  Or would they destroy him, because he could bring anymore destruction on the world?

This is what I’m trying to work on for Scion and while I can’t see anything else that is happening in the story, I have a clear image of this character that I’m trying to create.  I see him, and I see his inspiration that is John Locke.  My only hope is that I can make this new character of mine 1/10 of as impressive as John Locke.  If I can do that, then I assure anyone who plays in my Scion adventure down the road … you’ll be in for quite a treat.

Anyone who has followed my online career knows that I have periods of ludicrous updates and activity, and then I go away for a long time.  This situation, is somewhat of a middle ground as it really hasn’t been so long, but still long enough for people to question what the hell I have (or more appropriately haven’t) been doing.

It has been little over a month since my update on the RPG campaign, and I suppose I will start there because it requires the least amount of effort.  Things are going well in the adventure right now, as we are hitting a balance of extremely difficult encounters, but the characters are just on par to make it through.  For me, this is what I wanted.  The threat of death is real (we’ve had at least 2-3 close calls for PC’s), and the group is doing some really epic shit.  Kudos to them, it only gets better / worse from here on out … depending on your outlook of course.  =)

The first annual Diablo 2 Marathon weekend took place on the 13th and 14th and to say that it was a success would be an understatement.  Games started Friday night at about 9 PM with Josh, Corey, Luke, Dan, Katie and myself all going up against the minions of Diablo.  Friday night ended at 2:30 AM, with us half way through Act II.  We picked up right where we left off at about 11 AM on Saturday, minus Katie, and we kept going until 10:30 PM that night.  In that time we finished up all the acts, killed Diablo, dropped Luke off in Boonton, killed Baal, had a drinking game, took a shot at the end of each act, and did the Secret Cow Level.  Suffice to say, I still don’t think I’ve recovered after all of these days.  I have a feeling that this is not the last time we do a Diablo 2 fest, not to mention what we are going to do once Diablo 3 comes out.

Final gaming note, is that as you can see on the right, my Death Knight is doing fairly well for herself.  =)

With the geekiness out of the way, it is starting to finally hit Katie and I that the wedding is coming.  We are about 4 months away, and really there’s a lot that still needs to be taken care of and of course I feel like it could never get done in time.  I haven’t been hit by a wave of nerves or jitters yet, only a profound desire to just have the wedding already.  It’s shaping up to be one hell of a party, and really I just want to have it already.  Excitement is really starting to work it’s magic over me, and I’m fully embracing the big life change that I’m in store for.  Katie shares my sentiment.  If we could have the wedding in all of it’s glory tomorrow, we would do it.  But alas, we have some more things to finalize, and a more days to sit through, but in the end it will be worth it.

Other than that, things are quiet on this front.  I will promise you further updates to come, and in a more timely fashion.  I also promise you that there will be a lull.  Hopefully not immediately after I post this, but one can never be so sure.  Until that day then …

I have been participating in pen & paper role-playing games since I was in the 8th grade.  In that time I’ve been a Jedi Knight, a Shaman, a Vampire, a Drow sports agent, a Kazekage for the Sand Village, and an insane Changeling just to name a few.  For the longest time I felt like my calling was to be a player character, to simply react to what a hard working game master / storyteller would give to me.  This had always been my lot in the world of RPG’s.

I had tried my hand at GMing a few times during my high school days, but it was a mixed bag at best.  I always had fun ideas, but my initial problem was that I would have one really great idea and cinematic, but didn’t have anything else.  I didn’t plan very well, I gave too much to the players, and I couldn’t improv very well.  Suffice to say, I was taken advantage of, but not in a bad way.  What my friends Steve and Tom taught me in those sessions where they beat the ever loving crap out of me, was what to plan for.

Player characters are an interesting breed, and with having the GM experience and my own what I found is very easy to understand.  Players want the most power and positioning, because they want to ensure that their character makes it to the end.  They want to be able to say once a GM closes their book, laptop or RPG screen is, “Not only did I make it to the end, but look at all the stuff I did and got!”  Just like in real life, perhaps even more so, they want to brag about their accomplishments.  They want to complete the goals that were set out for them, either determined by the GM or by themselves.

I didn’t get back into GMing seriously, until I started reading the White Wolf system.  This, pretty much everyone knows already.  What was not readily apparant is how I would take the system and use it to this very day.  When I made my first World of Darkness campaign, it was all Vampires.  What did I want to do with it?  I can’t even remember to be honest, but I had accounted for having large amounts of people in it, and I introduced a character who has lovingly haunted me for a little over four years.  To quote Fight Club, his name, was Jimmy Jackal …

With each passing session in which I had to plan for, Jimmy’s life came to me in new small doses.  Stephen King once wrote about how sometimes, a story just comes to you even when you aren’t thinking about it.  You’d start writting down your ideas, and a thought or a character from a previous story would come crashing in, and you wouldn’t even subconciously know about it.  This is what happened to me.  Jimmy Jackal just kept showing up in my plans.

It started in London, and he was there causing trouble but also guiding the PC’s towards what they needed to do in order to survive Gehenna, the Vampire Apocolypse.

In New York he wasn’t immediately known, but he did have somewhat of a role to play.  I never told Pedro this, but his character Damen Locke who was a Malkavian … he was embraced by Jimmy Jackal.  Jimmy saw great promise in the man, in both brothers to be specific.  For some reason he knew that the priest would come in handy at some point and had a role to be played.  That destiny is coming …

In Paris, he had a more immediate impact but one that many had to think about.  How was it that Jimmy Jackal had just left a position of power in London and immediately ascended to a high ranking role in France?  Odd indeed.  He was there and this was where the death of Jimmy Jackal took place, at the hands of Longinus … or did it?  Even then I knew that he wasn’t going to die, I had plans for him to come back.

Yet that adventure fell through and by the time I had found another group of players, the new World of Darkness had come out.  There were points where the two worlds could cross over, assuming you wanted to go that way.  For me, I had to finish what I started.  In order to finish it though, I had to figure out where it began.  I figured out what Jimmy Jackal was planning, and that was for the supernaturals to not live in peace, but at least to live in understanding.  The difference was, you didn’t have to like the other groups.  Hell you could loathe them for all he cared.  All he wanted them to realize though was that they all have to live in a balance for each to continue through.  If one of them gets too powerful, it throws off everything and they just end up killing each other.

With that established, it gave me the opportunity to begin a true crossover, one where I could explain why all these different groups were getting together.  Next issue I had to address of course was, where did it all begin.  New Orleans …

Mostly because the city is a feel good story where after such a terrible tragedy such as Katrina, the town got back together and rebuilt as much and as quickly as possible.  Yet there are still parts that are doing badly, and that causes conflict in real life, and it can obviously do the same in game.  This was the spot I wanted to focus on, and I wanted to do it in an effort to display the city in different lights.

So why this very long, tired blog post?  This weekend, marks the start of the New Orleans RPG end game.  I have all of the things that I need to get across written out, and they all have consequences.  All the last bits of the adventure are going to come out, and at some point in the near future, the group will have either succeeded or failed.

My favorite GM, my friend Steve from High School once told me how you had to approach a campaign such as this.  He told me that for most of the campaign, you want to tell the story and flesh out your characters.  You want them to survive.  Sure they can get hurt and go through tough times, but in the end you need them to make it to the end.  Once they are there though, the threat of death is real.  It has to be because the characters are fighting for their lives, and in order to resolve whatever conflict you’ve given them.  You can only hope that they have built the character and planned just as much as you have in order to do that.

That is where I am at right now.  The characters are at that dangerous point where death can come if they don’t play the cards right.  No matter what though, and this is a thing that I will emphasize, this is the story of Jimmy Jackal.  Will the characters help me make it a story with a happy ending?  Or will be the last we see from him?  I look forward to seeing the result, either way.