"We are locked in history, they were not"

This to me is the pivotal phrase in Werner Herzog's documentary film "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" about the Chauvet cave where the oldest known cave paintings have been found. I will not speak of the film's creative merits (tremendous as they are), or the technical merits (a better application of 3D technology I cannot think of), or its philosophical meaning (ponderous and intrusive as it may be). Instead I found myself thinking of what it means to live inside and outside of history.

We live in a world that is at once as future-oriented as it is mired in the past. We worry about the future nearly as much as we worry about the past it seems to me. Yesterday and today there was yet another spat of missile exchanges between Palestinians and Israelis. Who struck the first blow in this very recent exchange quickly turns into a question of who struck the first blow. Ever. Period. We are - despite tremendous technological progress - very conservative species. We are quick to grab to whatever flotsam we can and turn it into conventions and traditions - the past is far more important than the present in our psyche. Even our imagined future is only an extrapolation of what we know about the past and the present.

Imagine people living outside of history. They have no records of what happened 50 years ago, or 100 years ago, or 6000 years ago. There are cave paintings, stories and myths, songs and carvings. They get periodically updated (as Australian Aborigenes touch up ancient rock paintings as a sign of respect and bonding with their ancestors), but they are timeless. They might as well have been created 50 years ago as 30,000 years ago. The future rarely exists beyond a year. Only the immediate future is regarded with any degree of anxiety. Anything farther than that is regarded placidly. There is something comforting in this fatalism. Do not worry about another Great War. Do not worry about the C

old War turning hot. Do not worry about the climate change, or recession, or a flu pandemic. Be born, grow up, raise children, pass on what you know, die.

The cave painters of Chauvet are such people. They regard the world around them with reverence I think. Look at the details of the paintings of animals. They are not being hunted in these paintings (unlike the more recent ones). They move, they fight, they run, they hunt, they copulate. There is joy in the paintings, the awareness that the humans are not the pinnacle of creation - they are merely given the gift of active observing. The paintings in Chauvet Cave were made over approximately 5,000 years. People came back to that cave, over and over again. They relighted the fires. They made obeisance before the bones they carried to the cave. They touched up earlier paintings and made new ones. They left their hand prints in ochre paint. An autograph? A link to the past? A link to the future? There is awareness that time passes, but I get the feeling that it was a calm acceptance on their part that time flow. It's all the same. Imagine being a paleolithic artist walking into the cave. You see paintings left behind by your predecessors. These paintings could've been done by your grandparent. Or they could be done by an artist dead for 5,000 years. It makes no difference. You pick up your coal or ochre and start painting beside or around the older images. What does it matter when the older image was painted? It's all the same.

How long will our creations last? The oldest known structures still standing are barely 6,000 years old. That they still stand is not really a testament to the ancient builders, but to the materials they have chosen, the climate, and sheer luck that they have not been toppled by earthquakes, drowned and washed away by floods, or taken apart brick by brick (or stone by stone) by their enterprising successors. Alan Weisman's excellent book The World Without Us takes a serious and sobering look at how quickly nature returns when we are gone, at which of our creations will endure. It will not be long for our most magnificent creations to cease. In the grand scheme of things we are, as a poet once said, "But a beat within the heart of time". So let's enjoy the moment and stop worrying about the past and the future once in a while.

An ideal RPG

I've been running role-playing games (RPGs for short) as a Game Master (GM from now on) for nearly 15 years now. I think I've ran maybe 10 different systems (including the different iterations of Dungeons and Dragons), played in several more, and read maybe 20+ different systems. In additions I've tried my hand at writing my own systems, and got paid for contributing to a game system (Fantasy Flight Games' wildly successful line of Warhammer 40k RPGs). So I have some weight to opinions on RPG design. In all this time, however, I've never reached my platonic ideal of a perfect RPG to game master (GM). That said, however, I have some darn good inklings as to what my ideal RPG to GM would look like.

Minimum of rules for maximum of results

I want a system that doesn't provide me with minute rules for every possible action a character can make (never mind that it's an impossible task). I want a system that tells me how I can quickly come up with my own rules to adjudicate character actions. I don't want a system that needs tinkering, or a lot of rule memorization, in order to work. I want quick tools that are applicable in the maximum of situations. What RPGs so far might fall under this heading? The closest I've seen so far is Mouse Guard (based on Burning Wheel system), Wushu (terrific for one-session play, but a little too rules-lite), and (albeit with some tinkering) the New World of Darkness RPG from White Wolf.

Plug and Play

My ideal system does not require much (or ideally not any) tinkering to be used with a variety of settings and groups. I don't want ponderous rules for spelling out the nuances of all the individual species, classes, gear, etc. I want a system that focuses on character actions and decision regardless of what setting they might be in. The adventures of Odysseus are - despite the obvious differences - similar in structure and motivations to those of Jack Carter of Martian Chronicles, or many comic book heroes, or whatnot. That's what interests me more: the actions of the characters, their motivations, their adventures and personality. That's what I want the system to focus on, not tables upon tables of every conceivable minutae.

So easy your grandmother could use it

I'm not a dumb person, and I have a reasonably good memory, but I want the minimum of memorizaton required. If the rules could be fit on a DM screen in their entirety I would be ecstatic. If I could hand the rules to my players and they'd be familiar with them after 20 minutes of reading tops I would be ecstatic. I don't want a challenging tactical simulator (I'd play video games or tabletop wargames for that), or a super-realistic game. My criteria in this category is that the system should at no point slow down the game or take away the fun.

It keeps going and going and going...

There are many so-called narrativist and rules-lite systems that already do most of what I've set out above. Most of the ones I've looked at, however, suffer from a particular flaw - they do not support character progression with meaningful rules. The players are at heart stat-munchkins (even if they say otherwise). They want to see numbers change on their character sheet. They want to feel that their characters change in more ways than just their role in the story. And they want that progression to be meaningful and visible (again, even if they say otherwise). Most rule-lite RPGs I've read work great for short adventures or one-shots, but few offer this kind of progression that satisfies the players.

I've got the world on a string

The characters won't be doing much if there isn't a world to do it in. World building is a fun part of any GM's job and most of creativity and imagination goes into world building. All too often, however, I get frustrated trying to adapt a particular system to the world I have in mind. I look at the feats or skills or advantages or edges or aspects or whatnot that I would have to come up with for my world in order to make it work as intended. And therefore I return to my first point - instead of rules I want tools to help me make up monsters, people, effects, vehicles, gear, etc., on the fly without having to look through a book (and normally I'm lucky if it's just one book, usually it might involve multiple supplements) and thus grinding the game to a halt. That just ruins the fun and wastes time for everyone. Also, if I have to spend more time preparing for the game than actually running it, then I do not want to run it. That's why I don't run Dungeons and Dragons (of any edition) anymore.

Am I asking for too much? Eh, I'm sure I could get some good answers about people's favourite systems that purport to fulfill all my criteria, but to be honest - and arrogant - I doubt that they would. Eventually I'll build my own and inflict it on my players!

Ad Astra

http://www.ad-astra.org/ is a yearly sci-fi/fantasy/horror/speculative fiction convention, focusing especially on literary side of these genres of fiction rather than celebrating the fandom (although there was quite a lot of that going on as well). This was my first year at Ad Astra and it was overall a very positive learning experience. Every humanities student/afficionado dreams that one day s/he will get published, become famous, and add to the field, and in this respect I am no exception. As a result I was particularly in Ad Astra not just as a venue to meet some of my favourite authors (although I have met a few), but also as an opportunity to learn more about how to write, how to edit, how to make connections, and how to get published. In this respect Ad Astra was a humbling yet necessary lesson.

What does it take to be a published author? Patience, self-discipline, and lots of masochism. The pay is lousy, the rejections plentiful, the angst and self-doubt always lurk around the corner, and one's work is always on a verge of being castrated (whether for good or ill) by the editors. Even getting published once is no guarantee that the lightning will strike again. One of the loudest messages was how few new authors succeed in getting published a second time, let along third or tenth. Yet Ad Astra also demonstrated first-hand how emotionally and socially rewarding being an author can be. There are the fans of course and the signings, but there is also a tremendous spirit of camaraderie and excitement, and even just being around the scene for a couple of days provided an enormous intellectual stimulus.

Some other highlights of Ad Astra included meeting some of my favourite authors (Eric Flint, Ed Greenwood), meeting many Canadian authors who I've never heard of before, but now I'm eager to read. The panel discussions were for the most part very interesting and fun. The atmosphere was quite intimate and the authors had very easily engaged with the audience for the most part. I particularly enjoyed the panels on: Medieval Martial Arts (which was more of a history panel than a demonstration, plus I won a sword in trivia!), Post-Medieval Fantasy, Getting Your First Novel Published, Publishers: A View From the Other Side (really fun and instructive workshop on crash-editing). I also had the pleasure of going to an excellent storytelling session, and a panel where the authors read some of their own work. At one panel the panelists were sufficiently impressed with my question that in half-jest they'd invited me to join them (I declined them this year).

There was some ugliness as well. There was perhaps more self-promotion by a few authors (really a minority) that I appreciated. There were also some rather cringe-worthy displays of fan enthusiasm and fawning. The really loud post-dance party that was going on was very annoying to try and sleep through. Finally I think that Steampunk movement is plateauing. It was really noticeable this year and was on display everywhere. The effect, however, was not charitable. It has begun to seem cliche, passe, and mechanical and unimaginative in its execution. The costumes were well-executed, but the designs have really started to seem more and more uniform. The 'punk' in Steampunk is supposed to represent the counter-cultural elements in 'Steam', but as it often happens with counter-cultural the external appearance can sublimate the real ideas within. But more on that in a different post I guess.

Still, Ad Astra - well worth it! Definitely going next year!