One of the hacks I did was to lift the ‘werewolves can’t get wild together’ rule. I messed with the setting and the in-game culture enough to allow characters to be involved physically and emotionally. (Actually, that’s already in the books to some extent, I just removed the parts that punished the characters for doing so.) I also added a mechanic for the levels of love a person can fall in love with and talked about how the People dealt with those stages. It was a BLAST to write and I think a lot of people had a good time with it. (Or so they’re saying on the internet.)

When I was originally writing and planning it out, I wrote a tongue and cheek section talking about what sex and love is like from the various tribes. Before I even showed it to my developer, (David) I cut it for wordcount and because it didn’t quite vibe with the rest of what I was doing. It ended up more like practice writing. (Something I am a BIG advocate for in any kind of writing.)

But anyway, it was still cute, and all this writing about sex and vampires reminded me of it. (Did I mention I just finished my redlines up for Strange, Dead Love? Why I did! And that’s a book about sex and vampires!) So here, for your viewing pleasure is a bit about werewolf sex and love I was too embarrassed to show to my editor.

Shot Gun Weddings and Kissing Cousins

At the end of the day, pack attitudes and the opinions of individual Uratha are what matter when it comes to sex and marriage.

You think so? Really? Tell that to little Billy’s over protective Tribal Elder who raised the kid to be a proud and strong Hunter in Darkness and doesn’t much care for your pretty Iron Master nose sniffing around his boy. Below are some example Tribal attitudes toward sex, marriage, and Uratha offspring.

Blood Talons

Should you marry a Blood Talon, (without being one?) Mm. Probably not. Of any tribe, the Blood Talons are the most hung up on the right breeding, (not good breeding, but the right breeding) and family lines like the Lodge of Garm are so vital that it’s almost impossible to get elder consent to mate with a Blood Talon without being one first.

Would I have a wild, whirl-wind affair with one? Damn right. Stalwart warriors and high idealists, a Blood Talon is the last Uratha you have to worry about giving into a berserker rage and do something you’ll both regret. That said, a Blood Talon won’t hesitate to kill when it’s necessary, so make sure you don’t insult her mother.

Bone Shadows

While the Blood Talons might be very worried about who you’re mating with, the Bone Shadows are likely to be very hung up on how you’re doing it. The preservation of ancient traditions to appease the ancestors and spirits who might over see your relationship is going to be a big deal. Don’t anticipate running to Vegas if your would-be bride a Bone Shadow. Instead, expect to be dragged onto the Hisil and introduced to each one of her ancestors three hundred years back with a formal greeting and exchange of Essence and other gifts.

That said, the Shadows do believe in payment in kind, and so they can be nurturing loves with an eye for giving as good as they get. Keep in mind though, if you screw around, payment in kind can mean something very different.

Hunters in Darkness

If you want the kind of lover you broadcast about to any and all channels, you may not want to hook up with a Hunter in Darkness. The master hunters maintain their affairs with the same silent dedication that they maintain their hunt. It isn’t anyone’s business what they do, or who they do it with, and if you’re along for the ride, you sure as shit better be able to keep your mouth shut.

But you want to talk about tender, romantic, and secretly thrilling? You want to talk about the smoldering passion the Hunters keep in check just aching for an outlet. If you can stand all the cloak and dagger crap, you’ll be thrilled by how they treat your sacred places while in their territory.

… Meaning your heart, of course.

Iron Masters

So, you do want that Vegas wedding after all? Maybe looking a little love outside the status quo? If it’s cutting edge, challenging to the old guard or even just plain freaky, you probably want to hook up with an Iron Master. While there’s something potentially kinky in the hearts and souls of any Uratha, the Iron Master’s willingness to change and try new ideas, it is refreshingly easy with members of this tribe.

Keep in mind, though, since they’re so flexible in their concepts of territory and what territory even means, you might well find yourself in part of the new definition. In which case, expect a lot of honor, and likely a lot of possessiveness.

Storm Lords

Power, authority, purpose.

Scary, huh? The Uratha mate or lover of a Storm Lord has to be prepared to be understanding at best, made of granite at worst. They may be condescending, traditionalist, dominant and obsessive.

But, they’re yours. If you can put up with their driven nature, a Storm Lord will weather just about anything with you, and better still, won’t complain about the little annoying things you do. That might show weakness.

I have a problem with world of bleakness settings.

I have a problem with zombie apocalypse, total apocalypse, bleak darkity-dark-da-dark-dark fantasy games and so on.

The problem is, I play them ‘wrong.’

If you drop a character of mine in the existential bleakness of a setting in which ‘everything sucks’ all I want to do is break it and fix ‘everything.’

Is the Prince King of Discord on the Forever Throne of Depression which he uses to oppress the people and keep the sun from shining? Yeah, I don’t want any victory but the one where I kick Princy-poo in the anus and dismantle his whole society of suffering.

Is ArzTecConTec Co so completely in control of it’s work force that they’ve totally lost free will and thinking is basically outlawed? Yeah, my buddies want to game the system and be rich mercs on the outskirts and in the shadows. *cough, heh cough.* Me? I want to shake ArzTecConTec Co to it’s foundation and liberate it’s literal wage-slaves! Hell, I want to undo the whole system!

Does your setting say I have to end up evil, miserable, and alone? I’m going to fight it. I’m going to sift through all your material for evidence that there’s a light in that dimness and that’s what I’ll focus on and play.

My first D&D character was a pacifist. A complete pacifist. I forced the DM to find other methods to give us EX because we weren’t going to do much by way of ‘killin’ things’ thanks to my pain in the ass character.

Sometimes, people like this. Often times, setting ‘purists’ get mad. Pissed. Because ‘that’s not what’s in the books.’ Though I suspect more often it’s that ‘that’s not what I signed up for.’ That doesn’t make them wrong. Follow your gaming bliss. This may be my issue, but it lends itself to the sort of game I want to make down the road.

I want games where ‘kill the monster, take the treasure’ is not the default. I want a game where killing someone, anyone, is a big fucking deal, (much as I love the Wolf and will keep playing it no matter what, the Humanity system, in any denomination, doesn’t work for me.) I don’t mean in a ‘you’re SCREWED’ so much as, you kill someone, it’s felt. It’s a big decision. It matters.

Leverage keeps coming to mind, because the source material is SO optimistic, and so very much about ‘making things better’ but it leaves off the ‘fall out and repair’ part of things.

I’ve mentioned in several places, my want for a game that involves rebuilding. Act Raiser. Minecraft in some ways. Simcity. But with plot and setting and character development that goes along with soscital rebuilding. I imagine this want comes out of my above problem. My want to fix things over killing things. That’s a ‘progressive’ game to me in the most literal sense. Is it possible to do with standard games? Totally. I could see a D&D game (of any edition) bent and broken into line until it satisfied my desires. WoD. Heck, you could do it with RIFTS if you forced it. But I guess I’m looking for a game that has that carrot-and-stick already in it.

Is it out there? Probably. There’s shades of it in Apocolypes World, isn’t there?

So yeah, if I screw up your Darkity Dark game, this is why and I’m sorry. I’m slowly working on the game that will satisfy my need so I can stop bringing it to your setting. Sorry folks!

So I’m working from a Word template because that’s the program on this machine. We’ll also have a InDesign ‘blank’ I think we’re disributing when we get it finalized, so I guess I’ll be working in that when we have it. But basically here’s what it looks like:

(You know the deal, click to embiggen.)

There are actually only certain sections that I need to worry about. Sections like the Rules and the basic intro are all going to be the same from guestbook sheet to sheet. So too the place for signatures will be handled by the layout so that leaves me with the following to do.

• The Character Story
• The Character Descripton
• Conflicts
• Words
• and of course Story Seeds

I will also have to give consideration for the special hand sign, but that’s still in development, so I can’t give you the inside on that yet.

YET.

So there’s no right way or place to start, but I find the Story Seeds to be the toughest part so I tend to do them last when I’ve figured out everything else first.

Character Story

So this section is what people will first read about the character, in theory, and gives them an idea of why the character is fun. Fun being the operitive word. It should be a little twisted, a little funny, or if you’re doing a more dramatic character really compelling.

Easy, sure, so long as your remember this has got to be in around 100 words. Or, if you prefer, two short paragraphs. So in one hundred words, give or take, you need to:

• Give a feeling for who the character is.
• How they’re in the situation they’re in.
• Potential roleplaying hints, or suggestion of how they might behave.
• A hook to lead them into their seeds.

If you break it down to about one sentence to a paint above, you’ll probably be fine.  If you can have each sentence hit on two points, you’re double plus good. Does this seem a little obsessive compulsive? Yeah, it probably is, but that’s me, counting projects down to 100 word blocks if I have to.  More importantly, a Guestbook character is a lot like Gaming Haiku. All my favorite forms of poetry are very structured forms, so I’m bringing that to this project. YMMV.

So the character I’m doing right now is the Bonus Character we’ll be distributing at Gen Con Indy this year. (Yay! Woo!) In this case she’s a super awesome badass Space Marine. She’ll be a lose tie-in with our game Machine Zeit, you know, marketing and all that. Anyway, that gives me the following information for the sheet.

A hired gun with skills, experience in dangerous environments, she’s being paid good money to be set up to a derelict space station and scope the place out.

That’s 28 words, not bad. But I feel like I can pack more information into this opening line. I’m going to take out the mention of ‘money’ and replace it with ‘credits’ and adjusting the value attached to something more geeky. That propels the character into a more clear sci fi setting with a different system of income than our own. Also, ‘scope the place out’ is very weak. It says nothing about the character, the setting, or her purpose on the station, and so it’s got to go. After thinking about it a while, (and staring at the word ‘derelict’ while trying to figure out why I can never spell it right…) I decide ‘in search of profit and something far more personal. Something his employers don’t know he’s after.’  With a little more fidgeting, that changes out intro into:

A hired gun with skills, experience in an array of battlespaces and covert opts, she’s gotten a frak-ton of credits in search of ‘sensitive company property.’ That’s not the prize she’s got an eye on, however, she’s looking for something far more personal, and something her employers don’t know she’s after.

That’s about 50 words, and it might be a little obsessive, but I feel like almost every word suggests something about setting, character, mood, or motivation. “Sensitive company property’ and how she’s hiding things from her employers gives a feeling of paranoia and EBUL CORPORATIONS that’s vital to this subgenre as well as our game specifically without harping in too much detail about it. (Battlespace is real term. I found it on the DOD Military terms site. I love research!) Even the word ‘array’ feels better to me than ‘variety’ or other synonym because array has a sci fi military feel to it. Every double meaning you can cram into the character is a good one.

So with that, I feel like why She’s there, who sent her, what she’s after and who she is nicely covered. (There’s a little space between the cold hard mercenary and her search for ‘something personal’ so the player of the sheet can take it in either direction. Roleplaying suggestion, not demand, after all.) Now I just want to give a little more punch to the ‘setting’ and the hook for the story seeds to come and I’ve got a whole 50 words to do it! So I hit up the station itself, again, a tie in to our other game, but it needs to stand on it’s own. In this case, I’ll borrow a bit from our cover copy because these are words that have already been labored over and it saves me some work.

She’s heard the ghost stories about the stations and ignored them. She was wrong. The ghosts are real. Whatever they are, they’re hungry and they don’t like intruders. Whatever else she may be, the Space Marine is an intruder.

That satisfies me on the points I want to cover and gives me plenty of angles for my story seeds to come. That clocks the character story in at about 90 words. (I tend somewhere around 88 words. I don’t know why.) It gives me room for a sentence in case David takes a look and decides I’m missing something. But again, YMMV.

Character Description

This is actually just notes you’d give to an artist to describe what you want the piece. I’d give rough age, possibly body type, important details, what have you. In this specific case, we handed the art over to our cover artist George Cotronis. With him, because we know him as an artist we just gave him the layout requirements, that it’s a female space marine, and step back to wait for the magic to happen. If I were working with a new artist, I might get more specific and I might mention our Artist Guidelines. If you have some Creative Commons clip art you’re tossing in there, or you’re going to draw your own stick figure, you can skip this step.

Words

I actually like to do the Words to Use next, because this is simple and gets me juiced about the character. This is a mix of five verb and five Nouns. (Though, admittedly, I cheat sometimes and use adjectives here and there.) Usually, this process involves putting music on too loud and dancing around in front of my white board until the words spring to mind. Sometimes, like with this character, I can borrow from their profession to help with words. In this case, I’m going to hit up words from the DoD site I mentioned above and maybe some words from the Halo playing community. (If I can stand it.) Or maybe movie and TV related, Battlestar Galactica comes to mind and some words that suggest body horror to go along with the ghosts in the setting. After a little research, I come up with these words.

Nouns: Sticky, Intangible, EMP Intrusion, Trap,  Radiation.

Verbs: Frag, Strafe, Agonize, Decay, Freeze.

Again, there’s some double meanings here. (Frag could have been a noun, but I think it says more if it’s a verb.) A lot of your micro setting can be drawn out of these words and some of it took some tightening. For example, at first I used EMP Emitter because that sounded like a cool toy. While cruising the DoD site, though, I saw they had the term “EMP Intrusion” which says so much more with less. Now I could have a device that could do such a thing, or maybe monsters or station environment or whatever you want to do with it when you’re running the sheet.

The other fun thing about the Word to Use is that they’re not for you as a player. When you’re being the Space Marine, you can totally ignore this section if you want. It doesn’t come into play until your running the story for your partner. You have a bunch of words that imply things about your character and your setting, but challenge you as a GM because you have to jam them into the story of a character who has nothing to do with them.

Complications

There’s only three of these babies, and again, we’re going to be using the themes and setting tropes and so on from the character sheet even though they don’t get used by the player during his character turn. I like to draw on cliches or things that would regularly be a problem for a character like this. Why? Well, let me show you. Let’s say, these are your conflicts:

1. All Out of Ammo: During your story, being completely out of ammo is going to be a big problem.
2. Fracking Piece of Junk!: Some big important piece of technology will fail during your story and hinder you big time.
3. This Sucks: In your story, a vacuum will threaten your life.

This is all stuff that ties into a Space Marine in a Sci Fi horror pretty well, clearly, but it isn’t for her. These are complications her player throws at the other player. So, if the other player’s sheet is, say, a teenage super hero trying to pass a midterm without getting caught using her powers, that suggestion of a vacuum may not mean the vacuum of space, it may mean a vacuum cleaner that’s gone wrong somehow. Likewise, say the other player has a fantasy elf princess, they’re going to have great fun trying to figure out what ‘technology’ means within their story for the sake of the second conflict. This is really what this game is all about, twisting your head sideways and telling a short quick story while standing on your head.

And, so far as word count and all, lean on the short. Imply instead of say. I don’t say ‘vacuum can be space or a cleaner.’ I leave that to the players to decide. Ambiguity is a good thing when used on purpose, it’s especially useful in poetry, for example, and as I said, this is much more like poetry than it is like prose.

Story Seeds

For me, for whatever reason, this is THE hardest part of a Guestbook character. Partially because we’ve created some really crazy restraints and partially because I know these seeds are going to be what really inspires stories and I’m LOATHED to have them suck. Basically, these are ten (or nine, we’re working on the layout on that,) three sentence story starters that bloom into the adventure your character is going to go through. So, you look at your list on the character, pick a story seed you haven’t done yet, and tell the other player, your GM, what adventure you’re going to tell with her help. Clearly, every time you sit down to play this game it’s going to be different because the conflicts and so on come from a different sheet and person, but with several seeds to choose from, you have even more variety to play the same sheet over and over again.

How are seeds constructed? Well, first I decide if there’s a theme I’m using, or if I’m just drawing from the character. For example, with The Taco Girl, I wanted most of seeds to be ‘about’ her wanting to help her community and her family. This helped me narrow down what sorts of stories would come out of her hook.

For the sake of our Space Marine, I think that each of the seeds is going to draw from either what she’s personally looking for vs what the Company wants her to look for.

Beyond that, the format is very specific. One sentence to set up the story. One sentence to introduce the main conflict or problem the character will face, and one sentence to tell both player and GM what they character must to to resolve the story successfully. That’s it. That’s all the time you have for your seed. But no pressure, because you’ve already got in your head plenty of methods to help with this micro writing. Here’s my process.

1. Once on the station, you’re free to start looking for your daughter, held in cryostasis from before the crisis that shut the station down. Unfortunately, you’re not the only one looking for your daughter, as a bounty hunter appears on the station and now you’re racing to get to her first. Figure out why this bounty hunter wants your daughter and protect her from him before he can escape with her.

I feel like that’s a fun little seed with plenty of little mysteries to explore, but I think it can be tightened up. A lot actually. For example, we know the Space Marine STARTS on the station, so there’s no need to say ‘once on’ and so on. No need for bridges between the story hook at the end of your character story and your story seed. Start these little monster ‘in media res’ as the smart guys say. (In the middle of the action, if you can’t be bothered to google it and don’t know it already.) Additionally, some of the language can be tightened up and a lot of excess language can be dropped. Honenstly, I wouldn’t try to write the sentences perfectly tight the first time through. You’ll waste a lot of time thinking about doing instead of doing. With writing, especially mircowriting like this, it’s easier to perfect something that exists than it is to create something perfect out of nothing. Write your whole seed first, than go in and trim and adjust. With that in mind, here’s what I cut the seed down to.

1. Your daughter is being held in cryostasis on the station and you’ve got to find her. A cut-throat bounty hunter is on the station with you, he also wants to find your daughter, and it can’t be for any good reason. Get to her before he does or risk losing her forever.

Now, I’ve left some stuff out to make the story more flexible. Finding out why the guy wants her isn’t as important, but mostly that’s because I feel like the player will tend to include that anyway in order for the narrative to make sense as she’s creating it. In this case, I don’t mention ghosts, the evil corps that sent her up or anything like that. The player will again, potentially drawn in from that flavor, or they might not depending on the sort of descriptive words and complications they’re throwing into the mix. I don’t think it’s necessary for each story seed to hit on all points on the character. Quite the contrary, using some and not others gives you more variance out of one sheet and increases the chances for replay which is vital to this game. Three seeds based on the same idea with different parts of the sheets ‘setting’ can help you fill a sheet up pretty fast.

Here are some of the other seeds I’m going to throw on this character.

2. There’s a black box on the station you’re supposed to collect. Not only does it contain the reports of how your husband died up here, but the ghosts of all the other victims up here are trying to protect it from falling into corporate hands. Destroy the ghosts or prove to them that if you get the box, you’ll make sure their deaths are exposed for what they were; murder.

3. Your daughter is being held in cryostasis on the station and you’ve got to find her. Only, your dead husband is up there and he can’t see the difference between friend and foe anymore. Convince him that you are there to help so you can get past the protective spirit before the life support fails and your daughter dies.

4. You know what’s in the hardcopy you’ve been sent up to retrieve, and you know what it’s worth. Due to structural failing, the hardcopy has probably fallen into the lowest section of the ship, through a few ‘circles’ of ghostly-hell. Descend through several floors of ghost infested horrors to find the hardcopy without joining their ranks.

5. They told you it was just some equipment, but as soon as you see it, you know it’s a weapon. So you’ve got a huge radiation-producing megaweapon, but getting out a live with it is going to be hand since it seems to attract the ghosts on the station. Make good your daring escape with the weapon as the ghosts, monsters, and station itself try to stop you.

6. While collecting your bounty, you realize there are still about ten people alive on the station in need of help. They know how to avoid the monsters better than you do, but they don’t know how to survive the mercenaries sent up to ‘erase’ the ‘loose ends.’ Get the survivors out while they help you dodge the ghosts and you help hold off the mercs.

7. The station is supposed to have been ‘dead’ for about six months when you go up. And yet, as you are searching the wreckage for your bounty, your reality keeps getting overlapped by visions of that final fateful day. Don’t lose yourself to the horrific flashbacks of death or get dragged into it by the ghosts who can’t let go.

8. If there’s anything you hate more than bounty hunters, it’s pirates. The station is crawling with a team of pirates up here to steal company property. Fight off the pirates and prevent them from getting to anything too useful without them fragging you and adding your ghost to the community up there already.

9. You’ve been sent up with an engineer who is as brilliant as he is daring. What he isn’t, is prepared for the physical danger of a malfunctioning station full of hungry dead. Keep the man alive while he risks his neck to study what destroyed the station.

Some of these seeds will have identical set ups, they’ll share details, but because of little additions of setting or pieces of background left out, there’s a lot of room to play. Other things to keep in mind while you’re creating your seeds.

• The seeds do not need to be related. They’re only ‘cannon’ in the story they’re used, so even if the seeds contradict each other completely, no worries. (As in the case of number 1 and 3.)
• Cheat if you have to. There are times even the greatest poets broke form, and there’s really no problem with that. If it was good enough for The Bard and Dylan Thomas,  it’s good enough for me. (Just try not to do it too much, that’s half of the fun of the creation.)
• You don’t need to use the conflicts or the words in your seeds. Remember, they’re for the other character’s stories. They should fit themes and tropes and so on, but they don’t have anything to do with what happens to this character.
• Be exacting. Ambiguity in idea is good, in word choice it isn’t. Use exactly the word you mean, and use every word you can to fill in colour and concept. Spare nothing. Abuse your thesuraus. No risk of being flowery here, the work is too brief. (Micro writing fascinates me, but that’s another post.)
• Leave room for interpretation whenever possible, but especially in your ‘solution’ sentence. Don’t tell them ‘kill the monster, get the gold.’ Tell them ‘get around the monster, get whatever he’s hiding.’ Solutions that do not require violence are very good solutions indeed. There are plenty of games focused on slaying the monster. This is a game about solving the problem instead.

So, if you happen to still be reading at this point, thank you so much for sticking around, and I really hope you try your hand at this yourself. I look forward to hearing what you do with these sheets in play, in hacking, and in creation.

She’s relentless. That’s what they say about her. She makes a choice and she follows it through, with the determination of a Rottweiler, whether she’s going after a john, casing a pimp out of her territory, or getting the girls who walk her streets to get their shit together. Usually they call her a bitch, but she laughs it off because, well, she likes the violent connotation.

She fucks for money. She never much liked the word prostitute, it sounds like a ‘social disease’ that some stuffy shithead in a suit attributed to ‘fallen women’ and no one has said anything better. She knows the activists are using the term ‘sex worker’ and she’s okay with it. It applies too, but if you ask her, straight up, she’ll say she fucks for money. Whore is a sacred word, to her, and one only a couple of people get to whisper to her in the heat of passion.

She works the streets because she likes to catch the violent johns off guard and take them out of the equation. Six years ago she got caught cutting a guy’s cock off and feeding it to him. She found a ACLU lawyer just as crazy as she was and they got the charge reduced no nothing. She spent six months in prison. In that time, she became a sort of martyr. Wherever people were demanding rights for sex workers, they held up pictures of her, even if she did kill someone in cold blood.

Sometimes she still feels things. She’s not a sociopath, so far as she can tell, but she can turn it all off when she needs to. But that whole ‘hardened’ thing is bullshit. She just chooses when she cries. And that isn’t often. She hunts so long as she’s still physically able to, and after that, she might take those activists up on their regular requests to come help them out. For now, killing fuckers who go too far is more useful than shouting at congress. She fucks way too many congressmen to think they’ll listen. Yet.

News people, good detectives, vampire hunters, all sorts of people come looking for answers about what’s going on in her turf. Even the werewolves won’t move in where she’s working because they think she’s crazier than they are dangerous. Or maybe it’s the same thing.

They say crazy. She says empowered. But that’s a debate for college students and bloggers.

She’s not a junkie, she fucks because she likes to. Men tend to be more trouble than they’re worth, so keeping them emotionally at arm’s length is the way to go. She doesn’t like junkies working in her turf. Too dangerous. Raises the risk of disease. But she’s got contacts in programs. They might help the junkies, she can’t. They may just get them out of her hair, and that suits her just as well.

She’s proud, dynamic, and aggressive in her sexuality. She fucks who she wants and doesn’t do anything she doesn’t want to. She’s arrogant, sometimes, and she rubs people raw. They either lover her for it or hate her, but in the end, they don’t walk on her. A poet she’s fucking calls her a ‘force of nature’ and pities anyone who tries to tie her down. She burns copies of ‘Pretty Women’ at protests and can quote Veronica Franco when it suits her but she never finished high school.

She’s been raped, she’s been beaten, but so have plenty of suburban housewives, if you ask her about it she’ll remind you.

She’ll deck you if she has to, but she’s rather hold you tight and kiss you till you shut up and do what she wants.

You can’t stop her, you can only survive her. She’s not a victim of the patriarchy, she’s the reason they’re afraid of women. And one day, she’s coming for them.

So yes, this is a highly idealized situation. Many sex workers in the US are beaten down, abused, and unable to stand up for themselves like this. I don’t think that’s the way it has to be, and I CERTIANLY don’t think it should be that way. That’s another post, however. Point is, you don’t want to play the millions of boys who go off to war and just get killed, you want to play the hero of war. The one who gets through the gritty reality and becomes a legend.

I want the same thing.

I don’t want you to punish me with STDs, even if that’s realistic, because I’m playing a sexually liberated woman who uses her talents (not just her body) to make herself powerful within her society and subculture. I don’t demand your war hero have crippling PTSD or life threatening cancer, because this is fantasy.

I don’t want you to punish me with pregnancy because that is not a story I want to tell with this character. (Unless I’ve told you otherwise.) I don’t want you to punish me with pregnancy because I think it’s sick to treat the creation of a new human being as a means to subjugate another human being. I have heard, in some form or another, GMs actually say, “ha ha, I’ll show that slut. I’ll just have her get pregnant and she’ll have to stop playing the character.” Worse still, then they hold the threat of ‘murdering the baby’ over my head if I play the character any way. Anything, in their sick little world, could result in miscarriage. It’s cruel and it’s weird and I want you to stop and think before using a creation of new life as a ‘consequence.’ Think about what that says to the people at your table. Think about what that means. It is not a thing than would ever be used to stop a male character, and so it’s an inherently unfair punishment for, frankly, something that doesn’t need to be punished.

In this particular fantasy, this woman has killed to avenge herself or her friends, but she isn’t a professional killer any more than your super hero who hunts down serial killers. And considerably less than your badass mercenary. There is a revenge element in this part of my fantasy that isn’t necessary for every sex worker character or even a majority of them. In that case, the violence free sex worker whose only crime is controlling her sexuality and making it work for her instead being a victim to it should be treated the same as your musician who entertain audiences and should be seen as more noble than your gun runner or your drug dealer.

In the beginning, there was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. John 1:1*

If you sort of ignore the actual intention of the quote and take it literally, man, that’s a sexy egotistical concept for even the most humble wordsmith.

I’ll say it, I’m a devotee of the Word.**

I have hymnals floating all over my house. Bird by Bird is sitting in my bathroom right now. Two copies of On Writing float around the house, though both are right now in my dining room. I have books on structure and genre piled up next to my bed and there are more then a few editing books in my living room. I go to these books when I want to revel in my faith, but I also go to them when I find I have a crisis of faith. Picking up a good one, flipping through for inspiration, generally fills me with fervor and suddenly I want to get back to practicing my faith.

I’m not clergy, though, I spread the faith casually, I have neither the vision nor the dedication to teach The Word to others. I have to live with it, practice my religion in the real world outside of the safety of many churches devoted to The Word. I envy clergy their solitude to contemplate The Word, but I guess if none of us were laity, there wouldn’t be much of a faith to discuss. I honor the men and women who devote their time to the Word as an idea and something to study, but I’m not smart enough to do much more with it then live it.

But this isn’t some hippy religion with guitars and a lot of forgiveness. As far as I know, confession exists, but it’s generally something you can only do if you aren’t successful and even there, there isn’t really anyone to absolve you.

To add it it’s cult-like mystique, it’s usually something no one practices in public. You can’t go to an open service on Sunday or see us spreading the Word in a public park on at an airport. Sure, you’ll see the rare anarchist sitting in a coffee shop with their alter pieces; laptop and moleskin notebook and hymnal. Sometimes they’re actually practicing, but more often then not it’s just set dressing to control how people judge them. “Oh, they must be Wordists, you can tell by the props they carry. They must be really faithful. Look at all their stuff.”

I admit, I am sometime guilty of putting the alter pieces before the worship and get so lost in the rituals, (I must have silence or the right music or the right candles,) that I neglect the Word. Here, I’m confessing.

Anyway… We don’t often do it in public. We tend to have to do it in dark places, under rocks and in closets and away from eyes that judge. It often alienates us from people who don’t understand the Word the way we do. Hell, it tends to isolate us from each other. Almost like and anticult. We have to form elaborate excuses to gather in hotels or convention centers or coffee shops or online on forums just so we feel a little bit less alone, and yet service to the Word is still done so inside the self that it has to be done in private.

And of course, no one worships the Word right so far as anyone is concerned. When my worship is done, the first thing I want is to find other worshipers to tell me what I did wrong. Like the  gathers, we construct elaborate ritual around critiquing the way others celebrate the Word and what they did wrong and right. Sometimes we gather around the works of Worshipers long dead to decide if their work is still relevant or how it’s so much better then anything out today.

Plus there’s the blood sacrifice.

No, really. Sometimes you’ll be in worship, have say, 10,000 words down of a 60,000 word novel when the Word speaks to you and you realize that about, say, 5,000 of those words don’t actually fit in this novel and without them another 3,000 don’t work so I’m pretty much going to have to start over.

So, I’m cutting and hacking and bleeding all over and the Word is appeased. Hemorrhaging word count on the alter is sometimes the only way to reconnect with the Word, and that’s why so few people really stick with the church for long. I don’t have a problem with those who lapse, they’re probably smarter then me, less brainwashed by their faith. I almost envy them too.

I’ve probably stretched the metaphor, but since my form of confession is a one way street anyway, I’ll just have to live with that.

*You know who’s fantastic? Cherie Priest. You know why? Apparently, she has that phrase it Greek tattooed on her lower back. I love her so very much!

**Not to be confused with any actual religious figures, spirits or ideas. The faith represented here is purely fictitious. Probably. Unless you want to give me money.

I can’t give you perfect general advice because my experience is very different from yours.  I tend to be packing for two to four people, have business concerns to deal with at any given time, and may have more of a need to feel pretty than you do as your packing up for the adventure ahead.  That said, pick and choose, and for godsake, don’t forget your business cards.

Business cards. Did I mention those yet? Have some. Have extra. Even if you aren’t going to conventions as a professional, it might be the very best way to stay in touch with new friends you’ve made at the convention. If they’re not professional cards, make sure you have all your social networking listed on them. (Twitter, facebook, whathave you.) That way I can look up who you are when I’m looking through my stacks of cards after a few weeks of convention recovery.

Get a water proof folder, or binder with page protectors in it. I print out this stuff:

• Maps of all the locations I’ll be walking/driving. Yes, GPS and Smartphones are nice. Yes, they can break, not function, think the town you’re in doesn’t exist. Don’t let technology get the best of you.
• Print outs of all your confermations. Hotels, buses, planes, con tickets and any other thing you can preregister for. Also, preregister for everything you can possibly preregister for. Seriously, save yourself the hassle.
• A list of phone numbers and addresses. Emergency contacts, the people you want to hook up with at the Con, the local guy you’ve gotten in touch with ahead of time to ask questions of should you need to. (You do have that guy, right?) The hotels and centers you’re going to visit. It also never hurts to scope out a restaurant or two ahead of time. If you’re in a place you’ve never been too, knowing what the locals love might give you the chance to try something awesome as only the locals can do it, but that’s going to take some research. (Case in point, have you ever heard of a Lobster roll? me either. If I can find one while I’m in Boston, I am noming the hell out of that!)
• Blank character sheets for your game of choice. You never know when the moment will strike and be lost to have a great pick up game because no one has sheets.

Other important stuff.

Fresh clean socks. This is mostly a thing for my husband, but it can make all the difference. For him, we buy a new bag each time.

Clothes, sure, but extra clothes for weather hiccups. Layers are always the way to go in unfamiliar locations. Strip or stack on as needed.  (With the little ones, I try to pack 1 and a half outfits per day. That is, for two days, three outfits, and so on. Kids are very good at ruining clothes in inverse proportion to the rarity of clothing you brought.)

I like bags inside of bags. I section off bags for my makeup, for toiletries, for road-medicine. (You bring soap? Good. You bring aspirin and Tums to handle headaches, backaches, and stomach upset from crappy con eating? You are a master.) Also, stop buying little travel sized shampoo. Seriously. Get some empty bottles and fill ‘em up. You don’t need to spend a dollar on a nickel’s worth of soap. )

Also, don’t forget a little febreeze. I have kids and cats, and sometimes you don’t notice something has a … special added scent… to it until you’re outside of your home environment. Carrying a little fabric refresher can help and help you feel more confident and relaxed on your trip which is a big part of having a good time.

So there’s most of my Con pre guide. (Maybe I’ll examine traveling with kids more closely another time.) Now, I should probably stop typing and get back to packing for PAX East! Wooo! Wish me luck stalking Wil Wheaton!

• I did Phauxcon the week before last and it was a certified blast. The smallest and coziest convention I’ve been to yet, I loved the chance for a real personal experience with the other attendees. I want to thank our hosts Robert and Sierra, they were awesome, I’d do it again next year without hesitation, and I think David and I created some new gamers in the crowd. That always makes a nerd-mama proud. While there, I got to hear from writer L.A. Banks, her story is beyond inspiring and developed a pretty immediate admiration for her. David talks about her talk here. The stuff of inspiration.

• My first fully independent role playing game is now up for you to buy at RPGNow. Torn Apart by Radiation Wraiths is a teaser, demo style game written for Maschine Zeit, a full Horror/Science fiction setting David and I are working on and hope to have out next year. Torn Apart by Radiation Wraiths is a full contained game complete with five developed characters full of secrets and motives. Torn Apart is also my first experiment in my Dominadora project. It’s less than $2 bucks over at RPGNow, so head over there and pick up your copy. (Note to new customers. Torn Apart had some strong language in it, so you have to login to view it. Login is free and required to buy anyhow, so it saves you a step later!)
• Next weekend I’ll be at GameXpo just a hop skip and jump from Philly. I’m going to be there pretty much all weekend manning tables, running games, getting people excited and hopefully selling more than a few copies of Torn Apart. In addition to all that, on Sunday David will be doing is WILDLY successful “RPG Design in an Hour” Panel and I’ll be joined with him, this dude, and this other sketchy character to talk about pen and paper RPGs and how awesome our writing is. (Erm, you know, not too much self promotion, I’m sure.) Come on down and hang out or we might have to bring the whole con to you, and trust me, you don’t want that sort of shenanigans going on at your place.
• I’m getting some real movement and support over at A Letter to the Game Industry. If you don’t know what that is yet, in short, it’s an open conversation going on about being a woman gamer and all the highs and lows that entails. Professionals to casual players are welcome to join the conversation, and I hope you will too.

Beyond that, I have about a dozen new projects sitting on various burners and various plates. I cannot wait until I can tell you more about them when I can. Really very exciting stuff.