Sleepless nights

Well, we've passed the light peak of the year, and now the days will get only darker. I like the dark nights, they give me the time and space to think and breathe. So put on some Eddie Vedder, shut the lights, grab a bottle or glass or bowl of whatever you want to drink, sit down and cool off. Take some time for yourself to see, even in the dark. Here's a little something to see you through.

And a supersticious solstice to all!

There are two days in a year when a big part of the world gets the itch to light humongous piles of wood and debris on fire. Now every Finn reading this will go "Midsummer whoooooo!" and dash to the car to drive to the summer cabin. Of course, only a rare few Finns will read this before midsummer's already long gone, because most of them are already at the cabins.

Midsummer is indeed the first date to light the fires, which - if you discount it being awesome - seems a bit foolish: it's, especially in Finland, the day when the sun almost (or literally) never sets. And yet we feel the unquenchable urge to put huge bonfires to the torch. The second date for lighting the fires happens, would you have it, on another solstice: the winter solstice.

These dates are, on the calendar, as far from each other as you can get two days to be, and are otherwise diametrically opposed as well, the summer solstice marking the highest point of the sun, the longest day of the year, and the winter solstice being the exact opposite of this. The supersticions surrounding these two days are, however, very specifically linked, especially when it comes to the bonfires.

The human penchant for pyromania on these two specific dates comes from old, old supersticion. Nowadays christianity and before that every other "pagan" belief has nicked the day from the previous one, dating back as far as we might care to follow. Somehow fire has been a symbol of protection and safety, for the belief behind these blazing fires seem to be that evil spirits are disheartened and driven off by the flames.

These two days have been chosen because the loss of light has been viewed as the time for these evil beings. The summer and winter solstice mark the two days that act as kind of lodestones to the whole thing. On midsummer, as the light begins to fade, the malign spirits are strong as their power begins to rise anew, whereas midwinter finds them at the peak of their power and the fires must be burned to drive them off.

These are not the only supersticions that have survived to our day surrounding midsummer: healing herbs, cantrip spells and divination are all things that are closely linked to midsummer in our folklore. I'm not going to delve into those here, or I'll be writing this still when midsummer's already long past. Here are some sights from last year's midsummer, may it be as pretty this time around. A supersticious solstice to all!

A real-life comicbook supervillain!

I try to keep off anything topical on the internet here, because I am well aware that people often have rather specific opinions when it comes to things that are on the wall at the time. This time, however, such inaction is not an option. This is a time to hoist the colors and do some banner-waving.

For those of you who don't follow online comics or the news circulating around them, FunnyJunk.com (a page that lives on contributed content, also known as leeching off everyone else) hired a lawyer, Charles Carreon, who sued Oatmeal.com for, uh, defamation and false advertising (the false advertising tag, atleast, is false, because Google doesn't work the way they seem to think it does). They wanted 20 000$ for this little hoot, so Matthew Inman (the man behind the Oatmeal) went ahead and raised almost 10 times that amount in an online fundraiser and gave it to National Wildlife Foundation and American Cancer Society. The fundraiser is still on, if you feel like pitching in, by the way: the Bear Love Good, Cancer Bad -campaign.

Now, there's been some name calling and some such on both sides, but FunnyJunk and specifically Mr. Carreon are finding out what exactly the Streisand Effect is all about (in short and in this context, the internet always hits you back with greater volume). Charles Carreon, however, rose to a whole new, comicbook-supervillain-kind-of an infamy on last friday, when he, privately, sued the Oatmeal, IndieGoGo (the company behind the fundraiser) and also the National Wildlife Foundation and the American Cancer Society. Now, the complaint isn't available yet so no one (except the Dr. Doom behind this little escapade of idiotism) knows the reasoning behind sueing the two beneficaries of the fundraiser. I'm sure in his personal universe, it makes a lot of sense.

I'm talking about this because everyone should. We should show that this kind of megalomanic censorship and butthurt crazy. I'm not an expert, so read it from the horse's mouth, and even more preferrably, an expert. Even more importantly, spread the word, donate money, help in any way you can.

Time

This thought has been baking for almost a week now, ever since I saw the movie The Man From Earth. I recommend this movie to everybody, everywhere, ever. It's a really, really good movie that, at least to me, as a viewer, forced some hard questions. It came out in 2007, so it should be pretty easy to find a copy, too. It's a movie about a man who tells his friends he's 14 000 years old. To tell more would spoil the surprises. Watch it.

We're going to step outside the bounds of everyday reality now and do a bit of a thought exercise. Create a world, just like ours, and put yourself in it. Now, for yourself, create a friend. I believe it would work better if this friend would be an adult, but it's not a must. Your friend you've made here is a real friend, a true persona that you genuinely like. Your friend, after you've known him for a few years, seems like one of those ageless people: his/her looks might change, but you can't really tell what age he/she is, or see any real signs of aging.

After you've known for a score of years, you start to become certain: your friend doesn't age, or atleast doesn't seem to. You grow older, while he/she seems to, atleast outwardly, stay the same age. Maybe ten, or twenty years from the day you met, your friend seems the same as ever, fit as a fiddle, still as ageless as the day you met, while for you time marches ever onwards. Would you believe the evidence of your own eyes or discard it as a mere curiosity? What if your friend confirmed it? Could you not be envious? Could you keep the cold touch of enmity and the feeling of unfairness from affecting your relationship, knowing that while you grow older and will eventually die your friend will forever stay the same? If you couldn't, would you wish for your friend to not have this ability or would you wish you had the same trait? Would you wish it only for yourself, or for both of you?

Now imagine, if you can, yourself ageless. Seasons, decades and centuries pass and you flow through it all like water in a stream. How would it change you, to see time pass you by? Everyone you know leaves this world in what might, after a while, seem like quite the hurry, while you are outwardly ever the same. How could you keep yourself from jading, from simply stopping to care? Or would you view yourself as apart, different enough to not be forced to care at all? Would you have to, to be able to hold on to sanity? Or would you lapse into inaction or reclusion, unable or unwilling to act in a world that passes you by? Would you try to change things, make a difference, given all the time in the world?

The philosopher in me thinks these questions important. However, I find myself unable to give a satisfying answer to any of these questions: I can simply wonder and make assumptions, play little games in my mind where I act one way or the other. As often happens with such palaces of thought, I am not certain of how things would turn out in reality. I create differentiating "truths", a juxtaposition, and try to create an absolute. This is where I fail: second guessing comes to me by nature. There is no perfect stance, no given answer simple enough to encompass it all. This complexity of thought leaves me a bit rattled at times, but the grey between white and black is probably better than either absolute.

It seems I digress: the sleeplessness of too hot summer nights makes my mind run in circles. Thus, in closure, if I should give a reason to the barrage of questions arrayed here, I suppose it would be relativity to other humans. How would you relate - how could you relate - if there was a dividing factor so pervasive as to affect every aspect of the whole? As I, rather spaciously, pointed out in the previous paragraph, I don't know. This, to me, makes the question ever more interesting. A question you already have an answer for does little to grow you as a person.

Stranger's Prayer

This prayer is not fully from my pen, but I have modified it somewhat to fit what seemed to me the aestethic prosadic form. As for where it's from, it is an amalgam of collected conversations, thoughts and correspondences. And that's all the preptalk I'll give it today.

Stranger's Prayer

Your face is unknown to me

And this place is new

So let me show as much kindness

As is in my heart

For I may not pass this way again 

Games and the bigger social picture

For those of you who follow debates and/or news about the video game industry, this will not come as a surprise. For those of you who don't sit down and strap in your seatbelts, because we'll be entering a war zone.

If you are not familiar with the game franchise Hitman, I'll sum it up in a few words. They are games where the player character is a bald-shaved, well-dressed assassin codenamed 47 who goes around killing people in a plethora of ways, since he gets paid to do that. Now, the Hitman franchise is getting a new game soon-ish, and this game got a new trailer just last week. I'm not gonna link the trailer here because this blog's supposed to not be adult content, but you can go search for it on Youtube if you wish, it's easy enough to find.

So, a game franchise that is about killing people got a new trailer, how is this special? Well, the trailer has caused something of a flame war on the internet after airing, because it's not just a trailer of a game where you kill people: it has 47 kick in the faces of a group of female assassins first disguised as nuns and soon disrobing to a rather more revealing get-up. If you still want to see the video, the new game's title is Hitman Absolution. You'll find it with that.

The trailer caused a huge public outcry for two reasons which snowballed quickly into one huge clusterfuck. The first reason was that the trailer depicts a very graphic kind of violence towards women. The Hitman series has always been about gruesome violence, so the violence itself is nothing new, but this is the first time that opponents that fight back have been female. The second reason revolved around how the lady assassins in the trailer are viewed: their choice of clothing has raised an outcry because people feel that the trailer objectifies women.

Personally I can see where both of these arguments are coming from, especially the latter: the choice of clothing seems rather ridiculous. The first reason, on the other hand, seems somewhat ridiculous: the women are actually depicted as combatants, not as helpless targets, which means that it's not chauvinistic, it's misogyny. (For reference, when someone has actually been bothered to voice outcries about the Hitman series before, not counting the first game, the usual argument has been chauvinism.)

While the argument itself has been blown out of proportions some ways back (there's a reason I've used terms such as flame war - the trolls are having a field day with this one), the reference frame of this discussion is, in my opinion, also good. It raises public awareness to the fact that games are a massive, influental media. It brings arguments and questions both moral and ambivalent to the doorstep of people who might never have thought of any of them.

Of course, for the denialists and haters this is one more reason to cry wolf and claim that games are the end of morality and whatnot. What I'm hoping for is that, after the flames go down a bit, people will be able to see that the field of games is atleast as varied as that of movies (for something on the other end of the scales, check a game called Dustforce to get you started) and that thus this kind of discussion is both needed and good for both the people making and using the game industry.

Rakkaudesta, unelmista ja kaloista

Pyörränpä puheeni ja jätän viimeksi lupaamani aiheet myöhempään, koska tämä polttelee nyt mukavasti mielen takaosissa niin kovasti.

Elokuvaorientoituneempi lukija kenties hoksasi otsikosta, että kyseessähän on erään uuden elokuvan suomennettu nimi. Tai mahdollisesti ei, koska muoto on tyypillinen blogiotsikoilleni muutenkin. Kyseessä oleva elokuva on alkuperäisnimeltään Salmon Fishing in Yemen. En yhdistänyt näitä kahta toisiinsa, ennen kuin ystäväni mainitsi kyseessä olevan uusi elokuva, jota hän on menossa katsomaan. Oli kuulemma lämminhenkinen ja nokkela draama. Tässä kohtaa minunkin lamppuni alkoivat syttyä, ja google-fulla todistin kyseessä olevan sama elokuva.

Tämähän on esimerkkinä lievä, mutta kuitenkin lajityypille, no, tyypillinen. Erityisesti 90-luvulla elokuvien nimien suomentamisessa tuntui olevan muotia pilata mahdollisimman paljon elokuvan juonesta käännetyllä nimellä. Henkilökohtainen suosikkini on ehdottomasti Shawshank Redemption, elokuva, jonka käännetty nimi todella paljastaa yhden koko elokuvan tärkeimmistä juonenkäänteistä. Suomennetulta nimeltäänhän tämä kulttuuriteko on Rita Hayworth - Avain pakoon. Toinen hieno käännöskukkanen on esimerkiksi Rules of Attraction: suomeksi Fuck the Rules.

Televisiosarjojen puolella näitä älynväläyksiä on tarjolla myös jonkin verran, mutta en keksinyt yhtään esimerkkiä tähän hätään. Jostain syystä me, ainakin jollain tasolla älykäs kansa, näytämme pyrkivän mahdollisimman älyttömiin ratkaisuihin, kun kyse on filmatusta materiaalista. Myös melkoisia käännöskukkasia tekstityksen puolelta löytyy: "Minulla on terminen laukaisin" (I have a thermal detonator, Star Wars) ja "Minulla on laukussa muskottia" (I have mace in my bag, en muista lähdettä) näin esimerkkeinä.

Noin rakkaudesta, unelmista ja kaloista muuten: rakkaus on mukavaa, unelmat toisinaan hyödyllisiä ja vietin tänään noin tunnin katsellen rannassa, kun pikkukalat pakenivat jotain suurempaa petoa. Melkoinen kuhina siinä rantavedessä kävi.

Vaikenemisen jalo taito ja muutamia muita pohdintoja

Olen ilmeisesti onnistunut kulkemaan jonkinlaisen ympyrän pääni sisällä. Pyöräillessäni tänään kotiin pohdin, että minun pitäisi kirjoittaa tarinoiden kertomisesta. Tajusin noin puoli minuuttia aihetta pohdittuani kirjoittaneeni jo tästä, englanniksi. Aivoni eivät luoneet välitöntä yhteyttä, koska eri kielellä kyseessä tuntui olevan eri asia.

Jos minulla ei tälläkin hetkellä olisi toista kymmentä luonnosta odottamassa valmiiksi kirjoittamista ja julkaisemista, tämän voisi nähdä älyllisen kirjoitustoimintani päätepisteenä: hanskat tiskiin ja kirjoituskone esiin, minä kirjoittaisin enää fiktiota.Tilanne ei kaikesta huolimatta tämä ole, joten kai sitä on pakko jatkaa sanaisen arkkunsa avaamista tänne jatkossakin. Enpä minä muutenkaan osaa olla hiljaa kuin toisinaan.

Vaiti oleminen on taito, josta on hyötyä. Tämän huomaan erityisen hyvin silloin, kun ymmärrän joskus olla hiljaa pidempään kuin hetken ja huomaan, että maailma on täynnä ääniä. Eräs ystäväni sanoi kerran, että puhun jottei minun tarvitsisi ajatella. Hän oli yllättävän oikeassa, joskin tavalla, jolla tuskin tarkoitti.

Puhuminen on minulle jäsentämisen väline, samalla tavalla kuin kirjoittaminenkin. Samalla käytän sitä välineenä, jolla tarkkailen todellisuuden muodostumista - oma ääneni on minulle varma ankkuri. Minulla on tätä varten jopa muutama lause, jotka olen toistanut niin usein että tiedän, miltä niiden pitäisi minusta kuuluessaan kuulostaa. Niitä en kerro, koska jotain salaisuuksia pitää olla. Puhumalla ajattelun lomassa vältän samalla myös helpoimmat sudenkuopat, kehäpäätelmät ja jatkuvan itsensä epäilyn, johon tekojaan pohtiessaan helposti sortuu.

Juhannukseen ei ole enää kuin muutama viikko: elämme vuoden valoisinta aikaa. Ainakin minun kehoni vetää aina johdotukset ristiin, kun yöllä ei olekaan pimeää - nyt kun olen selvinnyt pahimmasta siitepölyväsymyksestä, kehoni on koko ajan sitä mieltä, että nyt on aika olla aktiivinen ja tehdä jotain, koska ulkona on valoisaa. Tämä yhdistettynä yleiseen unettomuuteen johtaa joinain öinä täysin ylitsepääsemättömään levottomuuteen, joka onneksi juhannukseen mennessä yleensä menee ohi. Valoisan aika antaa kuitenkin mahdollisuuksia tehdä myös iltaisin asioita aivan eri tavalla. Minä ainakin kaipaan helposti jotain ulkotekemistä iltoihini, vaikka sitten petankkia.

Jos ette ole koskaan kokeilleet, istahtakaa vaikka huomenna johonkin ulos, vähintään puolijulkiselle paikalle, ainakin pariksikymmeneksi minuutiksi ja lakatkaa ajattelemasta mitään omia asioitanne. Kiinnittäkää kaikki huomio mitä teillä on itsestänne ulos puristaa kanssaihmisiin, niihin jotka ohittavat sen paikan, jonka leiriksi valitsitte. En aio kertoa tämän harjoituksen tarkoitusta ainakaan hetkeen, koska se pilaa sen tarkoituksen. Käykää kuitenkin kokeilemassa, onko teistä huomioimaan tuntemattomia kanssaihmisiä hiirenhiljaa.

Seuraavaksi puhun luultavasti kuolleiden muistamisesta ja bloggaustunnustuksista. Toivottavasti muistan nämä aiheet, kun ne tähän kirjoitin.Tässä vielä loppukaneettia. Pohtikaa, mikä teille on tärkeää. Ja tiedän, että toinen kuvista on uusiokäytössä, mutta se sopii aiheeseen. Kyseessä oli ainakin jotain tärkeää.

Elämän jäljet

Teknologia hyödyntää nykyään pitkälti yksilöllisyyttä: sormenjäljet ovat yksilölliset, kämmenenjäljet ovat yksilölliset, silmät ovat yksilölliset, ääni on yksilöllinen - jopa kasvojen luusto on yksilöllinen. Länsimainen ajattelu siitä, että me olemme uniikkeja, ainutkertaisia lumihiutaleita on todistettu tieteen keinoin. Tätä innovaatiota, tätä lopullista todistetta persoonasta käytetään ihmisten erotteluun tarkkailun vuoksi tai vielä yleisemmin asioiden salaamiseen.

Yleisin käyttötarkoitus yksilöllisyydelle on yhä parempien lukkojen valmistaminen, joiden taakse voi sitten piilottaa muilta yhä enemmän itsestään. Tämä ainutkertaisuuden käyttö yksilöllisyyden lisäämiseen on minusta hieman surullista. Yksilöllisyys äärimmilleen vietynä lieneekin yksinäistä puuhaa - molempien kantana on numeraaleista ensimmäinen, joka ei seurasta piittaa.

Elämä kuitenkin yksilöi meitä myös muuten. Silmälasit ovat kuulemma huono tuntomerkki: jo noin puolet suomalaisista käyttää säännöllisesti silmälaseja. Kuitenkin ulkoinen olemuksemme tekee meistä yksilöitä. Olen itse melko tapaturma-altis, joten monet minun yksilöivät jälkeni löytyvät ihosta. Arvet ovat uniikkeja: ne ovat merkkejä kokemuksista ja tapahtumista, jotka ovat tuoneet meidät tähän asti. Harva osaa kertoa arpiensa tarinoita montaakaan: itse muistan muutaman kourallisen, mutta minulla myös on mistä muistaa.

Joillekin arvet ovat kuin häpeäpilkkuja - virheitä muuten täydellisessä tuotteessa. Minulle ne ovat voitonmerkkejä, todisteita siitä, että olen edes yrittänyt joskus tehdä jotain. Toki ne myös todistavat, etten ole välttämättä onnistunut läheskään joka kerta, mutta nekin yritykset ovat olleet kokemuksia, joista olen kenties oppinut jotain.

Uskon, että kaikki mitä teemme, kaikki keitä tapaamme ja kaikki mihin otamme osaa jättää meihin jonkinlaisen jäljen. Se, jääkö tämä jälki muistiin tai ymmärrämmekö sitä tai sen merkitystä itse on kysymys, jolla on kenties enemmän merkitystä. Itse elättelen toivoa siitä, että voisin kenties jättää jäljen, jolla olisi merkitystä muillekin. Tämä jälki ei ole minun, mutta joku sen on jättänyt kaikesta huolimatta.

Dark Tales: Introducing the Players

From now on, the tag Dark Tales in the title will point out that the post will be about the Call of Cthulhu game I'm acting Keeper for. Thus, if you are uninterested or otherwise unwilling to read and learn about the darker stories of horror and gamers' delvings to the human psyche, it will from now on be a tilte to stay away from. If it is not so, read on, brave adventurer.

Today, you shall meet the players, the braver and more cowardly souls that shall, through chance, consequence and machinations of fate be thrown together to become the protagonists of our little play - investigators, as they are named, due to their innate curiosity and, in the end, uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right (or perhaps more often the very, very wrong) time. The faces behind these masks shall not be shown, but you will meet the participants of the story today.

We'll get to the place a bit more later, but we must set the mood. So grab your fedora and saxophone and think of the year 1910. If the mood you are in is chipper and light, dim down the lights and put on some Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnrH-7URvpc) to make it darker. Now envision Belfast, but with darker undercurrents: an almost permanent winter fog hanging over it, bleaching color. A damp, drizzly weather, grumpy people, fights and whatnot breaking out. People on the edge, with even the people a bit unsure of why. We will talk mood and location more later, but this is the place you're stepping into to observe.

Our first dramatis personae is Xavier Devaux, 29, a french immigrant come to Belfast some years ago. Born in Toulouse, Xavier was orphaned when he was rather young, and has been living largely off his heritage since then. Not intent in staying in one place for long, Xavier came to Bristol to study medicine. There he found a new, rather theoretical field to his liking: that of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis and psychology. A smart and educated man, Xavier graduated with honors and some knowledge in both pharmacy and medicine and, discontent to simply return to the land of his birth, ended up in Belfast to start a small doctor's shop there, near the dockside. Xavier is an honest man, if sometimes a bit at odds with the system of the law, with a penchant towards wines, people and sometimes women.

Next, we meet Huang Rin, more commonly known as Hong Kong Harry. At age 33, Huang owns a small bookstore in Belfast called Portobello Second Hand Books and Restoration Equipment and Accessories. If he knows where the name originates from, he doesn't tell. Huang, while being a salesman is also a collector and hobbyist, with a vast knowledge of history and a lot of tidbits in many other fields as well. Trained in martial arts as a child, Huang is rather clumsy and never made it very far. Somewhat of an egoist and opportunist, Huang's biggest vice is probably absinthe.

Looming in the back like an eclipse waiting to happen is a man larger than life: Solomon Grundy. A 25-year-old englishman, Solomon knows nothing of his parents or much of his origins other than having born on a monday, and when the Red Horse Circus and Animal Show picked him up as a small lad they named him after the nursery rhyme. Traveling and living with the circus most of his years Solomon picked up a bit of everything, but when he finally grew up to fill boots quite a bit larger, he became the strongman of the Red Horse. The circus is in Belfast for the winter, as often before, and so is Solomon. He can be seen as a bit dishonest, but Solomon is in the end a moral man.

Finally, behind the bar we find Jack Flannagan, a Belfast-born-and-raised irishman. Jack is the owner of an establishment called the Four Winds Bar, a place to rent a room or eat a bit as well as wet ones throat. Hearing many things from behind his polished wood bar, Jack is not an educated man, but he is smart. He has a knack for listening and knows quite a bit of local lore and legend. A well-liked and respected man, Jack is known as an honest deal that sells his rooms clean and whiskey uncut. At 34, he is a man known to keep an establishment as clean and respectable as himself.

These are the main players in the drama about to unfold. Unwittingly, all of these men have stepped into the middle of events larger and quite a bit more dreadful than any of them might have guessed. The familiar world is about to take a lurch towards the unsavory for all of them.

Call of Cthulhu

Edit: as this turned into a huge wall of text: TL;DR, a lot of talk about role playing games and game systems, might be posting a multipart story here that "documents" a Call of Cthulhu campaign I'm gamemastering during the summer.

After the rant that is my previous point, how is it relevant to anything? Well, I kicked off a Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG adventure today. Now, let's break that previous piece of jargon down into human speech.

Kick off, verb: (idiomatic) to start, to launch. It's rather confusing how kick off can also mean to shut down or turn off suddenly - the problem with idiomatic slang is often that it's a kind of a double entendre to language that approaches the meanings from completely different angles. This time, we're talking about starting. There might be a point worth cultivating about language functions here, but not today. Moving on.

This next part needs to be taken as a bigger whole and then sliced down to smaller chunks, the big picture being the whole of "a Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG adventure". Let's start from the bottom: what's a tabletop RPG adventure? The letters RPG come from Role Playing Game, which might give some of you a mental image of prepubescent teens running around in woods waving wooden swords, wearing capes and talking funny. This image, while relevant, is not exactly the whole truth: what you've just envisioned is LARP, short for Live Action Role Play, which includes physically taking you character's place, putting on clothes to match and acting out the role of you play to be.

Tabletop role playing, on the other hand, (usually just shortened to role playing, but the tabletop part is there to prevent excessive confusion) is the more "modest" father of role play as a genre of self expression, where the characters whose places players take are fleshed out on paper, often with numerical values to represent their specific abilities and skills and work as a playing aid: this is a game after all, more so than LARP is, as might be evident from the G representing "game" at the end of RPG. What's usually needed is pen, paper, possibly a rulebook and some dice, some adventuring spirit and a lot of creativity.

An RPG adventure, on the other hand, is sometimes synonymous with a campaign or a story, meaning a longer sequence of events that create a coherent whole. While sometimes synonymous, an adventure can often be a smaller part of a campaign, which can then be a part of a story, thus creating a rather huge, complex entity of entwining tales. An adventure has some universal parts, however: a beginning, and an end. It might not always be satisfactory, or follow the rules of drama, but it is a self-contained entity, or atleast it should be. There can be open ends and storyhooks for later use, but the main story itself should be brought to a close, kind of like a single book in a series.

Now, I'm not gonna go into much details about Call of Cthulhu here, since my previous post, "Necronomicon" explains the Cthulhu mythos in some detail. The players of a Call of Cthulhu RPG are usually unwitting individuals who stumble upon the greater secrets of the Mythos and the uncaring universe and often end up needing to outwit or outrun an entity of the Mythos simply to survive - outgun isn't really the thing in Call of Cthulhu, since the mood is that of an uncaring, vastly powerful universe that you can mostly try to hide from.

Now, after all this, I get to the beef of my post: what I like (and don't like) about Call of Cthulhu as a system. It has it's downfalls, as the amount of random-generated parts of the character (most everything) make for rather unbalanced characters. This, for most parts, isn't a problem: people are different and excel in different fields, and vastly different characters make the game all the more interesting, just as it would with real people.

Unfortunately, the game system puts quite a bit of weight on two mental stats, as the game is more bent on the intelligent part of it: research, knowledge and such most of the time counting for much more than raw strength, which means that these stats, Intelligence and Education, outweight everything else. While defining two of the game's three most important rolls (Know and Idea rolls, with Sanity being the third) these would also comprise the amount of skill points you have. Thus not having relatively high numbers on these would make you stupid, slow-witted, ill-educated, mostly useless and, in addition to all this, suck at everything.

The system actually makes characters so that if you're not smart, you can't be physically good at much anything either. I changed this so that they count for less, but the absolute oversight irked me: how is your ability to learn how to climb affected by your booksmarts? Of course all game systems are abstractions, and such oversights often get left in the final products. This is exactly the reason why the game master can and should make changes: no system is perfect.

What I really like about Call of Cthulhu, however, is the mystery and the intelligent aspect of it. The whole point of the game system is to create a sort of an intelligent challenge to the players, who, through their player characters, try to solve and outwit it. Most of this can and should be shrouded in a supernatural aspect of horror and fear, giving the game an eerie feel. The point of the game is to try to give the players an intellectual challenge and, if possible, some terror chills.

After the first night of play I feel rather good about the game, as my investigators (the name Call of Cthulhu uses for player characters) seem to be rather baffled by what's been thrown at them. It'll be interesting to see where this game leads and I might indeed try to write it into a story of sorts (I've tried this with campaigns where I've been a player, but the point of view is a bit problematic then). If I manage this, it'll be a sort of a multipart story that will be appearing here approximately weekly. We'll see. For now, it seems summer will be holding some cheap thrills in the form of mythic spooks.

Edit: Gah, what a wall of text. If anyone fought through it to the end, sorry about excessive mouthyness.

Necronomicon

 Most of whom read this will probably have heard the word on the title, Necronomicon, somewhere. It's the title of a fictional book, said to contain information on the vast horrors of the beyond, specifically focusing on a thing called Cthulhu.

This guy. (Wikimedia Commons)

 Who's that, you say? Well, Cthulhu is a Great Old One, those being entities usually able to travel through the vast void of space and sometimes that of time as well, all with a rather sickly obsessive-compulsive fetish about our own little Earth here. I mean, if there are countless other planets out there with countless other races on them to pester, why do most of these tentacled monstrosities seem oh so very stuck on our little rock? And why do all of them seem to have tentacles, or failing that pseudopods?

This whole lore was originally cultivated by a gentleman by the name of H.P. Lovecraft, a man seemingly somewhat obsessed with his Harder-Than-Average-English-Words-Thesaurus and horrors that cannot be described. He seems to have thrown a few gears down the road, but I recommend his horror stories: until he tries to explain all of his horror (oh, look, ancient space-faring aliens that are kind of like elves in being better than us in every single way) it's all rather good.

Of course, a plethora of writers have picked off where he dropped off and carried on with his work of what is nowadays known as the Cthulhu Mythos, named after the sinister squid-faced world eater allegedly sleeping in the Pacific Ocean, in a vast underwater city named R'lyeh (which also boggles the human mind. This is a bit of a theme). Even some of that is good, although personally "cheesy" is the word I tag to most of these scifi horror writers: if humanity is constantly plagued by vastly superior alien races bent on killing, enslaving or eating us and/or our planet, how the fuck are we still here?

This is the problem of most of laid-open "god" horror: you have an entity that wants to smack the lot of us off this piece of rock, and has the means to do it, in a multitude of ways. But for some reason he/she/it chooses not to. "It's an alien intellect so vastly beyond our comprehending that we could never understand it's motives or actions" only carries you so far before becoming a rather corny and not a very satisfactory explanation.