“Sage? It’s William. I know you’re in there. Look, we need your help–”

The taller man cut the shorter one off, pushing past him and stooping to apply picks to the door lock. The shorter man stood dumb as the tall one easily opened the lock and slipped into the apartment. A moment later he too crossed the threshold, stepping uninvited into the apartment at the top of the stairs.

He discovered his companion along with their quarry, a young woman no more than nineteen years old, in a cramped and cluttered office. The taller man stood with his hands in his pockets, grimly watching the woman. The woman sat slack-jawed in a reclining chair, her eyes unfocused, staring in the direction of a half dozen computer monitors. The screens flickered, casting different colors of light across the back wall of the room. Each seemed to be displaying information at random, and changing every few seconds: a photograph would blink out of existence to be replaced by an encyclopedia article, then a news clipping, then a photograph again, and so on ad infinitum.

“Sage?” the shorter man repeated, stepping forward to stand beside her. When she didn’t respond he passed his hand in front of her face, but her expression remained blank, unaware of his presence. Her breathing did not change, she did not even blink.

“She can’t hear you,” the taller man grunted, once again reaching into the inner pocket of his coat. The shorter man frowned.

“You said she could help us,” he said, the earnest tone in his voice giving way desperation. “You said you could make her help us!”

The taller man held up his hand, silencing his companion. His other hand reached into his coat and withdrew an aged paperback book, no more than 200 pages, tossing it so that it arced and fell into the lap of the catatonic woman. The Adventures of Tuxedo Cat, the shorter man read on the cover. He blinked and glanced hesitantly to his companion. The woman stirred, and for the first time since either man had entered her presence, she blinked. She blinked slowly, and so deliberately that the way her eyelids slid down to momentarily cover her eyeballs was practically audible. All at once she stood, plucking the book off her lap and stretching her back, rubbing at the weary circles under her eyes.

Five years ago the woman had been diagnosed with high grade astrocytoma and given a grim prognosis. An immediate surgery was scheduled, and purely by chance it happened to coincide with a celestial event: a meteor shower and a resulting power failure which brought her surgery to a premature halt. And after that she had never been quite the same. The tumor sat on her brain, like some bloated spider beneath the crown of her skull, legs wrapped tight around her gray matter.

They called her Sage now. This was not some fiction about human beings only using ten percent of their brains; she had merely become a statistical outlier. Her capacity for recall and her ability to collate information had both been increased beyond previously observed limits. It was not merely that she could recall in exquisite detail everything she had ever seen, read, heard, smelt, tasted or felt. It was her ability to cross-reference this knowledge, to draw connections between disparate pieces of information, that made her miraculous. Sage made the invisible plain, like a conjurer plucking scarves from thin air.

A brief while later the two men walked back down the stairs. Again it was the shorter man who spoke first.

“She’s getting worse, isn’t she?”

The taller man stopped and turned to look at the shorter man over his shoulder, his expression unreadable.

“It’s a cancer, Liam. She goes on living with it, but…” He shook his head and turned to resume descending the stairs. “There is no worse. There’s just dead.”

My name is Doriana Mudd. I was born on November 1st, 1851. I’m still alive, and I haven’t aged much past thirty-something. Which isn’t to say that I haven’t died. That’s happened, from time to time, but it never quite takes.

I don’t know what’s keeping me alive. I’ve had over a century to investigate my own mystery, to ponder the puzzle that I am. But to be honest I don’t have a clue, and never have. Every lead and every notion I’ve ever had has come to nothing.

I don’t know what makes me special. I know that I am alive today, and that it seems very likely I will be alive tomorrow. I know that I’ve been shot, stabbed, run over and in one case hung by the neck until dead.

And I know that I cannot leave the City. There wasn’t much of a city here, back when I was born. More of a fort in the woods. It’s the same now as it was then; If I get more than a few miles away from where the buildings stop, I pass out.

When I come to, I’m always back inside the city. Used to be that every so often I’d get angry, sick and tired of feeling like a caged animal. I’d make up my mind to start walking away, with every intention of never looking back.

These days I’m too scared for that. I don’t like waking up in strange places, for one thing, and I’m too old and too set in my ways. Too frightened to give up control. And maybe I worry.

Maybe I’m afraid that whatever keeps me alive, whatever keeps me eternally young, is caught up with this city somehow. Maybe it’s better not to tempt fate. Maybe if I keep trying to leave, one day it’ll actually let me go.

I don’t want to die, and fortunately for me, I can’t — not for very long, anyway. But don’t call me an immortal. Please.

I peer at my own face in the mirror, half-covered in a beard of white foam. I run the safety razor under the water and then lift it up under my chin, holding my breath as it glides against my skin. My stubble is just a little too coarse for this two-bladed piece of crap, and it leaves behind an invisible but irksome residue of bristle, even when I shave against the grain. I could shave my whole face twice and cut my skin to ribbons, or leave behind enough growth to have a 5 o’clock shadow before lunchtime. I read somewhere that you can soften facial hair by using conditioner on it before you shave, but I’ve never tried it.

I’m contemplating all of this when I abruptly fall to my knees. Simultaneously my head dips forward, cracking against the edge of the sink, and I topple half-shaven onto the tiles of the bathroom floor.

Clairvoyant narcolepsy, that’s the simplest way of putting it. I perceive things in my dreams that I have no rational way of knowing, visions of other times and places, of the future and the past. But only the dreams I have when dozing, nodding off from the waking world and peering into another.

In this particular vision I’m someone else, and I’m standing on the ledge of a roof overlooking some squalid neighborhood south of the city center. I can feel a tingling in my fingertips, and I flex my digits, sensing currents of potential in the air, like the moment before a static-electric discharge. If I had a mirror, I could see who I am, and maybe make some sense of this vision when I wake up. But the mirror I’ve got is back in my bathroom.

Back in my bathroom, where I am concussed and quite possibly bleeding. Oh Hell.

I dream of rising up onto the balls of my feet, trusting the rubber tread on my sneakers to grip against the marble of the ledge. Am I going to jump? Apparently yes. Tensing my legs and springing, flinging my form inhumanly far, across the void of the gap between tenements to the ledge of the next building. Whoever I am, I’m not your average guy, but that’s hardly surprising. I don’t have visions of everyday events.

Speaking of which, is this the future or the past? There’s no immediate clues. I have a vague sense that it’s the present, or the immediate future, but by now I know better than to trust the leaps of intuition made by my sleeping brain. You ever know something in a dream, just know it out of nowhere but for dead certain? Even though it doesn’t make sense? Better to second-guess myself than to make faulty assumptions.

My vision swims a moment, bobbing as I walk across the roof and flip down onto a fire escape without using my hands. Something’s off about my hands; I’m nervous about accidentally touching the railing of the fire escape, fingers hovering a foot above the metal. I should be wearing gloves.

In the gap between my outstretched hands I can see down into the alley below. My eyes adjust from near focus to far, and it’s a moment before I make out the figure lying flat on the pavement. A female form in a house dress, on her back in the shadow of a dumpster. Not sprawled, just laid out peacefully. Her hair is splayed like a halo, half in the puddle of water beneath her head.

The muscles in my face twitch. Cognitive dissonance. Whoever’s eyes I’m seeing through, he doesn’t recognize the unconscious woman on the ground. But I do.

Time to wake up.

“Hey!” I shouted, blinking and trotting to keep up with it. My hand slapping at the closed door. “Oh, c’mon, you’ve got to be kidding me!” As the train began to accelerate I saw the corners of the train conductor’s mouth twitch, and something inside of me gave way. The hand I had been using to pound on the safety glass twisted, traced a sigil in the air. It was practically effortless; a gesture, and the brake went down, bringing the train to an abrupt halt. Another, and the doors wrenched open with a shuddering groan.

My boots pounded kick plate as I stomped onto the train, glowering at the stupefied civil servant who was now leaning back in his seat, lazily cowering from me. “What,” I said flatly, the neutrality of my tone surprising me, “the fuck.” When he didn’t reply for a few seconds I turned to stomp down the aisle of the mostly empty train car.

“Hey,” his high-pitched voice came from behind me. “Hey, mister, you didn’t pay your fare! Hey, come back here!” Rising anger in his voice correlated directly to an increasing calm overtaking me. The world around us grew quiet, the silence between us palpable. I turned back to face him slowly, forcing myself to be so cool that my voice was shaking.

“You’re going to give me a free ride,” I said without aggression or malice. I didn’t append any of the string of obscenities or insults that crossed my mind back when I was on the platform, watching him smile and drive off. For a moment I thought it was over; I could see the sweat trickling from the conductor’s bald pate onto the lines in his forehead. Then he spoke up again.

“I’m not taking you anywhere, freak. Off the train, now!”

The next sound I remember was the dull thump of his body hitting the platform, his lips curling back into a howl of anguish that wouldn’t quit until he went hoarse. I had peered into his eyes, and now the poor bastard was going to spend the rest of his life in an imagined torment of immolation. If he was lucky, he would die from cardiac arrest in short order.

“Shit,” I muttered wearily, reaching into my pocket for the last of my cigarettes. Stepping over his writhing form and ascending the stairs towards the street, I began trying in vain to dredge bus routes from the depths of my memory. I was going to be late.

So in keeping with my teeth-gnashing frustration at the abuse of the name Seraph by the Matrix trilogy, I’ve decided to focus a little bit of attention today on naming and terminology for this game. To that end the game itself has been given a name. It is at least tentatively to be titled HouseLight.

The following is a developing Glossary of Terms for both the game and it’s world:

• Avatar: one of those Iconoclasts whose mind has been freed to the truth, allowing them access to true independence and greater-than-human powers when operating inside the Shell. (E.g. Morpheus and Trinity.)
• Daemon: an artificially intelligent program which possesses an Icon within the Shell. (E.g. the Oracle, the Merovingian.)
• Host: a Daemon who serves the Source, with an eye towards order and control. As with angels, the plural is the same as the singular (a host, the host.) (E.g. Agent Smith.)
• Icon: a consciousness manifesting in the Shell. Most Icons are human minds, bound to a world of false material and blind to the lie. (E.g. random people in the Matrix.)
• Iconoclast: a human Icon which has begun to question the lies of the Shell. Only Iconoclasts may become Avatars. (E.g. Neo at the beginning of the Matrix.)
• The Shell: simulated reality, the false world constructed to imprison human souls and limit their potential. (E.g. the Matrix itself.)
• The Source: refers to both the demiurge which constructed the Shell, but also the truth that underlies the Shell which Avatars can perceive. (E.g. the Architect, although that’s debatable.)
• The Trunk: any of a number of simulated realities accessible from the Shell but which obey different natural laws. (E.g. the train station.)

Clever people will notice that these are all some sort of double entendre, although some are better than others.

A typical game arc would therefore concern player-characters who began as Iconoclasts, came into conflict with the Host, became Avatars, confronted the Source and changed (or destroyed) the Shell forever.

I have also begun to broaden the scope of my influences on the game; while it remains a primarily Matrix-themed RPG, I have begun mentally borrowing elements from Carnivale and the Amory Wars. It remains to be seen whether this is a positive development or will lead to the idea losing focus and becoming a sprawling morass of unfinished ideas.

This is fine, I guess. It works really well for games like Primetime Adventures. But it isn’t always what I want.

Done incorrectly it can cause a game to become choppy. There have been times around the table where I’ve felt that the scene was over just as I was really getting into character. I’m spoiled by boffer-LARPing I guess, where I have the opportunity to immerse myself in the persona of a particular character for whole days at a time.

Maybe I’m in the minority, but I actually enjoy roleplaying for it’s own sake. It’s good if a game can manage to stay on task, to prevent a session from being totally aimless. But one of the things I miss from my days in traditional gaming is the freedom to stretch my legs. I don’t necessarily want every scene to be long and discursive, but I think it would be good if that was at least supported.

My vision for my currently untitled Gnostic Allegory game, for example, is going to require scenes of exposition and also the joyful wankery that is in-character philosophical conversations. If it’s going to conform to my current vision, those things will be vital.

The trouble as I see it is this: I know that a system can support short, punchy and pointed scenes. I’ve seen some good examples of it, and have a fairly good grasp of several effective methods for pushing that type of play. But is there any way to push more rambling and digressive scenes using the system? Should that even be a design goal? Or will trying to create rules that do that just derail any game they’re part of?

A few weeks ago on the SGBoston mailing list I casually mentioned a desire to run a Matrix-themed game at some point. Not long after that my friend Dev wrote on his blog a post titled “The Matrix: Unknowable”. I cannot say for sure that he was responding to me, but I suspect he may have been, at least in part. And this post is my own thoughts; it is not a response to his post, except insofar as I read it, and thus his arguments got thrown into the stew pot of stuff about this as-of-yet undefined game that has been on my mind.

I’ve been batting around the idea of using a hack of the Don’t Rest Your Head rules, at least to get the ball rolling. That may or may not happen. At this point I am more concerned with precepts than I am with system. Design will come first, system will be added after. Melody first, and then the lyrics.

I kind of want to pick up a copy of the Matrix and Philosophy before I get too far into planning this game. I’ve heard surprisingly good things about it, for a pop-culture philosophy book. I have a pretty good handle on the Gnosticism in the mythic overtones of the first Matrix movie, enough to understand how on the one hand it was even cooler than it seemed on the surface and on the other hand how totally disappointing it was that the rest of the trilogy failed to deliver on the premise and promise of the original. Such is life. But I’m curious to gather perspectives from smarter and more educated people before I delve too deeply.

What I have in mind is to run a game that is inspired by (and thematically similar to) the Matrix. A game wherein the narrative and play concern a Gnostic Allegory as interpreted through the lens of Cyberpunk and the Jungian dissociation so endemic to modern life. What I do not want is The Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix^TM Roleplaying Game. So though I expect the archetypes to appear (or be reinvented by the players over the course of the game) I don’t want to start with a game universe that already contains Morpheus, or Trinity, or the One. I don’t want to prescribe the blue pill or the red pill, the Oracle, the Architect, or Agent Smith.

Also within the game, once the sky cracks open and the first glimmers of what may be the truth begin to seep through, I want to give the players at least the opportunity to paint their mythic overtones with larger brush strokes than were used in the film. I like mythic overtones. One of the most disappointing things to me about the Matrix: Reloaded was their decision to introduce a character named Seraph and then do absolutely nothing of substance with him.

(As a side-note: Seraph? Seriously? C’mon, people! Put not your faith in angels.)

(I’m given to understand that more was actually done with that character elsewhere, either in the video games or the Animatrix or both, and I don’t care. If you include him in the movie at all you become obligated to do something not-sucky with him. See also General Grievous. But I digress.)

Finally, and perhaps most crucially at this stage, I’m starting to think this is the sort of thing I don’t want to do at SGBoston. I do not mean to impune that hallowed conclave and all that it has given me, but I have noted in the past a difficulty in presenting certain genre pieces in that setting. These notions have reached a critical mass in my head; if I’m going to do this at all (and it’s looking increasingly like I am going to) I am going to do it right. And that means getting together the right small group of players, and hashing out something big. Something that will likely take a few sessions to play — more than four and fewer than a dozen, is my current estimate. Something that synthesizes the lessons I have learned from the Story Games crowd and the things I still find useful from my days in more traditional gaming and puts them forth into the world in the first instance of something that is really mine.

It’s funny to say that about a game derived from a movie, but, well, there you have it. More to come.

I am wary of over-compartmentalization. If I’m going to have more than one blog, I want to have a solid idea of what each one is for. They might not need actual mission statements (although those aren’t necessarily a bad idea), but ideally each blog should have a clear focus.

In the Fall of 2007 I started attending a weekly meet-up at Pandemonium Books in Cambridge called Story Games Boston. I’ve been playing roleplaying games for much of my adult life, but SGB broadened my horizons in ways I could never have imagined. There was, I discovered, an entire small press and indie games movement. A movement I learned about firsthand by meeting a number of the writers and game developers involved in it, several of whom participated in SGB (or were its founders.)

I had always considered my philosophy on gaming to be among the standard points of view. I liked systems well enough, but I was always more interested in the roleplaying than the games. I wanted to use games to tell stories; I made primary use of the Storyteller System to do just that. And when the system got in the way of story, well, that was life. It could be disregarded or house-ruled at will.

Little did I know that, up until my first contact with SGB, I dwelt in darkness and ignorance. The Storyteller System, it turns out, was not the end-all be-all of roleplay-driven games. It wasn’t even close. Here was a community of people at the Forge and Story-Games.com who looked at the status quo and were deeply unsatisfied. “Why should the system get in the way?” they asked. “Why shouldn’t everything in the system work in service of a good story?”

It was a revolutionary notion, to be sure. And just like the heroes of old, this fledgling community decided to be the change they wished to see in the world.

My perspective on the gaming world has changed radically in the past couple of years. All sorts of new notions and ideas brew and percolate in my head. Unfortunately, in my adult life, the constraints on my time are different, and my opportunities for gaming are significantly lesser than they once were.

I haven’t had a lot of success writing about these new ideas. I started a gaming quotes community over on LiveJournal, but it never really took off. So I’m going to give game-blogging a shot here at Enthusiastick. Maybe even put a few of the things I’ve designed down on paper. Share some actual play reports, all that funky jazz. Where we go from there is anyone’s guess.

But that’s at least one of the things this blog is for.

3 years later, in the Spring of 2007, I participated in the founding of a LARP called Steam & Cinders. The organization running that LARP decided to incorporate, and I was very flattered when they chose the name Be Epic to adopt as their own. Once the corporation existed the be-epic domain was transferred to its ownership.

Which is all well and good, I suppose, except it left me without a web presence. I sifted through the domains I already owned and found none of them to be particularly satisfactory. After an excruciating and agonizing process of coming up with new ideas for a domain name, only to discover that all the good ones were taken, I settled on Enthusiastick.com. That pretty much brings us up to date.

Why should there be a blog here, when I already have a LiveJournal? Good question. Maybe I’ll get to that in my next post.