I just finished the second video of the Fall of Magic actual play series that I am editing. Fall of Magic is a game written by my friend Ross Cowman that's on Kickstarter right now. And it's doing really well! The whole game is screen printed on a 5 foot scroll, so it's a piece of art in addition to being a game. I'll also be writing one of the lost islands for the game if it gets to that stretch goal.

The video is similar in style to the Life on Mars actual play video I made for Ross. My goal with these videos is too keep them watchable and entertaining while still giving an honest portrayal of the actual experience of sitting at the table. I try to edit out any lulls in the conversation or narration, or any parts where the camera is a bit too shaky, without removing any of the content of what people were saying. Unlike the Life on Mars video which I filmed and edited, the Fall of Magic videos were actually shot by Ross and I think he did an awesome job.

I also filmed another game of Fall of Magic which Ross is editing, and the way we are trading off on roles makes it feel like this cool collaborative project. I'm excited to see those videos too when they come out. I've been thinking about starting a Patreon for making actual play videos like this for other people's games, in addition to more promotional stuff like the video I made for Second Skins or the one I made for The Quiet Year, so if you would be interested in having me make a video like that for you, let me know.

I had this dream last night where I was at a story gaming convention at a hotel. An ex was there (one who in real life never played story games). A friend of hers comes over and it's someone I know, a girl who maybe I saw once a year at conventions. She was familiar in the way that I knew we had hung out before but at the same time I had no firm memories of her. She seemed to remember me better than I remembered her which made me feel a little guilty.

We all go out for dinner and... at some point she turns into a cat. I could tell in the dream that she just had decided she wanted to be a cat so she became one. A little black house cat. There was nothing strange or silly about it.

Fall of Magic Actual Play part 1

I'm currently working with Ross Cowman on a series of videos of a game of Fall of Magic played by some good friends. The game is currently being kickstarted here, and is also an awesome work of art in itself, printed on a 5 foot long scroll. The next part should be out sometime in less than a week. Check it out!

Broken Picture Telephone at ECCC 2015

Last Year at ECCC I was having trouble interacting interacting with the artists and I had the idea to play a game with them. It worked, I ended up meeting and talking to a bunch people and it was a lot of fun. So this year I did it again.

Picture Telephone is a game that has been around for a long time, no idea how long. It's been known by many names, Drawception, Telestrations, Exquisite Corpse, and Eat Poop You Cat are just the ones I know, there may be more names I've never heard. The way you play is one person starts by writing a description (you can start with a drawing too, if you like, it works the same way.) It could be a description of anything, doesn't matter what. Then the next player reads the description and makes a drawing of it. The player after that only sees the drawing, and writes a description of it. Play continues like that, with each player only seeing the work of the player who went before them. At the end the whole game is revealed to all the players and it's usually pretty hilarious.

There are two websites that I know about where you can play this game online, one is broken picture telephone.com and the other is drawception.com. There is also a boxed version I've never played called Telestrations, but you can easily play it yourself with some scraps of paper and pencils and a decent sized group of people.

Most of the people who played this year were people in the artist alley, and I brought back a couple artists who played before but most of them were people who hadn't played last year. Aaron Diaz started it off and I had Jeph Jacques (who started last year's game) draw the extra last panel for the game that started with a drawing. I ran two games simultaneously so each artist could draw for one game and describe for the other one.  It took me over 6 hours to get all the drawings finished. I planned to do 20 artists but the hall was closing after I got 18, so I ran off to get Jeph to finish it.

A big thanks to all the artists who played, I just do this for a fun, as a way to meet the artists, and my hope is that they have fun and feel like they made a connection with the other artists they played with, even if just in a small way. Everyone who played this year and even the people I talked to who didn't want to play or couldn't were wonderful to talk to and made it a blast for me.

So anyways, here's the games! This time I posted them in multiple versions so people could more easily view them on different devices. The first is a composite image of all the turns from each game in one big image, best for viewing on a computer. There are high res and lower res versions of each, but even the low res version is pretty big. The high res versions are mostly there in case someone wanted to print one out as a poster or something crazy like that.

The other galleries have all the turns as separate images, so you can download them individually or scroll through them more easily on a phone or other device with a small screen, instead of dragging around on the big image. Cool right? Also that way the artists or anyone else can download copies of their own drawings or just their favorites. I always hope someone gets a tattoo of one of these... If you don't like those galleries it's also embedded below the break, but the link versions are much bigger and nicer. Anyways, here's the links!

Big Composite images  

Separate Images Game 1   ------   Separate Images Game 2

Spirits of The Wild

This is the photo version of the game I made for Gamechef 2014, Spirits of The Wild.

It took me the whole week to make. I had to draw and cut out 10 cardboard stencils. Robert helped me get the cardboard from a dumpster and drew a lot of the stencils. Cutting them out with an x-acto knife was extremely time consuming. It's really difficult to get through both layers of cardboard quickly and precisely. After I was done I got two cans of glow in the dark spray paint (Glowz by Krylon) and went to the Olympia Train tunnel. The 10 different lines of the game are spread out fairly evenly down the entire length of the tunnel, along the south facing wall. A friend helped me hold the stencils and I sprayed. I forgot face masks so we were inhaling a lot of paint and fumes, especially when the wind in the tunnel died down. No fun.

Conceptually, here's how the project came about. The theme of Game Chef this year was "There is no book". I brainstormed a bunch of different approaches to this and one idea was to write the game on a wall as graffiti. As I thought about it, I thought it would be really cool to make a game that was basically two games. One game would be following the instructions of the game, but the other game would be finding the instructions themselves. After I settled on that, my original plan was to create a maze of graffiti messages in downtown Olympia with glow in the dark paint. The messages would be written in the alleyways around 4th ave, and each message would have an arrow leading towards the next one.

I ended up giving up on that idea at the last minute, mostly because I had run out of time and was preparing to do the graffiti on the weekend, when that area of downtown is super busy. The number of people around on weekends was part of the reason I wanted to do it there, for the visibility, but I didn't want to do it when they were around. Since I had never done anything like this before and since there would be so many people around and no other time to do it before the deadline, I felt like the chances of me getting caught and slapped with a fine I couldn't possibly afford were pretty high. Another option was to get permission from buildings, but that also seemed time consuming and somewhat unlikely.

So at the last minute I decided to switch to the train tunnel. The train tunnels have very low visibility, but that also made it much easier to do it whenever I wanted to. The train tunnels are already filled with graffiti anyways, so I figured that the police probably wouldn't even care if some guy did a little art project in there. If I didn't think that I wouldn't be posting this here, I would have had to use a pseudonym, So being able to take credit for the whole thing is an added bonus.

Picture Telephone with the artists of Emerald City Comic Con

This year at Emerald city Comic Con I played Picture Telephone with 25 comic book professionals.

AP: Suspended Animation, the conclusion

HUMANITY LOST- TRANS HUMAN

I have been talking about first contact for years. Ever since I was a little kid I had dreams of what it would be like to meet an alien, to travel to other planets like Captain Kirk. But everyone knew that if we ever did meet intelligent life, they wouldn’t look anything like the aliens on Star Trek. Life in the far reaches of space could take on forms that we would never even recognize as living things. Or it could take a form that was horrific to us.

Since the success of the DOR 8 the nation has been on a rollercoaster of relief and shock. After decades of rationing tightening restrictions on birth rights, when word came that a new world had been found, suitable for human life, the entire planet rejoiced. But the latest discovery has divided the people of the world.

When Archie Petrovsk returned from his mission in February of 2053 he was publicly declared to have died in hibernation. Conspiracy theories surfaced but few people took them seriously, including this very publication. I wrote an article in the 2053 March issue in which I personally denounced some of the more popular theories. The only proof that Dor 7 had returned with alien life were low quality photos that experts said could have been easily doctored, and even then it only looked like a cheesy sci fi effect dreamt up by a film student. Infamously horror filmmaker and photographer Darnell Reiner recreated the photographs using Hollywood special effects, which he documented and spread through viral videos on the internet.

Petrovsk’s death came as a soft blow in the light of the mission’s success, and he was lauded and memorialized as a hero who died ensuring the future of the human race. But his escape from government prison was an even greater shock. Last month we published the horrific story of the torturous experiments conducted on him, his daring escape, and the weeks he spent hunted like a monster by the government and civilians alike. His survival is a testament to the adaptability of the alien life form that has fused with his body.

This month we met with Petrovsk in his first public interview. He is still locked away for his own protection, kept in a secret location guarded by hundreds of his sympathizers. He must live like this to escape the millions of people calling him a threat to humanity and crying out for his destruction. In person, though his appearance is strange and frightening, I did not feel threatened by him. He appears as a dark, opaque blob, with a surface that shimmers with an oily swirl of color when it reflects the light. When he moves in front of a bright light, it shines through the substance of his symbiote and one can make out the vague human structure within, curled up in a fetal position like a child in the womb. His skin is transparent, transformed and merged with the flesh of his symbiote, showing the intricate web of veins, muscles flexing around the dark silhouette of his bones, the only thing blocking the light.

When he speaks his surface blurs, the smooth edge taking on strange contours as it ripples against the air to produce sound, though it perfectly recreates the sound of Archie’s human voice. The sound that emanates is directionless and seems to come from a person standing right beside me. I was told that If I touched his symbiotic skin that he could communicate directly with my nervous system, that he would be able to see and speak through words and images directly into my head. I was admittedly too squeamish to try this, though I saw it performed by some of Archie’s close friends. As they touched him they fell into a deep peaceful calm, and they later described the experience very similar to being in a lucid dream. Archie always appeared as himself in the dream, always accompanied by a woman with exotic Indian features who went by the name Isadora, the chosen name of the symbiote.

For whatever reason Isadora would not speak out loud, Archie spoke for her. Though Isadora seems to identify as a female, the symbiote seems to be genderless, seeming to take on the identity of the ideal mate of it’s host. For this interview I focused on interviewing Archie, but by next month I hope to gather the courage to have a much more intimate conversation with the Symbiote itself.

SA: How did you become a host?

AP: During my mission I came across an alien distress beacon. It turned out to be coming from a crashed alien ship. Upon further investigation I found the ship held many samples of alien species, but all of them seemed dead. I could not get into the rest of the ship. After leaving, some sort of life raft followed me. When I took it on board we found alien life forms inside, the blobs I called the Tarball. One of them… well it came at me and I thought it was attacking me and I wounded it. We were investigating it but it got out of the specimen chamber and somehow got onto me while I was in hibernation. It was able to reprogram Dor, so that had something to do with it.

SA: How did you feel about it?

AP: I was… really upset. I didn’t know what it was doing to me, what it was planning to do with me. I could only assume it was malevolent because it had done this without permission. I went back and forth between feeling this intense rage at being violated and then having powerful suicidal urges to kill myself, ironically because I wanted to preserve the person I once was and not be changed into something else. But, I guess like any other sudden change in life that you can’t control, eventually you are forced to accept what happened and learn to go on living.

SA: How do you feel about it now?

AP: It’s hard to describe the intimacy you gain from sharing a body and mind with another intelligent creature. But over time I guess I’ve become attached to it. I’ve started to call her Izzy, which is short for Isadora. But Isadora was someone I knew before I left on the journey, someone I cared about, and I don’t feel right calling Izzy by the same name. I don’t really believe in being forced to be with someone, so I’m always reluctant to admit this, but I do love Izzy. I stopped being mad at her a long time ago, she’s shown me her mind and feelings in a way that let me actual experience them, and I understand that the fact that she joined with me was a raw biological need that she couldn’t help. I feel like we were both victims of circumstance, thrust together. But we’ve been able to accept that circumstance and learned to find comfort in each other’s company. Companionship. The amazing thing is she loves me too, and maybe it’s all biological but… I’m happy being with her.

SA: What are the benefits of being a host?

AP: Well, I never get hungry, I never have to go to the bathroom, and I don’t need to breathe. Izzy is an extremely efficient organism and only needs sunlight and now and then a few minerals to live on. More than that I have access to very heightened senses and a broader range of them. I can sense electrical impulses, heat, ultraviolet light, humidity and pressure differences in the air, and sound, feel, taste and smell to a much higher degree than usual. I can sense and see the world in a way that is far beyond the normal human experience, more than I could ever describe to you in words. The last major benefit is the ability to communicate mind to mind, not only with Izzy but with anyone I touch. The feeling of connectedness to other living beings that results from knowing the innermost part of another person is incredible. We can even talk to animals.

SA: What would you say to other people thinking of becoming hosts?

AP: It’s not something to be taken lightly, and until there is broader acceptance I would definitely not recommend it. I know that the majority of the world thinks I need to be destroyed, and I even thought the same myself at first. You’d have to be able to accept a complete transformation of everything you know, doing away completely with your concepts of self, of privacy, of beauty… everything changes. But I don’t want anyone to think that this is the answer to hating the world or yourself. It’s a change that one should approach with love and readiness.

SA: How do you feel about the groups calling for your extermination?

AP: I completely understand and empathize with their fear. To them I represent the destruction of humanity, and I certainly may be something that could change humanity forever from it’s current form. But only for those who choose it. The thing is, humanity needs to change. We’ve been over consuming and destroying our planet and each other for far too long. We’re lucky we were able to find another planet this time, But that doesn’t mean we can continue living as we have been. If we continue at the previous rate we’ll use up the new planet’s resources within the next thousand years and be faced with extinction yet again. And that’s if we don’t kill each other first. The impulse in people to destroy me is the same impulse, the same fear of the unknown, that causes people to go to war and kill each other. Need and scarcity breed greed and insecurity. It’s possible that the only way for humanity to change is if we get help, and as frightening as it is, that’s exactly the sort of change Izzy and her kind offer.

SA: What do you think the relationship between Humanity and the Tarballs will look like in the future?

AP: Let’s not call them Tarballs, it’s an ugly name that I came up with in my initial ignorance. I’ve been trying to think of something better but it’s difficult to translate my understanding of these creatures into such a condensed linguistic form. I’ve been toying the idea of some simple word implying a conncection between two things, like links, bonds, or hybrids. So maybe step one to helping our relationship grow is a nicer sounding name. But really I feel that Humanity and Tarballs will join, if not physically, than in an alliance. I think once people can meet me, speak with me, connect with me and really get to know me and Izzy, the thought of becoming a host will become much more attractive. Many people here already want to have what I have with Izzy. And I think that’s wonderful, not something to be afraid of. But I also think it’s wonderful that much of humanity will not want to and will remain unchanged.

SA: Will we have to go to war with the hunters?

AP: I sincerely hope not. I have already seen how easily eradicated they are by our military might. Surely they will want revenge on us, and my heart pours out for the pain they must feel at the loss of an entire planet. But… war for them would be suicide, and we must do everything within our power to prevent that. They are a people not much unlike ourselves, and we need to focus on what we have in common. At worst I believe they will realize they have no hope of warring with us and will form a treaty out of necessity, but I truly hope we can come to a real open understanding of one another, without any resentment or guilt.

SA: If you could be human again, would you want to be?

AP: That’s a difficult question. To be honest I still feel I am human. And yet much more than that, I’m now able to connect with humans in a deeper and more profound way than was ever possible for me before. That is, given that a person is willing to accept me as I am. As a scientist the potential for creation with the uses of my extended senses and abilities excites me to… well I’m extremely excited to see what I can create from it. So… no, I wouldn’t go back given a choice, but at the same time I would not be sad if I had to, there’s nothing wrong or inferior with being human. I’m just happy with who and what I have become.

END.