Cardboard Code

This is an explanatory writeup of one of my Original Characters (OCs). Nothing here is necessarily related to a meaningful fiction you should recognise and is shared because I think my OCs are cool and it’s cool to talk about OCs you make.

Rile is a problem solver. That is, he’s a problem, and he helps solve things. Gabriel Singer escaped a covert lab where he was built, not born. His panic and horror leak out in combat, corroding minds and pushing people toward violence. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone (he does, actually, but he’s working on it — don’t be weird). The world doesn’t always give him a choice.

He’s quiet, intense, and clearly not okay. Polite, even gentle, but tension clings to him like static. People feel it when he enters. He avoids crowds and flinches at praise, but shows up when it counts. Even if it breaks him a little more each time.

It’s hard to be a hero when you’re a threat to the peace.

Rile as a hero can be best described as dutiful. In a landscape full of people who hurt other people, Rile steps up and stands in front of harm to protect the people behind him with all the energy of a retail worker clocking on. There’s a shift to do and he’ll do it, without speeches or praise. Such things even make him a little uncomfortable, a little shy.

Part of it is because how he protects himself while he’s protecting others is unsettling. A powerful telekinetic and less-powerful telepath, he’s more of a broadcaster than a listener, and the result is that when he fights, people around him tend to think and fight like him. Not allies – he can keep a lid on that aspect of himself, and he tries to keep his thoughts from being invasive to people he’s not engaging aggressively. But enemies get just as reckless and thoughtless as he does, with many foes fighting well past the point that a more thoughtful opponent might run away to avoid capture.

Thanks to his psychic powers, Rile constantly pushes incoming force away from him, and uses it to push his own attacks farther and faster thatn they would be. He fights with an enormous psychic projection of a weapon, which, in a seeming metaphor for his issues, forms an enormous, overwhelmingly heavy sword. This sword is capable of throwing enemies around, but mostly does damage to people’s minds and wills – enemies often black out or fall into locked-in hallucinations rather than physically fall unconscious from trauma.

It’s not something he’s particularly proud of. It leaks into his ordinary everyday life as well, where people who spend time around Rile learn about his feelings and thoughts easily, projected from him. Because he doesn’t want to run the risk of harming anyone unduly with his thoughts, he tends to sequester himself and keep himself away from others. There’s a part of Rile that is worried that a lack of attention to other people’s feelings might slowly turn him into a villain.

It’s not an unreasonable position – after all, while he thinks the laboratory that gave rise to him was a military experiment (because that’s pretty common), he’s yet to discover that he’s a clone of a psychic villain from the 2000s – and he’s one of many.

Mechanics

Rile is a Psychic Armour/Titan Weapons Tanker. I was interested in making this build ‘good’ and I had some Very Rare invention sets sitting around. I built him for Melee defence and recharge, since I figured that the defence would protect him from very common attacks, and high recharge could give him lots of stacks of the two defensive click powers, Psychokinetic Barrier and Consume Psyche. As it is, the numbers indicate he can do those two things stacked three times over.

His build as it is has:

45% melee defence, 36% smashing, with Defensive Sweep up. He can stack the sweep three times, but c’mon, if I’m doing that I have other problems.

90% resistance to Smashing, Lethal and Psionic damage

An absorb pad of 75% of his base hit points, which means an enemy needs to deal double his hit points in a burst window of 20 seconds or he’s never going down.

100% global recharge without Hasten.

A self-rez that recharges ridiculously fast (Momento Mori).

Mechanically speaking it’s not hard to get a build like this out of anything Titan Weapons, mind you. It’s a powerset that already benefits from recharge, because recharge gives better options in the Momentum window, and brings up Defensive Sweep more conveniently to enable momentum.

History

Rile is a weird character to think about in terms of his continuity. He’s been a lot of things but none of them have been Riley, as I think of him now, they’ve just been kind of near him, adjacent to him, bits and pieces of the concept I’ve had to explore in stages. The first form he took was Recollection, a character I made to join a ‘proper’ RP SG. He was a Mind/Forcefield controller, built at the time around the idea of being a sort of masc Jean Grey figure. I thought that if I was struggling to level team-reliant characters, I should try to get into a supergroup to do that. That connected me with Stranglehold or Eisregen, a guy who I have a lot of fondness for, even though I’ve fallen out of contact with him, a very odd person I think of as ‘Gossamer Blush’ but who I am now pretty convinced was just lying to me a lot, and Lady Darkhealz, a person who taught me a lot. I can’t think we’ve had three long conversations, which is an odd thing to consider. These are anchors in my mind to not just being a better roleplayer, but learning how to be a good friend, which included knowing how to set boundaries and defend them. That version had the clone backstory, and was, when that whole SG experience went badly, I moved him to the Young Spartans, my all-purpose catchment crew and gave him another Re-something name.

The next version of Rile was when Homecoming happened, where he became Retrace. Retrace was a Mind/Psi dominator, because I was trying to fill out all the dominator types that interested me. That build was fine and all, but he just didn’t have anyone to connect to, and I’m a firm believer that it’s *actively bad* to play a character who has to do a backstory dump for people to interact with them. What happened to him is interesting, but that’s not as interesting, in my opinion, as the person he is and how he talks to other people, and what he cares about, right? Interacting with him should be natural and involve learning about him, that kind of thing. Retrace similarly got no attention, and when he was isolated, I wound up reusing the build for another character when we got access to Monster Costumes.

When we got Psychic Armour, I made and levelled the character at first with only a vague idea of how I could use Titan Weapons to simulate the big psychic weapon, and the armour to fill in the concept space. I really like doing this kind of thing – using one powerset to represent the ‘power’ of the character and the other powersets are there to show them training or building other combat abilities on top of their powers. Like if a character has fire armour and then doesn’t fight with the fire armour, then learning how to do martial arts, or maybe use a weapon or something shows that they’re expanding their combat ability beyond the powers they’re granted.

And that’s where Rile is! The concept work all was laid out by the other versions of him that existed and hopefully give him some depth.

Conclusion

I suppose it goes without saying that Rile is yet another example of a Talen OC who is an extremely hot bisexual polyamrous boy who has a bad relationship to a morally complicated dad. He’s got emotional trauma that stems from some uncertain space and he has an impression of himself as only useful for violence. But, and this is important, what makes this one different is his outfit is purple and yellow.

I don’t want to try and give you an inappropriate amount of whimsy by parodying the opening song.

Look, there are a few texts I’ve considered sort of off-limits to discuss, because I don’t think anything good can come of my expressing my thoughts about them. Back in the day when this blog was opened to Twitter and was explicitly trying to get attention from people on that site, there was a fear that if I wrote something negative about a piece of media they cared about, a random stranger, marginalised and fragile, might take criticism badly and be upset. This was a real concern I had! I got static from people based on even implying I might have issues with She-Ra.

Now, these days in my life I don’t have the same problem; my best friend considers Undertale to be one of their favourite games, and I deeply hate that game, and I hate what it made evident in the videogame journalism space. Neither of which are reasons to dislike the game, mind you – that it impacted journalism badly, or that I dislike it.

Nonetheless, Steven Universe has been on my mind lately.

Hold up! Before you go any further, two things to know: One, I am not a fan of Steven Universe, and dropped off watching the show despite enjoying it quite a bit for a time. Second, this isn’t really going to be about detailed spoilers about what happens in Steven Universe as much as it is about ways of thinking about it, and feeling about it. There are going to be ‘spoilers’ but they are not actually specific spoilers – specifically, I’m only going to talk about the ‘end’ of the series in terms of its finale that I’ve absorbed through cultural osmosis.

Steven Universe is a show about this kid, named Steven. He’s from this nowhere Americaville, called Beach City, in that very particular kind of Americana where there’s this super relatable down to earth ordinary that everyone is aware of because America’s been exporting it forever. He lives with his dad Greg, and three super-powered aliens called the Crystal Gems, composed of Amethyst, the cool one, Garnet, the complex one, and Pearl, the other one.

I deleted so many jokes at Pearl’s expense there.

These aliens are present because, after many episodes, we learn that Steven is the child of an alien (sort of), and that alien was super important, politically, to these three Crystal Gems. They’re defectors from a vast alien empire of Crystal Gems, who have a network of weird and interesting places to go all around the universe where various problems need solving, and eventually Steven has to come to terms with learning that his parental figures – all of them – are people with the best of intentions who also fail in their own ways.

It’s a show that’s been sometimes glibly joked about as being ‘singing and crying,’ where episodes can be silly youth comedies, transformation fantasies, training montages and of course, immense trauma dumps.

I’ve talked about the idea of intrinsic versus extrinsic problems in media, where there are problems that media can have because of what the media wants to do, and then there are problems that happen because of the systems we have that let that media exist. One of the reasons I like genre media so much is because the requirements for a lot of that media is lower, as long as it is made cheaply enough and has all the hallmarks its likely fans are going to respond to.

Steven Universe had a lot of extrinsic problems, which are linked directly to the series being a piece of Queer Media made by Queer People. I understand that the Queer Author, such as it is, threw a lot of hands about it and that the series got made and managed to cross the line is itself a huge accomplishment, and very impressive. I tend to find extrinsic critique of media boring, otherwise I’d have to jettison all consideration of say, movies and manga, because I don’t think any of those exist without some kind of unreasonable abusive work standards.

Now, nominally, the problems I have with Steven Universe are largely a bunch of intrinsic problems. That is, a person can’t make Steven Universe, with the values it has and the way it wants to tell its story and with its character archetypes and its personality and identity, without doing the things I don’t like about it. I don’t like things about Steven Universe that are about what it chooses to be and what it chooses to value.

For example, I dislike Peal’s behaviour a lot. I don’t think that she’s a character who should be positioned in authority over a child. I think that a sensible adult watching this scenario would realise one of these characters is making their emotional damage the problems of a child, and violating that child’s boundaries in a way that aren’t good. The story, however, is about Steven, who can handle those violations just fine, and the focus wants to be instead on Pearl, who seems to be some kind of autistic trans lesbian who just cannot get over having fumbled a pretty girl in the past who Just Wasn’t That Into Her, and people see that as really relatable.

Which is not a bad story to want to have! But, and this is the most important of all… who cares?

I don’t just mean dismissively in that I’m some guy and my opinion doesn’t matter. My opinion does in fact matter, it matters a great deal to me, and by telling me that my opinion doesn’t matter at all, you’re devaluing something I made and wrote about and put effort in. You dick. But rather, when I think about my feelings about this show, who cares about this show?

Little kids!

Steven Universe is a show for and about little kids! Its metaphor is focused on little kids! This is a show where one of the problems of an episode was Steven and Amethyst getting too into being wrestling heels! A whole episode was about the silliness of a conspiracy theorist talking about sneeple!

Now, the counterpoint I could raise to that, my argument is, that hey, this is a culturally relevant program that adults like me care about, and they talk about it. I understand the ending of this show entirely from the cultural osmosis of the people around me! And I know that that ending is the ending that brings up the topic of genocide. I saw the scenes of the Diamonds doing genocide in the series before I dropped it, as it made that turn into the Serious Subject Matter. I know this is a series about a villain that commits a genocide, and I know the conclusion of the story isn’t going to be about those genocidal imperialists being hanged at Crystal Nuremberg.

In fact, and I say this only from again, cultural osmosis, Steven Universe probably ends with Steven singing a song to convince them to change their hearts. I’m even going to guess that they didn’t realise that what they were doing was a genocide. I’m not going to make fun of that idea, though because I genuinely don’t know if that’s actually the case.

Thing is, saying all that, what did I want? I don’t remember who said it, but a long time ago I remember reading about the conclusion of Avatar something akin to:

What, did you want this show for nine year olds to show the twelve year old snapping a grown man’s neck?

And like yeah, that’s pretty fanciful on the face of it.

I may have disdain for the idea of a story that wants to talk about a genocide failing to deliver on that genocide, but I think the problem is upstream of the diegetic moment of a child choosing to not to kill someone. I think the story shouldn’t be about that, that this hike needs bigger boots. I mean, I may have been raised on stories of heroes commiting righteous genocides, but I think that’s pretty messed up!

Steven Universe is a pretty incredible kid’s show! It looks great! The music is clearly very catchy (very catchy, to the cadence of giant wo-man). And for all that I dislike the show it is, every single complaint is merely an expression of not wanting this show, not that this show is not something someone should want.

I think I write this blog post every few years and I’m not particularly wild about it. It’s still something that I think I need to revisit, because every Pride Month, the same thing feels like it’s happening.

I plan well ahead for my blog at this stage. Typically speaking, at the end of each month, the bulk or whole of the next month’s posts are written, and maybe even made; the only articles that are made ‘near’ to their posting are Dev Pile articles (meant to represent ongoing work) and the video posts at this point. At the start of the year, I had a few videos already lined up – and I’ve definitely considered ‘belting some out’ for that category.

Lemme talk about ‘Queer Games’ as a category to talk about in Pride Month.

First of all, The Game Pile is an exercise in both playing games critically and about engaging with games in a way that I find interesting. It encourages me to play things, and it discourages me from just playing the same old things in a loop like my Dad who has sunk probably a full year of time into DOOM. Not that DOOM is a bad game or anything, but I want more. I want to have a full reasonable and interesting variety of work to look at. I want to understand the world of games with a great and wonderful variety. Right now there are some people who consider themselves really interested and informed of games because they’ve played all the Resident Evils and all the Dark Souls, while I’m doing weird stuff like playing flash games and board games and games that came out a few years ago.

I also want to be playing games that I find interesting and fun. This means that I commonly want to play things that feel good to play, with an interface I can engage with readily, and with reasonable pace and playtime options. I don’t have the time to sink into large JRPGs these days and I find visual novels an immense slog – just check out how my predominant feeling about Secret Little Haven was ‘dear god let me please speed up a little.’ I was honest about it, which is frustrating in hindsight because the game seems really good! Reading the text out of context, it’s really charming and made me smile a lot even when it was sad, but the thing that stuck out to me as a game was that it was the friction, not the fiction, that stood out to me.

And then there’s the way that “Queer Games” is a term that with almost no effort, can be used to justify talking about almost anything. Any videogame of any size was made with the work of queer people; I know for a fact, for example, that Guild Wars 1 was made in part with the work of a wonderful trans woman, and I know that that work was then part of Guild Wars 2. I could use this narrative as a reason to talk about Guild Wars 2 in Pride Month, which is a cute trick but come on.

Come onnnnnnn.

I know a large body of games are made including a piece of middleware that I know a trans woman worked on, that doesn’t serve as a transitory property! The idea of ‘look at this famous well-known beloved piece of work, surprise, you support trans leftist queer commies!’ is a cool trick but it’s not really worth doing twice. It is literally, a trick, and what’s more, it’s a waste of space.

I have, typically, fifty two Game Pile articles a year. Of those, four or five are going to land in June. I am a bisexual boy who is happy to write about queer stuff all year round, which means anything that lands in June with the theme of Pride, should be putting something more specific, more intense, more clear up for consideration. I try to make sure it’s something that pushes against my own limits a bit, too; for example, Gay Sauna: The Board Game was not a game I’d normally talk about, especially since I never had the option to play it directly.

That means that it’s not enough to have a game that’s made by queer people, and if I wanted to talk about some cool or great game and then go ‘surprise, you’re now an ally or else!’ I could do that any time. I’ve done that before!

Here’s parameters for what I think I want when I want to talk about Queer Games.

I want a game that is made by and with the involvement directly of queer people, and for those queer people to be open and publicly clear about being queer.

I want these queer people to be directive of the art and expressing something they want to, even if within constraints.

I want something I can meaningfully play and engage with in a way I find interesting.

These parameters are going to introduce some biases. For example:

If the game is to be made by publicly out queer people, it’s going to discourage me from any non-English game source. It’s going to encourage me towards smaller indie projects being made by queer people who have access to an existing network that could get the game in front of me. I’m going to be biased towards games that are made by my friends, for example.

If the game is being fundamentally directed by queer outlooks, it’s going to be biased towards games that are already favoured to queer folk and some of those game types may be ones made to be easier to play with, like Twine, Ren’Py or RPGmaker. Ren’Py and RPGmaker are both games good at making games whose genres don’t appeal to me, which makes the search harder.

The desire to play games that I find for lack of a better term, engaging means that I’m going to miss the deep, well populated category of queer art games, such as (for example) Anna Anthropy’s dys4ia.

These biases are not any kind of deal breaker. But they are biases, and it’s worth being mindful of them. I’m just not interested in talking about visual novels or lengthy JRPGs. I’m sure that some of the newer Atelier games may have some really cool queer potential, but I can’t speak to the representation being derived from queer creatives, and that’s got to be okay. You don’t want me talking to you about queerness from Japanese media as if I’m any kind of expert.

For All Mankind is a Show That Exists.

I watched a season and thought I’d do a whole Story Pile on it. Put it in the hopper, had some plans, at least kind of, thinking about how I’d address this show I was watching. I try to keep a pretty broad media diet, and quite frankly, I think NASApunk is a really cool aesthetic. Figured that there might be something to be said about alternate histories, and the very legitimate example of how America, a country obsessed with never being humiliated, might respond to not being the most special boys in the world. It’s a pretty strong series and definitely worth talking about!

The problem is it’s boring.

For All Mankind is a series set in an alternate 1960s America, in NASA, which means, even with the work the story does to try and fight the homogenised White Guy With Buzzcut cultural milieu of the era, it’s still predominantly looking at a bunch of guys who my dad would think look like ‘proper’ TV stars. In the story, in order to try and get ahead of Women’s Liberation movement politics, NASA takes up the task of training women astronauts, which involves the introduction into the story of the incredible Molly Cobb.

Oh and spoilers kind of for the first season of For All Mankind.

Molly Cobb is an arsehole. Just a real abrasive, hard-nosed, no-nonsense, tough-titties-cupcake kind of character of the era. There’s a lot of misogyny floating around in the passive environment of 1960s America, and Molly Cobb is a woman pilot who has succeeded in those spaces and in the process, become flinty and hard. She’s not without any thoughts to her appearance – I mean look at that blowback, she’s obviously a very specific kind of gorgeous.

She’s cagey about her homelife, too, which is pretty significant in this time. It’s not uncommon for the people in these spaces to talk about their homelives, which makes sense when part of the job of NASA astronauts is to self-isolate for a month or so at a time. It’s pretty reasonable to want to make sure someone is mentally stable and being aware of their situation and home life is part of that, after all.

This caginess about her homelife did build in me the curiosity, then nary, the expectation that Molly was private about her homelife because she had something specific to hide. This is the 1960s, after all, there’s a lot of homophobic legislation around things like whether or not you can fire someone ‘for being gay,’ and NASA are a public part of the government that does have problems with trying to be responsive to the public. The women astronauts after all, were being selected by Nixon (at first) to make sure they’d be good for PR.

(Which in this case, I’m pretty sure is that Nixon picked the hottest ones he could find in the dossiers. That’s just my impression of the kind of guy Nixon was, though. That guy seemed like a bit of a weirdo.)

Anyway, with this slow evasiveness about Molly’s home life, her privacy and her containment of that whole situation, I did kind of expect that we were getting a pretty stereotypical story. Butch lesbian, gets as far as she can in a misogynistic, homophobic environment, then she gets outed, we see her leave the story, maybe they play a sad song over her collecting her things from her desk because we know she’s being treated unfairly but there was no other way the story can go.

Anyway, then the show really abruptly shows Molly, in the bath, with her husband, Wayne. It is night and day with Molly; she’s laughing, she’s smoking, she’s chilling out and he’s washing her back. Then, like she’s reading my mind as a viewer, Molly says ‘They think I’m a lesbian at work.’

Now, that, on its own, is only so much to comment on. It’s the response that surprised me. Wayne, taking the cigarette (so they’re getting stoned, right?) leans back and contemplatively says ‘I do identify as a lesbian, politically, somewhat.’

Now, if that conversation comes up on Tumblr, this year, it wouldn’t be totally out of place. But in the 1960s, that particular line of conversation coming from Wayne who we’re kind of meeting for the first time, it’s not just a surprise, it brings in a vocabulary type I genuinely wasn’t expecting from this world of extremely tedious ordinary dudes. Dont’ get me wrong, it’s a speculative line of reasoning from the 1960s, but the actual conversations gender radicals and queer liberationists were having back then were denser than we in a post-MOGAI world may expect or even appreciate.

Basically, in the moment and the context, my reaction was: Wait, is this guy cooking?

We get to know Wayne after this point, even as a minor character who’s kind of subordinate to Molly, a character whose importance slowly recedes over the course of the story. I like Molly a lot, but part of what I like about her is the way all her recontextualisation works to take her away from a stereotypical lesbian story and instead show that this character has a sort of extra layer of depth, and that she’s connected to, or at least aware of, a defiance to a heteronorm. She’s not an honourary lesbian or anything by any means, I’m not trying to present her as any kind of icon, nor Wayne, but it means that the story doesn’t do it the way I was expecting.

Instead, Molly is an intense, driven, hard-nosed woman with an incredible technical skill, who loves and is married to and has a wholly emotionally resonant relationship with a sweet doughy guy whose primary income is from his work doing concert posters for bands in the 1960s.

The show does wind up introducing lesbians in space, clearly following the lead of The Locked Tomb. I understand it kind of winds up doing the same thing with the sad lady being forced to quit because she’s, again, a lesbian, and maybe we get a track play across her collecting her boxes.

Or they blow her up in a terrorist attack, I don’t know. I didn’t watch that far.

Still, For All Mankind has Molly in it, and I kind of hope that if Molly as a character got to stick around, she and Wayne would wind up being those cool older couples that when kids in the 90s started to get really weird with genders and sexualities, would go ‘that’s cool, y’all.’

Crisis is a tabletop role-playing game of superheroes and their limitations. The system is designed to run without any kind of gamemaster or storyteller steering the overall plot, and I’ve seen some describe it as a ‘diceless’ role-playing game. Building on Avery Alder’s Belonging Without Belonging tabletop roleplaying game system, Crisis is a game which seeks to take that system’s perspective of the marginalised building communities outside of an existing power structure, and employs it in telling stories of superheroes protecting a city in a time of, well, crisis.

It’s an indie TTRPG available on itch using an established system to present a bunch of tables, and it wants to talk about superhero characters as marginalised identities. Of course I was going to talk about this once I found it.

Mitch Schiwal’s itch.io creator page says they’re actively interested in reviews. Well, Mitch, I hope this is what you wanted!

You might not be overly familiar with the Belonging Without Belonging system. I’m not fantastically familiar with it, despite having talked about Balikbayan and Sleepaway in the past, so if there’s anything I describe in this ‘how the system works’ part that’s wrong, that’s on me, not on the system.

Belonging Without Belonging is a system where players have access to specific ‘moves’ that do things in the story. Moves are divided into two basic categories; there are ‘easy’ moves, which provide you with points, and there are ‘hard’ moves, which cost points. Easy moves often are things that make your life more complicated, and hard moves are often things that let you prevent or protect problems. The simplest version of this system is a sort of improvisational narrative where every cool thing is balanced with a painful thing. However, sometimes there are times when a player can’t do a hard move (no points) and they don’t have any easy moves that would work (because they’re hardly universal) which means players have to turn to the universal easy move, the all-purpose release-valve and story-progressor, ‘invite the Crisis to advance.’

This is one of the places where the game escapes the need for a storyteller. Inviting the Crisis to advance means taking the top card of a deck of playing cards, looking at it, and then incorporating that into the story. This is a whole deck of narrative prompts, broken up by genre into expanding setting information, creating tension and dread, indirect damage, and direct suffering. Basically, you have a one-in-three chance pulling a card from this deck to get a prompt that says ‘and then, things get worse.’

Where Sleepaway used its index cards to create a sort of conspiracy board (that I liked), Crisis has players making index cards that symbolise things that are places, people or things around the city. There’s also a setup for the overall story, which involves rolling some dice and using that with other players to come up with the surrounding material, which in turn, is maintained through the use of those cards that make up the tableau.

That’s the basics; moves-based action, prompts from a deck when you’re out of ideas, and some setup prompts. It is a system that works and, I think, for a particular kind of improvisational group, really strong. The game has a natural pull towards an end-game state, a specific genre it wants to express, and a clear idea of how it wants to do that. It is, as with many such games derived from a functional engine, a very functional unit of game.

There are ideas I like in Crisis. Some ideas I think I’d like better if they were handled differently, mind you, but the idea of it is by no means bad. It seems a good system for a campaign-based playspace, where the city can be built up, over time, and different heroes come to play in the same space the players built over time, to create a kind of universe or continuity that the players can learn to love. That is something I think is really cool, though I, again, have problems with it. When building up locations with cards laid out in front of players, it’s very easy for me to see that as the creation of an actual city, an aesthetically representative relationship of places in a bigger place. It is a city. When people and items are treated the same way, it dissolves that sense of relationship between them, and feel like that dilutes it. Could there be ways around this? Of course. I think I’d just cut any index card that’s meant to represent a person in half, so that it can be moved around, can rest on top of index cards that represent places, similar to objects or landmarks.

The idea of using a system for marginalised spaces in storytelling about a trope commonly discarded as a thoughtless power fantasy is, I think, cooking. I think very highly of the superhero as a character storytelling trope not because of its relationship to the significance of myth but because of its much more important relationship to creativity. Every superhero is expressing an identity, and if they’re not, then they really lose the identity of being a superhero. Just Some Guy In A Jacket is the worst superhero type, but a mask, a cape, a design, an aesthetic choice, that’s the person being creative.

The book has a sidebar on the superhero as a marginalised identity, and I want to argue with this panel for hours. I think it’s genuinely correct in that superheroes are a marginalised identity, and I think it’s completely wrong in how it explains the superhero as a marginalised identity. The idea of them being ‘not like us’ is part of the problem: Superheroes that aren’t ‘like us’ aren’t superheroes, they are the mythic heroes, the uncreative sorts. They all eventually become Homelander or Apollo or The Plutonian because being able to maintain and have a normal life that makes you ‘like us’ is what keeps these powerful characters from just eventually becoming gods.

Look, the superhero is, in its heart, the fantasy of a really powerful person who can do things that obviously need doing in an immediate sense that isn’t limited by the systemic rules of ‘you can’t.’ It’s the leftist fantasy that when given immense power, we wouldn’t abuse it, and we would find ways to confer it on people around us, ‘giving it away.’ When Superman stands in the way of a bullet, he’s not doing that so you think him stopping a bullet is dope, he’s doing it because he wants the person behind the bullet to not be hurt by the bullet.

Batman dresses up like a bat and tries to scare people because he thinks that would work on him if he wasn’t Batman. His idea of ways to change and guide people is through fear, and that fear is exerted by looking like a bat, because Batman responds to fear and is afraid of bats. It’s a simple example of a character whose identity explains ideas about his character. Bruce Wayne, the identity he normally has, is the most privileged person in the world; typically, a white affluent old-money and entrenched beneficiary of the systems of Gotham. Batman is not Bruce Wayne, which means he does not have those systems and is not allowed them – he’s Batman, he’s a guy the police shoot at on sight. To play the created identity, to do what the identity is meant to do, he has to take on an identity divorced from the ‘proper’ way for him to do things and exert power.

And then the only common point superheroes have – by default – is that they’re united in secrecy. They can’t know one another and don’t know one another – or at least have to say that. The identity is put on to engage with the community, which has a lot of parallels to other forms of marginalisation. It’s really interesting!

This is a good choice!

Now, I’m going to complain about Crisis a bit but any reader should bear in mind that:

I haven’t played it.

This is obviously a project made by maybe, like, three people, and the scope of what they can do is very different to a larger team.

First of all, Crisis is not a searchable pdf. Instead, all the text is embedded in images. I think this also makes it unreadable by screen readers, which is pretty annoying. I know I did a lot of stuff with embedded images turned to pdfs, I know I’m not blameless here, but this isn’t good and there are better ways to format a page.

This book is difficult to read. Not because it’s a challenging text, it’s not full of concepts that present a struggle to answer but rather the book is itself materially, difficult to read. It structures its information in a series of blocks, with a dense, heavy font that makes me feel like it’s the boldface of another, more readable font, and just left on. The result is that paragraphs sort of form spiderwebby blocks, undifferentiated from one another making it easy to lose place on the page, especially since all the pages are structured in very similar ways.

There’s very little use – I would really say ‘basically none’ – of layout, diagrams or art to break up or characterise the flow of the book. There’s almost no in-book visuals beyond some chapter title pages, and art and diagrams serve great purpose for tabletop roleplaying game books. It’s one of the tricks of game art signifying in rulebooks – they help players leafing through to find things they’re looking for.

I feel like this is a game that was predominantly playtested with the creator in the playtest group. The way the book is structured and written makes me feel like it’s got to be the product of someone who knows how to play it and just isn’t good at clearly or usefully conveying that to me, a mere bozo who has never played it. The prompts are so thin, things I know I could work with, but which I feel would leave someone who say, doesn’t have twenty years of tabletop roleplaying game experience under their belt really struggling to know what to work with.

There’s also a tenuousness the system, where the game system present things that seem like they should be specific, reliable rules, with the same structure as things that seem like they should be vague, aesthetic preferences. The rules encourage players to ignore things they don’t want to do, but I feel like doing that a lot runs the risk of depriving the system of any of the feeling of being present at all. When? How much? Should it perhaps be a pre-decided thing, a systemic way to opt out of things, or is the gentleness of this system that also wants to talk about the defender as a fundamentally suicidal urge just something that a player is expected to deal with?

Crisis is available on itch. I think it’s a really cool idea, and I think it’s got good ideas. I don’t know how playable it is to people of varying skills, to people who aren’t already vibing hard on the idea of a superhero narrative space. For me and my friends who are in a superhero narrative space the unfortunate and immediate follow-up is ‘what does this system get me?’ Do I need it? What about this game encourages me to play it?

There’s a really cool conversation the game implies about the philosophy engine of a superhero story. The archetypes are described by this author’s idea of how these archetypes should work and what that means, and what those characters even should look like, and that’s all interestingly encoded, but with a sort of sighing, trailing gasp of ‘well, if you want to, I guess.’

Oh, and let me be clear, this isn’t about the safety tools. Those are great, and the specific, personal way of describing it as never wanting to hurt a player is I think a good value statement and rules parameter. It’s more the way the rest of the rules are suffixed with ‘or you could not, if you want’ that strikes me as a sort of design fumble. Maybe make the deck design more of an explicit, shared experience? Talk about ways it can be done, or what removing cards could do? After all, many of the prompts are detail-light and nearly consequence-free; players might be trying to pull cards to avoid Easy Moves and have that bite them on the bottom when a crisis card comes out they can’ t fluff away.

I find myself less wanting to play this game than I want to encourage its designer about superheroes, to offer them ideas for the next thing, for ways to improve this thing. I hope it plays as well for the fans of the system as I want it to, for the ideas that it’s trying to deploy.