Cardboard Code

The 3e module Return To the Temple of Elemental Evil has a gay couple in it. Kind of. Sort of. Not really. But definitely.

The Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil is such a weird book, to me. I mean almost all modules are weird to me, I don’t tend to find myself particularly interested in reading someone else’s suggestions for a site-based adventure. I mean those are good things to have, it’s really handy, but apparently some part of my brain has never needed someone else to stitch all those things together for me.

That aside though, the Temple of Elemental Evil is a ‘big deal,’ a sort of historical artifact whose importance isn’t really something I get. I understand that it was a big dungeon that Gary Gygax was fond of and ran people through, and one of the real high-value campaign books back in the day. It had enough cachet that in 3e, there was a book as a throwback to that original campaign, with all sorts of references.

In the Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, the players head to the site of the original adventure, with a town around it. This town apparently is developed from the original campaign, and is full of references to it. Particularly, the town has two ‘elders’ that aren’t quite governors, aren’t quite mayors, but are to some extent in charge. These two guys, named Burne and Rufus, are apparently, adventurers from the first campaign, refernces to Gygax’s own table.

Burne and Rufus are a pretty standard seeming pair of characters from the rulebook. One’s a wizard, one’s a fighter. They’re both pretty high level by the standards of a starting adventurer – in a world of 20 levels, a 10th level wizard is pretty significant, and capable of infrastructural power. These are the homage characters, characters that were good friends to one another back in the days of Gary’s table.

Now, this is where things get a little fuzzy. See, the best records I was able to find on this indicate that these two characters were not, in fact, gay boyfriends in the original adventures. They were just characters played by friends, who were nice to each other. And the thing with that is, as best I can tell, this led to the rest of the table joking that they were boyfriends, which, given the time and context and the fact that Gary Gygax was a Jehovah’s Witness, probably indicated that these characters were being, rather than ‘gay’, being ‘gayyyyyyy.’

Now, this detail was then homaged in the campaign Return to the Temple Of Elemental Evil, where these characters who weren’t gay are seemingly represented as husbands. They share their tower, they share their quarters, and they share their apartment. When asked about it, the module author, Monte Cook, said that while the original characters were not intended to be gay, according to their players, when he wrote the campaign, he did intend them to be, but chose ot do it in a way that didn’t involve explicating it. It’s got an odd little effect of being a sort of sneakiness, like he was trying to make sure he hasn’t actually done anything an editor might notice.

What’s more, it’s an especially interesting example because it feels like something that started as a meanspirited joke between pretty sophomoric guys, that then decades later another author hit upon it as something that’s actually interesting about the characters and weaves it into things, resulting in a footnote in an edition that is otherwise, honestly, quite lacking in any material.

Pride month is rough on me when I want to write about 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons. One part of the problem is that the kind of thing I was interested in, and bought during that time, was much more about character options and Dungeon Master advice. Complete Warrior, Complete Arcane, those books are ones where there’s a lot of talk about what goes into a character, and not about what that character expresses.

That means that I honestly don’t know much about the place I’d expect to see Pride material show up in the game, because with a few exceptions it’s largely not something character-construction rulebooks have anything to talk about. What I’d expect to see for representation of queerness in the world of these games is either explicitly intentional worldbuilding advice (where the books wouldn’t mention queerness, because they weren’t comfortable with the topic), or in any given text that represented characters and their relationships to one another.

Basically, the books I was getting weren’t the ones with scenarios and modules and non-player characters in them. The Dungeon side of the publication, rather than the Dragon side of it. I haven’t the means to look at every published guide to find anything ambiguous in them, and I have strong memories of owning an issue of Dungeon magaine that included a reference to a gay thieves’ guild leader, and the ensuing issue where a letter to the editor complained about it.

This is something that was present – after all, I was a bisexual guy reading these magazines and books so I knew there had to be queer people playing Dungeons & Dragons! But it was something that apppeared in such minor ways.

Back when the game was much newer, I understand there was a lot more proactive gender play, as framed by dudes who didn’t want to talk about things and weren’t particularly endowed with the deeper language required to talk about gender. Supposedly, Gygax’s table had people who had spent years in differently gendered bodies – always deniably in the background rather than in the actual events – like they were going on a vacation. These particular ideas, while being a bit on the weird side for their context, were all about playing with gender through a system that let them do.

It’s kinda interesting that when things went corporate with Wizards of the Coast, in 3rd edition, a lot of these signifiers kinda … just went away.

Hey, you wanna see what chunks of my phd look like in plain language before revision? Here’s a chunk! This is a section of the text called the Concept Emergence. This segment is meant to serve as an expositional description of the process of pulling together the ideas that underpin Moonshiners and why I made it.

The backstory elements of the Moonshiners that came to form the game’s lore were necessarily a result of things that I find interesting, which means necessarily engaging with the reflective practice of what I personally find interesting.

The auction mechanic I think comes mostly from watching Cash & Guns. That game was, upon playing, a pretty simple kind of auction – players take the roles of criminals after a major heist. One player is designated the boss, and then other players are gangsters under the boss’ rule. Players then load their guns with a card (that can represent an empty chamber or a full one), and point their gun at another player. The boss can change where someone’s pointing (usually meaning the boss points people away from themselves), and people count down to either revealing their card or lowering their guns. Lowered guns get out of the hand, the revealed cards either go click or bang, and the people who’ve been shot are out of the hand. Then players distribute the items in the lot based on having survived the hand. The game’s auction system is spending a limited resource – whether or not someone has bullets is a depleting resource over the course of the game, and in that, players can treat themselves as ‘spending’ their bullets throughout the game, and the boss role can be purchased during the distribution of the lots. With that resolution system out of the way, though, the rest of the game is a series of valuations of interconnected sets, the types of loot a player can get, the type of ways those loot can interact with one another, rewards for being good at it or bad at it, that kind of thing.

This kind of intrconnected loot is what started part of the design thoughts of Moonshiners. I wanted a game where the resources players are competing for represent a variety of different related mechanical pieces. At first, art objects cared about one another and money cards, then turf cards were useful for obtaining more money cards, and businesses were a way to spend money cards that had late-game value. This initial presumption would not survive extensive playtesting.

The werewolf bootleggers comes in part I think from learning about the colorado miner strikes that led to songs like Solidarity Forever. Best I can track is that this particularly kicked off with a viewing of a Chill Goblin documentary that led to a lengthy binge of Moonshine-related distilling material on Youtube (cite, September 2023). There’s this aphorism amongst leftists that you go far enough left, you get your guns back, which while specious (as I’m pretty anarchist in my politics but don’t particularly plan on getting a gun), served as a novel take on a stereotype I knew I hadn’t really considered enough. Couple this with an interest in bootlegging and the culture of the American deep south and Appalachia alcohol culture, I found myself finding the idea of people who make alcohol out of an interest as an actual interesting, meaningful core of the storytelling.

The redneck is a well-established and well-known character in a lot of game media. They’re typically depicted as thoughtless, toothless, reckless and tasteless. While I didn’t intend to lionise it, there was also a documentary I watched about The Beverly Hillbillies (how the Beverly Hillbillies changed everything, April 2024, Quinton Reviews), where the reviewer repeatedly establishes that the Hillbillies in question were simple, not dirty. This idea of re-examining assumptions about these people helped to serve conversations with my friends about the culture of the space.

That was the next conceit. I already had ‘werewolf bootleggers’ as stated, but I didn’t have the idea of heroic redneck bootleggers brewing moonshine in the woods. That came from this point, as I grew on the idea of people who distrusted a disaffective government, who had no interest or trust in the people who were ostensibly in charge of them, and therefore, the things that those people were supposed to be getting as a benefit for their tax. They hated the revenuers, because they didn’t see any thing they were getting from the government in any kind of context, and that makes the revenuers just thieves who showed up and took from them.

That gives two parts of the fork for the concept of this game. There are the werewolves, tough and powerful characters who like to fight and brawl. They want to supply booze to the businesses they’re ensconced with, and they do this with their big social Meets. The Meets are an opportunity for characters to set boundaries and recruit members of the family who want to work with one another, without anyone being properly actually against one another. With my existing design senses, I had a few ideas for what ‘stuff’ might feed into this, such as thinking there could be a way to make players have access to proper currency and bidding. I could use whiteboards and pens so players can place bids in a Dutch auction style, but I wanted turn-based bidding so the fighting could happen. In order to have turn-based, simultaneous bidding that could burst out into violence, I needed the game to have a turn-based mechanism, which meant that I was once again turning to my beloved toolkit of decks of cards. These cards led to subsequent design challenges and new demands of the art and fiction of the game, which will be covered later.

With this in mind, I summarise it as the epiphany: Chasing Trends – I will find myself deeply fascinated with a subject, and then making game mechanics to represent that subject become more interested in it. There is a self-feeding mechanism in my practice, and that creative practice is something that can sustain itself, which means the challenge is actually in finding when to stop, in order to make something shareable. There are going to be material boundaries, which include the current ongoing problem of trying to find artists who can help actualise these ideas into physical pieces that I can then turn into the distributable game.

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.