Burrowowl

Anybody that has a website that permits both comments and search engine spiders has run into comment spammers. They don’t care about rel=”nofollow” attributes. They don’t care about the subject matter of your site. They just post their gibberish and URLs and get out of dodge. One of the mechanisms I use to reduce the amount of comment spam on the sites I maintain is Akismet, who have been kind enough to publish stats on the sheer volume of garbage being dumped onto our Internets these days (which, contrary to popular belief, is much like a dumptruck: you can pile all kinds of stuff onto it).

Their stats map pretty nicely to the raw volume of unsolicited bulk email that my benevolent employer sees. It’s nice to know that the spammers are keeping their minds open to both new and old vectors to defraud the public.

With the close of my recent Iron Kingdoms campaign and the start of Dan’s Serenity Game, I’ve had a lot more free time to fritter away online instead of doing game prep. One of the fruits of this newfound spare time was the discovery of My Life with Master, a dark little RPG by Paul Czege. MLwM uses a light sprinkling of rules and a heavy slab of genre assumptions to build a storytelling framework that is a departure from your typical Dungeons & Dragons, Palladium, or GURPs fare.

The setting of My Life with Master is a remote town in central Europe some time around the year 1805. Science and Reason are on the ascent in the civilized world; but fear, uncertainty, doubt, and superstition linger in the zeitgeist. The primary antagonist is always the Master, a character created by collaboration between the game master and the players. The Master is primarily defined by his what he needs from the town folk and what he wants in regards to The Others. The particulars of all this vary according to the imagination and agreement of the play group. The Others are some person or group that the Master does not dominate, and the Master’s wants revolve around his relationship with them. My Life with Master uses several examples to illustrate this, the most clear-cut being how Doctor Frankenstein desperately wants the respect and approval of the scientific community. To satisfy the Master’s needs and the pursue his wants, the Master has a number of minions, each with a role in his schemes.

The minions are a pathetic bunch, really. These are the hapless, lonely, much-abused henchlings of a terrible power. The minions are motivated almost entirely by fear (of the Master), self-loathing, and a desire to belong; to be loved. The Master tasks them with horrible deeds, cowing them with fear and manipulating them with feigned intimacy. Eventually, through sincere contact with the townspeople, one of the minions will eventually break from the Master’s control, asserting himself and ending the reign of terror.

Unlike most RPGs I’ve been exposed to, My Life with Master has a definitive end-point. From the moment the Master is created, he is doomed to never achieve his wants, and is assured to be destroyed by one of the minions upon which he relies for his needs. Also unlike most RPGs I’ve been exposed to, with Paranoia as the most notable exception, the players aren’t expected to act as a coherent group working towards a common goal. The Master can be expected to set his minions against each other as their ties to the townspeople grow too strong, but in the long-term it’s in vain. The Master will die.

The game mechanics revolve around a very small number of numeric factors. The setting itself has ratings of Fear and Reason. Each minion has his own Self-Loathing, Weariness, and Love. By various combinations of these numbers (e.g., the Master rolls Fear plus Self-Loathing to compel a minion to perform a task; the minion roll Love minus Weariness to refuse) you determine how many four-sided dice are to be rolled. Adding the total value of the die rolls (ignoring all 4′s), whoever rolls higher gets his way. This is done on a per-scene basis, with scenes rotating amongst the players. One scene, one roll. Simple.

Due to the collaborative manner in which the Master and his minions are created, there seems to be ample opportunity for everybody to get a little of what they’re looking for, and the one-roll-per-scene dice mechanics fairly well assure that a game session won’t bog down into a tedious slog of number-crunching. If the Master ordered you to go kill the town cooper, you frame the scene, roll the dice, and describe the outcome. Yeah, you strangled the heck out of him. As you slog back to the Master’s demesne, you can hear his bereaved wife wailing at the injustice of the world trailing off into the distance. Add one to your current Self-Loathing.

I’ve been enjoying my stint as a player instead of GM, so I don’t expect to break this game out any time soon, but it’ll be waiting there on the back-burner, ready to pounce on the first sign of GM fatigue.

The Rebel alliance is made up of self-loathing Jedi who blame the Empire for every ill in the galaxy, and politicians suffering from power-envy, bitter that the galaxy’s only power can do what it likes without having to ask permission. The truth is that the Empire has behaved with enormous restraint since the Battle of Yavin. Remember.

Remember the gut-wrenching holos of weeping stormtroopers phoning their partners to say, “I love you,” before the station was destroyed. Remember those people leaping to their deaths from safety-pod hatches with no safety pods installed.

Remember the hundreds of droids buried alive.

Remember the smiling face of that beautiful girl who was in one of the detention cells.

Remember, and realize that the Empire has never retaliated for the destruction of the Death Star in anything like the way it could have.

So a few Rebels got locked without a trial in cell block 1138? Pass the Kleenex.

So some Gungan wedding receptions were shot up after they merrily fired their blasters in a sky full of Empirial shuttles? A shame, but maybe next time they should stick to confetti.

I love the Empire, yet the Empire is hated. The Empire is hated because it is what every galactic empire wants to be – rich, free, strong, open, optimistic.

Remember the Death Star. One of the greatest atrocities in human history was committed against the Empire. No, do more than remember. Never forget.

To everybody who told me that Irving Lewis “Scooter” Libby may actually have to sweat it out in a jail cell until getting a last-day pardon from George W. Bush: neener neener neener. How horribly naive. I humbly suggest that a constitutional amendment may be appropriate, removing the Article II Reprieves and Pardons power. When was the last time a president used this for anything other than rewarding cronies or to cover his own criminal behavior?

Scooter Skates
Full text of Bush statement
Bush Frees ‘Scooter’ Libby

*quick edit to replace scary Dick Cheney image.