Monster, Monster, Come to My Door; for I've Rigged It with Unstable Explosives and Am Loading My Shotgun as I Wait for You.

I was discussing villagers the other night with a friend of mine when she made the comment that the villagers in every book, movie, and game are just faceless masses waiting for their own destruction at the hands of the latest bad guy to pick up a rock and think that blood is a pretty color and should be used to paint a room with because no one ever considers the way that people actually act when they get scared. It's too difficult to imagine that we pick up guns and start shooting every mother fucker who happens to poke his head in our window. 

She's not wrong. 

Think about the games you run for a minute. When do the villagers pick up the torches and pitchforks? Do they do it once there's enough to get them scared? Or do they wait until things have really moved beyond the threshold of reasonable action? Do they ever do anything more than run away and die?

For a long time my villagers did nothing more than run and die (perhaps I was too busy concentrating on making sure that my bad guys lived long enough to be more than a footnote in the game's play). What turned me about on that noise was realizing that the people I lived around - men and women from a rural, mountain community - wouldn't act that way. They would have started shooting the monsters in their stupid, fucking faces for getting too close to their stills and meth labs. They would have picked up ball bats, axes, Bowie knives, pipe bombs, and every gun they could get their hands on and fucked up some monstrous creatures' days; and that might sound like a stretch to you but consider this: we have coyotes, bears, mountain lions, wild dogs, and all manner of rabid animals. When they get a bit too aggressive the people in my home town will kill every last one of them and drive down Main Street with the carcass tied across the hood of a pick-up truck while bitching that there was only one to kill. I know, animals are different from people. Except that they're not really treated all that differently in this area as I know old women who have incapacitated rapists that had intended to kill them by twisting their balls in different directions (when asked she said it was because she wanted to hear him scream); gangs of baseball bat wielding vigilantes searching for the sons-of-bitches that murdered some cats on an out of the way highway; and a group of twenty angry women armed with knives searching for the boy who raped one of their friends so they could cut his dick off and shove it up his ass (the cops caught him first for those wondering). 

This community isn't an aberration in our reactions. I can pick up a copy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and read news stories about vengeance murders, gang attacks, posses formed to ferret out fugitives, and hunters killing wild animals. If it's something that happens in communities large and small then why isn't it happening in your home games?

My initial answer to that last question was that I wanted the players to be the stars of the show. After all, the game is about their adventures not a bunch of corn gobblers from a village that only the five of us know the name of and that I'll be the only one to remember. Only that's really a bullshit answer. See your villagers aren't suddenly becoming the main attraction of the story by reacting to the events in the game; instead they're becoming a catalyst that will help propel the players forward. While absolutely true that some of the villagers are going to be running for their lives you're also going to be having armed groups of regular people turning back towards the danger to try and stop it. Bringing these cats who are fighting rather than taking flight into the game has really made village situations something more exciting and far less mundane - especially since I just assume most everyone in my villages is a redneck with a rudimentary knowledge of explosives and born with an eagerness to see something blown to hell.  

The People of Yesterday Held Different Beliefs Than We Do Today! WHAT IS WRONG WITH THEM?

Lately I've been spending a lot of time reading through the TOR.com exploration of Gary Gygax's Appendix N and wondering what is wrong with these people. Their criticisms are often not about the works they're reading but instead about the people who wrote them - people who often reflected the times they lived in by holding outdated views about morality, sexuality, race relations, social justice, and the like. As a result their objections all tend to sound the same: "Author X was writing in 1910 and held views that were common during their lifetime but are completely wrong by today's standards. What the fuck is wrong with them?" I mean who would ever imagine that someone writing more than a hundred years ago might have moral and societal values that are vastly different from the ones we have today.

It doesn't end there, though, as so often the argument that they're making isn't just that these people lived in a vastly different society from what we live in today but that we should not read them because of that very fact. These authors from the past, Lovecraft and his Pulp contemporaries, should be actively avoided because they held the wrong beliefs and that is the exact opposite of a liberal's core belief, not only when it comes to reading, but to free speech in general. 

Look, liberals used to be the cat in the room who listened to too much jazz, drank whiskey, smoked unfiltered cigarettes, and was constantly pushing lists of locally banned books into your hands and rasping, "Man you got to read Hoffman, Thompson, Miller, Twain, Vonnegut, Heller, Faulkner, and Salinger because what they're doing is on another level from the rest of us." We used to be the guys who were telling the fascists to go fuck themselves because we're not going to use their approved language and walk down the road thinking their approved thoughts. We were the god-damned, liberal, pinko, commie, fags who were challenging the conservative elements of the nation by going out, doing, being, and trying everything until we found our own thing. We were the people who taught the world to, "Do you, bro," because what mattered was that each of us were true to ourselves and developed a morality and understanding of the world that we could live with rather than one that would grind us into dust beneath its heel. Somewhere along the line though the assholes infiltrated us and now we're sitting around looking at people demanding that they, "Do you, just so long as it's according to these pre-established guidelines of acceptable thoughts and actions." I've been a liberal for too long to suddenly begin walking down that line happily chanting the party slogans. "Think like us! Talk like us! Be an individual, just so long as you're exactly like us!" 

Fuck that. 

I'm still reading books like The Tropic of Cancer, The Great Gatsby, Slaughterhouse-Five, Red Nails, Huckleberry Finn, and Catch-22. I'm still reading adventure stories and murder mysteries that have no morality plays attached to them. And though I've long since stopped smoking I'm still listening to too much jazz and drinking whiskey late at night while pushing lists of banned books on my friends telling them they've got to give these guys a chance. 

Read Banned Books by Topher MacDonald (who makes some kickass stuff)