Distaste for Talents

Evil Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley in "Mirror, Mirror"

I buy a lot of TTRPG PDF bundles. They're usually for a good cause, they're often great value, and hey, I just like reading TTRPG rules. I like daydreaming about what system my group might run next; I like having lightweight stuff with which to throw together a novel one-shot on short notice. One of these days I'm going to have to start a series of posts where I poke through the dozens of games I've accumulated over the past few years and…I don't know, review them? Just pick out stuff I like about them? So far, I've only picked, unfairly, on design choices in games I haven't even played yet (spoiler: that's what I'm doing in this post too). Anyway, the ever-growing collection is mostly oddball lightweight indie stuff, but there are some bigger names too—Numenera, Traveller, and, as of last week, thanks to a Humble Bundle offer, Star Trek Adventures.

The rumors about STA 1e are true: These books are not laid out well. I like gonzo graphic design, I love LCARS, I enjoy a rulebook stuffed with lore and fluff…but on every count, this game went too far. It's an absolute mess, with information scattered all over the place and little or no visual distinction between essential rules and fun background material. But there's still a lot to like!

My love of lifepaths is well documented, so you'd better believe that I was especially pleased with the character creation system. It's pretty quick, it's very flavorful, it's super fun for a Trek nerd like me, and it creates characters with a ton of good roleplay direction. It just has one glaring flaw: At four different points during the process, the player is asked to choose a “talent,” which is a catch-all category of bonuses somewhat akin to feats in d20 games, although they also cover things that might elsewhere be skills or magic spells (the Vulcan mind meld, for instance, is a talent, but so is just getting some extra health, or being good with computers).

The problems, or potential problems, with feats have been discussed and debated ad nauseum all over the internet. Redditor Sleeper4 summarized them pretty well in a post on r/osr earlier this year:

1. Slows down character creation - this is a pretty easy problem to fix, you can simply give feats out at levels higher than 1.

2. The presence of feats creates situations where a character is implicitly unable to try something because there's a feat that provides the ability - aka "feat niche protection". I think with careful design, feats can be created that somewhat mitigate this problem.

3. Shifts the focus of the game - every added character power that's put in a list for player to pour over shifts the focus of the game away from "go adventure to discover riches and powerful magic items" to "make sure you pick the best character abilities from this list" - it draws the players thinking into the character building systems and away from the fantastical world they inhabit.

STA mostly avoids #2 (although in its brand new second edition, it seems to be heading the wrong way), and it fully avoids #3 (you generally can't have more talents than the four you start with), but boy does it ever bang its head on the low bar of #1. Even for the kind of dyed-in-the-wool dork who enjoys reading rulebooks (me), having to stop four times during character creation to click through hundreds of pages of material looking for talents that match a character concept is a nuisance. It's also, as ever, an invitation to min-maxers to throw roleplay out the window in favor of mechanical optimization, or, for rules-averse players, an indescribable session-zero headache.

Now, there are lots of games I like, or even love, that use feats or feat-like character building blocks. There are lots of ways to avoid the above problems, or to embrace them and have fun with them.

Stars Without Number makes foci (i.e., feats) the primary vehicle for character construction. There are a very limited number of classes, and those who don't have psychic or magical powers don't gain any class-related powers as they level up. They start with a few simple (and powerful) abilities, but as they level, they mostly just get more health, higher attack bonuses, and more points to spend on skills. Foci are the primary source of mechanical distinctiveness, there are only about two dozen of them, and they mostly just allow characters to do the same things everybody can do, but faster, more reliably, or more powerfully. Robust, flavorful, limited in number. Excellent.

FIST leans even further in this direction. On character creation, you choose (or roll) two traits and a role, and that's it: All of your character's abilities (and nearly all of their stats and starting equipment, too) come from those traits. Character creation takes all of 15 seconds (perfect for the rules-averse) and wrapping your head around your weird and possibly dissonant powers is a great source of character development, fittingly for the game's theme, with kind of an X-Men vibe of angsty mystery. Why am I this way? How does the world respond to my freakish nature? Delightful.

But in Star Trek? Especially in a game that already has a bunch of brilliant avenues for character definition and expression, like values (a way to make a character's motives and beliefs mechanically relevant, without the clumsy rigidity of D&D alignment or the like) and focuses (a very elegant, flexible way to bridge the gap between “not enough skills to articulate a character's abilities in a high-tech setting” and “way too many goddamn skills, most of which we'll never actually use”), it just seems like a half-assed sop to people for whom a character is defined by the interplay of a bunch of minute stat modifiers and not by, you know, their character.

Lore24: June (?)

From "Chasing the Lightship" by Les Edwards

Continuing from May, and yes, I’ve fallen behind a bit! I scrawled a few notes for this project during my summer peregrinations, but haven’t yet gotten around to fleshing most of them out. Will I catch up? Who knows. I’ll try!

* * *

1. Because photonic weapons are one of the only reliable ways to harm someone protected by a deflector array, they are tightly controlled in both the Empire and the Continuum. Commissars of the Continuum almost always have a laser cannon or two at hand; knights of the Empire consider them unseemly and dishonorable, but the emperor’s household infantry are well-equipped with them. A hold full of such weapons is a dangerous and immensely valuable asset for any independent trader.

2. Trokhos is a warm Earth-like world (very much like Earth in its orbital period and its gravity), slightly less than half covered in water, that occupies the innermost orbit around Gamma Chrysantae, a K6 subgiant (2.67x the radius and 1.65x the luminosity of Earth’s sun). Trokhos is home to hundreds of millions of people; the majority are bordars who live at an essentially medieval technological level, fairly evenly distributed in small farming communities spread across the planet’s ample landmass.

3. There’s another terrestrial planet, Kheramos, in the circumstellar habitable zone of Gamma Chrysantae, merely half an AU beyond Trokhos. It is larger, wetter, and much colder than its sister world, and wracked by intense volcanism. About two-thirds of its surface is covered in water-ice. There are some research and manufacturing facilities that benefit from the low temperatures, geothermal power, and abundant water, but the punishing gravity means travel between surface and orbit is prohibitively expensive. Fewer than a million people are counted as permanent inhabitants (although at least they all have access to advanced technology). The atmosphere is thick but breathable, at least for short periods; long exposure is toxic.

4. Beyond Kheramos are an asteroid belt, two dense rocky worlds, and two large ice worlds. An archipelago of ramshackle habitats, prospecting bases, research outposts, asteroid mines, “free ports,” and the like are sprinkled across and among these.

5. In the orbit of the outermost planet is a station known as the Alabaster Citadel, an Anchorite redoubt that, a few centuries ago, suffered an explosion that cracked its seemingly impenetrable skin, allowing wreckers to pry their way inside. They found a vast necropolis: The station’s inhabitants had turned nearly every inch of the interior into a maze of catacombs, the dead carefully stacked along every corridor by the thousands upon thousands. The last had laid themselves to rest centuries earlier, and the station had persisted unchanging until one too many automated systems gave out or malfunctioned and a major accident finally occurred.


6. Trokhos had a fairly sophisticated native ecosystem dominated by bryophyte analogues, but Earth-origin life has generally overtaken (or been imposed over) the indigenous flora and fauna. Areas remote from human activity—undersea, near the poles, in isolated deserts and mountain valleys—are home to the most robust native biomes.

7. The hardiest indigenous lifeforms on Trokhos, or at least the surviving indigenous life most visible in human-dominated areas, are a class of invertebrates called hispids, ranging from the size of a fist to that of a medium-sized dog. They are slow-moving creatures with thick carapaces that, in most species, are covered in fine, stiff spines that grow so densely together they resemble fur.

8. Trokhos has long been a world of rigid social order and Byzantine laws, although a great deal of change has come in the last century, ultimately set in motion by House Essa’s great project: a vast high-speed rail network connecting every major settlement and site of economic activity on the planet’s surface. Six generations of nomarchs down to the present duchess, Halyna Essa, have utilized an endless rolling corvée of bordar labor to undertake this and other great public works.

9. Corvée teams are assigned labor quotas but also recognized and rewarded (as individuals and as small groups) for exemplary service. Many are rewarded by being elevated to vassalage, given license to leave their land and seek employment elsewhere. Many receive positions in the growing civil service (as railworkers, in the militia, etc.); many others embark on new careers in the urban private sector.


10. This long-running and increasingly dramatic growth of a free middle class has led to rapid urbanization, substantial social and political upheaval, and a “Trokhene Renaissance”—a flowering of arts and culture. Ex-bordars bring their handicrafts and folk traditions to the cities; rich old families patronize young artists, trying to outdo one other in appointing their estates and diversifying their social circles.


11. The original planetary capital, Approdo, was built at a site selected for its proximity to the equator, to fresh water, and to a deepwater port; there was no consideration given to the possibility of the urban population swelling into the millions. Neighborhoods and sub-cities clamber up and down cliffs, ridges, gullies, and ravines and along a jagged coast. The old spaceport, a small affair, is near the city center and the seaport; the far larger “new” spaceport (centuries old at this point) is well to the south, near the enormous, ever-growing rail terminus.

12. The Essas have long eschewed the heat, humidity, and chaos of Approdo, preferring their mountain roosts and forest lodges in higher latitudes. The original project for which the corvée was instituted was a railway from the new spaceport to a regional capital in the far south, Bukola, built at the behest of one duchess Cervine, who hated to travel by air; the duchy’s seat was transferred there several generations later. The immediately previous duke, Halyna’s father Robor, officially moved the capital a second time, to a small planned city (Roborea) in the mountains east of Bukola.


13. Even from orbit, it’s plainly visible that there’s a lot of high-intensity activity going on beneath the surface of Kheramos; enormous amounts of waste heat are dumped into the otherwise-frigid oceans in various locations, creating large ice-free patches that are visible from space with the naked eye, at least when the weather is favorable. Rumors abound.

14. Copestone is the one “city,” if you can call it that, on Kheramos. A few hundred thousand people live in a low-rise sprawl of sealed habitats that hive the ice around the planet’s solitary spaceport.


15. The romantic cliche of the wrecker crew has them making a lonely, dangerous, years-long delve into a lost system, but most wrecker activity involves shorter jaunts into abandoned or forbidden regions of inhabited systems. An independent captain with a torchship capable of making safe, relatively swift passage between stars is more likely to position herself as a salvage merchant, doing a circuit of semi-civilized systems where wreckers are picking the bones of lost worlds or derelict stations, bartering for their finds, and then taking those goods to market on richer worlds.

16. Gamma Chrysantae is the rare system from which long wrecker delves are launched on a fairly regular basis; several decivilized systems lie within five or ten light-years, and the outer system is perpetually abuzz with activity as crews head out into the black or return with their hauls. Smuggling, illegal trade, unreported recovery of proscribed artifacts, and other related phenomena are a constant headache for the duchy’s small local fleet. Even the fastest torchship burning at an acceleration difficult for its crew for bear takes days to reach the outer planets.

17. The Trokhene nobility have a strong taboo against eating tubers, bulbs, or corms—anything dug out of the soil—and a consequent prejudice against those who eat such things, whom they disparage as “dirt eaters” or “filth eaters.” Onions, garlic, and potatoes are staple elements of the bordar diet nearly everywhere on Trokhos; their social “betters” make much of the supposed stench of these foodstuffs. Conversely, bordars rarely get the opportunity to eat seeds, nuts, or the flesh of vertebrate animals, which are seen as the province of the high-born.

18. The small but growing Trokhene middle class is at pains to imitate the eating habits of the nobility (and avoid those of the peasantry), although they often struggle to afford a balanced diet. Conversely, progressive-minded elites and the rebellious young scions of the nobility are keen to shock their peers and elders by sampling the vibrant, intoxicatingly aromatic cuisine of the poor.


19. Less ironclad than the taboo against tubers and bulbs, but growing in strength as the nobility seek to distinguish themselves from the burgeoning class of civil servants and from those who live off-world, is a disdain for anything grown in water—paddy rice, certain berries, anything grown hydroponically. A schema associating foods with the classical elements has proliferated: Those associated with the “low” elements, earth and water, are unfit for noble hands, which should touch only those associated with the “high” elements, air (the fruits, nuts, and seeds of trees and upland grasses) and fire (cooked meat).

20. The Condolent Inquiry is a sect that has cultivated and curated an extraordinarily ancient body of knowledge (the Lucubrations) encompassing the thoughts and ideas from all of human history known (or believed) to be most calming and comforting to the human mind. They labor to condense and hone these ideas; perfect their expression in all the languages of the Pale; and promulgate a calming, healing, mantra, now widespread in various forms, which the Inquiry calls the Litany of Solace.

21. The wrecker torchship August Moon is presently on its way back from a delve into Beta Chrysantae. The Essas’ fastest warship, the Apologue, is being prepped to intercept her for a customs inspection upon her return.


22. Unsurprisingly, nowhere on Trokhos is a more fecund hotbed of political activity than the railroad, which now connects nearly all of the planet’s largest settlements and employs, or has employed, a substantial minority of all the planet’s inhabitants. The Order of Railway Employees is the most powerful vassal-dominated organization in the system, and its radical offshoot, the United Railworkers, the only organization of any power or note at all in the system to include bordars. 


23. The crust of Trokhos is rich in metals, and there are particularly large, easily accessible copper deposits near Approdo. Some finished copper products (including artwork and electronics) are exported from the planet, but the supply far outstrips the demand—after all, copper is found, even if not so abundantly or so easily, on every world of the Pale; much can be mined from planetary rings and other objects accessible in microgravity. Trokhos, consequently, has a rich tradition of metalworking for local consumption. Copper and copper alloys are seen in nearly every kitchen on the planet, even in poor bordar households.


24. Copper alloys are also frequently used in construction, particularly in Approdo itself—hence its nickname, “the City of Copper.” Brass lampposts line the streets and bronze statuary dots the parks and squares. Copper domes gleam atop new construction; verdigris gives the ancient manses of the upper classes their characteristic signifier of old-money authenticity.


25. “You were born in a small village on a pleasant backwater world. For most of the year, the hundred other villagers were your universe entire. From time to time—to buy, to sell, for pilgrimage—you went to the nearest proper town and moved among a hundred times a hundred people, and this, already, strained your power to grasp. Perhaps you traveled and found that a hundred such towns made a commonwealth, and a hundred such realms made a whole world—a small world, and insignificant, but a hundred times a hundred times the limit of your comprehension. There are a thousand worlds in the Pale, many much larger than yours. You could live a hundred lives and travel every day and never see them all, even from a distance. It is easy to think of our Sanctuary as an impossibly vast space—yet the space beyond is infinitely vaster, as the Pale is to your village.”


26. Solar and wind supply the vast majority of the electrical power on Trokhos; bordars and some poor vassals in rural areas use local peat for heating and cooking, but the cities are fully electrified. The absence of fossil fuels from the native ecosystem means that liquid hydrocarbons are beyond the budget of nearly all individuals and most organizations. Most vehicles larger than bicycles are battery-powered, including nearly all aircraft not intended to reach orbit. Airships, microlights, and EVOTLs ply the local airways.


27. The lands around its inland seas are fertile and relatively densely settled; the more sparsely peopled Trokhene interior contains vast deserts, rugged mountain ranges, steppes, and enormous stretches of seasonally arid hills and plains, studded with baobabs and other hardy trees.


28. Honey is one of the most important products of the agricultural hinterlands, both because nearly all Trokhene cuisine, regardless of class or geography, makes heavy use of it and because the nobility make extensive use of it for cosmetic purposes, including as a depilatory—a custom that has been enthusiastically adopted by the burgeoning middle class. Flowers, too, are a ubiquitous crop, harvested for pigments, spices, fragrant oils, and more.


29. Before the rail network reached its current extent, most heavy transport across the surface of Trokhos was carried by barges along an extensive system of canals. These still carry a great deal of commerce as a supplement to train traffic, and many of the railbeds follow current or former canal routes. Several major cities, like Moagem and Terzihan, grew up along the canals as regional hubs for the collection and transshipment of honey, spices, perfumes, handicrafts, and other valuable goods.


30. Bukola never became a major center of commerce or industry like Approdo, Moagem, or Terzihan, but many of the most prominent Trokhene families moved their seats there for the sake of proximity to the ducal residence. Now that the planetary capital and its concomitant administrative facilities have moved to Roborea, the city is reclining into genteel irrelevance. The former middle-class districts are half-abandoned and two-thirds overgrown, but the hilltop estates ringing the city center still play host to lively parties, dances, and polo games. The city plan for Roborea does not accommodate rambling country estates, and a Bukola address still has tremendous cachet.

Alien: Heresy

Alien: Romulus does Alien 3

Sabrina and I saw Alien: Romulus on Wednesday. We prepared by watching all six of the previous films in the series (no, we didn’t bother with AvP) in the preceding six days. I had seen them all save Alien: Covenant before, but some not for 20 years or longer. Watching them all in a row gave me a newfound appreciation for some and inspired some flamin’ hot takes about others.

For all that the series is beloved, for all its immeasurable influence, most of the individual films haven’t been highly rated. The first two are widely—almost universally—regarded to be the best, and sometimes “the only good ones.” Are they? Let’s quickly review the other five.

* * *

ALIEN 3

Although all four films from Alien 3 to Covenant have their haters, Alien 3 probably comes in for the most contempt, and it’s easy to see why. This film kills off two of Aliens’ protagonists before the curtain even rises, knocks off a third fairly early on, and finally dispatches Ripley herself in the end—not a recipe for fan enthusiasm. It went through a famously hellish development process, which is abundantly evident in the theatrical cut. Even setting aside the bold choice to kill off a bunch of beloved characters, it’s just not a good movie. The screenplay, hacked together from parts of better work that was deemed unfilmable (i.e., too expensive), is poorly paced, clumsily plotted, and largely (albeit not entirely) characterized by indistinguishable characters and unmemorable dialogue. The special effects are terrible, too—the crude CGI xenomorph doesn’t even look consistent from one scene to the next.

ALIEN RESURRECTION 

Resurrection too has its vocal detractors. People don’t like the campy extravagance of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s direction, the Joss Whedon script full of one-liners and zingers (essentially a dry run for his show Firefly), or the sinister Ripley clone who behaves little like the character they know and love. The script definitely has its rough (or just plain embarrassing) patches, but for the most part, this thing is a hoot. It shies away from suspense and leads hard on body horror, gross-out weirdness, and visual verve. And after two straight performances of strained, uncomfortable heterosexuality, Ripley finally gets back to being quietly gay. With robot Winona Ryder, no less!

PROMETHEUS 

Prometheus is probably the least common choice for “worst Alien movie” (except perhaps on the technicality that “it’s not really an Alien movie”), but for all its merits (and it has many—it’s a beautiful film), it is almost certainly the dumbest. Thanks to a truly awful screenplay by the ever-detestable Damon Lindelof and a few poor casting choices, the cast are not the least bit believable as a team of academics; they bumble along, making every possible wrong or stupid decision, while a convoluted story unfolds around them that tries to turn a bunch of ancient-aliens conspiracy goofiness into a grave, portentous fable about creation and mortality. None of it works, and the cowardly decision to have the Engineers just be big bald Dr. Manhattan types instead of elephant-headed giant ETs is a petty but particularly bitter disappointment for me.

ALIEN: COVENANT 

Covenant tries to square the circle of being a proper sequel to Prometheus and bringing the series back to its sci-fi horror roots, with mixed results. The screenplay, Lindelof-free, is much improved, but still saddled by many of the previous film’s poor choices, and once again features a whole mess of characters whose job it is to travel through space and explore alien planets yet who seem to have no idea how to do that safely. Taking a page from Alien 3, it dumps some of the previous installment’s ballast by unceremoniously murdering a main character offscreen. Michael Fassbender is an absolute treat, though.

ALIEN: ROMULUS 

Romulus, at the end of the day, is an Alien clip show. It has a ton of potential—great production design, wonderful practical effects, some very cool set pieces—but it is determined to cram every frame with Easter eggs and homages, and eventually pivots from homage to simply regurgitating iconic lines and images from the previous six films nonstop through its last half hour. The use of AI to recreate the late Ian Holm (and not even to reprise his role from Alien, but simply to portray a similar character) might be the single lowest point of the series. (For all that, it’s mostly enjoyable!)

* * *

So is my heretical take that Resurrection is good, actually? Well, yes, but it’s kind of a corollary to a much hotter take: Resurrection might be the second-best of the series, which means that Aliens isn’t. In fact, it’s one of the worst, and it’s guilty of almost everything that the subsequent sequels (and prequels) catch hell for. Take off your rose-colored Millennial nostalgia glasses, and let’s run down its list of sins. Aliens…

1. Rewrites the main character. Alien 3 especially gets shit for this (Resurrection gets more of a pass, I think, because it’s not meant to be exactly the same character); people don’t like meek, maudlin, suicidal prison-planet Ripley. But superheroic good mother Ripley is no less of a departure from the unsentimental, no-nonsense professional we met in Alien. The gloomy, beaten-down Ripley is relatable, at least, like the original Ripley just having a bad day at the office. This Ripley isn’t.
2. Undoes the ending of the previous film in order to shoehorn in an otherwise incompatible plot. No, it’s not as egregious as killing half of the characters offscreen or bringing one back from the dead, but it is pretty ridiculous that Aliens sends Ripley straight back to the planet she just escaped from, and without much in the way of motivation. Burke never satisfactorily explains why it’s important that she join the mission, and her choice is ultimately framed as the fulfillment of a self-evident need for her to face her fears. Big Reagan-era self-help energy here.
3. Departs from the tone and mood of the previous film. For some reason, Alien 3’s bleakness and Resurrection’s gonzo campiness come in for constant criticism, but Aliens gets a pass because “it’s an action movie, not a horror.” But it’s not just a shift of genre. Aliens is basically an R-rated children’s movie, complete with a plucky preteen deuteragonist who’s never in any real danger, a schmaltzy found-family narrative with intimations of a (hetero) romance, a raft of wisecracks and one-liners, and an improbably happy ending. None of it has aged well; the whole thing has a slightly camp quality (in contrast to Resurrection’s intentional campiness).
4. Dilutes the impact of the monster. This is a common problem in horror sequels, and Aliens commits all the usual sins: it multiples one implacable monster into a legion of uninteresting cannon fodder, making them individually fragile and disposable; it shows the monsters more, relying less on mystery and the viewer’s imagination; and it adds new types of monster, something that the prequels catch a lot of heat for but that started right here. Yeah, the queen is a cool design, but it proves to be a very slippery slope.
5. Drives the plot in order to tick various boxes rather than to follow a consistent internal logic. We want to go back to the planet and fight aliens, so we go back and fight aliens without a satisfactory justification. Gotta keep the characters on the surface—guess we’ll stick an alien in the dropship (never mind that none ever goes outside). We want another ending where an alien gets blown out an airlock, so we contrive to have the queen follow the characters up to orbit after a false ending. We need a bunch of fodder for gory kills, so the Marines show up under strength, with inadequate equipment and no knowledge of what they’re up against. Does Burke even want this mission to succeed?
6. Overstuffs the cast with forgettable, generic characters. We’ve got the green young officer, the grizzled NCO, the Latina stereotype (played by a white woman in brownface, no less), the aviator-wearing pilot, and…eight others? A couple of them come into focus eventually (hetero love interest, panicky whiner) but most are just meat. And yet they get names, they get screen time, they get dialogue. Instead of eight near-identical grunts with speaking parts, there should’ve been three dozen extras (because although the cast is too big, the deployment is bizarrely small, and perplexingly includes no crew for the ship itself).
7. Diminishes the environmental terror of the setting. We go right back to the same planet Ripley just left—an awe-inspiring wasteland of freezing temperatures, howling winds, and hellish precipitation, which humans could traverse only clumsily, in bulky spacesuits—and thanks to some hand-waved terraforming, everybody can now walk around without so much as a face mask. (Never mind that there are facehuggers afoot!)

And those are just the flaws it shares with its successors. What might be the worst thing about it—something that really sets it apart from the others—is how dated it feels. It spoils some of the groundbreaking gender progressiveness of Alien by pushing Ripley into a more archetypically feminine mold, making her both a mother figure and a heterosexual love interest to a male soldier. It traffics in the casual misogyny, racism, and homophobia of its benighted time, which is both embarrassing on its face (again: brownface!) and a pretty grievous failure of science fiction writing. The air of anachronism extends beyond the cracks about gay sex and illegal immigration, too. Why do the Colonial Marines have American flag patches on their uniforms? Why does most of their equipment look like vintage kit from the 20th century?

There’s also a more subtle but more sinister message in the soldiers being—behind their charmingly roguish exteriors—universally virtuous, brave, and admirable, and not at all complicit in the evil deeds of their slimy, untrustworthy, ignoble corporate taskmaster. Cameron had Vietnam in mind when he conceived the story, an allegorical tale of good soldiers thrown into harm’s way by corrupt leaders disconnected from reality and ignorant of the situation on the ground. Like an American clean Wehrmacht myth, it’s a cryptofascist revision of Vietnam history, of a piece with the lie that returning servicemen were spit on by hippies and antiwar protestors. But the very existence of the Colonial Marines is a poor choice, too, diluting and confusing the monolithic power of The Company. No longer is this a post-government hypercapitalist dystopia; now it’s just 1980s America in space.

* * *

It’s still fun! All of the sequels and prequels are fun in one way or another (and all have bits and pieces ripe to be plucked for a TTRPG campaign—expect to see their influence seep into lots of content on this blog in the coming months). Each is flawed, too, in many of the same ways: riddled with plot holes, stuffed with too many uninteresting characters, ignorant of quarantine protocols. None even comes close to matching the quality of the original Alien.

The seven films together do not form a coherent whole—and that’s fine. Down with canon, I say. Down with lore. Down with the franchise. Up with a diverse roster of filmmakers taking an iconic horror baddie for a spin and not worrying much about continuity or fan service. Speaking of which—isn’t it high time a female director helmed one of these things? Give Claire Denis an Alien film!

The GOAT with a Thousand Young

From Lunaran's "Mothers Be Good to Your Spawns"

While I’m on the subject of greatness, I guess it’s time for me to fulfill my promise a couple months back to make the case that “Quake is the greatest game of the past 15 years, and of all time.” (We’re talking greatest PC game, to be clear. Identifying the greatest game, period, or even the greatest videogame, is probably beyond my ken.)

There are, of course, plenty of valid alternatives. You might say World of Warcraft, for its enormous longevity and industry-warping profitability (greatness doesn’t have to be good, remember), or Minecraft, for its sheer ubiquity, or maybe one of the Sims or Civilization titles…but I feel a strong inclination, when we’re talking PC games specifically, to reach for a shooter. Maybe one of the early id titles, which defined the genre—Wolfenstein 3D or Doom. Maybe one of the slightly later, more refined iterations on the formula, like Half-Life, which created such a strong blueprint for subsequent FPS titles, on consoles as well as PC, to follow, and which spawned the mods, especially Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat, that shaped multiplayer FPS gaming for the next two decades. Half-Life is an excellent choice.

For my money, though, it’s Quake. It wasn’t the very first fully 3D game, but it was the first huge success, and the one a host of others would build on—the Quake engine was the chassis on which Half-Life itself was built, in fact, and Quake’s level design established the archetypes for multiplayer arenas that nearly every later shooter would iterate on, from those Half-Life mods right down to the present day. Quake’s influence is immeasurable. But to me, Quake’s greatness, and its greatness as a PC game specifically, isn’t so much in its groundbreaking technology or its trailblazing level design and gameplay. It’s the accidental masterpiece of the game itself, the way it fired my imagination and the imaginations of countless others, and the community that grew up around it and continues to thrive today, almost thirty years later.

* * *

I think it starts with the setting. Quake, famously, was a half-baked hodgepodge of themes, with the various principals at id all pulling in different directions: the original concept involved a trad fantasy setting “bleeding into” the modern world—giving us our cyborg ogres with chainsaws and grenades—and subsequent iteration introduced Lovecraftian horror elements, only for the whole thing to be reconceptualized as a more straightforward Doom-like sci-fi shooter and rushed toward release. There was no time to build a whole new set of assets, though, so the new blaster-wielding enforcers just got dumped into the stew with those cyborg ogres, some straightforwardly medieval knights, and a whole Lovecraftian menagerie. Military bases, castles, and otherworldly dungeons were stitched together into a hallucinatory patchwork of levels.

This wasn’t what anybody at id had wanted, and they swiftly corrected course, releasing Quake 2 the very next year with a much tighter, purely sci-fi theme—one that every subsequent release in the Quake franchise has stuck with. (It’s basically Aliens with cyborgs instead of xenomorphs. Hard to overstate the influence of Cameron’s film on the games of the late 90s and early 2000s; Bungie’s Halo series and Blizzard’s StarCraft are both so dense with Aliens references that they teeter on the line between homage and unlicensed adaptation.)

Quake 2 was a bigger commercial successes than Quake, and Half-Life a far larger success still. They were all built on the same engine (as were a host of less successful titles like Hexen 2, Kingpin, Daikatana, and Heretic 2), and each is as easy to mod as the next. Quake 2 and Half-Life (particularly the latter) gave us a host of popular and influential multiplayer mods, many of which were spun off into standalone titles. But among this family of games, the original Quake is the undisputed single-player queen. Her acolytes have churned out literally thousands of maps, and continue to push the engine’s limits to outdo each other in artistry and ambition. For all that they were thematically cohesive and told engaging stories, Quake 2 and Half-Life never fired creators’ imaginations the same way; they never inspired so many people to tell new stories in their worlds. Quake is a lucid dream, immersive in a way few games are, always inviting players to make it their own.

I wouldn’t say that literally everything works with Quake…but almost everything does. New art, new themes—the dreamscape assimilates them easily. Many of the “classic” map aesthetics that have been iterated on dozens of times and centered by contests and jams began life not at id but in the community—the occult horror of Knave, the Moorish austerity of IKblue and IKwhite, the blood-soaked weirdness of Zerstörer. Those checkerboard-floored libraries, soaring minarets, and grimy monoliths feel as authentically Quake now as any military base, castle, or dungeon.

* * *

I might, one of these days, embark on the Herculean task of visiting all of the All-Mother’s children (or at least all the ones rated 3.0 or better on Quaddicted). To round out this post, though, I have thoughts on just a few enduring favorites.

The maps and mods at the very tippy-top of Quaddicted’s rankings are all great, of course. Arcane Dimensions is one of the coolest things any fan community has ever created. Alkaline is right up there with it. Rubicon Rumble Pack is outstanding (“Ceci n'est pas une pipe” is one of my all-time favorite maps). All the work that’s been featured in the recent Nightdive/MachineGames remaster (Honey, Underdark Overbright, The Punishment Due, Rubicon 2, Beyond Belief, etc.) is fabulous. But I’m going to highlight a few that are a bit farther down the list (although, to be clear, these too are all beloved and highly regarded in the community—this isn’t a list of “hidden gems” or anything like that):

• Zerstörer: Testament of the Destroyer (1997, Nihilism Unlimited): I was 13; this was the most metal thing I had ever seen in my life. The graveyard! That bleak ending! Some of it seems a little cheesy in retrospect (starting with the team calling themselves Nihilism Unlimited), but “True Love Waits” will live rent-free in my head forever.
• Insomnia (2000, czg): I know czg hates this one, but it blew my mind then and it still does now. The scale! The curves! The atmosphere! Yeah, maybe it’s a little lurid and over the top in its fleshy ooh-it’s-so-evilness, but you better believe it hit hard when I was 15.
• Contract Revoked (2002, Kell): I wanted to shy away from maps that’ve been added to the official remaster, but Knave is too important not to touch on, and the OG, despite having been eclipsed (ratings-wise) by the Knave jam, than’s “Subterranean Library,” and Kell’s own “Red 777,” is still my favorite. It has an ethereal quality that a lot of the later, grander, somewhat overstuffed Knave maps lack—an atmosphere of loneliness and desolation, but without feeling empty or unchallenging for want of danger.
• Adamantine Cruelty (2004, Vondur): Beautifully built, cleverly designed. Gorgeous, sinuous architecture and a fun little micro-theme derived from a mashup of vanilla texture sets.
• Warp Spasm (2007, ijed): Something of a throwback, resembling much older releases like Zerstörer and 2000’s wildly ambitious machinima tie-in mega-project Nehahra in the way it brought in custom assets and a substantial backstory. Also like Zerstörer in that there’s something a bit puerile in its embrace of the evil and grotesque. But you know what? It works, even when you’re not a teenager. It’s gnarly. It feels oppressive.
• Dead Memories (2012, Scampie): Another little map that’s just beautifully, elegantly constructed. Takes all the elements of the original base theme and spins something inventive out of them.
• Backsteingotik (2013, sock): Gorgeous, and one of the best implementations of the original game’s “wind tunnel” mechanic and theme. Majestic. Dripping with atmosphere.
• Retro Jam 3 DLC (2015, ionous, negke, and skacky): These are all great, but “It Seemed to Devour Light” by ionous is another all-time favorite of mine. Creates a totally original aesthetic and deeply sinister atmosphere out of (I believe) only vanilla textures.
• Waldsterben (2022, Paul Lawitzki): Manages to feel almost like something that could’ve been in the original game (it couldn’t possibly, but it somehow feels like it) and yet creates a totally novel aesthetic. Moody and rewarding.
• Head Reattachment Trauma (2022, Suzanne “Trashbang” Will): Claustrophobic and urgent. Slightly reminiscent of System Shock while remaining unimpeachably Quake-y. Tells a powerful story—or communicates a powerful sentiment, anyway—in an sly, playful way.

Signs of Life, Thoughts on Greatness

 

It’s been a busy summer for me: three far-flung weddings on three different continents, two of which we spun into short vacations; a long dog-sitting stint at my sister’s place; and a move, in the midst of all that, to a new apartment, complete with various snafus getting the internet set up. We still haven’t fully unpacked, and I still haven’t set up my desktop computer. But I’m mostly settled in, and I’ve got my decrepit 12-year-old MacBook Pro up and running—it’s time to get back on the blogging horse!

* * *

In my absence from Online, I missed getting to comment on either ESPN’s “Top Athletes of the 21st Century” or the NYT’s “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” This probably should have been an opportunity for me to reflect on the fact that I don’t have to write about every piece of engagement-bait nonsense barfed up by our floundering media giants, and yet here we are.

Being lazy engagement bait, both lists are stupid on their faces—let’s get that out of the way first. Trying to rank athletes is something of a fool’s errand even within one sport, even a sport like baseball (my lifelong sporting obsession) that’s absolutely drowning in data. How do you compare pitchers to hitters? How do you compare guys who played pre-integration to those playing today? Even within a much shorter time span, can you compare the speed-crazy 1980s to the power-mad steroid era at the turn of the century? Now try to compare baseball players to basketball players. All the stats go out the window; we’re left with awards and accomplishments—championships, trophies, All-Star selections. Now compare them to water polo players and gymnasts. There are almost no points of connection. It’s an exercise in absurdity.

The absurd exercise managed to get even more absurd, albeit also more interesting, in ESPN’s hands, because—despite supposedly having polled their affiliates all over the world—they came up with an improbably U.S.-centric list, with 56 of the selections being American-born (and plenty of the remainder having attained their fame, or at least the greatest measure thereof, here). Unsurprisingly, the list, especially the top half, is very light on soccer players, and there’s almost no representation of sports that are neither popular here nor dominated by our athletes at the Olympics (one solitary cricketer, for instance, down at the very bottom). Basketball is overrepresented, in keeping with ESPN’s contractually dictated biases. But it’s the inclusion of Olympians that’s particularly perplexing, when you get down to trying to understand what the editors mean by “the top athletes,” “the greatest athletes of the 21st century,” or “the best athletes of the 21st century” (they use these terms interchangeably).

The single greatest athlete of the 21st century? Michael Phelps, apparently. Which, sure, the guy was amazing…in an athletic niche that almost nobody pays attention to, three years out of four. Maybe that's enough, though; if you’re indisputably the best ever in your sport, no matter how marginal that sport might be, you’re the greatest, right? Except that if Olympic dominance like Phelps’s is good enough for the #1 position, surely all-time great cross-country skier Marit Bjorgen and all-time great speed skater Ireen Wüst are in the top five, or at least the top ten, right? Nope—they’re not on the list at all. Are there any marathoners, any distance runners at all, any representation of Kenyan and Ethiopian dominance in those highly visible sports—ones in which far more regular people participate as amateur competitors than in things like gymnastics, ice hockey, auto racing, American football, or even, for all its recreational popularity, swimming? No, of course not. Americans don’t know them.

* * *

In the literary world, or at least one tiny-but-influential corner thereof, a bunch of very different people approached a similar question about a completely different subject and botched it for similar reasons. The best books of the 21st century, as selected by a bunch of NYT contributors, are even more preposterously U.S.-centric than ESPN’s list of great athletes. They chose 87 books by Americans! Entire continents went unrepresented, or almost entirely unrepresented (Han Kang’s The Vegetarian was the only selection by an Asian author who lives and works in Asia). To the very limited extent that the contributors engage with Asia or Africa, it’s almost all through the eyes of Americans and a few Europeans (Min Jin Lee, Katherine Boo, Marjane Satrapi, Mohsin Hamid, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Hisham Matar). All of these authors were born in Africa or Asia or have close family connections there, so it’s not like this is literary tourism or colonialism, but it is still a degree of remove from the reality of life in other countries, in other cultures—an incuriosity about the world except as communicated by the same little coterie of English-speaking MFA graduates who write all our novels, our short stories, our essays, and, of course, our book reviews.

The American literary ecosystem, dominated by a few institutions like the Times, is a small, closed system. A group of authors who are the product of the same class, the same cities, the same schools, all reviewing each other’s work—no surprise that nothing new enters the system, and that the criticism of what does get covered is invariably toothless. Book clubs and attentive individual readers pick up the books covered (and nearly always recommended) by the Times, they sell (modestly, but well enough), and the cycle continues.

It’s striking that when the Times published an alternative list of reader selections for the 100 best, 39 books were shared between the two lists. (When this second one dropped, I was online enough to peck out some salty Reddit comments on my phone.) Many of the other 61 show up as runner-up recommendations in the original list, too; there’s enormous overlap between the lists, which would be surprising in light of older stereotypical expectations of authors’ reading preferences (obscure, thorny, experimental) and those of bourgeois newspaper subscribers (middlebrow, unchallenging, conventional). Times change, I guess. Even the literati are now firmly middlebrow, inward-looking, and narrow-minded.

It’s not news that American readers are parochial; for all our imperial ambitions, we’re a famously parochial people. We don’t follow the news of the world except when our military is (or might be) involved and we know perilously little about other cultures, about geography, about the history of the rest of the world. We rarely read anything in translation, and what little we do is almost always European—mostly 19th-century classics, the occasional more recent Nobel winner. We don’t trust ourselves to recognize greatness on our own, I guess.

* * *

What is greatness, anyway? As presented by ESPN and the NYT, it’s somewhere near the intersection of “what we know and like” and “what’s marketable.” The “top athletes,” or “top books,” sure, I’ll buy that as a list of who’s got the biggest sponsorship deals, the most Instagram followers, the most sales, the most Google searches. And the “best,” if it can’t be quantified by sabermetric number-crunching, might as well be purely subjective. But the greatest?

Maybe a quarter-century is just too short of a window for evaluating these things. When we think about the literary canon, and even when we think about the great athletes of the past, we tend to think about legacies, about influence—the first to do it, the inventors, the bar-setters, the ones who invented styles, revolutionized genres, spawned a thousand imitators. Things can be great without being good; they can be great without deserving moral approbation.

What’s the greatest TTRPG of all time? (See, I managed to find my way home eventually!) It’s D&D, obviously. It doesn’t have to be the best, it doesn’t have to be your favorite, and it doesn’t have to be unproblematic. Greatness is objective, undeniable, beyond all that.