AKB 48: Modern Nuns?

Today we heard word of a scandal overtaking the modern Tokyo phenomenon of AKB48. Their 14th most popular member, Minegishi Minami, was caught by a journalist leaving the house of a “boyfriend,” a 19 year old member of some random boy band (compared to AKB48, the boy band in question is largely irrelevant). The pictures were published in some scandal rag, Shukan bunshun (週刊文春), a magazine which basically makes its income from printing shit. As a result of this indiscretion, Miss Minegishi has been demoted to research student (kenkyusei) status, meaning a massive loss of pay and  that in the strange heirarchy of AKB48 she will have to climb back up the ranks to reclaim her position as an enormously popular public figure.

The heart bleeds, doesn’t it? Actually the apology is a beautiful and heartfelt thing, and it’s clear that Miss Minegishi is under a lot of pressure, as one might expect if one were published leaving the house of one’s lover the morning after a trist and published in a magazine read by millions of people, in a country where everyone (well, not me!) is watching you and discretion in sexual encounters is paramount. This is a nation where holding hands in public is still frowned upon by many young people, and kissing generally avoided at all costs. Being photographed the morning after a shag is obviously going to be very embarrassing.

AKB48 sold $200 million of records alone in 2011, and endorse everything from elections to instant coffee. They are the very definition of a household name, and getting into the top 48 of this weird little business enterprise is a license to print money for the young women involved. It’s also not easy: their recent documentary carries the subtitle no flower without rain, which draws on an old saying about how beauty and/or success depend on suffering. The structure of the AKB48 system is redolent of university and the early years of the corporate system: it is intended to reproduce the sense of having to strive to make it, being indebted to one’s seniors, and being vulnerable in the face of life’s challenges. In many ways, AKB48 are perfect representatives of the Japanese notion of gaman, of having to suffer through adverse circumstances to achieve: this is the same spirit of gaman that enables Judo masters to bully their charges[1], but which makes a Sumo wrestler like Takanoyama enormously popular because he tries so hard. Two sides of the same coin … I don’t know if it could be said that Miss Meinegishi is being bullied in this instance, though … what she did do is fall foul of a contractual obligation not to go on dates. That’s right – AKB48 girls are not allowed to go on dates! The Guardian article makes it appear as if this rule is based on “the strict rules to which Japan’s young pop stars must adhere to project an image of unimpeachable morals” but this isn’t the reason at all – that’s just bullshit western misinterpretation of east Asia’s so-called conservatism. The real reason that Miss Minegishi has to live a sexless (or at least secret) life until she “graduates” from AKB48 is that her band is idolized by nerds and pre-sexual teenage girls, and to both groups of fans they have to appear pure and single. These are girls next door who are struggling through a metaphorical high school/university/early corporate life, and girls like that don’t get DP’d in love hotels.

Miss Minegishi’s extreme haircut is also not forced on her by her contract: she did this all by herself, to symbolize her abasement. This means she’s going to be trying extra hard to regain the favour of her fans, and my prediction is that this little cock up is going to be a goldmine for her and for the AKB48 business: she’ll soon be returned to the top ranks, fans will love her more for having fallen and strived, and there’ll be another documentary with tears and struggle – a genre that AKB48′s fans love.

Which brings me to my William Gibson-esque point: these girls are Japan’s modern shrine maidens, the modern equivalent of western nuns of yesteryear. They’re required to swear themselves to celibacy, live lives of constant self-flagellation and torment, and simultaneously have to symbolize everything that is admired in the women of their time: chastity, beauty, sexiness, innocence and endurance. They also have to tread the line of hypocrisy that characterizes modern attitudes towards young women: at the same time as they are making swimsuit videos and soft porn, these girls will get demoted if they are caught having sex. And because it’s Japan they also have to be educated: there’s currently a TV show about some of these girls going to college and trying to get a qualification. William Gibson has a few short stories about these kinds of characters in the cyberpunk world (I think Idoru is the most apt, though I haven’t read it): women whose celebrity depends on their embodying all of the ideals of femininity of their time, and whose personal lives are warped or ruined as a result of it. So let’s hear it for Minami Minegishi, embodiment of all the trials and tribulations of modern womanhood – and of the complexities of the cyberpunk era. Ganbare, Minegishi san! The hopes of a generation, and the weight of an entire society’s sexist expectations, are resting on your skinny shoulders …

—

fn1: though maybe not anymore: watch the video of the coach apologizing and listen to the cameras – the girls he bullied weren’t willing to tolerate it and his humiliation is pretty much complete. These guys’ world is changing, and it’s apparent that they aren’t catching up…

 

Campaign Setting: Shadowrun in a Time of Default

Shadowrun is suited to campaign settings rife with economic corruption, the desperate and abandoned poor, powerful corporations who control the social fabric, shady underworld groups and street gangs in conflict. Sounds rather like a vision of Greece after the default, if you were to chuck in a bit of magic. So let’s do that! And what better way to do it than through a resurgent Greek mythical pantheon. And, for that matter, if Greece’s default were to drag Europe down, we would also see Italy and Ireland fall into chaos – and what do they have in common but a history rich in pantheism and magic? How would we construct such a near-future shadowrun campaign?

In comments to my previous post, Paul tried to describe a worst case scenario for Greek default:

Greece comes up to a pay day for the public sector and has no money to pay in. They issue IOUs. The public service goes in strike shutting down hospitals. A run on the banks begins and everyone withdraws their money in Euro. The banks collapse. No medicine is being imported into the country or moved to hospitals. Petrol imports stop and the prices go through the roof, preventing the transport of food and other critical supplies. The entire economy locks up because no one can get to work. Farms lie fallow or with harvests rotting in them because farmers can’t use their equipment. Food and potentially power/water shortages start to hit major cities leading to rioting. The police haven’t been paid or fed so they join in. The damage to property and life is massive. Refugees head to neighbouring countries. Eventually international aid arrives, food and petrol shipments unlock the ability to provide basic necessities of life but medical support remains at the level provided via international aid (i.e. broken bones are treated, people with cancer aren’t going to get drugs worth more than tens of dollars – which I believe is most of them). Restarting the economy from this situation is chaos, it’s basically shut down and had spiralling cascades of defaults.

Now let’s suppose that Greece has a pantheon of sleeping gods, but they were roused by some mischievous figure in one of the resistance movements (New Dawn sound like contenders, but anyone will do). They see a country in chaos and desperate for a guiding hand, so they start letting their magic seep out again. How could they have been roused, and what would the implications be for Greece and Europe? I have a few ideas …

Witch Hunter Rebekka

In this version of the campaign, the PCs are members of a top-secret Greek government organization that was tasked with keeping supernatural threats under control, like the organization from Witch Hunter Robin or Double Cross 3. Unfortunately, their organization was abolished as part of the austerity package insisted on by the European Central Bank, and they suddenly find themselves unemployed in a world where the supernatural is suddenly given a free hand. Perhaps they embark on a solo quest to find out what’s really happening, or maybe they set themselves up in some seedy downtown office and start selling their services to corporations and gangsters who have discovered that the dark side is coming for them. And during this maybe they notice a pattern. Perhaps there are other, similar organizations throughout Europe, and as Europe unravels in the wake of Greece’s chaos those organizations too get shut down or worse.

An orthodox priest, a banker and a schoolgirl walk into the Parthenon …

Perhaps the secret organizations working to protect Europe are not government run, but maintained instead by the churches. In Greece this means the Greek Orthodox church… so what do they do if they are approached by a banker, who does a sideline in hacking, who has discovered evidence that something behind the trouble was planned – that much of Europe’s chaos was actually schemed up by some sinister cabal that saw a chance to create chaos in Italy, Greece and Ireland at the same time. The mechanism is economic collapse, but the goal is to revive old, dark gods – the pagan gods of Ireland and the Southern Mediterranean that the more modern churches drove out. So who do they turn to? A motley group of PCs who have special powers and a can-do attitude, perhaps drawn from the many warring street clans and gangs that have sprung up in the chaos of the default and the political struggles that followed.

A conspiracy of bankers

Of course! What else? We all know that the major banks are servants of satan – let’s make it official! Perhaps the whole economic collapse was engineered to create the kind of chaos necessary to create space for new gods, to generate new, radical and subvertible political movements, and to force the collapse of the secret bulwarks that the Europeans have established against the dark powers that used to rule Europe. Perhaps European history is a long story of dark powers manipulating politics, and the modern European Union was a post-war project to try and drive them out of society and politics. It was working fine – until someone had the silly idea of setting up a common currency. Then the dark powers saw that they could use mundane, financial means to tear the entire European project down, along with all its political and cultural movements against the kind of chaos on which the dark powers depend for their success.

This whole conspiracy would take place in the halls of power, in the boardrooms of banks and sinister organizations, would be traced through emails and secret meetings and currency transfers through shady swiss bank accounts. It’s the perfect conspiracy for a couple of street hackers to slowly track down and unravel in the course of their dubious work – running in the shadows of the corporations, they find a deeper, darker conspiracy at play than mere political corruption … and all of it focused on unleashing old powers long forced down by the church, the enlightenment and the scientific revolution. We all know that our enlightened, materialistic world view depends on the special social order made possible by wealth and the absence of war and political conflict. What better way to unravel it than to engineer economic chaos, poverty and political disruption in the heartland of the old gods – Greece!

A New Dawn for the Gods

Another possible campaign would involve not a conspiracy of bankers, but a conspiracy of radicals. In this campaign, political movements proliferate after the default. Some of them are very violent and become popular very quickly, and as Greece slides into poverty and political paralysis the conflict between these street gangs explodes. Many are also connected to criminal groups and also to ethnic groups – Macedonians and Albanians, Turks and African migrants, for example. Many of them are easily infiltrated by people with authoritarian tendencies, and one of them – probably New Dawn, but others could be imagined – is soon overtaken by a man with special powers, a descendant of one of the Greek gods whose powers have revealed themselves during the chaos. He begins to impel his movement towards the revitalization of the gods, and as other gangs see it they also begin looking for new powers to fight with – perhaps they begin to research alchemy, or bring their ancient gods from across the sea. The PCs, investigating minor crimes as adventurers in the post-default chaos, suddenly begin to discover hints that people are dragging up bigger powers than they have ever seen before, and realize that the street-fighting and political conflict is taking on a religious flavour – with the gods returning to the world as the fervour increases. The fevered political environment of a country in chaos and conflict is a perfect place for new powers to emerge, or old powers to revitalize themselves.

Exploring the Genesis

Shadowrun is set after the cataclysmic events that changed the world. Those events are history, and their effects taken for granted in the Shadowrun setting. But I’m fascinated by how they could have come about, and what the world would have been like when magic was being unleashed. Perhaps an imagined economic and social cataclysm in Europe is a good way to construct those events, and gives us a chance to run an adventure right at the time of the genesis of the world Shadowrun takes for granted. I’ve always imagined that such a catastrophe would not necessarily be a physical one, but some kind of cultural and social upheaval that made gaps through which magic and gods could flow. Catastrophic economic problems and social conflict in Europe offer just such a setting. From something completely mundane like a run on some banks, to dragons ruling the sky … could you run a campaign all the way from beginning to end, and create the world of Shadowrun from whole cloth?

 

 

Current Viewing: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Rebels don't endorse standard public health messages

This is an excellent interpretation of Stieg Larsson’s page-turner of the same name. For my sins, I read the novel and enjoyed it despite its sometimes crappy writing, because the story is compelling and the characters are fun. Both the main male character, Michael Blomquist, and the eponymous female lead Lisbeth Salander are excellent depictions of their particular archetypes[1]: crusading journalist and lunatic hacker, respectively. The movie brings them to life well, perhaps even improving on them through good acting (’cause lord knows they were held back in the original through bad writing!) It also brings out the setting, both the historical part and the modern Swedish setting, so that they were just exactly how I’d imagined them when I read the book. It also makes the investigation interesting, and you can understand how the combined talents of Blomquist and Salander are capable of solving a mystery that no one else managed to. It also managed to cut out some parts that would have made the movie too slow, and to interweave the three stories (Salander, Blomquist, and the historical part) nicely without being confusing or chaotic. This is surely good movie-making …

The acting was also great. The woman who played Lisbeth Salander, Rooney Mara, was superb in the role and did a brilliant job of holding together the tension, intelligence, viciousness and strangeness of that character without over-doing any of it, or pushing Salander into a stereotype of a hacker. Salander is a complex personality and a complex emotional story – simultaneously vulnerable and fragile and extremely tough, uncaring about convention but very aware of how other people think and feel – and Mara did a superb job of getting her right. In his own way, Blomquist, though superficially simpler, is also hard to get right, though perhaps more from a direction point of view: Blomquist is a man who respects women but doesn’t put them on a pedestal, who has deep passions but doesn’t lose control of them, and who probably isn’t a particularly expressive guy. Daniel Craig does a very good job of getting it right. The cast were also chosen so that everyone felt real, and many scenes that one might expect a movie remake to change, gloss over or misogynize were very well crafted.

This is an important and unavoidable problem in bringing this book to cinema: handling the gender relations. This is a book about getting vengeance on rapists and murderers of women, but it’s also a story about a young woman who falls in love with an older man (cliche 101!) and a couple of Scandinavians who have an open relationship. The temptation here for your average movie director is to make the rape scenes sexy or shallow, to make the young woman a victim of the man’s charm or the age-gap completely normal and believable, and to make the women in the open relationship young sexy babes, or just crazy fucked-up people. None of this happens: the rape scene is horrible and the vengeance enormously satisfying, while also repulsive; the young woman is not a victim of the older man’s charms, and the nature of their relations with other people are such that you understand the situation is not normal for him or for her – it’s the first such old man/young woman affair I’ve seen in a movie that feels believable. And the older women in the open relationship – 40 something career women – look their age, like attractive 40-something career women in control of their own lives and sexualities. It’s through Blomquist that we mainly encounter these people, and his approach to the women in his life is straightforward, respectful and understanding. A perfect counter-point to the men that he and Salander are engaged in foiling, who are sleazy liars who only know how to use people, and especially women, for their own gratification.

This movie also has one sex scene in it that really does describe the difference between a movie that depicts the real relations between modern men and women, and most of the rest of the American movie industry. The scene is nothing special, but its execution made me happy for its frankness and realism. We see the young woman and the older man having sex, but she is on top grinding away to her own orgasm, largely oblivious of him, and he is just kind of going along with it. In the end she comes and he doesn’t, and I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen a sex scene where the woman gets something and the man gets nothing. Usually either the man comes or they both do, simultaneously, without any effort on his part except the glorious power of his amazing dick. The reality of course is that sex is not often like that, unless the girl is faking it, and everyone who has more than the barest experience of sex has experienced the woman who takes her own orgasm astride the man, often quite aggressively. It’s like the guy who made this movie actually wanted to show sex as it happens between real people who love each other, rather than as it is imagined in the minds of people who insist on reproducing the imaginary gender relations of the American culture industry. For that reason alone, the scene made me happy.

The flipside of these scenes, though, is that there is a lot of nasty stuff to wade through in this story. The rape scenes, graphic evidence from the murder scenes they are investigating, the final tense showdown, animal cruelty … if seedy under-belly-of-society type movies don’t appeal to you or you just can’t watch films that involve rape or the cruel mistreatment of women, then I suggest avoiding this one. You’re not going to get much satisfaction. If you can bear this sort of thing in order to see a good story and fine acting, and you can get pleasure from fairly nasty revenge scenes (I certainly can), then I recommend taking this one in on the big screen. In addition to a tense story, fine settings and excellent acting, it also has some very cool cinematography and a great soundtrack, so its well worth the effort if you can endure that sort of cruelty on screen. But you need to go in ready for some nastiness, and if you don’t think you are, then you probably should give it a miss …

—

fn1: Archetype is the word you use instead of “stereotype” when you enjoyed the book.

 

Current Reading: Woken Furies

This is the third book I have read in the Takeshi Kovacs series, by Richard Morgan. It’s set maybe 100 years after the last one I read, Broken Angels (which I seem strangely to have neglected to review) and features an older, much angrier Kovacs returning to his homeworld, Harlan’s World, for personal reasons. The story traces the problems he gets caught up in, and the way things fall apart around him as his anger and built up psychological damage drive him deeper and deeper into trouble.

The defining philosophical concept for this science fiction universe is the process of “re-sleeving,” in which most people can save their souls into a small unit in their body (their “stack”) and be brought back to life after death in a new “sleeve,” or body. These bodies are either the bodies of people being punished for serious crimes or bodies specially grown for the purpose. Takeshi is a demobbed member of an elite commando unit whose members get broadcast across space, re-sleeved at their destination, and sent in to trouble spots to commit heinous acts of slaughter. In this universe, faster than light travel is impossible so travel between the stars is primarily done by broadcasting souls into new bodies. We saw in Altered Carbon that this process can have strange philosophical consequences, which can be interesting to explore.

The defining setting for this book is Kovacs’s home planet, Harlan’s World, which was terraformed by a combined team of Eastern European and Japanese, and is basically owned by the families who originally settled it. It’s an ocean world, but travel and even weather forecasting is difficult because it is ringed with orbitals, set up by a prior civilization, which destroy any flying object more sophisticated than a helicopter. No-one can enter or leave Harlan’s World physically, and the air is off limits. The society is corrupt oligarchic capitalism, a system of exploitation of the poorest that was so bad that 300 years ago the world was torn apart by a revolution, the Unsettlement, at whose head was a mysterious prophet-politician called Quellcrist Falconer.

Into all of this returns Takeshi, intent on revenge for a wrong done to an ex-lover, and happy to live cheaply in a low-grade sleeve for years while he embarks on an extended mission of extermination and torture. His targets are a new religion, the Knights of the New Revelation, who are clearly analogous to the worst excesses of Islamic Fundamentalism. Unfortunately events transpire to entrap Kovacs in a society-shattering scheme, and he and various groups of unfortunates who get caught up with him soon find themselves reeling within schemes within schemes. We discover, indeed, on the second page that the First Families of Harlan’s World have an old copy of a much younger Takeshi, which they have sleeved and sent after him, though he doesn’t know why. The fact that they’re willing to commit such a crime – an “erasure mandatory” penalty exists for “double-sleeving” – indicates he is up to his neck in trouble, and our task as readers is to watch him navigate, then inflame, then (maybe) try and escape all this trouble.

This book concerns itself less with the philosophical ramifications of sleeving as it does with the history of the prior civilizations, the martians, and their unique effect on Harlan’s World. We get to learn a lot more about just how strange these martians were, and perhaps uncover a little more about them. But the central concept we investigate at some length in this book is the long-lasting consequences of Quellism, Harlan’s World’s homegrown marxist/anarchist revolutionary ideology, as originally spouted by Quellcrist Falconer. This revolutionary tendency is not dead in Harlan’s World, and as Takeshi gets deeper involved in plots within plots we find him confronting his own dialectic: the tension between his natural proto-Quellist anger at the exploitation of the poor, and his natural resistance to ideology and political movements of any sort. Takeshi has put down revolutions on several planets and strongly believes that their leadership are as cynical and destructive as those they aim to replace, but at the same time his origins in dirt poverty, and his anger at the events that led to his discharge from the Envoys, mean that he really wants to believe a revolution could happen on Harlan’s World – that maybe it’s “time to burn the motherfuckers down” at last. Watching him bouncing between these extremes, and resolving all of his conflicts by resort to anger and/or intense violence, is grim work to say the least.

As an aside, I really like Quellism as presented by Morgan in this book. It’s a pastiche of carbon-copy Marxist/Leninist/Anarchist material, held together and given a life of its own by the uniquely streetwise prose of its author. It’s not cloaked in the revolutionary sloganeering and turn-of-the-century intellectualism of the original upper-class revolutionary thinkers (Prince Proudhon the anarchist, Marx the maid-shagger, or any of the rest). Rather, it’s wry, witty, down-to-earth, cynical, vicious and very very angry, and where the original thinkers had dry political debate, Quellcrist inserts poetry and laughter. Quellcrist was a clever, thoughtful but very very angry revolutionary, and a lot of her sayings have over the years become streetwise aphorisms. Takeshi himself, though he has spent 200 years or so wandering the galaxy killing people a lot like Quellcrist, remembers her sayings and falls back on them occasionally. He also retains her class analysis, though he obviously doesn’t share her goals, and when he brings his own special, personal anger to bear on the First Families, the Yakuza, or the Knights of the New Revelation, he doesn’t miss any details of their political position and class antagonisms. This is a joy to watch, as if someone had loosed a Marxist-Leninist assassin on the bad people of the world, but infected him with a strong strain of nothing more noble or constructive than chaos and a desire to punish.

And this is where the book is maybe hard work for a lot of people. Takeshi Kovacs is not a happy man, and while his anger in Altered Carbon was an entertaining and witty personal force, by the time he returns to Harlan’s World it has become a brooding, overwhelming aspect of his character. From the moment we meet him to the close of the book he spends his time destroying anyone he hates or believes has wronged him, with an intense and unrelenting passion that by the middle of the book is beginning to become hard going. Even when he is trying to enlighten those he would like to save he is shaking them, yelling, and unable to comprehend why they aren’t listening. He is the antithesis of the Quellist ideas about how to change the world, that are slowly welling up around him as the book progresses. I think for some people Takeshi’s intensity and unhappiness will spoil this book, but I found it believable and engaging, and enjoyed the feeling in the second half of the book of a larger and larger revenge building – and I also enjoyed it when the whole thing fell apart in political schemes and realpolitik. I also found the ending very satisfying, though there were (again!) elements of Deus ex Machina which, though believable, are starting to shit me a little in modern literature.

This book moves at a good pace to a violent, surprising and not undesirable conclusion, where a whole series of separate strands of the story are woven together very nicely to a final resolution. In fact I would say that the plot is very well crafted, the expositions of the things you missed along the way are natural and welcome, and the story itself is big enough to just get lost in and enjoy, but tightly enough told that by the end you can put everything together and marvel at the results. It’s an excellent read and my only reservation is that I think some people will find it too grim and angry. But if you think you can do that and you want to read some really interesting, modern ideas in cyberpunk and space opera, then I recommend this highly.

 

So Cyberpunk it Hurts

Trawling through my spam box I just found this comment:

The text is jambled is there something wrong with this site

from the website of a company called Armoured Apparel. Now, I don’t usually like having my prose style critiqued by a fucking robot, but in this case my interest was piqued by the website name so I went and looked it up and it is exactly what it says – an online purveyor of women’s and men’s armoured garments. It even has a list of ballistic gear standards for those who aren’t sure they’re getting the top drawer stuff.

Check it out, it’s so cyberpunk it makes your eyes bleed.

 

Japanese Science Fiction

Is this really how it looks to you?

Is a topic I don’t know much about, but James at Grognardia has been pondering how Japanese interpret Traveller and similar science fiction. To reproduce my comment to him there, the concept of the “Frontier,” which is important to Traveller, is not so relevant to Japanese literary history. Aside from a very brief and unfortunate period of recent history that didn’t work out for them, they don’t have a history of imperialism or colonialism. Even their brief foray into imperialism – which ended tragically for them by 1945 – was at least partly geopolitical (to keep up with the West) and also occurred at a very unusual aberrant political period, when they were living under essentially a military dictatorship. Japan also never had a strong history of exploration – in place of an “age of exploration” they have an “age of isolation” and no long naval history, even though their navy now seems integral to their identity. In fact Japan’s most famous naval victory was due to a typhoon, not their own navy, and for many years they had no ships bigger than fishing boats. So the main themes of traveller – exploration, imperium, colonies, etc – don’t have a strong place in japanese literary tradition.

The sci-fi I’ve seen here seems to be largely near- to medium-future inward-looking dystopias or post-apocalyptic stories, often cyberpunk without the punk. Maybe this is more consistent with their cultural history. There are some catastrophic-war types of stories, in which there are no clear good or bad guys, also consistent with recent history; but expansive imperial stories are not really the stuff of Japanese legend. I have a private theory that the Japanese have a history of conquest and exploration within Japan but it is so old that it is only reflected in myth – I think the momo taro story may be an allegory for the driving out of the Ainu from Honshu, but I have no proof of this of course.

So this means that stories like Traveller would have no place in or resonance with contemporary Japanese literature, and would simultaneously be exotic and interesting to a subgroup of nerds. The same, I suspect, applies to Star Trek, Star Wars and other similar western imports, so they have less relevance here than they do in the West.

As an example of Japanese interpretation of Western sci-fi, here is a picture I found on Amazon of the cover of a Japanese interpretation of Iain Banks’s Player of Games. It seems jarring and not serious enough to me, though the grid at the bottom is kind of perfect. But I’m not sure what illustration would suit that novel, so maybe my sense of its strangeness is overdone.

 

Cyberpunk Campaign Idea: HIV and Western Collapse

This semester I’m teaching a course on Global Crime and Public Health as a special lecture series (in fact I should be preparing material now instead of posting here). This course represents a culmination of 15 years’ research experience in the service of a general model of what constitutes a “good” response to the public health threat of movements in global crime. The key public health threat in the West is, of course, HIV spread by injecting drug use and/or sex work[1]. Both HIV and sex work have an international criminal connection, since the former is fed by international crime syndicates and international criminal connections drive the movement of women from high-HIV areas in Asia to low HIV areas in Oceania, to work in unregulated sweat shop-style brothels. The movement of these drug- and sex-work markets in Australia is also tied into its multicultural history and movement towards open markets and trade, so there’s a lot to take in, but basically it’s about HIV.

A lot of people – including quite a few in positions to know better – seem to think that HIV is no big deal, perhaps through their having looked at it through the prism of the developed world’s good luck, but in my wandering through this topic at the University I have had to review both the history, recent epidemiology and effects of HIV. It’s certainly the case that, had the developed world had the singular bad luck that Africa had, or reacted more slowly, our lives here in the pampered Western world would be very different. I wonder if our luck in dodging this bullet might be partly responsible for the growth of zombie/disease movies in the last 10 years, and while I was wondering at that it occurred to me that a slightly different set of historical circumstances could create an alternate history earth with a lot of cyberpunk elements, that could be an interesting setting for a gritty near-future cyberpunk campaign. To understand it, we should take a look at a brief potted history of HIV, and its effects.

The history of HIV

The first known death due to AIDS was a Norwegian sailor and his family, who died of AIDS in about 1972[2]. He almost certainly got his HIV while travelling through Africa, where it is believed to have appeared during the 50s at least, and from where it spread to Haiti in the 60s. It is then believed to have circulated through America, but it appears to have been confined to gay men at first in America. Unfortunately for the Africans, AIDS appeared simultaneously in 3 separate, geographically distinct locations in heterosexual populations in the early 80s, and it’s possible it was already endemic in those areas by that time.

In the USA, UK and Asia, however, it was not endemic – having come to those countries from other countries – and it did not appear first in the heterosexual community. The huge benefit of this is that it could be contained, because of the good luck of its originating in a separate community with different behaviours and a strong community identity. This combination meant that it wouldn’t spread fast outside of the group, and health behaviour messages were easily communicated within the group.

On the other hand, in Africa it appeared in the most diverse community possible – heterosexuals – and because of its incubation period (10 years) and the fact that it was native to the region, it was already endemic by the time it was identified. It’s very hard to control a disease that is already widespread in a group with a very vague shared identity, if the only form of prevention is behavioural change.

The Effects of HIV in Africa

HIV in the west is a scary disease that affects a small portion of the community. Strong public health systems can handle scary diseases in minority communities very easily. However, in Africa the disease has spread amongst heterosexual populations very quickly, and is now at epidemic level within nations. Prevalence of HIV in Swaziland is 26%, and in Lesotho 24%; even in countries with a model response, like Uganda, the prevalence is around 5-6%.

HIV exacts a cruel toll on its victims, both in terms of their horrible suffering as they die, and the effects on their family and friends. In Africa the disease’s high prevalence has also had economic effects, especially:

• Reduced food production, as labourers either die or leave the land to care for relatives
• Poverty, as people drop out of work to care for relatives
• Reduced school enrolments, as children are withdrawn from school to support families whose main earners are sick or dead

In a lot of countries in Africa, HIV is expected to lead to long-term entrenched poverty, loss of food production, and loss of economic growth because businesses cannot find suitable labour. Recently Lesotho petitioned South Africa to be absorbed into the South African nation, because Lesotho itself is facing economic and social collapse specifically because of the HIV epidemic.

Alternate HIV History

Suppose, then, that the disease had developed in the USA rather than Africa, and appeared spontaneously in three areas in the heterosexual community, rather than the gay community. Suppose further that it was already endemic in these areas. Even if all three areas were rural, it’s hard to believe that the US could have done better than Uganda, and given the amount of travel in the US compared to Africa in the 70s and 80s, the sexual looseness of the time and the presence of the pill, it’s pretty easy to imagine the disease getting out of control. It would spread rapidly to the UK and Australia through travel, but not so rapidly to virgin Africa, since there wasn’t so much contact between the two at the time. By the time it was identified and isolated (and maybe first it was called “Heterosexual Related Immune Deficiency”?) the Africans would have been in a position to ban travel from the US, and gain a few years’ grace to teach Africans about safe sex. i.e. the situation that the West experienced, in reverse. It’s possible to imagine, too, that the economic costs could have been larger in the US than in Africa. Much of the economic cost of HIV in the early years in Africa was handled on the cheap, by letting people die or giving very basic palliative care, while in the US it would be all-hands-to-the-pump in what was then still a quite well-run system.

The difference, of course, is that the US and Europe were the key drivers of economic growth in the 80s and 90s, and if they suddenly collapsed in on themselves due to HIV, the world would have gone along a very different trajectory. Asia – or at least those countries untouched by HIV – would have been the key drivers of economic growth in the 90s, and those countries of course would be the nations isolated from US involvement, or relatively untouched – China, Vietnam, Korea and maybe Japan. Japan, if untouched, would have continued the development aid to the region which enabled most of Asia to grow during that time, and we would be looking at a world where the West was collapsing in on itself while Asia grew, and Africa went on its own, possibly quite isolated trajectory to growth. How would African growth be affected by a collapse in the West? Would trade with Asia be a less protected and more open affair, so Africa could grow out of its problems? Without Australian and Canadian wheat, would Africa become a major food supplier and thus grow in a way it didn’t in the real world?

The world that would come from this strikes me a lot like the world of Appleseed, where a few isolated Asian countries have achieved great wealth and security while Europe and the US struggle and collapse in on themselves. However, the cause wouldn’t be some kind of global war, but a global disease catastrophe that changed the economic development model of the last 30 years.

Some HIV-driven cyberpunk scenarios

A world where nuclear-armed, militarily sophisticated states collapse in on themselves under the burden of epidemic disease is a scary one indeed, and suggests a variety of interesting scenarios for adventuring:

• The Isolated Survivor: Perhaps a couple of countries acted early to isolate themselves, and while the rest of the world (or the rest of the world that we’re interested in) struggles and dies, they soldier on. Such a society might be a lot like the world of Children of Men, grotty and nasty but trying to cling on to its past social structures while it slowly and inevitably decays into a post-apocalyptic mess. Adventuring in such a state would be something between cyberpunk and post-apocalypse, as the scenes in the refugee camp in Children of Men show. There would be many factional sides to take, and very little to be gained from being self-interested except power.
• Dictatorship and War: With economies failing and populations in unrest, an obvious way for Western governments to reassert their authority, regain popularity, and regain resources, is to launch foreign wars, either for material gain or for the simple distracting power of a good, cleansing war. War overseas is a good excuse for dictatorship at home – as is a state of permanent disease – and the PCs could find themselves suddenly on the wrong (or the right) end of a fascist, communist, or even religious dictatorship. Dictatorships in a society slowly falling apart from the inside are an excellent dystopian cyberpunk setting, with the PCs able to position themselves as freedom fighters, spies, death squads, innocent victims of a plot, etc.
• Homesteading and survivalism: With no cure in sight, and large parts of the populace infected, maybe the wealthy, the brave, or the stupid would try to set up their own kingdoms or survivalist enterprises. The best ones are always at sea, but there could be other places too – the arctic, the deep mountains, enclaves inside fast-collapsing cities. The PCs could be hired on as guards, or could be members of the original community who find themselves caught in a plot – or sent on a mission.
• The Cure: Maybe someone finds a cure for the disease, and the PCs stumble on it or are enlisted to protect it. What do they do if they find that a local power-broker/government/corporation wants to keep it secret to use as a political tool, to assure world domination, etc? Do they go along with the plan for a slice of the goodies, steal the cure, or reveal the truth to the world? What if the cure is a bio-weapon that instantly kills the infected? Would the PCs disseminate it for the greater good, destroy the last sample, fight to prevent its use?
• The Truth: Suppose that in fact HIV were not a natural disease at all, but one of the conspiracy theories about its origin proved to be more than true, and it was in fact a bioweapon gone wrong. A campaign leading up to this revelation could change the world – especially if a government of an uninfected country had secretly released it, and was sitting on the cure.
• Drug dealing: In an America with a properly cyberpunk economic system, crumbling infrastructure and declining wealth, very few people would be able to afford anti-retroviral drugs, which would become a new kind of treasure. The PCs could be dealers in ART, or even Robin Hood style liberators of stashes of the drugs, constantly running from criminal rivals and the law. Or they could be dispatched by the government or a corporation to break up such a group.

My favourite is the first or second, or a combination of the two, though elements of any of the rest could be thrown in for effect. HIV-related collapse has the advantage of not being as catastrophic as modern disease/zombie movies, so it creates a crumbling cyberpunk society as opposed to a post-apocalyptic one, but it gives an opportunity to create a future with an economic order that has been changed in a semi-plausible way, and a reason for the moribund state of western nations. It also gives a plausible background against which genuinely fascist or radical, but powerful religious movements could be resurgent, and the slow development of the virus gives a  long time frame for corporations and governments to work their schemes, rather than the kind of disaster-management scenarios we often see in zombie/outbreak-type movies.

Beyond HIV

Of course, invented diseases could be more tailored to the scenario than HIV. A disease that causes madness, so that the victim never recovers and never dies, and is a constant burden on society, could create an even more disturbing future. Maybe the mad are easily contained, but in some places there are just too many… Diseases with catatonic or similar semi-stuporific states would create a challenge of an interesting sort, as do diseases that lower fertility or prematurely age the population. All that’s really needed is a disease that appears suddenly after a long latency, so it is insidious; that is highly contagious; and that creates a huge, irresolvable social burden out of its victims, sufficient to create the conditions of economic decay and apocalypse that would characterise the campaign world, because the purpose of the disease is not to create physical enemies of its victims, like zombies; but to create the context for a debilitated society, suspicious of its own members and falling from its previous greatness due to disease and rapid economic decay. Under these conditions one can create the backdrop for a game of gritty urban cyberpunk semi-apocalypse, which I think could be an interesting setting for some unpleasant and challenging adventures.

 

 

 

 

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fn1: Though it’s of course not the only such problem. I’ve been thinking of setting my students an assignment based on the problems that the Italians are having with rubbish disposal and the mafia, but I suspect that there isn’t much published on this. Contraband olive oil created significant public health disasters in Spain under Franco, and there is now of course the potential health consequences of smuggling animals and plants. But I think these don’t compare to the real, identifiable effects of heroin importation to countries like Australia and Kyrgizstan.

fn2: Doesn’t even bother checking the lecture he gave last week for the exact date…

 

Japanese RPG Double Cross 3: Titus and Lois

A few weeks ago I played in a Double Cross 3 session, and wrote up a few reports on it. This post constitutes the final report on that session, in which I describe my experience of the Lois and Titus rules and how they affect gameplay.

Lois and Titus

When you roll up a character in Double Cross 3, you are also required to generate a set of Lois‘s. Lois’s are people you know, connected to you through your life path, who help to keep you connected to the real world of ordinary human life. They can be colleagues, school-friends, family members, or people who helped you in your earlier life. When you develop these relationships you have to roll up a negative and positive trait for them, which will be things like “envy” and “charity” or “rivarly” and “love,” and you then choose one of these traits to define your relationship to the Lois when you start the game. Lois’s don’t have to be present in your life during play – they can be memories, distant figures, or the legacy of dead people.

Ideally, as you adventure in a rich world of secrets and superheroes, you gain more Lois’s. Your Lois’s have three direct effects on the game-play:

• They give you allies and contacts you can call upon. These people aren’t henchmen, but people tied intimately to your lives who will aid you when you need help
• They give the GM (and the players) adventure hooks. Just as they will come to you when you need their help, so they also will come to you when they need your help, which gives the GM a lot of opportunities to start or interfere with adventures
• They save you from corruption. As you adventure, your use of your virus-related powers increases your level of corruption, which draws you ever closer to losing your humanity and becoming a germ. At the end of every session you get to roll 1d10 for every Lois you have, and subtract this from your corruption total. The lower your corruption the weaker your powers, but the higher your corruption the greater the risk of permanently sliding into darkness and ruin

This type of relationship could actually be introduced to Warhammer, come to think of it…

But there is another aspect to the Lois’s which makes them particularly potent. Their kindness (or their memory) can be abused, at which point they become Titus, so-named after the Shakespearean character of that name. A Titus is a lover spurned, a friend whose kindness was abused one time too many, a family member with a grudge… they pursue you to the end, wrathful as only someone once-loved can be. A Lois can become a Titus through your own stupidity, or through the game-mechanics device of sublimating a Lois.

Sublimation

When you sublimate a Lois you get rid of them from your life altogether, passing them from Titus through to gone. In the process of doing this you gain one of a series of in game benefits – adding 10 dice to a single roll, or healing a certain number of hit points, and so on. The in-game benefits that derive from this are quite significant in some cases – 10 dice is a phenomenal bonus – and well worth tossing your grandmother in front of a bus for. I think you can also do this with Lois’s who have become Tituses through the story (rather than a deliberate choice by the player). I’m not sure what the downside of burning a Titus is, besides that you have lost a story hook – this seems to be a way to get a vengeful ex-lover out of your life, which is only a good thing, right?

I haven’t read the section in the rulebook about this yet (I’ve been very busy) and we didn’t get around to seeing the benefits or disadvantages of a Titus in the game I played. So I’m not sure why one would allow the process of deLoisification to stop at merely producing a Titus, but I’m sure there’s a good reason.

The big downside of burning a Lois, of course, is that you then lose the ability to call on them for corruption amelioration, which will make your adventuring life a lot shorter than it would otherwise be (not that your Titus will care).

Game example

In my game, I sublimated my mother and the memory of an old, long-dead client of the Robot-driving business he worked for. I sublimated both of these Lois’s in order to regain 1d10 Hps each time (hey! what can I say? I sell my loyalties cheaply). My relationship with my mother was characterised by hostility, due to anger at her tolerating my Father’s secret membership of the False Hearts; my relationship with the memory of my dead ex-client was ishi, the will of the dead, some long-carried-over request or obligation to his memory.

So how did I burn these Lois’s to get a healing surge? The first was my Mother, whose memory I discarded like an oily rag after the minions of the False Hearts struck me down in an alley. I imagined this as my character realising he had been ambushed and outdone by the False Hearts, and as he struggled to retain his consciousness, recognising that all his life he had been thwarted and ruined by that hateful organisation first manipulated and preyed upon by his father in pursuit of a secret goal, then pursued through the dangerous underworld of Tokyo when he worked in the mecha business – perhaps even to the death of his client – and now to be hounded to death? All this was too much! And then I imagined that his mother called him on his cellphone, just as his last breaths were ebbing away, and that call (of course it has a special ringtone) penetrated the fog of impending unconsciousness – here was all his anger at the False Hearts crystallized in the form of the woman who he had always felt had betrayed him and who would not relent from constantly trying to get him to forgive her. Why should he forgive anyone for the harms done to him? I imagined him surging back to life, anger at his mother charging through him in the form of his viral payload, generating a healing surge at the same time as it destroyed his cellphone in a vicious series of sparks and lightning bolts. Just as every anime character has to surge to wakefulness with a scream at least once [1], so Kintaro regained consciousness surrounded by clouds of electric rage, blasting his phone and symbolically eliminating his mother from his life.

The next was his client. This time Kintaro had been knocked down by the False Hearts leader, his life’s blood ebbing away in some shitty Tokyo Snack. Again, as he felt his defeat looming, he remembered all the failures and defeats thrust upon him by this sinister organisation and raged against them. This time I imagined Kintaro had given up on his hopes of a normal life, and realised he had to fully embrace the powers he had inherited, rather than pretending he could continue to live like a normal person. He would have to cast aside his past life and devote himself to destroying the organisation that had so plagued him. So thinking, he cast aside his last contact with the ordinary world – his last Lois from outside of UGN – and all the long-overdue obligations it had shackled him with. Surging back from that fading state, again imbued with electrical power, he screamed his rage at the world that had wronged him, and reentered the fight…

Conclusion

Lois’s offer excellent game hooks, dramatic opportunities and mechanical advantages. They also offer an excellent narrative technique for justifying (and stunting) healing surges, recovery from corruption, and other phenomena that might otherwise just seem like in-game fixes. I think they could be repackaged in some way as an excellent addition to Warhammer as a mechanism for helping draw PCs back from insanity or corruption. They are another example of the differences between Japanese RPGs and Western RPGs, and an interesting example of incorporation of a dramatic element into the game through the rule system.

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fn1: I’m reminded of when only one company distributed anime in Australia – was it madman entertainment? – and their adverts always involved a screaming guy, and someone else yelling “what’s going on in here?!!!”

 

Japanese role-playing game Double Cross 3: Kintaro “The Noble”

How does he keep the hat on...?

This post, third in a series describing my recent experience playing the Japanese role-playing game Double Cross 3, which I have been reading and recently had the chance to play-test, describes the character I played, Kintaro.

Character Concept

Kintaro, aka “The Noble,” is a pure-breed Black Dog syndrome male in his mid-20s, who works for the UGN company and hails from a wealthy family. He is a section chief at UGN, and like most Black Dog Overed, relies on physical strength and the power of lightning and storms to do battle. Black Dog powers don’t have much subtlety or information-gathering power. They smash and fry things. Kintaro’s work history is as a mecha-driver and engineer, using equipment similar to that seen in Aliens or Avatar.

Statistics

Kintaro’s stats are:

• Physical: 6 (melee 4, resistance 1, Robot-driving 2)
• Sense: 2
• Spirit: 3 (Will 1)
• Social: 1 (Provisions 2, Knowledge-UGN 1)

Hit points: 35

Effects

Kintaro knows the following effects:

• Resurrect (lvl 1): regain 1d10 Hps, but must have a corruption score below 100 to use
• Warding (lvl 1): Turns non-overed NPCs into “extras” for the duration of a scene
• Concentrate (lvl 2): Reduces the critical number required for any effect with which it is combined by the level of this power
• Cyber Arm (lvl 3): Kintaro has a nasty-looking cyber arm that does bad stuff to bad people
• Arms Link (lvl 2): Adds [lvl] in dice to Kintaro’s attack roll with his melee skill
• Lightning Attack (lvl 2): Adds 2x[lvl] to Kintaro’s attack power (the damage he does with his attacks)
• Shield of ball lightning (lvl 2): Adds 2x[lvl] to Kintaro’s guard value (for resisting damage)

Kintaro has one power which he composed of a combination of 4 of these abilities.

Strike of the thunder arm (雷腕の攻撃): Combining the Cyber arm, concentrate, Arms link and lightning attack effects, Kintaro can add 2 dice to his next attack, reduce the critical target from 10 to 8,  and increase the attack damage by 4. His total dice pool using this combination is 8, and he adds 10 to damage after rolling the damage dice resulting from his attack. A potent strike indeed!

Life path

I rolled for life path in the book, and obtained the following details:

Origin

A noble family.

Experience

A dangerous job.

Encounter

Old clients, perhaps people in the world of his dangerous job.

Awakening

Sacrifice

Impulse

Hate

Lois

From the above life-path details, we obtain Kintaro’s Lois:

• His mother: Kintaro’s relationship with his mother is characterised by hostility
• A client of his old work: This client is dead, and Kintaro honours his memory
• Silk Spider: A UGN agent who values Kintaro’s happiness
• Fellow Traveller: Kanamoto Saburota, one of the NPCs, whose relationship with Kintaro is characterised by “alienation.”
• Domeki, a PC, in whom Kintaro sees much promise

(The last two of these were generated for the adventure).

Putting the threads together: Kintaro’s story

Kintaro was born the youngest son of a wealthy family, inheritors of a network of nuclear power stations scattered across Japan. In his late teens Kintaro’s power began to manifest and his father, up until then a remote figure, began to draw him into the family business, rewarding his expression of super-power talents and slowly revealing their shared knowledge of the Black Dog skills. Perhaps proximity to the nuclear power plant induced this particular expression of the Renegade virus, but Kintaro’s powers were never strong, and ultimately his father despaired of him, tired of him, and became angry and hateful towards him. Somehow, Kintaro discovered that in fact his father was an agent of the False Hearts organisation, and confronting him with this knowledge, was offered the chance to join the organization by his father. He refused, and his father said terrible things about Kintaro’s weakness and lack of proper renegade manifestation. Kintaro, angered, suddenly manifested his full power and, in a burst of anger, set off such a cataclysm of electrical power that the power station in which their confrontation occurred collapsed around them. Kintaro, severely injured, fled his home and never returned. Somehow in the cataclysm his body fashioned itself a cyber arm from discarded pieces of the powerplant, and he left his home behind him.This explains the awakening of sacrifice.

Showing an affinity for machines, Kintaro took up dangerous work as a robot operator, heavy machinery operator and ultimately mecha driver. In between he associated with Yakuza, Yanki, and all the dangerous elements of the underworld that surround jobs associated with hard physical labour. He had some confrontations with his mother during this time, but discovered she had always known about and tolerated her father’s secret contacts. Angered, he withdrew from his mother, though she constantly calls and contacts him, and disappeared for years into the simple world of hard labour. It was here that he met one of his Lois’s, the client of one of his companies, who was perhaps a yakuza boss or brothel-owner but was like a mentor for Kintaro, helping him to control his anger. This man died, perhaps in an encounter with people connected with the False Hearts.

Eventually Kintaro’s occasional encounters with the False Hearts brought him to the attention of UGN, and they recruited him. Discovering the truth about the False Hearts and the plans his father had had – and his mother had tolerated – enabled Kintaro to find a new depth of hatred for this organisation and its fellow travellers, and this became his driving impulse. He threw himself into his work, becoming friends with the UGN contacts Silk Spider and Saburota, but his devotion to his work and dangerous manner alienated him from Saburota, so they trust one another but have awkward daily dealings. Kintaro took up working in a UGN mecha shop as his cover, but does a lot of agent work.

Characteristics

It should be clear from this description that Kintaro is a driven character, full of hatred for his enemies and impatience with those who cannot aid him. He is quick to anger and slow to forget, capable of bearing grudges against those he loves and who love him, and driven by personal demons and a strong sense of mission. Though he may not be stupid, he is clearly a man of action, unwilling to tolerate the niceties of diplomacy or social graces. People are a tool in his main goal, which is to avenge himself on and ultimately destroy the organisation which changed his life – the False Hearts. This probably suggests an equivocal view of his own powers, which he sacrificed much to gain, and possibly even a quite calculating view of his own employer. But one thing is certain – his mission is destruction, and he has the tools to carry it out.

About the image

The image is from the Black Dog chapter of the Double Cross rulebook. The inset panel says “before you look,” and the main panel says something like, “A bolt of energy that is surely 440 times the speed of sound, a million volts of power, and as much as a gigajoule of energy… that is to say, LIGHTNING.”

 

Japanese role-playing game Double Cross 3: Scenario Craft Random Modules

In my previous post about playing this game on Sunday, I mentioned that we used a type of module called “Scenario Craft,” in which every element of the module except a vague skeleton of the plot is random. This post gives a little more detail about the scenario craft process.

The book

The scenario craft book we used was called “Public Enemy” and can be viewed here (Japanese). I’m not sure what the background to this module is, but it contained some expansion information for the game, some new NPCs, and the website indicates it has information on the history and development of the False Hearts organisation, which is the evil underworld for crazy superheroes. I didn’t see much of the module book itself, since the GM was using it a lot. The book presents 4 types of adventure based around interaction with this organisation.

The basic idea

The basic idea of the Scenario Craft plan appears to be that the adventures are built collaboratively by the GM and players, through some outline decisions and choice of scenario that the players and GM decide on together, followed by a kind of collaborative decision-making process about some aspects of the PCs that are required to fit the adventure. After this, the players and the GM between them roll up all aspects of the main NPCs, including the bad guy, so we all know what we’re up against and its relationship to the party. The remainder of the adventure plays out through a semi-structured flow chart of action, and a lot of random events, clues and conflicts rolled up during the different stages of the adventure.

The scenario choices

The scenario choices are presented as a vague outline idea, and each scenario choice affects the structure of the action flow chart, the nature of the adversaries/NPCs, and the random tables on which the action is determined. We were presented with 4 possibilities, but I can’t remember the other 3. The one we chose was “Everyday life should be protected” (mamoru beki nichijou, 守るべき日常）. The outline idea was that someone in the False Heart organisation was about to find a way to reveal the virus infecting our superheroes, and we need to find a way to stop it.

Scenario plots

Each scenario comes with its own plot, which is very broadly outlined. Here is ours:

The “cooperating NPC” approaches the PCs to tell them he thinks that his underling, the “Rival NPC,” has joined the False Hearts. Simultaneously, the “Heroine NPC” tells one of the players (with whom she has a close relationship) that she is worried about her friend, the “Rival NPC.” The PCs agree to find the “Rival NPC” and bring him back to UGN for questioning.

That’s it. These NPCs are worked into our characters’ lives through a very simple plot mechanism, the Lois (see later).

The action flow chart

Almost all of the adventuring is constrained to two pages of the book. The right-hand page contains necessary tables for randomly generating everything, and the left hand page contains some outline information and a flow chart which breaks the adventure down into 5 main scenes. The scenes are:

• PC Opening, 4 separate subscenes in which each PC appears briefly to have their intro to the adventure explained
• Grand Opening, in which the four PCs join together to determine their attitude to the adventure
• Middle Phase, in which the majority of the adventure happens
• Climax, in which the PCs get in a big fat fight
• Flashback, in which the PCs attempt to return to normal life and shed the corruption of the adventure, get XPs, etc.

The main action happens in the middle phase, which is divided up into separate stages in the flow chart. These stages may or may not be sequential or conditional (I think in our case they were sequential). Our main stage within the Middle Phase was “Research Event,” in which we did investigative stuff which triggered encounters.

This action flow chart provides the GM with a structure around which to hang an actual adventure, just like in any normal module, but it really only provides an outline from which to hang all the random tables.The Middle Phase here is also set up to include a lot of random variation in how long and diverse it is, how many encounters there are, and what they are, through the use of a progress tracker.

The progress tracker

The progress tracker seems very similar to the method of Warhammer 3rd edition for resolving drawn-out challenged tasks. Basically, the GM sets a target number of “successes” for some investigative or challenged action occurring in the Middle Phase. Every day, the PCs set about resolving this action, using some kind of skill check (we used our social skill for information gathering). We have to accrue a certain number of successes before we can proceed to the next section, and can only get one each a day. Every day we adventure trying to gain these successes we incur a d10 of corruption points and a risk of a minor encounter, which we will win at the cost of further corruption points. Corruption points make us more powerful in battle but also drag us closer to becoming irredeemably infected (“germs”) and at risk of having to burn all our social contacts to drag ourselves back to reality, so rapid progress up the tracker is a good thing.

There is a separate progress tracker for “prize points,” which are bonusses gained from very high skill rolls. These prize points are rolled randomly on a table, and are essentially hints as to the nature of the problem we are trying to solve. More prize points makes it easier for us to find the correct solution and progress along the tracker to the next stage, i.e. ideally they will help us choose a way of solving the problem which gives bonusses to our rolls, increases our combined successes, and kicks us along the tracker. In fact, this didn’t happen in our game because our GM was a little weak in this regard, but the idea is solid I think. At the end, if you get to the end of the progress tracker, you learn the solution to the problem and go to the next stage (though I presume the GM can short circuit the tracker if the players solve the problem).

I like this because a) it gives an idea of how long the task takes to solve, and solving the task quickly is useful, b) the prize points thing can be used to give XP rewards – particularly if creative thinking gives players bonusses on their rolls and thus more prize points and c) if the PCs are having success in the tasks but the players just aren’t thinking the problem through, the GM has a trigger point at which to allow the skill rolls to determine the outcome, and stop the game getting bogged down because the players just can’t figure it out (or the GM can’t explain it).

Choosing the NPCs

We chose the NPCs by rolling, together, the details of their relationships to us, their appearance, name, their goals, and pretty much every other aspect of their personality except their stats and powers (which were either already chosen, or secretly rolled by the GM). There’s no reason these couldn’t be rolled too, I suppose. But then, would you even need a GM? We also had to choose a PC to be linked to the Heroine NPC and the Cooperative NPC, which was done semi-randomly (scissor-paper-stone). These relationships are a really important part of Double Cross 3, and being able to choose even relationships with NPCs and enemies is interesting too. Especially when you burn them for an extra 10 dice in your attack pool.

Random tables and the progress of the adventure

The random tables included information about where we went to do our research into what the Rival PC was up to. Every day we did research, we rolled up a possible encounter, so on the third day we stumbled into an area that had been “warded” by False Hearts agents, and on other days nothing happened. There were also random tables for where we finally confronted the boss guy, and I think our adversaries in non-boss encounters may have been randomly generated too. Also, the “prize points” were randomly generated, only we kept generating the same two prize points, until we reached the end of the progress track.

Reaching the end of the progress tracker showed up one of the big flaws of any kind of randomized adventure scheme, because our GM wasn’t up to the task of wrapping up all the random encounters into an information package from which we could extract the clues we needed, so he ended up just kind of … handing us the information we needed. This is a good aspect of the progress track if the failure to draw a conclusion is the players’ fault, since we incur a corruption cost but don’t fail the adventure; but if it’s the GM’s fault it leaves you feeling like you didn’t succeed in the adventure. I don’t think there’s a way around this aspect of randomized gaming, except to have adventures without a plot or a conclusion. The progress tracker at least gives the GM a trigger at which to get rid of the investigative phase of the adventure and get to the finish.

Conclusions

I like this schema for mostly-randomized adventures, and the layout of the module was such that it was very easy for the GM to run the whole game collaboratively with us without giving away any details early, or getting too confused. It was fun generating our own adventure as we went, but it was also frustrating when it wasn’t tied together properly and we just skipped from progress track to ending, a problem I’ve always had with adventures that aren’t fully prepared by the GM beforehand. in truth this can happen with traditional modules that have been badly designed, or with work that a GM does by him/herself. I think when a GM writes their own adventure they tend to go through a wider range of scenarios in their head, and know the plan better, so that they are more flexible at adapting to player stupidity/their own gaffes. GM-written adventures are hardly immune to the problem though.

In general the Double Cross stuff I’ve seen so far has been very well laid out and clear, and they’re fond of very easily understood flowcharts and diagrams. I think that this is a strength of this adventure setting too, and a lot of careful thought has gone into making these modules playable on the fly. Also, of course, they’re ideally suited to day-long conventions.