robotnik2004 | FARC! (Was: Fark!)

Two very fun gaming sessions this week:

jeregenest's Pantellos game on Sunday and Unknown USA last night.

In both cases I think one of the things that made it fun was that the GM was pushing a little, but not all the way, out of their regular comfort zone: Jere kicked off the Pantellos game with a great pulp action sequence—Chase scene on narrow Peruvian mountain road! Incan mummy and Tesla-Marconi gravitic radio in the back! Gorillas! FARCs! It's not his normal style, but I for one ate it up with a spoon. (OK, it turned out they were Shining Path, not FARCs.) But FARCs ("Farks!") is more fun to say.)

And in the UA game, I ran with much less script than I'm used to. About half the characters were on fairly well-prepared paths, but the other half were roaming around with really no preset storyline to follow at all. I had a few bangs to throw at them (and some goodies I didn't get to use) but nothing that had to happen or any real sense of where it would end up. That half of the group probably had more slow time (exacerbated by having 6 (!) PCs, including 2 that had just joined the group), but it also generated the most exciting moments of play (for me, at least), including a 1-in-a-100 roll by John as his old blues man recorded a song in a Memphis record studio. What do you do when someone makes a spectacular roll on something non-spectacular like playing a guitar?

Funny: Jere runs these intricate, intellectual games and I'm kinda pushing him for more straight-forward action. While in my gaming history, action has typically been everything, and I'm now trying to figure out ways to make a scene with an old man playing his guitar as exciting and as valid a climax as a car chase or a shoot 'em up. Playing what you know is good, but so is stretching your muscles.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Sounds like a great session, both of them. I'm a friend of Bryant's ("Did I mention the cliff?") who followed his link here, and was wondering if you were familiar with this quote from Alan Rodgers' Bone Music:

"There is a song all bluesmen know: they call it the song for Judgment Day. Some of them know it in bits and pieces; others know it nearly whole. The oldest, greatest deepest talents among them know the song as it truly will be sung - but none of them would ever sing it just that way.

"None of them would dare.

"As bluesmen and lady blues singers learn their craft they come to know this song a little at a time; as they master the blues the song comes to them more and more clearly. If and when they grow to be Hoodoo Doctors (and few of them ever do) they know it by heart, and in their hearts - no matter how they've never heard it sung.

"No Hoodoo Doctor who knew the song would ever play it. "

"Not -exactly-. he wouldn't dare; anyone who hears the song enough to know it knows what it will do. If you listen to much blues, you've probably heard bits and pieces of it, worked and reworked into blues standards (some of which have gone on to be rock 'n' roll standards) - but even if you've heard them all you've only seen the shadows that this song casts. There's no way plain uninitiated folks can imagine the original from its parts.

"The bluesmen of the Delta call the song Judgment Day - because that's when they'll sing it. Gabriel will blow his horn, and all the Hoodoo Doctors everywhere will hear, and they'll sing Judgment Day. And the sound and the resonance that rise up from their truest song will shatter the Eye of the World.

"When it shatters the Apocalypse will be upon us.

"Terrible things that weigh on a song - things that would hang like doom impending if Judgment Day were just another simple four-four melody. But Judgment Day isn't just a song; it's an unmasterable riff that lives only in the deepest secret hearts of Hoodoo Doctors. Only one man alive has ever deduced the song and sung it just exactly so - and that man was Robert Johnson, and what he sang and when he sang it are the deep root beneath this tale."

Hiya!

Sorry I didn't reply to this earlier - I was in Canada last week for a job interview and let my email get away from me.

Good catch on the Bone Music reference, and thanks for the quotation, which I think I'll forward to our game's mailing list. I did read that book a while back and I have no doubt it was part of my inspiration for Blind Joe's accursed song. Though I think I've probably wanted to run a game involving Robert Johnson's 30th song ever since the 1980s movie Crossroads with Ralph Macchio. (Steve Vai and the Karate Kid play duelling guitars in Hell! How can you not love it?)

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Judgment Day

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