I’m working my way through some early posts on Kieron Gillen and Jim Rossignol’s blog, Old Men Running the World. Rossignol has a post on “the RPG-mediated search for Experiential Validation” that I found resonant:
The act of playing, and of finding out what happens at the table, is a sort of creative multiplier. The equivalent of a jazz band. The basic riff might have been there, and even some of the cool hooks, but the improv is where the magic happens. Indeed, the stuff that RPGs produce can often not be rendered anywhere else. I have in mind here a moment, years past, of a collapsing pocket-dimension spraying naked dwarves over an apocalyptic battlefield and… well, it’s a long story, but you get the idea: that was a landmark for me, but typical of RPG sessions. More of that sort of thing, I thought.
That particular image immediately brought me to one of Brennan Lee Mulligan’s unhinged classics, the bit in Fantasy High: Sophomore Year about “225 adult babies,” which is of course a parable about the sexual power of rock music. You may have to watch it to see what I’m trying to get at here.
Earlier in the same video (it’s a clip compilation) there’s a bit from Freshman Year where Gilear, the always hapless divorced dad of one of the PCs, explains how he knows an order of garlic knots he found on the street were added to the corresponding pizza by accident (he checked the receipt). My own perhaps best example of this phenomenon is when my charmed ranger provoked five PvP attacks of opportunity trying to save the enemy who’d charmed him.
For contrast cases: There’s some heartwrenching stuff in Sophomore Year. Fabian accidentally exterminates the cult of warlocks whose patron is his dead father; Adaine has a brief moment of connection with her sister, a villain of Freshman Year whom she’s rescued from months of torture, only for the walls to come crashing down again. These are amazing moments, and I believe they’re largely improvised… but they’d be equally at home if Fantasy High had been written as a novel or a scripted series.
And perhaps those materials themselves are not what I am searching for, but are instead the medium in which I dig for a specific feeling, or a particular aesthetic and emotional response, or a distinct, rare vibe, like a connoisseur forever searching for that rumoured but as-yet-unexperienced flavour.
I’m not sure the flavor I’m talking about here is the flavor Rossignol is looking for. But maybe these little fragments are an existence proof of some kind—that such rare vibes exist, and that RPGs and the improvisation and chance that drive them really are the unique substrate of those vibes.
Currently listening: LAST CALL, by Tim Powers, read by Bronson Pinchot.