Through much of this past winter, I wasn’t creatively blocked, as such, but I didn’t have much direction. I wrote a couple of stories in response to open calls, but they were one-offs that weren’t building towards anything. My cup slosheth and spilleth but not runneth over in any consistent way.
With the uptick in my tabletop activities, that situation has changed. I’m now in two Arden Vul campaigns, one using OSRIC and the other using Old School Essentials, and a Forgotten Realms game using 5e. This sudden enrichment of my environment has led to a not-entirely-unexpected burst of creativity, scaffolded by the hard work of other people and driven in part by my personal need to twist familiar tropes.
I’m going to hold off on AV for a bit because I’ve heard rumors cool stuff happening around that online community, which I’m not at all a part of, and I want to learn more about it before sticking my big nose in there.
Instead I want to introduce Glenwood, my 1st-level 5e Dragonborn Druid from the after-work game at Glenwood Public Library. This turns out to be a popular combination, according to the internet, which returned many beautiful images produced through various methods, computational and otherwise. This is not one of them, though I did use a few of them for reference.
Also, for the sheer alliterative hell of it, I typed in the phrase “dinosaur druid,” and discovered a whole 5e subclass (!!!) that had never occurred to me, though I have often thought about the ghosts of ecosystems past, even before reading and hearing and eventually seeing Joe Lansdale’s “Fish Night.”
Anyway, Glenwood’s specific niche (him being a red dragonborn druid) is doing controlled burns to manage fire-prone ecosystems. That’s how he makes his living and manages the peasants-with-pitchforks risk of being a literal monster in their midst. Here in NC, that would include the remaining longleaf pine forests in the Sandhills, as well as the transitional agricultural and game lands that need fire to keep them from closing in. What that means in the ecology of the fictional Forgotten Realms? No idea. It will be fun to explore.
My favorite moment during the first game was the unanimous laugh from the table the first time Glenwood opened his mouth. He had just tripped a dragon cultist and spun his spear around to point it at the guy’s throat, and said, “Come on, now. Better give up,” in a heavy Appalachian accent. They knew he was a red dragon, but they hadn’t considered him being a redneck dragon.
I, of course, am a redneck through both heritage and personal experience.
I haven’t dropped the full Boomhauer on them yet, as he mutters to himself in Draconic. That’s going to be a good laugh, if I don’t screw it up.
Middle-Aged White Guys Standing/Sitting Around
Punching “king of the hill D&D” into the internet brings up a lot of stuff on defending a static point on a map, but nothing I could find about translating those wonderful Mike Judge characters into tabletop versions with stats, except for one random comment on reddit.
I think Dale is the smartest, doing stuff like becoming fluent in Russian. Except there’s a reason D&D has intelligence & wisdom as different scores.
It’s a natural extension, really. Compare.
Both my current AV campaigns as a player are similar. Camille’s after-work library campaign, on the other hand, is so far more evenly gender-balanced, with four men and four women around the big table (counting the GM). Also a wider variance in age and gaming experience. What effect will that have on play? Dunno. Again, fun to explore.
But Back to Crossover Characters
This has always been big fun for me. I put Clive Barker’s Nightbreed into my long-ago Marvel Super Heroes game as Terrigen-powered rivals to both my player characters and the Morlocks. I had ambitions to use the Ghostbusters and Disney’s Gargoyles, too, and did stat them up, but never quite got around to dropping either team into an actual session. The Babylon 5 bridge crew became NPCs in my aborted Middle-Earth campaign at UNCG, along with Edie Brickell, Natalie Merchant, and Lothar of the Hill People. None of it makes particular sense, and it doesn’t have to. That’s the beauty of play.
How ‘Bout Some Actual Science, Man?
Below is my classroom summary of Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory, which lays out the general behavioral options for two groups of vertebrates and maps them onto the nervous system. “Vagal” refers to the vagus nerve, and “poly” implies that the vagus is a mixed nerve with multiple functional pathways running through it.
Normally we think of the two systems as opposed to one another in seesaw or push / pull fashion. The sympathetic nervous system, using mostly adrenaline and other dopamine derivatives, generally increases alertness and activity by mobilizing energy reserves from glycogen and fat and moving blood from the organs to the muscles. The parasympathetic nervous system pushes against this, towards relaxation, digestion, healing, and even sleep.
Overwhelming sympathetic activity is responsible for berserker states, familiar to any fans of speculative fiction or action movies, where the hero’s strength, stamina, and pain thresholds go way up, and personal empathy goes way down. Two of the most famous are both from Marvel — Wolverine and the Incredible Hulk.
Neither of them can control this state, and historical berserkers (if they actually existed) had to engage in unknown communal rituals to enter it. Cheap cheesy cheater barbarians from D&D just announce it as a bonus action.
Overwhelming parasympathetic activity is responsible for the freeze responses in lizards and small-brained mammals like rodents — especially the ‘possum, which can stay frozen for over an hour. This is in response to an overwhelming threat that can be neither fought nor fled from effectively. The only hope is to turtle up and hope the predator gets bored (or disgusted by the emptying of bladder and bowels) and goes away. Big-brained humans can’t restrict blood flow to the whole brain for an hour without dying, and instead have highly variable freeze responses, where different parts of the brain partially shut down in weird combinations, which have started getting a lot more attention from trauma therapists.
But today I want to focus more on that brown triangle pointing off to the right. Mammals (and maybe a few bird species?) have the unique ability to balance the activity of those two nervous systems in a different way, allowing us to be both highly alert and highly relaxed at the same time. That is a superpower, for the way it allows for competitive / cooperative social interactions and turbocharges learning without necessarily escalating into a fight where someone might get hurt.
A rat model of play (NOT explicitly linked to polyvagal theory), showing that there are lots of ways to approach something so complicated.
A book from 2005, which I found in the References of the paper above and have not read, stating that we can find some basic forms of play even in amphibians.
Or a question????
Thanks for reading!