Rat Bastards
slaves and orphans
A post on Murkmail led me to something called a blogwagon (which I assume is like a bandwagon, but for blogs). They were looking for gaming related posts on randomness, and provided tables of constraints for that post. For instance:
I rolled a five and a one (6) and then a two and a one (3). I did not take pictures of those dice rolls, so in some circles that would make me a dirty fudger. So be it.
2d6 Paragraphs on Randomness
I’ve already mentioned Erlenmeyer Flask and his delver party in the latest incarnation of Barton’s Arden Vul home game.1
That party has the standard spread of character classes. The first thing anyone asks when joining a group is, “What do you need?” or “What do you not already have?” That’s because the standard theory of play is the balanced party. Modules are written with this theory in mind. I find that self-reinforcing loop annoying.
When I was still living in Lexington during the early 90s we floated the idea of an all-bard party (in other words, a troupe of traveling performers), and our GM was willing, but only if we all committed to the bit. In other words, he called our bluff, and we backed down. But why not? Why not just roll a die and make the best of that role? Warhammer used randomly determined character classes, and it was a blast. How else would you get a Prospector, a Mule Skinner, a Grave Robber, or an Exciseman? In my experience, most players are not that creative. TSR Marvel Superheroes likewise mocks the idea of party balance by randomly determining everything about a character, from Background to Resources (economic level) to Powers to Skills, all the way down to Contacts.
The other requirement for this assignment was to reference a post by a randomly determined member of the blogwagon. I rolled Coins and Scrolls, which was new to me, and chose the Generic Laboratory and Generic Wizard Tower posts, because as far as I know there’s no details on the insides of the Arcane Practitioners’ Club in Gosterwick, nor on the towers of the various wizards who live in Newmarket. The insides of Klimt’s tent are deliberately mysterious.
A Not-Generic Abandoned Building on Elm Street
I was downtown with some business peeps, touring the old Kress building. There are many of these scattered around the US. They started as five & dime stores, in competition with Woolworth’s (now the International Civil Rights Museum). The Kress cafeteria was also the site of a sit-in, some months after the more famous one.
There are a bunch of different dates online, but according to the realtor who let us into the building, it was finished in 1930, at the opening of the Great Depression. Samuel Kress was an art collector whose foundation, established in 1929 (before or after the stock market crash?) toured pieces of specifically European art.
We found some five-year-old Budweisers in an unplugged fridge on the third or fourth floor, which had both been used most recently as wedding event spaces. John Lomax, who bought the building for about $500k a couple of decades ago, is asking $2.9M, and it is probably eligible for the city’s new infill bridge loan program as well as being in a federal opportunity zone, which will make for some nice tax credits. The city says it’s looking for small developers, but the website with the details is currently down.
Check out the Kress von Kressenstein coat of arms, roughly 1530, which appears on the building.
Crowns, swords, and waves. I gotta say I like the ram’s head with the tobacco leaves flowing out of its horns better. Symbols of fertility and medicine (or addiction), rather than of naked force.
At least here in the US, our corporate overlords are still relying on stealth and guile to keep us in line. I think this is one reason for the popularity of the ass-kicking slave girl archetype in anime.
Part of the strategy of the abolitionist movement in the US was about making the cruelty and waste of the slave system obvious to the casual observer. We need to see the bars and the chains.
And we want to see them break. It’s cathartic.
In reality, even getting people to see how they themselves are being exploited is a grinding slog. I am currently reading Handbook for the Revolution: Building a More Perfect Union for the Twenty-First Century, by one of the cofounders of the Amazon Labor Union.
Companies don’t need to hire thugs when they can control information. Author Derrick Palmer says at one point, on the last page of the chapter “Getting Started,” that outside journalists they were collaborating with sometimes knew more about what was happening inside the HR department of their warehouse than they did.
I’ve been playing with some of these ideas in my tabletop gaming. The Archontean Empire in The Halls of Arden Vul has slavery, just as pretty much every ancient historical empire on Earth did. In actual play, it’s sort of in the background, though, as the area around the dungeon is the domain of the reformist noble Alexia Basileon. The Green Lady has outlawed the slave trade in her own town of Gosterwick, though it continues in secret through the Temple of Heschius Ban, a literal cult of domination whose holy symbol is a set of platinum shackles. They’re the kind of whip-wielding, ear-licking cartoon evil you’d expect to see in an anime.
Erlenmeyer Flask’s situation is different. He and his entire extended goblin family are subject to a sort of magical Service Agreement, a geas-like curse that randomly and continually re-writes itself to keep them in bondage. It may in fictional fact be alive, a form of artificial intelligence on vellum. Maybe a demon, or a devil? Nobody really understands it. Least of all me. My reading and my gaming (and thence my writing) tend to feed off each other in twisty ways. Tune back in for a more extended case study of that dynamic next week.
Meanwhile, in the Desert City of Brownsboro
We are about ten inches of rain short for the year so far. This has exactly one benefit for me. I have not been bitten by a mosquito in many weeks.
The downside of this is that there are fewer insects around for the birds to eat, which somewhat justifies my wife’s obsession with keeping the bird feeder full through the summer. It’s a more or less rodent-proof device, but when the birds throw food on the ground, the rodents are right there to pick it up. I can tolerate squirrels and chipmunks, despite their constant planting of acorns and walnuts, which I then have to dig up after they sprout. But I draw the line at rats.
I realize that rats can be personally charming, and that they have been unwilling collaborators, tools of The Man. They aren’t trying to give us typhus. They just eat all the same stuff we eat. And occasionally our babies’ fingers.
When Chloe the Wonder Dog was here, I didn’t have to deal with rats directly. But a couple weeks ago, we noticed two under the feeder, one slightly larger than the other. By the time we managed to borrow an air-powered pellet gun, there was a baby out with them.
I grew up on a farm and am very familiar with different versions of the air rifle. Unlike gunpowder weapons, they were considered safe enough for an experienced ten-or-twelve-year-old to use unsupervised (like cell phones today). My little brother and I broke a lot of bottles and jars at our illegal trash dump down in the woods2. What I had never used before was the optical scope, which both magnifies the target and limits your field of view. I had to practice some with that.34
When I felt ready, I set up a chair behind the jessamine vine twining up the railing on our ramp (we bought the house from the family of a polio patient). I wanted some elevation so the pellet would be sure to go into the ground, because when I was shooting aluminum cans for practice, the pellet (moving roughly 1000 feet/second, according to the manufacturer) could penetrate both sides of the can without knocking it over, bounce off the wooden fence, and roll audibly down the metal carport roof. I was also careful that my neighbor and her cat were not outside at the time.
Being the Disney-trained bastard that I am, I shot Mom first. She never took a step, just rolled over and twitched a few times with a small hole in her chest. I did not want her running around wounded. Deadbeat Dad high-tailed it under the fig tree, and we haven’t seen him since. He might be limiting himself to the night shift.
Baby Bambi, though, was traumatized. It is still visiting the feeder, even while I’m outside sitting quietly and reading a book (and taking notes on its movements). It’s not too afraid of me, per se. It is definitely afraid of that gun, though, and not even the sound of it (whenk!). Rats are supposed to have terrible vision, but this little one definitely recognized that long black shape. Since it is a break-barrel single-shot model, and there’s only about six feet between the feeder and its cover under the gardenia bush, I need Bambi to calm down and stand still to have much hope of hitting it.5
So we’re going to try a live trap. Poison is not an option for me. I like our local raptors, including the vultures.
We rejoin Pyrite and friends on their own backyard troll hunt.
