Category Archives: villains
Demons and Devils
Playing Dungeons and Dragons in Texas during the ’80’s and ’90’s was basically a subversive act. The reason? Fundamentalist Christians actively stepped in and persecuted you for it. It was their sincere belief that a thing that had demons, devils, and dragons in it had to be from Satan. Satan, they reasoned, used a game like that to poison the imaginations of innocent children and turn them to the Dark Side of the Force. Or, rather, the Devil’s side of religion. They were terrified of subtle corruption of the mind, believing that certain patterns of words and ideas could turn goodness into evil. In other words, their religion advocated living in a bubble of non-association with certain words and ideas in order to superstitiously inoculate themselves against badness. They were, of course, not entirely wrong.
Kids playing the game will often develop the desire to play the Dark Side, to be an evil character, to commit evil acts and murder without the hindrance of conscience. That is the reason I wouldn’t let my own kids even consider playing Grand Theft Auto or similar murder, rape, and pillage sort of video games. It is, in fact, possible to desensitize yourself to violence and immoral behavior, and I have serious philosophical doubts whenever anyone tries to tell me that that can be a good thing. My Dungeons and Dragons games always contained a rarely spoken understanding that if you chose to play an evil character you were going to lose everything, because any adventure is solved and overcome by combating evil and siding with the forces of goodness. Paladins with their magical swords of ultimate sugary goodness are always stronger than evil wizards with their wimpy bat familiars and potions in the end.
But leaving out demons and devils was never truly an option. If you never face decisions between good and evil during playtime, what hope do you have of avoiding a life-altering mistake later in life when faced with evil for real. If you are going to make an evil choice, say for instance, committing an act of murder, isn’t it better to learn the consequences of such an act when the murder was killing an imaginary rival wizard for a magic staff you coveted than if you committed that murder in a fit of passion in real life? The fact that the rival wizard’s spirit takes up residence in the staff and finds a way to punish you every time you use it for the remainder of your adventuring life in the game may teach you something you can use when faced with the opportunity to steal for profit and get away with it to make a better decision about what to do.
In the Tomb of Death adventure that the three demons illustrated in this post came from, the only solution was to find the weakness in the demon team. Estellia had been ill treated by the other two and deeply resented it. She resented it enough to tell the adventurers’ thief about the brass demon bottle that could be used to magically imprison the demons and then force them to do the bottle owner’s bidding. Viscarus had been using it to control the other two, so only his soul truly needed to be captured. The demon-hearts of the other two were already inside. That story taught several lessons. Manipulative evil can bite you in the neck even if you are the one wielding it. (If only Trump and his cronies had learned that about their own brass demon bottle.)
Evil people don’t see themselves as evil. Often they only see themselves as victims. And it is true in real life that there is goodness in even the most heartlessly evil people. You can find it, appeal to it, and possibly even reach the goodness in their hearts necessary to change them for the better.
I truly believe that those kids who over the years played my story-telling games were better, stronger, and more inherently good because they played my games and learned my lessons. I believe it is true even though there may have occasionally been demons and devils in the stories. And if I believe it strongly enough, it must be true. Isn’t that how faith is supposed to work?
Making Characters for Traveller
When I started playing the role-playing game Traveller with a group of middle school students, one of the first challenges to overcome was the creation of original characters and interesting new stories. You can only play for so long with characters named Solo, Skywalker, and Vader. Then, you must get creative.
What I am going to show you today are a passel of characters so creative, lame, and craptastic, that you will probably forever after have pity on those poor kids who chose to play the game with me.
Harry Scipio Strontium 90 was a space detective. He and his assistant, the dwarf Quark, were necessary to the game because player characters had a tendency to kill people, aliens, and destroy planets, routinely misusing the biggest and baddest weapons in the equipment handbook. He relentlessly pursued player characters and villains across space and time.
The Geomancer was a deep space explorer who mysteriously never took off his space suit. He bailed characters out of trouble when they invariably got marooned on airless asteroids, lost in dead space with no fuel for the starship, or imprisoned by cannibal plant people on an unexplored world. In the end, it turned out that his mysterious space suit was actually empty, containing only gas and radiation, and possibly an alien spirit-entity.
Mantis was actually a player character. The son of the high school science teacher was one of my most dedicated game players. He decided that he had to have an evil player character. He said to me, “Mr. B, we will make him secretly evil so that he does things that take the party into danger and betray them without their knowing. It will be fun as they try to figure out how to save themselves.” Now, Mantis was an alien super-scientist who had a very big head and small body, so he removed his own head and connected it to a large robotic body. He stood imposingly taller than all the other characters at eight and a half feet tall. His evil plots were initially rather lame and easily defeated. It didn’t take the players long to figure out that he was working against them, and he spent a considerable amount of time as a detached living head on the starship’s auxiliary control panel. He went through various penances and punishments, ultimately avoiding being flushed into space through the space toilet.
Susano initially started out as Mantis’ evil experiment. He was an enhanced clone with super powers and wings. He was super charming and likeable, but supposed to further Mantis’ evil agenda. They began to plot the take-over of entire planets like Djinnistan and Vilis. But the longer the game went on, the more he became a son to Mantis, and the more he influenced his scientist father to use his abilities for good. They would eventually help a band of rogues create a New Star League out of the ashes of the Third Imperium. Teacher’s kids are often the biggest pains in a classroom, but that tends to be because they know all the teacher tricks already and are invariably more creative than the average classroom clown. The last I heard from Mantis’ creator, he was an electrical engineer in Austin, Texas, and probably busy secretly planning to take over the world. Though hopefully he didn’t remove his own head as a first step.
That is only a small sampling of the characters we created for Traveller, but at more than 500 words already, I need to be saving the rest for another day.
Filed under characters, Dungeons and Dragons, heroes, Paffooney, science fiction, villains
Good News in a World of Our Own Making
Sometimes the US Government does actual good things.
Of course, it helped the process along that we voted out the mutant orangutan covered in Cheeto dust that somehow chose the White House as its unnatural habitat. That was a long four years totally misspent until the last gasp of the Republic in peril.
But now that we have actual governing professionals somewhat in charge of both houses of Congress, we actually got some good things passed in a reconciliation bill. There are over 360 billion dollars for combatting the climate crisis in the bill. Solar power, wind power, air scrubbers, and carbon-sequestration methods got a huge boost and may help mitigate the worst of what’s coming.
Of course, the stupid people who are guided by shape-shifting lizard men who tell them comforting lies on Fox News, still think Biden is destroying the economy and wants a socialist country instead of a patriotic one that knows better than to believe phony science from liberals about climate catastrophe, and never mind about the record heatwaves all across the country, that’s just a coincidence. Republican paradise which was granted to us by the orangutan can only be restored by, at the very least, not allowing a cap on insulin costs to protect pharmaceutical profits from diabetics who keep scheming to stay alive without pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. (That one thing was the only Republican priority that was voted in by Republicans, who voted, “No!” on everything else in the bill. They had to get something. So, economic pain or death for diabetics was a real Republican win.)
And it wasn’t just a climate-crisis win for the good guys (or somewhat good guys.)
The ability to give Medicare the control to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies is also in the bill. As are tax increases for corporations (especially the ones who pay nothing in taxes on billions of dollars.) Good things were wrested out of the hands of lizardmen who work for the supposedly-ruling 1%.
But the Republicans still plan on winning back both houses in the midterms. Then the Hunter Biden trials will begin with lizardman fervor and cold-blooded profit policies will again rule the day.
It’s nice, however, to at least win one before the end of the world.
Filed under angry rant, humor, politics, villains
Everything That’s Wrong
As old Mickey has been watching the Impeachment Inquiry, he began thinking about making a naughty or nice list. Ooh! The naughty side is huge!
I really don’t need to talk about the Impeachment itself. I knew the Pumpkin-head President was guilty before I knew what the crime was. He has routinely done the most horrible thing possible, and everybody wants to see him removed except for those deplorable Tea-Bagger types who are positively giddy about the pain he inflicts on Democrats, liberals, immigrants, school teachers, poor people, and highly intelligent people whom they also hate and want to gleefully continue to punish for the crime of being alive.
So, who was on the naughty list? Without a doubt the Great Trumpkin Pumpkin-head President heads the list. He cheats to win elections and colludes with Russians to do this. Robert Mueller investigated and came up with enough evidence that the Presidentsy-foo was covering things up and interfered with the investigation to the point that he had to be guilty. You don’t obstruct investigations like that if you are innocent.
The naughty list includes toxic leprechaun and budget-buzzard, Mick Mulvaney. He who cuts budgets to the bone to kill Meals on Wheels, starve grannies, and then gives that money to rich guys in massive tax breaks.
It also includes Steven Miller, the nephew of Dracula, who single-handedly sucked all the blood, hopes, and dreams out of DACA kids and other worthy immigrants whom he personally hates and wishes to deport over the protest of everybody else. He also thinks asylum-seekers need to give him their children to put in cages, and then intentionally loses the lists of them and who they belong to.
The naughty list has to include all those who enabled the President to do horrible things to good people, especially government Republicans who didn’t actually resign their positions in disgust and leave the rest to help the Great Orange Face to get away with any and all crimes
The single most important factor in putting these dark elves on the naughty list is Greed. Too many of the naughty-listers care about no one but themselves. It doesn’t matter to them what happens to others, especially others that are different than themselves ( a different color, a different sexual orientation, a different language-speaker, a different way of looking at the world, and often, every difference that makes another person not the same person as them). They are okay with depriving those others of wealth and ease, respect, dignity, and even those things necessary to stay alive.
I even need to include on the naughty list the dreaded Pink-Hat Bandit. That notorious stealer of hot-dogs and random pieces of bread from the fanily dinner table also poops out that food in the house when she is done with it, especially if it is too wet or cold outside to go pee and poo outdoors.
So, who, then, is left to be on the nice list? Well, we nice-listers tend to forgive everybody and try to see only the good in others. Therefore, if left up to us, everybody taken off the nice list eventually goes back on. It is the primary difference between us and them. We, have to do something different than we usually do. At the very least we need to help the old Pumpkinhead into his nice, comfy prison cell for the rest of his life. But since I am no longer desirous of making that whole gosh-darn naughty list, Mickey does not volunteer to be Mickey Claus. He merely liked the hat and bought it at Walmart.
Political Pessimism
I get tired of being the one whose blood is constantly sucked by vampires. And I am not talking about actual blood so much as money I need to live. Every time I turn around another corporate vampire is sticking a fang or a needle into my bank account to exsanguinate it more. I owe more money than I can pay to the IRS. I owe a huge gob of money to hospitals for the last two hospitalizations that struck my family. And these are blood suckings that occurred after I went bankrupt at the end of 2017. Why do I have these woes from things sucking on my neck? Well, one thing that is staring me right in the face is how the current government, run by Republicans, is enabling corporate vampires who pump the economic blood out of middle class and working poor people like me and feed it into the gaping bloody maws of ever-engorging CEO’s, fatbat investors, and wealthy one-percenters.
You are not going to believe this, but I found an article that says Mitch McConnell is directly descended from Dracula. You can see it for yourself at this link. So let me expand on this with a list of dire predictions for our economic health and wellbeing generated from my blood-deprived pessimist’s brain.
- Even though it looks like the Trumpula Administration is about to implode from chaos overload due to porn stars and betrayals by lawyers, it is a very long-lived undead thing and will continue to survive.
- Republicans will continue to suck trillions of dollars of our economic blood because they will win in a large way due to legal gerrymandering, voter suppression, and Russian assistance by hacking. The minions of the vampire lords are many. And at least a third of the American population is zombified to the point that no evil act committed by Trumpula will make them vote against him.
- Midwestern farmers will all be driven out of business by Trumpula’s tariffs and trade wars with all their most important market countries.
- The bread basket of the world will be turned into a toxic goo factory by Monsanto (noted vampire brand for GMO-based mind-controlling food substitutes).
- We will all become mindless zombies and happily vote Trumpula into the presidency for life in 2020.
- And then the whole world will gradually cook itself through un-combatted global warming into a lifeless orb fit only for the undead.
So there you have my rosy outlook on not only my economic future but that of everybody who is not currently a billionaire blood-sucking corporate vampire. I say “rosy” only because red is the color of blood which is draining away from my bank account at this very moment. I know it is an over-exaggerated conspiracy theory worthy of Alex Jones at his top-of-the-lungs shoutiest, but if Trumpula could become president, then any possible horror show could soon be coming to life.
Filed under angry rant, feeling sorry for myself, horror writing, humor, Paffooney, pessimism, politics, villains
Making Characters for Traveller
When I started playing the role-playing game Traveller with a group of middle school students, one of the first challenges to overcome was the creation of original characters and interesting new stories. You can only play for so long with characters named Solo, Skywalker, and Vader. Then, you must get creative.
What I am going to show you today are a passel of characters so creative, lame, and craptastic, that you will probably forever after have pity on those poor kids who chose to play the game with me.
Harry Scipio Strontium 90 was a space detective. He and his assistant, the dwarf Quark, were necessary to the game because player characters had a tendency to kill people, aliens, and destroy planets, routinely misusing the biggest and baddest weapons in the equipment handbook. He relentlessly pursued player characters and villains across space and time.
The Geomancer was a deep space explorer who mysteriously never took off his space suit. He bailed characters out of trouble when they invariably got marooned on airless asteroids, lost in dead space with no fuel for the starship, or imprisoned by cannibal plant people on an unexplored world. In the end, it turned out that his mysterious space suit was actually empty, containing only gas and radiation, and possibly an alien spirit-entity.
Mantis was actually a player character. The son of the high school science teacher was one of my most dedicated game players. He decided that he had to have an evil player character. He said to me, “Mr. B, we will make him secretly evil so that he does things that take the party into danger and betray them without their knowing. It will be fun as they try to figure out how to save themselves.” Now, Mantis was an alien super-scientist who had a very big head and small body, so he removed his own head and connected it to a large robotic body. He stood imposingly taller than all the other characters at eight and a half feet tall. His evil plots were initially rather lame and easily defeated. It didn’t take the players long to figure out that he was working against them, and he spent a considerable amount of time as a detached living head on the starship’s auxiliary control panel. He went through various penances and punishments, ultimately avoiding being flushed into space through the space toilet.
Susano initially started out as Mantis’ evil experiment. He was an enhanced clone with super powers and wings. He was super charming and likeable, but supposed to further Mantis’ evil agenda. They began to plot the take-over of entire planets like Djinnistan and Vilis. But the longer the game went on, the more he became a son to Mantis, and the more he influenced his scientist father to use his abilities for good. They would eventually help a band of rogues create a New Star League out of the ashes of the Third Imperium. Teacher’s kids are often the biggest pains in a classroom, but that tends to be because they know all the teacher tricks already and are invariably more creative than the average classroom clown. The last I heard from Mantis’ creator, he was an electrical engineer in Austin, Texas, and probably busy secretly planning to take over the world. Though hopefully he didn’t remove his own head as a first step.
That is only a small sampling of the characters we created for Traveller, but at more than 500 words already, I need to be saving the rest for another day.
Filed under characters, Dungeons and Dragons, heroes, Paffooney, science fiction, villains
Hypocrasysiphus
And God said, “This world I have created is good. It is very good. In fact, it is too good. We must balance the good with evil.”
Then God took a ball of elephant dung and created Republicans.
“You see, beloved ones, if the world is too good,” said God, “Then when I get full of wrath, there will be no one to smite. You don’t want me too full of wrath. I may pop like an overfilled balloon. So someone needs to get struck by lightning to let off some of the pressure that has built up through the hard work of being God.”
So God took up a ball of old chicken guts and created Democrats.
“Why do you always seem to let the evil ones get away with lying and deceit?” a prophet dared to ask. “They cheat and steal and become wealthy, and then use that wealth to cover over their crimes, yet you do not smite them with lightning bolts?”
God threw a bolt of lightning and incinerated the prophet.
“I did say in the Bible somewhere that God helps those who help themselves. I’m sure I remembered to put that in there somewhere. God doesn’t make mistakes. Or if He does, they are perfect mistakes.”
“So you authorize the wealthy, who became wealthy by exploiting others, to commit further acts of exploitation until they virtually control the government and say that any crime is not a crime because they are now in charge of making the laws and deciding the consequences?” asked another brave but stupid prophet.
God immediately sent a plague of locusts to eat the prophet’s flesh down to the bone.
“The Bible says that all governments are put in place by God. No government exists except with my approval. If I don’t like them, I will remove them. So if the government of the United States is to be run by my evil Republican creations, I merely have to create a lot of very stupid citizens who will vote to give everything to the rich and exploit everyone else, including those who basically voted against their own best interests.”
Another rather stupid prophet got up to ask a question of God. He raised one finger, opened his mouth, and was immediately turned into a pillar of salt.
“I have anticipated your question. I do have a plan for mankind. Remember the Greek myth of Sisyphus? That old Greek idiot who has to labor for eternity rolling a heavy rock up a hill, and just as he almost reaches the top, it rolls back down on top of him and he has to start over at the bottom of the hill? That is a metaphor for all human life and accomplishment. Income inequality becomes a heavier and heavier burden as you near the goal of getting rid of it. You have a Great Depression, then FDR comes along to fix things and help common people. Then Reagan takes over with “trickle-down economics” and rolls you all back to the bottom of the hill. It ends in Junior Bush’s Great Recession of ’08. Obama comes along to fix that. Then, in a sudden political reversal, the party of pure evil takes over again. Back to the bottom of the hill we go.”
And so, no further prophet got up to speak. It was not because prophets had gotten any smarter. No, it was because there were no prophets left.
Filed under angry rant, cartoons, feeling sorry for myself, humor, irony, metaphor, politics, satire, villains
Demons and Devils
Playing Dungeons and Dragons in Texas during the ’80’s and ’90’s was basically a subversive act. The reason? Fundamentalist Christians actively stepped in and persecuted you for it. It was their sincere belief that a thing that had demons, devils, and dragons in it had to be from Satan. Satan, they reasoned, used a game like that to poison the imaginations of innocent children and turn them to the Dark Side of the Force. Or, rather, the Devil’s side of religion. They were terrified of subtle corruption of the mind, believing that certain patterns of words and ideas could turn goodness into evil. In other words, their religion advocated living in a bubble of non-association with certain words and ideas in order to superstitiously inoculate themselves against badness. They were, of course, not entirely wrong.
Kids playing the game will often develop the desire to play the Dark Side, to be an evil character, to commit evil acts and murder without the hindrance of conscience. That is the reason I wouldn’t let my own kids even consider playing Grand Theft Auto or similar murder, rape, and pillage sort of video games. It is, in fact, possible to desensitize yourself to violence and immoral behavior, and I have serious philosophical doubts whenever anyone tries to tell me that that can be a good thing. My Dungeons and Dragons games always contained a rarely spoken understanding that if you chose to play an evil character you were going to lose everything, because any adventure is solved and overcome by combating evil and siding with the forces of goodness. Paladins with their magical swords of ultimate sugary goodness are always stronger than evil wizards with their wimpy bat familiars and potions in the end.
But leaving out demons and devils was never truly an option. If you never face decisions between good and evil during playtime, what hope do you have of avoiding a life-altering mistake later in life when faced with evil for real. If you are going to make an evil choice, say for instance, committing an act of murder, isn’t it better to learn the consequences of such an act when the murder was killing an imaginary rival wizard for a magic staff you coveted than if you committed that murder in a fit of passion in real life? The fact that the rival wizard’s spirit takes up residence in the staff and finds a way to punish you every time you use it for the remainder of your adventuring life in the game may teach you something you can use when faced with the opportunity to steal for profit and get away with it to make a better decision about what to do.
In the Tomb of Death adventure that the three demons illustrated in this post came from, the only solution was to find the weakness in the demon team. Estellia had been ill treated by the other two and deeply resented it. She resented it enough to tell the adventurers’ thief about the brass demon bottle that could be used to magically imprison the demons and then force them to do the bottle owner’s bidding. Viscarus had been using it to control the other two, so only his soul truly needed to be captured. The demon-hearts of the other two were already inside. That story taught several lessons. Manipulative evil can bite you in the neck even if you are the one wielding it. (If only Trump and his cronies had learned that about their own brass demon bottle.)
Evil people don’t see themselves as evil. Often they only see themselves as victims. And it is true in real life that there is goodness in even the most heartlessly evil people. You can find it, appeal to it, and possibly even reach the goodness in their hearts necessary to change them for the better.
I truly believe that those kids who over the years played my story-telling games were better, stronger, and more inherently good because they played my games and learned my lessons. I believe it is true even though there may have occasionally been demons and devils in the stories. And if I believe it strongly enough, it must be true. Isn’t that how faith is supposed to work?
Catch a Falling Star 