casting magic missile and other adventures in geekery
A few months ago, I was in the middle of bagging my comics books, and one of my friends looked over and said, "wow, Cris, I totally forgot how much of a geek you are."
That's a term of endearment in case you were wondering.
As folks who read this journal know, I've never been one to really hide my love for comic books, but in person my dedication to all things sci-fi tends to be more muted, particularly since I'm usually outclassed by my friends. I can get and make jokes about Star Trek, X-men and Lord of the Rings, but I'm not quite as hardcore as those who consume whole seasons of Farscape over a weekend, hunt relentlessly for freshly subtitled anime BitTorrents, or read every Brian Herbert novel regardless of quality simply because they believe that reading bad Dune fiction is still better than reading 95% of what passes for literature these days.
Before, when compared against my other friends, my gaming devotion hardly ranked, but that's was more to do with recent neglect. My parents gave me copies of Excalibur and Bakshi's Lord of the Rings when I was seven, and that triggered my "knights and armor are cool" phase, and to indulge that they bought me a copy of Dungeon and Ultima III, and thereby condemned my childhood to a decade of geekery and terminal uncoolness. How bad, you might ask? I had a house all to myself in my senior year in high school, and I did not abuse it by holding monthly alcohol fueled debaucheries filled with teenage sex (well, at least it wasn't monthly). I did not turn the garage into a semi-permanent rehearsal studio for my friend's hiphop band, and I did not convert my parents' bathroom into a makeshift LSD laboratory. Instead I spent most of my weekends with the same five friends, running marathon Dungeons and Dragons sessions with miniatures, graph paper and a couple cases of Mountain Dew. Our Fridays blurred into Saturdays and Sundays, marked by scattered dice, crumpled up note paper and acne that had mutated into a contagious virus fed by pizza, Dew and frustrated hormones. It was like a crackden for gamers.
It was awesome.
I stopped playing when I went to university and couldn't find any other gamers on campus. My little brother had started getting into Vampire: The Masquerade, and occasionally we'd trade copies of Vampire and Mage books to indulge our imaginations, but save a minor one month stint of live-action in 1996, I had largely dropped the habit. Occasionally, Q would float game ideas past me, but they never went past conception. Then I moved in with silas7.
I felt my first twinge when I saw his intricately painted collection of Warhammer 40K miniatures, so reminiscent of the Rogue Trader campaigns that we dabbled with in high school. Oooh ... Space Marines. Mmmm ... Tyranids. Then I found myself listening in on his Friday night Mage games, paging through his copies of White Dwarf over a weekend breakfast, and lingering in the fantasy games section of Border's afterwork. I started asking my friends about the campaigns that they were involved in, and next thing I know, heatray's offering me a spot in his new D&D campaign.
It's weird getting back into this again . . . and not just because I'm getting adjusted to the version 3.5 ruleset. Hell, the last time I played, the switch to 2.0 was still a big deal. It's more to do with the feel of playing with twentysomethings instead of teenagers. The jokes are better, and the conversations are based on a wider repertoire of cheesey action cinema, but our underlying motivation as players is also different. When I was growing up, role playing games were this avenue for fantasizing about people that I could become, not necessarily a skeleton bashing cleric, but at least some idealized notion of goodness, purity and courage that you could aspire to -- and perhaps one reason why I stopped playing was because, as I grew older and became more accustomed to who I had become, I saw less of a need to fulfill that sense of fantasy. So the games now are more about improvised fantasy epics, where we make up stories to fit the rolls of our dice, and we don't feel too bad about rolling up a character with shitty ability scores so long as we can transform that into comic relief.
I went to Games People Play a few nights ago and bought myself my first pack of dice in eleven years. It felt like running into an old friend that you haven't seen in ages, and realizing, at that moment, how much you missed talking to them.
and in related news -- three comic books that some of you might want to look for in the next two months:
The Escapist -- Leading the 'well, duh!' category of comic book crossover, Michael Chabon's bringing the fictional subject of his novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay to comic book form via Dark Horse Comics. btw, if you love comics and you haven't read Kavalier and Clay, yet, you are A Bad Person. Though, really, no better than someone who didn't see Unbreakable until last week -- someone like ... say ... me.
Sleeper: Out In The Cold TPB -- because the fifth season of the Sopranos doesn't start 'til March and some of you need some gritty gangsterism to tide you over 'til then. It's a mob story involving supervillains who do things like hang out in bars and bitch about how they don't get as much respect because other bad guys can, like, blow up the world ten times over and all they've got is a little invulnerability. If you have to pick up a 'superhero' book this year, go with this (and maybe Ultimate Six if you like Marvel stuff) and get the trade paperback so you don't have to hunt down those ever elusive back issues.
Heaven's War TPB -- On the eve of World War II, Aleister Crowley wants to exploit an angelic battle to shape reality according to his will and he is opposed by JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and Charles Williams. Yeah, I know. It's either going to be an awesome riff on the historical fiction trend in comic books or it's going to be a piece of trash that gets tooled on by rabid fantasy fans the world over. Perhaps both. League of Extraordinary Authors, anyone?
That's a term of endearment in case you were wondering.
As folks who read this journal know, I've never been one to really hide my love for comic books, but in person my dedication to all things sci-fi tends to be more muted, particularly since I'm usually outclassed by my friends. I can get and make jokes about Star Trek, X-men and Lord of the Rings, but I'm not quite as hardcore as those who consume whole seasons of Farscape over a weekend, hunt relentlessly for freshly subtitled anime BitTorrents, or read every Brian Herbert novel regardless of quality simply because they believe that reading bad Dune fiction is still better than reading 95% of what passes for literature these days.
Before, when compared against my other friends, my gaming devotion hardly ranked, but that's was more to do with recent neglect. My parents gave me copies of Excalibur and Bakshi's Lord of the Rings when I was seven, and that triggered my "knights and armor are cool" phase, and to indulge that they bought me a copy of Dungeon and Ultima III, and thereby condemned my childhood to a decade of geekery and terminal uncoolness. How bad, you might ask? I had a house all to myself in my senior year in high school, and I did not abuse it by holding monthly alcohol fueled debaucheries filled with teenage sex (well, at least it wasn't monthly). I did not turn the garage into a semi-permanent rehearsal studio for my friend's hiphop band, and I did not convert my parents' bathroom into a makeshift LSD laboratory. Instead I spent most of my weekends with the same five friends, running marathon Dungeons and Dragons sessions with miniatures, graph paper and a couple cases of Mountain Dew. Our Fridays blurred into Saturdays and Sundays, marked by scattered dice, crumpled up note paper and acne that had mutated into a contagious virus fed by pizza, Dew and frustrated hormones. It was like a crackden for gamers.
It was awesome.
I stopped playing when I went to university and couldn't find any other gamers on campus. My little brother had started getting into Vampire: The Masquerade, and occasionally we'd trade copies of Vampire and Mage books to indulge our imaginations, but save a minor one month stint of live-action in 1996, I had largely dropped the habit. Occasionally, Q would float game ideas past me, but they never went past conception. Then I moved in with silas7.
I felt my first twinge when I saw his intricately painted collection of Warhammer 40K miniatures, so reminiscent of the Rogue Trader campaigns that we dabbled with in high school. Oooh ... Space Marines. Mmmm ... Tyranids. Then I found myself listening in on his Friday night Mage games, paging through his copies of White Dwarf over a weekend breakfast, and lingering in the fantasy games section of Border's afterwork. I started asking my friends about the campaigns that they were involved in, and next thing I know, heatray's offering me a spot in his new D&D campaign.
It's weird getting back into this again . . . and not just because I'm getting adjusted to the version 3.5 ruleset. Hell, the last time I played, the switch to 2.0 was still a big deal. It's more to do with the feel of playing with twentysomethings instead of teenagers. The jokes are better, and the conversations are based on a wider repertoire of cheesey action cinema, but our underlying motivation as players is also different. When I was growing up, role playing games were this avenue for fantasizing about people that I could become, not necessarily a skeleton bashing cleric, but at least some idealized notion of goodness, purity and courage that you could aspire to -- and perhaps one reason why I stopped playing was because, as I grew older and became more accustomed to who I had become, I saw less of a need to fulfill that sense of fantasy. So the games now are more about improvised fantasy epics, where we make up stories to fit the rolls of our dice, and we don't feel too bad about rolling up a character with shitty ability scores so long as we can transform that into comic relief.
I went to Games People Play a few nights ago and bought myself my first pack of dice in eleven years. It felt like running into an old friend that you haven't seen in ages, and realizing, at that moment, how much you missed talking to them.
and in related news -- three comic books that some of you might want to look for in the next two months:
The Escapist -- Leading the 'well, duh!' category of comic book crossover, Michael Chabon's bringing the fictional subject of his novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay to comic book form via Dark Horse Comics. btw, if you love comics and you haven't read Kavalier and Clay, yet, you are A Bad Person. Though, really, no better than someone who didn't see Unbreakable until last week -- someone like ... say ... me.
Sleeper: Out In The Cold TPB -- because the fifth season of the Sopranos doesn't start 'til March and some of you need some gritty gangsterism to tide you over 'til then. It's a mob story involving supervillains who do things like hang out in bars and bitch about how they don't get as much respect because other bad guys can, like, blow up the world ten times over and all they've got is a little invulnerability. If you have to pick up a 'superhero' book this year, go with this (and maybe Ultimate Six if you like Marvel stuff) and get the trade paperback so you don't have to hunt down those ever elusive back issues.
Heaven's War TPB -- On the eve of World War II, Aleister Crowley wants to exploit an angelic battle to shape reality according to his will and he is opposed by JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and Charles Williams. Yeah, I know. It's either going to be an awesome riff on the historical fiction trend in comic books or it's going to be a piece of trash that gets tooled on by rabid fantasy fans the world over. Perhaps both. League of Extraordinary Authors, anyone?