What Kind of Person?
Where I make the case for looking behind the masks.
I have not, and probably won’t, actually watch Squid Game.
But I’ve eagerly taken in the discourse about it, and there’s something there for RPGs that has grabbed my attention. Most of the discourse centers around parsing how desperate you’d have to be to join the game. And that’s a compelling question. But I’m more fascinated personally by the infrastructure surrounding this thing, and specifically the Guards. These are the mask-wearing goons who unhesitatingly murder the game’s participants.
Because I can actually understand why you’d take an all-or-nothing shot at being set for life or not having to worry about it any more. I’ve never been in such dire straits myself, but I could imagine being there, and I’ve been adjacent to it. It’s coherent, it makes sense to me.
But to take a gig where I go to work not sure which of my (presumably) fellow citizens I am going to just murder today? That’s a level of nihilism that’s so… cartoonish, so surreal that I like to think I’d never end up there. So that’s the thing that really interests me about the property: those goons. Are they being blackmailed somehow? Are they all ex-cops like the director? Are they, I don’t know, robots? We apparently do see one of them unmasked and he’s ‘just a kid’, but that just raises more questions.
About 4 years ago, I was running a Feng Shui campaign. We were having a really good time with it, but about half a dozen sessions in, the Las Vegas mass shooting happened, and it was the trigger for me just not wanting to play a game about gunning down mooks any more.
Governments spend a lot of time and training to get soldiers to actually shoot at other humans. It’s not something we’re generally inclined to do, and it takes practice (or y’know, indoctrination) to be able to do so easily and consistently. Even then, it’s almost certainly going to cause significant trauma to the people doing it. So the idea that these Squid Game guards can just impassively machine-gun random strangers means either that someone’s spent some time and effort training them to do that, or there’s something else weird going on.
I am like 90% certain I wouldn’t want to devote an actual game to showing the life of one of these people; there’s some rumors that Season 2 of the show itself may dive into the ‘staff’ side of the production, and that’s something I’d be interested in. I do wonder: has one of the guards ever said “screw this” and turned his gun on the others? Can you wash out of the ‘training’? If a guard simply refuses to pull the trigger, or decides to just kill everyone, what happens in the game?
It’s deeply ironic that the only movie that ever even hinted any interiority for these henchmen was actually Austin Powers. There’s a one-minute short about the call that Dr. Evil makes to the wife of the guard that Powers runs over with a steam roller. It’s supposed to be a gag, and it’s actually pretty funny, but the last line is too real: “No one thinks about how things affect the family of a henchman.” No kidding, sister.
So, yeah, Apocalypse World Principle Six: Give everyone a name, make everyone real. It’s in direct conflict with the narrative purpose of those Squid Game guards. I’m so fascinated by them because they didn’t give them names or make them real people. But there’s enough narrative cruft around them that I can’t help but have the impression that there is something there, I just haven’t seen the reveal yet. I feel like that’s the key: if you’re going to have goons, mooks, henchmen, you need to make sure you build a narrative around them that can carry the weight of not necessarily knowing who they are. Like, though I don’t know their story, the guards of Squid Game feel right; the goons who keep working for The Joker even though he regularly kills his own men never have.
This is all stuff I’m going to have to chew on over the next few months as I work on Ex-Capes: Balancing the dramatic impact of adversaries they know little about against the danger of simply making them cyphers. I’m curious to see if Squid Game decides to look into that as well.
Just Played (Last Week)
On Saturday, I played another session of a long-running campaign of The Pathfinder Card Game with an old friend from MA. We started before the pandemic, playing in person face-to-face but eventually moved online when we were stuck inside. He’s got the actual cards, so I have a Google Sheet with both of my character decks typed out, and have one window open on the WIKI that hosts all the cards. I move the cards column to column as I draw and play them. It’s awkward and time-consuming, but we’re all-in on the narrative, an adaptation of the Mummy’s Mask Adventure Path. Right now we’re two play sessions from the big final boss fight against the Undead Pharaoh himself. It’s not exactly an RPG, but it’s not not an RPG. We each play two PCs to make sure we’ve got enough Skills covered: I’m an Ectoplasmist with the ghost of my dead husband as a permanent card in my deck, as well as a half-janni Rogue who pretty much solves every problem by throwing a fusillade of knives at it. Despite the highly scripted adventures, I mentally bin those characters as PCs, and think of our cared game adventures in the same valence as any other D&D-style game. It’s been interesting. I’ll report on our final fate in a future newsletter.
Tuesday was another session of Ex-Capes on The Gauntlet. The PCs had an all-Action! Session. It went swimmingly, but I’m definitely feeling I need to tighten up the Action phase. It’s got a specific structure borrowed from The Between that I like enough to not want to mess with, but it needs some kind of tweak. One of the players just unlocked a custom Threat, so there’s that to look forward to because they may be able to take down two different Threats next week! I’ve just put the edited videos of the last several session up on YouTube, so check the link below if you’re curious.
Wednesday afternoon was a session of Against the Dark Conspiracy, also on The Gauntlet. It’s a game I first played around two years ago in a much earlier incarnation. Since then it’s been refined, tested, and released for ZineQuest, so even though I had the same character as I had back then (former Secret Service Driver Sophia Manzanares), it’s like we’re playing a different game because it’s so much more lean and elegant. It borrows elements of Cthulhu Dark, Night’s Black Agents, Operators, Forged In the Dark, and other bits to create a great framework for open-table paranoid espionage adventures. The idea that the campaign is based around a loose network freelance Vampire hunters coming together on as-needed basis makes it a great open-tab;e game, you can run it for 3-4 weeks and have folks drop in and out but the whole will remain coherent and suspenseful. We jumped in with an op in Bucharest this week, following a sleazy nightclub owner to try and bag his Conspiracy handler, but we may have bitten off more than we can chew given the red-eyed limo driver who seems to shrug off handgun rounds. That’s where we left it, so I’m thinking it may be incendiaries or silver bullets next week, we’ll see. Having daytimes available means I can join in these games from the UK (Our GM Alun is in Wales, and the other players are UK/Eurozone), and I’m super grateful for that.
Wednesday evening was another Stonetop session. We wrapped our expedition to glep the Forest Folk by using one of the PC’s relics to draw the blighted energy from their village and cure everyone. It was cool to get an emphatic win like that without just slaughtering everyone. I’m hoping our next few sessions will focus back on the home front of our Village. There’s a contentious mayoral election coming up, and the Hill Folk are restless, so that will be a nice change of pace from the Big Monster Hunt of the last few weeks.
Finally, Thursday, and a second session of Ares Ascendant, Dan Brown’s Paragon playset about colonizing Mars on The Gauntlet. I’m enjoying this game enough that I picked up and read The Martian for inspiration and background ideas. I’m still working through how I feel about the Paragon System (the engine for the Agon RPG), but definitely enjoying the game thus far. My billionaire tech genius went from his highest high (getting the highest roll against s contest) in guiding an icy asteroid to a perfect crashdown near the colony as a water source, to his lowest low (a panic attack on his first Marswalk harvesting that same asteroid) as a result of failing that check. Right now the system feels pretty opaque to me, and I have little sense of how all of it balances, I could just as well be flipping a coin as rolling all these dice and marking these boxes; I’m not optimistic it’ll resolve with only one more session, but I’m sold enough that I’ll want to try another Paragon game with a longer run time.
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You’ll find my game writing in the pages of Codex magazine and other Gauntlet publishing works, including the upcoming Trophy RPG.
You can fund a large library of actual play videos of various RPGs at my YouTube channel.
My podcast, Just Played, is currently on hiatus. Each episode features an in-depth recap of an RPG session I participated in as a GM or player.
I’m always looking for topics, so if there’s a tabletop RPG-related subject you’re curious about, let me know, and I’ll do my best to take a run at it. Comments responded to as I’m able and amenable.
But now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go play another game!
Thanks for the positive feedback on Against the Dark Conspiracy, Jim.