Author Topic: Caleb is a mad genius (or Yet Another Fan Club Thread)  (Read 709433 times)

Cthuluzord

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Re: Caleb is a mad genius (or Yet Another Fan Club Thread)
« Reply #495 on: July 10, 2013, 06:53:45 AM »
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I do think it is a very well written scenario and not gratuitous but it is by its very nature going to be a lot more disturbing to most folks than Calebs other work.

Thanks, Tim. And I do think that is a very valid point. Being held down and violated by something is a far more primal fear than the Fisher of Men. Though I would argue that that there is a cosmic horror element to Lover in the Ice (Characters exist in a universe that would allow such a creature as the Amante to exist...eww), I'd agree it's definitely not the main focus. I think not inviting your friend without knowing more about her as a player was a good idea, but I'd like to think the same would be true for male roleplayers as well. I hope Hebanon has other stuff out there you can use with your newer players.

I suppose what I'm commenting on here and in this thread (http://slangdesign.com/forums/index.php/topic,1718.msg38415.html#msg38415) is that its weird where that "too close to home" line is placed. I find people get a lot more uncomfortable about the sex thing than say, the risk of being attacked by an animal, even though the latter can happen in the real world as well. I mean, as a person who has had close relatives that suffer from some of the disorders that can be rolled for in a CoC sanity table, I can attest there is nothing adventurous or fun about schizophrenia. The possibility of mental illness is also a very real, very scary real world proposition, yet I hear very few people complain about sanity mechanics in games, even when the very offensive "you see a shoggath so now you have a debilitating genetic brain disorder" situations come up. Its usually just recognized as Horror fiction is intended: a safe place to work through otherwise uncomfortable subject matter. But the sex stuff always seems to bump up closer to that limit despite, in my opinion, having equal competition in terms of relatable real-world fears.

Anyway Tim, thanks again for running the game and your comments. It's given me something that's useful to think about.

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Caleb Stokes: an advocate bugging girls' panties.

False. For the record, the character of Haru Kano is an advocate of doing what is necessary to get the job done. His antics have only just begun. In addition, he technically bugged a man's pair of panties.

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One of my great regrets is that I could not back the kickstarter. Also I think this discussion has produced yet another good answer as to why Caleb would not want his face associated with his scenarios.

Exactly. I'm not ashamed of anything I've done with RPPR (quite the opposite), but this is a policy I won't see changing in the future. I don't think anybody that puts out as much unfiltered content as RPPR is going to make a run for public office anytime soon.

Tim

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Re: Caleb is a mad genius (or Yet Another Fan Club Thread)
« Reply #496 on: July 10, 2013, 01:00:04 PM »
Lover to me (and this may just be the way I read it/ran it) seems more akin to a survival horror game than cosmic horror. Most of this hinges on the fact that the entities have very real world and knowable motivations but also some of the trapped in a box nature of the game. The cosmic elements in Byrson Springs are a lot clearer to me. The Fisher is essentially unknowable and beyond comprehension. This maybe my narrow view of what separated cosmic from survival horror but it is my general rule of thumbs.

One of the ways to establish horror is to transgress on taboos. This is both societal taboos and personal taboos. I think you can sort of gauge if a work is going to disturb people based on the your understanding of the society/culture but how it will effect each person, where they will draw the line that it is too much, is highly individual and so I think it is difficult to know that when you release the work into the public. As a personal example I recently had a friend end his own life and so now I think I would be much more deeply effected or pushed over that line but the use of suicide. Not the 'save the last bullet for yourself' suicide but if a scenario hinged on an entity that slow drove someone mad while all those around him did not know it was going on till the person ended their life I think I could find that hitting too close to home when a year ago it would not have bothered me nearly as much or not at all.

Your own examples of your connection to mental illness is going to prime you for that while fortunately for many, including myself, it is not something we have a lot of experience with so not a fear that is really concrete. I do fear losing my mind of course but to actual witness it up close to people you care about is going to draw that line for you differently.

In the case of sexual violence given the truly terrible statistics even though I personal don't 'know' anyone who has been through that I actually do know a number of people who have who have just not told me about it. That for me at least does make that quite concrete and does push it into the real fears camp.

What I did note about my players reactions was that they were less freaked out by the Amanta trying to implant a seeder then by their confrontation with Skip. The scene ended up playing out quite a lot like the podcast where they caught him at home but had a man around back with a gun. When Skip bolted out the back there was a stand off and Skips reaction to the gun and the violence was something that creeped everyone at the table out.

The above makes me think that while the Amanta is creepy it is the seeders and their actions that drive a lot of the horror, at least for people at my table.

I don't think you wrote a Saw knock off where you were being shocking to be shocking. The story is a solid one and while it deals with some disturbing shit it is not needlessly gratuitous. Perhaps others mileage may vary but over all I found it satisfying to run.

Gorkamorka

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Re: Caleb is a mad genius (or Yet Another Fan Club Thread)
« Reply #497 on: July 16, 2013, 03:26:27 AM »
Did the Hebanon games website just get hacked?

All it says is "site is in the process of returning data" in Bosnian. (sajt je u fazi vracanja podataka)
Gorkamorka (Fridrik)

Cthuluzord

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Re: Caleb is a mad genius (or Yet Another Fan Club Thread)
« Reply #498 on: July 16, 2013, 09:47:18 AM »
I don't know. Thanks for the head up though.

I can get access to Wordpress just fine. All my files are there, and the security package I downloaded after the last hack hasn't recorded any changes. But no matter what I do, I can't get anything except that stupid Bosnian to show up.

My current theory is that something is going on with my webhosting, so I've emailed tech support. I guess we will wait and see.

Man, I knew running a website would be complicated, but in all the steps of this Kickstarter process that is the one that has baffled me the most. I almost spend more time trying to get the damn website to work than I do writing the scenarios.

Tadanori Oyama

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Re: Caleb is a mad genius (or Yet Another Fan Club Thread)
« Reply #499 on: July 16, 2013, 11:38:02 AM »
I'm sure there's a proverb about Rome and it's roads in this somewhere.

Gorkamorka

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Re: Caleb is a mad genius (or Yet Another Fan Club Thread)
« Reply #500 on: July 16, 2013, 11:45:46 AM »
"All optical fibre leads to Sarajevo" ?
Gorkamorka (Fridrik)

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Re: Caleb is a mad genius (or Yet Another Fan Club Thread)
« Reply #501 on: July 16, 2013, 12:49:29 PM »
I was thinking more like how long Romans spent on their roads versus the total time of the Empire.

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This time the tech guys (I am NOT one of them, obviously) say that the malware was installed over the course of months before it was activated, some of it even hidden within the security plugin we installed after the first hack. This means that all of our database backups are corrupted going as far back as the release of The Fall Without End.

I think it's a humorous coincidence for this to happened to guy who created "Know Evil". It's almost a cruel irony.

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Re: Caleb is a mad genius (or Yet Another Fan Club Thread)
« Reply #502 on: July 16, 2013, 06:11:44 PM »
Its back!
Sweet merciful god its back!

Leviathan

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Re: Caleb is a mad genius (or Yet Another Fan Club Thread)
« Reply #503 on: July 16, 2013, 11:25:38 PM »
Looks like it's down again. I was proactive enough this time to copy-paste the blogs' innards onto my computer, in case you didn't manage to save them. Sad to see brilliant writing go to waste. Edit: Never mind, it's alive again!
« Last Edit: July 17, 2013, 07:09:11 AM by Leviathan »
Railroad Diary, a place where I occasionally put words.

Cthuluzord

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Re: Caleb is a mad genius (or Yet Another Fan Club Thread)
« Reply #504 on: July 17, 2013, 12:05:01 PM »
The "back" is an illusion. They rolled back a version, but in updating the security settings Ross and I managed to completely lock ourselves out of the system. The hosting service has no idea how to fix it yet. And we'd yet to delete all the malware before we got locked out.

Yeah...fun times over here in Caleb land.

Tim

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Re: Caleb is a mad genius (or Yet Another Fan Club Thread)
« Reply #505 on: July 17, 2013, 01:19:22 PM »
Was troubleshooting and recovering a hacked website not in the job description the high school guidance councilor showed you after your tests showed you possessed a high aptitude for freelance game design? If not they really need to update those skill lists.

Tadanori Oyama

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Re: Caleb is a mad genius (or Yet Another Fan Club Thread)
« Reply #506 on: July 17, 2013, 01:59:51 PM »
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Yeah...fun times over here in Caleb land.

I really want to make some theme park jokes but I can't get any good ones to work. I do know the main attraction would need to be "The Death Traps" 'Death trap' is singular and therefore inaccurate'.

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Re: Caleb is a mad genius (or Yet Another Fan Club Thread)
« Reply #507 on: July 18, 2013, 09:29:47 PM »
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Yeah...fun times over here in Caleb land.

I really want to make some theme park jokes but I can't get any good ones to work. I do know the main attraction would need to be "The Death Traps" 'Death trap' is singular and therefore inaccurate'.

It's a rollercoaster that kills 90% of the people riding it, but the other 10% say it's SENSATIONAL!

Gorkamorka

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Re: Caleb is a mad genius (or Yet Another Fan Club Thread)
« Reply #508 on: July 21, 2013, 04:36:53 AM »
ĦEl Matadors! EVIL twinbrother

ĦThe masked Matador!

Gorkamorka (Fridrik)

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Re: Caleb is a mad genius (or Yet Another Fan Club Thread)
« Reply #509 on: July 22, 2013, 11:25:08 AM »
Evil Twin nothing. That's El Matador's morally equivalent twin.
I cast summon pedant.