Z is for Zebedee

Z

This is just a tiny bit misleading.  While Zebedee features, the main focus of this post is the wonderful, surreal and generally fabulous Magic Roundabout.  The show has a deserved cult following and brightened the early days of my childhood hugely.  It ran for five minutes before the news every evening and was reliably entertaining. 

It has a slightly bizarre history, which greatly amuses me.  The BBC bought the original children's series from France and somehow the animations arrived but the scripts did not.  To compensate for this (and possibly to avoid translation costs), the BBC decided to transmit the episodes with new scripts created by Eric Thompson (father of Emma Thompson).  He knew no French.

What you get with The Magic Roundabout is therefore Eric's unique take on what he thought was happening and bears precisely no resemblance to the French version of the stories.  He also narrated, doing all the voices from Dougal the acerbic dog to Ermintrude the singing cow via Brian the snail, Dylan the stoner rabbit, Mr Rusty the tricycling gardener, Florence the human girl and Zebedee himself.

The Magic Roundabout was treated to a remake in 2005 which I admit I've not seen.  Somehow I just don't want to.  I loved the original and don't even dare watch the originals on Youtube in case they disappoint. 

Zebedee.  Guardian of the magic garden and its even more magical roundabout.

It was a joyous series.  The plots were random to say the least and mattered hardly at all.  The real joy was the characters.  Every one was clear as crystal and while they were funny apart, together they were hilarious. Brian's cheery Mary Sunshine attitude invariably drove acerbic Dougal to the brink of insanity.  Florence was the voice of sweet reason, and Mr Rusty worried about the magic garden.  Ermintrude addressed everyone as "dear heart" and had wild fantasies about being a bus (among other things) while Dylan slumped under a tree in a stupor occasionally twanging his guitar.

At the end of every episode, just as everything was about to spiral out of control, Zebedee would appear and announce that it was time for bed.  It was a little bit of heaven at the end of every weekday.

That seems like an appropriate place to leave the A-Z challenge 2012.  Thank you for joining me on this alphabetic oddyssey.

Y is for Youth and Yeth Hounds

Y

I hated being a Youth - as in "the youth of today", aka teenaged.  Childhood was interesting, but youth was something that didn't agree with me.  What I really wanted was to hibernate for 7 years, from the ages of 12-19 until I turned back into something recognisably human.  If someone had offered me the option to do so, I'd have taken it, but sadly they did not and I had to take my own measures.

These measures included being paranoid, anti-social and cultivating a yak-type hairstyle which still stands me in good stead.  The upside was that since I isolated myself very effectively from my peers, I had a lot of time on my hands and read obsessively.  Bear in mind that I am still incapable of going anywhere without at least two paperbacks stashed in my handbag.  At that stage of my life, I read while walking down the road.  Myths, legends and  fantasy were my areas of choice, and this is where the Yeth Hounds come in.

Illustration by Anne-Marie Perks

Several other A-Zers have dealt with the Wild Hunt of which the Yeth Hounds form such an important part.  Also known as Yell Hounds and Gabriel Hounds, they appear in a number of northern mythologies.  I haven't found any southern instances, but they may exist.

The origins of the hounds possibly lie in flocks of migrating geese.  Human imagination has turned that eerie sound into spectral hounds.  They cannot be turned aside.  If they catch your scent, they will run you down and there is no escape.  Lean white hounds, with baleful eyes and red ears, they race across the autumn and winter skies, led variously by the devil, Herne and Odin.  Typically the hunt is not evil.  It can be summoned for a purpose however, and as a neutral force, will obey a sufficiently powerful caller whether good or bad.

I've got to admit that the first time I read about the hounds, I stayed awake all night jumping at shadows and fleeing under my duvet at all the night sounds I'd never noticed before.  They still terrify me.  Now however, I'm more interested in them for the way they keep popping up in mythology and I'm still curious about why they should be such a northern phenomenon.

All that self-imposed isolation meant that I at least emerged from my teenage years very widely read indeed.  Completely lacking in social skills mind you.  Which may have contributed to my disasterous start in the romance game.

All this is a very long time ago now, but the me that emerged from the youth-phase is still the me I wake up with.  Most of the basic obsessions were in place and while some of them have mellowed, others have evolved and grown deeper.  Maybe the hounds got me after all.  Some things can't be escaped.

X is for XP

X

XP stands for experience points.

Experience points are a way of keeping score in an RPG.  Earn enough of those little bunnies and your character gets better, stronger and more awesome.  Win enough XP and you gain a level and get harder to kill.

Easy.

Or not.  As with many niche hobbies, there are a multitude of loudly voiced views on XP and the earning thereof.   The idea of course, is to encourage players to do things they might not otherwise consider doing.  Deadly and dangerous things.

Back in the early days of D&D it was extremely simple.  If you killed a monster, you earned XP.  If you picked up treasure, you earned XP.  Under the rules, only the person who delivered the killing blow earned any XP.  This lead to a lot of very grumpy fighters who had spent ages swatting at a monster to reduce it enough for the killing blow to be delivered by someone else entirely.  It also lead to the kind of larcenous behaviour that gets role players a bad name.  "Ooh, we're at the inn.  I take the candlesticks!  Worth 20XP."

Gaining levels was nigh impossible for classes who didn't kill things or steal things, especially as not all classes gained levels at the same rate.  A fighter only needed 1000XP to go up from level 1 to level 2, but a magic user needed 2,500.  Bit of disparity there as your average magic user was completely useless until level 3 and it took an eternity to get there.

Beware the might of the magic user

The theory here was that high-level magic users were so dangerously powerful that they had to gain their goodies slowly.  Tales abounded of magic-users who could demolish the entire campaign with a well-chosen spell.  Fighters, clerics and thieves became progressively less useful as they went up in level compared to the magic-user.  Those variable XP tables were intended to level the playing field.

Old school gaming has a lot of things going for it, but longevity of characters isn't normally one of them.

Later iterations have taken a wider view of how XP can be earned.  Quick thinking, disabling traps, cunning plans and fast talking are also valid methods of gaining those cherished points.  These are also open to abuse, of course, but it is a fairer system.  It encourages players to build more varied characters good at more than one thing for a start.  It encourages GMs and adventure writers to provide a buffet of challenges beyond killing things and taking their stuff.

Most games now allot XP equally to all players, regardless of the contribution they made to the encounter. The fighter who flubbed her diplomacy check at a crucial moment is not penalised any more than the cleric who failed to land a blow against the dragon.  Equally unfair you may say, but so much depends on the dice - and we all have horrible rolling days.  Or months, in my case.

Personally, I'm tending to bottle out of XP allocation altogether and decide when the players have done enough to gain a level.  In a PbP that works out at an average of five enounters.  In a table game, probably 9-10.  Encounters being any kind of interactive situation.

That covers a multitude of sins, but allows me to reward creatively minded parties as well as the more mainstream groups.  I currently have two parties traversing the Tomb of Horrors (the 4e version).  One party are currently earning their XP in the traditional way by wiping out the denizens of a dungeon and surviving traps.  The other group are prancing around Freeport with a brass band and a box of slaad eggs.  Both are earning XP.  They're just doing it in their own special ways.

W is for Way through the Woods

W

Path through the woods.  Pierre Auguste Renoir (1874)

THEY shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods.

(Rudyard Kipling)

About two years ago, I got involved in some play testing for Open Design's Courts of the Shadowfey.  I had enough time and cash to become a patron and got the opportunity to contribute fairly actively on the design.  At the early stages we bandied about a lot of ideas for how the thing should work - what made is strangely fey, what people feared about the fey and so on.  The picture and poem combo above was a trigger point for me. 

For anyone not aware of Wolfgang Baur's work and his inspirational patronage system, I beg you to take a look if you are at all interested in RPG design.  It offers a unique platform for development within a defined structure and I found it an incredibly helpful experience.  I would (and will, when funds allow) contribute again.

That, however, is not the entire point of this post. 

The other point is that looking for the way through the woods is a kind of symbol for the hunt for inspiration.  That moment when the spark hits.  All of us look for it.  All of us recognise it when it hits.  I'm not sure you can force it, but I am sure that continually looking doesn't hurt.  You never know what the trigger will be.  Mine tend to be images and words.

Ways through the woods.  So elusive, so rewarding, so frustrating. 

V is for Venice

V

I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't want to go to Venice.   Really.  Part of my History of Art degree involved spending three months in Venice and I fought tooth and nail to avoid this horrible fate.  Quite why I was so against the idea is now lost to me, but if I had the chance to go back I'd smack the 20 year old me pretty hard and tell her not to be such a daft baggage.  Luckily, I had no choice.  Got off the train at Santa Lucia station, looked across the canal and fell in love.  Reluctantly and irrevocably.  My telegram home to let my mother know I'd arrived safely was short and to the point.  "Damn."

So, what's to love so much?

Well, it's so practical for one thing.  For all the glamour of the palaces lining the Grand Canal, at bottom they are just flashy docks.  You can trace the history of Renaissance and Baroque architecture in those buildings.  All of them were built by great Venetian families with two purposes in mind.  Showing off outrageously and allowing easy access to storehouse space.

It hasn't really changed.  I think of Venice as a kind of hermit crab.  It is built on the sound principle of accretion.  Bits get stuck on here and there, but since the city can't expand, the basic structure and layout are the same as they were 900 years ago.

The Rialto Bridge is a comparative newcomer on the scene.  Prior to the stone one opened in 1591, there had been a wooden structure.  This eventually collapsed under the weight of a major procession, but can be seen in the picture below.

By Carpaccio (painted around 1490)

The replacement was the familiar thing still around today.

By Canaletto (c.1750)

Present day, courtesy of the Italian Tourist board

All of Venice is like this.  The street map would be just as familiar to Tintoretto as it is to any baffled tourist.

The hermit crab analogy holds up in another way too.  The Venetians were notorious as pickers up of unconsidered trifles to send home to La Serenissima.  A bronze horse here, a gold pillar there.  There is no particular rhyme or reason to it.  If it looked pretty, or was valuable or could show the world that Venetians had been there and done that, home it went.

Unlike, say, the beautifully organised Renaissance perfection of Vicenza down the road, Venice lacks any kind of unifying theme.  The result should be a mess, but like the hermit crab, it has a style all its own.  San Marco is the perfect representation of this and prompted Mark Twain to say that the basilica looked like a "vast bug taking a meditative walk."

Piazza San Marco (Canaletto again).  Note the magpie effusion of the basilica in the background.  Note also the huge campanile.  It fell down in 1902 and was lovingly rebuilt to recreate the 1514 original.  Amazingly nobody was hurt in the collapse and no buildings were destroyed.

It wasn't just pretty objects either.  Venice was well known as a melting pot of ideas and technology as well.  Many of them were picked up from the dangerous east and the Serenissima was regarded with permanent suspicion by rest of Europe.  Venice has been a haven for many outcasts as long as they were useful outcasts.  Practicality has always taken precedence over any need for orthodoxy.  Indeed,  the Venetians gave their real devotion to the Serenissima - that mythic aglomoration of ideas and place that combined government and city in one.

For the first time visitor, Venice is a hideously confusing city.  Although it is very small indeed (you can walk it end to end in an hour), it is also, without question, the easiest place in the world to get lost in.  Helpful signs on the walls mean nothing at all.  Wide (by Venetian standards) calle* peter out entirely or end in canals.  Narrow calle with no apparant exit open abruptly onto small unlabelled campi*.

At this point you can either consult your map and get even more confused or take the Red Queen's advice and walk in the opposite direction to the one you think you should be going in.  Doing so results in you finding your destination almost immediately.  If you're lucky, you may end up at Paolin, purveyers of the best ice cream I have ever tasted.

I've long wanted to build a campaign around Venice.  It is the perfect amalgam of the an urban setting with dangerous areas, Byzantine rules and mysterious people.  Writing this has reminded me of it and once Mikelmerck is slightly more concrete, this is where I will turn my attention.

Beautiful Venice.  You bizarre product of extreme pragmatism and magpie instinct.  I'd go back in a heartbeat.


* - calle.  The Venetian term for a street
* - campi.  Plural of campo (small square)

U is for Utnapishtim and Universal myths

U

Myths have deep roots.  My own realisation came when I read the Gilgamesh epic for the first time and suddenly there was Utnapishtim right in front of my nose.  "Whoa, that looks familiar ...  man builds boat to avoid flood.  Heard that one before."

(At risk of teaching my granny to suck eggs, Gilgamesh is the hero of one of the first written stories.  His adventures take him all over the place and at one point he visits Utnapishtim, who is the Mesopotamian version of Noah.  Gilgamesh is described as two parts god and one part man and his battle with his own mortality is one of the core themes of the epic.)

There, I think, is the nub of the matter.  With myth, we've all heard that one before.  The stories and the way they work are part of how we operate as human beings. 

If I was asked to define what makes people, people, I might well settle on stories and story telling as our defining characteristic.  Plenty of mammals communicate to share valuable information, but I don't know of any other species that creates history and story for itself as the means to do it.

Stretching that a little further, I wonder at what point this happened.  When did we first start telling stories around the fire?  When did we first start trying to work out what happened after death?  When did we first need heroes?  It feels as if that was an evolutionary turning point.  The need to know combined with the ability to put ourselves into another place or person.

Of course we still do it today.  Drama and games in all their forms are part of this old tradition.  We tell stories to keep ourselves human. 

T is for Traveling with G and why Delta Airlines is forever on my Christmas card list

T

(A true story for the letter T)

I have fleetingly mentioned spending a lot of time in the US travelling when I was a child.  In a reversal on the usual procedure, my role was often to look after my father.  He was spectacularly eccentric and my mother deemed me a proper person to make sure he got to places on time.  She had done it for many years and felt that her 12 year old daughter would make a decent substitute.  Or something.  I've never known quite what her reasoning was.

However it came about, G and I found ourselves going on a jaunt to Mexico via San Francisco before heading to New York to catch a flight home to England.  Ever practical, mum made sure that I was the person looking after passports, visas and flight tickets.  "Make sure you tell your father the flight is two hours earlier than it is." was her parting advice as she saw us off.

It was well-intended advice.  G habitually ran late everywhere and his notion of comfortable travel consisted of drinking half a bottle of wine, swallowing a nembutal and crashing out in a cacophonous snoring heap until the flight landed.  Minor details like knowing where we were supposed to be staying he could deal with, but airports did not bring out the best in him.

G and I liked travelling together.  I didn't mind the snoring and rather enjoyed whimsical side-treks to wherever took his fancy.  He let me stay up late and was unfussed by my desire to live entirely off Pepperidge Farm cookies.  It was a win-win as far as we were concerned.  Stage one went very smoothly.  Atlanta to San Francisco was a complete success.  I went with him to whatever lab it was he was supposed to visit and cheerfully broke some software.  We went to see Godspell.  We ate some nice meals and looked at San Francisco which I adored and have never visited since.  Onwards to the airport for the journey to Mexico.

Following mum's advice, I managed to get G awake enough to arrive at the airport comfortably early.  I was so proud of myself.  He wandered off to the bar while I book browsed and we met up to have some lunch.  Over which he announced that he had taken his pre-flight nembutal.  Two hours early.  This was not good news.  Oh how my sensible lie had come back to bite me in the bum. 

Working our way down the marathon walkways of San Francisco airport, we duly arrived at the departure gate and I took my eyes of an obviously rather woozy G to make sure we had the relevant tickets.  When I looked around again, he had vanished.  He stayed vanished.  The flight was called.  He was still vanished.  I could only think of one solution.  He must have gone to the Gents and the nembutal had kicked in.  By now, I was the only person at the departure gate and announcements were blaring all over the airport demanding that Professor Pask present himself immediately. 

Major panic ensued.  I was not going to investigate the Gents by myself.  Masterminding my father was one thing, but that was way out of my remit.  I got on the flight and demanded to see the captain.  Where I explained that my father had probably passed out in the Gents and could they possibly go and get him for me.  To the infinite credit of Delta Airlines, they did just that.  I've been grateful to them ever since.

This, of course, was before we got trapped at Mexico airport when we discovered that my visa had expired.  Same journey, but another story.