(no subject)

[camwyn]

I am, at heart, a horribly, HORRIBLY lazy person who believes that if the Gods had not wanted us to use the real world in our RP they would not have made it so innately interesting. One does not have to labour overtime to ensure that one hasn't put the desert spang up against the jungle if one is using the geography of the real world, albeit slightly transplanted. One needn't explain why the Chinese are packed right up against the Italians if one is using New York City to play in, because that's just how the city worked out. Need something simultaneously implausible and scary in the way of background colour or antagonists? How about Russo-Canadian anarchist nudists? You can't make this stuff up, but YOU DON'T HAVE TO. It's right there. It's real.

I make a lot of stuff up when I set to work on plots, but you should consider this your warning: if you're RPing with me, and some element of mine seems excessively ludicrous, there's a really good chance that I'm pulling it from reality because only in reality could you get away with it.

Comments

[ebony14.livejournal.com]

"Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make sense." - Attributed to alternately Robert Heinlien and Tom Clancy

[camwyn]

Eeyup. And when you live a life that's been repeatedly and persistently flicked by the finger of the Angel of Surrealism, well... things get interesting.

[deepfishy.livejournal.com]

Both arson and bombing were used. [...] Most of these acts were committed in the nude.

...wow. That's a whole 'nother level of weird.

I love the world.

[camwyn]

Ain't it grand? There's always something like this available. Always. Somewhere.

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

So, what you're saying is "Tim Powers Tim Powers Tim Powers Tim Powers Tim Powers Tim Powers."?

[camwyn]

*fails to recognize name*

*looks name up on Wikipedia*

It would appear so. At least to some degree, anyway. Funky.

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Reading that, it sounds like I'm calling you derivative. Far from it. "A is strange and true, B is strange and true, C is untrue and impossible, but explains A & B better than their normal strange reasons do." is an equation for excellent Story, and I salute you for doing the research.

I tried to do it once, but then I threw up my hands and gave up when Actual History got far weirder, more interesting and more exciting than my idea.

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

I strongly recommend him.

[camwyn]

I didn't think it was calling me derivative, more like 'are you advocating this guy's style of constructing his stories'. Which I wasn't really, since I've never read his stuff.

For me, the thing is- well, you've got reality. You've got all this completely bizarre stuff going on and perfect examples of things you want to work with. Example: let's say you're the British government and you have a top secret, utterly freakydeaky project that you just do not want anybody to even try and find out about. Where do you put it? Logically, you'd put it somewhere remote and inconvenient and make sure it had a damned good reason for people to say 'it's not worth going there to investigate' as an extra layer of protection beyond your mere security systems. Ideal candidate: how about the island where Winston Churchill detonated the anthrax bomb? Sure, you have to integrate several overly complicated protection protocols into the daily routine of everyone who works there, but we're talking about a plot that involved capturing a werewolf for scientific study. A few extra infection controls aren't much next to that. The anthrax island is a reality, although they cleaned it up some years back and it's got sheep on it now. It's named Gruinard Island. Very convenient place for suitably paranoid plottage, although you might have to scootch it around a little bit to prevent locals from spotting your arrivals.

Another example would be the fact that the people who created Ghostbusters were courteous enough to set it in New York City rather than making it somewhere fictional yet urban. I can point out the major locations from the movie on a map of the city, since nearly all of them are in Manhattan. If I want something to happen at a restaurant that fits in with the overall theme and/or mood of the movie, I can think of at least three restaurants off the top of my head that qualify (admittedly, two of them are branches of the same restaurant and one of them involves ninjas). If I need something peculiar to be purchased I have stores with suitably mysterious names, like "Barry Supply Co.: Hard-to-Get Items", right there (it's on West 17th Street). That could sell anything in the Ghostbusters universe. The museums, whether you mean the big ones up around Central Park or the tiny ones in lower Manhattan, could play host to almost any kind of artifact imaginable because they already do. When the same museum plays host to the largest meteorite ever recovered by humans, the recovered corpse of Architeuthis dux (the giant squid), and the coronation crown of the King of Nepal at the same time, why not make use of that? The real world only needs a tiiiiiny little nudge to go spinning off in the direction of whatever weirdness you need.

Thats the gods honest truth

[argonautilus.livejournal.com]

When I run games (as I've been doing in a Werewolf LARP for 3 years), I've found the creepiest things come from real life rather than my imagination. I still get nightmares from the NPRcast where they talked about child sex slavery in the United States and interviewed a victim who had recently wrote a book about it. And yes, I did use it as a villainous group from my game I'm afraid.

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

Exactly right on NYC. I love NYC.

Ghostbusters 2 is an excellent example of that: Of course, if the original bway pneumatic line was built in secret, why not others?

It's why I ignore the stated-setting of my preferred modern RPG, as it says NYC is, supernaturally, a wasteland. Screw that.