[S/lay] In the Refugium

[Eero Tuovinen]

On account of S/lay w/ Me having been a current topic of discussion here lately, I've been arranging to play it here in Helsinki. I've had initial discussions about it with several gamers around here, and the first session materialized yesterday. A short play raport is in order for your entertainment.

I was "I", and my "You" was one Tommi Horttana, a 20-something hobbyist from Helsinki. I met Tommi this last spring when I moved to Helsinki and started a playtest workshop - most of my roleplaying friends in Helsinki are strongly dedicated to D&D, so anything more progressive, such as playtesting my on-going development project (Eleanor's Dream, as you know), basically requires me to look for some other folks to play with. Fortunately it's not difficult to meet new gamers in Helsinki, so I quickly formed a haphazard crew out of people who mostly haven't played together in the past, but who are all interested in experimental games and playtesting. Not that it pertains to the topic at hand, but I have to say that I'm very pleased with our accomplishments so far - we've done some serious work on three Finnish rpg projects, and I'm hopeful that I'll get the 10-session playtest campaign for Eleanor's Dream that I'm hoping for, as well.

This week we didn't have a full playtest session with this crew, mostly because people tend to go haring off any which way with their summer plans in July. Tommi and I didn't have anything better to do, though, having already done our summer haring, and we're in between games anyway - I'm trying to get Eleanor ready for playtest for next week, but for this week S/lay was a natural match. We decided to try it out, and maybe continue playing it next week as well; there are certain scheduling details in the air that might benefit from delaying the beginning of Eleanor's Dream playtesting until early August (not the least of these being the haphazard July movements of the gamer flocks).

As this background indicates, we don't know each other that well with Tommi; I basically know that he's studying IT at the uni, he runs a Heroquest campaign for his friends, and we tend to be a tiny bit awkward in free discourse because I'm wordy and exuberant (by Finnish standards, in case you've met me face to face and disagree) while Tommi is pretty reserved and shy in demeanor. Fortunately he's also gotten into the habit of bitching at me when I don't let people get a word edge-wise, so it's starting to work out well enough.

Anyway, here's the hero Tommi created when we followed the chargen procedure:

I am myself. I am canny, brutal, experienced. I laugh at the gods. I delight in life. My foes meet death swiftly. My Songs are beloved wherever I go, but I fear they sow doom and horror in my wake. My hair is dark and long, my frame lean and sinewy, my voice bright. I dress in the best sorts of skins, gifted to me where'er I go.

The concept here strongly suggested a Kalevala-associated hero to me: a restrained style (nothing phantasmagoric on the surface here!), great singer, a tragic undertone. When I made note of that, Tommi gave the hero a name: "Kiuru", which would be an archaic pre-Christian Finnic name (that'd be "Lark" in literal translation).

Tommi continued on to make understated choices, which I can imagine might worry a random outsider - S/lay is a game of phantasmagoric fantasy, more akin in style to Michael Moorcock than Mika Waltari (a Finnish author known for his historical romances). I wasn't worried on the spot, though, as I've got plenty of experience with this peculiarity of the Finnish mindset - Finnish gamers very often make creative choices that are often termed "Kaurismäki-like" for Aki Kaurismäki, a movie director whose work is particularly understated, laconic, acerbic, realist. When this applies to fantasy, we've taken to calling it "mudshit fantasy" - it's the sort of fantasy literature aesthetic you'd get if the world of Warhammer did not have magic in, and all interesting events were merely implied gently instead of shown explicitly ;)

To wit, here's the quest:

I wished to disappear in the wilderness, remove myself from human society, so as to avoid having my curse befall anybody else. I travelled far to breathe the clean, free air of the mountains.

I mean, you see what he did here? That's the single most mundane location on the list (perhaps the single most important constraint in S/lay is this list of setting locales that the "You" player gets to choose from before play; it's sort of a turbo-charged version of the thing Trollbabe has with the map), and the motivation is basically existentially loaded and nihilistic. Good times in Finnish gaming. Fortunately I know exactly how to massage this sort of thing. Here's what I prepped for the Monster and the Lover over the next few minutes:

Rald the "Ermine" is a half-neanderthal, socially dysfunctional hermit delving deep in the mountain range where he remains close to his father's "clan" and subsists by hunting. He is a stout, extremely masculine man, with inhumanly developed chest, arms and eyebrows, yet little natural ability for running, climbing or swimming. He is followed everywhere by the stench of carrion, and all his clothes are darned of the skins of small animals, which he attracts with the eldritch tunes of his secret pipe. Rald slays you fast, up-front, savagely and alone.

(In hind-sight it's interesting how Rald is sort of a mirror image of Kiuru - you can see how they both have this primitive skins-and-leathers theme going, as well as a musical thing.)

Rachel is the supposed daughter of Rald, living all alone with her dad in their abandoned valley. She's young yet buxom, short and even stocky, strongly freckled and has shoulder-length reddish hair. Rachel loves you innocently, for she is lonesome and hungry for human company, yet any attraction is murderously forbidden by her father. She is open-hearted by nature and knowledgeable in the ways of her mountain valley.

The actual play was calm and unhurried in comparison to my earlier plays of S/lay; in part this was because I had decided well in advance to play slowly and considerately with a relatively strange co-player; another factor was that we were both riffing the understated aesthetic and thus spent a lot of time simply talking about the natural landscapes and routine house-keeping. We took about 4-5 hours for the session in total, character creation included.

High points of the story in my opinion were as follows:

• In my role as setting developer I chose to background the highlands landscape relatively heavily over the first half of play: our story was set in the distant prehistorical past of fantastic imagination, basically in the spirit of Howard's Hyborian age. Ice was receding from the continent (of Europe, presumably) and strange tribes and customs were coming in from the south. Kiuru was escaping the doom of Ys, convinced that his was the fault in the catastrophe. Climbing ever higher in the Alpine regions he was seeking a place uncluttered by humanity, not heeding the warnings of the ever more sparse highlands population about the mountain valleys that provided refugia to the clans of "slopebrows" - neanderthal humans. (This was our strategic marriage of understated aesthetics and pulp fantasy - a pretty compelling milieu, I think.)
• Once Kiuru learned that there were humans in the valley he had chosen for wintering, he chose to risk attempting to cross the high pass to the next valley, not heeding the risk of doing so when the first snows had already fallen. (As we learned in flashback, he was yet madly grieving for the Ys lost to his voice, and for princess-sorceress Dahut.) The fool encountered a great field of rock in the pass, and got trapped by his ankle as he attempted to shift the stones. After many hours of lying there awaiting his death, Kiuru was "rescued" by Rald, who took the injured man back into the valley.
• When Kiuru lay helpless and in chains in Rald's cabin, awaiting his death (the implication was that the hermit intended to slaughter and eat him), he got an explanation from Rachel the daughter of the monster; she was agrieved by what encountering another human being was revealing about his supposed father (the degree of neanderthal heritage in both Rald and Rachel was a source of ambiguity and tension through the story), who had apparently been lying to her about his plans for her future. She chose then to rather release Kiuru than to let Rald slay and cook the man; the very thought sickened and horrified her, for hers had been a sheltered upbringing, knowing little of the ways of his grandfather's clan.

Regarding the Climax, Tommi was rather unfortunate with the dice, and missed his window for toppling the tower:

Kiuru escaped the burning cabin, slinking off into the forest. Rald carried the lifeless body of his daughter out, laying it down in that way of his, devoid of emotion; Kiuru knew not whether she had breathed the smoke, or if Rald had used his horrible upper-body strength in anger - regardless he was forced to leave her to her fate. Escaping from the relentless slopebrow, Kiuru came upon the river and risked its freezing waters rather than face Rald, who had taken all his weapons earlier. As it happened, the monstrous man attempted to wade into the river himself, but apparently was not comfortable swimming, and was thus left behind to curse in his broken language as Kiuru receded into the woods. Over the next three days Kiuru allowed his ankle to heal, and then took to the slopes of the western pass with determination; he now realized that these secluded valleys were the refugia of the ancient clan Rachel had told of, and the solitude he desired for would not be found in making war on the inhuman brutes; he had failed in his goal of seeking seclusion in these mountains.

The biggest difficulty we had with the procedures of the game was in choosing the climax outcomes: Tommi had trouble wrapping his head around the idea that he'd choose the single good outcome his dice warranted him in advance, and then we'd narrate the various consequences and finish the left-over strands of the story afterwards. I relented on the point rather easily, as Tommi explained that he'd find it more natural to let the story develop a bit to help him decide; in practice Tommi's unwillingness to make "bald" choices meant that I got to at least strongly suggest certain outcomes (such as Rachel's ambiguous demise) during the several Goes Tommi needed before he was willing to commit to the "avoid the Monster" stakes at the river. (Because Tommi lost the Match and only got two good dice, he had to choose between her life, his own life and slaying the monster; he could get only one of those.) I assume that we'll have less trouble in the future, and it does you good to have to stretch your brains now and then.

All in all, I rather enjoyed the game; we well might continue next week, I'm pretty curious about how Tommi'd handle the "I" role. We'll see; I've got plenty of other players lined up for the game as well, so I might arrange for some sort of a multiple-pairs game night. S/lay is in many ways a similar "type" of game compared to Zombie Cinema, but I haven't played the latter for a while now, so it's a nice change of pace to bite onto something that is mostly about nuanced story-development with sharp and absolute rules constraints ensuring that the story goes somewhere - yet there is still a full responsibility on the players to make sure that direction is compelling. The most memorable games of ZC for me have always involved the sort of chewy, cinematic "setting mythology" that we developed here in a few bold strokes; the sort of thing that would make me want to see the movie version of the story. I think we succeeded in this pretty well this time; despite our almost pathological avoidance of anything smacking of the phantasmagoric, we had a spooky, atmospheric portrayal of a down-to-earth semi-historic fantasy here, and one that cast a clearly Finnic protagonist in the role of a tragic pulp hero - this is a big deal from a Finnish viewpoint, we're used to thinking that Finns are at most comic sidekicks. Kiuru was pretty bad-ass, what with the iron arms collected over his travels, his knowledge of the ancient spell-songs, his confident survival and thriving alone in the wilderness, and his absolute conviction that ill fate would befall any hearing his singing.

[Tommi Horttana]

It's true that I didn't really embrace the hypermasculinity suggested by "I am myself. I am canny, brutal, experienced. I laugh at the gods. I delight in life. My foes meet death swiftly." I've just never been able to take that kind of thing very seriously (no big Arnold fan here). I think I pretty much only followed through with "canny" and "experienced". The list of character concepts was, however, much more suitable to my preference - I could have picked almost any one of the sentences listed but decided to go for the tragic bard. I also agree with Eero that the reserved "Kaurismäki" style appealed to me, so I went to length describing how my character just quietly stares at the mysterious stranger etc.

I also found it a bit difficult to figure out what I was allowed to do as a player, so I mostly stuck to what my character was doing, and fell into the "I try to" trap more than a few times. In hindsight I could have been bolder about describing how my character beats up the enemy, but . On the other hand, I had less (but non-zero) trouble describing how my character fails, by getting his foot trapped under a rock or getting whacked by the handle of the axe. I imagine I'll get better at it, though. Additionally, it was difficult for me to understand quite what the individual die rolls meant in terms of describing the following events. As in, whether 1 would mean I had to fail in the present situation even if I was winning in the long run (though I never was).

Despite that, the die mechanism was pretty interesting to me. The fact that no skills had been specified at start was refreshing, though it did make the progression of the story seem rather random. I'm guessing the idea here is that you don't win by cleverly applying the skills you picked at start but by being active in pursuing your goal (because the more actions you take in pursuit of it, the more dice you get into your pile). Which, again, is pretty enticing to me now that I realize it.

In my opinion, the taking of turns didn't add very much to our game, but that might be because I fell into the "I try to" trap a lot, so it was a pretty traditional GM/player experience in terms of who can narrate what. I suppose I wouldn't change it but sometimes it felt a bit forced, for example when I was trapped and chained in Rald's cottage and it was my turn even before the situation had been described to me (so I basically just ended up asking Eero what I was seeing and then made the action of moving to the doorway).

So, all in all, an interesting, though a bit clumsy experience. Will be happy to try the "I" role next and to continue Kiuru's story in the future.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Ah yes, that's an interesting point I forgot: Tommi took a clearly critical stance towards the "macho" elements he perceived in the game text (or perhaps the game text as perceived through the lens of the genre - original pulp with its chauvinist posturing is much more familiar in Finland than later deconstructive stylings, so while that "motto" at the beginning of chargen could be read in a less macho and more desperate way as well, it might have been more natural to interpret it in this case as Ron trying to make us play macho barbarian jocks). I rather liked the effeminate (not gender-ambiguous, I think, but rather merely metro-sexual masculinity - like a mirror image, again, of Rald) feel that resulted for the hero. There's a lot of similarity to Elric of Melnibone here, in fact, in everything we did, what with the melancholic hero and the lost city of Ys and so on.

Also, I agree about the "clumsy", this has been my experience of playing S/lay before as well. It's sort of... such a minimalistic game that even if it theoretically asks us to do something quite simple, in practice it feels unnecessarily clumsy to execute it. I suppose part of it is that the turn order makes us self-aware of doing many things that would happen automatically as give-and-take without having to think about it. Like dialogue, where you technically should relinquish the go after every sentence; it doesn't have to be clumsy, as long as we perceive who has the go at a given moment, but in takes a bit of practice to get over worrying about it too much. (We used an explicit conch to indicate whose turn it was, which influences the matter as well in both positive and negative ways.)

[Ron Edwards]

Hi! It's great to read this, and Tommi, welcome to the forum.

I'll begin with some technical points.

1. The individual die rolls mean absolutely nothing. You do not have to narrate a failure or a victory in the moment based on the outcome of a single die. Merely roll it and add it to your stack.

2. "I try to" narration is a profoundly embedded habit, I have discovered. It does require practice to overcome. I have found that the learning curve for this is steep ... but extremely short. Get to the second session of play and you'll see. You'll find that driving more assertively and completely for your goal - and perhaps evolving the goal a little, which would have been necessary in this set-up - will generate you many, many dice. There is no limit to how many dice "you" can get, along as the "I" player has not yet reached his or her pre-set total.

3. Given the dice outcome that you could only choose one item for success, your insistence on playing through to find out which one was not problematic. However, when you gain two or more, you must choose abstractly and immediately. Doing otherwise unfairly hampers your fellow player's ability to contribute.

I've played sessions of about two hours' duration, but 4-5 hours sounds fantastic. I envy the poetic, descriptive, and relaxed speaking you must have done. You definitely did not meet the usual profile of running a fast fight and wondering what else the game can do.

I'm interested in the characterization and play of the Lover, Rachel (interesting name choice), because Tommi chose to preserve his character's life rather than to save her. When your hero dies, you have the option to cease playing a hero and acting only as "I," or to begin a new hero and continue to play normally. Conceivably Rachel's life could have meant more to Tommi than Kiuru's, without risk to his ability to continue playing. Apparently it did not. So Eero, how did you play Rachel? Would you have stayed with her, given the chance? (Note: I am not asking whether you would have made the same choice given the immediate Climax circumstances, which is not a fair question.)

The explicit conch for Goes, which is not the same thing as "speaking," has been added to the rules since I discovered it last November. The way I use it is, if you have it, then you're not getting rid of it until you provide the effect of a character's actions.

Best, Ron

[Tommi Horttana]

I've played sessions of about two hours' duration, but 4-5 hours sounds fantastic. I envy the poetic, descriptive, and relaxed speaking you must have done. You definitely did not meet the usual profile of running a fast fight and wondering what else the game can do.

Don't envy it too much, it was more hesitation and wondering what could be done next than an effortless flow of descriptive poetry, although we did have a decent serving of that. Also, I'm pretty sure it lasted less than 4h (I arrived at 5PM, Eero explained things to me, and we finished around 9PM).

I'm interested in the characterization and play of the Lover, Rachel (interesting name choice), because Tommi chose to preserve his character's life rather than to save her. When your hero dies, you have the option to cease playing a hero and acting only as "I," or to begin a new hero and continue to play normally. Conceivably Rachel's life could have meant more to Tommi than Kiuru's, without risk to his ability to continue playing. Apparently it did not. So Eero, how did you play Rachel? Would you have stayed with her, given the chance? (Note: I am not asking whether you would have made the same choice given the immediate Climax circumstances, which is not a fair question.)

Well, my goal of escaping all humanity probably made it a bit difficult to Eero to involve the lover into the game. I met her once in the woods, exchanging words but only seeing her back when she left. Then I met her again after her father had captured me and tried to eat me, so there wasn't really much room to develop an actual romance. I guess Kiuru might have felt some dept because Rachel saved him, but well, it wasn't obvious to him that she was in mortal danger anyway. Also, I was asked to make the choice abstractly, and "Kiuru leaves death and misery behind him again" seemed far more enticing than "Kiuru makes heroic self-sacrifice". Also, I'm surprised you ask us to play a gritty and brutal fantasy, yet are surprised that we didn't go for the big heroic cliche. But I guess it might be something that happens a lot pulp fantasy - I haven't really read much of it.

edited to fix a hanging quote tag - RE

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Tommi,

I'm not criticizing you - it was a great story. I never want anyone to play this game except exactly in the moment, making the decisions they feel to be the way to play, for them, just like you did. Please don't interpret my post as saying what you should have done, or even as expressing surprise. The game as a process, and I as its author, have no expectation whatsoever about the Climax choices. I've already seen a huge range of outcomes for one-item choices, including the one you made.

My question really was directed only at Eero and only concerns playing the Lover. The most interesting learning curve for the game concerns this character, or rather, the succession and possible repeats of Lover characters.

Best, Ron

[Tommi Horttana]

Sure, and I didn't mean to criticise your response either, so we're good. :)

[Eero Tuovinen]

Yeah, this sort of game lives and breathes from the actual artistic agency residing with the players at the table; it'd be ludicrous if anybody tried to second-guess the creative choices made on the spot afterwards.

The explicit conch for Goes, which is not the same thing as "speaking," has been added to the rules since I discovered it last November. The way I use it is, if you have it, then you're not getting rid of it until you provide the effect of a character's actions.

This is exactly why I added it: it puts a clear burden of responsibility on the player who's currently talking (that is, who has the Go and might otherwise make a weak move) - they know that their turn won't end and the conch won't move unless they say something actually useful. Concentrates the mind wonderfully, especially when the opponent can push the conch back to ask you for more contribution.

On the other hand, we found that often we didn't care to move the conch during e.g. dialogue, which could be interpreted as either "don't mind me, I'm just commenting a bit while you narrate" or "here we swap turns very quickly, so as to find out line by line how the other side reacts". I don't think that this is a problem per se when the players know each other well enough to understand where the Go is even if we forget to move the conch for a little while. (We've only played something like half a dozen sessions of anything at all with Tommi, so we're not at that point yet, especially with our different temperaments.)

3. Given the dice outcome that you could only choose one item for success, your insistence on playing through to find out which one was not problematic. However, when you gain two or more, you must choose abstractly and immediately. Doing otherwise unfairly hampers your fellow player's ability to contribute.

I agree; at the time I didn't think that it'd be an issue, but I did have to do a slight bit of footwork over and above baseline playing skills here to continue defining the situation in an useful manner without effectively forcing certain choices over others on Tommi. The way it worked out in detail was essentially a loose serial elimination of options (although I was willing at any moment to backtrack, should Tommi decide on one of the passed-over options after all): first I provided the situation where Kiuru should act to save Rachel, if he was going to, then the situation where he could slay Rald, and so on, until after crossing the river Tommi basically had to make an abstract narrative choice: he could either decide that Kiuru's leg injury wasn't truly serious/significant and fail the Goal of becoming a hermit, or he could decide that the injury was crippling, but succeed in his hermitage. It was a pretty interesting choice, I think, but maybe Tommi found it difficult to consider the situation from outside the character viewpoint here?

All in all the Climax is a pretty decisive point in the game. I haven't really thought about how heavy that sort of thing can lay on a player unaccustomed to the sort of logic this type of game utilizes.

I'm interested in the characterization and play of the Lover, Rachel (interesting name choice), because Tommi chose to preserve his character's life rather than to save her. When your hero dies, you have the option to cease playing a hero and acting only as "I," or to begin a new hero and continue to play normally. Conceivably Rachel's life could have meant more to Tommi than Kiuru's, without risk to his ability to continue playing. Apparently it did not. So Eero, how did you play Rachel? Would you have stayed with her, given the chance? (Note: I am not asking whether you would have made the same choice given the immediate Climax circumstances, which is not a fair question.)

I knew from before we started that I would play "soft-ball" in the Lover department to begin with; we don't know each other that well with Tommi (I just today learned that he's actually 32 years old, same age as me), and I didn't want to weird him out with a very provocative Lover. On the other hand, I wanted to find out how Tommi would react to a heroic situation, a damsel in distress type of thing. Rachel's old Israelite name was picked to evoke the way pre-Tolkien pulp fantastists tended to mix mythological, fantastical and entirely historical details nilly-willy - like Howard calling a Conan character "Valeria". (Not that either Rald's or Rachel's names ever came up during play, I think?)

The way she shaped up, I played her as a pretty naive and perky sort. The best comparison that comes to mind is Rapunzel in Disney's Tangled (itself a S/lay story if there ever was one), now that I think of it: she'd never seen another human being aside from her father, but she had an instinctual desire for human contact, and natural virtue aplenty in terms of personality and moral backbone. She was quite distressed when her father revealed to her that her presuppositions about the world were all lies he had planted and allowed to flourish - she was willing to throw her lot with the sad stranger, in fact, when he told her about the Clan and his decision to take the girl to live with them, not to speak of the clearly monstrous practices they apparently had regarding the treatment of homo sapiens. A bad misjudgement from Rald, but then I imagine that he was borderline-autistic himself, really; a half-neanderthal scorned by the Clan, clearly with a pretty traumatic relationship with his mother, and so on. Nothing definite came up regarding Rachel's actual ancestry, but I wouldn't be surprised if Rald had slain her mother accidentally in her youth, or had simply found her orphaned and lied to her about being her father.

(Obviously this is all basically hillbilly horror story material.)

As for how this (my internal picture, that is) came through in play, it could surely have gotten a bit more work; I mark it down as learning to communicate with each other. Tommi made many choices in the game that were pretty passive, atmospheric and sort of tangential, and i reacted to those by not hurrying towards anything in particular, which sort of had the practical effect of me delaying having more interaction with Rachel. This just happened to end up with Rachel maybe getting a bit less face time than she could've had (first time playing, we maybe started the Match unnecessarily soon, as we both pushed a bit too hard towards it - could've had a scene with Kiuru enslaved by Rald as a thrall, with opportunity for getting to know Rachel better; all very much standard tropes of historical romance/fantasy), and what she got was mostly pretty condensed - she got more than anybody else, I suppose, but we sure did take our time speculating about the internal state of Kiuru vs. the natural landscape around him ;)

A good example of this interactive friction we had was when Kiuru first met Rachel and thus learned that he was not alone in the valley. The encounter itself ended very ambivalently, with him not even seeing her face (which worked nicely later; Tommi was uncertain until quite a long ways into the scenario whether the daughter carried the "taint" of the slopebrow clan in her blood as well, due not not having gotten a good look); she started the encounter friendly and even playful, but Kiuru was very quiet, very suspicious and quite distant at that first meeting, which made her worry a bit and cut the meeting short.

That scene alone might have been frictive enough (I don't know how Tommi viewed it), but then afterwards Kiuru had a moment of solitude, and he started singing to the river. This was a powerful moment in terms of his characterization and backstory, as he sung the songs of his far-away people, songs he wouldn't ordinarily dare to sing for fear of casting doom upon any listeners. Well, I totally missed that nuance about fear for other people at the moment (and this strikes me as significant regarding our learning to play together - I don't really miss much when people narrate things, usually), so on my Go I remarked about the song expanding to fill the valley, and then opened my mouth to introduce a scene where Rachel would've braved the stranger's camp on the next morning, to be there when he woke up (to presumably ask him again to come visit her dad's cabin and tell them about the outside world). However, Tommi interrupted before I got out two words, it was important to him to elaborate how careful Kiuru was about singing, and about how he wouldn't sing if he suspected people to be nearby (there was some clarification about the spatial location of the last scene, too, merely to gauge this entirely arbitrary issue of how suspicious Kiuru might be at the moment about somebody else having their steading nearby).

Because Tommi interrupted, I scrapped my intended scene (the causal logic was that she would've heard his singing on the evening, you see, and that would've attracted her to return - in hindsight I could've done that scene anyway, as she knew well where his camp was, but that's hindsight) and instead did a sad flashback / dream sequence about the lost city of Ys. Thus, by respecting what I understood to be Tommi's concern, I actually missed the natural moment to elaborate on Rachel, which then directly led to the somewhat existential and distant emotional tone of the rest of the session.

(People often interpret play reports that tell about "difficulties" much more strongly than the reality would warrant. I want to emphasize here that despite us still learning how to play together, I enjoyed the work quite a bit. Our play was maybe a bit slow and focused on Color of play because of the friction in the ephemeral social communication, not bad, I think.)

As for whether I'd have chosen to stay with Rachel: given a different type of hero, why not. Rald would have to go, and it might be difficult to get together with her after taking out her dad, but that could fall out any which way (as we saw in actual play - she was like a Gothic romance heroine, her most private life built on lies). Specifically, a character who wanted nothing more than to retreat from human society might find appeal in a highly self-sufficient yet optimistic girl. I could see myself playing such a character, and him getting smitten by Rachel. (Heck, I could see myself being smitten by such, could I but get over my obsession with erudition.)

However, I don't wonder about Tommi's choice at all, given what we learned about Kiuru during play. That man's messed up emotionally! I'd actually be quite interested in playing through the events of his visit to the lost Ys, flashback style (think Sorcerer & Sword treatment of flashback logic here), just to find out whether he was always so emotionally distant and cold. I suspect not. However, the man he was at the valley, that was a man who would need a slow and peaceful romance, and an opportunity to heal. Sure, Rachel saved his life, but Kiuru's a practical and acerbic man, the sort who would assume that she knows what she's doing with her father; I also suspect that his roots are in a more matriarchal or egalitarian society (as for why I would so suspect, that goes into a bunch of Finnish mythology and anthropology - suffice to say that the implication of the story was that Kiuru's a member of the ancient Finno-Ugric peoples of the east, while the locals were a mix of Celts and Indo-Europeans), which would make him more inclined to think that there's no sense in a man sacrificing their life to save a woman's - no patriarchal responsibility, you see.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi,

I'd been planning to post one other point about your game but was overwhelmed by other things last week. It's this: I love mud-shit fantasy. One of my favorite examples, which might not immediately spring to mind as a candidate, is Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword, the grubbiest, toughest, rudest story of high fantasy I've ever seen. (I don't really know if the high mavens of literary fantasy agree with my classifications, that's what it seems like to me anyway.) I'd even think that Njal's Saga counts.

S/Lay w/Me can do this admirably. Yes, it's tempting to go further in the direction of Clark Ashton Smith or Michael Shea's Nifft the Lean, and yes, I was poking the more opaque pools in my mind where their work settled in order to come with up the locations ... but since you can tune the brief phrases to whatever you want, that particular brand of daily-mythic human adventure is certainly available too. I also recommend Darrell Schweitzer's We Are All Legends, a very important book for S/Lay w/Me, as a perfect example of mud-shit (and decay, and weariness, and dried blood, and much foggy mist ...) married to intensely cosmic, hallucinatory, surreal, and symbolic freakiness.

Best, Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

Those are interesting recommendations, I'll have to check them out. I haven't read Poul Anderson's fantasy works at all, despite them being name-dropped regularly in the Internet. (Hmm, I think it's Three Hearts and Three Lions that the OSR folks talk about - apparently it was a Gygax favourite or something along those lines.)

And yes, the sagas of Iceland are often very much "mudshit".

Clark Ashton Smith has been a lot in my mind in relation to S/lay, the aesthetics are very similar. He's one of those authors I'm excited about today, being as how he's one whose work I've yet to completely devour in my youth (CAS is not well-known in Finland), but who regardless writes exactly the sort of beautiful language I like and sometimes miss in current literature. (I've been using CAS as a sort of source and inspiration in my Eleanor's Dream work, but I intend to read his work more comprehensively once I get out of that particular thicket.)