[S/lay w/Me] First Experiences

[greyorm]

A while back, Ron mentioned something to me, that he had half written S/lay for me anyways. I was curious what he meant, and he mentioned it might make a good topic for the boards. I had originally planned to wait and ask after I'd played S/lay a time or two, which required getting my wife to read the book.

Now, Jen isn't a gamer -- she has played D&D before, but gaming isn't a "thing" for her that she seeks out, so getting her to read the damn game was like pulling teeth -- but once she did, she had some wonderful things to say about it. "Ron wrote this, right? Make sure you tell him I really enjoyed reading it." And specifically she says she loves how it is written "...like he's just talking to me, instead of all blah-blah-blah like most game texts...I think anyone could just pick this up and play." She also said "The writing feels sensual." So, awesome. Unfortunately, Jen and mine's first attempt to play was a bust after about an hour: mainly due to nervousness on her part it just didn't go anywhere (this shyness is part of the reason she doesn't game).

She was I, and I was You. She decided on a dark-skinned, red-haired demon's child seeking an artifact of the dragon gods in the cemetery city, whose use could take the corrupting influence of the demon out of her. She cracked a joke about it being the Golden Phallus of Bahamut, and we were definitely thinking of going with that (yeah, kink). I had decided the Monster was the sleeping dragon god himself, and the Lover would be the priest, one of the city's caretakers, who met her at the shattered gates. Unfortunately, we only managed about a scene-and-a-half before we put the game away (it had taken her most of that hour to come up with the character, with lots of prompting and reassurance that she didn't need to be nervous).

She's said she wants to try again, but that hasn't happened yet, and I don't want to push her into it. I think next time we'll go the route of her playing the Monster/Lover and my playing the character, so she doesn't feel spotlighted by being "the player" (I know that's not how it works, because things are much looser and more mutual, but I know that's how she was feeling).

I'd then also tried to stir up some interest with friends on-line and get them to maybe play a session or two with me (I'm convinced S/lay is pretty much perfect for chat-gaming), but (story of my life) was completely ignored. So as play is clearly not happening anytime soon, I figure now is as good a time as any to have a discussion about what you meant by having half written it for me, Ron? (And anything else that strikes anyone as discussable in the above.)

[Ron Edwards]

You articulated it best yourself, in the Naked Went the Gamer is posted thread:

I came into gaming on the edge of the early 80's cleansing of the material. Because I grew up in the middle of nowhere, we were always around a decade behind other areas of the country in terms of what the big things were and what was available to us, so my old school books were old school, with bare-breasted demonesses and funky 70's style illustrations, even though my first introduction to the hobby was the red box D&D Basic set (I graduated backwards to the old printings of what would become 1st Edition AD&D). This is despite living just a few hours north of the D&D belt, which expanded to the south-east.
...
Unlike a lot of other guys I knew who grew up in that transition era, I dug backwards into the stuff as I got older, though it was based on some early foundations, like a complete reading of the Lord of the Rings when I was five years old, extensive exposure to Norse and Greek myths, odd little sci-fi and fantasy books from the library (inc. some of the greats that I really didn't know were greats until much later), hit Howard pretty early (grade school sometime IIRC), books about monsters (movie and mythological) often with naked women in Classical style, etc.

So I'd already had a good taste of all this when growing up, and lots of outside exposure to the same kind of material elsewhere (Wagner's Nibelungen opera, the funky original LotR movies, the Clash of the Titans, the old Sinbad movies, etc), and I've been digging more deeply into that history, or into the artifacts of that history, as I've gotten older (frex, I just recently started reading the old Heavy Metal mags).

Although I appreciate some of your qualifying remarks about the differences between our experiences, yours is effectively the same as mine in certain key ways. We simply speak the same language and use the same semiotics when it comes to words like "fantasy," "myth," and "story." That's been evident since you sent me an image file out of the blue in support of the first on-line version of Sorcerer. That's where I was coming from in my comment to you. Not especially profound, I guess.

Best, Ron

[greyorm]

Well, awesome (though now I feel rather silly for starting the thread).