Puppetland
by John Tynes
$29.95, Acrid House Publishing
I was a little surprised when James
asked me to review a role-playing game; I figure it would have made
the perfect excuse for one of his pet nerds to explain away yet
another dateless Saturday night. "Sure I could've gone out," I can
hear Kyle or Jonathan saying, "but James asked me to write another
piece for SurReview. He's _counting_ on me."
I should have more faith in my editor. My
experiences with roleplaying games had heretofore consisted primarily
of pasty people in capes, loaded down with Diet Coke and Cheez-its,
pretending to be elves, vampires, and/or giant robots in some sort of
adolescent psycho-sexual crypto-retaliation for growing up as dateless
outcasts.
But this game, once I picked it up and got
into it, got beyond the neccesary evil of rules and mechanics, this
game took me back to a place I hadn't seen since childhood, except
maybe in long, gnawing dreams. It's about puppets. Sounds childish,
right? Fair enough. Childish like nightmares are childish. Childish
like a sense of awe is childish. Childish like love and fear and hope
are childish.
This is the backstory to the game, as near
as I can tell: there was once a human Maker, who made all the puppets
and had them live together in peace and harmony. Then the Maker's
favorite puppet, Punch, rose up and slew the Maker, made cruel
servants out of the Maker's rent flesh, and began to rule the Maker's
land with cruelty and malice. A strangely Virgin Mary-esque Judy leads
a sort of resistance, and dreams of the redemption of Punch and the
resurrection of the Maker.
So right there you've got a game that
takes a core subject matter that usually evokes childhood times and
wraps it up with horrific imagery and deep, uncomfortable Christian
religous themes. This constant juxtaposition of adult themes and
childhood imagery really gives the game strength; in a way like _Au
Revoir, Les Enfants_ or _The Lord of the Flies_, but less concerned
with the a child's reality and more with their dream-worlds.
Within this framework Tynes gives some
sample stories. One is an ultimately self-sacrificing attempt for one
of Punch's servants to shed his evil nature and do good. Another takes
us on an Odyssey through strange lands, including underground of
decaying clockwork tended by windup dolls and a land on the far side
of a great sea filled with Balinese puppets fighting terrible demons.
As far as the rules & game stuff go, they
weren't what I expected: no endless incomprehensible charts or
formulas. The person in charge, the "Puppetmaster", is supposed to hew
true to the spirit of the game and some basic guidelines, but for the
most part you just make it up as you go along. I asked my recovering
nerd boyfriend about this, and he told me that some games had been
moving in that direction in recent years (especially _Over the Edge_).
It was simple enough that I felt like I
could take it out for a test drive after minimal preparation, so I
assembled some friends, some vodka, and some vague plot ideas. I tried
to send my friends scurrying around in a _Wizard of Oz_ style quest to
find a distant, magic city. I got them there eventually, although my
friends proved frustratingly difficult to lead around by the nose,
spending most of the time fighting amongst themselves. There were a
few moments where their declared action surprised me and I was left
speechless, trying to figure out what to do next, but as the night
(and the vodka) poured on, those moments grew shorter and shorter. I
failed to evoke the mood of gothic decay I was shooting for, but a
good time was had by all, and I have no doubt that with a little
practice I could be running the role-playing equivalent of "The Street
of Crocodiles".
As an artifact, the game is
gorgeous. Slick paper, well-bound, sturdy covers, beautiful murky art,
like a modern graphic novel with too much text. Presumably, the job of
the art is to convey the feel of the world the game designer has in
mind; the art here alternates between evoking the animation of the
Quay brothers -- and anyone who's seen my films know what a compliment
I consider that -- and coming off like illustrations from a book
written for unimaginably world-weary children.
So, I liked it. I don't think I could play
it every week or anything, but it convinced me that role-playing games
weren't all irredeemable power fantasies, and maybe even led me to an
idea for a short or two.
I should throw in a disclaimer: the author
of Puppetland, John Tynes, is in some small yet vague way affiliated
with SurReview. I've never heard of him, so I figured that's probably
why James had me do this -- he didn't want to feel too guilty about
plugging his friends. You can check out an early version of the game
here.
