Action Speaks Louder Than Action

I want you to watch this scene from my all time favourite film 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'. The important part is from 1:54 to 2:06, if you don't want to watch the whole thing. It is worth watching, but I'll fill you in on what happens before that important part.


You've just witnessed dialogue. You've just witnessed character development.

If you are familiar 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' then you know this as the scene in which Li Mu Bai (played by Chow Yun Fat) gets his sword, The Green Destiny, back from Jen Yu. But he does that 20 seconds into the video, long before this fight even begins. This resolves one of the major plotlines early in the film and, yet, the scene goes on for another two minutes and forty seconds after Li Mu Bai gets his sword back.

Why?

Is it because Li Mu Bai wants to find Jen Yu's teacher, The Jade Fox, and he wants to question her? Yes. Is it because he wants Jen Yu to leave her teacher and study under him, becoming the worthy disciple he longs for? Yeah, it's that too.

But in terms of scene questions (Will Li Mu Bai get the sword back? Will Jen Yu reveal where Jade Fox is hiding? Will Li Mu Bai convince Jen Yu to join him?) they're resolved pretty quickly and, in fact, they're answered with some pretty simple resolutions. He does get the sword, she doesn't join him and she doesn't tell him where Jade Fox is hiding. If you're keeping track, that's a Yes a No and a No for resolutions. "There's no Yes, but..." and zero "No, ands..." We can't even say it's "No, and Jen Yu gets away" because Li Mu Bai clearly lets her go willingly.

So this is bad, right? We've talked about this. Simple answers to scene questions lead to dead ends and pointless scenes and waste both space and opportunity, right? Right.

I'm glad you're paying attention.

But this scene is doing double time. There's another conversation going on here that has nothing to do with what the characters are saying. Did you see it? Do you want a chance to watch again? Remember, we're watching with the sound off.

For that minute that I got you to watch, Li Mu Bai picks up a sword and proceeds to smack Jen Yu around with it, then let's her go. Jen Yu is using a live blade, that's some real cutting steel she's swinging at him. Li Mu Bai hits her a couple of times, but mostly he blocks and deflects.

What Li Mu Bai is saying in this fight scene is "I can beat you. I am beating you. I'm so much better than you, I can use a stick to beat you. I'm barely even looking at you and I'm beating you. I am the superior fighter." But he's also saying something else. He says, "I don't want to kill you. I'm using this stick because I'm not here to kill you." Before this fight, earlier in the video, Li Mu Bai uses his sword to cut straight through the tip of Jen's weapon. Before that he blocks her attacks with his sword's scabbard, clearly making the statement that he is unafraid and that he can easily overcome her if he wishes. Li Mu Bai speaks to Jen Yu through combat.

And it's not a monologue. Jen Yu is speaking back and she is screaming. She strikes at Li Mu Bai with full force, with her sword drawn, putting everything into it. She says, "I will not be shown up. If I can, I will kill you, and I believe I can. I don't need you. Look at how great I am!" This is not a fight scene, this is a conversation. They are developing their relationship, learning about each other, setting up a lot for later in the movie. Li Mu Bai's frustration with Jen Yu and the doubts that she is worthy all begin here and they climax later on in the film in a similar but even more beautiful fight scene.

Did I say this scene is doing double time? Scratch that. This scene is doing triple time. Something else is happening here.

The characters are not only speaking to each other, they are revealing themselves to the audience. This is a big scene for character development and for showing who these characters are to us the film viewer. We learn a lot about both Li Mu Bai and Jen Yu in this scene all in how they move.

Jen Yu makes big attacks, throwing herself into every movement, adopting long stances and wide lunges, swinging the sword in big arcs over and around Li Mu Bai. On every retreat she flurries the sword again. She steps back and forward, switches and crosses her stances. She strikes mostly for Li Mu Bai's head, going for a killing strike in every movement. Her sword is always up, tip aimed at her opponent. In a matter of seconds, we learn that Jen Yu is aggressive and merciless, that she likes to look good when she fights and put on a show of her skill. Jen Yu is doing the martial arts we all think about when we think of martial arts movies.

Now look at Li Mu Bai. He barely moves at all. His stance is high, his guard is low, he follows Jen Yu's retreat with small steps. He holds The Green Destiny in his other hand, but keeps it pressed against his back at all times, essentially fighting one handed. He strikes at any target he's given - head, neck, hand, stomach. Li Mu Bai is a calculating and ruthless fighter, backing up an extraordinary confidence with an extraordinary skill that is tempered by his mercy. He doesn't show off, he fights. He makes direct movement, countering and striking in time with his opponent. He is completely at ease with what he is doing, not afraid or angry in his actions.

Well damn. It's no wonder Jen Yu didn't have a chance.

It's tempting to keep going and analyse this from a purely martial perspective, but let's focus on the writing.

Okay, so in three minutes, we've barely nudged out plot along. This is a long scene for a lot of quick resolutions. But this isn't about plot, this is about character. This is about developing the characters for the audience and developing the relationship two characters have in the story. We're doing three big things here all at the same time.

When I started writing 'Pilgrimage' and started developing Roland's character, one of the first questions I asked was "How does Roland fight?" If you're working on a story with lots of fighting, as 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' is and, indeed, as 'Pilgrimage' is, there is no reason for you not to think about how a character is revealed by the way they fight.

In 'Pilgrimage' Roland is big and heavy and he's strong and he likes to use all of that weight, throwing himself into and onto many of his enemies. But more importantly, Roland doesn't ever restrain himself. Roland hates himself and has the next best thing to a death wish for most of the book. He doesn't have a survival instinct to tell him that grabbing a sword with your hand is a bad idea, he just takes the opportunity to win, regardless of what it costs him. His self-loathing is reflected in his fighting. As is his desire to win. Roland will use whatever is on hand to give himself an edge, be it a magical artifact or a can of beans, and will gladly strike an opponent while they're down or severely injured.  The only sense of accomplishment Roland has is victory in a fight and he will do what it takes to feel that satisfaction. He has no sense of honour or poor form in combat, he's only there to win.

At various times through-out the book Roland's self-loathing, lack of restraint and need to win is the subject of discussion, criticism, discovery and introspection by Roland and by other character. But he shows all of those features in the way he fights as much as he does in how he drinks and how he interacts with others and how he sees himself in quiet moments of reflection. Roland doesn't stop being Roland just because it's time for an action beat.

If you're writing a story with any fighting, there is no reason for you not to think about how a character is revealed by the way they fight.

If you're writing a story with any fighting, there is no reason for you not to think about how a character is revealed by the way they fight.

That's what I want you to take away from this.

Writing a fight scene to be dialogue is a little harder and you may take some time to figure that out, but this one is easy.

If you're writing a story with any fighting, there is no reason for you not to think about how a character is revealed by the way they fight.

This extends beyond fight scenes, too. Action scenes of all kinds can reveal character in the way they move and overcome obstacles. Characters can talk to each other in how they work against each other.

Bad actions scenes exist to fill time with spectacle.

Good action scenes exist to move the plot forward with excitement and suspense.

The best scenes do double or triple time, moving the plot, developing characters and/or revealing characters, expanding on subplots.*


*Note I did not say "The best actions scenes" but "The best scenes." That's all scenes, people. All of them.

Feed Your Imagination

I love ebooks. Ebooks are a fantastic development for readers. But the ebook vs print book is a false dichotomy and despite the arguments you see about the issue, I think most readers agree. People who like to read books just like to read books, printed or digital.

For me, I find I impulse buy more print books than ebooks. Seeing something new in a book store, taking it off the shelf and buying it on a whim is a far more satisfying experience than buying digital. Yes, consumerism has trained me well.

But this is how I happened to come across a book titled How To Disappear. It's a fascinating book on hiding in plain sight and making it hard for people to find you. It's a guide for people wanting to escape abusive relationship, people wanting to start their life again, and all manner of (legal) reasons for wanting to vanish into (and not out of) the system. I've never thought much about the topic or why people would want to disappear, but it certainly is a fascinating book. What really attracted me to it was the case files included in the book - the real life examples of people the author had helped to disappear.

I finished the book over the next couple of days and it now sits on my shelf alongside other books on topics as broad as religion, philosophy, psychology, sociology, history, art, politics, crime and assorted other books on random topics that have caught my interest.

Reading, as you no doubt know, is important for the writer. Reading is key to learning how to write. Study and consume literature as much as  you can and learn from it. You can't write good fiction unless you read good fiction. Our favourite authors are our teachers.

But are you also reading non-fiction?

This all comes back to that old maxim "Write what you know."

What do you know? Do you know history? What about religion and philosophy? Psychology, sociology and politics? Martial arts? Superstition? Mechanics? Science? What do you know?

You see "write what you know" is layers upon layers of wisdom that you should be heeding. But I also look at it as a challenge. "Write what you know" demands that you know things. It's not just about knowing what it is like to be a middle class suburban white boy who likes cats and the rain but prefers not to mix them. It's not just about knowing what it's like to be a human that loves and hates and cries in sadness and in joy. It's not just about knowing what life in a city is like, or life in a small town, or growing up in the '90s or staring at a long list of job adds and feeling the struggle between your pride and your desperation.

All of that is part of your human experience and it is what you know.

But what you know is also about how to hold a sword, how to ride a motorcycle, how to quote classic literature and form a logical argument and teach using the Socratic Method.What you know is how to cook a damned good hamburger using whatever ingredients you have on hand and knowing the serene pleasure of a long walk or the short lived thrill of a downhill sprint. What you know is the biographies of serial killers and the detectives who stopped them.

All of that is what you know, too.

And the more you know, the more you can write.

The things we learn from non-fiction is food for our imagination. We can find inspiration and ideas in the true stories of our world. How much truer is the climactic sword fight you've planned in the third act going to be for your reader if you have also stood, sword in hand, staring down a bigger, stronger opponent? How accurately can your murderer-come-nihilistic-philosopher if you have never read Dostoyevsky's 'Notes From Underground'?

I've said this before and it bears repeating: "Write What You Know" is not a limitation but a challenge. Learn. Know more and write more. Fill in those gaps in your experience with other people's experience. Non-fiction will feed your creativity and take your imagination to new places.

So read widely and read often and make space in your schedule for non-fiction.

The Book Club 3: This Time It's Personal

It's that time again, kids! Yes, it's time to get your read on. And because this is the third annual* book club book recommendation, I'm recommending twice the books for twice the fun!

Sort of!

So the first book I want to recommend is one you might already be familiar with. It's 'The Princess Bride' by William Goldman. You've no doubt seen the movie and heard the quotes and considered buying the t-shirts. I personally recommend the 25th or 30th anniversary edition because it has more features that are quite enjoyable. 'The Princess Bride' is a lot of fun and you should read it. I approve this message!

The second book is not actually a book, it is a series of books. It is 'A Series of Unfortunate Events' by Lemony Snicket (AKA Daniel Handler.) Yes, I am recommending that you, all you adults out there, read a thirteen book series aimed at children. At least read the first one and maybe the fourth. Books two and three are sort of optional in that they don't do much that the first one didn't. Book four is where it really picks up. But regardless, I say read them all. They're quite enjoyable.

But I'm not just here to recommend books that are good. You can find those books without me. I'm here to recommend books that will teach you something.

Both 'A Series of Unfortunate Events' and 'The Princess Bride' will teach you to be weird. Being weird is good. It's good to be different, to stand out, to be noticeable.

You see there's a standard for books. We see the standard all the time and we learn to write a book like these standard books and there is nothing wrong with that. Many great books are standard books. Some of the greatest books are standard books. But they're still standard. They follow the set conventions. One convention is particular is that the world of the book and the world of the reader are separate and do not intrude on each other. We the reader are not a part of the book and we acknowledge that the book is not a historical record and we're okay with that.

Not these books.

William Goldman provides a framing device for his books in which he is not writing the story but abridging it for re-publication. The book has a fictional history, the world has a fictional history and William Goldman has a fictional history but by constantly addressing us, the reader, and by providing a framing device like this, he blurs those lines and invites us to be a part of the world in which the story is taking place. 'The Princess Bride' is a story told in layers. Both the creation of the book is a story and the book is a story.

It's hard to explain.

I have to admit I didn't care much for it at first and I sometimes wished that William Goldman and his framing device would get lost and let me just read the book. But in the end it grew on me and I became as much involved in the fake story about the book as the fake story that is the book.

Head spinning yet?

You'll have to read it to get a full grasp of what I'm talking about.

A little easier is 'A Series of Unfortunate Events.' The framing device here is similar: The story is real, the people and places are real. The narrator (Lemony Snicket) is a character in this world, a researcher reaching the story, and he is telling the story to the reader. Daniel Handler (as Lemony Snicket) constantly addresses the reader to remind us that the story is true and that there are many happier and less unfortunate stories you could be reading.

Again, the author is blurring the line between the world of the book and the world of the reader by directly speaking to the audience and asking them to believe that they are also a part of the world. You see in the world of 'A Series of Unfortunate Events' by Lemony Snicket, there is a book called 'A Series of Unfortunate Events' and it is written by Lemony Snicket and that book is the same book as the one you are reading.

Chew on that idea for a little while and let it settle in your brain's stomach.

Now you might like this way or writing or you might hate it. You might decide to try something similar or you may not. The point is that we have conventions - many of them for a good reason - and we write within those conventions - often for a good reason. But some people don't and we should be aware that we don't have to, either.

As authors we do not read for just enjoyment but also to learn. We learn from those who succeeded and failed before us. William Goldman and Daniel Handler have succeeded and met with much acclaim for their work and they did it, in part, by breaking with convention. Whether or not we walk a similarly unconventional path, we can learn from what they did and we should be aware that rules can be broken.

Jive to your own groove, kids, and keep writing.

*Not really annual.

Soap Box:Don't Feed The Trolls

Fair warning, this post is me doing a bit of soap boxing and some thinking out loud. If you're here for writing type stuff, go on and skip this one and I'll see you next time.

I don't like the word troll. Specifically, the way we use the term for 'internet trolls.'

I've been on this here internets for a long time now and, as the man said, "I've seen shit that will turn you white."

Way back when, around the time the term "troll" started being used, a troll was a kind of prankster. They were the people who spent their internet time dicking with others on whatever forum they happened to be a part of. To call them "devil's advocate" is too be far too generous, but they got their jollies winding people up and fanning the flames of controversy. A troll would drop into a conversation, leave a short inflamatory comment about something, and duck out again.

If I had gone onto a Lord of The Rings fan forum in 2001 and said "This movie is basically a rip off of the Dungeons and Dragons movie that came out last year." and then sat back and watched the fans go nuts trying to prove me wrong and give me an enraged historical lesson on Lord of The Rings, we'd call me a troll.

There's an old joke on 4chan known as "The day /b/ went too far." Google this at your own peril. You'll probably be offended. But the idea is that one person posts a specific picture and asks if anybody has seen it. Everybody who is in on the joke responds with messages like "Too soon, OP." and "Oh god, why did you have to remind me?" and everybody who hasn't been around starts asking what the picture is and why everybody is so upset and nobody tells them exactly why, but keeps on making a fuss about how heart broken they are. It's all done to mess with the newbies.

This is trolling. You could call it juvinile, you could call it a lame way to get your kicks. You can criticise it in all kinds of ways but what you could not call it is damaging or illegal.

Somewhere along the way, the word has changed. I'm tempted to blame news media. The word got picked up by some reporter who didn't understand it but used it anyway. It could also be just plain old evolution of language. How it happened doesn't matter.

But I don't like it.

Because lately there has been a lot of talk about trolls, especially in regards to things like Gamers Gate and similar internet controversy. And now, when we hear reports of people getting threatened with rape and murder, when people's home addresses are shared online against their will, when private data and photographs are hacked and spread around, when people are verbally abused and stalked online or campaigns of hate and character assassination are launched against them, we call it trolling. These are internet trolls.

I can think of some better terms. Scum of the earth, assholes and criminals all come to mind.

Make no mistake, many of these things we call "trolling" are actual crimes. If you did this shit offline, you would be arrested.

I can see no reason why troll should become a euphemism. I see no reason why we shouldn't call a stalker a stalker or why the asshole in the YouTube comments is described as "trolling" when what he is doing is "threatening to break into your house and violently rape you." If you said this to somebody in a bar or on the street, nobody would call you a troll, they'd just call the police.

I don't like the way we use the word troll. It's not because I am resistant to the way language changes out of principal and not because trolling used to be something so harmless. It's because when we call this "trolling" we are hiding what it really is and making it sound a lot less damaging than it really is. These kinds of serious and aggressive actions don't need euphemisms, they need stopping.

Failure Is A Dead End

I'm going to keep talking about success and failure in narrative because it's an important and broad topic and we should all be aware of it.

Last time we spoke I said that success should come with conditions and unconditional successes are boring and should not be common for your protagonist. I'm going to expand on this a little and we'll do that by talking about doors.

A locked door is a basic catch all obstacle for narratives. The protagonist wants to go through the door but the door is locked. The door might not be a door, it might be a wide chasm, a foe he has to fight, a guardsman to sneak by, a shape shifting fox woman he must seduce, a wall he much climb, etc. etc. The point is, when I say "locked door" I'm using it as a kind of stand in for any obstacle which your protagonist must do something to in order to get past it to his or her goal.

A Locked Door.

Broadly speaking, there are four results that can come from trying to go through the locked door. I'm going to borrow RPG terminology again because it's where my brain is lately. Your protagonist can have a...

Critical Success (They get through the door.)
Conditional Success (They get through the door but with a consequence.)
Failure (They do not get through the door.)
Critical Failure (They do not get through the door and something bad happens.)

We've covered why Critical Success is dull and Conditional Success is preferable. So now we'll cover Failure and Critical Failure.

I may have said that writing your protagonist to fail instead of succeed is generally preferable as it does a better job of building tension and drama and excitement and all that good stuff. This is true. But you can write yourself into a trap very easily in doing this so be careful.

Failure is, or can easily be, a dead end. Your protagonist tries to break through the Locked Door and his attempts end in Failure. Now the protagonist is in front of the Locked Door and what he wants is on the other side and he... What? He tries again? He gives up and goes home? More than likely he walks off and finds another Locked Door to go through to reach his objective.

We have a couple of problems immediately with these options. If he can just try again or find another route, then your scene runs the risk of being pointless. It has become padding. If you took this scene out and started with his second attempt to overcome the Locked Door (or his attempt at a different Locked Door) and that's where he succeeds, then you've lost nothing except words and time. It hasn't impacted the plot.

If you can excise a scene from your book and it doesn't change the plot in any way, then maybe that scene shouldn't be there anyway. Judge for yourself. Give scenes purpose.

So Failure at the Locked Door creates problems with your narrative. It can mean pointless scenes and it can mean narrative dead ends (more on this later.)

So instead, consider a Critical Failure. Your protagonist tries to break through the Locked Door. Your protagonist not only fails, but he alerts all the Locked Door's friends of what he's doing and they start gunning for him. Or he fails to break through the Locked Door and knocks himself unconcious, letting the Locked Door take him prisoner. Maybe the Locked Door knew he was coming all along and prepared a trap to drop the failing protagonist into a vat of toxic waste.

What all these results have in common is that they create new scenes out of the protagonist's failure. They up the tension and up the ante and make things happen and move us from one event into another natural event. No dead ends here.

Before we finish I'd like to just elaborate on this idea of a "dead end."

When I say dead end, I'm talking about a scene that stops the narrative flow and forces your protagonist to start again and build up more momentum. A story shouldn't always be moving at 100km/h but it should always be moving. Anything that grinds the flow of scenes to a halt and stall your plot is probably a bad thing.

You might be thinking of another kind of dead end, however. The kind of dead end that impacts you the writer. You say in Chapter 1 "The only way to get the McGuffin is to go through Locked Door 1. There are no other Locked Doors." And then in Chapter 2 the protagonist gets to Locked Door 1 and tries to go through and he fails - because Carl said failures are better - and now you don't know what to do because there's nothing else your protagonist can do to. We call this "writing into a corner." It's something I hear mentioned from time to time and don't worry because it's really easy to fix.

Delete the corner. Just go back, highlight that corner and delete it. Change things up and try again. Or even easier still is if any kind of failure is going to write you into a corner, give the protagonist a break and offer him a Conditional Success. Let him get the McGuffin from behind Locked Door 1 - but in doing so he breaks his leg and then in the next chapter that broken leg means fails to stop the antagonist from stealing his McGuffin.

Writing yourself into a corner sucks and we all do it from time to time, but all it takes is a little work to get out of it. No sweat. Corners are not the same as dead ends. They're more like creative road bumps or caltrops that you drop in front of yourself like a buffoon.

Okay, so, what did we learn today class? No dead ends! Failure is an option but it might be a sucky one so avoid it where you can.

A Great Success With Terms and Conditions

Just a short one today because I accidentally stabbed my finger this morning and now typing is both difficult and painful. If I'm going to suffer, I'd rather suffer for a project and not the blog.

A belated wish for a Happy Easter for anybody who is into that kind of thing.

Easter is a long weekend here in Sydney, Australia. The Friday and the Monday are public holidays, which means four days of weekend. Somebody, many years ago, had the bright idea to use this weekend for a Tabletop Gaming Convention. I attend every year and, more often than not, I run RPGs over the weekend as my bit to help out the community. This year I ran Deadlands, if you're interested. Much for was had.

But a good friend of mine ran a game called Dungeon World. Dungeon World is a low crunch rule system that reminds me a lot of first edition Dungeons & Dragons, only with a lot less suck. But there's a very interesting rule in Dungeon World that I've often thought should be included in RPGs but, to my knowledge, hasn't been.

And that is, conditional success.

Now it's not uncommon for RPGs to have varying degrees of success. Most games have some kind of critical success mechanic in which a good roll is a success and a super good roll is a faster, better, cleaner success with a happy ending. That's normal. That's standard. Likewise there's fails and critical fails.

But Dungeon World has a conditional success, in which you succeed on your action at a price. That price might be you take a little bit of damage, you draw unwanted attention to yourself. You succeed in picking the lock but not before the patrolling guard gets back and sees you. In my experience, this is unique to Dungeon World.*

And it works well. But of course it works well. It works well in a tabletop RPG for the same reason it works well in, say, a book. A straight up success is boring. Too many successes is really boring. Failure creates tension, creates drama, creates story. The protagonist succeeding at something without consequence should be the least common kind of resolution to problems in a story you're telling. And when I say "without consequence" I mean consequences that matter after the fact. A chase scene in which your protagonist must outrun a killer cyborg armed with a chain hammer (part chainsaw, part war hammer) is tense and exciting, but if your hero gets away from the cyborg and crosses the border into Mexico where no cyborg may follow, then the drama only lasts until the end of that scene. If your hero gets across the border but drops his teddy bear, without which he can not sleep at night, then you've created a lasting consequence and created drama that lasts until he gets the bear back. You've also given yourself more avenues for story.

Failure is harder in a narrative game. I've mentioned this problem in regards to video games before, but it must be said about tabletop RPGs, too. Failure does not feel good. Players don't want to keep failing. We're trained to see failure as bad and success as good. When a protagonist in a book we are reading fails, it pushes us to the edge of our seat and makes us bite our nails and drives us to keep reading, but it is not as though we failed. We're just spectators. But in a game, where we are not spectators, we want to succeed and feel awesome.

And I don't begrudge anybody wanting to feel good, it's just that it limits how we can tell stories. That's not so good.

Dungeon World has found a way around this by adding a very simple mechanic that replicates the way we write stories for books and movies. By adding a fifth option to the failure/success spectrum, it opens up new opportunities for excitement and conflict in the game. Dungeon World even goes so far as to making this the most likely version of success you get. It makes sense and more designers should use such a mechanic.

And so in the way that the designers of Dungeon World took from literary theory to improve their game, so can we use Dungeon World as a reminder to ourselves of how we can write better.** So I encourage you to make note here and do as Dungeon World do. Failure for your heroes is always best, but when failure is not an option, make them suffer for it, give your protagonists consequences to go with their victory. Give all triumphs conditions. Your readers will thank you for it.


*Various FATE systems make it more or less implicit that you can do this, but only as a thing that is encouraged and not as a core part of the mechanic.
** Role playing and RPGs very rarely serve as a good source of writing lessons. Role playing and writing are not the same thing and should not be mistaken for the same thing. Write to practice writing. Don't role play to practice writing.

Quoth the Sharehouse of Darkness

So over the last couple of months I have been running a World of Darkness game. I've called this short lived campaign of mine, "The Sharehouse of Darkness." The set up is a simple one, a variety of supernatural monsters (A changeling, a mage, a werewolf and a promethan) share a house in the quiet northern suburbs of Sydney, Australia. They are young, hip, university students who get up to a variety of shenanagins in an episodic fashion. It's "Being Human" meets "The Young Ones." It's a World of Darkness sit-com.

Because I find things like the "Out of Context D&D Quotes" tumblr to be hilarious, I'm going to share some finer moments of Sharehouse of Darkness.

The players in this comedy of errors are...

Dom: A werewolf a gym junkie. He is currently on parole for unspecified crimes. He is doing his undergraduate degree in "Bro Science." He lives in the garage because it's the only room that can fit all his exercise equipment and mirrors.

Marian: The resident mage, Marian considers the arcane secrets of the universe to be his life's second calling. First and foremost he is an artist, a film maker and a visionary. At least that's what he says. He uses a variety of mind magic to control his unwitting actors and forces magic to do the special effects.

Nicolas Tesla: A chap from the 1920s and a wizz when it comes to electricity, Nicolas Tesla has spent the last few decades in the world of the fae. The changeling has since escaped and is living off the interest his family money earned while he was away. Nicolas has a goblin servent named Geofferson, a door that opens to London and lives in the linen closet. He is English and may or may not be the real historical Nikola Tesla.

John: John is just the happiest and good spirited Promethean you will ever meet. He has a mild addiction to electricity but that never gets him down. John believes that the highest virtue in the world is charity and frequently donates his and other people's worldly belongings to a good cause.

And now, for your entertainment and mine, the out of context quotes. Attributions are given where I've bothered to write them down.

"I ate a shoe this morning." - Dom

"We could just go kill things." - Marian

"I kind of need to watch these guys sleep."

"Wait, do any of us have brains?"

"Tasers are my drug!" - John

"This is going to be weird. Come with me into the bedroom." - Dom

"The Saucy Gibbon - where you get your rump steak nice and saucy."

"We are not stripping guys!"

"Dead people don't need clothing."

"Oh yeah, that's bad. We just killed three people."

"I'm not that kind of Mage!" / "You are tonight."

More things topical (maybe) next time!