Storytelling

I'm battling with my recurring problem of insomnia so I thought I'd take some time to talk about a story I am currently involved in writing.

I am in the middle of writing an open ended story. That’s the polite and less nerdy way to say that I’m preparing to run my first ever D&D game.

(Waits for the raucous laughter to die down)

I know. There isn’t a whole lot more nerdy than Dungeons and Dragons, but you know what? It’s astoundingly fun. Once you learn the rules and how to make a character, you get to pretend to embark on fantastical adventures with your friends. In other words, it is an interactive (and more detailed) “Choose Your Own Adventure” book read aloud to you.

I know it sounds silly, but it gives me a chance to explore some of the creative and unique story ideas that I’ve played with recently.

A friend and I started a simple D&D story a while back in which we both (from the real world) were sucked into a world known as Ravenloft. Since I doubt many of my readers know much about D&D worlds, allow me to indulge you in it for just a moment. If nothing else, it will give you more to laugh about later.

Ravenloft is a world full of gothic horror. Rather than the traditional Dungeons and Dragons worlds where there are wizards, orcs, and dragons running around, the world is much more like a simple medieval Earth. What monstrosities there are in this pretend world are very gothic sounding nightmares like vampires, were-beasts, and occasional shambling undead. If you can picture a creepy graveyard lit only by the light of the moon, imagine a wolf howling in the distance while the wind tears through your ragged clothes, or see the pitted and aged stone of a gargoyle atop a crypt, you have successfully imagined what might be a scene from the Ravenloft world.

As in most gothic horror stories (especially those of Victorian England) in Ravenloft, the best laid plans almost always go astray. Those who become too prideful will see their downfall and those who are weak will stay that way. It is a relentlessly depressing outlook, and one for which I believe I am well suited. Ravenloft is circled by a large bank of fog, and few can pass through it. Those who try will usually find themselves returned to Ravenloft in another place, and some never make it out at all. The world has no particular gods or demons, but instead is ruled by a nebulous group of entities known only as the Dark Powers. Little is known of the Dark Powers (meaning that the person writing the story as the players make decisions can make them into anything that he wishes them to be to suit his storytelling).

My friend set the stage for the last game. After being sucked into the Ravenloft world, we found ourselves in an area ruled by an altruistic seeming group of men who seemed to be much like doctors. They could heal people of most any ailment or injury, but every time they tried to do so, something else would go wrong. If your arm got crushed in a mine, they could amputate it and give you a new one, but it might periodically be uncontrollable (i.e., perhaps you drop your sword quite a bit, or perhaps you accidentally punch random passersby). If you had a head injury, they might be able to rebuild your face, but in doing so damage your brain such that you become nearly catatonic. To make the story quite gothic, the doctors did not seem to care about the terrible side effects of the people on whom they operated, and in many cases did so without the person’s consent (even in the case of my character, over my specific wish to the contrary). Instead, they were driven by a need for knowledge and information and a desire to control the world (a la Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Moreau from horror books).

The story ended with the two of us fleeing from this world along a safe path we’d discovered through the mists.

I am about to rewrite the ending to that story with my game. The scenario into which I am about to drop my friend is as follows:

On the night in which we were to have escaped Ravenloft through the mists, something strange happened. We both entered the mists, but only he emerged on the other side in our world. For some reason, I had not made it through with him. After some strange goings-on occur on Earth, my friend finds himself transported back into Ravenloft. He finds himself in a luxuriant fortress atop a high mountain. Guards escort him through an enormous library to a back study where he comes face to face with a terrible sight. An evil-looking nightmare of fangs, claws, shredded bat-wings, leathery skin, and lizard eyes confronts him. That creature is me.

While my friend has been away only a short amount of time from Ravenloft, time passes inside differently than it does outside. When he fled into the mists that night long ago, I fled with him. He made it out, but I did not. I found myself back in Ravenloft. Time and time again, I tried to cross, and each time when I left the mists I found that I was still not home. During my lifetime in Ravenloft, I mastered many arcane arts from dark teachers, thinking that they might give me a way to breach the mists. As an old man, I stumbled across both a terrible secret and a possible way to achieve my salvation from the nightmare world of Ravenloft.

The supernatural Dark Powers that govern the world are indeed gods, and in my studies I have unraveled a truth that is rich with possibilities. When the gods created the world, they imparted small bits of their own divinity into each sentient creature that they created. Upon that creature’s death, the spark of divinity (carrying with it the knowledge and memories that the creature attained in life) returns to the god from which it came. The god then becomes more powerful, and can impart anew the small spark of the god’s divinity.

This truth opened the doors of possibility to me and I constructed a fabulous machine which can manipulate the souls of sentient beings. My machine allows me to siphon the souls (the sparks of divinity) out of sentient beings and insert them into new bodies. In this way, I siphoned my own soul out of my aged body and inserted it into the body of a younger person. Immortality (of a sort) was now mine for the taking.

By experimentation, I soon realized that a body could hold more than a single spark of divinity. What’s more, a being with more sparks of divinity seemed capable of performing feats that would be difficult for normal people to accomplish, as a result of the greater amount of godhood contained within. In a flash, I realized what I must do to overcome the Dark Powers’ grip over Ravenloft, and to enable me to return to my home.

I must become a god.

Over time (and I have an infinite amount of it, since I can always move my consciousness to a new host body when my old one becomes old or injured), I accumulated more and more souls and became a demi-god in my own right. I rule over a large kingdom which allows me to gather more and more souls, each one drawing me nearer to my goal. In return for a life of unparalleled luxury and peace (a state they know the benefit of since they are reminded of the terrors that lurk, ever-present, outside the wall I have erected around my kingdom), some number of them must surrender their lives to me. Not only do they lose their souls in my quest for power, but they come to me willingly and with happiness to serve.

This is where my friend comes in. 800 years have passed since he first walked out of the Ravenloft world, and I have had near 800 years in which to amass within myself a great deal of divine power. Unfortunately, I am discovering that I do not simply absorb the souls of those whom are added to me, but I must control them through the force of my will. While it was easy for me to control them initially, the more of them I have added to myself, the shakier and shakier is my control over them. The souls of the many thousands of others contained within me are fighting a war for their freedom, and that war takes its toll on my physical body by aging me quickly, tearing me with unseen weapons, bruising me from unseen punches, and breaking bones with unseen blows. As my body rapidly decays under the weight of my constant injury, to simply continue to exist I must find a new body in which to place myself (thus absorbing yet another soul into the vast multitude within me, and making my control over them even slimmer).

This is where my friend finds me, and after this scenario is set, he must write the rest of the story by making decisions.

It's my first try at gothic horror, but I like the idea of a main character who stumbles upon a clever way to gain power, pursues it, and who is then trapped in a web of his own cleverness with no way out but to "stay the course" even though he can see that it now leads to his ultimate destruction. Pretty neat, huh?

I think I was deleted

Sometimes I think that others have said what I wanted to say far better than I ever could myself. While the storyline is not profoundly applicable to any of my current life situations, a single piece of the story sums up an emotion I am feeling quite strongly right now.

I must be stoic, so that others may grieve

It has only been a day, but it feels like a lifetime.

There are periods in your life when everything seems to go downhill… periods when the world seems to contain an awful lot of pain and ugliness just beneath its shining and glittering surface. It is on days like these when I tend to try to escape into a world of storytelling.

I am a storyteller by nature, and once, nearly by profession. It is often difficult to confront the dark terrors that I see around me, but even when people seem to abandon me, I try to find some silver lining to hold onto.

Yesterday, that silver lining was very difficult to find.

I went to Kansas City to visit my uncle. I hadn’t seen him in perhaps 4 months or so, but in the intervening time, he has aged more than 20 years. The man I remember as a vibrant and captivating man just barely past his middle age was not the man I saw in the hospice bed at my uncle’s house. This new man was almost a stranger. He weighed less than half of what my uncle weighed, and his loose skin hung off of his bones like so much old clothing. The man I remember as fiercely independent had been replaced by a man who could not roll over in his own bed without the aid of another, and who much use a baby monitor to summon relatives into his room to hold him up over his commode. The fire that once danced in his eyes and the passion in his voice when the two of us sparred over American educational policy had been covered over with a dullness weariness so palpable that I – the long-winded orator – was rendered speechless.

I don’t expect him to last for more than another week or so.
I got to talk to him for a little while, but his strength is rapidly fading. He can only handle talking to people for a few minutes (10 minutes at the most) before he becomes too tired to do anything else and falls asleep. The doctors said that he doesn’t seem to be in any pain, but simply that his body is shutting down as toxins build up in his body.

I can’t believe that he’s going to be gone. I just don’t feel prepared to deal with a loss like this. In times of crisis, I’ve always been the cool-headed one. I have an uncanny (and probably unhealthy) ability to lay aside the part of me that feels so that the part of me that thinks and does things can take over. When the girlfriend of my father’s boarder tried to commit suicide in my parents’ house, I was the one that went into action mode, called 911, directed the trucks to the house, and cleared a path from the front door through the living room so that they could stretcher her out. When my brother got married, I didn’t participate in the joining of two people I care about into their lives of happiness so much as I took care of the details allowing them to enjoy their day.

The only problem is that by being the cool head when other people are in crisis, I don’t have time to deal with my own well-being. The more I care about what’s going on, though, the harder and harder it is for me to divorce myself from the part of me that can do things under pressure when other people break down.
I’m just not sure I am going to be able to bear that burden this time. It’s too much weight for me to carry at once, and I’m afraid of what will happen if I try. I’m just not sure what other option is left for me.