Current and recent reading (June 2022)

I've been suffering from blogger's block for the past few months. To try and break it, I figured I'd go over some books I've read recently, or am in the process of reading:

• The World of Fanzines - A Special Form of Communication, by Fredric Wertham, most famous for his Seduction of the Innocent, which lead to the Comics Code, and made him in many ways an enemy of comics, weird fiction, and the like. And yet, he became a big fan of fanzines as a medium, and writes about them insightfully and appreciatively, even when they satirize him. Cites from a variety of sources, and dedicates the first half of the book to reproductions of fanzine art.
• Sailing - an Informal Primer, by Richard Ulian, is an acquisition from back when I gathered up quite a few books about maritime subjects, preparing for it being a bigger focus of my Dungeons & Dragons campaign. I'm glad I got this one - it helps me make sense of description of sailing in fiction, and gives some ideas of the kinds of problems you might run into. Possible seeds for challenges and hazards in games that are focused there.
• The Study of Folklore, edited by Alan Dundes - this collection is a treasure trove of classics in the field. It's grouped by subject, and is wide-ranging - which is good, because folklore is very wide-ranging itself.
• Contested Culture - The Image, the Voice, and the Law, by Jane M. Gaines - a difficult read, encompassing two fields I'm not very acquainted with: legal and culture studies. But I'm enjoying my slog through it. This critical look at copyright law and how it relates to the creation of culture, and who gets to be termed a creator thereof, is a nice complement to all my reading about folklore.
• Subterranea - Journey into the Depths of the Earth’s Most Extraordinary Underground Spaces, by Chris Fitch - each one of the vivid studies in this book could inspire a dungeon delve or other underground adventure, from terrifying natural phenomena that either themselves or taken to a slightly larger extreme could become a significant adventuring challenge, to depictions of human habitation below the surface.
• The Complete Wargames Handbook, by James F. Dunnigan - I am starting to feel that I could at least get something out of a hex-and-chit wargame. Also interesting to get some perspective on how an out-and-out board wargamer saw role-playing games in a book published in 1980. A third edition is available online (pdf), although I'm reading a copy of the first edition.
• Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Keeper's Rulebook - the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide was a huge disappointment when it came to helping me do my work as a dungeon master. This, so far, seems to be much better at providing guidance as to how to actually run a game of CoC, although I haven't done this myself yet.
• Apocalypse World 2nd Edition - this edition is supposedly less edgy than the first one. It still has a bit of that left left, but having persevered in reading through a few chapters, I'm already seeing why it's become a classic, as well as a template for a whole genre of RPGs.
• Welcome to Mars - Politics, Pop Culture, and Weird Science in 1950s America, by Ken Hollings - a book based on a limited radio series (found here; out of order, unfortunately). Made me revisit the start of the Atomic Age, and realize how fascinating it is, in itself, in its effects on our culture and society, and in its fictional and gaming potential. Also full of horror stories resulting from Operation Paperclip, MK-ULTRA, and many human experiments.
• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, by Erving Goffman - I went all in on Goffman after encountering his frame analysis in Gary Alan Fine's Shared Fantasy, and reading this is already rewarding.
• Night's Black Agents, by Fritz Leiber - More well-known for his Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, this shows Leiber as a very good modern weird/horror fiction writer, as well. An easily available, Lovecraftian sample is The Dreams of Albert Moreland, originally published in a now scanned fanzine (The Acolyte 10, pdf).
• Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Sep/Oct 2020 - I used to manage to keep up with Analog so that I would finish one before the other came around. Towards the middle of 2020, as I started accumulating RPG and other books, this fell by the wayside. I was also not very happy with the early 2020 issues, which made it easier to decide to cancel. I still have a backlog, and I finally finished this one. Mixed bag. Two stories that should express the gamut of the magazine pretty well are available from the publisher online: The Chrysalis Pool by Sean McMullen (pdf) is a weird tale with Arthur Machen vibes, while The Writhing Tentacles of History by Jay Werkheiser (pdf) is a more typical hard science fiction story, with animalistic aliens that would make fine inspiration for your next science fiction or fantasy game.

TTRPGs as folklore

Last year, I wrote two posts reframing the role-playing game system as a theory - as a way of comparing subsequent play sessions. The first introduced the idea, while the second responded to criticism, and developed the framework a bit further. In this post, I'd like to take a lateral step, and incorporate my recent delving into folklore to examine play sessions in aggregate as a folk activity. I'll start by motivating this viewpoint.

Imagine the following: a small group of people, usually 3 to 6, gather together on a regular basis, somewhere between every week to a few times a month. They sit down at a table. They talk, read, write, roll dice, move figurines around, sketch for each other. They imagine a world together, and fictional characters living and interacting within it. There are rules for how this is done. Often, one of the participants is tasked with describing the world and most of the characters within it, while each of the others describes what an individual character attempts to do there, although that's not required. Whether or not a character succeeds or fails in what its player wants it to do is determined by these rules, with or without the use of dice, potentially combined with numbers and figures, whose interpretation the participants agree upon. After each session, and especially as sessions accumulate, the participants build up a set of experiences, and a collective story about those experiences, that they helped create, and for which they are, if not the only audience, then the most important one.

This is a folk activity. Folklore is notoriously hard to define, but it usually requires a set group, with creative practices that are performed by members of that group for members of that same group. Most commonly people think of folktales, but the items of folklore can be dances, pieces of pottery, jokes, barns, parables, as well as, importantly, storytelling and games. In addition, the practices are passed on traditionally, informally, rather than taught through formalized training.

And, indeed, despite repeated attempts, through the use of the tools of pedagogy, the creation of starter sets, sometimes even professional associations and after-school activities for children and young adults, I think that the vast majority of tabletop role-playing is learned and conducted through this kind of traditional, informal process. In particular, most play groups, or tables, in which one or more campaigns are played, are formed this way.

I'd go further and say that the TTRPG started as a folk activity, bridging and combining the folk activities of science fiction and fantasy fan communities on the one hand, and miniature wargamers on the other, to form a new folk genre. This was further developed by informal communities, who communicated through play and through the zine and APA scene. Due to his focus on contemporary and often informal self-documentation by participants, Jon Peterson's Playing at the World, which covers the former, and The Elusive Shift, which covers the latter, provide important material for the TTRPG folklorist. This despite giving short shrift to folk history in the sense of accepting people's recollections today of what they thought and did in the past.

Even Peterson's more business-minded The Game Wizards has something to offer. Coupled with the interviews in the indie documentary Secrets of Blackmoor, it sheds a better light on Dave Arneson's seemingly self-defeating attempt to lay claim to a portion of Dungeons & Dragons, while simultaneously arguing against the very publishable and formalizable aspects of the product that are actually respected by modern American intellectual property law. I think that he was trying to capture, using legal tools not up to the task, the fact that his practice of running Blackmoor as an informal creative process, inherently hard to document, and therefore market as a product, was foundational to the subsequently written product, D&D, as mostly formalized by Gary Gygax and other writers and designers at TSR. 

I have to wonder what a folklorist's version of The First Fantasy Campaign would look like. Not a collection of Arneson's notes, but a combination of transcripts of sessions, interviews with participants, perhaps records and insights from participation. Something that would do for Blackmoor what Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles did for Appalachian ballads.

We do know that Blackmoor and the Braunstein games that immediately precede it had enough informal cachet that they proliferated to other participants in person, as a folk activity, to the point where others were independently creating formalizations before D&D started spreading. Unfortunately, at the time, and perhaps to this day, the only form of widespread legitimacy a gaming practice like this could have was through a ruleset.

There's a conversation to be had of how the very attempt at reproduction, and the expansion in audience it entails, might change the activity, as well as the relationship between reproduction and commercialization - I hope to return to that in a future post.

Until then, I would suggest that this point of view is already illuminating about the hobby, both its history and its contemporary practice.

We no longer live in a pre-COVID19 world

I have tried keeping politics and current events away from this blog, but since Twitter is no longer an outlet for me, I find myself wanting to express certain things here.

Let's start with a film. Late December I watched a political thriller, The Parallax View, starring Warren Beatty. I strongly recommend it, although the reason I watched it then was that it was leaving Amazon Prime, so you'll have to find it elsewhere.

I won't spoil the film for you, but I have been repeating one episode in it to people when I try to explain my exasperation at the discourse about COVID19 and "going back to normal". In the film, Beatty's character chases someone onto an airplane. He runs from a cab, through the terminal, up the stairs, into the airplane, and only then, after takeoff, does a flight attendant come over to ask him for his name and whether he'd be doing a round-trip or taking them one way. See, back then you didn't need to have pre-paid for a ticket, checked your luggage with your ticket, gone through security, then have your boarding pass checked before you were let on a plane. Planes were a lot more like buses.

Now imagine the following pitch for a new airport design: once we're done with terrorism and airborne smuggling, surely we'll go back to those good old days as expressed in the film above, so let's use the latest in soundproofing technology to allow the gates to be a dozen feet away from departure drop-off, so people can very easily get on the plane. TSA is just a temporary measure, right? Airliner hijackings are a thing of the past, right? We'll go back to normal, and then we can just make things so much smoother.

This may sound ridiculous, but that's exactly how policymakers and business leaders sound when they discuss COVID19. It's all about "going back to normal", "getting people back in the office", dozens of op eds concern trolling about the ills of working from home, the psychological effect of physical separation of children from their classmates - all potentially legitimate concerns, but not comparable to the horrors of suffering from a serious disease or watching classmates, siblings, parents, colleagues, teachers, suffer or perish.

We can't just pretend things are going back to normal. Nothing says that we won't still be dealing with it five years from now. And we'll still only have solutions designed for a world that pretends that this plague doesn't exist.

Imagine a different path. Imagine if, six months into the pandemic, world and local leaders had actually sat down and thought how a functioning society could work while taking this disease into account. We have all these tools that allow us to work and study remotely. We have the constraints that are very acute for parents with children. What could we do with this? Maybe the government could incentivize households to pair up so that work and childcare can be shared. Maybe the office buildings which will no longer consistently hold in-person businesses can instead be used to significantly reduce class counts to make in-person schooling actually safe. Maybe some effort could've gone into modernizing ventilation systems and adding air filtering to classrooms and businesses, and training more healthcare workers to deal with expected surges. Maybe there are better solutions for these and other problems that have come up that I can't even imagine, because I'm a software engineer and RPG crank whose highest academic training was in theoretical physics. But we'll never get there if we keep pretending that this is just a temporary speedbump.

We are beginning Year 3 of the Plague. Let's not pretend it's going to just dissipate. It'll even be economically more sensible long-term to actually adapt instead of constantly pushing off the inevitable by insisting on normalcy and then disrupting this normalcy as case counts make it untenable again.

2021 in review - folklore

Another thing I spent quite a bit of time on in 2021 was folklore. It started with an exasperation at repeatedly running into Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey as a blueprint for all compelling stories - and how this affects writing and the expectations from role-playing game plots - but became something more.

I started with Stith Thompson's classic, The Folktale. It is an extensive study of folktales from around the world, using what's now called the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index of folktales, and the Thompson motif index of folk literature, including descriptions of the folktales and their variations, as well as the methodology of collecting and cataloguing them. While a bit outdated, and occasionally offensive - to give an example, it separates the world into "civilized" and "primitive" cultures, and when presenting folktale collection methodologies, has no problem having members of the former do their own collecting, while the latter's work is to be collected by more civilized folklorists working with local agents - it made it clear that there are a variety of story types, most of which have nothing resembling a hero's journey, that have been so engaging to various cultures, that they have been continually reproduced and adapted, often without the use of mechanical reproduction or even writing. It also presented evidence of an extent of inter-cultural permeability that isn't often taken into consideration when people discuss culture. It was also interesting to read the various categories of supernatural elements that appear in folktales, and that now live in modern fantasy in a much more restricted manner, due to their appearance in Dungeons & Dragons and in Disney movies. Jon Peterson's treatment of the medieval fantasy genre in his Playing at the World goes into the former in detail. The latter you can reflect on when you consider what first comes to mind when you hear of Snow White or The Little Mermaid.

Having finished with Thompson for now, I went on to read Barre Toelken's The Dynamics of Folklore, which tries to provide a starting point for analyzing folk life and folk creation as something living, as opposed to a pervasive attitude of relegating it to a less educated past. Toelken makes it quite clear that folklore is happening all the time, and that the actual performance of the piece of folklore is paramount - which, to me, connects very closely to how I'm starting to view role-playing games, an activity whose focus is in its performance to and for its participants, rather than something that should be compared to fiction, or cinema, or other forms of culture that involve separate stages of generation, reproduction, and consumption. There's something bigger to discuss here about the relation of canon to fan works and vice versa, and the attempts to control folklore, a creative, autonomous process, when it develops around reproducible media, with all the intellectual property consequences that entails. I will hopefully find more learned studies of this topic.

In Dynamics, Toelken pointed several times to the works of Edward T. Hall, specifically to his The Hidden Dimension, where he introduced the concept of proxemics, the study of personal and cultural perceptions of space. I took a detour to read that work, which is why I will probably only be done with Dynamics next year. While it is also a bit outdated, and has an unfortunate tendency to present animal models for human behavior uncritically, as well as to indulge in cultural stereotyping, the very fact that human perception of space is multi-sensory, can be broken up into reasonable ranges, and that people's comfort and interest in what happens when thus separated from each other can depend on their cultural context, context, as well as personal preference, was pretty insightful. Specifically, for tabletop role-playing games, this is something I will be keeping in mind as I am trying to communicate position and its emotional effect, and will contribute to my thoughts about combat systems, exploration, and other spatially-significant aspects of an imagined world. I have some more reading material in that direction - here's hoping it can bear fruit sometime next year.

2021 in review - role-playing games

We're getting towards the end of 2021, so it's a good time for me to look back on this year, also the first full year of my blog. Since role-playing games have always been my focus, this post is dedicated to them. I only intend to mention games I have played - reading is all well and good, actual plays can be useful, but the play's the thing.

After winding down my own first role-playing campaign, I decided that I will no longer run Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. Instead, I've continued to learn and play other games, although remain a player in a 5E campaign with my existing local group.

After attempting to playtest it a bit last year, this year is when I had the most experience in Blades in the Dark. You can find an index to the posts I wrote about my experience here. To summarize: very interesting, intense experience, but lacking in constraints in places, and would require me to do a bit of thinking and some constraining of my own before I ran it again. Mostly good as my first real attempt to run a modern fiction-first game. I should try and see how it runs as a player, too. Maybe next year.

I also ran a Sorcerer one-shot. I still struggle to summarize the experience - I think at this point I just feel that it was premature as it stood - but thinking about it, combined with the seasonal connection to my main inspiration for the scenario, A Night in the Lonesome October, led me to my most prolific project of this year, constituting the majority of my posts: Through Sorcerer's Eyes. In some ways it connects to my speculation about system as theory, except applied to literature rather than role-playing.

In terms of games played, this year was a success. I'm surprised that I didn't write a post about Session Zero Online, a convention centered in Manila, the Philippines. In my defense, it was very intense, and came along just as I was starting a new job. I played three games there: a playtest for Basheer Ghouse's upcoming Ahadi, a narrative role-playing wargame focusing on high-ranking officers in the Mughal Empire, which I am really looking forward to seeing in a more complete stage, as even this early draft was delightful; Rajit Kalita's Ramayana Run (now published as Ramayana Tales: Search for the Sanjivni), a 5E adventure and supplement set in the world of the Indian epic, the Ramayana - fascinating, but the experience clarified to me just how much 5E's character sheet game overshadows any attempts at doing something different with the system; and Curious Chimeras` Mere Gods, a contemplative narrative game inspired by traditional Southeast Asian cultures, about people returning to their home-town after a long absence, which I also thoroughly enjoyed.

After this, I helped playtest Bounty Hunter TTRPG, which I had backed on Kickstarter. It was my first experience with a diceless TTRPG - this, in turn, led me to the Amber Diceless Role-Playing Game-focused community, with which I participated in TirCon 2021. There I played two games using ADRPG itself, as well as the award winning Alice Is Missing, which is unfortunately not for me, and an ADRPG-Everway concoction called Amberway, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Other games I played were Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition, RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, Troika!, MÖRK BORG, and Ultraviolet Grasslands (now situated as part of the Vastlands).

Aside from the platforms provided by the conventions I mentioned, I want to thank the CoC-focused Pinkerton One-Shots Agency Discord, especially for allowing me to run my Blades and Sorcerer games, as well as The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, a blog and podcast that I support on Patreon, which is also focused on CoC, but discusses horror and general gaming, and in whose Discord I have played and expect to play many games.

Short social media update

You may or may not have noticed that I've not posted on Twitter since last Friday, December 17. The reason is that I have been locked out, pending an appeal of their demand that I remove a tweet in which I implied that the US Constitution is a suicide pact. They claim that this constitutes promotion of suicide or self-harm, which is against their rules. I say "they claim", but the tweet was flagged mere minutes after it was posted, and my original appeal was rejected moments after I raised it, so I'm not sure whether any human was meaningfully involved in the decision. This has given me some time to reflect on my social media use.

Early this year I raised concerns about using platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc, to hold thoughts and conversations about RPGs, or any topic, really, although I was being much less self-serving there. I figured that if I keep my long-form thoughts here, on this blog, which I am backing up so that I can preserve it, even if Blogspot decides to shut down or decides it no longer wants me here, that this information, at least, will remain less ephemeral.

However, I have to wonder whether letting Twitter guide my attention is a good idea at all. I do like the accounts I follow there, but I also find myself spending more and more time engaging in interactions that I'm not sure are healthy for me. Not to mention how many accounts I report as potentially fake, and how many tweets I genuinely think are harmful remain there despite my reports. For example, I reported an antisemitic "joke" a month ago, and it's still there at time of writing. I know I wasn't the only one outraged by it, either.

I am leaning towards deleting my "offending" tweet so that I can use my account again, then letting my followers know that I'm either leaving the platform or otherwise no longer going to engage with it, and urging them to follow me here or to email me. Facebook I keep mostly for friends and family overseas, and a few interest groups, so it's a bit more useful to me, although I've lowered my engagement with it, as well, in that I don't think I post there more than once every few weeks.

In case it hasn't been clear before, I do welcome feedback and comments on my posts. Unless I've made a very silly configuration mistake, you should be able to comment under the posts themselves, and there's a form for getting in touch if that's too public for you.

I have a few ideas for posts for the rest of the year during my break, but I also have to pack for my move, so I can't guarantee anything. If you've added me to your RSS reader, you'll know soon enough.

Through Sorcerer's eyes - Lonesome October revisited

During the month of October, I posted once a day for my "Through Sorcerer's eyes" project (now indexed!), where I used Ron Edwards' game, Sorcerer, about people undermining the laws of nature by trafficking with demons, to analyze Roger Zelazny's book, A Night in the Lonesome October, as I read it. I now want to reflect on that analysis in a more centralized and focused way. As always, this will be extremely spoiler-filled, so reader beware!

Throughout the project I kept a certain façade of someone encountering the book chapter by chapter for the first time, by not specifically identifying the tropes and characters brought up, outside of when they seemed relevant to sorcery. I was somewhat inconsistent in this. I did name the Cthulhu Mythos, but mostly failed to identify the protagonist's master as Jack the Ripper, Rastov as Rasputin (or someone close enough), the Count as Dracula, Larry Talbot as the Wolf Man, the Great Detective and his companion as Sherlock Holmes and Watson, or the Good Doctor as Dr. Frankenstein. This put them on equal footing with other main characters, such as Morris and MacCab, "Crazy" Jill, or Vicar Roberts, who did not stand for particular genre characters, although they did seem to stand for tropes: Jill as a classic witch from British folklore and its modern bowdlerization, Vicar Roberts as a clergyman turned Satanist, and Morris and MacCab as generic Victorian occultists.

So the book is a pastiche of Victorian detective, mystery, and horror fiction, combined with Lovecraftian horror. To this, we must add another genre that doesn't quite make the jacket: children's (and adults`) sentient animal literature, such as White Fang and Watership Down. This shows itself in the main living characters in the book being the animal companions. They are the ones with whom the point-of-view character, Jack's dog Snuff, is most able to communicate, and who seem to undergo the most growth. Even supposedly mundane animals, who are not the companions of anyone magical, are capable of verbal communications of some sort, at least with other animals. Notably, humans are not normally capable of speaking to animals, except for Larry Talbot, who, due to his lycanthropy, is able to converse in human form, but only with wolves and dogs. Companion animals are able to converse with their masters, but only during the hour after midnight.

This mixing of genres is challenging to address with a Sorcerer model, because the default premise of the game is to take a naturalistic setting, and add the supernatural to it exclusively through the actions of demons, who are controllable to some level by sorcerers, and whose existence and actions are kept secret from the general populace. But here, there seem to be several separate aspects that seem supernatural, or at least fantastical, and definitely secret. The naturalistic setting in the original game is recommended to be the "here and now", some stylized version of a part of the world we live in, so let's start our journey from there and see where it leads.

We start by being transported back to the late 19th or early 20th Century, near London. Sherlock Holmes, or a stand-in, is well known for his keen ways of observation, so this is not sorcery, but rather skill. Vivisectionists are well-established, although possibly detested. Ritual killings, assaults, and grave-robbing are investigated, but not necessarily understood. Animals are capable of talking to each other, even without any specific summoning of demons, although humans are not aware of this, with each species or family having its own language. Rumors of vampires, werewolves, and other such gothic horrors might abound, but they're not really understood.

Into this stylized, somewhat fanciful Victorian setting are plunged practitioners of many varieties of forbidden magic, which nevertheless feature in common animal companions with which said practitioners can communicate only between midnight and one in the morning, the use of dead body parts, interference with the weather, and concern with an event which happens a few times a century, in which the moon rises full on All Hallows` Eve, and the Lovecraftian Elder Gods can be brought back. The practitioners are drawn to a certain area, and subconsciously position themselves to form a pattern from which one can calculate or divine the specific location of the event.

Some of these practitioners have supernatural aspects that seem independent of what's common between sorcerers. There is a vampire, who could be represented as a sorcerer with a blood-drinking Parasite. There is a werewolf, also potentially representable as someone with Parasite demon, albeit with less control over it. Being a werewolf is something that can be "learned', as we see when the Great Detective becomes one at the end, which suggests a demon being summoned and bound.

At least one potential practitioner isn't even concerned with this upcoming event - the Good Doctor, who is just there to bring the dead to life, which, fortunately, seems to work with the other themes of sorcery pretty well.

One issue to reflect on is where the sentient animals fit in. In my day-to-day analysis, I presumed that they were demons - but an important feature of demons in the base Sorcerer game is that they are very two-dimensional. They are driven by their Need and Desire to a comical degree. The GM is encouraged to play them as cartoon characters. But Snuff, Graymalk, Quicklime, Bubo, and the rest are not two-dimensional. They couldn't be, because otherwise the book, which is mostly from their perspective, would not be as compelling.

One way to try and address this would be to flip the roles - what if the companions are the sorcerers, and the practitioners we called sorcerers were actually the demons? Since we get to see far less of their inner worlds, we could reinterpret Jack, Jill, Rastov, and the rest as somewhat more two-dimensional, even cartoonish. But the problem is that they are clearly the ones binding demons, and in some case, the instigators of supernatural change for the animal companions.

Snuff himself is the biggest problem in this regard, because his origin story almost compels us to identify him as a demon - Jack made him into a supernaturally strong guard dog after he was something else, which he didn't like being as much. Owen's severing of Cheeter's shadow also seems like a sorcerous action, and it was instigated by Owen, not Cheeter.

I kept referring to base game, and the reason is that Sorcerer has supplements. When it came out, there were two advertised: Sorcerer & Sword, which expanded the game to capture the Sword and Sorcery genre, and The Sorcerer's Soul, which is supposed to take Humanity and expand its use, adds angels, and, importantly for our case, allows demons to be played as full-fledged player characters. I have read the first supplement, which is a fantastic read if only for the analysis of the genre, even if you end up using different systems, but have not read the second, which might contain solutions to some of the issues I brought up here.

Stepping back from all this, it's clear that there is potential here for at least one mostly straight Sorcerer scenario. Specifically, the existence of an upcoming sorcerous event, which draws sorcerers from all over to one place. In game terms, perhaps it provides unique bonuses or access to power levels for demons not otherwise available. It makes for a great template for Kickers, whether the characters want to change something significant about the world, or see their role as protecting the existing order using unorthodox means. In my own one-shot, which I hopefully will discuss more extensively sometime in the future, that was pretty much all that I brought over - the setting was modern Troy, New York, in which an event was about to occur which would allow stronger demons to be more easily Contacted, Summoned, and Bound, and the pregenerated characters were human archetypes that I would expect to live around the area in the here and now - although a Passer cat named Graymalk, and an elongated intestinal Parasite named Quicklime, did survive.