Appendix N, The Game Master

I’m late in piling on The Bandwagon (thanks to Traverse Fantasy for being the catalyst). I was originally too intimidated to throw my hat in, mostly because I was expecting all of these to be amazingly curated lists of extremely specific and impeccablly indie taste. While many were just that (and all have been fantastically made – check out elmcat’s entry roll), some were of a different tenor and vibe than I was expecting, so I’m going to try my hand at something equally different. My list is primarily made up of moments. Blips in time that vibrated so harmoniously with my gutbrains that I haven’t been the same since.

The First Gate And The Western Oracle from The NeverEnding Story (film)

There’s something about the cutting back and forth between Atreyu’s upward gaze and the first gate’s sphinxes’ closed eyes from below. There’s a palpable tension, sure, but it feels like a sixth sense vibration in my brainstem. There’s Intention and Purpose and Presence and Menace behind those orange stone lids. When the lids finally lift to reveal a blinding, unknowable light behind them, the tension and maddening mystery peak. To my 40-odd-years-older eyes on a rewatch of the scene, the laser effects are hokey and the jump scare with the dead knight is weak, but the thrumming of the unspoken tension still hits.

Contrast that tension with the ease and warmth from the Western Oracle. There’s a mirroring here with two sets of sphinxes (although, on a rewatch I noted that one set is decidedly more boobish than the other), but I always felt jarred by the discontinuity of the snow field surrounding the second gate — why isn’t this more symmetrical? And then the crumbling of the Oracle at the end, like any help is going to be meager and fleeting.

How This Influences My Game

• Explanation is the death of tension, and nothing is explained less than the unexplainable. Embrace “the weird,” sure, but further: embrace that some things won’t make sense on any level.
• Sensible doses of the unsettling add an outsized amount of flavor and emphasize the contrast between the terror of adventuring and a warm seat at the tavern.
• Things don’t have to be symmetrical to create depth. Don’t prep cathedrals; prep forests.

Other such moments

• Tolkien grab bag: Eöl’s lonely dark lair, Bombadil’s tendency to unnerve, the inexplicability and terror of the Barrow Wight scene.
• The ceremony scene at the end of Conan the Destroyer, when they animate the statue and then it melts. The monster itself is hokey, but the lead-up is brain-melting for me. I have intense fondness for this movie despite its extremely ragged edges, probably because my parents wouldn’t show me, a sub-6-year-old, Conan the Barbarian, presumably due to it being less friendly to the He-Man crowd.

• Super Metroid, when Crocomire melts horribly and screams and it’s SO gratuitous, and then somehow animates as a skeleton for one last scare.
• Seeing a full-size statue of a Lamassu at the Louvre and realizing they have an extraworldly five legs, which certainly wasn’t lost on the artist. And those dead, empty eyes. I certainly must’ve been thinking about the sphinxes. Looking up at them, I kept thinking of hearing a low thrum and then my head exploding.

When We Broke HeroQuest

HeroQuest’s original TV commercial was Extremely My Shit™️, so I begged for a copy. I was enamored of the minis and the artwork and the whole vibe of the thing, but it took me a few years to scare up enough friends to play without the need to cajole. We pretty quickly found the seams and edges of the game, though, wanting more than the pretty mundane adventures available. There are only so many times you can drop a gargoyle onto the board and elicit genuine fright. One of my friends, who had more concrete D&D experience than the rest of us, suggested, “why don’t we just make up our own adventures?” This eye-opening moment led to so much more fun than we’d ever had before – NPCs, our own villain arcs, invented weapons and items. I picked up The Classic Dungeons & Dragons Game and it only expanded our play, eventually leading us to abandon the HeroQuest board altogether. (Like a lot of others, I bounced right off the rules, which seemed hopelessly opaque. The box was probably sold in my parents’ cross-country move, sadly, and it would be many years before I picked back up anything resembling B/X)

How this influences my game

• Rules are a good foundation, but as soon as you find yourself rubbing against them, consider breaking them.

Other such moments

• The moment I thought to spam round bombs off of cliffs at enemies in Breath of the Wild. The game (eventually) taught me to avoid fighting wherever possible, and to avoid fighting fair at all costs, even though this felt suspiciously like cheating at first. It helped that I was falling into the OSR at the time I was (re)playing. They meshed nicely together.
• Being railroaded through presented with the adventure of The Dragon Of Icespire Peak, my sorcerer (named, in one of my proudest moments, Florcerer) found the haughtiness of the leader of the rangers in a stronghold in Neverwinter Wood to be off-putting and insulting. My thoughts were to magic missle the shit out of him, take over the stronghold, and rule like a despot, but I suspected my DM (who is wonderful) would not take kindly to it. In hindsight, I wish I had followed that urge and broken the game.

Having run out of thematic moments, a more standard list

• Nausicaä (of the Valley of the Wind) under her ohmu bubble watching the drifting spores in a moment of serenity. Fun note: I saw the Warriors of the Wind edit of this, once, in probably 1986 as a wee bairn, and nearly fell over in shock after putting 2 and 2 together coming out of the theater after Princess Mononoke 13 years later.
• How The Silmarillion dares to defy story beats and just be a “historical” record.
• Danny stuck in the half-snowed-in concrete pipe with something at the other end, The Shining (book).
• Finally We Are No One by múm plucks at my brain, both warm and unsettling.
• The Magicians, when the snotty-ass kids go raiding the dungeon and the fire giant with a huge member comes storming out along with a throng of monsters.
• Jonathan Strange & Mister Norrell by Susanna Clarke
• Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven by Godpseed You! Black Emperor
• The original Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy VI, all different stops along the maturity curve.
• The Once And Future Witches by Alix E Harrow
• Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts by M83. Described to me as “the soundtrack of an abandoned ship crashing into a deserted planet in slow motion.”
• The whole of The Tombs of Atuan. Just the whole damned thing.