thedeadone.net » Fiction

A little flash fiction for Lost Heroes RPG

Mark Cunningham — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 17:48:14 +0000

While working on Lost Heroes RPG over the Christmas, I wrote this little flash fiction. I was hitting a bit of mental block so I changed tack and wrote something else. I think it works actual, what do you think?

He put down the staff beside him and scratched his head. “I don’t know if it’ll work. I’ve passed the message up the ranks, but Hermes doesn’t really have any pull with Hades you know? Do you happen to have a fag? I’m dying for a cig.”

I pulled a pack out of my pocket and offered him my last one. He accepted it and used his herald’s staff to light it. It sort of glowed and a flame squirted out of the top, lighting his cigarette. “You don’t happen to be a great singer or artist or something that I didn’t know about?” I shook my head. He weighed his hand heavily on his shoulder, “its not looking good.”

“I need to save her, bring her back.” I pleaded with him.

“The best I can do is allow you to see her one last time from the opposite shore of the Styx. You can say you’re goodbyes and all that. I hope she made it to the Blessed Isle otherwise…” he buried his head in his hands. He was suppressing a sob. “Why do you want to bring her back? The dead is better dead, Hades let nothing leave his domain.”

Controlling my own grief I said, “Because it was my fault. I killed her. I made a mistake…” But at my words, his entire body shook and his face drained of colour as he stared at me.

“Oh my. What have you done my friend!” The sky started to darken. “I’ve given them a connection, a connection to you and you damned fool admitted your stupidity!” His staff started to glow, the wings on his shoes started to flutter. “I can hear Erebus demanding justice!” He added meekly, “you’ve given her to the Furies by telling me this…”

“I don’t understand…” but I could barely speak, the roaring sound of a car drowned out my words and its lights stinging me and holding me in place. He was gone, already flying into the black stormy sky. Before the truck hit me, I saw her face, in the driver seat, an awful black aura burning of her deathly beauty, rage and revenge.

Laura and the Stalker with the Golden Blade

Mark Cunningham — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 05:30:37 +0000

“Its been a long journey” from Laura’s Blog

I know I haven’t posted in ages. I’ve been going through a few things recently and it’s just been too heavy to write so openly about it. This whole year since John’s funeral hasn’t been easy. When he passed away everything went dark in my life. It made just getting out of bed in the morning a nightmare, waking up in that big empty bed was a stark reminder I’d never see him again. Our huge house became cold and eerie where before I was always telling John to tidy up his gear because I was always tripping over it. In those then empty evenings I found it easy to finish a full bottle of wine listening to bad romantic ballads to starve off the tears. I know, cliché.

I became intensely private, didn’t want to go out too much, barely talked to anyone outside of work. I got fed up with people asking, “are you alright? Is there anything I can do?” and it became easy to pall of friends’ worry with a fake “I’m fine. Just tired.” Well I was tired (shattered, destroyed, exhausted and so on) but I was also not fine. All I wanted to do was wallow in my private sadness. At the back of my mind, I thought that was as low as I would go and I would just thread this depth of depression forever. Then something happened and I found I could go much deeper.

Two months after John’s funeral, I was restless in the middle of the night. I just couldn’t sleep, every time I closed my eyes, I started to dream and that was something I desperately wanted to avoid. I didn’t want to think much either so I huddled up in my big duvet to fight the bitter cold because I no longer bothered putting the heat on at night for just me. I liked the quietness of the late of night because it felt somehow eternal, never-ending, a way to forget forever. But a screaming cat broke the stillness and I stuck my head under the corner of the curtain to see if I could spot the annoying minger. And that’s when I saw him.

He was standing outside our house, on the pavement, looking straight up at my window; a homeless man with a dirty tattered coat, a mottled blue woollen hat, black beard, scruffy and downright freaky. For ten minutes, I watched this guy but he didn’t move. I turned on the light and in that brief distraction to find the lamp the man was gone. Puff, disappeared like a magician in smoke.

I was quite shaken up. It reminded me of the night John died – I was home late from work that night. I remember coming in, throwing my shoes off and calling out for him, but he wasn’t there but I didn’t worry, just assumed he’d be home later. And then there was that knock at the door, two Gardai standing in the doorway, the blue light of the police car flashing in the background. I remember John’s body, cold and motionless, laying in the white room and me nodding, saying, “yes it’s him,” but not hearing the words actually come out of my mouth. It made me freeze, deep inside. Something went dead in me right then, but also another part of me wanted to run, wanted to buck everything, escape the nightmare. But this night, when I saw that homeless man, that part of me reared up again, yelling at me to get away, to escape, that it wasn’t real. My heart thumped vigorously for hours. But he didn’t appear again that night. If that was it, I would have been okay. I would have dismissed it, a once-off, that’s all.

The days after, I was a little paranoid, looking over my shoulder all the time and jumping at everything. I started to relax, started to forget the incident. Three weeks later, I had worked late again and on the Dart home, the train carriage was nearly empty. I was sleepy, nodding off for a few seconds at a time. That’s when I caught sight of the mottled blue woollen hat. I jumped, turned around and there at the other end, he was sitting looking at me. I stood up moving backwards and toppled into another traveller. I panicked at the door-open button and luckily the train was stopping at that moment. I got off, didn’t care where. I looked back at the train as it moved off from the platform, but I couldn’t see him any more, even though I knew he had moved.

I was a wreck then. I watched everywhere, but I never saw him. It was only when I wasn’t looking that I would see him. I tried to work as much as possible from home, avoided travelling anywhere. When I did travel, I always did it when loads of people were around such as at rush hour. Weeks passed and I couldn’t keep it up. I couldn’t keep hiding. But it was when I relaxed, when I wasn’t really looking, that I saw him. I saw him once when I was shopping and I hadn’t been concentrating on what I was doing, he was there in another aisle, staring motionless at me. Another time, when I was dozing at my desk, I spotted him outside my office, the crowds flowing around his motionless watching form.

I did contact the Gardai about it, but, as usual, they couldn’t do anything about it. The freak hadn’t threatened me, hadn’t even approached me, no breathing down the line or dirty calls. My stalker wasn’t considered a critical threat according to them. But I felt my life was under siege. I was trapped in our empty house and when I let my guard down, he would be there, watching. Once, late in the loneliness of night, I imagined that the stalker was John, come back from the dead for he was about the right build and height. That just shows you how fucked I was getting, all Helsinki-Syndrome.

I couldn’t live like this, a slave to my own fear. So it was one night, when I had been woken up by the screech of that annoying minger cat, I felt a strange determination. That part of me that wanted to flee was strangely quiet. It was replaced with something hard, something curious, something fearless. Without much thought, I grabbed my coat and walked to the front door. I paused briefly with my hand on the doorknob. I didn’t know what I was doing, just felt it was now or never, that I either stand-up or forever crawl into my bed in search of the bliss of forgetfulness. It wasn’t cold that night but there was a wind that nearly pushed me down the street. I had to hold strong and compose myself but then I followed it. I don’t remember how long I walked, but I couldn’t stop myself. It was only when a gruff a voice called out “ho!” I turned around to face the voice and I stumbled in shock. My eyes were deceiving me for I saw two scrawny monsters approaching towards me. They appeared generally human in form, but one had only a huge gaping mouth of sharp awful teeth instead of a head, the other one had two wailing bunch of tentacles instead of arms. They were approaching me slowly, like predators approaching a trapped prey. I couldn’t scream or even run, all I could do is watch these two things zig-zag slowly towards me.

Then the mouth-head leaped at me, its mouth wide open so that I could see the awful tongue that danced in anticipation of biting down on me. But there was a sudden flash and the mouth-head was rammed against a wall. Something was ripping into it, I saw a glint of a short but broad golden blade, striking down so many times I couldn’t count. Blood splattered the wall. The tentacle-armed freak seemed to move back in fear, and then this something with its golden blade was tearing into it. In less than a blink of an eye, I saw it gut the tentacle-armed freak in two, its innards spilling all around.

And then I recognised who this something was… the mottled blue woollen hat, the dirty tattered coat, the black beard… he turned towards me, in his hand the golden blade dripping thick red blood. I started to move away, my cold determination slipping away, lost in his fury of the blood. My stalker stood there, blood splattered across his face. He looked like he was waiting for something from me, he stretched out his hand for me. I was horrified, shocked and when he saw the fear in my face he recalled. I swear I saw tears as he pulled away. And in a flash he was gone and I fell unconscious to the pavement.

When I awoke, I was in a hospital bed. I was thankfully unhurt. A Gardai in plains clothes was sitting there asking me questions about what happened. Apparently the two “monsters” I had seen must have been a trick of the light or some weird delusion of my paranoid state. They had been two old drunk guys looking for trouble. They asked a lot of questions about my stalker and I told him everything, I told him how shitty he had made me feel, how locked in I felt and he just listened. And for some reason, I felt unburdened and when I went home, I dared to say, I felt free.

Three months later and it brings me up to today. No sign of my stalker, the fucker seems to be gone. I even went out with the girls last week for the first time since John’s death. I smiled today. It has been a year and a day since John’s death and it is beginning to feel like I’m coming out of the dark tunnel and letting light back into my life.

3 weeks of holidays isn’t enough!

Mark Cunningham — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:56:55 +0000

And the rain this morning really tops it off. I’ve spent the last two days going through all my emails, forum posts, web feeds and blog comments and I’m dozzed out with info overload. It really feels like I haven’t been away now at all, ack!

I didn’t do an inch of coding while on holidays and I’m all the better for it, loads of family time, sunny weather, no stress, no work and I even got to do some writing (for my “secret project” L___ H_____) and drawing (I’ll put up scans later). I’m hoping to keep the momentum up for writing, at least until work has worn me out a bit. I’m afraid this doesn’t mean more blogging but I’ll try and keep regular updates going.

Phew! That creative burst is over I can get back to doing other stuff

Mark Cunningham — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 05:30:52 +0000

Last Friday I release “TDO-Forum WordPress Theme“, thankfully. It was a piece of code that burst out of me, cut through my on-going writing/roleplaying project and other coding projects, stopped me from blogging, demanding to be finished. It even bit into my work during the day (but so does the lack of sleep from having two small kids). The only time it didn’t swallow was when I was with my family (shows you my true priorities I guess).

Do you ever get that? A piece of writing or coding that demanded to be finished, that consumed you until it was done or you managed to pull away from it?

I’ve read about many writers who claim that a book or story forced itself out of them. Though coding isn’t the same as writing, I think the abstract mental creative-process is the same (the skill-base is obviously different). I think it’s something different to “the flow” (I’ve written about it before and here is the wikipedia entry on the flow psychological state). Certainly the flow is an accelerator or enabler of creative bursts, and coding and writing neatly fit into the model of the flow.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that the piece of writing will be exceptional or the code perfect. Though I do think they benefit from the obsessive neurotic drive of creating it.

Separating the Author from their Writing

Mark Cunningham — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 08:45:24 +0000

Does anyone else have difficulty separating the author from the book?

I prefer to know little or nothing about the author of a book before I start reading it. This equally applies to roleplaying books and it’s a roleplaying book that I’m having difficulty at the moment separating the creator (and his/her actions/opinions) from the writing. I don’t have a problem with dead authors. Once they are dead, everything about them is becomes simply “context” (historical).

The FudgeList has awoken and it got a bit heated there for a little bit. But I saw a comment from a writer on a blog about when the whole “Fudge is dead” debacle started. He hadn’t gotten involved in the list or this particular argument and had no idea what he was talking about yet he said something nasty about the Fudge community. It was only one line. However, all I could think was “asshole!” It’s a pity, because I would have bought one of his forthcoming books, now I won’t. I’ll probably never look at his work. He doesn’t know me and I don’t know him, but that opinion has tainted my perception of his him and his work. If I pick up a book of his, I’ll remember the comment. I could get over it and let it drop, but the problem is that it creates a barrier to overcome and therefore it makes reading one of his books effort. Why should I bother reading a book if it’s just going to be work instead of enjoyment?

I think Fred Hicks was right when he talked about prompting RPGs and always being positive. A single negative can lose you a customer and then the power of the internet is that if you hit the wrong person, it can have a much bigger impact then just one dropped potential sale.

It’s another reason why I find it hard to objectively read the work of friends. I see my friend’s personality in the work and it, well, becomes hard to separate my opinion of my friend from my opinion of his writing. It becomes especially difficulty if the writing is in a field of shared interest like roleplaying, because more than likely we’d have argued and discussed RPG design issues and I’ll see that shining through their work.

Which is perhaps why it’s a good idea for me to keep some distance from many of the RPG design forums like RPG.net, theForge and story-games. My perspective of people’s work will become tainted by my opinion of the them, not their work. (TBH I think it’s more than likely that I have a tendency to shy away from very large online communities), I guess also perhaps that’s why I’m quite closed about my writing and my ideas. Afraid they’ll judge me rather than the work itself.

Anyone else feel the same about books?

A quote on destiny and fate…

Mark Cunningham — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 13:38:06 +0000

This is a warning, not a saying:

“To know your destiny is to destroy yourself. It is better to live in ignorance and love, for the world is fated to be destroyed by destiny.”

I was at the gym and I started musing on a story in my head. The gym is one place I do a lot of thinking and imagining while I work out. I played the whole story out, right up to the end. It was a fully concieved story, several main characters, background, mythos and a plot. Then those words appeared. I could see them as the last lines to the novel. I don’t know exactly what prompted it as I normally envision stories in my mind’s eye like movies, not text in a novel. The story I was imagining was certainly about destiny, how once you accept it, it consumes you totally but if you try and fight it or ignore it it will also destroy you. Destiny and fate being something much larger than the small lives of men, their hopes and fears.

I tried to analysed my thought processes that lead to it and I know, in part, the text is actually a warning against religious zealousness, though the story had little of that.

I feel like giving up!

Mark Cunningham — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 09:47:54 +0000

Today I discovered White Wolf’s newest line “Scion: Heroes”, (thanks to matt’s accidental discovery of it).

From the White Wolf’s web page for it:

Find your Destiny

The savage Titans have escaped their eternal prison to wage war with the Gods once more.

Their battles in the Overworld have spilled over to ours.

Armed with abilities and weapons granted by their divine parents, the Scions stand as humanity’s only defense.

Sounds great huh?

I’m not saying White Wolf are evil, don’t get me wrong. It is just that my big RPG project (LH) is based on scarily similar themes. (I’m not accusing White Wolf of stealing my ideas, I’m not paranoid and there is sufficient fundamental differences in my work and what I have seen so far of White Wolf’s). The issue for me is emotive, even if my LH ever does get out there into the wild, it will be compared to it and I, full-time working father, cannot compete with an army of freelance writers, fanboys, artists, editors, etc. and a company that knows how to market. It’s enough to nearly give up the game.

But I won’t. Not yet at least.

What makes it so tempting to quit, back up the files, and focus on other things, is how frustrating my “time management” is these days. It’s hard to get a big enough gap of time to sit down and write. Even when I do, I often have to stop and run off to do something for five minutes right in the middle, breaking the precious flow. But that’s to be expected. With a new baby only two months away… I guess my passion these days is my family. Gaming takes a second place, will always take a second place to that. (Well actually third, our Nintendo Wii is coming in second these days).

Beating my procrastinating!

Mark Cunningham — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 20:09:34 +0000

I think I’ve managed to beat my procrastinating. I’ve started doing the necessary work for Reboot over the last week. However my pace is a bit slow.

The problem is, I’m still itching to do some coding. TDOMF is crying out for me to jump right in, I want to do some work on MOC(my roleplaying group’s webpage), Game Crafters’ Guildand have a number of ideas for some cool plugins for WordPress. The danger is, when I code, I get wrapped up in it and swallows all my creativity. Reboot would be lost.

Apparently this is a psychology state called the Flow.

From Wikipedia:

Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing, characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.

I do get into the flow when I write too however coding has some additional “hooks” that make it worse. Two of the qualities of the flow are:

Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).

The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.

When I’m coding, I find it flows so easily and “effortlessnessly”. Given enough time I feel I can complete any objective I set. And with a lot of my PHP projects, the rewards are fairly instant. Code a little, see the results. Code more, more results. It makes coding addictive. While with writing, I have to write a bit and then read and rewrite. The process doesn’t come off as effortless. It’s an uphill process. And I’m not a writer by trade. The task of writing seems more difficult than coding.

When I’m in the flow it’s hard for me to switch tasks, almost impossible. If I start coding and get into that state, forget writing. In fact, more than once, I’ve caught myself in the flow with a personal coding project in work and find it very difficult to break out of it. I tell myself, on the hour I’ll stop, at fifteen minutes after the hour I’ll stop, etc. Also the flow sucks for debugging non-linear problems. You get lost in one thread of investigation and it becomes hard to switch to another thread, even impossible to explore multiple threads at once, which is often what you need to do.

Also interesting, when I looked up the flow on Wikipedia, there was this link at the bottom.

Solving Procrastination an application of Flow to solving procrastination by Kevin Chiu

The main point of Kevin Chiu’s article is that you should break up the task your procrastination about into multiple tasks that you can order by perceived difficulty (easiest first). This falls inline with the way the flow works.

And, unsurprisingly, this is how I conquered my procrastination over Reboot. I started by listing all the things I wanted to do, then started inserting the new headings I wanted to fill and then I started writing…

Why am I procrastinating?

Mark Cunningham — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 16:25:53 +0000

I don’t know what it is, but I just can’t sit down and do it. I’ve set aside time to do it. I’ve said to myself, finish this and then do that. That didn’t work. I’ve put time limits on it, though thats more for writer’s block and I certainly not out of ideas. In fact, it’s the opposite, I know what needs to be done. So now I’m at the writing-about-procrastinating in the hopes the writing momentum will carry me through it (another trick to fighting writer’s block).

I don’t know if there is any real “trick” to getting around it. You just got to do it, right? But even the lure of money isn’t enough. I think, perhaps, I’m not in the right mind-space to do it. I’m not getting enough sleep or even just plain chill-out time. All my energy goes to work, Alice and home. This project should be enjoyable. I know once I start, I’ll just keep at it. But it’s not even the first hurdle or opposition that’s stopping me.

Anyone have any suggestions about beating procrastinating?

Is it time to “reboot” my reboot?

Mark Cunningham — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 17:11:39 +0000

Things have been quiet on my current active roleplaying project “Reboot 2006″ up until this week. (For more info about Reboot 2006, you can read the previous post or just read my posts tagged with Reboot 2006, tags are a new feature of my website). For those who are new to my blog, Reboot is a roleplaying adventure that I’m hoping to get published, as a PDF (i.e. online), via GreyGhost, publishers of Fudge, one of my favourite RPG systems. It’s also my first *thing* to be published!

I sent Ann @ Grey Ghost, a friendly request for an update and within a week she did and had got some feedback on the sceanrio and the maps that I did for it. This is the choice bit from the email:

He thinks it’s great as a convention game but needs a bit more “meat” for a commercial product.

Of course, they’re right. It was designed and playtested as a convention game and I tried to keep all that goodness in there without losing it. As I was re-working it, I stubbornly pushed the temptation away to turn the adventure into a fully-fledged world, thinking it would detract from the completeness of the project. Seems, perhaps I should have caved to temptation.

But now I’m left contemplating coming up with multiple solutions to the adventure (I proposed only one in the adventure), multiple “branches” within the adventure to explore the world/story, re-working the format, introducing new elements to the world, etc. I’m a little thrown about how I should do it. It feels like I was walking a long a well envisioned path, suddenly to become blinded by the lack of path below and before me!

I haven’t responded to the email yet, I’m exhausted with Sophie, my wife, being sick at home and therefore I’m getting Alice, our 2.5 year old daughter, up in the morning and putting her to bed at night and I’m still struggling to get over this nasty cough, a leftover from Saturday. I have to hit the right tone in my reply. My first, human, reaction is to explain why things were done this way or that… but that would read as “like duh! Thats the way it’s meant to be, silly!”, while I want some more like I’m taking your ideas on board and seeing what I can come up with.

This “reboot” of the adventure is a creative challenge because I’m treating the whole project as something new. Hopefully I have the headspace and time to properly invest in it.

(Maybe I should rename the tag Reboot 2006 to “Reboot 2007″ now.)

thedeadone.net » Fiction

A little flash fiction for Lost Heroes RPG

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