This scene- in which a pampered housecat beats the shit out of a digimon that has already digivolved and has energy attacks- implies that, were cats introduced to the Digital World, they would be invasive, species-destroying super predators like they are IRL. I hypothesize that this is what happened in our world, where cats were introduced to the Internet as Lol cats, dominating the Internet memetic ecosystem and preventing the formation of the Digital World seen in Digimon.
One last journey across an ancient battleground to find a pilot's final resting place.
This is Ech0, by Role Over Play Dead, a GM-less storytelling and map drawing game about a group of children and the ghost of a mech pilot.
I played this game for about 3 hours with a small group of friends earlier in May, using a hex map and a little bit of notepaper. Today, I'm going to tell you about it.
The Premise
Ech0 is designed to be played in one sitting. It's GM-less, but that doesn't mean that everyone at the table plays the same role. One person is the ghost, a mech pilot from a war that is long gone by. The other players are children, who find the mech pilot after playing through the wreckage of a mech. Over the course of the game your characters will build a landscape by answering questions about the war and how it's changed the land, filling in pieces of history by asking the mech pilot to ask about the wrecks of war machines that have been inactive for decades.
Each turn of the game focuses on a different child, bringing the crew to a mech that they know about. The children are responsible for filling in details about what the mech looks like now, and the game provides roll tables to help inspire the imagination. You won't just ask about the state of ruin the mech is in - you'll also talk about how that mech fits into the landscape and culture of the people who have outlived the war, and how the children view them. Then, the table turns to the mech pilot, and asks them about who piloted that mech before they died - were they a friend? A rival? An enemy? What were they known for? How did they die?
The Game
I think a good amount of our game was inspired by Pacific Rim, as our mech pilot player suggested that the war was a conflict against kaiju, and that the conflict was across an entire galaxy. Our planet wasn't the only one affected by the kaiju, but all of our characters - the pilot included - agreed that we were only familiar with our current planet.
The kaiju had been defeated at some point, but their legacy remained in the various illnesses that plagued our community, including the children's parents and grandparents. Our hometown was contaminated, including the lake just outside of town, and the first piece of lore we figured out together was that all of the kids had been told multiple times by our parents that if we swam in the lake, we would also get sick.
When we got to each mech, the pilot would tell us about a different member of the military: some mechs acted in a healing capacity, while others were engineers. Our mechs ranged in size and shape: one was moth-shaped, while another was a giant orb. Our mechs were surrounded by tunnels, ripped in half, and in one case, embedded into the side of a cliff. I think one of my favourite moments was when we decided that the community would occasionally sit on the shoulders of the cliff-embedded mech when they watched concerts, but that the hatch had been sealed shut in such a way that nobody could get inside. It lent an air of mystery to the entire thing.
The Vibes
Ech0 is simple and easy to play without any prep: I basically read out each step of the game as we got to it. The questions it asks you sets your table up for introspection: how much has technology changed since the war? How does the ghost feel about it? What stories are told about the war, and how does its memory live on in the bones of the community today?
Our table decided that the war had happened long before our characters were born, but that there were elements that lived within our grandparent's memories. For my table, I think that made sense, because there's a similar relation we have to war.
Most Canadians don't have strong war memories, but many Canadians have great-grandparents who experienced WW2, and my country's involvement in it is still a really poignant part of our history. My own grandparents were refugees, and I've heard stories about my great-grandfather and his participation in the Dutch Resistance. War has influenced our families, and those memories have been carried down, but for our table, those memories were third or second-hand.
In that way, I think it was fairly easy to approach the idea of war from a child's perspective. Our children didn't know what exactly happened back then: they had been told the stories, and they might know on some level that the illness that plagued their community was linked to it, but that connection to the mechs as war machines was tenuous, when their context was so separated.
One of the mech ruins we came across had been turned into something very beautiful - it was a shrine, a memorial, with a rope of white paper connecting the halves that had been separated in an act of great violence. My child character knew about it because she had been told that her Gammy & Gampy had met there and fallen in love, sneaking out to dangerous places when their parents had tried to keep them home. These ruins had been completely re-contextualized, and when she brought this up to the pilot's ghost, the pilot's player told us that the mech had belonged to his brother.
In retrospect, I think that family connection is very bittersweet: our children's grandparents were too young to be in the war, so they managed to fall in love and have children. The pilot and his brother both died, so it's possible that there are no more people on that planet who carry their family's genes. Even with the folks who survived, the contamination has shortened the lives of them and their descendants. One of the players mentioned after the game that his character hated the taste of licorice because he associated licorice with the time his father spent in the hospital, contextualizing how the residue of war has affected that child's family long after the kaiju have disappeared.
Ech0 has delivered the amount of poignancy and reflexiveness that I was hoping for, and on top of that, it's a short and sweet game. It's a great option for a group of friends that want to do something both creative and reflective, and I highly recommend giving it a shot.
The gay child is not lacking, she is difference, outside of the norm, inside a normality of her own; not until later will she come to understand that her normality marks her out from others, condemns her to secrecy and shame.”
― Nina Bouraoui, All Men Want to Know
Is this about how ppl born in the late 20th century have a unique and fluid experience of navigating barriers to information access and its our responsibility to teach the younger folks how to tinker with technology to avoid being spoonfed everything we experience in order to have critical skills that keep us informed, autonomous, and able to hold power despite looming threats of authoritarianism or..........???
If the trash pickup people stop doing their job for two weeks you'd be throwing a fucking tantrum. Same for the janitors who keep your office spaces and bathrooms clean. (And that's before the various illnesses start to spread all over your city from the build up of pathogens.)
The people responsible keeping our spaces clean (and thus, mostly disease-free) should both be paid more AND thanked more.
I think that we should start an urban legend for nipless top surgery folks. Something like "If you purple nurple someone hard enough they actually turn purple and fall off". So that someday a kid will see me at the beach or something and I can be like "It Could Happen To You"
I did not "decide to become a girl" I was actively suppressing the "girly" desires and things to talk about before realizing I'm a girl due to the expectations that society placed on me
RIP Marjane Satrapi, author of the amazing graphic novels Persepolis about living during the fundamentalist revolution in Iran in the 70’s and 80’s. She also created the animated movie based on the graphic novels, which is where these gifs come from.
Reblogging in honor of Marjane Satrapi, one of THE great graphic novelists. Her comic Persepolis was a crucial text for shaping my belief that comics can deeply explore identity, culture, politics, and history.
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