I Don't Know What to Call This Post

 I should have punched him in the face.

It was college, my sophomore year, and I should have punched him in the face when I realized what was going on.  Never-mind that he was my favorite teacher up until that point. Never-mind I was in a state of shock. I was the metal head. I should have beat the crap out of him. I was drunk at the time when he kissed me and groped my genitals.

We went after him through the college board and administration. I never got the police involved. My one friend he also did it to broke down and asked if this is what it felt like to be raped. Only later I found out he had been doing it for YEARS from a friend who was an alumni from before.

He was an awesome teacher.  Amazing, really. He had three themes to his Western Civilization class and we applied those three themes to each lessoj. It made for a fascinating class.

I should have punched him.

In the end he was dismissed from the college and moved to be closer to his family.  We never involved the police. He was allowed to go on, and possibly continue doing it to other people.  I don't know.  Maybe he would be cowed by other people doing that but I doubt it. Once a predator always a predator.

I thought I had dealt with that but then the whole Penn State/Sandusky thing exploded.

I broke. I have my boss at the time to thank because she knew I was going through a mental thing.  She could have fired me because I couldn't function at work at all. 

Thing didn't get better until I was on my second set of head meds. (I will talk about what happened with the first ones another time.)

I alienated a few Penn State alumni with my outspokenness about how the Sandusky stuff was handled over the years. A lot of that, though, came from an internal place because I didn't truly stop HIM.

Any person he hurt after me, that's on my head, because I could have stopped him and didn't.

I am sorry but that's the way I feel about the situation. 

"Preistly" Duties

 In the LARP I play, my character aspires to be a priest to the goddess of knowledge and love, named Tara. It's an interesting path because in real life I am an atheist but at the same time the whole experience brings me closer to religion in general. I find some religious writings to have significance in terms of people's lives and how people should interact with each other. Religion has done good and bad in this world, and I would like to focus on the good (while standing up against the bad).

Some examples of things that are in my Book of Tara:

Never stop learning.

Never stop loving

Sorrow and Remembrance - Happy is the heart that still feels pain.

Generosity - while this can be of time, physical items, etc. I always think of Generosity of Spirit. Colored by the path of Sorrow and Remembrance (My path), Generosity would be interpreted as empathy, sympathy, or compassion.

To know Generosity of spirit is to act with kindness, to be open and willing to share with others without expectation of receiving something in return.

A nurturing environment is one that gives Tara's children the security and opportunity to discover themselves and their world.

Some of this is Christian based that I have discovered over time.  Some is song lyrics. Some is a little of everything else. All I know is that playing my LARP character I am trying to be a better person outside of LARP.

Hopefully it is working. In the meantime no matter what path you follow, I hope you give and receive kindness in this world.

LARP Coming Up

 So tmorrow I will not be me.  I will be Hayward the Bastard, healer to people who fight far better than him.

Gods I need this. 

It's funny how I use my LARP character to reset my brain. Hayward was my place to go to cry for years, to the point where everyone knew Hayward was going to cry at one point or another during a game. What they do not know is that sometimes I need Hayward to cry for me. LARP is always the safe environment to deal with situations where I cannot deal with them in real life.

Nido, who was the 1920's Lovecraftian Coward, did this for me also. I had an insane exterior because I was so scared of many things, first of all my alcoholic father. Man, when I was a teenager I feared that guy. I would watch the clock when he was supposed to get home from work, because you knew if he was late then he was out drinking after work. The later he got the more fear would be built up inside, because you knew the drunker he was.

I stood up to him once, yelling across a kitchen table at him that he was a drunk and abusive and all of that.  The table between us disappeared and I briefly considered throwing myself through the window behind me to get the hell out of there.

That was many, many years ago. I don't know if I ever truly processed the situation and didn't know back then what sort of help I could have gotten.

Playing Hayward gives me strength, though, and I need that right now. Hayward is slowly transforming into what I want to become. Hayward is slowly losing the crying aspect of the character and leading more towards a heroic figure.  I need to tap into that for my own life.

I need Hayward.

Savage Worlds

 Among my friends, it is no secret that I love the tabletop RPG Savage Worlds. It is just crunchy enough to satisfy the D&D heads out of my players in building their characters, but it has a system easy enough that game prep is a breeze compared to things like D&D and GURPS.

(In fact, the podcast host of Happy Jack's RPG Podcast sayf GURPS is to LEGO as Savage Worlds is to DUPLO. I cannot disagree with Uncle Stu on this one.)

Savage Worlds is a setting agnostic system, and there are many settings that it can be played with.  One day I will go through the ones I have played and comment on them, but for now just trust me while the system shows its strength with pulpy adventure, by adjusting a few settings rules it does anything pretty well, even Call of Cthulhu type stuff.

Right now the Savage Worlds I am running for my friends is a fantasy homebrew that I ported over from D&D 3.x (yeah, I could have translated it into Pathfinder - even the Savage Worlds version of Pathfinder - but I was not interested). It's a world that has some history to it and often I just make hooks that are there just for the PCs to explore a new facet of the world. My players are awesome nad have made the following characters,

Chibb - A nose picking halfling that has friends all over the city

Urghat - An Orcish Paladin who can finally cast healing spells while raging.

Tilly - A mute half elf who is a deadshot with a bow

Calden - A mage and basically the straight man of the group. All the PCs work for his father.

Ayimyr - A homicidal, genocidal, island elf with a "death frisbee." The player channels Rosa Diaz from Brooklyn Nine-Nine dialed to eleven.

Together these adventurers deal with caravans, explore ruins, plot to assassinate dragons (well, one of them does), and generally have a hatred of Hobgoblins, who are an accepted race on this world. (And for some reason the PCs call them Herb Gerbs.)

Chib has picked another person's nose so stealthfully they didn't notice. Urghat has convinced Orcish bards to rejoin the tribe. Ayimyr has made Dryads stutter and cry just by talking to them.  Calden sighs a lot and casts balls of fire when needed. Come to think of it Tilly seems to jjust go with the flow.

I don't like D&D because a combat with a dozen combatants can take an entire session, or really even if it doesn't just long enough that it bores me. Savage Worlds we decided to do a stress test of the system.  We had a combat that went on between two huge ships with over 80 combatants.  It worked out quite nicely, though it was Calden's fireballs that helped weed out the weak quite easily.

What amazes me is how little combat we do otherwise.  The characters interact with the world, and honestly half the time I don't have a plan. Urghat is really into food carts, for example, and has caused all sorts of adventures just from food carts.

I must remember to talk about reality hopping avatars in a future post.

We Are All Going to Die

 I have a friend who is sick.  Wait.  It's more of I have a friend who I strongly suspect is very sick and I am having insane anxiety over it. I don't know how else to put it.  He has known something is wrong for him but he is not insured so he doesn't want to incur medical expenses if he can.

He finally went to see a nurse practitioner, who set him up for some tests immediately making sure he could get in to do these tests the next day. We don't know the results of these tests yet, though talking with a nurse friend of mine she said that she wasn't going to bullshit me and it didn't sound good though she admitted she had a minor amount of information to go on.

My friend is a stubborn man, and I don't really think he cares if he dies. I will admit to being a selfish prick who has had this person in my life for decades and I want to continue to have him in my life. It's selfish, I know. I am only thinking of my own wants and needs over what he wants. The whole thing makes me sick to my stomach and I know he would be annoyed at knowing he was causing me worry but it's a dear friend.  It's one of those friends where you say "I love you" to them.

Back in the 90's we did a 1920's horror LARP together. I played the coward and he played the big game hunter bodyguard.  By the end of that campaign (which was very cosmic horror and rightfully ended with the end of the world), us and the group of PCs we assembled were the most influential in game faction there. We didn't set out to do this so much as he just drew people to us with our unwavering commitment to help people.

During combat my friend would run around trying to keep people alive and fighting off monsters, all the while whistling "Ode to Joy".  It's funny because you would be fighting for your life and you would hear the whistling increasing in volume as you knew the big game hunter was closing in on the monsters.  It was beautiful. Many years later my friend confessed that his character whistled that when his character was scared.  I never knew that.

I wrote a bad guy for that LARP simply called the Boogeyman. Sacrificed children and the souls of miscarriages would go to his realm. When my wife and I were trying to have a kid she finally got pregnant. We picked out a name, had our hopes and dreams about our future child, and then she had a miscarriage.  All I could think about was the stupid character I had created years before and where the souls of miscarriages go in that story. I truly believed I deserved what happened to me because I created the Boogeyman. I broke down in front of my friend about that fact and he simply said, "I would go to the Boogeyman's realm to retrieve her soul," and that gave me such great comfort.

It's moments like that I can't repay.  My friend has been there far more often for me than I have for him. He makes everything OK.I don't want to lose him, but in the end we all lose. We are all going to die, and there's not a damn thing I can do about that. When my firstborn son Gavin came into this world, I remember looking at him as a baby, and just crying because I knew no matter what I did, one day he is going to die alone.

This is of course the things in my own head I have to deal with. It's my problem, not yours, my gentle reader.

May you have a day of peace.

Long Time

 I realized today I have been LARPing for 26 years on and off.

I have been tabletop gaming for 40 years.

Christ I feel old.

Hayward the Bastard

 After about an 8 year absence, I returned to Xanodria as a PC (what they call an Adventurer).

I decided a comedic charatcer was in order, so I made a drunken swordsman who had traveled the known world. He basically had an inflated opinion of his sword fighting abilities and his charms with women. Hayward the Bastard was meant to be put in his place rather often and in rather comedic ways. 

He was quickly shanghied by a lunatic wizard named Cassandra and he ended up becoming a wizard himself.  He honestly didn't realize it was happening until it actually happened (because he was drunk at the time)

So now you had a drunken wizard running around trying to make a "Enhance Member" spell so that he can make it even better with the ladies.  Then the game hit that forever changed things.

There was a game where we were supposed to give our character's biggest fears. Hayward really wasn't developed enough to have a greatest fear, but I told the people running that game that I had my own fears about something happening to my children.

So what happened was there was this bad guy named Martin. Martin revealed that Hayward, who had slept across the known world, had fathered a son three years before, and presented the dead child to Hayward.

This sent the character from comedic to tragic faster than Londo Mollari. It was a sudden moment in time that dominated the entire time I have played the character.

Mind you, I have greatly enjoyed this broken character full of depth rather than the shallow comedic character I created.  His interactions have been defined by that moment.  Hayward has become "Papa phisyk" using both magic and mundane means to heal the wounded in Xanodria. While there is a certain sadness to the character, he wears his emotions on his sleeve and that has made for some excellent role play with other people. 

I like the quiet moments. It's part of the reason I enjoy The Sandman by Neil Gaiman.  There are sometimes just conversations on a plane that are just enjoyablke for me to read. IN game, I have had hour and a half plus conversations with people in character.  No skill use.  No combat brewing. Just conversations.  And they have been glorious.

Death in the Movies

 (For the record, I understand no one reads this blog.  That's OK because it lets me get my thoughts out in a public forum that is ironically more private than I would intend.  That's OK.)

One of my coworkers asked another coworker if he always watched movies with a lot of death and violence in them. I started interjecting suggestions until I realized people seem to die in a lot of things. (Unless it was a RomCom, which honestly I don't watch many of)

The first thing I thought of, which is a play and a movie about some horrible, plotting people, is The Lion in Winter.  No one actually dies in it, though there is plenty of plotting and knife drawing in the movie.

I tried going toe musical route, but it took a couple.  Godspell - someone dies. West Side Story - forget it.  Wait!  Brigadoon! - um, no, someone dies. Oklahoma - wait no. I had to get to the musical 1776 to find one where someone didn't die.

At least I didn't try Shakespearean tragedies. That would have went horribly.

So, if anyone ever reads this, even if it is horribly out of date when you are reading this, what are some non-RomComs where no one dies that you like?  I just realized one - Good Will Hunting. No one dies in that IIRC. 

I just - I want to see movies where people don't die.

LARP and Mental Health

 It's an odd relationship between Xanodria and my mental health.

I am very medicated due to my depression and anxiety.  The medication is nice.  I don't want to destroy myself like I used to.  I don't suddenly go from minor mishap until the world is ending. It's a good thing.

However, the medication doesn't work perfectly. During COVID I didn't LARP.  Also during this time I had these - what would I call them - anxiety attacks - waking nightmares? They would involve terrible things happening to my children and I would have to bury them. There were songs at their funeral and everything. I have buried my family (because sometimes my wife was included in these mental tragedies) more than I care to remember. It was horrific enough that I considered getting therapy (which admittedly would help with my situation regardless but my schedule is insanely tight at the moment)

However, once I went back to the LARP, it stopped.  Granted I play a guy who has lost a child to a villain. I honestly think that the LARP helps as a safe space to explore my anxieties.  It's a good thing. 

I have thought that maybe the LARP is the problem, but I used to have these anxieties before, and they were before I played the character I do.  In fact, when they asked for a greatest fear for my character, I explained my character isn't developed enough yet to really have a greatest fear but losing my children is my greatest fear in real life.  The GMs for that particular game played with that and thus I got to experience that fear in game. Like I said, a safe space to explore these anxieties.

Now I know LARP doesn't replace good therapy.  I swear at some point I will get to therapy.  It's just not happening right now. I am functional enough that the motivation for it is not there. My apologies for that.

#LARP

#Mentalhealth