lets not and say we did
This blog was originally intended to showcase a copypaste of my sexier posts I put on the official SLA forum before Jarhead booted me for overly sluttish mind-in-his-crotch behaviour. I dip-tasted it again and found myself still sizzling from the inspiring World of Mort. It really ought to be a soundtrack.
Nightfall Games sued some guy for stealing Dave Allsop’s
so-lush-I-cum-on-it spatter-textured gritty graphic art from the original
pre-digital era version, so I’m not sure how well it will go down if I share
some of it here as an act of fan worship. Momentary pause for contemplation.
You must know by now that I go down well, and so fuckit;
SLA Industries and all characters, settings, images and other intellectual properties pertaining thereto are (c) 1993-2000 Nightfall Games Limited,
and
are used without permission. No challenge to those copyrights is
intended or implied. This is an unofficial SLA Industries fanzine.
So now you can see that what really inspired me to juice
over SLA is the fashion illustrations!
Costume designs!
I swear I should have
done a clothes making course instead of creative writing.
The following childrens entertainment pre-programmed the techno generation
(check out the intro; Bauhaus style 808 beats and analogue squelch.
I bet you wish your pussy made those sounds too like mine can do)
An 18 age rated version of SLA would have been better methinks.
Televised media hyped gore and violence they can handle; it’s the pink soft
secrets that the public are told to be afraid of.
Okay so now you are properly in the mood it is time for some
of my promised poetry.
A college English major pays its way in glossy words I’m sure you’ll agree. My character in SLA is RAZHEL as you'll know by now from checking out my previous SLA related blogs. Here's a little something of what she has to say.
http://nightfall.me/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=17
Re: Your World of Progress
Cyberpunk influences flavour WoP, from Naked Lunch through Halo Jones to Manga; using the rulebook as a launchpad, a backdrop, innovating far beyond the reaches of publishable fiction. Anti-grav hab-blocks filled with better-than-life holo-com zombies lined in rows like prison cells, worlds behind closed doors spoill over into public conduits until Shift hour calls a curfew and Jumpers dare to play between the grids. Tin can sanctuaries offer little protection from smuggled offworld psychedelicatessen cults spilling viral spore through lock-down zones on terrorist groups out to prove the worlds gone crazy and forge a name for endless forgettable logo's. Eco-warrior guerilla-gardeners spraying gm greenspace night-forests amidst riot-gang berserkers. Old world artifacts peddled at high prices to colony bidders require diggers in the deadzones where tv crews dare not tread. Anyone wanna play our game? Nah, they're all freaked out enough by Shadowrun already too much to dare our darkness. We played alone in our bedrooms at night by candlelight with goth-metal nightclubs blasting through headphones, playing telepathic misadventrues with others like us elsewhere in imagination. All the nasties we could handle out-hardcored the local roleplay heroes with their safe little plastic models and lead headed ready meals delivered by skybikers in that cross-over zone between escapist fantasy and nihilistic reality where our elders shot up and sold our dreams to fund gangland routines that we couldn't see ourselves fitting into. All we had left was the rulebook that said 'chip in the head for a war-wage' and it clicked in our heads like a pack of rabid muties crashing the fence. Then came along videogame and we forgot our teenage kicks, left school and took off to see what is left of this world by foot. Many years passed out before we came around again to tell of our tales, and not much has changed except this time, united by websites we find those alien others who programmed our minds and we wonder at what they would make if they only knew what they had started in us, dwelling in cracks between a soulless society and the promise of another repressive tomorrow that no-one can afford to live. So we took to our guns and cut blazing through the night until childhood hopes were rusted and dusted, and whats left is left of center and still blazing, endless fire because they cannot cut us down, they cannot cut us down and still we dare to kill our makers. Its the look on your face as you shoot the bitch in the head well past its dead point, just to make sure. Thats what the camera's call bite point and they cannot get enough. So we keep on coming, recycling the trash and building new layers to forget yesterdays failures. Thats what we call progress. You will too when you're ready. When you've been through too much and the rules that they forced you to obey are dissolved away, away, so much that the badder you are, the freer they make you, grant you the rights to be as twisted as girls because the anti-heroes keep the ratings soaring. The game had a sixteen rate but we took it to the X and we never came down.
_________________
Name: Rachel "Zel" Dauphinoir
Package: Kick Murder
Backstory: Musician & Therapist
Age: 20
To survive Mort the kids have to be brought up differently to how kids grow up on Earths consumerist monocult. Kids growing up on Mort are not lied to and protected from the harsh realities of Life. To do so would make them into victims. To survive on Mort, you either get very good at hiding and watching it all on omnipresent tv, or else you learn to kick back from an early age.
On Earth, kids know about guns before they know about sex, because there is a social taboo on earth that fucks peoples heads up. On Mort, this taboo does not exist. Only maybe with the ones whose heads are full of tv propaganda and I get the idea that on Mort, tv propaganda is less aimed at dumbing down a society and more aimed at telling them as it is - it's kill or be killed out there, outside this tin can there is a monster lurking, and sharpening its claws, and it wants your fleshy little meat for lunch, and its on its way here now buddy, the tv just mentioned that its right up your street...
Its like the Fremen of Arrakis, people don't have time for bullshit because bullshit = non-survival. It's a harsh and hardcore world that creates harsh and hardcore people. So as the extremity increases and becomes normality, what the fuck are people going to do for kicks when they get bored of the way things are?
Luckily its such a strange world, warped and twisted in ways beyond Earth (something like the universe in Immortel Ad Vitam gives an insight to it), that there is something for everybody. All you have to do is go down there and search for it. And try not to cross that line between 'operative' and 'renegade' while doing so. WellI guess, for the ones with imagination. The meat-heads just buy armour and bigger guns and sit in the bar remorselessly drinking over how many deadbeats they wasted this paycheck.
And the sci-fi element, totally controlled by SLA and Slayers agenda, whatever that is. WE know that the head honcho's have personal teleport beams and hardlight entertainment facilities and war-droids, and they don't actually need us, apart from the fact they are immortal and we are their popular entertainment channel for when they get bored and need some innovation. And thats us, and countless planets like us, upon which - so we are told - war rages.
Into dream go the Ebon, and being what they are, they bring back dreams of war. At least thats what the rulebooks say. But its short-hand you know it is, for so many countless things, Lovecraftian myths of horror lurking down below from the subconscious, safely packaged for consumer markets, its shorthand for all the other nasties that nobody sane dare write down, because planet Earth has orthodox Orwellian state mind control (and mind control technologies) and a war-on-terror budget that would psycheval probably most of us in here directly to the Bay.
_________________
Name: Rachel "Zel" Dauphinoir
Package: Kick Murder
Backstory: Musician & Therapist
Age: 20
THe technology in Mort is that they have Fax machines and they have glue. I guess they have photocopiers too. The most cost effective and hands on method of advertising is stickers. And posters. So there will be people employed to put posters and stickers everywhere advertising products and groups. People will also be doing this just simply to get their name known. Stickers can be made by anybody, a cult, a band, an operative, a corporate group, a media group. There will be stickers everywhere. They will be sticked on top of other stickers and peeling off where they have gone soggy in the rain. On top of this there will also be marker pen everywhere, tags and scrawl, like what happens. And gum stuck on everywhere too. Somebody else will be employed to scrape the gum and stickers off the walls and scrub the marker pen off or paint over it. Perhaps the same guy who is paid to stick the advertising stickers on the walls does this too. And pamphlets. There will be pamphlets and calling cards everywhere as well. And missing persons posters. This is the general background texture of the World of Progress.
_________________
Name: Rachel "Zel" Dauphinoir
Package: Kick Murder
Backstory: Musician & Therapist
Age: 20
This is what my mate who was a storyteller on wwwSLA.me website, had to say about the world of MORT;
GAMEKEEPER JIM JAMES (as XIMR):
I love the sci-fi gritty urban reinvention of the archetypal and classical mythology. Animal heads, the creatures in the illustrations - pictures tell a thousand words, I was inspired by these as much as the text. Minotaurs from the labyrinth below our feet. It is Lovecraftian, I found the nightmare cthulhonic powers sought by magi and cultists to be symbolised by the evolutionary cycles of aliens and entering the White space. It is R'lyeh dreamtime incarnate into scifi.
The first time I read the rulebook I came away with a different world to the intended one I discovered when I re-read it. I saw that:
By the writers and development team not having made it too 'exact' and 'defined' it is possible to interpret the same setting differently, so that layers of meaning are overlaid like layers of paint and grime on pot-holed tarmac streets and bullet-holed concrete infrastructure now doorless, windowless, inhabited by any who dare. Halloween Jack is not merely the pumpkin headed scythe wielding jester, a headless horseman of dark urban decay, he is the Bowie character who slides down a rope because the elevator is broke, from Diamond Dogs which wierdness when you first encounter it is awe inspiring, and that soundtrack, 1984, is caught up and woven into the mesh of SLA's morbid world. Layers of meaning and layers of world like a philip K dick distopia, like BLADE RUNNER hints at when you feel its textures and watch the background detail promising that this is a full world, you already know it. Layers like raggedy clothes worn as masks over bodies forgotten so hard they are sexless and devoid of any personality but for that which is painted onto them by the observers interpretation and whatever, whoever you have to be on the day. Multiple levels of reality so that the world is made up of syncronicities between them, and we interpret them as we need, as we can, if we can, if it has not all already freaked us out to the point of irrational insanity. Syncronicities between layers and contradictions between layers. It is a classic writers trick used for emphasis and ambience; orange ball in a blue room, blue ball in a blue room. This taught me so much! The multiple versions of a world built on the useless trash of yesterday because progress demands it, and yet for most, the vast majority shaping the hive mind, we cannot afford to live in that fresh new glossy consumer production line market that calls us failures if we are less than glossy consumer market production line people fresh out of our packaging. For the most of us we are scum and decay, making good of what we have which is to assemble broken dolls for our play, Sebastians Game, and these are frankenstien dolls with a mind of their own and no feelings to prevent them eating yours alive.
So the majority hide in their illusion, locked in behind closed doors and fearful that the world they are watching on television is the world they will find if they leave the comfort of their tv phone in mail order lifestyle. Because monsters climb and monsters crawl and they come through the walls. The brave few explore armed with guns they get the only way they can - sign on and join the corporation. For those who don't, they stew in the juices of their own madness, trapped in their boxes going stir crazy. You can feel it when you enter peoples houses, your head pops with the pressure of the mad paradigm maintained to protect their fragile egos from seeing through the veils of a confident voice on television and have to see the world as it truly is; chemical stained dirt and grime with no future at all and no past worth remembering.
This theme seems to spread like dry rot through all of the parallel versions of real until we are forced to face the reality that it is the reality, that everything else is built of yesterdays soggy hardboard,even the moods we thought represented us. So in this fugue of feeling alive and wanting to make a change, we surround ourselves with warriors and feel comradeship and pills, anything to change the rules, to shift the bleak human condition we are faced with.
I saw that the city is layers and layers and layers of rotting infrastructure with the new stuff on top and the old decaying down there beneath us full of mutants and hybrids, aliens and experiments, a place where lurking psychosis has gone to find others of its kind or as near as possible to it. Everything is going on down there, everything. Because each area of another persons madness that bends the walls and causes us to live within its hue while we step into its bubble, is hard to describe upon arising and so we stereotype in shorthand for the sake of appearing to be keeping it all together.
Im reading it again and its different this time also.
_________________
grew up watching monsters on tv, but the mirror says the monster is in me
mirror crackles shards as sharp as teeth, childhood hides screaming scars beneath
“Dad! Channel 66 says you’re dead! It showed your picture”
“I told you son, tv always lies”
I love the sci-fi gritty urban reinvention of the archetypal and classical mythology.
Animal heads, the creatures in the illustrations - pictures tell a thousand words, I was inspired by these as much as the text. Minotaurs from the labyrinth below our feet. It is Lovecraftian, I found the nightmare cthulhonic powers sought by magi and cultists to be symbolised by the evolutionary cycles of aliens and entering the White space. It is R'lyeh dreamtime incarnate into scifi.
The first time I read the rulebook I came away with a different world to the intended one I discovered when I re-read it. I saw that:
By the writers and development team not having made it too 'exact' and 'defined' it is possible to interpret the same setting differently, so that layers of meaning are overlaid like layers of paint and grime on pot-holed tarmac streets and bullet-holed concrete infrastructure now doorless, windowless, inhabited by any who dare. Halloween Jack is not merely the pumpkin headed scythe wielding jester, a headless horseman of dark urban decay, he is the Bowie character who slides down a rope because the elevator is broke, from Diamond Dogs which weirdness when you first encounter it is awe inspiring, and that soundtrack, 1984, is caught up and woven into the mesh of SLA's morbid world.
Layers of meaning and layers of world like a philip K dick distopia, like BLADE RUNNER hints at when you feel its textures and watch the background detail promising that this is a full world, you already know it. Layers like raggedy clothes worn as masks over bodies forgotten so hard they are sexless and devoid of any personality but for that which is painted onto them by the observers interpretation and whatever, whoever you have to be on the day. Multiple levels of reality so that the world is made up of syncronicities between them, and we interpret them as we need, as we can, if we can, if it has not all already freaked us out to the point of irrational insanity. Syncronicities between layers and contradictions between layers. It is a classic writers trick used for emphasis and ambience; orange ball in a blue room, blue ball in a blue room. This taught me so much!
The multiple versions of a world built on the useless trash of yesterday because progress demands it, and yet for most, the vast majority shaping the hive mind, we cannot afford to live in that fresh new glossy consumer production line market that calls us failures if we are less than glossy consumer market production line people fresh out of our packaging. For the most of us we are scum and decay, making good of what we have which is to assemble broken dolls for our play, Sebastians Game, and these are frankenstien dolls with a mind of their own and no feelings to prevent them eating yours alive.
So the majority hide in their illusion, locked in behind closed doors and fearful that the world they are watching on television is the world they will find if they leave the comfort of their tv phone in mail order lifestyle. Because monsters climb and monsters crawl and they come through the walls. The brave few explore armed with guns they get the only way they can - sign on and join the corporation. For those who don't, they stew in the juices of their own madness, trapped in their boxes going stir crazy. You can feel it when you enter peoples houses, your head pops with the pressure of the mad paradigm maintained to protect their fragile egos from seeing through the veils of a confident voice on television and have to see the world as it truly is; chemical stained dirt and grime with no future at all and no past worth remembering.
This theme seems to spread like dry rot through all of the parallel versions of real until we are forced to face the reality that it is the reality, that everything else is built of yesterdays soggy hardboard,even the moods we thought represented us. So in this fugue of feeling alive and wanting to make a change, we surround ourselves with warriors and feel comradeship and pills, anything to change the rules, to shift the bleak human condition we are faced with.
I saw that the city is layers and layers and layers of rotting infrastructure with the new stuff on top and the old decaying down there beneath us full of mutants and hybrids, aliens and experiments, a place where lurking psychosis has gone to find others of its kind or as near as possible to it.
Everything is going on down there, everything. Because each area of another persons madness that bends the walls and causes us to live within its hue while we step into its bubble, is hard to describe upon arising and so we stereotype in shorthand for the sake of appearing to be keeping it all together.
I'm reading it again and its different this time also.
And my head is popping again.
All of the electrical technology is sealed into a flexible translucent rubber wrapper to make it waterproof.
Plastic outer clothes are essential and far more stylish than the rain macs found on earth.
Because soap fumes are pumped into the atmosphere by industrial machines in the hearts of the cities, the rain often tastes of detergant and everything is clean.
There are awnings everywhere, and dry air blowers in shop doorways and in phone booths. Posh houses have them too, and tumble-dryers in the hall.
Wellington boots are the most popular footwear.
_________________
grew up watching monsters on tv, but the mirror says the monster is in me
mirror crackles shards as sharp as teeth, childhood hides screaming scars beneath
“Dad! Channel 66 says you’re dead! It showed your picture”
“I told you son, tv always lies”
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