lessthanpleased

Dude, I’m in the middle of finals week, so I’m a bit scattered.

If, in a week, the con hasn’t happened, I’ll be more than happy to come up with some ideas based on your hook.

You could, however, take the easy way out: use a Scenario from WEEP, the UA book of one-shots.

I’ve played in a few and run a few, and they’re frickin’ incredible at getting newbies into the world. I’m sure you’ve already read it or own it, but if you wanna run a game at a convention, look at the One-Shot “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” (I could be a bit off on the title).

If you don’t hook all of the newbies with it, I’ll be shocked.

If, however, you wanna run an original one-shot, then just post and, if you still need help in a week, then I’m in.

Just a few thoughts…. It’s hard to get newbies into the game, and that scenario, along with “Jailbreak,” are written to hook players on UA by the creators of the game.

neal hebert=neal hebert

“The Kingdom” is what “Kingdom Hospital” is based on.

Pretty cool stuff, btw.

lessthanpleased=lessthanpleased

lessthanpleased here…

The problem, of course, with going with taut definitions of postmodernism is that, in defining it, one misses the point that postmodernism is trying to get at. I’m a graduate student in philosophy at LSU in Louisiana, and I quite like the “postmodern attitude” in the UA magick system.

Check out Thomas McEvilley’s excellent article “what is at stake in the culture wars” which can be found in an anthology of art criticism called “beauty is nowhere” (the no caps in both titles are intentional). When I first started playing UA, my GM asked me for some good research on what exactly postmodernism is.

Of course, defining it kinda ruins what it’s getting at. McEvilley has a pretty good idea of how to explain it: he simply describes the shift from Modernism to Post-modernism in the artistic scene, finding the point of departure that is used by Derrida, Nancy, Deleuze, et al. in their work, which is so varied that it is almost a disservice to lump them all together as simply falling under a “postmodern” label.

With all due respect to sophist, postmodernists are still fighting modern fights, but using old tools in new ways: picking apart language to find the structures beneath it that inform it and define it as in Derrida, power matrices in Adorno, the list goes on. But ultimately, the principle tenet in a lot of the postmodern authors seems to be a rejection of absolutes in favor of paradox and illogic, refuting reason in favor of intuition.

So, the magick system in UA has to have “rules” for game mechanics, but these rules seem to be intuitive to the mages as part and parcel to the magick they do. Furthermore, compare lots of the “postmodern” schools to Mechanomancy and Narco-Alchemy: they are quite different, and represent adherence to different societal viewpoints. In the Renaissance, Cartesian Rationalism was new and exciting; now, its Foucault who’s the new guy, and Descartes is old news.

These postmodern schools are responces to an incredibly rational and codified system of magick that has persisted in the collective unconscious since the Renaissance, and it is only after WWI and WWII that these new schools developed: the same events that inspired many of the postmodern writers that we study to reject the rationalism that came before them.

So, that’s my feedback. Hope it helps. Email it to me at lessthanpleased@yahoo.com

I guess I do have one more thing: all of the professors I know who study and use postmodernism as an intellectual tool say the following:

“the postmodern is a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.”

lessthanpleased=lessthanpleased