It's another Mashup Monday!

I have a little spare time this morning, so let's see if we can't come up with a mashup post! I pulled two books at random from the shelves, and they are:

Volume 1 of Stan Sakai's classic Usagi Yojimbo, the tale of a wandering rabbit samurai.  

Ronald Hutton's Stations of the Sun, a handy one-volume woo-free history of British ritual and folk custom. 

So let's see what we've got! Opening Usagi Yojimbo to a random story, we get a tale in which Miyamoto Usagi finds himself resting at an inn full of drunken gamblers celebrating.

And in Hutton we've got a discussion of violence on St David's Day in the 16th and 17th centuries (English prejudice against the Welsh was a little more severe back then because there weren't enough Irish people to go around).

To the Welsh, of course, it was a matter for pride, symbolized by the wearing of a leek as a national emblem. It had been associated with St David since the Middle Ages ... the reasons for this are lost. What was always clear was that the sporting of it was always much more common among the Welsh when abroad than at home. ... 

 The same observer also recorded the response of the cockneys, 'not only by calling after them Taffey, Taffey or David, David, but also by hanging out all kinds of dolls and scarecrows with leeks on their head'. Five years later, in the City, Samuel Pepys encountered '(it being St David's Day) the picture of a man dressed like a Welshman, hanging by the neck upon one of the poles that stand out at the top of one of the merchant's houses, in full proportion and very handsomely done;.

Not surprisingly, all this gave rise to a great deal of fighting, so that in 1661 alone on Welsh gentleman stabbed a local commoner near Westminster, while the retinue of another got into a pitched battle with a London crowd.

 OK, so this writes itself, partly because Usagi Yojimbo always has very D&D-able stories -- it's about a dude who wanders from town to town looking for trouble, after all. So our heroes arrive in a big city -- it works best when it's a big city -- which has a minority or faction who are celebrating their special feast day (bonus points if they're cranky and hungry because their feast day is in Lent).

Roll d12:

1 - faction-identifying doodad coincidentally similar to distinctive item worn by PC (amulet, odd-coloured tie, animal familiar, etc.).
2 - drunk mob of Faction A insist that PCs join them in toast to downfall of Faction B, preferably within hearing of outnumbered and resentful B group.
3 - drunk mob of Faction B identify PC most likely to appear like member of their faction and berate him/her for lack of national/ethnic/religious/whatever spirit (e.g. "no real dwarf doesn't plait his beard on Saint Axebeard's Day!").
4 - innocuous charity-collecting process associated with celebration difficult to distinguish from being mugged by band of lunatics.
5 - restful stay at inn disrupted by boozy revelry; boozers interpret complaints as ethno-religious disparagement.
6 - neighbourhood/village bigwig offers prize for best-constructed offensively threatening caricature.
7 - traditional songs and dances performed on ethnic feast day encode legendary/magical knowledge now lost to modern culture but recognisable to e.g. Bard / PC with high Cthulhu Mythos.
8 - seemingly innocuous bardic song understood as containing coded references to ethnic tensions.
9 - embattled members of either faction offer to hire tough-looking strangers to guard / assist with their festival processions. Big fight with antagonists in antic disguises.
10 - wandering swordsman with sore feet has had 9 encounters with drunk faction mobs and will stab a fool at encounter 10.
11 - traditional Faction B festival costumes provide convenient opportunity to infiltrate thing worthy of infiltration but invite assaults from drunken mobs of Faction A.
12 - local muckamuck wants prominent member of Faction B dead/arrested but too cowardly to risk offending on feast day; hires ignorant out-of-town bounty hunters instead.

The long-awaited return of Mashup Monday!

It's been a busy week, but one that has been marked by the acquisition of some new books I'm excited about reading. To celebrate, let's do another mashup exercise.

Lyuba Vinogradova's Defending the Motherland is about female Soviet fighter pilots during WWII and Werewolf Histories, edited by Willem de Blecourt, is a collection of academic papers about werewolf beliefs in (mostly?) medieval Europe. I haven't read either of them yet. Let's open them, flip through a bit, and see what we can find.

"They encountered two German motorcyclists on the road. One was busy repairing his motorcycle and the other pointed at their bundles, where, he was guessing, there would be food. Glafira was distraught, and began very slowly to untie her load, at the bottom of which there was a gun. While this was going on, Sonya pulled out her own pistol, shot the German, ran over to the other one and shot him twice at point-blank range. The women dashed into the bushes and ran away as fast as they could."

OK, that's a promising start. Let's see about the werewolf book. 

"The marginalised family Kramp fitted all too well into the image of rebellious devilish shape-shifters and most horrible villains, who had violated godly and familial order. ... No one could blame the lord of Schmidtheim for rooting out these beasts. Clearly, Reinhard the Younger had two aims: firstly, to gain sovereignty from Blankenheim, and secondly to gain lordly prerogatives in Schmidtheim."

This all sounds quite WFRP-y, or for that matter my-D&D-game-y. So in order to eliminate a family of political rivals -- or just local troublemakers who are making his life difficult -- a jumped-up local lord accuses them of being werewolves, forcing them to go on the lam. The only problem is that they actually are werewolves. Or perhaps in true classic horror-comic style they aren't werewolves, but are merely highly-trained assassins who are cutting the throats of every hapless son of a bitch waving a sprig of wolfsbane at them? If you want to use that angle, vampires is funnier.

Or maybe being accused of werewolfism is like bad-jacketing; if someone accuses you of being a werewolf, you're screwed. So screwed that the werewolves will come along and offer to "help." Either way what you get is two young daughters wandering along the side of the read with their bindles and occasionally ripping the throats out of soldiers. Works for me.

Mashup Monday (belated): Bookshelf packing edition

As I may have previously mentioned once or twice, I am currently getting ready to move house. That means that many -- indeed, most -- of my books are packed up. Nothing daunted, I'm going to do another two-thing mashup post because my creativity is at a low ebb. Let's do it.

Opening these books to random pages, we find the following passages:

The term 'monkey-handler' is not to be taken literally, but is probably the late Eighteenth-Dynasty equivalent of 'shyster'. It goes without saying that the real handlers of monkeys can have done nothing to merit such an unjust reputation. There are other colourful expressions in this text, which Horemheb may well have picked up during his army career.

 A promising start! Let's look at the next one:

In our District and Experience ... we find Riots and dangerous affrays among foreign seamen (many of whom continue on shore until they are destitute and then seek a support by plunder) the most prevalent offences and most difficult to be prevented. Discharged merchant seamen, their pockets bulging with pay, encouraged other forms of offences. 'Street robberies and particularly larceny from the person (chiefly committed on seafaring people)' appeared the most prevalent forms of crime in the Whitechapel district of Regency London ...

 OK, so clearly what we have here is a dishonest monkey handler who has trained his monkey to pick the pockets of sailors on shore. That's all very well and good -- and it would be a fun ability to give a rogue, for that matter -- but let us, instead, agree with the spirit if not the letter of the first piece and assume that the monkey-handler is the victim here.

OK, so sailors are a shady bunch in general, right? The cult of Cthulhu had lots of sailor members and seems to have employed them as assassins, and that's leaving out all the purely mundane smugglers, pirates, drug-runners and fugitives you get among sailors in various eras.

So our monkey-handler sends his little pal to swipe something from a sailor, but instead of the usual embroidered handkerchief, scrimshaw keepsake or roll of coins he comes up with something sensitive, something that reveals an important upcoming rite of the cult of Cthulhu. When the terrified swabby realises he's lost something incriminating, he immediately puts two and two together, and he and his buddies (maybe not even cultists, just outraged shipmates) hunt the otherwise-harmless rogue through the streets of Port Said with big knives. So when a frantic monkey comes running into the tea-house where the PCs are planning their next excavation ...

Easy-peasy, although it works a little better if your PCs have an inherent reason to care if a monkey handler gets knifed up. It's not hard to introduce the monkey guy in advance, though, because after all a monkey handler is a fun street-contact NPC in any fantasy or historical setting. Heck, you could even do it in Vampire and make any player who spent points on Animalism eternally grateful.

It's Mashup Monday!

With a lot of projects about 75% complete, I am turning to my bookshelves to provide inspiration for today's post. I'm gonna pull out two books and see where they lead me. I close my eyes, grab at the shelves and what do I find?

Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs, a fascinating collection of interviews with Americans who have different jobs. 

... and an issue of Fortean Times in which Ian "Cat" Vincent talks about the idea of Slenderman being a tulpa, a being created by the thoughts of those who discuss him online, which was also not quite the plot of an episode of Supernatural.

Let's get in there and see what we've got. First, an account by a woman who is a homicide detective:

And this is what I mean about these muthafuckas. ... he looks at me and he says, "You know what, Officer Childs?" He say, "I'm not angry or upset with you. Because I just love the way you got me." And then he smiles and he says, "You know? In another time and place you coulda been my woman."

Aggggghh! You know? This job makes it hard on relationships, and whatever -- I ain't even going to go into that -- but that hurt. Like, how do I always get chose by killers? Men who have absolutely nothin' going for themselves? Aggggh! [Laughs] You know? "In another place and time, you could have been my woman!" I just don't believe this. A heroin addict killer old man. That's who's comin' on to me. [Laughs] I just say, "Okay, Mr Boyce. All right."

Our second extract is the tulpa section I mentioned before.

So -- we have a vain murderer who fancies himself a ladies' man, and we have a tulpa originating from the collective belief of credulous young people on the internet. Please note that Vincent is aware that this is not what a tulpa actually means in Tibetan Buddhism, but the David-Neel meaning has (I'm sorry) taken on a life of its own.

And now, a scenario seed for a modern day occult/paranormal game:

Lefty Sloane

Like a whirlwind, Lefty Sloane is tearing through the Heights, taking over rackets, muscling out punks and thumbing his nose at the law. In a few short months, he's become king of the hill. There's only one problem: Lefty Sloane is twenty years older than this new kid, and rotting in a cell to boot. Talk to Kowalski in Robbery, he'll tell you Lefty Sloane was a bum and a junkie with nothing but a big mouth.

It's the big mouth that's the problem -- over years of telling the tales of his greatness, Lefty's actually come to believe them. Locked up in the Gardens with nothing to do but spin tales, silver-tongued Lefty's got the whole prison population thrilling to his tales of the good old days, when he romanced beautiful women, pulled off daring heists, smacked any fool who talked shit to him in the mouth, and fought the cops when they came after him. And now, that Lefty is on the loose in the form of a tulpa. 

But why now? Is it something to do with the drugs Lefty's on -- and how are they getting into the prison anyway? Does something in the Gardens focus these dreams in some way? And how can Lefty's tulpa be stopped, given that part of his whole deal is that he takes shit from no cop?