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gogollescentI'm about a year in the red on one of these and under 24 hours distant from the other. I played both with my partner, uskglass, over video call.
The first was ECH0, a GM-less storygame by Role Over Play Dead first introduced to me by Friends at the Table, in a worldbuilding episode for their third sci-fi/mecha campaign, Partizan.
The second, "Debrief," by Paracelsus Games, is a LARP that requires players to go in unspoiled, the better to play characters working from limited information to achieve competing goals. If you're interested, it's available online for free here. I think the website description is pretty complete; it's spy noir with a side of urban fantasy, relationship-driven, and a hell of a lot of emotionally harrowing fun if that's your cup of tea, as it is mine.
Again I'm going to start by linkinguskglass's review, which also includes a writeup of another Paracelsus Games LARP, "Drink Me." I am not writing up Drink Me today because, while it was amazing, I don't know what I can say about accidentally enabling the creation of a god-empress with her brother on a psychic shock collar in my, Dorian Gray's, body. In her defense: it was immortal and she liked it better. In my defense: Dorian Gray is not that bright.
My Debrief character, George Russell, was also a bit of a plodder. This first sank home for me while reading his (extensive!) backstory, in which he manages to overlook 1) his best friend's feelings for him 2) his feelings for his best friend and 3) his best friend's defection to the KGB, at least until Robert Alderidge shows up dead in a West Berlin alley with a pocketful of names and descriptions of British agents. But it really sank home when I actually sat down to play him, and realized that this was a person who desperately wanted to be smarter than he was exactly because he thought his foolish earnestness (or was it stubborn, self-serving complacency?) had led him to fail his friend.
Early in the conversation, Alderidge accused Russell of having been in denial; I really felt the intensity of Russell's desire to respond with a cold set-down or comeback, only for him to grind out "I never knew." In, as Alderidge was quick to point out but not quicker than Russell to realize, exactly the sort of wounded, manly, actually self-pitying and self-excusing tone that only passes for stoic by social consensus: the "look what you've made me do" of emotional nondisclosures. And then did I ever feel his shame and relief: shame, because he'd managed to surprise and disappoint Alderidge at a time when all the disappointment should have been on his side, and relief, because the vulnerability he couldn't hide was working. Alderidge was guilty. Alderidge was on the defensive. Otherwise he wouldn't have said such things! Thought them, according to the logic of Russell's envious heart, but never said them.
SO... THAT'S FRIENDSHIP... that's love, baby. It was a very "that's love" kind of story. The backstories as written put a fair amount of emphasis on the existence of an "ectoplasmic disruptor" that can destroy spirits for good; this took more of a back seat in our playthrough and especially in my Russell's mind because he just didn't want to think about it, and could only even mouth the line about "a great humanitarian advance" if he kept it out of direct view. Alderidge was more interested, in a somewhat fantastical, displaced way that spoke to his lifelong identification with the unquiet dead, saying things like, "That's what I want. I want an L-pill, for me and my fellow agents. One that works." To Russell the comparison was incomprehensible because, a spirit medium, he had never viewed death as annihilation: "An L-pill is a change of state." It didn't come up again explicitly in the conversation, but I had the sense that by the end of it he had gone from trying to persuade himself of the disruptor's value, even as a last recourse, to rejecting it out of hand.
Which wasn't the only change of mind.uskglass talks in his post about Alderidge challenging Russell to actually deny the Communist ideal, rather than the earthly regime, and Russell admitting that he couldn't. In addition to being a major emotional turning point for Russell, I got the sense it was something of a Pyrrhic victory for Alderidge-- but more on that in a moment.
The following is paraphrased rather than an attempt at an exact transcript:
ALDERIDGE: Would you do it? Take Dora and the children? Go on, [friendly] imagine. Door's open! You can just walk through.
RUSSELL: [short silence] Yes. Yes, in a heartbeat. Who wouldn't? Finally, something to be proud of; something I could explain to my children, something I'd be glad to pass on my share in. [bitter sarcasm] Something equal, something just, something guaranteed.
ALDERIDGE: [smile] Well there you are.
So again Russell tried to fling surrender in Alderidge's face-- only admitting the opposite, this time: not helpless ignorance, but understanding and empathy. The reason I say this was a bit of a Pyrrhic victory for Alderidge is because I think it was a moment they both realized that they had, differently, convinced themselves that it was enough to have this dream in secret, and procrastinated any of the saying or the doing. Russell inarguably had; but Alderidge, in his work for the USSR that bore so little relationship to the utopia he sincerely desired, his secret life and now secret death, had also given up the chance to talk to the person closest to him about it-- had believed all the time that Russell must give this answer, but hadn't believed it enough to ask.
What Alderidge would and wouldn't ask for became the last struggle before the hour limit, as the ideological hammer-and-tongs melted away. He implied that he had used his position both to protect and target Russell ("you were the sacrificial lamb") and asked Russell to resign before the bill came due; Russell negotiated for the names of Alderidge's network of moles within MI6 but was left, in the end, in the stunned awareness that he had agreed to his side of the bargain, not as a tactic, but because he no longer had any desire to stay with the Service. (I will say this was a trend with Russell's half-baked attempts at duplicity generally, including his vaguely-ideated opening gambit of offering to conceal Alderidge's identity for the sake of his nieces and nephew, a request Alderidge voiced before he could get a word in edgewise-- and in so doing, made Russell realize that he had no ability to go through the charade. If he made the offer-- as he shortly did-- it would only be with every intention of carrying it out.) So Russell came to terms with the fact that he wanted to get out, and that Alderidge's betrayal had destroyed his sense of duty and purpose-- not, as he tells himself in the backstory text, because their friendship wasn't real, but because he had been using their real friendship as an emotional crutch to lend meaning to futile conflict. But the more he realized that getting out was the best thing for himself and his family, the more he also saw that it wouldn't, on its own, bring Alderidge peace; after all, it wasn't for Alderidge. It was for him.
So the conversation came full circle to the matter of what Russell didn't know and Alderidge couldn't say. The unfairness of the situation-- that Russell should have seen him more clearly, that Alderidge should have had more time to try-- suddenly mattered less to either of them than allowing Alderidge to move on. Russell began with the well-intentioned "I'll try to channel you again, however many times it takes," in the spirit of offering rather than demanding more. But at the first crack in Alderidge's supposed indifference to his own fate-- his mention of the Billie Holiday song "I'll Be Seeing You," as a private reference Russell could use to convince Alderidge's wife, Jean, that they had really spoken; also implicitly a desire to achieve the peaceful dispersion granted spirits who pass on (the chestnut trees, the wishing well...)-- that intention flew out the window, and Russell started outright begging him to ask, to make himself understood, however he could.
They had this parting exchange, transcribed byuskglass in his post:
ALDERIDGE: [long silence] ... Do you remember Arthur and Lancelot?
RUSSELL: Yes.
ALDERIDGE: What do you think Lancelot would ask Arthur to do?
RUSSELL: [silence] ... [quietly, with a carefully steady voice] He would ask Arthur if he could bear him up. ... If he could carry him. To the highest point. So he could see every part of the isle. From his green bier.
[...]
ALDERIDGE: -- [thin smile] Then I release you from your duty, sir. You've served well. Put your weapons back on the wall.
RUSSELL: [silence]
ALDERIDGE: And George, by the way, I lied earlier. [laughs] --You look great.
ECH0 and Debrief both draw on genres that trade in anti-war themes while also romanticizing the practice and practitioners of war. Of the two, I would say that ECH0 is a lot more explicitly and thoughtfully pacifist in intention, but that Debrief makes a powerful point as a semi-accidental consequence of the immersion and interpersonal reckoning required. At least it did for me; I went in with the intent of doing justice to the real, incompatible loyalties and values on the line and quickly realized how frail of an emotional bulwark those were (though fiercely clung to as a result) against the fact of a loved one's imminent passing.
Of all the writing in Russell's backstory, the line I found most honest was his furious, dismissive, and unintentionally funny evaluation of Alderidge's corpse: Dead, he was not a handsome man.... He looked like an ordinary middle-aged dead guy, with blood splattered onto his fashionable suit. It made me think immediately of how much power the sight of Alderidge's spirit would have over him, with its lifelike animation and gestures. Bickering and wasting time and invoking the lives of strangers was all performance next to that. That's the selfishness of love, and there's a reason people balk when it's presented as only redemptive. But the fact is that it is redemptive, in the literal sense of claiming what was lost.
Toward the end, Russell asked Alderidge where he went wrong. It's a question that has a literal answer in Alderidge's backstory (Russell convinced Alderidge to engage in hazing and bullying at Weston for the sake of getting by as upperclassmen, and lost his trust in so doing), butuskglass had Alderidge reply, obliquely but still truthfully, that Russell "gave him the rush; got him hooked on being liked." Which is a very Alderidge framing of being denied unconditional love. As you see, Russell gave it another shot.
uskglass, over video call.The first was ECH0, a GM-less storygame by Role Over Play Dead first introduced to me by Friends at the Table, in a worldbuilding episode for their third sci-fi/mecha campaign, Partizan.
ECH0 technically requires three or more players: the premise has plural children find one (1) ECH0 drive, a black box encoded with the memory and consciousness of a dead mech pilot, years or centuries after the end of the war they fought in. The children then carry the ECH0 drive to various historical crash sites in an effort to reunite it with its former armor, Goldilocks-style. (I'm sure this is the plot of Goldilocks.) The ECH0 drive has limited battery, giving the game a fixed endpoint in the form of the pilot's final farewell.
In the FATT episode, the children's numbers advantage also tends to weight the story in their favor: the peaceful present recasts past atrocities as incongruous, even absurd, and the oblivious cheer of the young protagonists both prevents the pilot from losing themselves in memory and also makes powering-down seem like a last respite from babysitting. Although ECH0 is very open-ended as to tone and content -- the game materials consist basically just of some story prompts and a recommended structure -- I think the FATT version cleaves fairly close to the intent of the makers in its emphasis on the genuinely transformative power of time, the smallness of ideology and war beside the continuity of human life, and the mercy inherent in being forgotten.
It's instantly different as a two-player game. A ghost story about a living child and a dead adult feels, from the get-go, more dangerous and higher-stakes; multiple children have the power to turn almost anything into a mascot, but one child is automatically fighting for legitimacy, recognition, and respect, even if-- maybe especially if-- those are things the adult wants to offer freely. Moreover the adult ghost is, in a sense, just the most extreme form of the threat any adult represents to a child: that of the future being swallowed up by someone else's memories.
uskglass in his excellent review talks in depth about the writing decisions that went into his character, Carlo, the 11yo son of two colonists on a newly-occupied planet and a budding mech aficionado; I'll just say that Carlo was not an externally-characterized icon of innocence and hope, as children often do function in these narratives. Instead he was proud, anxious, mistrustful, and hopeful-- hopeful for himself, that is, in spite of stormclouds on the horizon, and not for any larger world he had to redeem.
I played Alice (callsign "Gorgon"), once an ace on the losing side-- but a proven "survivor" whose squadron was among the last to be picked off. She and her captain died together in a suicide mission to destroy one of their side's abandoned military bases, the better to deprive the enemy of it; this at her captain's behest, which she enabled more than obeyed. I didn't have to decide her real name until almost the end of the story, but I knew she was born, herself, on an asteroid colony rather than on the planet she fought to defend, and that she therefore had the personal self-consciousness and reticence of a young, undereducated "provincial" soldier who grew up in a time when war had already sucked social support and resources away from the political periphery and who would live to see the center sacrificed as well. In some ways, she woke up to a situation like that in which she died: with the war already lost, and her only companion obsessed with a fantasy of daring operations and individual heroism.
Except that those fantasies meant very different things to her captain and to Carlo. But with Carlo, like her captain, Alice found it easy to nod along. Her first dose of reality didn't come until he took her to see a half-submerged mech that had clearly seen multiple visits from salvage teams-- and had released toxic waste into the surrounding land and water. Suddenly Alice stopped seeing her powerlessness as a convenient pretext for nonaction and started to see it as powerlessness. Still, disembodied ghost that she was, she thought her best levers on Carlo were his curiosity and admiration for her persona as "unsentimental, battle-tried ace"; she tried, clumsily, to preserve that persona even as she voiced her concerns. She didn't want to get him killed either by encouraging him or alienating him at a time when his explorer's impulse had already been roused. She didn't know what it was that she wanted, as a dead woman; but not that.
That ambivalent and somewhat cowardly stance took them as far as a school trip to the nearest city (Carlo's family ranched on the occupation's arid frontier). There, despite rumblings of a protest that threatened to interrupt the bus schedule, they saw a second mech-cum-memorial outside the museum, which had belonged to one of the winning side's most famous pilots, Ramirez, supposedly killed in action-- actually, to Alice's knowledge, a defector who murdered his co-pilot Jordan Kim in order to fake his own death and disappear into the opposition's ranks. She knew just a little more about his motives: he suffered from a degenerative terminal illness that had initially seemed like as good a reason as any to join up, but he came to feel that he had only succeeded in making his last years terrifying. He then caught wind of a rumor that Perseus, one of Alice's mentors and a hero of the opposition, had access to cutting-edge assistive technology to accommodate a learning disability-- technology that made the user experience subjective time dilation. If Ramirez couldn't live longer, it was the next best thing.
I'll quoteuskglass's description of Carlo's reaction: They had an exchange where he first claimed—with cynical feigned middle school cool—that if he were Ramirez, he'd do something else with his time, like maybe learn to cook. Alice praised his wisdom, which possibly was his motivation to go back on it: and more candidly admit, minutes later as a non sequitur, that wasn't true—he would've done it too. He would've done it in a heartbeat.
uskglass is responsible for all of the worldbuilding concerning the occupying forces, the terrain of the planet, and the rediscovered mechs, as well as the fact of Perseus's dyscalculia (established via Carlo's encyclopedic memory for trivia about history-making aces and cautious, unspoken identification). On the other hand, the story of Ramirez was my invention as a player. I neither wanted to tell a story about a sick person driven to villainy by their sickness, nor about a deserter whose sympathetic fear of death is placed beyond the pale when they resort to the unsporting kind of violence, like in a Marvel movie. Instead I hoped that the obscenity of Kim's death could put a black spotlight on the strength of Ramirez's desire to live under pressure to accept destruction. I was touched when Carlo and Alice's conversation dwelled most on Ramirez' original decision to join up.
(As an aside: It was interesting to try to characterize Alice through discussion of her absent peers without directly touching on her own relationships with them. Carlo, though old enough to be interested in Alice and to see her increasingly as a full person, was not quite old enough to wonder or theorize about her social connections in the same way, and Alice wasn't about to volunteer-- both as part of her fumbling effort to remember, and maintain, appropriate boundaries with a child, but also for the sake of her dignity. Nonetheless the codenames "Perseus" and "Gorgon" for an experienced soldier and his protege suggest a fairly dark joke somewhere down the line, maybe about a regression in tactics forced by the course of the war or else about the perceived relationship between successive generations of troops; but to Carlo they were a matched set of mythological names, no more or less. And I found myself thinking after the fact about Alice's status as one of the last cohort of recruits must have given her empathy for Ramirez's original, fatalistic motive for joining up-- the knowledge that your personal world is ending need not differ much from the suspicion that your whole civilization is.)
In the last act of the game, Carlo snuck away from teacher supervision to investigate a nearby protest and discovered that protestors had gathered around the appropriated and built-over remains of (seemingly) Alice's own mech, chanting "Bring her home!" I have rarely been as stressed or as focused in an RP context as I was playing Alice trying to guide Carlo back to the museum, past police lines and tear gas, as a disembodied voice on a lanyard. Then again, I've rarely (not never -- more on that below) played a character who knew they were at the end of the line. And she was. The battery was almost drained.
For Alice, then, this game was learning the difference between as good as dead and dead. She went from living with the belief that her predestined early death made her choices meaningless, to feeling that her afterlife was more of the same, to suddenly discovering that she had a great deal of power and responsibility after all: a great deal relative to what she was about to have, that is. It's one thing to feel that you've been given more time you need to make an end; it's another to experience death as a frustrating, random interruption to business that could never be finished, because life's business never is. So I was happy for her. And becauseuskglass and I are both saps, we decided that there was just enough battery left for Alice and Carlo to catch their breath together after he made it back to the museum, where he hadn't even been missed-- and he set the ECH0 drive down by his feet so she could listen to the pigeons.
In the FATT episode, the children's numbers advantage also tends to weight the story in their favor: the peaceful present recasts past atrocities as incongruous, even absurd, and the oblivious cheer of the young protagonists both prevents the pilot from losing themselves in memory and also makes powering-down seem like a last respite from babysitting. Although ECH0 is very open-ended as to tone and content -- the game materials consist basically just of some story prompts and a recommended structure -- I think the FATT version cleaves fairly close to the intent of the makers in its emphasis on the genuinely transformative power of time, the smallness of ideology and war beside the continuity of human life, and the mercy inherent in being forgotten.
It's instantly different as a two-player game. A ghost story about a living child and a dead adult feels, from the get-go, more dangerous and higher-stakes; multiple children have the power to turn almost anything into a mascot, but one child is automatically fighting for legitimacy, recognition, and respect, even if-- maybe especially if-- those are things the adult wants to offer freely. Moreover the adult ghost is, in a sense, just the most extreme form of the threat any adult represents to a child: that of the future being swallowed up by someone else's memories.
uskglass in his excellent review talks in depth about the writing decisions that went into his character, Carlo, the 11yo son of two colonists on a newly-occupied planet and a budding mech aficionado; I'll just say that Carlo was not an externally-characterized icon of innocence and hope, as children often do function in these narratives. Instead he was proud, anxious, mistrustful, and hopeful-- hopeful for himself, that is, in spite of stormclouds on the horizon, and not for any larger world he had to redeem. I played Alice (callsign "Gorgon"), once an ace on the losing side-- but a proven "survivor" whose squadron was among the last to be picked off. She and her captain died together in a suicide mission to destroy one of their side's abandoned military bases, the better to deprive the enemy of it; this at her captain's behest, which she enabled more than obeyed. I didn't have to decide her real name until almost the end of the story, but I knew she was born, herself, on an asteroid colony rather than on the planet she fought to defend, and that she therefore had the personal self-consciousness and reticence of a young, undereducated "provincial" soldier who grew up in a time when war had already sucked social support and resources away from the political periphery and who would live to see the center sacrificed as well. In some ways, she woke up to a situation like that in which she died: with the war already lost, and her only companion obsessed with a fantasy of daring operations and individual heroism.
Except that those fantasies meant very different things to her captain and to Carlo. But with Carlo, like her captain, Alice found it easy to nod along. Her first dose of reality didn't come until he took her to see a half-submerged mech that had clearly seen multiple visits from salvage teams-- and had released toxic waste into the surrounding land and water. Suddenly Alice stopped seeing her powerlessness as a convenient pretext for nonaction and started to see it as powerlessness. Still, disembodied ghost that she was, she thought her best levers on Carlo were his curiosity and admiration for her persona as "unsentimental, battle-tried ace"; she tried, clumsily, to preserve that persona even as she voiced her concerns. She didn't want to get him killed either by encouraging him or alienating him at a time when his explorer's impulse had already been roused. She didn't know what it was that she wanted, as a dead woman; but not that.
That ambivalent and somewhat cowardly stance took them as far as a school trip to the nearest city (Carlo's family ranched on the occupation's arid frontier). There, despite rumblings of a protest that threatened to interrupt the bus schedule, they saw a second mech-cum-memorial outside the museum, which had belonged to one of the winning side's most famous pilots, Ramirez, supposedly killed in action-- actually, to Alice's knowledge, a defector who murdered his co-pilot Jordan Kim in order to fake his own death and disappear into the opposition's ranks. She knew just a little more about his motives: he suffered from a degenerative terminal illness that had initially seemed like as good a reason as any to join up, but he came to feel that he had only succeeded in making his last years terrifying. He then caught wind of a rumor that Perseus, one of Alice's mentors and a hero of the opposition, had access to cutting-edge assistive technology to accommodate a learning disability-- technology that made the user experience subjective time dilation. If Ramirez couldn't live longer, it was the next best thing.
I'll quote
uskglass's description of Carlo's reaction: They had an exchange where he first claimed—with cynical feigned middle school cool—that if he were Ramirez, he'd do something else with his time, like maybe learn to cook. Alice praised his wisdom, which possibly was his motivation to go back on it: and more candidly admit, minutes later as a non sequitur, that wasn't true—he would've done it too. He would've done it in a heartbeat.uskglass is responsible for all of the worldbuilding concerning the occupying forces, the terrain of the planet, and the rediscovered mechs, as well as the fact of Perseus's dyscalculia (established via Carlo's encyclopedic memory for trivia about history-making aces and cautious, unspoken identification). On the other hand, the story of Ramirez was my invention as a player. I neither wanted to tell a story about a sick person driven to villainy by their sickness, nor about a deserter whose sympathetic fear of death is placed beyond the pale when they resort to the unsporting kind of violence, like in a Marvel movie. Instead I hoped that the obscenity of Kim's death could put a black spotlight on the strength of Ramirez's desire to live under pressure to accept destruction. I was touched when Carlo and Alice's conversation dwelled most on Ramirez' original decision to join up.(As an aside: It was interesting to try to characterize Alice through discussion of her absent peers without directly touching on her own relationships with them. Carlo, though old enough to be interested in Alice and to see her increasingly as a full person, was not quite old enough to wonder or theorize about her social connections in the same way, and Alice wasn't about to volunteer-- both as part of her fumbling effort to remember, and maintain, appropriate boundaries with a child, but also for the sake of her dignity. Nonetheless the codenames "Perseus" and "Gorgon" for an experienced soldier and his protege suggest a fairly dark joke somewhere down the line, maybe about a regression in tactics forced by the course of the war or else about the perceived relationship between successive generations of troops; but to Carlo they were a matched set of mythological names, no more or less. And I found myself thinking after the fact about Alice's status as one of the last cohort of recruits must have given her empathy for Ramirez's original, fatalistic motive for joining up-- the knowledge that your personal world is ending need not differ much from the suspicion that your whole civilization is.)
In the last act of the game, Carlo snuck away from teacher supervision to investigate a nearby protest and discovered that protestors had gathered around the appropriated and built-over remains of (seemingly) Alice's own mech, chanting "Bring her home!" I have rarely been as stressed or as focused in an RP context as I was playing Alice trying to guide Carlo back to the museum, past police lines and tear gas, as a disembodied voice on a lanyard. Then again, I've rarely (not never -- more on that below) played a character who knew they were at the end of the line. And she was. The battery was almost drained.
For Alice, then, this game was learning the difference between as good as dead and dead. She went from living with the belief that her predestined early death made her choices meaningless, to feeling that her afterlife was more of the same, to suddenly discovering that she had a great deal of power and responsibility after all: a great deal relative to what she was about to have, that is. It's one thing to feel that you've been given more time you need to make an end; it's another to experience death as a frustrating, random interruption to business that could never be finished, because life's business never is. So I was happy for her. And because
uskglass and I are both saps, we decided that there was just enough battery left for Alice and Carlo to catch their breath together after he made it back to the museum, where he hadn't even been missed-- and he set the ECH0 drive down by his feet so she could listen to the pigeons.The second, "Debrief," by Paracelsus Games, is a LARP that requires players to go in unspoiled, the better to play characters working from limited information to achieve competing goals. If you're interested, it's available online for free here. I think the website description is pretty complete; it's spy noir with a side of urban fantasy, relationship-driven, and a hell of a lot of emotionally harrowing fun if that's your cup of tea, as it is mine.
Again I'm going to start by linking
uskglass's review, which also includes a writeup of another Paracelsus Games LARP, "Drink Me." I am not writing up Drink Me today because, while it was amazing, I don't know what I can say about accidentally enabling the creation of a god-empress with her brother on a psychic shock collar in my, Dorian Gray's, body. In her defense: it was immortal and she liked it better. In my defense: Dorian Gray is not that bright.My Debrief character, George Russell, was also a bit of a plodder. This first sank home for me while reading his (extensive!) backstory, in which he manages to overlook 1) his best friend's feelings for him 2) his feelings for his best friend and 3) his best friend's defection to the KGB, at least until Robert Alderidge shows up dead in a West Berlin alley with a pocketful of names and descriptions of British agents. But it really sank home when I actually sat down to play him, and realized that this was a person who desperately wanted to be smarter than he was exactly because he thought his foolish earnestness (or was it stubborn, self-serving complacency?) had led him to fail his friend.
Early in the conversation, Alderidge accused Russell of having been in denial; I really felt the intensity of Russell's desire to respond with a cold set-down or comeback, only for him to grind out "I never knew." In, as Alderidge was quick to point out but not quicker than Russell to realize, exactly the sort of wounded, manly, actually self-pitying and self-excusing tone that only passes for stoic by social consensus: the "look what you've made me do" of emotional nondisclosures. And then did I ever feel his shame and relief: shame, because he'd managed to surprise and disappoint Alderidge at a time when all the disappointment should have been on his side, and relief, because the vulnerability he couldn't hide was working. Alderidge was guilty. Alderidge was on the defensive. Otherwise he wouldn't have said such things! Thought them, according to the logic of Russell's envious heart, but never said them.
SO... THAT'S FRIENDSHIP... that's love, baby. It was a very "that's love" kind of story. The backstories as written put a fair amount of emphasis on the existence of an "ectoplasmic disruptor" that can destroy spirits for good; this took more of a back seat in our playthrough and especially in my Russell's mind because he just didn't want to think about it, and could only even mouth the line about "a great humanitarian advance" if he kept it out of direct view. Alderidge was more interested, in a somewhat fantastical, displaced way that spoke to his lifelong identification with the unquiet dead, saying things like, "That's what I want. I want an L-pill, for me and my fellow agents. One that works." To Russell the comparison was incomprehensible because, a spirit medium, he had never viewed death as annihilation: "An L-pill is a change of state." It didn't come up again explicitly in the conversation, but I had the sense that by the end of it he had gone from trying to persuade himself of the disruptor's value, even as a last recourse, to rejecting it out of hand.
Which wasn't the only change of mind.
uskglass talks in his post about Alderidge challenging Russell to actually deny the Communist ideal, rather than the earthly regime, and Russell admitting that he couldn't. In addition to being a major emotional turning point for Russell, I got the sense it was something of a Pyrrhic victory for Alderidge-- but more on that in a moment.The following is paraphrased rather than an attempt at an exact transcript:
ALDERIDGE: Would you do it? Take Dora and the children? Go on, [friendly] imagine. Door's open! You can just walk through.
RUSSELL: [short silence] Yes. Yes, in a heartbeat. Who wouldn't? Finally, something to be proud of; something I could explain to my children, something I'd be glad to pass on my share in. [bitter sarcasm] Something equal, something just, something guaranteed.
ALDERIDGE: [smile] Well there you are.
So again Russell tried to fling surrender in Alderidge's face-- only admitting the opposite, this time: not helpless ignorance, but understanding and empathy. The reason I say this was a bit of a Pyrrhic victory for Alderidge is because I think it was a moment they both realized that they had, differently, convinced themselves that it was enough to have this dream in secret, and procrastinated any of the saying or the doing. Russell inarguably had; but Alderidge, in his work for the USSR that bore so little relationship to the utopia he sincerely desired, his secret life and now secret death, had also given up the chance to talk to the person closest to him about it-- had believed all the time that Russell must give this answer, but hadn't believed it enough to ask.
What Alderidge would and wouldn't ask for became the last struggle before the hour limit, as the ideological hammer-and-tongs melted away. He implied that he had used his position both to protect and target Russell ("you were the sacrificial lamb") and asked Russell to resign before the bill came due; Russell negotiated for the names of Alderidge's network of moles within MI6 but was left, in the end, in the stunned awareness that he had agreed to his side of the bargain, not as a tactic, but because he no longer had any desire to stay with the Service. (I will say this was a trend with Russell's half-baked attempts at duplicity generally, including his vaguely-ideated opening gambit of offering to conceal Alderidge's identity for the sake of his nieces and nephew, a request Alderidge voiced before he could get a word in edgewise-- and in so doing, made Russell realize that he had no ability to go through the charade. If he made the offer-- as he shortly did-- it would only be with every intention of carrying it out.) So Russell came to terms with the fact that he wanted to get out, and that Alderidge's betrayal had destroyed his sense of duty and purpose-- not, as he tells himself in the backstory text, because their friendship wasn't real, but because he had been using their real friendship as an emotional crutch to lend meaning to futile conflict. But the more he realized that getting out was the best thing for himself and his family, the more he also saw that it wouldn't, on its own, bring Alderidge peace; after all, it wasn't for Alderidge. It was for him.
So the conversation came full circle to the matter of what Russell didn't know and Alderidge couldn't say. The unfairness of the situation-- that Russell should have seen him more clearly, that Alderidge should have had more time to try-- suddenly mattered less to either of them than allowing Alderidge to move on. Russell began with the well-intentioned "I'll try to channel you again, however many times it takes," in the spirit of offering rather than demanding more. But at the first crack in Alderidge's supposed indifference to his own fate-- his mention of the Billie Holiday song "I'll Be Seeing You," as a private reference Russell could use to convince Alderidge's wife, Jean, that they had really spoken; also implicitly a desire to achieve the peaceful dispersion granted spirits who pass on (the chestnut trees, the wishing well...)-- that intention flew out the window, and Russell started outright begging him to ask, to make himself understood, however he could.
They had this parting exchange, transcribed by
uskglass in his post:ALDERIDGE: [long silence] ... Do you remember Arthur and Lancelot?
RUSSELL: Yes.
ALDERIDGE: What do you think Lancelot would ask Arthur to do?
RUSSELL: [silence] ... [quietly, with a carefully steady voice] He would ask Arthur if he could bear him up. ... If he could carry him. To the highest point. So he could see every part of the isle. From his green bier.
[...]
ALDERIDGE: -- [thin smile] Then I release you from your duty, sir. You've served well. Put your weapons back on the wall.
RUSSELL: [silence]
ALDERIDGE: And George, by the way, I lied earlier. [laughs] --You look great.
ECH0 and Debrief both draw on genres that trade in anti-war themes while also romanticizing the practice and practitioners of war. Of the two, I would say that ECH0 is a lot more explicitly and thoughtfully pacifist in intention, but that Debrief makes a powerful point as a semi-accidental consequence of the immersion and interpersonal reckoning required. At least it did for me; I went in with the intent of doing justice to the real, incompatible loyalties and values on the line and quickly realized how frail of an emotional bulwark those were (though fiercely clung to as a result) against the fact of a loved one's imminent passing.
Of all the writing in Russell's backstory, the line I found most honest was his furious, dismissive, and unintentionally funny evaluation of Alderidge's corpse: Dead, he was not a handsome man.... He looked like an ordinary middle-aged dead guy, with blood splattered onto his fashionable suit. It made me think immediately of how much power the sight of Alderidge's spirit would have over him, with its lifelike animation and gestures. Bickering and wasting time and invoking the lives of strangers was all performance next to that. That's the selfishness of love, and there's a reason people balk when it's presented as only redemptive. But the fact is that it is redemptive, in the literal sense of claiming what was lost.
Toward the end, Russell asked Alderidge where he went wrong. It's a question that has a literal answer in Alderidge's backstory (Russell convinced Alderidge to engage in hazing and bullying at Weston for the sake of getting by as upperclassmen, and lost his trust in so doing), but
uskglass had Alderidge reply, obliquely but still truthfully, that Russell "gave him the rush; got him hooked on being liked." Which is a very Alderidge framing of being denied unconditional love. As you see, Russell gave it another shot.
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Date: 2023-01-05 03:46 am (UTC)(And hi! Nice to know you're still out there.)
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Date: 2023-01-05 05:57 am (UTC)And agreed about RPG proliferation, though it does make filtering more of a challenge. I've been playing another, epistolary game called Say What You Mean that I ought to do a separate post about at some point. Come to think of it, although I didn't mention it in the post, all of these have had a format component that I liked, whether it was the video call "seance" for Debrief, the collaborative map that ECH0 asks players to make as they go along, or actual physical letters. I think it helps them stand out more from the crowd, now that it's so easy to put together a good-looking rules PDF and throw it on itch.io.
no subject
Date: 2023-04-04 09:26 pm (UTC)