Author Page for Steven Attewell

Player Character Blogging: D&D 5th Edition, Session 1

I know I said I’d be heading back to real policyblogging soon (and I have a blog post on health care stuff handwritten, I just need to type it up), but since everything’s horrible and the world’s on fire, I thought it would be nice to do something fun for a change.

As you may remember, a while back I put up a series of “GM-Blogging” posts chronicling my time running “Masks of Nyarlathotep.” Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond my control, that game went on hiatus.

Fortunately for fans of reading about roleplaying sessions, one of the members of my original group decided that they would like to try running a game as DM. So we’ve moved over from Call of Cthulhu to the new Dungeons & Dragons 5^th Edition for an urban investigation-focused game set in a Fantasy version of San Francisco (complete with an overbearing Magitech sector and skyrocketing inequality). Our party consists of:

• “Honest Tomas” Rhymer (played by yours truly), a half-elf rogue/Fey pact warlock. Inspired by Moist von Lipwig from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, he’s a mostly pacifist con artist who got on the wrong side of a powerful Archfey, the Duchess of the Dark Side of the Moon. As a result, his soul has been hidden somewhere in the world and he has a year and a day to get it back (before unspecified bad things happen to him)…but to make things interesting, he’s been unwillingly declared the Duchess’ judicial champion, so that any spats she gets into with her fellow powerful supernatural beings means he gets unexpectedly attacked by horrible monsters to settle the dispute and is suddenly finding himself possessed of strange magics to help him win these fights. If he wins the fight, the Duchess sometimes sends him a clue as to where his soul might be…
• Telfer, the Fantasy Catholic Cleric who’s also a closeted Sorcerer who can’t help his obsession with Wild Magic no matter how much the Church condemns it. Currently on “sabbatical” from the Church for undisclosed reasons, brought into the group by Tomas, who’s suddenly very interested in the subject of his immortal soul. While his god may be sending him visions that his sabbatical quest is to save Tomas’ soul in the non-metaphysical sense, his obsession with forbidden (i.e, Wild Magic and Warlock Pact Magic) sorcery is also growing. Which will win out?
• Sera One-Horn, Tiefling Bard/Warlock and Rock Goddess. Sold her soul to the original party fiend Rockus in exchange for the Power of Rock, which she shows off every other knight at the Rancid Goat. Something of a local celebrity as a result of her hit single “Orkf*cker,” which has proven to be something of a crossover hit between the goth crowd, the preppies, and the orks who are hoping the lyrics aren’t metaphorical or ironic in any way. Helping Tomas come to terms with his new lifestyle change, and trading tips on how to sneak successfully and use a rapier effectively for Hexing lessons.
• Lysander, Lawful Good Paladin working with the City Watch…Arts and Antiquities Division. Essentially Simon Pegg’s character from Hot Fuzz, Lysander is one of the few honest elves in the Braxtonshire City Watch and surprisingly avoids Lawful Stupidity through bringing in CIs/Consultants/Deputized Watchmen like the three idiots above, who he met through Tomas in Tomas’ guise as a mostly-honest merchant of arcane antiquities. Undergoing rapid promotion due to a series of successful cases which all get solved in a 24 hour period, despite a shocking amount of property damage although surprisingly few casualties.

Come join us, won’t you?

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I’m Back!

As some of you may have noticed, I haven’t been particularly active for some time – my last post was back in February and it took an affront to Captain America to get me to write something. My inactivity had nothing to do with a lack of interest in blogging either generally or on this site, but rather that over the last eight months I’ve been dealing with an ongoing health crisis which limited how much mental energy I had available.

That crisis is now over.

So I’m back, and I have some Views to share:

• I definitely want to talk about the Senate Dems’ “Better Deal” agenda vis-a-vis the Congressional Democratic agenda in 2006, and why sometimes it’s hip to be square.
• I absolutely want to talk about why the internal Democratic party debate since 2016 has been so averse to actually talking about policy and why the term “neoliberal” is really meaningful when it comes to talking about the long-term impacts of Third Wayism from the 80s onwards.
• I definitively want to do a retrospective on the disasterous career of the Republican health bill, which took on an intensively personal meaning for me given the health crisis I was going through.
• And don’t think I’m going to let anyone forget about the need to re-elect Bill De Blasio to demonstrate that running and governing from the left will be rewarded rather than punished by the electorate.

But first, I feel like I should explain what’s been going on with me and why I haven’t been around.

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Would Captain America Approve of Punching Nazis? (YES)

At the risk of starting up this debate again, here is another essay about how our politics and our comic books are bleeding into one another…

As would surprise absolutely no one who’s followed my People’s History of the Marvel Universe series, I’m a strong believer in the idea that our pop culture is both influenced by our political culture and can have a strong influence on that political culture. Thus, it’s a major problem when the author of both of Marvel’s current Captain America comics gets all pearls-clutchy about whether it’s ok to punch Nazis.

(credit to Shop5)

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GM-Blogging #4: Masks of Nyarlathotep – Bad Luck at Ju-Ju House

Hey folks! As you know from last time, I’m blogging my Call of Cthulhu campaign, because at least in Call of Cthulhu the mad idiot gods have the decency to stay “beyond angled space.”

When we last left off, our intrepid investigators got their hands on some unpleasant books formerly belonging to the estate of Roger Carlyle, Esq. and started down the inveitable downward spiral of psychological entropy that is the Cthulhu Mythos Book Club…

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Columbia Copying North Carolina Republican Tactics

In yet another case of “unsurprising but disgusting,” Columbia University responded to the 1602 to 623 vote of its graduate students to unionize by trying to throw out the vote:

The battle over whether graduate students at universities can unionize entered a new phase on Friday, when Columbia University filed a challenge with the National Labor Relations Board over the recent vote by its graduate assistants to unionize.

Columbia said that tactics like voter coercion may have tipped the balance in favor of the union and that the N.L.R.B. should invalidate the vote.

At a rally at the Morningside Heights campus in Manhattan on Monday, students said the university was trying to drag out the fight, possibly until President-elect Donald J. Trump could appoint new members to the labor board, tipping the balance in a direction more likely to favor Columbia.

The “tactics” Columbia’s management are pointing to? According to management:

• Union leafleters were too close to the polling place!…which as an experienced union organizer I highly doubt was actually the case given that those distances are very clearly demarcated and you can talk to anyone coming and going without any need to step over a chalk line. Even if it was the case, a difference of a few feet didn’t change anyone’s votes.
• Union leafleters had cameras outside the building!…which somehow terrified people into voting for the union, despite the fact that the secret ballots were cast inside the building and the cameras in question couldn’t see through walls.
• The NLRB didn’t mandate employer or government IDs in order to vote! Wow, that sounds familiar.
• The NRLB wanted a different observer from the employer to be present at one poling place!
• One ballot location wasn’t open long enough and didn’t have enough challenge ballot envelopes!

Needless to say, this is all extremely small ball, and given the 72% to 28% outcome did not affect the outcome in the slightest. But that doesn’t matter, because as with what happened in North Carolina, the point here is to throw up any pretext for doubt long enough to delay matters so that the election isn’t certified before Trump can appoint his minions to the NRLB and reverse the ruling that gave Columbia students the right to vote. Which is exactly what Columbia did last time: Columbia graduate students got the right to organize back in 2000, but Columbia appealed and delayed so that the election wouldn’t happen until 2004, when George W. Bush’s NRLB reversed the ruling of the Clinton NLRB, at which point Columbia chained up the ballot boxes so that those votes could never be counted.

Two things can be learned from this: first, that supposedly liberal elite institutions have a lot to gain from a Trump presidency and won’t be shy in taking advantage of any opportunity; second, we can no longer allow Democratic presidents to delay granting the right to organize until they’re practically out the door and their regulatory decisions can be overruled by the next administration.

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A Gang of Thieves: Not a Metaphor

In my former career as a freelance policy analyst, I did a good deal of research on our nation’s Unemployment Insurance system, which convinced me entirely that the major flaws in our UI system that make it incapable of serving as a true automatic stabilizer stems from the role of state government in the program. Thus, it does not surprise me in the least that:

“A Michigan government agency wrongly accused individuals in at least 20,000 cases of fraudulently seeking unemployment payments, according to a review by the state.

The review released this week found that an automated system had erroneously accused claimants in 93% of cases – a rate that stunned even lawyers suing the state over the computer system and faulty fraud claims.

“It’s literally balancing the books on the backs of Michigan’s poorest and jobless,” attorney David Blanchard, who is pursuing a class action in federal court on behalf of several claimants, told the Guardian on Friday… (Guardian US)

I would go further than David Blanchard: this is a crime. The state of Michigan has committed an act of grand larceny against tens of thousands of workers, and the Justice Department should be prosecuting right now. (Incidentally, the phone number for the Detroit office of the U.S Attorney is (313) 226-9100. Give them a call, why don’t you?)

Here’s how they pulled off the con…

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GM-Blogging #3: Masks of Nyarlathotep – Book Party at Erica Carlyle’s

Hey folks! As I said last time, I’ll be doing some blogging of my ongoing Call of Cthulhu campaign to counter-balance the existential dread of real life with some fictional existential dread!

When last we left off, the party had received a mysterious telegram from an old friend, selecting them for an investigative team exploring the mysterious fate of the Carlyle Expedition…

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An Unusual Twist in the Trump-Appoints-Mnuchin Story

As you may have heard, it looks like Donald Trump has picked Steven Mnuchin to be his candidate for Secretary of the Treasury. As they should, Democrats have seized on this news, because Mnuchin is an ex-Goldman Sachs hedge funder, and is moreover implicated in the foreclosure crisis from his time at OneWest Financial. What’s interesting about this pick is that Mnuchin is also a movie producer (yet another reason why Trump’s neo-Nazi supporters are crying foul…) which makes him part of my little world of politics-meets-pop-culture. And not just any movie producer; here is a list of some of the films that he’s been responsible for:

• X-Men: The Last Stand.
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
• Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.
• Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice.
• Suicide Squad. 

In other words, he’s not just a corrupt plutocrat who’s been put in charge of much of the Federal government’s financial regulatory apparatus, he’s also responsible for the worst super-hero films ever, the “sullen ground” against which Marvel’s “bright metal…show[s] more goodly and attract more eyes.” If this is his private-sector experience, it doesn’t bode well for the future of America’s economic policy.

Now, to be fair, he was also involved with X-Men: First Class, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the Lego Movie, and Mad Max: Fury Road, so it’s not all bad. On the other hand, given that he was also involved with Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, Predators, Prometheus, and The Legend of Tarzan, I’m going to chalk those up to a stopped clock being right twice a day and conclude that this guy generally has a losing track record.

So one small silver lining if this guy survives the confirmation hearings is that superhero movies might get better on average…

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Bigger on the Inside

My friend Scott Eric Kaufman has passed away. Scott was a brilliant writer, a deeply compassionate man, an incredibly caring friend, someone whose boundless confidence in my ability got me through a lot of setbacks and dry spells, and one of the few people I’ve met who saw and thought about the world so much like I did that he could anticipate what I was going to think about something and vice-versa. I miss him terribly; I want to ask him what he thinks about this TV show or that movie, to draw courage from his righteous indignation at the unrighteous, to tell him about my day-to-day victories and celebrate in his.

Ever since I came across his writing on Acephalous and Lawyers, Guns, and Money, I have always thought of Scott as someone with an enormous capacity for enduring the absurd and improbable curveball that life was constantly throwing at him, and then turning it around with his unique gift for ironic and self-deprecating wit. In my mind, he was like a silent film comedian, forever triumphing over adversity by the end of the reel through some clever trick. Somehow, I thought this would be the same, and it comes as a shock that it isn’t – Scott would have called it bad writing.

My deepest regret is that, despite having talked for dozens of hours in front of microphones and webcams, that we never got to meet in person. We tried several times, but every time some bizarre turn of events would upend our plans: we were going to meet in Santa Barbara, but something went wrong with a car; we were supposed to meet up in London or New York and a volcano exploded. The closest we got was me getting to New Orleans, but life intervened and we weren’t able to meet up. At the time, it was both frustrating and funny, getting momentarily caught up in Scott’s vortex of improbability. It isn’t funny now.

In an attempt to do something productive with how I’m feeling right now, I’m planning to put together a book of Scott’s best work, from LG&M and Acephalous (and possibly from other sites as well depending on IP issues) with help from people in the community. So please use this thread to suggest favorite pieces of his that you would include in the project.

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GM-Blogging #2: Masks of Nyarlathotep – Jackson Elias

Hey folks! As I said last time, I’ll be doing some blogging of my ongoing Call of Cthulhu campaign to counter-balance our election-related anxiety (just a few more hours!). So let’s meet our team of doomed adventurers:

• Rabbi Guiseppe “Joey Irons” Ferro – WWI vet, locksmith, rum-runner. Italian Catholic who converted to Judaism and was ordained as a Rabbi. Which is helpful, since Rabbis (like other clergy) get an exemption from Prohibition Laws for “sacramental” wine. Not a made man, but a useful associate.
• Killian Digby – the other half of the “walks into a bar” gang, Killian handles the more technical side of the business, while Joey does the actual talking to people. Killian’s good with machines and has lots of contacts in the underworld, but is incredibly socially awkward and off-putting.
• Arthur Cameron, Naval Intelligence – representing the other side of the law, Cameron is a lawyer, served in the U.S navy in WWI, then transferred into Naval Intelligence after the war. Works the China desk.
• Doctor Professor Wendy Danger – with multiple degrees in anthropology, archaelogy, psychology, and medicine, MD/PhD Wendy Danger is one of the University of Chicago’s most distinguished scholars. A student of James George Frazer (he of the Golden Bough) and Sigmund Freud, Danger is on sabattical in NYC. Oh, and served in some classified capacity in the African Theater of the Great War…
• Sheik Horus, Magister Magician and Mentallist – an “Egyptian” (by way of the Mississippi, hey it’s still a Delta!) stage magician and occultist. Very stealthy and a dab hand with a throwing knife.
• Ricardo Fuentes, Veteran of the French Foreign Legion – a veteran of the Great War, has spent time since the war working as a guard on archaelogical expeditions, doing some “protection” work in various places. I’m not saying he’s a gun-runner, but he’s not not a gun-runner!
• Professor Thistlebottom – historian, linguist, noted pacifist.

The team gets together on New Year’s Eve of 1924, the year that saw the death of Lenin and the rise of Stalin, Kemal Attaturk abolishing the caliphate, Hitler jailed for the Beer Hall Putsch, the founding of MGM, J. Edgar Hoover appointed as head of the Bureau of Investigation, the Leopold and Loeb case, the passage of Federal immigration restriction, the first trans-Atlantic fax, the invention of the Caesar salad, the end of the American occupation of the Dominican Republic, the defeat of a badly divided Democratic Party at the hands of Cal Coolidge, the first Macy’s Day Parade, and Edwin Hubble’s announcement that there are galaxies outside the Milky Way…

What does 1925 have in store?

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Thoughts on Doctor Strange

I saw Doctor Strange last night. And as I said on Twitter, while it might not be the best Marvel movie ever, it may have come closest to feeling like the original comic come to life, overflowing with the trippy visuals, corny but evocative mysticism, and just a dash of problematic orientalism that pretty much characterized Steve Ditko’s original run in Strange Tales.

For a more thorough and spoilery discussion, see below the cut:

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GM-Blogging #1: Introducing Masks of Nyarlathotep

In an effort to distract myself (and you) from election-related anxiety, I am jumping back into table-top roleplaying games as a Game Master (the referee and main storyteller, for those of you who are new to this) for the first time since 2012. And for my first campaign, I’ve decided to run one of my favorite adventures, Call of Cthulhu’s (a horror RPG set in the works of H.P Lovecraft) Masks of Nyarlathotep and do a bit of blogging about it.

The first session is scheduled for this Sunday evening, which means there’s no gameplay stuff to report. However, I can talk a bit about the prep work I’ve done to get everything ready to go for my doomed team of investigators.

Masks of Nyarlathotep is a beloved adventure; despite the fact that it was published in 1984, it still wins polls taken today for “best RPG adventure ever.” So what makes this adventure stand out? To me, there are several main things that this adventure does really well:

1. It does a great job of balancing mystery and investigation, adventure, combat, horror, all the things that people want from a game set in H.P Lovecraft’s universe. Not coincidentally, it also delivers a lot of different playtypes for people with different tastes – if you like combat, you’re going to get combat, if you like solving mysteries, there’s lots of that, if you like roleplaying in the Jazz Age, there’s lots of that.
2. It is a genuine sandbox game in ways that a lot of RPGs have never quite managed to pull off – after the initial chapter in New York, players can decide where in the world they want to go, whether it’s London, Shanghai, Cairo, Kenya, or Australia, and do the adventure in any order they want to. As a result, no two games of Masks are the same.
3. Despite being a sandbox game, there is a really engaging overarching plot that connects all the different points in the map, engages the players and makes them want to solve the mystery, and has some really amazing setpieces that (if you as the DM can successfully guide the party a bit) will blow your players’ minds.

Because Masks is so beloved, it also means that creators and fans have been improving it for almost as long as I’ve been alive. The game has gone through four editions, the most recent one from 2010. There is an amazing fan-made Companion that offers a whole bunch of supplemental content that you can use to smooth over a few rough patches or throw experienced players a curveball. If the DM is willing to put in the prep work, you can make this adventure really special.

So what have I done to prepare?

(If you’re playing in my game, DO NOT READ below the cut…)

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