CHILL Art!

I hate to say it but it seems as if RPGs these days are chock full of art which is technically astute but as sharp as a wad of old chewing gum. Flip through the 5e D&D Players Handbook and it is character in armor, character in armor swinging weapon, characters in armor sitting around a campfire half of them apparently asleep, character in armor, scattering of tools, butterfly, spider, encephalitic halfling playing a lute that is thankfully mute, character in armor, character in armor, wizard casting spell of some sort, character in armor.

Ugh. Snore. Yerk! (Sound of my head suddenly jerking awake)

That is some damn dull art. Sadly, it almost seems to prove my suspicion that art in RPGs is like grammar. It is something that needs to be there to prove that someone cares about what we are reading. On the whole, after the initial purchase we stop noticing it. The art becomes a layout device to break up text walls and does not much else.

Since Halloween is almost upon us, I thought I might take a look at a game which I think does have good if not great art in it, and that is the original CHILL from Pacesetter which came out back when I was a kid circa '84.

CHILL has been and still is a spotty affair. It had great creative writing, crappy mechanics, and a slew of follow up editions that should never have been made. I'm sorry if that trods on any toes but Mayfair Chill looks like someone pulled it out of a dumpster dive and 3rd Edition, while doing much to improve the rules is just a strikingly dull affair. Sometimes it almost feels as if CHILL is a cursed property that no one can seem to do anything with. Or at least, nothing that improves over the original.

One of the reasons for this may have something to do with the excellent artwork of Jim Holloway. Most of it is done in stark black and white. It is not edgy. It is not extreme. It often looks like stills taken from a Hammer Horror film, but it is a whole lot of fun. This is what I mean about being sharp. A decent amount of thought was put into each of these images, probably well before pencil was ever put to paper. So let's take a look....

No snoozing around the campfire here. This guy is screwed! He is in a dark cemetery at night with at least two beasts to content with (probably werewolves, Pacesetter CHILL loves its werewolves). Oh yeah, and he has a single shot pistol. Is there a silver slug in that gun? Let's hope so.

Holloway loves to put a sense of direction and depth into his art. This one starts in the lower right corner of the foreground, shoots through it to the fearful expression on the guys face, and then goes beyond it to the red eyes he is blindly running towards. We are seeing this scene from the point of view of the creature which heightens the tension by implying that there is no guarantee mutton-chop man is going to survive the night.

GyaAAAAAAAAH!!!!! It's hard not to jump a bit when seeing this classic pic. This is no character in armor standing around waiting for something to happen. This is a guy in a suit who has probably fallen while fleeing a cemetery and hit the ground in the worst of all possible places. That arm is shooting up out of the ground, implied by the small bits of dirt hanging in the air around it. Once again we get a great use of perspective with the head stones adding to its depth. Holloway loves to use the moon as a back light, allowing him to highlight a face while still using a perfectly black sky.

"You Cowards!" You can almost hear her shout as the men in the room faint and flee around her. Once again, Holloway isn't interested in an unexpressed face and neither are we. It's also interesting that he doesn't care much for drawing furniture. He can, it shows up in other pics, but if the room is dark then why bother with anything but darkness? You can pretty much guess that there is a werewolf standing in the doorway but because all we are given is a silhouette we don't know for sure and that adds to the tension of the scene.

You never want to let the viewers eye fall on an image and go thud. This one has a great swoop of motion funneled through the big areas of black in its corners. The interest begins in the upper right hand corner, moves down over the werewolf, follows the creature's gaze in the direction of the girl moves up her dress, over her hands to her face and then follows the gnarled branch back onto the werewolf, or possibly off to somewhere else. Does he know she's there? Has she hidden herself well enough? Roll the dice...

Another great thing about this pic is its use of shadows. Hiding half of her head in darkness but showing us the whites of her eyes truly makes them pop.

Speaking of popping eyes, this is another great pic which has nothing over the top happening in it. The PC's are examining a skull that has been shot in the head. That magnifying glass blows the guy's eye way out of proportion. It says to Look! Look here! Look closely! There is something important to be found.

An interesting observation. Sherlock isn't looking at the bullet wound in the skull, the most obvious point of interest. He's looking at something else about it, possibly its teeth. What it is we will never know.

Be careful what you read in Chill. There is no telling what it might summon. In horror, you never want to show the entire creature. To know everything there is about a beast defines it, encapsulates it, limits it. Leaving it partially hidden erases its parameters. In the darkness there is no telling where its horror actually ends. But....

It's a werewolf. It's always a werewolf.

Want a great depiction of fear that doesn't involve chainsaws? Put Ben Franklin on a horse which is so spooked it is beyond control and running as fast as it can across the moonlit countryside. Ben is saying, "Whoa! Whoa! Nag Whoa!" but the horse knows better. It knows the headless horseman is charging up behind them, flaming jack-o-lantern in hand.

Once again, this is not just a picture of a thing. It is a happening. It's a big complicated messy misunderstanding just about to break. Isn't it great! So often adventurers get to run around doing whatever they want, but in CHILL the world still is as it is and for the police that five hundred year old vampire is just a kindly old, slightly eccentric, gentleman who is having his rights violated by a bunch of mutton-chop bearing hoodlums.

More fun with vampires. It's not enough to show us characters standing there. Everyone is doing something in this scene, even the vampire himself who we somehow know is summoning up the swarm of rats squeaking behind them. Another thing Holloway loves to do in his pictures is put a frame around the image and then break it (look for the torch and flying rat) to provide an extra sense of depth.

Is it me or does this one seem a lot like the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima? Either that or a deleted scene from The Breakfast Club. Speaking of eating....

Even by Florida standards, that is one hell of a roach. I love the guy about to chuck a squab at it. When was the last time someone in one of your games chucked a squab at something?

Once again, the picture is not just about having something happening but also capturing everyone's reactions to the happening. It makes one wonder, if something is happening and the characters are not reacting to it then does it actually happen at all?

Probably one of the most bad-ass images in all of classic gaming, nothing says Chill quite like a werewolf battling zombies in a decrepit old graveyard full of gnarled trees and with a big bloated moon hanging on the horizon in the background.

It makes me wonder about what else might be going on behind the scenes of all these pics. Could it be that the guy who fell in the cemetery before the up-shooting hand is actually a werewolf? Is the werewolf a villain or a hero? The world will never know.

With all of these works, it is also good to pay some attention to what is not in them. There is worry, fear, rage, concern and disgust, but there are none of the truly negative aspects of horror. No one is being tortured. No one is reduced to tears and begging for their lives. This is fun horror. Terrible things happen but no one's soul is ever being crushed beneath the heel of the bad guys. If anything, this is fight or flight horror. It brings out the best in these characters, forcing them to do more than they ever thought they could.

Ultimately, CHILL is an excuse to have characters run around screaming their heads off and occasionally hacking apart some ghoul with a shovel. Thanks Jim Holloway! There is just so much to love here. Happy Halloween!

Pop!

Car Wars 6th Edition. Autoduel for Dummies?

JFK riveted a nation when he said, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard!”

And in not nearly as glorious a light, I think the same could be said about why we played Car Wars back in the 80’s. Or at least why we spent so much time designing cars for it. When you pulled together a Car Wars car you milled through hundreds of equipment options, balancing price, weight and space with your vehicle’s engine power and suspension and chassis limitations. You crunched numbers. Boy did you crunch numbers. I think I once broke a calculator crunching all those numbers. Strangely though, that is what made Car Wars fun.

Know what sucked?

The game itself.

The downside of Car Wars was that you would eventually have to play Car Wars, a game with slow  screwy rules played on an overly large map that used dinky little cardboard chits which skidded out of control when you breathed on them. The only reason to play Car Wars was to test your vehicle design and take it back to the drawing board after the game destroyed it. If my friends and I had all been born two decades earlier, we all probably would have been gearheads doing the same thing with actual hot rods which we would take out to the desert to drag race American Graffiti style.

Or possibly not. That kind of thing is expensive and we lived nowhere’s near a desert. Like everybody else we probably would have sat around dreaming of such things. Which is why we play games. For the time and money involved, Car Wars is a lot cheaper than the nearest reality.

So anyways….

I just caught this video review of the new Car Wars 6th Edition which is coming out sometime soon.

It’s Easy Guys! Come on, it’s so so Easy. So much easier. And a whole lot easier than it used to be. If I had a dime for every time they called the game easy, I’d be rich and SJGames would be broke.

They realllllllllllllllly want us to believe that the new Car Wars is easy.
The funny thing is that I’m not sure if I believe them.

I can’t say anything for certain because I haven’t seen the rules, but from what I was able to glean, the new game seems more abstract than the original but not necessarily easier. You roll dice with little symbols on them. Like a cash registers at McDonalds they try to use hieroglyphs in place of words wherever they can. I didn’t see anything which resembled a speed or handling track. Maybe this makes it all easier, but the problem with an abstraction is that you cannot use your imagination to reason your way through it. All you can do is roll the dice and take whatever it gives you.

What do you want to eat today? Roll a die….

1 Big Mac.
2 Quarter Pounder.
3 McRib.
4 Fillet-O-Fish.

A 3! Oh, don’t look so sad. A lot of people like the McRib, and it only comes out once a year. Please come again….

I like what they had to say about Funsics vs Physics, but original Car Wars never ran on physics to begin with. It was always a close approximation of what seemed to be real, done to impart a realistic quality more than anything else. Funsics seems to be more about, “we can’t give you reality so we’re just going to give you a load of barbeque sauce and hope you don’t notice what’s missing.”

(Contains as much pork as Car Wars contains Physics)

Meanwhile, building a vehicle has been dumbed down to where your vehicle has a number of Build Points (like 16 or 32) and everything you add to it will cost a number of points. No price/weight/space or acceleration calculations. It sounds like something pulled from a video game. It feels like the principal was to zip through vehicle design as quickly as possible, something hearkening back to 5th edition Car Wars which had no vehicle design rules and had reduced the game to a collection of over-priced pamphlets containing pre-made vehicles and rules which if I recall correctly were still not complete enough to let people actually play the game. If there was cash to be grabbed, 5th edition would have existed to do just that and not much else.

Now. I have nothing against simple games that are easy to play and Car Wars - more than any game out there - could use a complete rules overhaul when it comes to the play of the game?

It feels like it is missing the target, that something is being lost.

The entire gaming world seems to be racing towards a ephemeral state where games are designed to be picked up, played once and abandoned. Like getting tube socks in a plastic bag with a ziplock seal, you may actually wear the socks until they hatch holes, but the company itself would much rather have you treat them as lunch meat for your feet. Something you would never think to wear twice. And yet, this is Car Wars. You never played just one game. If anything, games like Car Wars and Battletech were more sports than games. There was always an element of “wait until next time!” as you wheel the wreckage of your latest creation back to the drawing board to make changes and tweak endlessly.

(better believe I'll be back)

So. 6th Edition is finally going to be a thing. It will probably be SJGames does Gaslands. After all, if it wasn’t for Gaslands pulling the rug out from under Car War’s former glory there would probably be no 6th edition. Will it be good? Will it suck? Well, it really can’t be any worse than Car Wars itself. The question is, will it still be Car Wars or will this be more like Twisted Metal the tabletop edition?

We’ll just have to check it out and see.