ecosophia | Roleplaying Games and Spirituality

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Roleplaying Games and Spirituality

I was delighted recently to be interviewed by Gabriel West of The Table You Fear The Most, a recently founded Dreamwidth journal/blog discussing the interface between fantasy roleplaying games and the spiritual and psychological realms of human experience. We had a good lively conversation, which brought back a lot of good memories for me. (Yes, those volumes on the left were the original version of Dungeons & Dragons, and yes, I played that version.)

Interested? Check out the interview and the other fascinating content of the the journal here.

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The bit about the Satanic Panic is surprisingly relevant to my question this past Monday.
-Cliff

It is indeed. I gather that's on many people's minds right now.

The CBC did a very good podcast series on how it played out in one small Saskatchewan town.

I almost want to say if you're short on time, to start with episode 4, when it all falls apart, and then play backwards to episode 1, then go back to episode 5... But for maximum slow creeping horror as the story builds starting at the beginning is fine.

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/472-satanic-panic

A written summary is here: https://strangesounds.org/2020/03/satanic-panic-martensville-satanic-ritual-abuse-usa-canada.html

They only passingly note how it started in Victoria, BC. But I think it's important:

Michelle dreamed of spiders coming out of a gash in her arm.

(I wonder what would have happened if she'd dreamed of say, at random, worms?)

Speaking of spirituality, your interview with Gordon White just dropped.

Glad to hear it. I was expecting an email from Gordon -- no doubt it's in the inbox right now.

I listened yesterday.

What's up with Portugal?

On sunday my mom told me all her boomer friends and several of my family suddenly want to travel to Portugal next month.

I'm not sure which parts are still left uncharred and/or above water and/or accessible by non-striking airlines these days so I opined that was a very strange country to suddenly grip people's travel bug, but apparently there must be something more to this.

Good question. I have no particular interest in visiting Portugal, though I'm sure that it's a very pleasant country. Here in East Providence, Portuguese is already the second language of choice, what with the Azorean- and Cape Verdean-American population here, and more people from Brazil seem to be showing up every day.

How embarrassing for the Inquisitors.

Brazil, too, leapt to Canada's #7 immigrant source last year, suddenly (India still far and away #1).

Candles of the Virgin of Guadalupe showed up in the local Mexican restaurant for sale sometime in past few years; I'll now look for Aparecida. What an interesting origin story she has.

My husband commented the other day that Portugal has recently (?) been named one of the top ten livable countries. (Those things are a marketing ploy, aren't they?) Perhaps it's now hitting regular folks's radars.

Hey I'm just curious as a gamer myself... did you ever get into miniature war gamming?

I did indeed. I didn't do a lot of it, as I didn't have a lot of money to put into miniatures, but I was into Chainmail, an English civil war system whose name I've forgotten, a spinoff of that called Down Styphon! that was based on the H. Beam Piper novel Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, and a lively little small-group skirmishing game called Fire, Hack, and Run.

My deepest thanks, JMG! It was a pleasure to correspond with you, and I hope our chat proves to be helpful for any who read it!

All the best,
Gabriel

You're most welcome.

JMG and Gabriel,

Many thanks for doing this.

This exact topic has been on my mind for the past year or so. And of course, in the synchronistically, goose-bump-producing way things typically go around here, I saw this post last night--and the ideas happened to mesh with the meditation theme I had scheduled the next day.

Even though I have been thinking around the edges of this topic for a while, I haven't made much headway due to other commitments. I'm very much enjoying the articles on Gabriel's blog, and reading about the thought that has gone into spiritual potential of RPGs.

Thanks for doing this one! I'm looking forward to reading it. Some of my best memories involve a copy of the first edition of AD&D. I was in a small town as a kid, and about a half dozen of us talked a drafting/engineering teacher into letting us use his room after school ended. The school still had a copious number of skills based courses going, from shop to auto to home ec, ag, art and engineering. It was fantastic. Those days are long gone. His deal with us was that we had to be able to put the books and papers and dice away quickly if anyone popped their head in. We had his large sheets of vellum and rulers and whatnot handy to cover things up. The panic was in force, the town had more churches than anything else, and a friday night lights vibe the whole time I was there. It felt like a secret club. On days he was gone, the art teacher across the hall would wink, leave her door slightly ajar, and go home for the day. We always made sure to lock up after. We had many great adventures in those rooms, and I think the secret nature of the deal, and the surrounding moral panic made it all the more memorable. I can still smell the two rooms, the feel of the drafting tables and the drawing horse chairs, the late afternoon sunlight, the nods in the school hallway acknowledging our plan to meet after school ended. Now I need to go dig through my old boxes and pull out that d20.

Murmuration

That's a great story -- thank you for it.

Back at you! That was a great interview. Thank you for sharing. It was a lot of fun to read. I'm grateful to have been exposed to the blog, and I'm looking forward to following it into the future. His questions were great. I always enjoy finding interviewers who can take full advantage of a discussion with a guest who has lots to share. James over at Hermetix is like this. KMO at c-realm. Gordon at Rune Soup too. So often people interrupt, don't know the discussion material enough to follow up on tantalizing dangling threads, or lead the conversation into boring dead ends.

The portion at the end, where you were both speaking about the excision of ritual from daily life was quite interesting. I feel this strongly. I have personal rituals, and we have immediate family rituals, but it is so hard to find rituals to partake in at the Dunbar level. It is a very noticeable hole in daily life, and I'm an introvert. Most people fill this with a Target run, but man, that leaves me deeply unsatisfied. I want that dance around the bonfire, followed by mead and stories in the smoky longhouse, while the kids listen to branches snap in the dark, outside. Nowhere to be found right now, unfortunately...

When you spoke on Evily evil villains, and the Jungian projection of shadow, it resonated. I've been wondering lately what it means that I have deep antipathy towards the creeping global authoritarianism of the Whale. Surely I am projecting, and have work to do. When the kids behave poorly, my inner authoritarian comes to the surface quite easily. But, is there a possibility that an outer trend can be recognized as worthy of disdain, without it necessarily pointing four fingers back at you? A boot on the neck feels like Freud's cigar. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

It's not magic monday, but I also wanted to say thanks for your response a few weeks ago, about techniques to soften the signal of modernity, to the benefit of enchantment. I sort of turned off the net before I said thank you.

Murmuration

I was glad to see you say that the Second Religiosity would be tolerant; it gives me some hope that the current trend to intolerance will diminish over time. (Has this ever happened before in a monotheist civilization, though?)

I used to be a longtime gamer and have a D&D theory of reincarnation that speculates that our various lives are like game characters. In theory, each PC starts from scratch at level 1 with no knowledge of the world, and you play him or her that way. But underneath it, you the player learn and remember, so if your last level 1 PC was dismembered by an owlbear, your current level 1 PC (except in one of those games where you can get something by selecting "recklessness" as a handicap) will just happen for some reason to not feel a great hurry to run off and tackle the local owlbear. Ideally, as PCs come and go the player gets more and more wise or shrewd and skillful - and though you (should) learn to play PCs that differ in interests and personality, each always contains and reflects some aspect of the player.

I hope that my player ends up being pleased with the proportion of quest items I managed to finish during my campaign....

-Translucent Jejune Octopus

Hmm! I like that. It suggests, however, that we all need to listen more closely for the distant rattle of dice... ;-)

I used to play with a GM who was slightly telekinetic and could roll nat-20s at will - probably between 25-50% of the time. It wasn't just loaded dice because he could also pick up your dice and do the same. This is not a desirable trait in a GM.

-Translucent Jejune Octopus

I'm glad you did a print interview! You do so many podcasts, and I rarely find time for them, as I have considerable difficulty just sitting and listening to talk (and I haven't found a suitable activity to keep my hands busy). Are there ever written transcriptions of podcasts? If so, could you let us know?

I much enjoyed the interview, thanks.

I don't know whether there are print transcriptions of podcasts -- and that's an interesting question. Anybody else?

I also cannot just sit and listen to podcasts - if my hands and eyes aren't doing something, without a speaker to look at, I feel like I'm not "really doing anything".

1) How to get transcripts: Some of the bigger podcasts make transcriptions available. At the cheaper end is putting the podcast through a "text-to-speech" program of some kind, and at the more expensive end is hiring humans to do transcription. Some podcasts with larger audiences have folks that do fan transcriptions - for any with a large enough following, consider checking out Reddit or other discussion spaces for these. In the past, I've found most auto-generated text-to-speech transcripts nearlye useless, but maybe they've gotten better. You might try downloading some podcasts and putting them through such a program to see if they're helpful for you.

2) Activities for Listening to Podcasts: On the other hand, I do have rather more suggestions if you're looking for suitable activities for listening to podcasts:
1) Driving (obvious if you do it, not helpful if you don't have to!)
2) Walking (recreationally or to get places - when I traveled for my job, I listened to a lot of podcasts walking around airports)
3) Household chores (dishes or cooking are especially good for me)
4) Unfocused/Unskilled Handwork (Combines a bit with the above): Need to clean some stuff? How about fold laundry? Knitting uncomplicated patterns? Sanding large, flat spaces?
5) Caring for Little Kids: I have a ~2 month old and a ~4 year old, so when I need to feed the baby or fix dinner for the older one, I often put a podcast on headphones
6) Doing Non-Verbal Work/Play: When I was in college, I would sometimes do Sudokus during lecture to stay awake. I'm sure I wasn't paying as close attention as my full attention would have been, but the numeric-problem-solving part of my brain was apparently not the "linguistic/listening" part of my brain, as I felt like I was getting enough from the lecture and my grades didn't suffer. Use with care, as "multitasking" is usually horse manure.

Cheers,
Jeff

Addendum to 2): I recently found out that doing Jigsaw puzzles during podcasts works very well for me.

Milkyway

Jeff, thanks for the suggestions! I've had limited success listening to podcasts while driving, but it's worth another try. (On the other hand, I don't drive as much as I used to.) I can't do yoga postures, which I've tried during boring Zoom calls... I stop hearing. I really should take up crocheting again, which I did many years ago (long before there were podcasts).

And thanks to your input, I discovered that there are transcripts for OBOD's Druidcast! I won't run out of reading material for a while, LOL.

Glad to help! And oh, I bet crochet would be a great thing to do while listening - I haven't knitted in years, but I used to do it on guard shifts in the Army, and it was before podcasts, but I'd talk with other guys on shift and do alright, as long as the pattern wasn't too complex.

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Roleplaying Games and Spirituality

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Thanks!

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Fun interview!

Re: Fun interview!

Re: Fun interview!

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