Romance Option for Red Dead Redepmtion?

 

Staring into the Year End Campfire

When I set out to find the perfect Western, Biden was a Vice-President, Putin was a Prime Minister, Ukraine was a Russian client-state, Trump was a game show host, I had a heart that was 100% natural, and had never heard of the eight limbs of ashtanga yoga.  A lot has changed since then.

In those days, and the couple of years that followed, I spent a lot of meandering mental energy thinking about man in nature, the folly of civilization, completely ignored Hobbes, and longed for some kind of Tyler Durden-esque collapse of the status quo that would certainly have killed me within days.

(Side note: you know how life expectancies were so low back in ye olden days?  It wasn’t because everyone died at 35, it was because so many people died of things that we can prevent or manage today.  If I were born 50 years earlier I would not have lived past 40, and probably would have had trouble making it to my 20’s.  A friend asked me mid-pandemic why I was so cranky and depressed all the time and that it was bringing down all my co-workers.  I said that if the Qanon-MAGA hat crowd decides they don’t like the election results and start a civil war I’ve got 60 days max before a disrupted pharma supply chain kills me.  He thought that was ridiculous, then we had Jan 6.  He also occasionally read this blog.  Hi RC!)

In the decade since the allure of the return to primal has faded… a little.  I mean, I did save the picture above from The Last Book You’ll Ever Read, a graphic novel by Cullen Bunn about that exact re-wilding of civilization.  A lot of my non-western hiatus was spent reading Edgar Rice Burroughs, time travel hunting books, pulp safaris, Hemmingway’s hunting stories, etc.  I think that with a lot of yoga study I saw that there is a happy hunting ground between civilization and the wilderness.

Several times I’ve set out to make a Dungeons and Dragons character that felt like a Saddhu, the ascetic wandering yogis that still exist today.  My buddies assume that I’d make a monk, but the times where I’ve done it I’ve always made some kind of Druid. 

Yoga, particularly Shaivist Tantra yoga I study, is pretty primal.  You can’t really experience it unless you can experience it in your body first.  Not that you’ve got to be a super athlete; I started my study without a sternum, not a lot of complicated yoga postures happening at that time.  The quintessential yogi for me is Shiva- one of the three faces of God, Lord of Yoga, sitting on a mountain, meditating and surrounded by animals.

There is also some evidence that Cernunnos (the Celtic & Gaulic god that is a precursor to Herne, the Wild Hunt, and the Green Man) is Shiva.  So yeah, the druids were yogis.

That ascetic, austere seeker going to the mountains to meditate always appealed to me.  Why do people go to find enlightenment on top of a mountain?  Because you are never the same person at the top that you were at the start.  I even wrote about that way back in 2013.  Just this week I got thinking about this chain:

The Saddhu, seeking a quiet perch on a mountaintop to meditate.

The Druid, wandering the expansive forests and mountains of Britain getting list in vision of the Otherworld.

The Mountain Man, leaving the civilization that defined him to live apart from societal binds and expectations.

The Saddhu, the Druid, the Mountain Man, all connected.

Happy New Year.  Time for one last hike.

 

10 First Impressions of Red Dead Redemption 2

 

 

I’m midway through Chapter 3, here’s the impressions so far:

1. It’s almost like being in Westworld, but instead of $40k/day I bought it on sale for $30.  
2. Customizable Arthur is tons of fun.
3. Although set 12 years earlier, it captures the “end of the frontier” feeling better than the original.  
4. A lot of it plays like a frontier simulator rather than a strict RPG or action game, which I’ve really enjoyed.
5. I haven’t been this attached to characters since the Mass Effect series. 
6. Constantly torn between growing a massive mountain-man beard and shaving it down to a cool yet massive mustache.  In the mean time most of my money has gone to hair tonics.
7. This is probably the best written game I’ve ever played.  
8. One weak point in the writing so far is Dutch; he’s a little less fleshed out than in the original, but then again he was the most engaging character in the original and that’s a hard bar to hit.
9. I still like the early game style of redeye better than the later versions that you learn. 
10. Looks like it’s possible to have an animal hat, buckskin clothes, a mysterious medicine bag, a giant beard, a LeMat and a rolling block Sharpes, and a bandolier of massive bullets, all while riding a giant horse, which means I’ll eventually make Arthur Morgan a twin of Mad Amos Malone.
    

The Sixth Gun Coming to Savage Worlds

The Sixth Gun is a weird western comic book that for some weird western reason I never seem to read, besides the few trades I picked up at a Borders going out of business sale.  It is still coming out monthly, and now is part of a Kickstarter campaign to create a Deadlands compatible game with the Savage Worlds rules.  Check it out,

You can also watch a great video here.

Smart, Horny, Foolish, Outdoorsy

I started writing in this blog years ago as a way to define what I liked most about westerns.  While my enthusiasm to write regularly has waned, my enthusiasm for westerns has not.  My definition of a “western” is quite wide, meaning almost anything taking place between the late 17^th century and the early 20^th century on a North American frontier.  It was while reading The Dakota Cipher, third in William Dietrich’s series about Napoleonic era rapscallion Ethan Gage, that I stumbled upon the recipe for a perfect western.  A perfect western should take place in the time and place described above, and have a hero who is smart, horny, foolish, and outdoorsy.   

Allow me to explain.  A good yarn should allow the audience to identify with the characters and at the same time have elements of wish fulfillment. 

I have a fondness for main characters that are smart and horny, because, well, that’s me.  It sounds pompous to say that I’m smart, but it’s true (despite what a lack of solid proofreading in this blog might suggest).  As to horny, a quick tour through this blog (particularly anything tagged Randy Cowpoke) will show that is an apt description as well. 

Foolish?  Let’s instead call that prone to acting with without thinking, and the start of the wish fulfillment phase.  I typically think before acting, drink very little, never gamble, and rarely exceed the speed limit.  Frankly, it’s boring, and in fiction I love when otherwise smart characters leap into danger without forethought as I long to do, especially when their boldness is rewarded when danger slaps them upside the head.

Let’s turn outdoorsy into at home in the wilderness.  The older I get the more handy I become in the woods, the desert, the mountains, the river, and with a kayak, tent, fire, and axe.  I’m still no mountain man and would probably go under after a week alone in the woods (mostly because of my cardiac issues).  In my dreams, though, I read the wilderness like the back of my hand as I stride through the plains and can capably fell deer and owlhoots alike with a smokestick, tomahawk, or my bare fists.

So let’s take a look at some of my favorite characters and how they stack up.

George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman

Smart, stupidly horny, undoubtedly foolish, but although his adventures often take place in far flung frontiers he is much more at home in the parlor. 

Any hero in a Louis L’Amour story

Smart and outdoorsy to a man, but rarely horny and seldom foolish.

Robert E. Howard’s Breckenridge Elkins

Somewhat horny, very foolish, so outdoorsy he barely fits between four walls, but Breck can hardly be considered smart (I’ve mapped him out as a D&D character many times, never with an intelligence greater than 7).

William Dietrich’s Ethan Gage

Now this is the stuff.  Gage is smart.  He’s a savant, a scientist of the Ben Franklin persuasion, known as a master of electricity in a world still lit by candles.  After a spell at Harvard he spent time as a fur trapper in the Great Lakes, learning woodscraft, sharpshooting, and tomahawking.  Gage then made his way to Paris during the Revolution, and picked up the habit of leaping into danger, usually also involving first leaping between the legs of whatever woman happened to available at the time.

Gage is “lazy as an aristocrat, but without the manners,” and finds himself in various adventures across the globe, often as not tied to ancient mystical conspiracies.  In one spectacular tale (the aforementioned Dakota Cipher) Gage tumbles in and out of Louisa Bonaparte’s petticoats before hightailing it to the wilderness of North America, running from cultists and British spies while searching for, of all things...

 

Don't fuck with Thor's hammer

Sadly, I don’t believe that Dietrich managed to take Ethan Gage back to North America over the course of the series, which was cut short at eight books out of a planned fifteen.  Gage does set a high bar for the smart, horny, foolish, outdoorsy hero that I love to read about.

Gay Cowboys of Fallout: New Vegas

The days are getting longer, the temperature warmer, and the snow is less than three feet deep.  It’s almost spring time here in New England, and that means my mind and gaming habits turn towards raucous outdoor adventure.  I recently fired up Fallout: New Vegas, a game as much about surviving in the wilderness as it is about blasting mutants, and was greeted by the mustachioed face of my smiling, badass, gay cowboy.

Yes, you read that right.  Fallout: New Vegas is a game that rewards you for playing a friendly gay cowboy (mustache optional) in a world where cowboys and rangers are fighting Imperial Rome over the Las Vegas strip (yup, that’s more or less the whole plot).  Here’s how you do it:

First, be Good Natured.  Taking this perk at first level deducts points from all of your combat skills while increasing many of the important non-combat skills like First Aid, Speech, and Barter.  Sounds bad for a gunslinging cowboy, but you are only going to want the cowboy-oriented combat skills (guns & melee) so it’s easy to move points around to get all the wild west wasteland shootin’ and stabbin’ skills you need.

  

Second, you should be into dudes.  Serious.  By second level, if you are male, you can take the perk Confirmed Bachelor which rewards you for your intimate familiarity with the male body to give you +10% damage to the same sex (and a good chunk of your enemies are men), plus the chance to flirt with an occasional wasteland wanderer.

Third, make sure to get good at shootin’ and stabbin’, because by level eight with 45 points in guns & melee you can take the Cowboy perk, giving you +25% damage done by dynamite, hatchets, knives, revolvers, and lever-action guns.  

 

From there you can add in perks like quick draw, gunslinger, and a host of other gunfighter & survivalist perks to round out your cowpoke.  By building a gay cowboy step by step, you get a whopping +35% damage to some of the best some of the coolest weapons on your most common enemies.  Certainly this was a crafty plan of the writers, and I love them for it.