A homage with reference to a homage :o)

I have that rare thing, a story about a cat that is really worth the telling. But I’ll get to that soon. Writing about something else now.

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Two days ago, I made the mistake of impulsively sending the first ten (!) chapters of the rough draft of a fan-fiction story I was writing (for fidgeting purposes in between studying grammar – “anyone can do any amount of work provided it is not the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment”, Robert Benchley) to a whole bunch of friends. “Look, see what I’ve been doing!” It was the sort of exuberant self-indulgent action you do when you have a woozy head cold and secondary ramifications are occurring to you more slowly than the things you can do with your email.

Fundamentally flawed, really. Broadcasting it was. The problem was that a work of fan fiction is a work of love. And I had chosen as my fan fiction focus the world depicted in the obscure 2001 computer game Wizardry 8. No one to whom I emailed my story-efforts knows the game, or cares to. Actually, that just leads to the main problem. All the fun creativity I was perpetrating, the real art I was making for the most part, had to do with fleshing out that world about 10,000 percent and making sense of all the odd little side details and unexplained aspects in the necessarily rather spare game world and riffing off them in new directions, with jokes. Gwen, who also loves the game, had been having a great time reading each chapter as I finished it. But it’s invisible to someone else. For all that anyone who didn’t know the game could tell, I was just obsessively repeating and gassing on about the details that had been explicitly spelled out in the game. And so almost all of the cleverness I was having so much fun with is actually impossible for a novice to see.

I expect mostly a polite silence in reply. :o)

Ah, well.

I love that world, though. It merits it. It’s the contiguous habitable area of a planet called Dominus, which, like the rest of the universe dealt with by the games Wizardry 1 through 8, combines high technology with a swords-and-sorcery mix directly cloned out of Dungeons and Dragons.

I played the first Wizardry game on a friend’s Mac in the ’80s. Man, that was early. Almost no graphics, almost purely primitively text-based, the only graphic part was a wire-frame maze you walked through using the arrow keys, only seeing two squares deep in that. And now the game I’m talking about is Wizardry 8, and they were able to make a full, rich 3-D world, and it’s beautiful. The company went broke making it so gorgeous and deep, actually; they barely managed to release it at all. But it’s a grand finish.

But Dominus! Dominus itself – a planet landed on (or crashed on) for the first time in Wizardry 8. (No relation to the Transformers planet Dominus.)

I could tell you that the game is infinitely replayable – you just want to make another new mix of characters for your party and see how they do going through it. But that doesn’t explain the way you fall in love with it. I’ll tell you how you fall in love with it: there is a place there that is where I would like to build my dream house. And part of me wants to be dead serious about that. There’s a spot where the barren, rocky gorge that leads to the Brotherhood’s Monastery lets out into this big grassy range like the Palouse, with ridges of mountains all around, and on the far side of it the road to the city of Arnika begins, that runs away down the middle of a green valley. The range slopes a little, with rock showing through here and there and a big crag isolated at one place in the middle, and at the top end there’s a mysterious house with a barred door (it turns out to have been put up by some visiting aliens – doesn’t matter for this explanation). Now this is a nowhere place, really – off the beaten track, out of the way of the action of the game – but you look at it, and it’s big sky country. Seriously. I’d build my house there, right where the Umpani put their teleporter outlet. A nice spread, where a man could think.

And, like I say, the rest of the world is a busy place. And you get to thinking of it as a place.

That’s what got me writing. Once you think of it as a place, that would make sense fleshed out and made as real as it deserves, the questions start coming. You want to know more about the peoples of Dominus that you meet as you find yourself questing with great difficulty and at great hazard all over the world. You want to know more about the Higardi, the human-like race, with their Brotherhood order and their serene confidence that one day they will be the people to Ascend to be the next Cosmic Lords. Why does the apparently religious Brotherhood bristle with so many computers, and what’s that strange area underwater near the Monastery that looks like an undersea extension that you can’t reach? What are the full responsibilities of the Brotherhood? You want to understand more about those enigmatic Rynjin, who look like they might be related to iguanas, who live out there on their warm island in austerely primitive ferocity practicing their kung fu and their psychic skills, both of which are extremely well-developed when you have to pass through their territory. Why don’t they talk to you? Do they talk at all, to anyone, or do they just speak mind-to-mind between themselves? What is it like to be a Rynjin? And then there are the Trynnies, whose city is a tree huge beyond the dreams of sequoias, who look somewhat like hairless, earless rabbits and happily steal everything the Higardis have that isn’t nailed down when they’re not, very capably, preparing to defend themselves with those awfully long spears against the Rapax, the Rynjin and the Razuka. What strange, appealing religion centers around their Shaman and that mentally-projected Seventh Bough? And then there are the fearsome, bull-like samurai-Templar-culture Rapax with their crocodile tails and their dark demon Mother, and the grand bitter history of bondage and proud service that must be theirs… and there are the visiting alien expeditions with their own agendas (the embassy of close-mouthed civilized ape-bear Mook scholars, and the insectoid T’Rang and the rhino-headed British-Raj-uniformed Umpani scheming against each other)… and then there are the sub-races of fecund Dominus: what do those sprites do during the day when they’re not being complete spiteful menaces? how intelligent are the nightmares and dreadmares? and so on, and on.

You want to know! You want to be an interested expatriate.

What got me writing the story – or, the seed – was just the result of getting to feel that the world was a real place, to be taken seriously. Arnika, the great city of the Higardi, was mostly empty when I was there. It had been contemptuously invaded by the Dark Savant – I won’t even get into him, but he’s trouble – and he had built a mysterious tower there, and his alien cohorts and robotic soldiers frequently roamed the streets. So, although Higardi patrols continued to hold the line, most of the Higardi population had fled Arnika.

Where did they go? A lot of them had turned to banditry, certainly, but that’s not the population of a city. And I had travelled all over the place, and I had not found refugees.

I got to thinking that something terrible had happened to them. Something not covered in the course of the game/story. Which meant that most of the Higardi race had been wiped out and, in the circumstances of the emergency, the people I spoke to had not found out about it yet.

If they had fled to sea in their fishing fleet (Arnika is a port city – and just the one sunken boat lies by their wharf, suggesting trouble)… what had happened to them? Had they sought refuge in Bayjin – and had that meeting gone really, really badly? Or had something stranger happened?

Well. :o)

There was a story waiting in that… and then there was the special circumstance created by the end of the game. It is not revealing too much (even if you were going to go and get this old 2001 game and play it, which you should, but you won’t, will you, admit it!) to tell you that, at the end of the game in Wizardry 8, the player’s party succeeds in Ascending to the Cosmic Circle, defeating the evil Dark Savant, and claiming the prize he coveted – they become the new Cosmic Lords of all of reality for the next cycle of history, able to rewrite the universe as they wish.

So – what then do they choose to do with their power? What happens then? Something does.

And – as I said, the Higardi believed, had in fact been promised of old, that it was their destiny to be the ones to Ascend. How do they deal with this news? (And with the fact that the ones who stole that holy and prophecied Higardi destiny, while admittedly defeating the evil man who might have gotten it, were those disreputable adventurers who more than likely cleaned out the Arnika Bank?)

Well. As I say, that would be over-telling. Fan fiction is a personal thing, except to other fans.

But what I meant to give an impression of is how real the imagination comes to make the world of Wizardry 8. By necessity, so much cannot “really” be there in a pre-programmed game, even one that really does let you walk in whichever direction you wish (and take your chances). “Really” it is all stage scenery. But so much is suggested, and what is shown is so pleasing and thought-provoking, that the mind takes over, and comes to think as if the world depicted is fully full and really real. You get to think… no, to muse… about how nice it would be to spend a couple of vacation weeks in Trynton… to take a bungalow, maybe, on the third bough or so, and spend time listening to the walkways creaking in the breeze and very carefully sampling a couple of Fuzzfaz Fizzers poured by Fuzzfaz himself. (If you had a good Trynnie escort. The Trynnie augment their city’s security with a nice symbiosis trick, one apparently shared by the Rynjin, in which case the Trynnies may have stolen the secret – they let dangerous species roam their tree city freely, and the critters ignore them but are viciously triggered by strangers or guests…)

That is love. As real love as for one’s own beloved country – and perhaps with the same element of imagination applied – which is redundant, because that is love. What one loves is never a fact – it’s always a subject. There’s not “really” that much depth? Was anyone ever in love with anyone who didn’t have magnificent depths clear to see in his or her eyes?

(Come to that, I could write about any number of subjects in any number of tones, and something of this would apply too.)

But. I keep reading reviews of Wizardry 8 – written ten years afterward, which is quite something – that say that Wizardry 8 was not only a worthy culmination of the series but was the last great representative of a kind of computer role-playing game that has not been made anymore in the years since. I don’t know why, and I’m not enough of an expert gamer to join in the opining exactly. Maybe it’s the years since the text-based beginnings with primitive computers. I’m guessing. But – the writers of those reviews get it too. Wizardry 8 is an RPG that, in amidst all the florid spell-filled combats and monster encounters, does become the world you live in for a while.

(I don’t want to HEAR how the graphics aren’t up to your refined modern 2011 standards. I suppose you can’t listen to old radio dramas or watch black and white movies either. You proud crippled whippersnappers…)

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Addendum. I should also say one good thing about Wizardry 8, if I am recommending it, and I suppose that is one level of what this is: the combat is turn-based.

What that means is that, don’t worry, you can definitely actually play it. :o) I exaggerate slightly, but with me that’s what it can amount to. The frame-rate on my computer is never the problem; the frame-rate in my mind is the problem. For example, I can play real-time strategy games like Age of Empires without trouble, but, when the moving complexity on the screen goes up as in a really “realistic” real-time strategy game like Medieval II, my troops tend to die as their commander’s slow mind struggles, and when it comes to a run-around-and-shoot game like Team Fortress 2 I’m best off running around blindly like an idiot and forgetting about trying to play well, because my eyes and hands just don’t think that fast.

All of the Wizardry games had turn-based combat. It’s almost extinct now. You can think of it as being like chess. When combat is entered, the smooth flow of time suddenly stops. Time is now divided into turns, in which you have time to think. You tell each of your six party members on the screen what they are going to do in the next round; you decide if the whole party will move, in which case the party members will have to wait to act until the party stops moving, if the moving doesn’t use up all the time in the round; you look at the situation. (Let’s get our backs against this cliff. Priest, casting a “Bless” would be nice. Sure, you other guys can shoot arrows and sling stones as they close on us.) Then you click the button to start the next round.

Your people act, the enemy acts. The round ends. Everything stops again. You blanch at the new situation and again decide what everyone’s going to do in the next round. (Um, it would probably be a good idea for Zarf the gnome mage to try to cast the spell “Web”, although he’s not that good at it yet. Rollo [you liked the name Rollo] the elf rogue had better go into the party’s bags and grab some paralysis-cure powder, or poor motionless Petunia the hobbit monk is going to get clobbered. Hey, Rraargh, can you try to protect Petunia this next round? There’s a good lizardman…)

And so on. It’s really nice. Fast hands and overactive adrenals not required for desperate drama.

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End note, for the actually interested: It installs best in Windows XP and earlier, and I’ve also gotten it to install just fine in Windows Vista, using compatibility mode, I believe. So your computer you’ve had for a while can run it – and in much more sprightly fashion than the less powerful computers the program was written for in 2001! When it came to Windows 7, well, I managed that too on my new laptop, but some extra witchcraft was involved, so I’d better substitute “ask me about it” for “just fine”.)