Fun City is the best Shadowrun actual play podcast on the Internet, and its two GMs, Mike Rugnetta and Taylor Moore, crafted a beautiful, dimension-spanning arc with the most thought-provoking villain this show has featured yet.

Making a Monster: GM Edition asks actual play podcasters how they use the monsters in their games. Read the transcript and get more from the show: https://scintilla.studio/monster-fun-city-mike-rugnetta-taylor-moore

Get stat blocks, bonus content, and other monstrous perks: www.patreon.com/scintillastudio

Join the conversation: www.twitter.com/SparkOtter

Meet my guests, Mike Rugnetta and Taylor Moore:

https://funcity.ventures

https://www.twitter.com/MikeRugnetta

https://twitter.com/taylordotbiz

https://www.YouTube.com/MikeRugnetta

Music by Nihilore and Audionautix

http://www.nihilore.com/license

www.audionautix.com

Hi there.

This episode comes with a for fun city and especially the

float city art who's ending.

We will be discussing in detail.

The simplest definition of a monster is it's

a, a large, dangerous entity that is in some way, not human.

I have some favorite monsters in fifth edition, but the ones

that I enjoy playing are the ones who think they're doing the right thing.

So to them, they're the heroes, but to everybody else, they're the monster.

I mean, we know who our monsters are personally

in our personal life.

So for me, what a monster is, is someone or something doing harm with purpose.

at least in my games like that could still be an aboleth or it could be

some form of monstrous creature.

But like, in my opinion, they still have agency.

Like they had a chance to not do the thing they're doing now

and they chose to do it anyway.

I would say more that monster being antagonist that you're

not going to have a conversation with.

You got me thinking about my own biases now.

, why aren't you having a conversation with them?

Why aren't you trying to?

Villains don't think they're villains is the thing.

And so you're watching someone who, in some ways you can sympathize

with, because you know, the evil queen was just someone who was

wronged and thinks that she deserves, whatever it is she's trying to get.

In Float City, the Emissary.

That to me is a monster.

It doesn't have a human shape.

It is monstrous.

It is a thing that is horrific.

It causes terror.

It is something that is, until you see it, somewhat beyond the ken of the human mind.

I think a villain is something that plots.

A villain is at the top of a pyramid that your players work towards.

Welcome back to Making a Monster: Game Master edition.

Fun City is, I will argue, the best actual play Shadowrun podcast on the Internet.

And during lockdown, the team transitioned to a super-future RPG called

Stillfleet for an arc called Float City.

And it is GM'dby two extremely talented, very lovely people.

Mike Rugnetta and Taylor Moore.

So guys, welcome to the show.

Hello.

hi, thank you so much for having us.

Yeah, thanks for having us.

Mike Rugnetta is a writer host and theater artist.

He was the creator, host, and writer of PBS Digital Studios' multiple

Webby-award-winning series Idea Channel, which is where I first heard from him.

Uh, and has hosted and written digital video for Know Your Meme,

Crash Course, and Mental Floss.

He is an audio design professional and digital producer for influential companies

too numerous to list and, I will add, an exemplar of thorough and ordered thought.

Uh, your video about stuff on the camera lens showed via Baruch.

Don't laugh at me, Taylor, I'm

a professional,

I have to follow this.

ah,

I'm laughing because my and my, my introduction

is going to be air now.

Taylor Moore, a podcaster who lives in Brooklyn.

Oh, come on.

we'll cut to this.

Taylor Moore is a writer, performer and producer.

He has been seen on stage at Upright Citizens Brigade theater, writing,

and hosting True TVs Sex Your Food; producing podcasts for Splitsider,

including Rude Tales of Magic; editor-in-chiefing Fortunate Horse

magazine, which is making the world weirder one subway car at a time; and

creating the phrase "chill sitch", for which he has won multiple no awards.

Uh, and he plays

But many deserve it.

I will add, Mike, your video about stuff on the camera lens went through

Baruch Spinoza and Richard Garrick, and argued that merely understanding

something constitutes a form of belief regardless of its previously understood

level of fiction or reality, which is the whole reason I felt it critically

necessary to have a podcast that untangles the haphazard threads of stories that

have been stolen for the consensus fantasy universe, which runs D and D.

And that has been up to now the stock in trade of what Making a Monster does.

If you have a long running podcast that releases regularly, you are, to my mind,

a professional DM, and professional DMS have a certain level of authority on how

monsters are used and what they can do.

So that's what we're trying to get at with this short mini series called

Game Master Edition for the show.

So I want to hear from you guys how Fun City came to be and what

your hopes for the show were.

So Taylor and I, met playing Shadowrun.

It was the first, time that we like hung out was I was running a game with some of

his coworkers when he was a Kickstarter.

And we did that for a little while that game sort of petered out in the way that

a lot of just games run by adults do.

Um, but we, um, Taylor had approached me a bunch of times about like doing a podcast

because Taylor worked at Kickstarter in the, I forget what your title was, you

were like head of head of podcasting boy.

I started as the receptionist and then I became

the head of podcasts and comedy.

So Taylor was like, we should do, like,

you should do an actual play.

Like you should do a show.

Like, you know, it'd be good.

There's a lot of appetite for it.

The space is really growing.

And this was, I mean, this would have been what, three years ago, three and

a half, maybe even four years ago.

yeah, I was, I was in, I like, I, I discovered, actual

play podcasts and just became completely enamored of, of it.

And it looked, it looked just like this wide open place that was just full of

interesting stuff that could be done that not a lot of folks were doing.

And I really, I had been, I had been wanting to do podcasts for

forever before I was a Kickstarter.

I tried starting my own like comedy podcast network back when very

few people knew what they were.

Uh, and, and so I, and I was dying to get back back into the podcasting

world and then I I've, I then, yeah.

And then I discovered actual play and it was like, we gotta do this.

Like I've, I've got, I've got to do it.

Uh, and I just so happened to know, um, someone who might have some

requisite MC skills, uh, uh, some tabletop DM-ing, uh, uh, toolkit

and have had, had recently stopped making videos for PBS Idea Channel.

So, so Taylor and I talked about it a long time and like,

we talked about it for a long time.

And, um, at first I was like pretty resistant to it and it just, it took me

a long, a long while to come up with the list of things that would, I think, make

it make, make me not so nervous about it.

And one of the big ones was, uh, I was like, Taylor, you gotta be in the show.

And so

the original pitch was that I was going to be in the cast

and it was going to be Mike DM-ing.

Yeah.

And so I was like, no, like we gotta like, let's split it.

And like, what are we going to do?

Cause it can't just be like, okay, we'll do a Shadowrun show.

That's going to have a lot of its own challenges, uh, for reasons

that we will maybe get into, uh, you know, as we chat down the road.

Um, and so what are we going to do to the show, to like get people in,

because saying shadow run is going to actually turn a lot of people away.

And so we talked a lot about what the kinda, um, for lack of

a better word gimmicks would be.

And one of the things that we settled on was, um, Taylor being many of the

antagonists, um, that like Taylor would basically be, as we say it, the

bad boys and I would be the main GM.

And then once we had that, we were like, oh, okay.

That feels like a stat idea feels like a starting place for a show.

And then we went out to actually now answer your question.

Um, uh, like then we just basically started thinking about like, okay,

like who, who is going to be in this.

Uh, and I mean that, it took a while.

Uh, I mean, we were talking about who we wanted to be in the

show for like, I think like a

couple months.

Yeah,

like maybe maybe six months.

because what we didn't want to do was, and I'm not saying this is bad.

We didn't want to be like, all right, let's get a bunch of comedians in here,

or let's get a bunch of well-known tabletop people in here or any, like,

we really wanted to get a mix of people.

And when we say mixed, we mean like an intellectual mix of like expertise

and bias and stuff like that.

A lot of times when we talked about like diversity in casting,

what we're talking about was like, what are these people into?

What are their realms of expertise?

Like, we don't want everyone that has the same voice as every UCB

improviser at the time, right, making the same jokes and references.

We want people who can bring things to this, that we can't ourselves.

Uh, so we talked about like, who do we know that has this variety of input?

And we settled on this "Gilligan's Island" mix of comedians and

PhDs and chefs and writers it's.

Yeah.

Uh, you know, and these were all people that were just in our, in

our networks that we wanted to do.

Uh, yeah, like I had met Jenn as a creator

in residence at Kickstarter.

Um, I knew Bijon from, uh, through the same friend that introduced me

and Taylor years ago, uh, shout out to Nicole, patron saint of Fun City, um,

uh, Shannon and Nick are in Taylor's network from New York comedy world.

Yeah, but Shannon also was on the PhD track, you know, at the time.

I knew Shannon because I had done one show of hers years ago called Drunk

Science that she puts on here in Brooklyn.

That's a fantastic show.

Uh, but it was like, oh, well, that's a, that's a bullseye.

Uh, you know, and ever since I did her show, I was like, I really want

to work with Shannon again one day.

Uh, and Nick Guercio too, is just one of the best improvisers in New York City

was that instill

incredible.

just so, and one of the most charming people you can

possibly ever hope to meet in life.

And, and, you know, and I had just met Bijon out in Portland at XO XO, and I had

He's a tech journalist at the time.

I mean, yeah.

like,

yeah.

we had, all sort of run into these people and just,

yeah, th this was our hot list.

And I think part of it also is like one of the other things that

we talked about, we were coming up with the idea of the show is I really like a

futuristic, sort of scifi things that do not hide that they are about now, uh, that

like, it is very like on the sleeve that it's like, we are like really it's set in

the future, but really this is right now.

And so we wanted to have a group of people who would be able to react And like

Taylor said, like would have interesting things to think and say, about the current

political climate, the current cultural climate, the current climate climate,

uh, and so that was, that was a part, I think, also of like how we, how we talked

about and reached out to the people that we did is like, you know, who is

involved in what's going on right now?

yeah, Jenn de la Vega was one of those people that it was

like, why in the world is she doing

. . .? Taylor Moore: Anyone who gets to know

work with her and be her best friend.

Like she just has this force of like competence and imagination and charm.

She really has that force where she enters a room and the chemistry of

the room changes for the better.

Not like me, you know.

I'll say that Mike is shaking his head, like, oh, you have no idea.

It really like, I'm shaking my head because I'm thinking, when we

reached out to January, we're like, "Hey, do you want to be in the show?"

And she was like, "I don't think I'm going to be good at this.

I've never played it.

I've never played a tabletop role-playing game before in my life."

And then she showed up and just crushes it left and right.

It's wild.

She's maybe the most natural, immediate role player that I've ever had at a table.

It's wild.

I don't know

how she does it.

I hope that I'm not harping on Jenn to the detriment of all of your

other players who are in their own right.

Exceptional.

But I will say that, Jenn de la Vega could read the back of a cereal box in Merkis'

voice and I would listen for hours.

Yeah.

What made Shadowrun the game of choice for Fun City?

Mike Rugnetta did.

Yeah.

I mean, I just, I, I like it, despite all of its, various flaws as a system

and I think that it is a good setting in which, to talk about now and the world

as it actually exists, which is, um, you know, something that I like to do.

There's just, there's a - again, a blessing and a curse - there's

so much material in Shadowrun to work with that it really, yeah,

it really just lets you do a lot.

Uh, and I think also part of me is like, was interested in the challenge.

Like what do you, how do you turn this very complicated, huge system

that has cannon that has decades and decades of lore that has like, legal

decisions that are part of like how the game is written and how it works,

you know, how do you turn that into like a compelling narrative show?

I thought it would be like a fun, yeah, fun challenge and a good material to

work with narratively and story-wise.

Yeah, I gotta back Mike up on, especially the setting, like, you

know, people critique Shadowrun, and they ought to, but man that setting rules.

It's really fun to play in the Shadowrun world.

And I also, I think we joked and thought it would be funny.

We were like, oh, and we'll set it in New York.

That'll be funny.

That'll be good.

But Shadowrun is one of a few systems where you could set a game

in New York, like canonically, you know, Shadowrun exists or sorry,

New York exists in Shadowrun.

Um, but I think that there is a, there's like a shared amount of ownership over the

setting that we all have around the table because it's our city that we live in.

And so that I think provides another way that like all of the gears

sort of line up, we build that mind share around the table, like we're

in a place where even though it's a hundred years in the future we live.

And so we get to share a lot of jokes and insights and stories about that, and

both make inside jokes to our friends who also live in New York and I think

like invite people who don't live in New York to our New York, in a way, even

though, uh, you know, it's, uh, partially flooded and is literally run by the NYP D

well, I guess that's true, in our world.

yeah.

is it fair to say that Shadowrun is a near future setting?

I realized that you might be the one person who has like a distinct

opinion on whether that's true.

6E just came out, uh, Shadowrun 6E came out and I think it takes

place in like 2080, which like, I think

that's

that's near future.

Yeah,

you know, I mean, it's one of those things where it's a lot nearer

future than when they originally wrote it.

yeah,

You know?

I mean, they wrote Shadowrun before cell phones were really a thing.

Or even, you know, like widely democratized personal

computing was a real thing.

Uh, I mean, but that's what this is.

I don't know if we should credit Shadowrun with that.

I mean, this is, what's so fun about cyberpunk as a

genre and like the eighties.

So it's not like they alone were inventing this, but they saw, it's

like the gift to see 30 years in the future is not always the same value.

you know what I mean?

Like if you could see 30 years in the future in 1640, so what?

It's like, oh, a Tudor will be on the throne.

if you could see 30 years in the future in 1980, that's a big, that's a big deal.

And so it feels like a much further future thing than it really is

because I mean, everything we do in the show, like, you know, obviously

there's the fantasy element, which cross my fingers will happen today.

I want magic to be real, so bad.

Uh, but the, all the, the science fiction stuff, I mean,

that's, that's barely futuristic.

I mean, it is barely in the future.

Taylor also gets to another thing that, is a benefit and

one of the reasons we really like the system and the setting, of Shadowrun,

which is, we are both big cyberpunk fans.

I am a huge, like, I am a big cyberpunk nerd.

I just, I really love the genre.

I'm a big fan of sort of categorically, anything that fits into it.

Um, I just really love most of the genre markers.

I also really, really, really love, noir.

I have said, I think in other places that like really all I'm ever trying

to do is, uh, Dashiell Hammett with paperwork and ubiquitous computing.

Like that's like every single thing is just, that's the

story I want to try to tell.

And Shadowrun is a place that we can do that

Mike keeps trying to put like supercomputers

in Franz Kafka's The Castle.

basically,

I can't tell you how many times during Float City, uh,

spoiler alert for Float City arc, that we had like Mike wanted to

put more bureaucracy in this story.

it's

like

It's true.

like "No Mike!"

But we have to get to the fireworks factory at some point.

Kafka, you know, you never get to the castles.

And I'm like no,

it's, it's, uh,

to the castle, they'll kill us!

It's a three hour conversation with the manager.

That is the fireworks!

please put a spoiler alert for Franz Kafka's The Castle.

Uh, Taylor, in that case, I really have to thank you for being

on the show and reigning Mike in, because I wanted the fireworks factory.

Part of the reason that I agree with you, Mike, that cyberpunk is

fantastic, and part of the reason that I wanted a Shadowrun podcast

as part of GM Edition, was that cyberpunk is, the future via the past.

Like you have to think like someone in the 1980s would think of the future

and that's a fantastic mental exercise.

That breaks down a bit with something like Stillfleet.

I mean it breaks down a lot.

What is the difference between a near future and a super future genre?

What did Float City give you that Fun City never could?

All right.

Here's the difference?

You know what?

Let's give your listeners something to yell at us about, right?

It'll drive engagement.

Uh, here's the difference between science fiction and fantasy.

obviously these things interconnect and overlap, but the essential element

of science fiction is that there's the question of, can we bootstrap

ourselves out of the human condition?

Whereas fantasy, fantasy storytelling is all about as a storyteller, you have to

abstract the concept of power, and that's the only way you can tell this story.

And that's where magic comes from as a literary device.

So I think that a lot of times, even though Shadowrun has fantasy in it,

our version of Shadowrun and the world we play in is very much a, an answer

to the question of if technology got better with things still be bad?

You know, like yes.

Yes.

And the answer, and we play in the world of yes, but how yes?

That's, that's the, in what specific manner?

But uh Float City, then you're crossing the Clarke line.

You're going to a place where science fiction is so, like the science and

technology is so alien and advanced that it is effectively magic.

It is fantasy, right?

It is fantasy with a scifi skin on it, just like Star Wars or something else.

And the difference is, is that we get to further abstract notions of power

and all these society and obligation and, and, and, and all these things to

more like fundamental forms that aren't mediated by like the sigils and signs

of like current contemporary life.

So we can have someone, like the Saffron Annax or The Co itself - and

for listeners the Saffron Annax is a big powerful person who appears in the story.

And The Co is this company that our player characters worked for, which is really

like a satellite society of like colonial capitalists that's meant to resemble the

East India Tea Company during the American and Western European colonial age.

So instead of talking about the East India Tea Company, we just have it

be this, oh, it's this, it's this magical group of space pirates

that live on a satellite, you know?

And so we, Look, here's the real deal.

The reason we went to Float City was cause we didn't know how to record remotely

and we didn't want the main canon story to be infected with bad production.

And we did the same thing on Rude Tales of Magic as well, one of my other

podcasts, where we say, "well, this audio might suck, so let's do a different

story so that the main storyline is not infected with bad production."

what we found in storytelling was that Float City let us make much bigger,

grander moves and statements and vibes than the real world quote, unquote, real

world of Shadowrun would allow us to.

Yeah.

So we went really, really huge, you know, like multiple planet and

dimension spanning, in Float City.

And like tons and tons of credit to Wythe Marschall, the writer and creator

of the game, who's like a close friend of mine and the reason we were able to

play it, uh, before it's even released.

He was kind enough to like entrust us with his baby, uh, that like

he's been writing for 10 years

that I've been playing.

like I've

been playing versions of Stillfleet for 10, 15 years, like a long, long time.

Lots and lots of credit for Wythe for being like, what does anything look like

a hundred million years in the future?

Well, you can't possibly know, so let's get weird.

Wythe, and Wythe just, I mean, uh Wythe is a very, very smart person.

He got his PhD in, anthropology and, and future food studies.

Uh, he studies the, the future of farming.

He like just does all of this amazing, incredible work thinking

about like, what is humanity going to eat a thousand years from now?

And so that's sort of like the kernel that Stillfleet is based on.

And that let us turn a lot of the things, a lot of the moves, the like metaphors

that we try to get at in, in Shadowrun and in Fun City, it let us abstract them even

further and get so much weirder with them.

Almost turned them like into a Dali painting, uh, in a way, uh, like try to

get like really like out there and even like romantic in a way that like, we

don't tend to do on Fun City because Fun City is about like, you know, you're in

the lower east side, it smells like piss.

It's a hundred years in the future, the lower east side still smells like piss.

yeah, much more operatic.

Right.

It's it's like, it's like listening to like modern, like psycho drone or

like Philip Glass stuff versus Float City, which is just like Italian opera.

yeah,

do you know the romantic composers and, and, you know yeah.

And because we knew it was a limited series, we knew we were

going to get to end it soon.

Whereas Fun City's this ongoing thing, but when you get to end something, you

get to make a lot bigger moves, right?

Yeah.

And that's, and that has nothing to do with the world of the genre.

That's just a fact of the limited resources of living in the real world.

I have over the course of this podcast interviewed

something like two dozen game designers and four actual play DMS.

And uh, every single one of them has a slightly different definition

of what the word monster is.

I want to know how Shadowrun and Stillfleet differ in their

definitions of monster from D and D, which I can give you verbatim.

and I want to know how you guys, as co GM's of this podcast, use the

words or define the words "monster", "villain", and "antagonist".

Interesting.

That's like the heart and soul of what I'm trying to do with this episode.

And I, they're so interconnected it's very difficult to do those in

a particular order of questions.

maybe it'd be best to start from the system and work out.

Wait, I want to know what is the D and D like

verbatim definition of a monster?

Oh yeah, it's super easy.

It's on page four of the Monster Manual, if you have one and you want to look it

up, it is "anything with a stat block".

Anything that your players might interact with is defined as monster.

So like an armored guard is a monster.

Got it.

A commoner?

Monster.

Monster.

Interesting

Interesting.

Taylor, do I have a lot of thoughts about this?

I could,

can

start.

Yeah.

well, I, listen, I think it's fantastic for what they're doing,

because they're trying to make it easy on their copywriters to get clear rules

right.

D and D is by and large an Ikea manual.

So it

needs a way of saying this is an Allen key.

yeah, yeah, exactly.

So the word "monster" is just going to be an Allen key.

Love it.

The philosophical implications?

Ooh, lots of them, a

way better.

I just had a, a conversation.

I run a, a five E game with some close friends of mine from

college who haven't ever played any tabletop role-playing before

I love those people.

They asked me to run a game for them.

And, oh my God, it's so much fun.

I would say that my concern about playing " correctly" is low.

Uh, like my, my, the amount of worry that I have, that I am doing things as

prescribed by manuals is non-existent.

And they know this and they know that they have selected into this, uh,

game with this kind of, of, uh, DM,

um,

Establish ground rules and expectations.

This is

important.

Yeah.

listen, if you make a good enough case, I'll let you do anything.

Um, and one of them had a question.

They were like, is a Mind Flayer a creature?

Hey there, it's future Lucas just breaking in to remind you about

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Alright, back to the show.

They were like, is a Mind Flayer a creature?

Uh, because one of their abilities was like, any creature XYZ.

And I was like, I don't know.

Do you think a Mind Flayer is a creature?

And one of the guys who I play with has a background in

philosophy, he studied philosophy.

Oh, no.

And so we got to have a conversation about whether or

not the Mind Flayer is a creature.

So we started with, okay, when I say creature, we're like out, we're

walking in the woods and I say creature, what's the set of things

that comes to mind in that setting?

We're out in the city and we're walking around and, and I point,

and I say, "ah, a creature!"

What do you think of?

A rat, maybe?

A racoon?

You're out in the world of the Forgotten Realms and you point

and you say a creature, What's the thing that comes to mind?

Is the thing that comes to mind for those characters who inhabit that setting this

being, which is known to have a culture, known to have a history, known to be

not only smart but dangerously smart?

Do you think that they would regard that being as a creature?

And they answered "No.".

I want to fist fight everyone in this conversation.

You broke the game!

Yes, it's a creature!

It's a creature!

It is obviously the rules have, they it's like monster the rules

of defining categories to help you understand what your abilities can

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

damn it.

I mean, that's what I'm saying.

Like,

like if in a situation I'm like, listen, you get to do whatever you want.

So if you have a question about whether or not something is a

creature, let's answer the question.

If you tell me it's a creature, like I'm not going to argue, but if you

want to, if you want to, talk about it, we will talk about it.

I think yes, from that perspective, like, yeah, if you want to use an attack on

something and yeah, use it, it's fine.

Go, go for it.

like, break, break the game.

We ignore so much about Shadowrun that you know, is very, very tightly controlled.

The categories are extremely strict.

Every single object has a toughness and strength rating.

And there is a table in the book to tell you whether the door you're in

front of can survive the blast from the grenade that you're holding.

Like

oh, don't, don't get me started on grenade rules in Shadowrun.

Uh, it's uh, it's a good example of why you shouldn't write rules at all.

Yeah.

So I think in the broad sense, monster, villain, antagonist, it's whatever your

party is currently rolling dice against.

In the easy way.

Sure.

But I have strong feelings

about like narratively,

like

we go.

No one listens for the

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like outside of rolling dice, mechanics, stuff like that, how you decide for

the sake of the rules, what the thing that you are interacting with is?

How do you a player and how do the player characters appreciate the person or

thing that is standing in front of them?

I think of monsters as things like in Float City, the Emissary.

That to me is a monster.

It doesn't have a human shape.

It is monstrous, uh, like in a sort of like Noel Carroll sense.

It is a thing that is horrific.

It causes terror.

It is something that is, until you see it, somewhat beyond the ken of the human mind.

I think a villain is someone who is usually human, but it doesn't have to

be, but it is something that plots.

A villain is at the top of a pyramid that your players work towards.

They're planning.

They have ideas, they have preferences, and can make compromises.

They can sacrifice they can yield ground in order to gain what they

think will be an advantage later.

An antagonist is possibly literally anything, including the other

player characters around the table.

And I think that we are always like every player, every character, every object,

every NPC you're dipping in and out of friendly antagonist, from antagonist to

villain, back and forth, all the time.

And I think like Taylor's specific style of play is just like, it's like watching

a master at work, like watching, watching our players, players block your ears,

become best friends with people who they really shouldn't because, because,

because Taylor is able to antagonize them and then be like, no, but we're friends.

Like it's really, I mean, it's abusive, it's an abusive relationship.

am taking advantage of their weaknesses, like their

personal, cast members' weaknesses and fears and insecurities.

Absolutely.

A hundred percent.

Some of those people it's like unclear where the line is.

Are they a friend?

If not a friend, are they a useful relationship?

Mike, let me ask you a question.

Gollum.

Is Gollum a monster, an antagonist or a villain?

Oh,

this I assume is the Lord of the Rings Gollum.

Yes.

Not like a mutual friend.

We have we

perhaps the, the, giant thoughtless creature from Jewish folklore.

Ah, the golem, no, no, no of the Warsaw.

no.

I've heard them pronounced exactly the opposite way.

Oh really?

I had to clarify,

I'm going to say antagonist.

Because

the,

boundaries are, are messy, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, the boundaries are messy, except for one.

Antagonist is weirder.

I think what Mike said about like the antagonist can even be like a, could be

an institution or a structure or an idea.

I think that that's true.

I don't think the antagonist necessarily always has to be

like, what did Campbell call out?

Like the mirror self, the inverted protagonist, the shadow link.

I think that the main distinction between a monster and a villain

is a monster opposes the protagonist in the real, right?

Like the monster, the monster can be a hurricane.

The monster can be a canyon that is difficult to cross.

But whereas the villain opposes the protagonist within the symbolic order,

We're about to get Lacanian everybody!

The villain, the villain has ideology, right?

Like the villain believes things.

So like

the villain can never lay a punch, can never oppose the protagonist in the

real world, in the real world of violence and matter, and physical consequences.

Though, maybe this is a weakness of modern storytelling, including ours.

One thing I hate is that in like a lot of these like super modern

superhero movies, an ideological difference will be resolved with lasers

With flight again.

But I do believe that like, it is interesting to watch like

heroes and villains kind of have the, uh, encompassing battle of do we resolve this

within the symbolic order or in the real,

usually through violence or through a privation of some

necessary resource for the villain.

I want to offer, I think, an extension to this, which, I

think might be interesting for us to think about in our own games.

So like, I'm thinking about Cthulhu, an intelligent being, let's say,

something that we understand, even though we understand it to

be weird and incomprehensible in some ways we like consider it as

having an, uh, an interiority.

There is like it, I think so.

I think that kudu as kudu create like, yes and no, but it's like

So here's so, okay, so hear me out, hear me out, So here's so

If, if interiority is unknowable, should we

even call it interiority?

Or, cause

okay.

You're you're talking about.

what I'm going to talk about.

Give me a minute.

Yeah.

So what I'm saying is, is that like, is that, is that the, the, the continuum

where that interiority goes from, goes from a coherent ideology that like

a human could possibly understand to just complete unknowability is the

continuum on which something might also turn from villain to monster.

a hundred percent, a hundred percent like, ah, yeah.

I mean, totally.

I mean, that's what makes kudu, that's what makes the Lovecraftian

mythos and cosmic horror maybe my favorite genre of anything.

Um, so powerful is that cosmic horror was the first to be like, well, yes, lions are

scary, but what if a lion so smart that it was as large and indifferent as the

universe is to our, uh, you know, human endeavors that's even scarier than a lion.

I think

it's like, I think it's like, you know, like if, if, Uh for lack of a

better phrase that I, I, I, you know, I can't come up with on the spot.

It's like, if something has like eight dimensional ideology, even if, you know,

somehow that there is a thinking and a, um, there's a plan, there is a want, but

if it's just so removed from anything you could possibly understand it just

transitions from villain to monster.

which I think is interesting because that suggests that.

It is not really about the real versus the symbolic order that

the bad guy is operating in.

What it's really about is is it within the symbolic order that

the protagonist can access?

which is really about like our need to project, our values outwardly

and really in perhaps we're the bad guys, Mike,

I

oh, you're the bad guys.

thinking about it all the

humanity is the virus.

I am going to break in you here because, uh, I do have to Institute

what I call the Lovecraft protocol,

uh,

God,

to do, we

have to do a shot now.

do I have to have sex with a fish?

no.

I mean, you

can, if you want, I guess I don't know.

I've seen some hot fish

Uh, Lovecraft comes up in, I would say one out of every three episodes I do.

And

when he does, there are some things we have to say,

first of all

sure.

of course.

Sure.

right.

First of all, HP Lovecraft writer, commonly credited as the progenitor

of the cosmic horror genre writing in the, uh, early 20th century, had

as either his influences or became an influence for people who, espoused

ideologies that were extremely thick into eugenics and racism and xenophobia.

And, uh, by mentioning Lovecraft, we are not endorsing those philosophies,

Huge, huge, huge, big fat, bad racist.

Yeah,

Yeah,

yeah, yeah.

You know, it's, I always think when we talk about the racism of low

crap, how strange it is, because he was so seriously onto something with

his conception of cosmic horror.

The things that need to be true in order for cosmic horror to work

as an aesthetic negate all of his social categories by which he has

started his own private supremacy.

I always found that really interesting with him that like, if you take cosmic

horror at its roots, it is anti-racist in as much as it is anti-cultural,

right?

And yet there he was.

Right.

And this is why I have to do the Lovecraft protocol is because the genre

he created and the genre markers that it has and the cultural expectations

that have become attached to it are really interesting in their own right.

And they have enabled some really fantastic storytelling and philosophical

work and all of that I think is worth, what did Garrett call it?

bringing into the stage of universal acceptance at least.

So that's the Lovecraft protocol.

Uh, now we've done that we can move on.

We were actually about to make a pretty interesting turn.

We had talked about monster villain and antagonist

as, uh, and

going to talk about what Lacan called the mirror stage.

we could.

Should we, we might, um,

well, that's a, that's a different.

uh, one of the things that has also come up as a part of this exploration

is, uh, is the definition of hero.

And whether that is by necessity tied to the definition of monster

and or villain and or antagonist.

In as much as systems give you a definition of monster, they also

give you a definition of hero.

Does Shadowrun, and Stillfleet, give you a definition of hero or do you have to

create one from the definitions that you have for monster, villain, and antagonist?

I don't think they do.

I know for a fact Stillfleet does not.

And in fact, Stillfleet implicates your character immediately within

character creation because you are ostensibly, you're encouraged

to be part of this big company of like far future space capitalists.

They're like slavers.

Like they

ha like,

Like by our moral standards, The Co, The Company, uh, is bad.

I mean, obviously you can take a character and put them in that

world and not have them work for The Co, but very much it's encouraged.

Like you start out this way.

It's a good hook for adventure stuff.

D&D definitely doesn't, right?

And Shadowrun, S hadowrun very much encourages you to be a criminal.

I mean, "shadowrun" is the, is the name of a certain kind of crime in the world.

You're going on a shadowrun and the criminals are called shadowrunners.

In a lot of Shadowrun games, you see the same attitude

develop, which is I'm a player, character living in a dystopia.

the corporations control everything.

It's very hard to get by.

You have to do whatever you look out for number one.

You do whatever you can to like, make sure that you survive by hook or by

crook, or literally just, just by crook.

So what you get is you get a lot of games that I have described as "Capitalism

The Game", and that people just wash their hands of any

moral consideration because they have to do whatever they have to do to survive.

It doesn't matter what it is that they're doing.

Like the world is bad.

And so they have to be bad in the world because that's the

only way that you make it.

Are those heroes?

They are certainly protagonists.

Maybe that is a distinction?

Like, you know, I don't know.

Um, God, it's also so complicated because we have superheroes.

So like superhero is like a very specific kind of thing, but most of them

are just like libertarian fantasies.

It's like a libertarian wet dream, just like in, uh, in spandex.

Are most superheroes, good people?

No, I definitely not.

Are they otherwise like heroes and heroic in that they are like doing good?

hero is what we call propaganda, right?

I mean, there's, you know, there's protagonists.

There is a figure in a story that you are supposed to watch go

through the structure of the story.

You know, this is the character that leaves their normal existence goes into

a place that just so happens to resemble a lot of the internal conflicts maybe

they were experiencing and then comes out both a master of the past self

and the new self as crafted through the road of trials of the adventure.

You know what I mean?

Whoever goes in that circle, that's the protagonist.

They're only a hero if they are the Gallant in a Goofus and Gallant

propaganda dichotomy of what society is telling you, you should be.

And I will also say that, like, even though Dungeons and Dragons, doesn't,

outright say, you gotta be good, you gotta bad, whatever, but I will

point out that like, and I don't, I don't want to be one of those people

that's like trying to cancel D and D because it's a colonial product.

I mean, obviously it is.

Here we are, you know, everything we make is.

But like, uh, it is funny to me that like the basic adventure in D and D

you go into a dungeon or a tomb, take a treasurer out is like a fundamentally

post-modern colonial way to see the world, but it is a capitalist realist

thing like that is a, an object defined by culture is only as valuable

as you can sell it in the marketplace.

There is no inherent or sacred value to anything except your advancement

within the market by however you arrange the cultural detritus that you

received when you came into the world, that is fundamentally a capitalist

realist ideology and very colonial.

I mean, you know, people that wrote D and D are basing this on what's the, uh, uh,

oh, shame on me for not, uh, like they're basing it on like the British fantasy

adventure tradition, which absolutely came out of the British empire and their

tomb robbing in Egypt and their rape of all these other colonized places.

Right.

gentlemen, explorers of

the, uh, 19th century

Yeah.

What was the, what was the John Carpenter of Mars writer?

Oh, uh,

More, not more cock, was that no

no, I'm thinking H rider Haggard

and that's not

on.

I don't remember.

For not remembering, but it's coming out of that

adventure tradition, Edgar, rice Burroughs.

it's

I got it first.

very much like, oh, we got people from quote unquote civilization

going out into uncolonized lands and taking all the money from their graves.

mean, that same libertarian fantasy.

It's the, like the, like the powerful individuals choosing to consort

together to use the resources that they gather themselves in order to

gain some security for themselves.

You can very much play play a D and D game where you join a collective

and like help, uh, you know, uh, engage in some mutual aid.

I think it's not often the case and it certainly is not encouraged

by, uh, the writing in the book.

yeah, just like HP Lovecraft, like created this genre

that supersedes and negates his own horrible political beliefs.

Like the early days of tabletop role-playing games, even though

those adventures and a lot of those ideas are like dripping with the

sort of awful self-centeredness of their cultural origins, the tools

that they created are just like are fantastic and are no way I think

weighed down by any of that ideology.

Even if you want to do like rules as written D and D game, you can, like, you

can make anticapitalist, anti-colonial, um, uh, adventure and world and

characters out of it, which is one thing I love about the tabletop role-playing

Yeah, I was going to say a

lot.

A lot of people are now too.

It's very

I've talked to some of them within the last week.

one of my favorite actual place shows a campaign,

uh, is, you know, explicitly anti-colonial and anti capitalism.

So many are and shadow run definitely incur, you know, the way we play it.

Well, maybe I shouldn't say so much about that now.

Yeah.

I'll be quiet about how that relates to fund city.

Cause I don't want to, I don't want any of the players to listen

and get spoiled on what we've got

I hope they will.

want them to hear all the nice things I have to say about them.

I'm holding the 6E Shadowrun core rule book and I'm reading

the introductory section, which is

Oh, the miles of texts

the

life you have left.

Um, and it's about sort of like what the world is like and why

you might choose to not be a

normie as it were.

It is very much couched in the language of like, um, your hand feels forced.

I mean, what else will you do in this world?

You have so few choices.

If you make the one big choice to play by the rules.

And so why not not play by the rules.

I'm really glad that I talked to you guys last, cause I feel like

we've, we've done what I've been trying to do in the last four interviews.

But we've done it like all at once.

Um, I will be putting a big fat spoiler alert at the beginning

of this episode because I

can't do what I think I have to do with you

guys without saying that, because I do, I want to talk

about the Saffron Annax's offer.

For the people who may not have taken my advice and like immediately stopped

what they are doing, listened to all of Float City and come back to this precise

minute in the podcast, can you thumbnail for me what the Saffron Annax is?

The Saffron Annax is a canonical character

in the world of Stillfleet.

Wythe wrote him into the core rule book so when the game comes out

and people are able to buy it, they will be able to open up the book and

they will see like a description of who and what the Saffron Annax is.

Our Saffron Annax is slightly different from that.

A lot of what Wythe was writing was coming together as we were making our show.

So there are sort of like parallel constitutions of Saffron Annaxes.

A lot of the big items are.

The Saffron Annax is, a trade lord, like maybe a feudal king, maybe like

a Jeff Bezos, someone who just is engaged in the trade of goods.

He's not a company, but he's like a person who manages the flow

of items across many locations.

The two most closely tied locations to the Saffron Annax are two

planets, Rigamont A and Rigamont B, otherwise known as The Twins.

And they're these two twin, planets with a moon between them that he keeps in

balance, through his force of existence, through his sheer force of will.

He provides them not only with atmosphere, but also with things.

People live on these planets, they need food, they need shelter, they

need clothing, et cetera, et cetera.

He is

able to do this because he exists on multiple dimensions.

When we see the Saffron Annaxin the world of our game, he kind of is like this, semi

featureless slate or blue, gray, like man shape, like a peacock blue mannequin.

But in reality, he is what in the game is described as an, extra dimensional entity.

He exists across time and space in a way that is difficult for most

other three-dimensional sapiens, as they're described in the game

to like comprehend or understand.

And he is also just exceptionally smart.

Beyond being, powerful in the way that he can use time and space as a material,

in a way that, us three-dimensional beings have a hard time understanding

or, you know, being able to do,

Through the course of Float City, it is a classic

like LA mid-century detective story.

This guy hires him to go do a job.

They get framed for murder.

They thought that the guy that hired them is the guy that did it.

And the guy that did it, obviously is the Saffron Annax, who was

trying to use our player characters to start a war on a planet.

He wanted to add this planet to his trade network, uh, and through a very complex

series of events, this would tip the dominoes in his favor and that planets

economy would fall under his territory.

The players discover this, and they begin to work their way up through the

organization to get to the Saffron Annax.

There was their immediate manager named Algar.

Then there was his boss named H'rakt.

And then above H'rakt was the Saffron Annax.

And that these are the three people between the players and

the top level of the conspiracy

I forget who wrote it, but this is based on someone

wrote a scheme on how to design, um, conspiracies between villains, uh,

in TT RPGs.

And this

was very much designed using that as an inspiration and it

is called the conspiracy mid.

Posted to Andy Slack's gaming blog, halfway station in 2018, the

conspiracy and the van pyramid are two complimentary ways of designing,

not individual aggressors, but

systemic aggressors in a tabletop role playing games.

And I use it a lot.

This goes back to like some of the most

fundamental storytelling stuff.

Right.

Mike and I wrote these three characters, to be like each one of them is going

to have an attitude towards power.

Algar is like this low level bureaucrat who just believes,

like, I'm a good person.

If I do my job, if I do what my boss says, I'm good.

I'm just, he's the, I'm just doing my job guy.

H'rakt, guy above him, he's where we started to like really

crack into like the ideology of the layers of the ruling class.

So Algar represents like the petite bourgeois.

And what I, when I say represent, I do not mean that Mike and I are just

like writing out people we hate and then drawing lines character names

and be like, this one represents this.

It's like, no, it's like how do people relate to power structures

that they're in that have done bad Like, what do people say?

The thing that Taylor and I talk about a lot,

when we're writing villains is what does this kind of person want?

And then, and then we look at the other characterizations that we

have for those characters already.

Like we think it would be neat if they had these various sort

of quirks and characteristics.

So like, then you just figure out what kind of momentum you get building

to arrive at a full character.

It's like, well, they look like this, they have this kind of like

speech quirk, or they live in this weird place or they look like this.

They really like this kind of thing.

They are this kind of person.

That kind of person in this situation would want probably this kind of thing.

And then when you smash that to those two things together, what

kind of character do you get?

So H'rakt is like the middle guy.

He's kind of like a real zealot.

Everything I've done is justified because we're trying to help people,

he remembers when it was really bad and you weren't there,

so he's going to actually, he's here to save you from your own inaction.

Like, you gotta make sure that you're taking care of yourself.

And like if, people need to get hurt in the process, then like people

are going to get hurt anyways.

They might as well be hurt, making sure that in the long run things are better.

Yeah.

And I think that, like that is where most villain ideology

stops in a lot of stories, right?

If you watch, modern superhero movies, that's the villain ideology, the villain

ideology is I'm trying to help everyone.

Right?

The, in the Marvel movies, Loki and Thanos, are like, "I'm

trying to actually help you.

But I, and I know the best way, and I, all my things are justified

because the way I'm built things is going to be better for you."

but that's H'rakt, right?

We wanted to push beyond that.

And then beyond H'rakt is the Saffron Annax, finally the prime mover.

The final episode is the conversation with the Saffron Annax

and then it's its consequences.

And I really, I cannot begin to tell you how fun, uh, recording this episode

was because we built the Saffron Annax to be in one way, extremely simple and

in another way, extremely complicated.

I wanted to play the Saffron Annax completely honest.

TheSaffron Annax in that last episode does not tell one lie to anybody.

He is a top villain that is giving a completely faithful and non-manipulative

accounting of his reasons and his actions and what his incentives are

and why he's doing what he's doing.

And what he's doing is this.

He is trying to create a civilization-spanning economy under

his guidance and in his control because he believes that it is

beautiful because he wants it.

It sounds easy, like to fight against that ideology, like,

oh, you're just manipulating me because you want it go to hell.

But I wanted to have a conversation and offer a choice to the players

because the choice is like, look under this thing that I think I want and is

beautiful, everyone will be better off.

H'rakt is correct when he says like, if, if the Saffron Annax has control

of everything, everyone will be safer.

Cause in this world, there was a recent cataclysm, which Mike alluded

to, that hurt a lot of people.

And now things have been solved a little bit, but the cataclysm could happen

again at any moment at any moment, the prime technology in this world that allows

everyone to have economic opportunities could go away, and shutter all the

worlds and close them off to each other.

The Saffron Annax can stop that, and that will help everyone.

Now, he's not doing it for those reasons, but who cares?

And so the Saffron Annax says "Come and work with me and you can help me achieve

this vision, you're very powerful.

You're very smart.

You're very resourceful.

I can use you, and we can achieve this together.

It will help everyone.

I'm not doing it for that reason.

I think, and looking at this in like a multidimensional way, this

is extraordinarily beautiful.

This is an aesthetic project."

The Saffron Annax is built to force the listeners and the players to

that your own principles are also aesthetics.

Because if you try to fight the Annax in a principled way, you are dooming

billions of people to their death.

By what principle possibly would that ethical action be allowed?

In what possible way is that moral?

You have to admit that if you're going to stop this guy from saving all

these people, you're doing it because you just don't think it's nice.

You don't think it's pretty, you don't think it's beautiful.

And I wanted to force the listeners and the players to acknowledge that at the

end of the day, there are no principles.

All ethics are aesthetics.

And the only way that those different aesthetics can interact is through

the application of power in the real

The Annax as a character forces the listener and the

players to take a position on, the proposal that H'rakt makes, which is,

listen, are we going to start a war?

Probably.

will people die in that war?

It's pretty much guaranteed.

Is that better or worse than not starting the war, not being able to put a bunch

of planets into one trade network and then, broker this sort of like

central planning thing that doesn't, then depend upon technology that could

turn off at any moment, thus stranding people for God knows how long, could be

hundreds of years could be thousands?

And so it's easy to be like, no, like w what?

War bad!

War is bad!

Don't kill people for like the promise later of maybe things will be good,

except then you go and talk to the Annax and he's like, listen, not only like

I got it, like not only will things be good, like it's gonna be beautiful.

Like, yeah, some people will die.

Not only will it be good, it's gonna look dope as hell.

I mean, you will never be able to see it, but it's gonna look- just trust me.

Just imagine something that looks really good.

Yes.

People

will die, but imagine something that's going to look really good.

And then it forces you to think like, wait, what?

Yeah.

The world has nothing to offer this guy.

He's essentially a Demi God.

so why, why?

Why conflict at all?

Why do anything?

You don't need anything!

You don't even get any food.

You don't need water.

You're safe.

You're fine.

You're powerful.

What are you need nothing.

It's beautiful.

You know?

And like, and I think that this gets at so many things.

Number one, why does the ruling class hold onto power in our society?

They don't need it.

They're already rich.

They're fine.

Jeff Bezos could quit, never work a day in his life.

Never exert any control over another human being as long as he lives.

And he will be great.

There's no reason to maintain that level of power unless you just

want to, you just think it's cool.

So how do you deal with someone like that when it's not, Hey, listen, I

know we all want the same thing here.

I'm sure we can work it out.

You know?

you don't thing at all.

Not at all.

You don't, they want one thing you want another, and there is no electoral

process or disagreement, or there is no mediation between the two.

It is going to be which one of you can get rid of the other first.

And that the end that I really feel, I, me personally, Taylor, not just

in storytelling, but in the world, that is fundamentally the question

that our society is facing right now is like, we have got to acknowledge

that at some level, and it's always kind of like this, it's them or us.

And I wanted the Saffron Annax to like enact that choice onto the

players, forcing them to realize, that was also the choice all along.

I don't know if it worked because then you have this thing of like the structure

of narrative and the nature of genre encourages the players to just be like,

obviously we're right and you're wrong.

You're the bad guy.

Just like a character has plot armor, sometimes a character

has a big plot target on their

Yeah.

You, you push against the, the expectation and the momentum

of narrative and especially the momentum of tabletop role-playing,

which is like, you're standing in the room with the big, bad guy.

Like, this is the big, bad man who wanted to do a bad thing, who framed you.

Like kill him.

You have to, you, you, everybody rolls initiative, you take turns and you fight.

And then you get this interesting thing of like you, do you kill him?

You perhaps leave open the threat of another Tacheon quake down the road.

Uh, you have killed someone who everybody knows can create a connection

between economic partners that doesn't rely on pre-existing technology.

You've also literally destabilized two planets that are now

breaking apart in the midst of space and

all of the people and all of the people who

live on them are, are going to die

there

very, very cruel of us to do that players.

thematically it works because like, you just don't live in a world where

you get to make big moves like this and it doesn't affect a lot of people.

I cannot help, but wonder the ways in which it would be equally

interesting if they had said like, okay, like, yeah, we'll work with you.

Like then what happens?

Does the the Saffron Annax and I was like, no, just kidding.

And then he's, and then he's chosen to get into a fight

that he could potentially lose.

And so like, what is the sort of like background there?

Like, is that hubris?

Or do they say like, you know what?

No, just in general, no,

Yeah.

Which is what they went with, I think.

Yeah.

Just like, nah, not vibe in it.

yeah.

Or like, we're not going to take your deal, we're also

not going to try to stop you.

Like, this is just like, sort of choosing a kind of middle path of like, you know

what, uh, as Remy would say I'm tired.

So yeah, I think, I think that like the players, the players, the idea was to

give the players a, um, like a complicated choice and to put that complicated choice

up against the narrative momentum of a tabletop role-playing story and to see,

you know, whichever way they went, uh, whether or not it was

like, yes, we'll work with, you know, and you have to die or no.

And also we're just going to leave like you, do you, do, you were going to

just go do us to, to figure out yeah.

Like what, what are the repercussions of that?

Um, you know, I can speculate endlessly about the other two options

and what may have come to pass, but, uh, you know, that's, that's

basically fan fiction at this point.

Um, and you know, I think the, the one that we got was, yeah.

it was interesting.

Um, I, you know, I really liked the ending of the show.

I think the players did a really, really good

job, both on the macro level of like what the story needed in both,

in like individually what their characters wanted and needed to do.

Um, I think it turned out really well.

I think they made some great, they made big swings.

They make great choices.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Uh, as much as I loved Marcus and connected with him immediately,

uh, I, I, I looked at the way Remy went out and I thought it

was always going to be this way.

Oh, but to answer your earlier question, um, N no, like I, before

the recording, like we had discussed, like, here's what these characters want.

Here's what they care for.

Like, here's, you know, here's their vibe, here's their ideology.

But then in the, in the actual episode, that's entirely improvised.

didn't write out a single line of dialogue or anything.

That's hugely impressive.

At the risk of bringing religion into the conversation, there was a portion

of what he said that to some definitions of the term sounded like paradise.

. So I think the idea was that if you, if you work for me, I can

promise you a lifetime of fulfilling work toward a worthwhile goal.

And for some value, for some definitions of paradise that's heaven, um, was

that part of the plan, uh, is that something you're comfortable with?

Uh, and it like, does that add something to that that is useful or worthwhile?

Well, yeah.

I mean,

I think when we talked about it, we talked about it in very

like, dialectical materialism terms, and like the jokes that we made in the fun

chatty afterwards were all about central planning and about like, to what degree

is this a version of, of like some sort of weird author authoritarian leftism, in

fact, does this resemble fascism, does this resemble, communism or socialism?

and those were the terms that we've talked about it so far.

I think I had not considered, the sort of spiritual implications beyond

the idea of like the Annaxis so powerful he is effectively a god.

And he's like inviting you into his house in

I mean, there are Deva in his house.

Yes.

Yeah.

They are.

They are religious devotees.

Yeah.

So this is you've hit upon the one part where I think that like the

theme sort of falls apart because there is a fundamental difference between what

happened with the Saffron Annax and what we in the real world have to deal with.

Right?

As the person who wrote a lot of the Saffron Annax and played it, I

can tell you with a hundred percent authority he was telling the truth.

And that, that is what was going to happen.

That is why he was doing it.

And it would have, it would have worked.

Okay.

The problem is, is that we in our lives and all the listeners experiencing

this, we are all the players don't know.

And the players did not.

The players had been lied to before, by him and the other

members of the conspiracy and the players don't know if that's true.

When the neo-liberals and the techno utopians tell us, if you just let our

institutions grow and encompass everything of your life, it will be better.

We don't know if they're telling the truth or not.

Right?

So we can't make that.

I believe in my position as the person who knows the Saffron Annax was telling the

truth, what the players did is horrible.

Like they hurt so many people, for what?

Their completely ungrounded principle that there just

shouldn't be a person in charge?

Well, that's insane!

killing billions of people, just so you can feel good about something you made

up that everyone else didn't agree to?

That's wild!

You know, but from our perspective of human beings perspective, we're being

given the Saffron Annax's deal from the ruling tech class and we have no reason

to believe that they're telling the truth.

And so that's a major disconnect that we can't really solve for.

Like the listener doesn't know.

Only I know for a that it's actually a pretty good deal and

that what happened is a terrible

Well, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, and it's like, and you do the calculation of like the

steep costs on either side.

Like it's really, it's like a very it's - is there gonna be a rule for this too?

It's kind of like a complicated trolley problem really.

It's not complicated at all.

no, there's no Trolley Problem protocol.

yeah,

the simplest trolley problem

yeah,

but from the players, it's difficult.

But you know, it's like, uh, I don't know who said it at some

enlightenment person was like, or maybe it was back to the Greeks.

Oh, the best government would be the enlightened despot.

The ideal government is like the single person in charge who makes all the right

decisions, which doesn't exist in the real world, but we kind of created one

in, in fiction, which is very unfair.

So

this is

know, it's very unfair, it's like Escher drawing, these

impossible shapes, like look at it.

Yeah.

It looks cool.

walk.

What do you walk?

Go.

You walk up that staircase.

Why don't you go ahead and have a, have a little stroll around

this building that I drew?

Yeah.

So putting like a real world ethical like argument, like on this fictional thing

is dangerous because it's like trying to build one of those infinite staircases.

We lied to you.

We lied.

That's a trick you can do in audio does not apply to real-world objects.

I think we do this a lot in Shadowrun too, which is

just like, there's no good choice.

There's no good ch there's every choice you have is kind

of bad, cause uh, world bad.

It like just, it?

Bad.

Like the circumstances have been allowed to get to this point where you want to

act appropriately, you want to act morally or ethically, you want to judge, you

want to be in possession of information that then informs your actions so that

after you take those actions, you feel good about the actions that you've made?

Whoops.

Turns out you can't.

But I think like the, like

It doesn't really matter.

Yeah,

the trick, yeah.

The trick of storytelling no one cares about the architect

and the computers in the matrix.

just want to watch Trinity and ma- matrix man kiss.

that's That's all we want.

You

That's why, that's why, I watched the matrix, for the smooching.

well you, like it is!

It is why

is.

We want the young hot people to get together,

Yeah.

We don't give it like our emotional cores that keeps us like the thing

that puts you on the edge of the seat isn't the philosophical is that

puts you on the edge of the seat is like, Oh my God is going to be okay?

Like, oh, she doesn't care about having a boyfriend anymore, she

just wants to help her friends!

We watched a group of people, become friends and like, that's, that's

what actually makes the juices flow along your spinal column.

More than like, you know, our fancy stand in

Uh, what, what kind of fascism is this fascist?

Maybe

Yeah,

that's what gets Mike interested, I don't know.

I'll tell you, it's like a vote of confidence in the, in the

piece of art that you've created.

Yes, absolutely.

What happened to Merkis was the reason that I had to like, stop what

I was doing for a good couple hours and process the end of this story.

I think that the, the questions that we're having are the reason that

I'm still thinking about it now.

So I think you've, you've been able to do both, which is fantastic and

the way that you've been able to do it in this medium is so critically

important at this point in history.

I'll also tell you that, uh, maybe it was because of the presence of the Deva,

uh, and it was certainly due to my own background and the, like the things that

I brought to this story I read, um, I read the saffron on anox as a metaphor for the

divine, and that wasn't the only reason most of it was down to your performance

Taylor, that I fully believed him.

My reading of the situation was that he was going to fully do this.

And so it was weird to me that the, the players made the choices that they did.

And I, I think we've explored that.

I just like, I wanted you to have that as creators.

Like, this is how it hit me.

Thank you, sir.

And that wasn't an accident.

I mean, we are well aware of like, we're not the first people to live

in this world where the ruling class is trying to convince us

to just let them be God, you know?

I mean, that's a tale as old as time when, when you get power imbalances

through human history, but no, I mean, that's, it's all, it's

all wrapped up in the same stuff.

Yeah.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to chat with you guys

about the thing that you've made.

Cause I've been looking forward to this conversation for a very, very long time.

Thanks for having us.

We get to do this very rarely, usually it's like me and Taylor in

his kitchen being like, oh, and then, and then this guy, you know, and

like, oh, what if they want this?

yeah.

Let's what kind of cool gun can they, like, we don't sit debating Sarte.

Like we like, oh, what if a gun was big?

Um, and so, uh, yeah, it's nice.

It's nice to have someone ask like good, questions, uh, to, you know, help us

sort of refine some of these things.

If that's all I can add to the world, then, uh, that I will

have done something worthwhile.

If you are still here.

Thank you for listening to this.

The final episode of making a monster game master edition.

I want to thank all six GM's who made this mini series possible?

Nikki Yeager, Dan Locke, Andrew Coons, Cassie roll Taylor Moore and Mike Renetta.

If you've listened to this conversation and it hasn't been

spoiled for you, uh, listen, go listen to Float City, go listen to Fun City.

they're both great.

If you want something with an end, go for Float City.

If you want to join with us on this big journey, um, of the cyber punk, uh,

New York, 2101 or 21, what is it, Mike?

We haven't made the official transition yet, but it

will be 2102 in the second season.

Quote, unquote.

then listen to fun city and, you know, Fortunate Horse.

We make other shows as well.

Uh, if you want some like, uh, like comedy first, uh, wild and crazy

fantasy world building, you got to listen to Rude Tales of Magic.

And we just launched a new show about an intrepid group of explorers, having

episodic missions on a spaceship to other planets as if they are going through

some sort of trek amongst the stars.

And it's called "Oh These, Those Stars of Space.

oh, I'm taylor.biz on Twitter.

You can find a Fun City pretty much anywhere

that you listen to podcasts.

You can also find us on at funcity.ventures in your

browser and at fun city ventures on Twitter and Instagram.

You can find me on Twitter and Instagram and Twitch at Mike Rugnetta.

Um, I also make, uh, some YouTube videos every once in a while.

Uh, do youtube.com forward slash Mike Rugnetta um, and, um, what else do I do?

Uh, that's let's, let's leave it there.

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Next time on making a monster.

I have to just be honest, like Fizban is notably a forgetful

character, to the point of, I think, killing himself, trying to cast

featherfall because instead of casting featherfall he actually just summons

feathers and it's, and that's how he dies.

But his human form is so messy.

And, and how do you write quips in a book that who's supposed to be kind

of knowledgeable about dragons with someone who can't remember maybe what

a dragon is or how to cast any of these spells or who this person even is?