Assholes in Space: The Mixtape

Along with my initial concept of the Assholes in Space campaign, I made a mixtape of setting-appropriate soundtrack music that helped me visualize the setting. I tried to find as many of them as I could on YouTube, but there are definitely some important ones missing. It's a pretty potent blend of trad ska and reggae, hip hop, electronics and hardcore/noise.










Minutemen - This Ain't No Picnic (embedding disabled by request)

Mixtapes: Go home and be a family man!

So, I'm pretty sure that most people born in the 1980s have played a few rounds of Street Fighter II before. It's one of the universal arcade games of our era, like the X-Men side-scrolling beat-em-up or one of those Neo Geo cabinets with Metal Slug and Bust A Move on it that every skating rink or mini golf course had at one point or another. Apart from being the first fighting game in video game history, it's also perfect Feng Shui fodder.

Seriously, a bunch of super-powered martial artists, kung fu cops and what seems to be a Supernatural Creature from the Brazilian rain forest pitted against each other in a worldwide fighting tournament by a psychic dictator who runs the world's most powerful crime syndicate? That's your campaign right there! If you want to make it a little more down to earth (and a little stupider) there's the much worse in hindsight Street Fighter II V anime series, available on Netflix Instant.

Mainly, this whole post is an excuse to post Guile's stage theme from Super Street Fighter II, which I have had stuck in my head for three days. Enjoy!

Mixtapes: I'll be your garbageman

Got three pages of my 5th grade pathfinder to go then I gotta start working on my thought paper on media literacy, so here's a bunch of music from Scott Pilgrim.



Metric (w/Brie Larson) - Black Sheep cause they won't let me embed it.

A further note on the Mixtapes column

For the foreseeable future, I am going to try and find as much of the music for the Mixtapes column on streaming services, like YouTube videos or MySpace and Bandcamp pages. In the case of YouTube videos, this may mean that the video attached to said audio may be of some anime series or a skateboarding video or a fish decaying on the street. Pay no attention to it, unless you wish to.

I'd feel bad about just posting MP3s since, all in all, I'd like people to support these artists if they really like the music. But if it comes down to it and I can't find anywhere on the whole Internet where you can hear this song, which may be the case with a couple of these records, I'll post it on Mediafire.

Carry on...

Mixtapes: Wreck Stuff

So, Christian wrecks stuff to Keith Morris-era Black Flag, Scott does it to Bad Brains and the Gorilla Biscuits and Zak S does it to the blackest of metal...

What have I been listening to that makes me want to wreck stuff?

Lightning Bolt

Seriously, they may look like the biggest hipsters in Hipstertown, but Brian Gibson and Brian Chippendale TEAR IT UP. Armed with only a drumkit, a bass with a banjo top string, an array of distortion pedals and a telephone mouthpiece strapped to Chippendale's face by the neon balaclava that has become his trademark, Lightning Bolt will probably make you go deaf if you're too close to them.

I've always thought about revisiting Cyberpunk 2020. One of my favorite games that I played as a teen was in a friend's Cyberpunk game, where everything went wrong (as it often does) and our team had to improvise our way out of a parking garage filled with Yakuza thugs. But honestly, I could only really do Cyberpunk in two ways: go straight 1980s nostalgia future like the indomitable Doctor Rotwang's Lightstrip (of which I've been enamored since I saw it on RPGnet like three years ago) or just set it 5 years into the future.

We've got cyberpunk technology. Sure, there's no neural interfaces or full conversion combat borgs, but we can access a global information network from our goddamned phones (anywhere from 400 to 800 ebs in Cyberpunk, which is about how much you pay for a fully automatic shotgun). Dubai and Hong Kong are pretty much cyperpunk cities already. Corporations are bigger and meaner than ever.

And who's going to be playing behind those Heat-style shootouts, blending with the echoing blasts of automatic weapons fire?

Mixtapes: The Streets of Shrapnel

Mixtapes is a new column that I'm going to try and do every week about the music that inspires my gaming. Many folks on many blogs have gone into great detail about what books, movies and artwork have fueled their campaign worlds and play sessions, but a relative few have discussed music's role in the inspirational process. That's not to say that no one has: early in the history of Playing D&D With Porn Stars, Zak S posted a fantastic list of Songs Useful in D&D Games Renamed To Reflect The Situations Wherein I Have Used Or Plan To Use Said Music, which among other things got me into the Sword, and Christian and Scott, my two favorite guys on the Net, both tend to share my tastes in music and have included choice tracks by Fugazi, the Specials and the Hold Steady in their postings. But music is such an integral part of any campaign or character preparation that I do that it would be amiss for me not to do a column like this. So without further ado...

The Streets of Shrapnel

Soundtrack provided by: Guignol and Mischief Brew - Fight Dirty

Guignol are a punk/Gypsy/klesmer band comprised of members and ex-members of the Hold Steady, the World-Inferno Friendship Society and just about any collaborative musical project in the Tri-State area and have maintained a long and collaborative friendship with Erik Petersen, the frontman and occasionally only member of Philadelphia's Mischief Brew. I occasionally have issues with Petersen's lyrics, as I do with most anarchist songwriters, but I really appreciate his closer kinship towards labor radicalism rather than banal 'smash the state' rhetoric and when he writes a song, he can write a goddamned song. The two groups first collaborated an a song on Mischief Brew's first full-length and finally released a joint record called Fight Dirty, which consists of both Mischief Brew songs backed by Guignol's rhythm section and Guignol songs with Petersen's guitar accompaniment.

When I first started thinking about the Swords and Wizardry game that would later become the Motherlode campaign, the first element that I visualized was the city of Shrapnel. An urban metropolis built on a swamp, Shrapnel was my first fantasy city in the vein of Lankhmar, Sharn and Ankh-Morpork; a place where all sorts of urban adventures involving guilds, taverns and ever-thrumming furnaces underfoot. But it's not just a noir city in fantasy dressing: there's plenty of room for adventure, comedy, class warfare and all sorts of set pieces. It's the kind of city where bodies turn up in interesting places all the time, where you can start your night in a high-end restaurant at the top of the Stairs and end it fighting to the death in an underground gladiatorial fighting ring.

Sugar Park Tavern Death Song was the first song that struck that inspirational spark in me. To me, it conjures up images of dimly lit streets, solitary Chandleresque 'knight errants' smoking short stubby cigarettes and keeping one hand gripped on the long knife strapped to their lower back. The intertwining harmonies of Peter Hess's clarinet and Franz Nicolay's accordion are the backbone of Guignol's sound and they are on full display in this track. I liked the feeling that it gave me, so I kept listening and sure enough, the ideas started coming. Pete Merak has this amazing sleazy klezmer vibe that would be welcome background music in a multi-faceted den of ill repute and Dirty Penny's Pogo sounds like it could be played in a crowded open-air marketplace while people shop, eat and dance.

As I kept Fight Dirty playing during work, trips and walking home, the songs really started to define the feel that I had for Shrapnel. There's a series of about four or five tracks that would make fantastic chase scene music, from the up-tempo Gonzales, The Explosive Chilean to the screaming guitar of Create Destroy to their cover of Iron Maiden's Hallowed Be Thy Name. Even though Shrapnel was a corrupt fantasy city, there were still going to have to be people and organizations unflinching enough to require chase scenes through city streets and buildings, on rooftops, anything that allowed for the kind of manic energy and atmosphere that these songs provided.

I finally settled on the idea of an Arbiter, a 'body of justice' completely independent from the myriad corruptible guilds and councils of the city, much closer to a vigilante organization than a police force. The Arbiter's watchmen and guards are seemingly men on the outside, but that's where all similarity ceases. Their eyes are constantly covered by blank metal visors that don't seem to impair their vision, their speech isn't in any natural cadence and they cannot enter any building or structure unless given specific permission. No one in their right mind would report a crime to them or ask them for help; they enforce justice on the Arbiter's terms, which are utterly unknown to the public, but incredibly dangerous just the same. Thus, taverns, brothels and even temples have become the default locations for dirty dealings and if you do decide to murder someone in a back alleyway, make doubly sure that you're not alone. So characters in Shrapnel have to deal with criminal organizations, corrupt guilds, fickle nobles and on top of all that a nearly unstoppable police force that cannot be bribed or reasoned with. How do they survive?

Fight Dirty.