I linked once to this amazing story of unauthorized volunteer landmark restoration, but will do so again, because it's actually relevant to my intentions for New Horizons.

The Untergunther are PC fodder. Furthermore, they're PC fodder that would work particularly well in Fate - you can start tallying the aspects like "I Love My Heritage, Not The State", "Creative Engineering Our Specialty", and "Quiet When I Think It's Warranted". And look at what's involved in their accomplishment, from identifying a cultural good to do, reconnaissance, the original infiltration, the sustained effort, the social engineering of dealing with the administration, the whole deal. (And to judge from a photo of the restoration crew, they do it all while dressing snappy.) This is very much the kind of thing a lot of gamers enjoy seeing in their source media, and would enjoy playing with a bit of system support so that the absence of fight scenes doesn't make everything else feel bland and homogeneous.

I don't have urban explorers or freelance restorers on my list at the moment. But my hope is that the exploits of the people I do plan to cover will come out with this level of coolness.

Hey, it's been a while since there was one of these. And I have news, too.

The major development is that the book has an outline, which satisfies me, the publisher, and the editor. This is important because it's the framework into which I put the lil' pieces as they come along. So I can now tell folks how the book will be structured, and about how long it will be.

The structure is simple enough: an introduction, a series of chapters on kinds of outsider experience linked by a shared theme, and a concluding chapter on changing the world.

The introduction is about what you'd expect, and goes over in polished form a bunch of things I've already written about hither and yon - about the difference between "some people had lives like these" and "this is the sole and complete truth of the experience for everyone in a category", about how things mean differently to the one living through them and others watching from various differences, the importance of "as far as it goes" in setting boundaries for explanations, about why the book has a US-centric coverage, and so on. It will have a lightly annotated bibliography, because I love doing those, and also some explanation for why I chose the categories that appear below and why I set some aside for another time.

As I was working on the outline, I wanted something of immediate gaming use in each chapter even for people who don't really plan to play characters of the sort described there, and it struck me one evening. The major chapters will each end with a Preview of Coming Attractions, an introduction to and writeup of folks who make good antagonists or other NPCs, filling niches that gamers usually think of as filled with people from later times. I'll explain that as I go. :)

Here's the roster of chapter categories:

- Politics
- Sex and gender
- Religion
- Race

I haven't settled on a final order for them, and may well not do so until quite late in the day. I won't go into all the details of topics I want to hit in each just right now, but I will explain some about the coming attractions:

- Politics: fascism, taking on coherent identity in the '20s and shifting the political tides around it, with hooks into weird science, modernist art, and all kinds of stuff well before the Nazis in particular mattered to anyone but Munich cops. I'll have some to say about the planned coup against FDR as a template for a political pulp story.
- Sex and gender: censorship, with the Hayes Code as maybe the single most prominent success, 20th century puritans and guardians of the public weal as antagonists for a pulp campaign with less of the overt fantastic than some.
- Religion: for a change of pace, complications who aren't so innately antagonistic - paganism. This is the era in which modern paganism emerges as part of a wide-ranging occult fascination, in a movement full of people who are much weirder than anything players are likely to invent and who make great allies, mentors, rivals, complications, the whole deal. It's a context in which lost lore may not be forbidden, identities and allegiance shift unexpectedly, wise people have big blind spots and fools achieve great insights, and so on.
- Race: not a coming attraction but a current one - the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK was really important in US politics of the '20s and fills a lot of the villain niches gamers often assign to Nazis, offering, as I put it in the outline, "an amazing fertile spread of jackasses needing to be beaten up in all corners of the country".

So there'll be something in the book for you to use even if you don't actually have any interest in playing union organizers or refugee socialist journalists, epicurean gay aristocrats or working-class women crossdressing to work as firefighters and police officers, professors bringing the word to the public in free mass lectures or Mormon relief workers helping gather supplies for the Russian revolutionaries (hat tip to Brand Robins for that one), mural artists from Acapulco or accountants from Bangalore given work thanks to exclusionary laws aimed at others.

In part 2, some more about specific topics and about changing the world.

I'm doing some low-keyed early reading for New Horizons; I started with a re-read of Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower (a personal favorite of mine) and a first read of John M. Barry's The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. Today's post uses a throw-away line from the latter as its sermon text.

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Something's come up in individual cases a couple of times and I thought, hey, I should break it out into a full-blown generalization.

I intend New Horizons to be a straightforward book as far as prose goes, without irony, sarcasm, and the like, and I prefer to write that way myself these days even on other projects and when communicating as just me.

There are several reasons for this, both positive and negative.

The major positive one is that unironic prose is better for conveying actual information, and much of what I want to say in New Horizons is actual information, the sort of thing you could find yourself if you did the same research but which it's nice to have rounded up for you. Sarcasm and such call the material being presented into question, and I don't want readers to go wondering whether I actually mean an assertion in the book. If it looks like a fact, I'd like readers to be comfortable taking it as a fact, as supported by the information available to me. If it looks like an opinion, I want them to take it as an actual expression of opinion. If it looks like advice or suggestion...well, same deal all along. For the book to be useful for the audiences I have in mind, it shouldn't give them reason to suspect anything hidden in it as a trap for the unwary.

The minor positive one is that pulp styles are almost always unironic, so this is good evocation. Note, by the way, that it's not that the content is unironic: I've been wallowing in the Del Rey line of Robert E. Howard reprints again lately on sleepless nights, and am freshly reminded that the stories are full of dramatic and observational ironies. It's just that if Howard wants to tell you "I find this ironic", he tells you that. His actual presentation is itself honest and clear. The same is true as a general thing for pulp (and indeed it's a general thing for mass-market fiction, I think). So I can justify a personal preference partly also as a matter of illustrating the tone by example.

The negative one is that at this stage in my life I feel like I've got enough trickery and concealment to deal with, and I'm tired from individual sorrows and general Weltschmerz. I have no real interest in decoding the true meaning of utterances by people who couldn't just come out and say them, and I don't find much amusing in people copping to stances for the sake of a gotcha or cheap shot. (I also think that it's hard to fake craziness and stupidity in environments where there's so much real craziness and stupidity around, and the "I didn't think anyone would take me seriously" defense doesn't impress me much.) Most of the ironists I run into aren't as good as they think they are, but even when they are, it just feels like so much damn nuisance noise, most of the time. Maybe in some year when there's less calling for my attention, rage, and grief I'll have more energy to play with would-be clever encodings...if I feel like it, even then.

In the meantime:

If you want to get my best response, please make an effort to be honest in your presentation. I will do the same for you. When I am in doubt over whether I'm reading you correctly, I will ask for clarification; please feel free to do the same for me. I'm usually willing to take the time to hammer out clarification and mutual understanding when I feel that there's some prospect of getting to an accord, even if it's just "okay, we do understand each other, and are disagreeing strongly about X". It's the energy put into decoding that I really want to save for use on other things, like providing the best support I can for good roleplaying.

Thanks.

This is a question specifically for those of you who feel that pulp presentation of women and minorities is lacking. If not, please skip this. And this is a question specifically about good examples. If none come to mind, feel free to wait for a separate post about bad examples. I'll be policing comments for topicality on this and some other posts with New Horizons tag to keep them useful as reference for me later. Don't worry, free-wheeling unfocused rambles will come along too. Finally, please feel free to pass this around to folks you think may have something to say about it that would help improve the work.

There's a lot to say about stereotypical portrayals in pulp, and in the months ahead, we will, rest assured. But there are also bound to be characters, scenes, setups, and stories that you feel work very well and escape the traps of stereotype. Tell me about them, please: where you found them and what it is about them that speaks to you. (It is perfectly okay to say "I'm not quite sure what it is about this that works", too.) In other threads I'll want to get recommendations for near misses in pulp and unused inspirations outside here. This is about the cases in pulp that work, in your opinion, so that I can go read/watch/listen to/otherwise engage with them and build up my baseline of "more like this, thanks" expectations.

So! Whatcha like?

In no particular order, really, here are things it's occurred to me to say about New Horizons. This installment focuses mostly on motives and basics of approach.

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Some years aback, when I found it was all getting just unpleasantly stressful, I scrambled my passwords at a bunch of gaming forums. Which is why I don't post some places anymore. But that doesn't mean I wish not to hear what folks think and ask about projects like this! So if you see someone you think I should be talking with, please do feel free to steer 'em over here and to my email, bbaugh@mac.com - I'm not hiding or anything like that. :)

Edit, May 25, 2007: This one post is attracting a lot of porn and other spam for some reason, so it's now closed to comment.

This is my upcoming thing:

She is the strongest human being alive, her muscles super-charged by her own scientific processes. She’s fought dinosaurs barehanded and lived to tell the tale. But she can’t join any professional society for engineers, or even hold the patents for her inventions in her own name.

He is a supernaturally good poet. He can smell truth and lies from across the street. He’s saved the life of one president, two prime ministers, and a future pope. But if he goes out for a gourmet meal with friends, managers will insist he go in through the servants’ entrance.

Two men share a mystical union, pooling their health, knowledge, and magical essence. They bind demons and champion the falsely accused in courts on three continents. But if they ever once acknowledge the love they share along with their power, they’ll be disbarred and shunned by decent people everywhere.

The band of five fought in two wars for liberty, first against invading armies and then against tyrants at home. They free serfs, fight the architects of murder, and have twice stopped mad schemes of genocide. But they’re communists, and can't even get visas to visit other heroes and scholars in the US.

Brother and sister are heirs to a millennia-old family tradition of serving justice and knowledge. Their ancestors commanded armies, delved into ancient tombs to lay ghosts—and worse things—to rest, taught the founders of new schools of philosophy and military strategy. But in the New World, he's barely tolerated as a ditch digger—and she'll be deported if she teaches English to other immigrants.

These are the other heroes, the ones who must fight for their dignity and liberty just as fiercely as they take on the challenges all pulp heroes face.

New Horizons is a new supplement for Spirit of the Century. Each chapter addresses a marginalized group from the pulps, kept outside by their sex, their race, their lifestyle, or their beliefs. In New Horizons you’ll find information about real-life heroic individuals and teams, the challenges they face and some of the solutions they find to the problems of dealing with 1920s society. You’ll also find heroes and villains ready for use, plot hooks, and ties to the mysteries around the Century Club. The life of heroes outside the mainstream may seem as strange as the secret language of Atlantis, but can be as exciting and powerful in play as a zeppelin armada.

New Horizons comes to you from veteran author and developer Bruce Baugh in collaboration with the minds behind Evil Hat Productions. We aim to show some of the real failings of the pulp era when it comes to fairness and justice in order to provide rich and vibrant new possibilities for adventure roleplaying in a bygone era. The real world is full of surprises—dense, weird, and just plain cool—and the bright light of Spirit’s optimistic pulp heroism can shine on some difficult realities just where they need it most.

New Horizons is about adding truth without sacrificing adventure—about bringing the real world together with the fantastic. Change your game. Change the world.