V is for Vanilla and Villain

V is for Vincent, too, but not Victory for Micheal Vick and the B'eagles, all of whom are scumbags...

            Vanilla and Vanilla Fudge are my favorite flavors; I'm just like that, not much with the fancy, although strawberries, for some reason I can't put my finger on, I think that I should like them...

            Villains are a central pre-occupation of a GM and writer. They are the foil, the bad guy that opposes our heroes, and I cannot abide plain-Vanilla Villains. Mine must be more complicated, not dastardly dog-fighting ex-cons or baby-scalping alien invaders, although true evil has it's place (in a story, and 'Evil has It's Place' sounds like a winner...). But for verisimilitude, that sweet semblance of reality that I crave for my stories, we need shades of gray; complicated villains and the heroes who were made to stop them!

            Which leads into 'Villains and Vigilantes', one of those old school RPGs based on tried and true comic-book tropes; you rolled on charts of them, like 'bit by radioactive spider', or just selected something, and it all had a sort of thrown-together feel that I miss in certain modern games. Often too polished, the lot of them, as if the designers have been doing this sort of thing literally for years, which they have...

            In long ago times, lost in the mists of 1977, or there abouts, people didn't necessarily know what they were doing, and didn't let the rules boss them around. I was a kid, with a vague exposure to RPGs, but my cousins weren't interested, so the idea of making a dungeon, or building a world, lay dormant until college. Then I discovered D&D, but more importantly, Star Trek and later blessedly simple WEG D6 Star Wars and Ghostbusters, International and later TORG, the wellspring of Possibilities (literally; 'Possibilities', the player-influencing-the-environment-power in all of my games, whether or not a similar concept was already there, which it often was)! I GMed FASA Trek with a new alien species every week. The system had simple and agreeable world-building rules which I promptly mangled and mutilated, adding stuff from Traveller and from great world-building SF writers like Poul Anderson and Larry Niven.

            V is for... sometimes I brainstorm a little, and sometimes I know what I'm going to write. This is what I came up with for 'V'

Vengeance

Vendetta

Vexing

Vixen

'Lead them to Victory!' (the motto on the ToWWZ t-shirt 8-)

Virtue

Vile

Vote

Vole

Votive

Volt

Voltaire

Vor, Vorkosigan and Vorkosiverse (GB Lois McMaster Bujold! W,L,W!)

Visionary

Valence

Valentine

Valor

Vader, Darth

Vital

Veteran

Vetinarian

Villain

Vanilla

Viper

Victim

Volk

Valium

Vandal

Vinland

Vine

Varley, John

Voldemort

Valley

Vanna

Vance

Vector

Victor

Velocity

Velociraptor

Vellum

Vault

Vicar

Vogel

Vogel-perspektiv

View