Appendix A

The Bird Warren, aka Prismatic Warren, aka the Warren whose leader board I am seventh on (and climbing perhaps) is running yet another blog wagon - like a fool who's been living under a rock distracted by card games, insurance nonsense and ~4 hours a day of game work, I completely forgot to jump on it until now. So I'm gonna speed run this one with my birth name talking about early inspirations for me, then maybe make a longer one about a different topic with the name most of you know me by.

(sauce)

Section 1 - Those Who Do Not Learn From History

A is for Alessandro, the first to roll call, the last to learn how to spell their name. It's the name that was given to me at birth. The name of a conqueror (and the most common name among the most handsome men my godmother encountered in Italy). My childhood was steeped in history, in myths, in staring at a world map or the nightly news.

It is this half-remembered (primarily Mediterranean) history, regurgitated through Wikipedia articles and sanitized public school books, through History Channel specials and museum trips, through The Ten Commandments and Gladiator, that is one of my first and possibly most profound influences. History, as ever, is the greatest and most relatable tale of all, and I encourage any writer feeling uninspired to dive into all its horrors and all its glories. Something to also note is the ways in which authors and authorities warp histories, as this too can be fertile ground for further warps and re-imagine (it's why a lot of my sci-fi stuff evokes myths without pretending to be an accurate representation of them).

This was paired with living in Massachusetts, a state that prides itself on its living (colonial) history. A place whose baseball team was as steeped in history and myth as any Greek hero.

Section 2 - Read Terrible Books

I have a soft-spot for what I call "C-Tier Media" - Stuff that is too rawly authentic, creative and resonant to be bad, but too unpolished, clunky and ugly to be quite "good." It's the art-house and un-sexing of Killer Is Dead or the all-too-close close ups of Palahniuk's Choke or the crass puppeteering of the 2007 Dante's Inferno (or for that matter, the subtle charm of The Puppeteer). Do you remember Impossible Creatures? That's the Relic Entertainment game I was playing instead of Company of Heroes. I grew up on bargain-bin media, on 11 a.m. reruns while home sick, or whatever hand-me-down comics I could get my hands on. As I continued my work in media studies, the warts of these works became clearer, but so did their subtle genius.

The greatest trick of all is to take heavy inspiration from something no one knows, and everyone will think it feels fresh. Did you know Nier: Automata's whole conceit heavily echoes Expelled From Paradise, a film that came out 3 years prior? (And in my opinion the film has a WAY more interesting story, despite it being critically lukewarm and arguably c-tier?)

I think this is also why I value being nichely sublime over being universally liked - It's like that old saying that they used to design MtG cards with the idea that the best cards weren't the ones that everyone thought were good or balanced, but the ones that half the player base thought were incredible while the other half thought they'd be useless.

Section 3 - Youth & Games

I sometimes say "My campaigns usually boil down to either Final Fantasy 7 or Cowboy Bebop, and if they're neither of those they're StarCraft." - Some of the most influential games and media of my youth constantly leak out of my design whether intentionally or not. The action and gravity of Star Wars or the 3 stat systems of Fable. The emphasis on Play-Create-Share that made Little Big Planet so magical, or the bombast and versatility of Just Cause and Crackdown. Hell even just the UI of the Fallout games lives rent free in my brain. These are inspirations I don't always site, but ones that are undeniable. Why do my settings usually involve a jumble of ancient technology, zombie viruses, religious zealots and power armor? Surely it couldn't be all the time I spent playing the original Halo trilogy. Why am I constantly considering scale and mini-games? Is it because I was hooked on Spore? Zone of the Enders was my first real exposure to mecha, and still the influence that bleeds out the most. Growing up I had an MP3 player that was mostly filled with video game soundtracks I pirated, and aside from the fact that it's miraculous I turned out this well (mostly because I think I saw video games as a craft from an early age thanks to modding and map makers, and thus studied that and other artistic crafts to better understand, replicate and enjoy it) it's also shaped a lot of my musical taste, and it's why I think music is so pivotal to how I run most of my games. I could recite the opening speech from Killzone by memory and still get chills hearing that intro music. I'd listen to Metal Gear tracks on loop to find each difference between the Alert and Caution tracks. I'd knew all the vocal tracks to the Silent Hill games by heart before I knew a single pop song.

A weird quirk here is that while I played a lot of video games, my interest in tabletop really wouldn't come to fruition until college except through running my own version of 3rd edition (which was heavily inspired by the mechanics of Bethesda games and Fable) - Tabletop games fascinated me, and I loved reading the lore and rules for all kinds of war games or board games, but the cost was often too high for me to properly get into the hobby and have enough extra to get my friends to play with me (a reason I have a huge soft-spot for print-and-play). 

Section 4 - Extracurriculars

In my final re-visitation to my childhood, I think it's important to acknowledge through all of this I was acting. My parents (wisely) forced me to do extracurriculars, and through some incredible stroke of luck I landed in acting. Not because I enjoyed it, mind you. You'd have to pay me top dollar to ever get involved with a theater troop again. But because it taught me how to play to an audience, how to deeply read into the script of a character, how to mask, how to evoke a whole world by allowing one's imagination to flow out into the room. Tabletop games are emphatically not acting, but they do share a common ancestor. And while I lamented my time as a "theater kid", I think the skills I gained and honed there have been pivotal to both my success as a GM and also my success as a service worker. (Also shout-outs to everyone I used to write plays with because that was the highlight of the year every year).

Also I read all of Moby Dick when I was 12 instead of Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings and I think that did something to me. That book still fucks by the way. (I think I unironically read the first Twilight book directly after that... maybe something about that checks out in my works) -- There's something to be said that fantasy literature never really captured me, with Red Wall being an exception. I'm reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms presently and it's striking me that it's the first piece of fantasy literature I've read since Once and Future King which was like... nearly a decade ago.

These make up the primordial soup of my youth - The automatic assumptions and understandings I'd later draw on without a second thought. This is the Appendix A, before I dug deep and learned more about myself, the world and the art I truly valued (it's still a lot of C Tier stuff and StarCraft).