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Author: markrigney

Mark Rigney is the author of numerous plays, including Ten Red Kings and Acts of God (both from Playscripts, Inc.), as well as Bears, winner of the 2012 Panowski Playwriting Competition (during its off Broadway run, Theatre Mania called Bears “the best play of the year”). His short fiction appears in Witness, Ascent, Unlikely Story, Betwixt, The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review, Realms Of Fantasy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Black Static, among many others. “The Skates,” a comic (and ghostly) novella, is now available as an ebook from Samhain Publishing, with two sequels forthcoming, “Sleeping Bear” (Feb. 2014) and the novel Check-Out Time (autumn, 2014). In non-fiction, Deaf Side Story: Deaf Sharks, Hearing Jets and a Classic American Musical (Gallaudet University Press) remains happily in print one decade on. Two collections of his stories are available through Amazon, Flights of Fantasy, and Reality Checks. His website is www.markrigney.net.
The Camera Can Lie: FairyTale: A True Story

The Camera Can Lie: FairyTale: A True Story

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Cottingley FairiesNews flash: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, having created literature’s greatest rationalist in the form of Sherlock Holmes, spent his later years heavily invested in the occult, the supernatural, and the possible existence of (yes) fairies.

Of course, people have always evinced a desire to believe — sometimes in this, sometimes in that — and so it is perhaps not so surprising that Conan Doyle played a large role in one of history’s great photographic deceptions, that of the so-called Cottingley Fairies.

In fact, he was one of those most willing to champion the trumped-up, cheap-looking fakes (black and white stills of young girls posing in shrubbery with paper cut-outs of highly Romanticized winged fairies) His role in this debacle (the girls only recanted decades later) is the subject of a FairyTale: A True Story (1997), a film well worth revisiting given our drone-happy, GPS-driven, target-rich world.

You see where I’m going with this, yes? Given our present era of photo manipulation and computer generated graphics, our collective ability to dupe the unwary has never been greater, and just like statistics, images lie.

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Adventures In Gaming: The Temple Of the Sea Gods

Adventures In Gaming: The Temple Of the Sea Gods

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DSC05298I first created this adventure back in 1986, as a discrete part of a longer cycle in which the characters involved were questing for several potent artifacts intended to aid them in defeating their world’s largest dragon. One of those items was hidden here, in this temple.

For purposes of exhuming this module, I’ve made a number of things generic (both for the sake of easy translation to your gaming world, and to avoid any possible AD&D copyright issues). Even the particular “sea gods” to whom this temple system is consecrated can be adapted to fit your specific mythos. In fact, you can adapt pretty much any part of this; it’s for you, after all. For you to enjoy and hopefully put to use.

Character Motivation

If the player characters aren’t in pursuit of some massive relic (see above), then one fine reason to explore these halls is the usual mix of adventure seeking and treasure hunting. The bear went over the mountain, after all, and that OCD chicken keeps right on crossing the road. As a backup incentive structure, there’s always altruism. As you’ll see from the setting, the locals are beset by dangerous winged beasties, and it could be up to your particular band of heroes to free them from this (truly lethal) scourge.

Setting

A windy, treacherous tidal river. Dark, choppy water. Deep. Cold. Steep bordering cliffs, with multiple ravines and gorges forking off the main channel. What steadings there are bar their doors at night and keep a watch around the clock. Out of one of those ravines, often at dusk but not always, predatory bat-like creatures fly, and while you can fend off one or two, if they catch you in your boat or on the road, alone, and they come in a flock…

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Adventures in RPGs: Long Arc or Short Arc?

Adventures in RPGs: Long Arc or Short Arc?

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Scan 11AD&D carried me from middle school right through college, and about seventy-five percent of the time, I wound up as the referee. The core group with whom I played continued right on getting together for another fifteen years or so after graduation, engaging in annual reunions all over the country.

And I kept right on refereeing. After all, I had unfinished stories to “tell.” These story arcs played out over weeks, months, semesters, and then years. Many remain unfinished to this day. In the main, the rest of the group enjoyed my epic, often convoluted approach. For better or for worse, we weren’t much for hack-and-slash, in-and-out heroism.

Or were we? I’ll never forget Eric S. musing, as one reunion year wound down, that it sure would be nice if for once we could storm the castle, rescue the maiden, and be done.

His wistful comment stemmed in part from my having that very year posed a variant on that longed-for maiden-in-the-tower paternalistic standby: Orcus hired the party to rescue a damsel in distress, but this particular blushing violet turned out to be a truly enormous, deformed frog that had to be kissed in order to… well. Let’s just say there aren’t enough kisses in creation to make the wife of Orcus any more desirable.

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Adventures In Near-Future Sci-Fi: Black Mirror

Adventures In Near-Future Sci-Fi: Black Mirror

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Black Mirror White BearI don’t watch television. Or not, let’s say, broadcast television. Since the first X-Files video tape showed up, I have, instead, binge-watched episodic TV in irregular, spasmodic doses via VHS, DVD, and Netflix. I watch with my wife, and we’re not (to the shows) faithful: if a particular series bores us, we move on. Even Breaking Bad, after three seasons, felt like a joke gone on too long.

But Black Mirror. Holy cats!

It’s the best sci-fi you’ve never heard of.

A British show made for Channel Four, Black Mirror is the brainchild of one Charlie Brooker — whom you haven’t heard of, either. The series aired in the UK from 2011 through 2013. Based on that time span, you’d think it was a fabulous success spanning dozens of episodes. Only half true. Black Mirror consists of six shows total (plus a 2014 “Christmas Special,” which I have yet to see), and each is self-contained, a hermetic “What If?” often compared to Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone. The reference is not especially apt, but like Velcro and old chewing gum, it’s a label that seems to have stuck.

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Adventures In Straw Polls: Fear, Lovecraft, and Me

Adventures In Straw Polls: Fear, Lovecraft, and Me

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howard_philips_lovecraft_by_harsht-d48pzaoOnce upon a time, H.P. Lovecraft, he of the vaunted Cthulhu party set, set down his principles for crafting scary stories. He opined that terror is the oldest and most basic emotion available to humankind, and then went further, stating that those things unknown to we mortals are that which are most fearsome. His exact phrase, from the essay “Supernatural Horror In Literature,” (last revised 1935) reads: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

I disagree.

So far as I can discern, it’s the fear of what is known (or at least readily imagined) that is most terrifying. For example, being wounded and then dismembered by a lunatic straight out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Hostel, or being attacked by a shark while swimming.

Curiously enough, I’m getting set to either torpedo or defend this idea in public. I’ve been asked to be on a panel at April 25th’s Ohioana Book Festival in Columbus, Ohio. The panel topic is “Horror, Suspense, and the Supernatural,” and my fellow panelists include Julie Flanders, Debra Robinson, and all-around horror vet Tim Waggoner, with whom I share a publisher (Samhain).

Some brave audience member is sure to ask “What is horror, anyway?” even though “What isn’t horror?” might make for a better question, and then they’ll move on to asking about how authors scare people. Our tricks and devices. Do we, for example, rely on the known or the unknown to conjure our effects?

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Adventures In Italy: Calvino’s Italian Folktales

Adventures In Italy: Calvino’s Italian Folktales

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Blue FolktalesI grew up on Hans Christian Anderson, the Brothers Grimm, and the myriad anthologies of Andrew Lang: The Blue Book Of Fairy Tales, The Brown Book Of Fairy Tales, The Red Book Of Fairy Tales, etc. Most of these were read aloud by my father, so I received them as part of humanity’s long oral tradition, a fact for which I am now very grateful. Aesop, too, arrived in my life as something overheard rather than read.

All of the above work shared a common heritage. In fact, prior to high school at least, they led me to believe that fairy tales were specific to Europe, something vaguely Nordic, and familiar to the degree that the characters within the stories were uniformly white and spoke English. Who knows when it finally occurred to me that these stories were translated, and that many had international sources that transcended culture, race, and geography.

By 1980, when Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales finally arrived in an English-language edition (translated by George Martin), I was moving into different myths: Tolkien, certainly, but also the grittier, street-savvy story-telling of S.E. Hinton, Robert Cormier, and early Bruce Springsteen. The publication of Italian Folktales made not a ripple in my life. Indeed, I eventually read several other Calvino classics (If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler…, The Baron In the Trees, and The Non-Existent Knight) before realizing his omnibus folktales even existed.

It took me another ten years to order a copy and crack the covers, and ten more still to really delve into this enormous, 760 page trade paperback (Harcourt). What finally tipped me over the edge was the need for a new book to read to my adventure-obsessed youngest son.

At the outset, I admit to being worried that Calvino might not be a hit.

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Adventures In History: George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman

Adventures In History: George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman

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First FlashmanA few months back, I was (ever so gently) castigated for not giving proper credit to the screenwriter of the Michael York / Oliver Reed rendition of The Three Musketeers. That man was George MacDonald Fraser, he who wrote the Flashman books, a series into which I had never delved.

That has now been corrected, and just in time, too: no lesser a light than Ridley Scott (Alien; Blade Runner) is developing a reboot of Flashman with 20th Century Fox. As the fool on the hill once opined, everything old is new.

So let’s set aside fantasy for just a moment and allow for historical action-adventure as a sideline of the vast cultural behemoth that is now Black Gate. Swords, after all, form a big part of heroic fantasy, and in Flashman (first published in 1969, never out of print), swords of many types are on display and put to use. Lances, too. Plus primitive rifles, dueling pistols, and cannons.

The only thing missing? The heroism of our anti-hero, Harry Paget Flashman. He’s a survivor, and an accurate judge of other people’s character and abilities, but beyond that, he’s the very definition of reprehensible. He’s a cad, a coward, and an unrepentant racist; he’s treacherous, larcenous, and vindictive besides. Let’s leave off his appalling treatment of women, at least for now, and accept him for what he’s best at: looking sharp in military regalia. Ah, if only looks could kill…

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The Art Of Retreat, a.k.a. “Run Away, Run Away!”

The Art Of Retreat, a.k.a. “Run Away, Run Away!”

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Run MemeOver the last thirty-five years, I’ve enjoyed gaming (mostly D&D and its ilk) with something like ten different role-playing groups. Other than the blindingly obvious traits that all such gatherings share, such as a love of good company or having a pulse, the most salient characteristic exhibited by each band of gamers was a stunning inability to retreat in the face of bad situations or superior foes.

I find this mind-boggling. Fascinating, too.

Let me provide a couple of classic examples. Once upon a time, my friends Nick and Suzanne, playing a barbarian and a cleric, respectively, “went on ahead” of the rest of the group, which is to say, the rest of us couldn’t make it that week. They came upon a lonely cave inhabited by creatures we later came to call graylocks. I don’t recall the source or where the referee culled them, but that doesn’t matter: they were mean and tough. Think ogres with spells.

Nick and Suzanne pressed the fight, even though they were outnumbered; they pressed the fight even though their opponents were winning; they pressed the fight even when it was hopeless. In short, they behaved as if they could not possibly lose. It took hours of painstaking work over the ensuing weeks to rescue them.

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My Love/Hate Romance With Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit

My Love/Hate Romance With Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit

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GandalfLet me state for the record that I am a fan of the film adaptation of The Lord Of the Rings. Jack Nicholson can complain all he likes about “too many endings,” but that celluloid trilogy managed the impossible: it successfully imbued a made-up world not only with turmoil and action but with genuine emotional gravitas. The Lord Of the Rings (2001 – 2003), against all odds, mattered.

Having just seen the third of The Hobbit installments (2012 – 2014), I fear I cannot say the same for these sequel-prequels. I want to. At certain moments, I’m convinced. At others?

Yes, the task of adapting a book to the screen is arduous, full of perils, and the fact that Jackson’s scriptwriting team of Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and (for these films) Guillermo del Toro have had any success at all is remarkable. Tolkien, let’s face it, was not an efficient story-teller. Given characters like Tom Bombadil, it would not be unfair to crown him as King Of All Digressions.

So let’s take it as a given that adaptation involves violence toward the source material. Additions will be made, and subtractions, too. So be it. The goal, typically, is to preserve the spirit of the original.

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A Blast From the Past: John Christopher’s The Tripods Trilogy

A Blast From the Past: John Christopher’s The Tripods Trilogy

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white1Long before YA fiction conquered the universe and millennia before the trilogy became the gold standard by which the world judges any given author, there lived Sam Youd, a British writer who worked under the pseudonym of John Christopher. Youd published The White Mountains in 1967, at a time when the United Kingdom was lurching away from the tight-laced, survivalist mode inherited from and necessitated by back-to-back world wars. Cue mods and rockers, Pink Floyd, the Swinging Sixties. Twiggy. Bowie. Cue a mind-set ready to dismiss the bleak past in favor of (in Christopher’s eye) an equally bleak future.

I first encountered The Tripods trilogy in the late seventies, and both my sister and I devoured the series more than once. In the first book, Will Parker, his loutish cousin Henry, and a whipsmart French lad, Beanpole, embark on a post-apocalyptic journey to the only haven they’ve ever heard of where humankind isn’t ruled by the fearsome Tripods, massive metal beings reminiscent of The War Of the Worlds. But in The White Mountains, the tripods have won: humanity has been enslaved through the use of “caps,” metal headgear installed without fail on a child’s fourteenth birthday. Will, Henry, and Beanpole are about to turn fourteen, and they are all too aware that after capping, their peers are never the same.

So book one is the journey. Book two, The City Of Gold and Lead, pits the boys, along with a stoic German, Fritz, against the creatures that operate the tripods, the Masters. Will and Fritz pose as slaves and infiltrate one of the three cities inhabited by the Masters.

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