Bloodspell: The Answer May Surprise You

We’ve done this quite a few times, since we met Dominique and Sylvester. The four of us meet up on the Quay and start walking, out of town and around the headland and then down to the beach once we’re safely out of sight. We build a fire, and once it’s going we sit close enough to stay warm and far enough to feel safe (and look spooky, if I’m honest), and we talk about what it’s like.

There’s something on my mind tonight. I curl my toes up in the sand, on instinct, bracing for the revelation or something, and I ask “have you… how many people have y’all killed?”

Dominique blinks, deadpan, then laughs. Throws back her head and practically roars with laughter. I’d be offended, but I’m too busy thinking how incredibly hot she is. I’d never admit it, but the reason I suggested these little meetups was at least eighty per cent to spend more time talking with, and looking at, and thinking about Dominique. She glows in the firelight, shimmering dark and sleek across from me, and the next breath I take as I’m about to apologise for being such a weapons-grade dumbass is rough and unready because what I’m actually thinking about is jumping across the fire and burying myself in her giant hair and covering that long throat of hers in bites and kisses and —

I was gonna say something, but that’s Dominique for you.

“It’s not the sort of thing I count,‘Titia,” she says when she’s finally come back to Earth. “One thing to let it happen now and then, by accident, or to do in need when the damn fool’s decided you’re a monster and you gotta burn. But you don’t sit there, brooding and preening over what a monster you are. No pride, but no shame either. And never trust anyone who says you have to keep score.”

She leaves us no choice but to stan, says a stan who has no choice.

Dorian follows my eyes and coughs. I know they’re nervous about this. They’re not stupid, they have eyes and a bunch of brain cells, and they know — because we had the talk about this around the time we had the talk about that and the other, and what I’m saying here is that babe, I’m a vampire led in good time to babe, I love you and I don’t want to see you die one day and because we’d reached that point we had to negotiate with ‘til death us do part is a lovely sentiment but I’m poly and I have to know — will you get jealous?

D doesn’t get jealous, or at least they never admit to it, but they are a one-at-a-time kind of lover, and I think something buried deep in their psyche still worries about competing with Dominique. I keep telling them a) it’s not a competition and b) I have more than enough love to give and c) I don’t even know if Dominique swings my way and d) I live with Dorian and I let Dorian turn me into this and dear God I love you Dorian, you stupid sweet sexy jazz dork. I don’t tell them e) which is that nobody could compete with Dominique anyway, and I would hate to ever have to choose between them because if Dominique said yes, but it’s me and only me I might not immediately want to say no.

Anyway, Dorian coughs again and pokes up the fire to hide it and says, huskily as they can manage, “It’s not about keeping score, Dominique. If you reach a point where they’re just numbers, you’ve already gone off the deep end. But I think if you’ve happened to kill someone — if you’ve had to kill someone — you owe them something for the life they might have led. I keep diaries, and I write down every single name, every time for eighty years, just in case. Someone ought to remember them, and I’ll be here a bloody long time.”

Dear God, I love them. That’s what surprised me most about them. Not that they were a vampire, not even that they’d left the whole concept of ‘gender’ down the back of a sofa when Prohibition was still a thing and sort of got along without it ever since, but the sheer decency of them. The same petty, prissy, fussy little things that make them such a good teacher make them such a good vampire — according to my extremely limited ‘is it like a horror movie in here?’ sense of what makes a ‘good vampire’, anyway. Of course they keep notes in case they forget what happened last time. Of course they never throw away a diary in case they need it forty years later to remember some obscure fact about someone who might well be dead by now. Of course they care.

Sylvester. We all look at Sylvester. Dominique smirks, feline, and I crush the obvious joke as it bubbles up in my head even as I think about stroking her (stop it) and whether she purrs (stop it). Dorian’s lips are thin and tight, their eyes owlish behind their glasses, turning the firelight back. There’s some history there, and I’m afraid to ask.

“What are you all waiting for?” Sylvester grumbles. He’s kicked off his worn old man shoes and his worn old man feet are closer to the fire than any of ours. Words flit around my head — weatherbeaten, salt-stained, tanned — and as Sylvester shuffles himself a bit closer I catch a glimpse of scars and tattoos on his legs and the glimmer of heavy gold rings in the dark. If Sylvester the vampire pirate didn’t exist, someone would have had to invent him. He’s just too good to be true.

“C’mon, Sylv,” I say. “How many?”

“None.”

The word falls out of him grudgingly, a single penny in a slot machine, no lights or sounds blarting out at you, just the smallest kind of victory.

“You?” The word’s out of my mouth before I can cram it back in there, and “I don’t believe you,” says Dorian, and Dominique doesn’t say anything, she just sits there and smiles.

“Not for this. Not to eat. That’s what you’re aksing, in’t it? You live a kind of life where you kill a man and go to gaol, ‘less you’re in the army or the navy or what-have-you. So you’re aksing me a question as makes sense to you.”

Dorian’s mouth is open and they’re saying words — “You know very little about the life Laetita’s led” — and I put my hand up.

Sylvester nods to me and he says: “I don’t know how many men I killed at sea. Don’t know how many I knifed or hit in dock as died later. One or two women, I do know, and I amn’t proud of it now, but…” He rubs his beard, tugs at it like he does when he’s thinking, and points at Dominique. “Since that ‘un brought me over? Not one for eating, and I never tried to kill none either, after we ‘scaped Haiti and came to shore. Believe it or don’t; still God’s honest truth.”

It’s always the ones you least expect.

you thought me dead, but i sailed away

Back at work. Two days a week. Still better than the longest school holiday since I last had school holidays. Although wired to spend whole weeks not going out unless I'm getting paid for it, and not speaking to anyone who doesn't sleep in the same bed as me, it still feels good to be somewhere else, doing something else. The argument for ludic labour doesn't always feel compelling, but when I've spent four days in a cellar reorganising books and hauling crates about - I start to get it. There's a novelty there that not all forms of bullshit job come with. Of course, the week I went back was also the week I fucked my collarbone falling over in the bath (I turn more and more brittle and prematurely elderly with every passing day) and it's still stiff and sore and why is physical existence a thing at all, don't we have the tech bros working on this yet?

Back on my game dev bullshit too. I've functionally dropped out of the PhD, because I can spend a few months making a game or putting together a paper that investigates a problem in a small way but constructing a problem and then committing to it for SIX YEARS of spare time feels increasingly less workable. I mention this because all of the little games I've put out are working toward something bigger, describing the edges of a space I may one day feel compelled to go in and explore.

(Except Bloodspell, which is its own little bitter pill - a heartbreaker that turned into a hack that briefly dabbled with being a lecture. I thought I was done with it, but I woke up this morning with Laetitia's words on my lips and a strong sense of where a scene was going and what it was saying, so I guess we're still doing this.)

Anyway. I came in here to say it's Free RPG Day and those of you who like RPGs and Free Stuff should consider this Free Games Digest. It contains a game called Aces High which I wrote about ten years ago and did shit-all with except bung it up on a wargaming blog where all of four regular readers would be interested. Dolled up with art (Bri de Danann), editing (J. W. van Heerden) and layout (by Francita, who I know only as Francita) it is now looking and reading a lot nicer. Check it out. Also there's a cute Land Before Time style dinosaur adventure and a big folio o' random tables in there if they're your thing.

If you want to buy something, you could do worse than Volume 3 of the Short Games Digest, which (among other things) contains a game called All Your Houses, which I wrote and which also uses cards to substitute for a whole lot of other system cruft. In this case, it's a dynastic story-building kind of game which probably works perfectly well as a hand management game if you don't want to tell stories with it for some reason.

I am currently working on another game, working title The Hitch Hiker's Guide To Elfland, which is my attempt at - hm. Not decolonising D&D, because I am the last person on Earth who should be asked to decolonise anything, and colonialism is only one of the violences D&D has to offer. But there's a sort of attack-and-dethrone-D&D vibe and a reclaim-the-OSR vibe in the industry air at the moment and I'm trying to do that with a game about being a good tourist and exploring for the sake of exploring and building systems about that, rather than systems you ignore in order to do that. It's an experiment, but that's what the Digests are for - short-form experiments in game design that might be fun, give them a try. It'll be in Volume 6 when Volume 6 comes out (mid-September, ideally).

All of this is sketching around the edges of... something. It uses Tarot cards, ideally. It is fantasy, but not post-Tolkienian. It is an RPG, but not post-wargame. It is in some way indebted to the fiction of E. R. Eddison and it uses a lot of ideas from the OSR, but stripped clean of as much of their baggage as I can shift. It is not 'manifest destiny with swords', but it might be 'the Renaissance in space with crossbows'. It might have runes in it, or verb-noun magic, or I might come up with something else, probably involving Tarot suits. It is something I have been working towards, in a crabwise and inconsistent way, for the best part of a decade, and it will probably say what I want to say about games and death and stories in a more artful and poetic way than writing a thesis about what other people have done.

I bloody hope it does or I'm going to feel a right plum in 2025. Assuming we all live that long.