My Fantasy Role-Playing Game now

Hi everybody. I've decided to create my game as a paper and dice game instead of on computers even if it doesn't make any money that way. I've got the rough part of it finished already because I have a lot of experience with designing those kinds of games. I found a couple of people to play with me and right now we're doing a Mayan campaign where I've become inspired to let the right answer to every problem magically turn into their best guess about how to solve the problem. It's like, the prey runs to the hunter. It seems more Mayan that way, not using a European style map, but rather a map coming closer to that 200 page boardgame with signs in the heavens and events on Earth changing each other. We start Monday and I'm really excited. Today I have to go a barbecue at work and I'm not looking forward to it and I'm 2 1/2 days quit of smoking (except I smoked one this morning. Dammit. I'm so weak sometimes) and I just don't want to go and be bored around people who some of them are smoking cigarettes, because I feel really tempted and depressed and anxious today. Wish me luck.

Tim

New Post 8/10/11

    Hi Folks, I'm not reading about Cortes right now but have begun reading the travel accounts of an archaeologist sightseeing in Southeast Mexico and Central America in 1854 and he's pretty hilarious and I'm also reading this amazing book that you can't check out of the library but I go back each day and read it bit by bit. It's called "2000 Years Of Mayan Literature" by Dennis Tedlock. He reproduces many of the glyphs side by side the translations of the works he presents and there's a lot of his commentary to wade through, too, but I find it helpful and I'm not sure I'd have the patience to sit with the originals as long without his commentary to help me. My understanding of the texts would also be more dry and less playful and idiosyncratic. There is one chapter in the book about a Mayan book that is entirely devoted to a chart representing the travels on the one hand of planets in the heavens and on another level humans on the earth and the whole thing looks like a 200 page boardgame. I'm really dying to get to that chapter, but when I flip ahead to it I can,t make heads or tails...The most important idea he presents is that Indio literature is ongoing and being written right now, even if thousands or millions of the older texts were burned up as heresy by the Catholic Church at one point. Even if that was a tremendous loss to modern Mayans, it doesn't mean they don't still have just as much history as anyone else. Or more. I think when I'm done with the book about the archaeologist I'm finally going to get around to reading Carlos Castaneda, even though Don Juan was Yaqui and not Mayan. I was reading Millman's book The Way of The Peaceful Warrior and I hated it. I am beginning to become almost as nutty about Mexican stuff as I can sometimes be about Ancient Greek stuff. And it's fun having strangers call me "Amigo" when they see I'm reading a book about Mexico. I get into these really mystical conversations, even with people who are presumably non-Mexican. Peace, Tim

About The Book I'm Reading Right Now

   I'm actually trying to read about six books at the same time. I've made about a hundred pages of the way into a very blow by blow history of the career of Fernando Cortes. It's pretty heartrending in places. It was written in 1865 and does a good job of both being an exhilerating action story and a very morally ambivalent piece of work. Unfortuneately, the lies are laid on pretty thick, but how could it be otherwise? Every single page has between six and twenty contradictions of itself. The writer refers to a lot of first hand accounts that he is working from and it's all battle scenes, so it's no wonder there are so many contradictions and downright lies. What he doesn't whitewash is what he calls mixture of  "war, religion and rapine" that he says characterized that period in European consciousness. At one point-- and may Mexican readers forgive me if I detail this wrong or report it like it's just another story-- the conquistadores are in a huge Aztec city and the Aztecs ask permission to have a ritual dance, minus the human sacrifice. The conquistadores give permission and all these Aztec nobles start dancing in all their gold and the conquistadores suddenly attacked and slaughtered them all! One report is they just couldn't resist seizing all that gold, but another report is they had heard a rebellion was about to happen. Then a battle started where the Spanish became really sorry they had done that, because they were outnumbered maybe thirty thousand to one, but somehow they escaped the capital. But Moctezuma was so sad to be in the Spanish camp under those circumstances that he refused medical treatment for a serious head wound and basically let himself die. It's just an awful set of events and probably happened more or less like it says in the book. Reading and thinking about it makes me rethink a kind of generalized outlook on Mexican Indian response to Christianity that I wrote about here under the heading "Templo de..." It was certainly a very naive and whitewashed article I wrote. I think the reality was just so awful and morally weighted on behalf of the Indians that it is hard for someone of European descent like me to read or write about it without feeling descended from monsters. But there you have it. At least I can keep on learning and writing while I learn.