As I wrap up Wildermyth's campaigns, I find myself looking ahead to which RPG I want to queue up next. Owlcat're dragging their feet with that last Rogue Trader DLC. Or... I've been wanting to replay Mask of the Betrayer for nostalgia' sake, but on firing up NWN2 on my more recent computer I find it utterly riddled with graphics glitches and lockups, so that ain't happenin' yet. Or maybe... Witcher 3's been sitting in my collection forever. I was afraid it wouldn't have enough stuff to kill but I hear it's been remonstered now.
To sweeten the deal, my ultra-exclusive-dooper-super edition is offering me fancy duds. The schmanciest! I mean, I guess I could do without the... frilly... feathery... leather flake crap around the neck, but aside from that, as fantasy armours go, it's a remarkably down-to-earth design. As fantasy video game armours go, even more so. Hell, it appears a strict requirement of interdimensional travel to get persistently kitted out in one flavor or another of absurdly baroque furry/ferric finery boasting enough frills to make me look like I've been swallowed by a turkey buffed to an eye-searing gloss. MMOs of course have been the worst offenders over the past couple of decades, needing to consistently bait their audience into the cash shop with statelier and statelier status symbols, but it's not like you could escape it in single-player either, likely thanks to the long tradition of fantasy story illustrations being an ergononic nightmare.
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| "Everybody got their pom-poms? Let's go tickle evil." |
Much as I hate to admit it, there is some backing for this in our historic record, as advertising wealth and power has always entailed an inordinate degree of... well "bling" for lack of a better word. While visiting the treasury exhibition in Vienna, I did a double-take on seeing the so-called "sword of St. Mauritius" realizing it was the only piece on display equipped with an actual handle which might conceivably be gripped for more than five seconds, instead of some knobbly, slippery, jewel-encrusted eyesore. And yes, yes, I Get It, they're ceremonial pieces that were never meant to see more use than a bishop's bible.
... but then, is my game character strictly ceremonial? Because I was hoping to take him out for a spin. Maybe track some mud on an ogre's carpet. Maybe both pummel and pommel some bad guys. Maybe track down a dryad and check the armor rating on my codpiece, if you catch my driftwood. But whatever my adventures, one type of character I have no interest in roleplaying is the type of ditz worried about glitz over substance. Must everything be disco, my dear dancing queens? Has society gotten so feminized that our escapist fantasies no longer have room for the sort of grim Yojimbo With No Name who in real life owns ten gray shirts? (No that I!... okay, yes, yes I do.)
You really want to tempt me with a collector's edition bonus? Offer me rags! Sack-cloth protection over a comfortable plain beige linen shirt, a pile of mismatched furs and leathers, an unadorned verdigried hauberk dented with a thousand blows, scuffed, blatantly re-soled boots as shapeless as the badgers they were probably made from. And just to meet you art fags halfway, if you must embellish, I will admit there's a sort of busy visual design even wolf-men will abide:
The overgrown, the tangled and patchwork and decrepitly layered, the clanking, fluttering dregs of a misaligned loom and cross-eyed cobbler, the heavily downcast dross of a long-crumbled forge all stacked atop each other, the strength of entropy repurposed, portable exposed brickwork, let me clad at least myself as urban or verdant decay embodied, a crumbled brutalist temple tridiunal, and I'll forgive you far more of your foppish frippery.
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| thus, the lotus, from humble mud |
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