Monthly Archives: December 2010

The Ecology of Fraggle Rock

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Jeff Rients said, “I could probably get a post out of the strange ecology at work in [Fraggle Rock], but if someone else want’s to tackle it, please go ahead.”

All right, I will — in my own way, of course.

I watched a good bit of Fraggle Rock when I was younger, thanks to it airing on terrestrial CBC, which was carried on the local cable system, since northern Vermont’s on the US-Canadian border. I don’t know how much I was paid attention to the ecology presented in the show, but it couldn’t have been much, because I revisited the show a couple years ago and got it all twisted around in my memory.

There are four key elements in the cycle of life in Fraggle Rock — the place, not the show — doozers, fraggles, gorgs and radishes. They have a relatively complex web of relationships in the show, but my foggy brain made it much darker.

The Memory Cheats

For years, the way I remembered it was like this: doozers, the little green guys in hard hats, harvest radishes, using the material to build structures, tools and everything else used in their lives. Fraggles, the slightly larger little guys who sing and dance all day, snack on the radish-based constructions whenever the mood strikes them. In addition to keeping themselves alive and sufficiently energized to sing and dance all day, the fraggles’ actions also ensure the doozers have space to build continuously, as doozers lack the wherewithal to destroy their own work.

Meanwhile, the gorgs, big, hairy, galumphing human analogues, do two things. They raise vegetables, thus providing the doozers with raw materials via radishes, but also eat fraggles as a protein source. The gorg’s waste, organic and otherwise, all go into the trash heap, Marjory, a living, thinking entity who is the fraggles’ source of wisdom and guidance. In this scenario, fraggles are not only consumers, but the consumed. And their remains wind up in a trash heap, providing an agglomerated font of wisdom for the community.

This is wrong. And it’s unsurprising it’s wrong, because that’s awfully grim for a puppet show meant to teach children how to learn and share and junk like that.

The Way Things Are

A couple years ago, I revisited Fraggle Rock and was surprised by how things actually work down in the Rock.

Yes, doozers build things out of radishes and fraggles eat those things in a symbiotic relationship. And in addition to doozer structures, fraggles also eat raw radishes; indeed, it constitutes the basis of a great many of the meals they create, up to and including radish beer. However, gorgs regard fraggles as vermin, not food. Ma and Pa Gorg spend a great deal of time setting Junior Gorg the task of getting rid of the fraggles infestation. And the vibrant fraggle population just out of a gorg arm’s reach is a testament to Junior’s ineffectual efforts. Interestingly, the Wikipedia article notes that certain episodes of the series imply the surplus of fraggles is atypical in the gorgs’ world. Maybe it’s because of Junior’s ineptitude or maybe the Rock is the central colony of fraggles from which all others disseminate. They get the wandering fever, as Uncle Traveling Matt did, only eventually settling down.

So all three populations are in competition for the radishes, each with their own use for them. The doozers build, the fraggles eat and the gorgs make a cream to stop themselves from vanishing. The gorgs have an advantage in that they have agricultural skills. The fraggles can eat doozer architecture or go get their own from the gorgs’ garden. And the doozers . . . well, the doozers probably have their own means of harvesting radishes, probably in a more discreet way than sending Mokey out into the garden.

What Do You Want to Play?

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Theron at My Dice Are Older Than You brought the perennial question out of RPG.net and into the wild: “What do you want to play?”

That sword cuts two ways for me. I want to play in a game where I feel the GM is working with we players and neither aiming to grind us down nor controlling our actions to suit his desires. I want to play with a group with a collective sense of humor that walks the line of keeping it lighthearted without straying into absurdity. I want to play a game that celebrates “the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism,” to make this cross-topical.

In terms of content, I think any of these would make me happy:

  • A Spelljammer-esque sandbox campaign in which the party has come into ownership of their own vessel and a letter of marque from one of the sides in the next Inhuman War. So we can make money and do adventure-some things.
  • A Mage: The Ascension campaign because I still have yet to actually play that game. I won’t say any campaign at all, because I am not down with the “Technocratic Science Heroes Bring Progress to the Backwards Traditionalists” interpretation, but I like to pretend I would be up for most frameworks.
  • A station-based science fiction campaign, something like Babylon 5 or Star Trek: Deep Space 9, where the bulk of the action happens at a crossroads of species and cultures, but there’s also the opportunity for travel to distant locales. Probably more Deep Space 9 than Babylon 5 in all honesty, then.
  • A reality cops game in the manner of the Thursday Next novels, although maybe with a more strongly woven background mythos. Ooh. Imagine it were done with the organization rules in Angel! And pull background information from Collegio Januari, maybe . . . I should stop, probably. Or at least stash that idea for later.

What are you jonesing to play that you aren’t currently?

[Border Board Games] Battlestar Galactica

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The Saturday before Thanksgiving, Alex, Rachel and I went up to Derby Line, Vermont to visit our friends with Border Board Games, the Northeast Kingdom’s monthly gaming get-together. The game that took up most of my evening was Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game, in spite of my intention to finally get another go at Castle Ravenloft — I’ve been foiled twice now since playing it at Fall-loha last September, for the record.

I’ve known of Battlestar Galactica for a while. It’s been in the local gaming circle almost since it was originally published. It got a lot of play in its early days, which tapered off drastically to none due to issues of taste and preference. I managed to avoid trying it out by not being interested in the source material and not wanting to engage with certain players in the way that I understood the game required.

Even a year ago, I sat out what sounded like a fun session of the game, again telling myself it was because of player(s) involved with the game. But what I heard from that session made me wish I’d tried it. I didn’t get another clear shot at Battlestar Galactica until this Saturday at Border Board Games, so I took it.

We played with the Pegasus expansion, which I gather added more characters and terrible things to befall the fleet, in addition to the titular ship. The game’s owner, Carlo, took the Cylon leader immediately, which seemed to surprise the more experienced players, Alex and Bethany, so I suppose it’s another expansion element.

The core of Battlestar Galactica is the characters dealing with crisis after crisis, drawn from a deck of cards. Crises are resolved by characters playing skills cards of various sorts. One crisis may call for political and tactical skill cards, for example, so those count towards reaching the goal number, while all other cards count against that score.

See, the game isn’t just the characters working together to overcome challenges. There’s also one or more Cylons in the game, secretly working against the humans to drag them down on any one of four meters: population, food, fuel and morale. While the mechanical core of the game is overcoming those challenges, the social core is figuring out who’s a Cylon — or flippantly accusing anyone you like because it amuses you to do so.

In the game we played, I think we were a little distracted from rooting out the Cylon in our midst as Carlo was a very obvious antagonist as the Cylon leader. And he didn’t even do all that much in the beginning, preferring to build up to gain super-crisis cards. I chose Gaius Baltar as my character. He’s especially prone to being a Cylon, so I got a lot of suspicious glances and specious accusations, meaning I spent my cards and table talk trying to prove Baltar’s innocence and usefulness to the fleet. He was also the president the whole game. I didn’t see enough of the quorum deck to gauge its utility; I can say I was underwhelmed by the two quorum cards I did draw.

Like a lot of other contemporary games these days — I’m looking at you, Agricola — Battlestar Galactica has that sense of too much to do and too little time in which to do it. Each character typically gets one action per turn, and there are so many ways to use that action, all of them necessary to keeping the fleet together.

In the end, it was Rachel’s Starbuck who was the hidden Cylon. I had a strong sense it was her or Bethany as Adama, as they were the only ones who regularly drew tactics cards, which kept appearing in skill checks where they were a detriment. In the end, I used Baltar’s Cylon detection ability on Bethany, as I wanted to be sure one way or another about her. In retrospect, knowing Bethany wasn’t a Cylon meant we should have turned the heat on Rachel, since Alex’s character couldn’t draw tactics cards as regularly as Starbuck does. But that’s not what happened, probably because Bethany and Alex still suspected me, as Baltar’s inspired delirium lets him draw from any skill deck he likes, so I was a potential suspect for contributing the tactical spoilers.

Learning Battlestar Galactica was fun, overall. The paranoia aspect started to get me after all, as I relied pretty heavily on Alex’s lead without any reassurance he wasn’t a Cylon driving us to destruction. That can screw with your head. I’d like to play it again, but I plan to be select about with who I play the game. There are certain game personality types I don’t like dealing with at the best of times, let alone when there’s the additional layer of potential treachery.