The Neo-Westerns of Taylor Sheridan

Though occasionally I've seen the term "neo-Western" to mean "a Western made in the last couple of decades," I think the term is most usefully applied to films that deal with thematic material and often locales that are part of the Western genre tradition, but place them in a more modern era and reflect modern concerns.

Actor/writer/director has been three unrelated (other than perhaps thematically) films that are recent exemplars of this genre, though all there also partake of other genres. Each film recalls classic Western plots but manages to do so in a way that doesn't seem rote.

Sicario (2015), directed by Denis Villeneuve, seems at first glance fairly fare from Western conventions. It's a crime story about about government agents going up against Mexican drug cartels. It plays out as a noir with deception and moral compromise the order of the day. Despite it's modern setting, Sicario plays out as sort of an inversion of many late-era American Westerns set in Mexico. The Emily Blunt's FBI agent is not a anglo-savior for the Mexican people. Instead, she's merely a pawn in a game who's rules are concealed from here and are much crueler than she naively imagines. Benico del Toro is the avenger so grim his justice it is without catharsis. It's just another move in the game of horrors. Josh Brolin's affably amoral CIA agent resembles in some ways the gringo schemers of the Zapata Westerns, but Sicario is bereft of any sort of cynical humor regarding the actions of imperialist powers.

Oscar-nominated Hell or High Water (2016) is more recognizable as a Western, being a tale of Texas bankrobbing brothers pursued by an aging ranger (Jeff Bridges). This might be a story decent men driven to law-breaking by predatory money men, or the story of the Law personified by the dogged lawman trying to stop two wrong-doers. In fact, like more nuanced Westerns, it is both. When their chase ends after many a scene of dying, economically crippled small towns and dust two-lane highways, neither side will get exactly the ending it hoped for.

This year's Wind River, Sheridan's directorial debut, again finds a female FBI agent (Elizabeth Olson) out of her depth. This time, a young Native woman has been a murder in the snowy wilderness of a Wyoming Indian Reservation. Olson's agent has help, at least, particularly Jeremy Renner's hunter for Fish & Wildlife, who lends his tracking and shooting skills. Amid freezing vistas and the business of police procedural, grief is as ever-present as the snow. Grief for the decimation of Native cultures and Native families. Grief at the loss of daughters. Wind River could have easily been a story of revenge as many of its Western progenitors were, but again those particulars are handled in a matter of fact manner. Moving on, but never forgetting, is the order of the day.

I'd recommend all of these films, but Hell or High Water feels like the strongest, or perhaps the most unified in terms of theme and action.

Dictionary of Azurth Updated

It's been a while since my last update of the Dictionary of Azurth, your abbreviated (but free) guide to assort people, places, and things in the Land of Azurth. This update includes the skinny of Elementalist wizards, the Land of Under-Sea, and the very seasonal Father Yule.

Get it here.

The Ahistorical Historical Setting

Historically accurate Aristotle?

A social media thread about bad history in historical costume drama caused me to recall an idea I had years ago upon a re-read of Aaron Allston's wonderful Mythic Greece: Age of Heroes. At the time, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys was still in syndication, and while not particularly good, it did suggest the using of Greek Myth and geographic as a backdrop for a fantasy setting that might not otherwise have a lot of the trappings of Greek myth. For the most part, Hercules stuck to the big names, but there's no reason you couldn't get as detailed as Allston's book, but give it a wholly un-Mythic Greece feel.

The changes can be big. Reign: The Conqueror (based on the novel Arekusandā Senki by Hiroshi Aramata) re-imagines the life of Alexander the Great as a sort of science fantasy thing with giant Persian war machines and Pythagorean ninjas. Or, they can be subtle, like Black Sails weaving historical pirates with a sort of prequel to Treasure Island. (The difference I see between this last one and a standard historical setting which would generally tend to insert fictional characters, i.e. the PCs, into history, is the "high concept" of the literary/historical mashup.)

A lesson on Greek myth every week?

So I say go ahead and run a Kirby-esque space opera based on the book of Exodus. Recontextualize the War of Roses to have it take place in something like Warring States Japan. Or take the history presented in the Book of Mormon and turn it into a hexcrawl as Jeff Reints did.

Let history be your guide, not your boss.

Weird Revisited: Nawr the All-Consuming

Need a rat god? (And who doesn't really?) Here's a petty god post from December 2011 that has you covered.

Symbol: Stylized image of a rat-king, as if the animals are dancing in a circle.

Alignment: Chaotic

Ravenous Nawr is one of the group of petty deities know as the vermin gods.  It is not so much worshipped as placated.  Every harvest, offerings of grain are arrayed around small statues or carvings of rats where real rodents can consume them.

If this ritual is not observed, there is chance that rats will gather and in the twist and tumult of rodent bodies, a rat-king will form and instantiate the godling.  The composite deity wil summon up a swarms of rats and swirl through the community that has offended it, chewing, biting, and possibly consuming everything in its path.

The visitation always occurs at night and is of variable duration, but always ends by sunrise.

Planescape Cold War

"Intelligence work has one moral law—it is justified by results."

- The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John Le Carre

This is what comes of seeing The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2016) and Atomic Blonde in the same weekend.

Take Planescape's Sigil and re-imagine it as vaguely post-World War (it really doesn't matter which one) in technology and sensibility. It's the center of fractious sometimes warring (but mostly cold warring) planes, but now it's more like Cold War Berlin or Allied-occupied Vienna.

Keep all the Planescape factions and conflict and you've got a perfect locale for metacosmic Cold War paranoia and spy shennanigans. You could play it up swinging 60s spy-fi or something darker.

There's always room for William S. Burroughs in something like this, and VanderMeer's Finch and Grant Morrison's The Filth might also be instructive. Mostly you could stick to the usual spy fiction suspects.

The Meaning of Good & Evil (Alignments)

I don't use alignment much in my games admittedly, but I do like the idea of alignment as indication of at best only loosely morality-related cosmic teams or alliances. Even with the approach their are times where you might need to articulate in some way what an alignment means on a closer to human level. What follows is a way of looking at it in those situation.

The idea (not original to me) is that Law vs. Chaos is the primary conflict underpinning the multiverse. This works well with both the Appendix N source material and earliest iterations of D&D. The Good vs. Evil can only be understood in relation to that primary axis.  This secondary parameter gives an indication of the zealotry and methods employed to combat the opposing force. Those on the Good side of things believe that the opposing force can be moderated, ameliorated, or dealt with with less violent means. Those on the evil side of things believe that the opposing force cannot be tolerated or reasoned with, only destroyed.

So Lawful Good and Lawful Evil agree that Chaos is a threat, but Lawful Good has a more moderate maybe even "hate the sin, love the sinner" view, whereas Lawful Evil feels all chaos must die by any means necessary. Chaotic Good believes that Law is a wrongheaded constraint on freedom, but hearts and minds can be changed without violence in most cases (violence being coercion, after all), whereas Chaotic Evil wants what it wants so intently it's willing to see everything burn.

This way of looking at things has the advantage of showing a way around the rigid, asshole paladin, and also explaining the Dwarf/Elf tension despite the fact they are both Good, and also suggests demons and Devils would never team-up. Neutral Goods become "let's all get along" maybe and Neutral Evil is  perhaps "a pox on all your houses!" True Neutral remains about balance.

Weird Revisited: The Infernal Mob

The above is Mammon, boss of the Pluton family, ably rendered by Jeremy (that Dandy in the Underworld). He's one of diabolic mobsters that control Hell in the world of Weird Adventures. Check out these posts if you missed them back in 2011:

     Andras: "Hell's Hoods: The Owl"
     Avernus family: "Hell's Hoods: Meet the Avernus Family"
     Belial: "Hell's Hoods: Sin's Queen"
     Bifrons: "Hell's Hoods: Two-Faced Politician"
     Mammon: "Hell's Hoods: The Fat Man"
     Moloch: "Hell's Hoods: The Bull"
     Pluton family: "Hell's Hoods: Casino Infernale"