Appendix N: of sabers, darts, and drinking blood.
This post is part of a series of biographical reflections on the media that I love and have loved.
I take a drag and breathe out the grey smoke. The last drag of a cheap dart and the embers are so close to the butt that I feel the heat in the smoke. I press it out into the ashtray on my desk.
MSN Games Zone lobby is slow. Most players are in the states, so games this late in Australia are slow to fill. The incense I am burning masks the smell of my cigarettes, at least I think it does. It is past midnight and I have school in the morning, but I figure just one more game and then I'll go to bed. While I wait, I read about vampires. I read about the clans and the ancient jihad that takes place every night.
The lobby fills. The track changes. Dangerous MCs come out the speakers as I draw my saber. Biggie and Busta and a lot of lag are my companions through the battle.
C'mon, yo, throw your hands, c'mon, bitch grab your tits, c'mon
Let me know you in the spot, bump your fists, c'mon
Thugs tote yo' shit
We 'bout to get mo' rich, c'mon
Let's blow the club, c'mon
Fuck the place up, c'mon
a slice.
I have always known what dungeons and dragons is. My older brother played, and the books were in my house. But I didn't play it until I was in my 30s. Vampire: The Masquerade was the first ttrpg I played, bought the book and obsessed over it.
At 17, I had just returned to a mainstream school are spending 18 months at a school in the city for kids that don't want to go to school or adults who decided they wanted to go back. A re-entry school, they called it. All I really learned there was how to get around the city and how to smoke cigarettes. Oh, and also learned that my local school was filled with people who wanted to put it over you, and this place wasn't. At all.
It's the first day back at my local school and at recess I go to the oval to have a smoke with the smokers' crew and... they aren't there. No big crew on the oval blatantly smoking. I can remember distinctly realising that I didn't really know what to do now. That if there's no one on the oval, then I won't find my people. I still knew students there, but they weren't the sort of people I'd been hanging out with for the last few years. I walked about aimlessly for a bit. A few of the younger siblings of people I knew chatted with me and wanted me to hang out with them. But it's high school, and hanging with younger kids is a social misstep.
The decision I made next was probably one of the most influential choices I've made in my life.
I went to the Year 12 study room.
In the Year 12 study room were seniors who wanted to do well in their studies. They were also people who had no hangups about their interests. They talked about books and video games and movies and TV shows. Video games until about this time, in my social awareness, were distinctly for nerds. And if you played games, especially games on a PC, you were a nerd. And that was not something I wanted anyone to know about. Playing games on PC was something I did every day since I was about 8, but at high school, I'd kept that shit a secret.
Now there were these guys and girls (?!?), talking about gaming. And not just GTA 3 and Tony Hawks, which were suitably cool games to talk about. They were talking about Unreal and Doom and StarCraft and Diablo and... Jedi Knight.
They were also notably not talking about hip-hop, drugs, alcohol, graffiti, or fighting.
All the things that were almost in constant conversational rotation with my friends. This is where the changes come. This is where the melting pot of my imagination really churned. It's where street life, role-playing games, and creativity all came together.
sabers.
PC PowerPlay magazine (which sadly had its final issue recently) was a foundational element of gaming culture in Australia. My friend James even had a yearly subscription when we were in school. In primary school, we'd buy them when we could or when the games on the demo CD were worth it. I can remember buying issue 018 from the news agency on Semaphore Road in 1997. Staring at the Stormtrooper on the front cover. Up to this point, Star Wars had been strictly the original movies and the expanded universe books (Young Jedi Knights, mwah!). Now there was going to be a new 3D game.
The demo for Jedi Knight came with issue 19. Which must have come out late in 1997, because I know I completed that one level at least 10 times. It took me weeks to figure out how to actually solve the puzzle and complete it. But once I had, I played through it again and again and again. When I finally got to that level, level 9, in the full game, I whipped through it in minutes.
I went into high school in 1998, and video games became my little secret in a misguided attempt to be cool. Through all my years of 'being cool', this game stayed with me. So, in 2003, as I returned to the local school, Jedi Knight was played at night while I smoked and bumped hip hop.
the ugliest, money-hungriest, brooklyn loch ness.
My older brothers introduced me to the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, and Ice T. My first new friend at high school introduced me to Cypress Hill and Ice Cube. Ready to Die, though, was the first hip-hop album I bought for myself. I don't think anyone had told me too. I just thought the cover was cool and the art on the CD itself was clearly a graffer's doing.
I loved that album. I still do. And I bought every Notorious BIG thing I could after that.
It pains me to say, but the Diddy documentary has tainted my enjoyment of Biggie's music. There's a lot that I could say here, but I won't. It's just changed it all. Especially the album I'm writing about here.
I'm not sure how I got onto Born Again. In Australia, all music releases were delayed. We really got stuff much later than everyone else. Napster and Limewire made it easier to pirate stuff, if you knew how, but official releases were always months (sometimes years) after the fact. So, it was 2003 before I deep dived on this album. It had a mix of hip hop and R&B, and the features introduced me to rappers I hadn't heard of (that Sadat X track led me down a path of underground stuff I still listen to today).
This album became the soundtrack to my final year of school. Listened to in my room while gaming and reading, while cruising in friends' cars, and on my headphones on the train. Dead Wrong and Dangerous MCs being two that are still in regular rotation.
followers of set.
It came into the Year 12 room in whispers. Stories of club brawls, drug fuelled parties, and deception in the streets. Oh, and clans of vampires. You see, one of my friends' older brothers had been put up a year during high school and ended up at university as a 16-year-old. This removed a lot of options available for extracurricular activities. He found himself in the Adelaide University Vampire LARP group.
And he came home with stories. So many stories. Those stories were passed on to friends and little brothers and made their way to us.
It was winter, so halfway through the year, when we converged on the shed out the back of their place and created characters. I was fucking hooked. The artwork in that book, the green cover with the red rose, had the most amazing black and white line art. It is perfectly 2000s-cheese-edge-goth. I lapped it up. We all made weirdos to send out into the night. Sakhr the Follower of Set. He had a snake tattoo from his chin, over his shoulder, wrapped around his arm, with the head on the back of his hand. Bad. Man.
I still have the rulebook I bought that year. There used to be a game shop in the train station in Adelaide (it's now a superb secondhand bookshop) and I caught the train up there just for the book. My first TTRPG purchase.
We went deep into that game. Our stories were set in the local area, and it would lead us to exploring places in real life. Riding our bikes around after school to scope out the locations for the next session, finding floor plans of houses and buildings, and using street directories as overland maps. We lived in the world that we played in and that close connection made the whole thing feel important.
I guess it was.
Because I am writing about it 23 years later.