The Nerd in the Herd…

Let’s be honest; being a nerd is no longer the stigma it used to be. Thanks in part to Steve Jobs, Big Bang Theory, Comic Cons and the like; Nerdom is enjoying a Renaissance of coolness that is unprecedented. It is easier than ever to find a sympathetic and obsessed ear. Hop on your computer and there are Meet-ups, and Nerd bars and Cos-play at the click of a button.

But, meanwhile, back in the real world, we still pull the hood up on our alter ego. We still trundle to work as Plain Janes and Joes because (honesty again) if we ever released our true inner geek with its lunatic fascination for zombies and the apocalypse, they would call out the National Guard. We can’t hide it completely, but we settle for the tolerated, even celebrated, ‘mostly weird’ and keep the balls-to-the-wall, totally out there psycho fan for our friends and fellow asylum inmates.

Despite our current trendiness, we still know we are outnumbered by the ‘Normals’; so when you happen to bump into a nerd in the herd, it is a moment to rejoice. It happened to me this weekend and it was glorious!

Set the scene…a Girl Scout outing to a dinosaur museum with giggling pre-adolescents and barely-know-each-other moms. Yikes! It is enough to send any true nerd diving for their inhaler or anti-anxiety meds…so you pop off an obscure movie quote under your breath and, Lo! The woman next to you giggles! She gets it! It is kismet!

I had talked to this mom briefly before. I was attracted to her batman earrings, but the true essence of our nerdiness we kept under wraps. I mean, how much geek can you reasonably slather on a person if you know you will have to deal with them on a regular basis? However, despite our reservations and looking up at a T-Rex named Stan, we finally let it fly.

She is a much bigger Dr. Who and Batman fan than I am, but that’s okay because I get it. I am a bigger table top role playing fan and am caught up in our A’Kyria world, but that’s okay because she gets it. We threw out movie quotes like confetti, wondered why Treasure Planet was so underrated, argued the virtues (or lack thereof) of Frozen, geeked out about the upcoming cons and waxed philosophical about books, movies and shows. I don’t know if we will become “besties” as my daughter calls it, but by the end of the day my little cup of nerdiness overfloweth. I had bumped into a kindred spirit, another nerd in the herd, and I was replete with all things geek. (Insert contented sigh here.)

We are Our Own Game Company…Playing for the fun of it!

A Monster is as a Monster does

If you ever decide to develop a role playing game, might I suggest conscripting a few kids to help you? I’m not talking about child labor, but a very ready source of out of the box imagination.

When we first started working on A’Kyria, my husband sat the kids down and asked them to create creatures for the game…and, man, did they deliver! We have a huge folder of the improbable, the weird, the impressive and the downright creepy that is still growing. There is nothing like a kid to bring the dreamy and the nightmarish to life.

Of course, it takes some tweaking by the grown-ups to make most of these creatures work. If my middle son had his way, every creature he has created would kill you just by looking in its general direction. Space Tentacles immediately come to mind. He came in with a picture and a name and an explanation that made us wonder how he ever gets to sleep at night! The creature essentially floats in low lying atmospheric asteroids and when it sees movement below, it reaches down, snags the unfortunate, springs it out of the atmosphere where it suffocates to death and then is slowly digested in its center mass. Yikes! How do you fight something like that?!

And there’s the rub of having children advisors. Reality, even game reality, has little to do with what they come up with, so you have to stretch your imagination to make it work. Take my daughter’s first creature installment: Pussy Willows. We were at a restaurant and she was doodling on her napkin. She shoved the napkin over and said, “Look! They’re pussy willows. They are tiny kitties that stick on you and you have to pet them and make them purr to get them off.” She, and we, had no idea what they did, but her picture and idea was something we kept coming back to. The Pussy Willows eventually developed into one of the more annoying nuisance creatures in A’Kyria.

There is also the challenge of bringing a child’s creature to life through pictures. What do you do when your son comes to you with a creature that has three legs, four arms, three mouths and numerous eyes, noses and ears? Well, you stretch yourself and try to draw something with three legs, four arms, three mouths, etc. and hope it looks like something that could actually wander the plains of A’Kyria. Enter the Kead; a sentient warrior race of creatures that would just as soon cleave you in half than speak with you. Excellent! Just because it seems implausible, doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

My sons cornered the market on the brute strength, instant death, monsters, but my daughter wins hands down for coming up with the creepiest. In fact, we are all a little scared of my daughter since she came up with The Black Widow. She shows us a picture of a little girl on one side of the page and a spider on the other. She then tells us that you will be walking along a forest, doo-de-doo, when you find a lost little girl who looks like she’s starving and alone. You bring her back to your camp and when night falls and everyone is asleep, she shifts into an enormous spider that poisons you, spins you in a web and carries you off to her lair to snack on at her leisure. Yeesh! Oh, and the little girl has solid black eyes and the shadow of a spider if she gets caught in the sunshine. We walked really carefully around our daughter after that one!

I imagine that, because of our little minions, A’Kyria has creatures you may have never encountered in a game before. And, yes, we really enjoy the creepy things our kids have come up with…and I imagine you will, too!

We are Our Own Game Company…Playing for the fun of it!