Rhadamanthus the Ratkiller - Wrestling Angels with Owen Kerr (Dark Heresy)

What makes a character relatable? Does your character still fight when the odds are insurmountable? And is it enough to find joy in the struggle Hello friends welcome to characters without stories, a TTRPG podcast about the roads not yet traveled. I'm star. This episode I'm joined by Owen Kerr, a writer teacher Indie Game Designer, voice actor, professional game master Tik Tok

Oh, well, hey, thanks for coming to my TED talk. No enthusiast, LGBTQ+ father husband and ally. He was recently certified as a therapeutic gamemaster and will run our play in just about any TTRPG you'd like. Welcome to the show Owen. further questions.

Sounds like you have a lot of hats.

I guess I've got to buy a rack now. That's when you put it all in a pile like that. Thank you. Thank you. I'm really looking forward to this.

Awesome. So you are bringing a character for a game called Dark Heresy?

Correct.

I am not familiar with that game. Do you want to tell me a little bit about it?

Sure. Um, dark heresy is role playing game set in the universe of Warhammer 40k Warhammer 40,000. And it's the players take on the roles of very, very minor actors for the Inquisition. Your all acolytes read, expendable. So it's all it's very Shades of Grey, it's very grim, dark, your people send you out to fight worse things than you for the betterment of humankind. I like some of the 40k Fluff the non racist stuff specifically.

I am not familiar with the Warhammer lore, or really anything about it, just not something I've ever had a chance to explore.

Well, it makes sense when you figure it started out as a fantasy war game tabletop miniatures. And then somebody said, Hey, let's put orcs in space. And so they they built that castle in the cloud, and then had to build a huge foundation up underneath it, the lore for 40k. It dwarfs some like real world libraries. There's just way, way, way, way too much for a human mind to comprehend. So if you can imagine a shared universe built by dozens, if not hundreds of writers, creators, game designers all trying to be cool and edgy. Simultaneously.

It sounds like you like these kind of underdog stories. It sounds like the way you talk about dark heresy is that you're not super soldiers being sent out against monsters that are a little bit beyond your skill level.

That's true. That's true. I think, in my my backgrounds in theater, and perfect characters are horribly boring. A perfect character is completely unrelatable. To a human being. There's nothing, nothing relatable to them. I was talking about with my father one time, and he said I didn't like that book, is that when it says because the character was so fabulously rich, that literally nothing was beyond his scope, you know, so he's not a big fan of the Tony Stark's or the, or the Bruce Wayne's of the world. Because if you can just throw more money at the problem. And when you have a character that's good at what kind of what they do, but has some deep, deep seated character flaws. There's an inherent tragedy to that. And you can either you can either overcome your flaws, or you can lean into them. And either way is narratively interesting. The other half is like improv, and so always make the more interesting choice. And then what did the other writers say? Somebody asked him, How do you get the audience to like a character? He says, oh, it's really easy. I make them generally likable, little bit, and then I chase him up a tree and throw rocks at him.

I am with your dad on Bruce Wayne and Iron Man. I feel like if you have that much money, why don't you just throw it at the social problems that are causing supervillains?

Somebody pointed that out on one of the board's it's like, what was Dr. Freeze trying to do? He's trying to do cryonics to save his wife. Oh, what was this scarecrow trying to do? He was trying to work up new psychological treatments for his patients is again how many how many Batman villains would be would be solved by like, like a nameless grant. Oh, no, that's a good idea. What do you go over do that here's a billion dollars. Get back to me when you're done. You know, you know, too busy filling out paperwork to be a supervillain you know

Instead we get cool car.

Exactly, exactly.

So how are you bringing to the table today?

Ah, today we have a might be a little bit of a departure. He's one of my NPCs His name is Asher Novaak. And he is an ally, handler and throne agent, the hierarchy in the game as there's the big Inquisitor, who is there's dozens of them and they're stamping out heresy and, and demonic influences all around a truly massive scope. The conceit is humanity is basically taken over the Milky Way with all the governance issues that that entails. So they need they need lieutenants, and they're called throne agents and the throne agents are usually the ones that the PCs deal with giving assignments, giving rewards, meeting out punishments, etc. So Asher Novak is a throne agent.

So tell me a little bit about Asher, for example, how old is he?

Probably late 40s, early 50s. He is compact, below average height, he's wiry, and he's pleasant and urbane, and that he terribly rarely raises his voice, but the entire energy he gives off is of an efficient predator. He's always very polite, and that could be here's your new, assignment, acolytes, or, you know, calming a psychotic psyker, one of the rogue telepaths that's, you know, you're supposed to bring in or executing an enemy of the state. He's always just very even keel and can be quite charming. But again, he's like the epitome of yes, I've taught you everything you know, I have not, however, taught you everything. I know.

So you are a voice actor? Do you have a voice for this character?

Who thought about that one of his other things is he speaks multiple languages fluently, but he has no accent. Nothing that you could pin down. Oh, you're from this planet. You're from this region. And in my theatrical training, one of the first things we did was hammer out your regionalisms. Good evening acolytes. Please have a seat a briefing materials are in front of you. Please take a look at them. Their convenience and any questions that may arise, please make them known Simming he would be good reading bedtime stories. He would be good. You'd go and watch him at the you know, the kiddie time come and bring your kid to the library and have somebody read to them.

The words that you chose to demonstrate his voice are not particularly warm and fuzzy. There's something kind of standoffish and professional about it.

Yes, because he has a secret to tell. So my original concept was there's one of the Inquisitors and Inquisitors have Oh, so many enemies. So it makes sense to cultivate a professional sense of paranoia about everything. You never know who you can trust. Even your compatriots could be working against you if your agenda is even slightly different than theirs. So I came up with the character of Rhadamanthus Lehrer. And random at this layer is an Inquisitor, who is again just rabidly paranoid about any interaction. He only does dealings through throne agents, intermediaries, you get a voice recording that's obviously been processed through several different computer algorithms so that it's just a voice. It's it's not recognizable, and so I wanted Asher to be one of his trusted lieutenants. And then I thought, Hmm, what's the easiest way to hide something is in plain sight. So actually, our good friend Asher is Rhadamanthus Lehrer. He acts as Inquisitor to his other agents, but he is Asher Novaak because he likes to keep his fingers in a few special pies and player characters are going to be one of those groups. So he's an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a riddle. So his biggest secret is that he's not really who he is.

So you are talking about an inquisitor? And to me and Inquisitor, you know, I think Catholic Church. What is an inquisitor in this game in dark heresy?

The hierarchy in dark heresy is there is the Emperor, and the Emperor has been on his throne for about 30,000 years might even be dead, we don't know. And his direct servants are the Inquisition. The Inquisition is outside of every legal structure. They are the law they can command at a word they need your entire battle fleet around Cenobis 4 ASAP. They can casually order the extermination of a planet. They wheeled in calcula incalculable power, and the only checks and balances they have are each other. For better or for worse, some of them pursue darker stone As you know, using the enemy's methods against the enemy, there's a faction they are dedicated to adversity makes people stronger. So we should probably make life as hard on everybody as possible so that the cream rises to the top. So again, not good people at all very, very, very Shades of Grey trending, tending toward black in some cases. And that's another one. I'm a huge fan of the misguided, good. I don't like mustache twirling villains. I like somebody who's really trying to do a good thing. And using horribly, horribly questionable methods to do it, the Thanoses of the universe. Somebody said, Hey, why didn't Thanos just snap his fingers and multiply the resources in the universe by 10 times that would have done a to get really what happened? You know, we will build shrines to a mouth and nose you rule. But misguided, good is so much more interesting. Because you can relate, you know, you can go, I do not agree with your methodology at all. But I kind of get why you're doing it. You have a soul in there somewhere. And it's a little tarnished, but it's you trying,

I think that it complicates the relationship between the player characters and the BB, E, G. So instead of just taking a kill 'em all approach, you have to question that kind of decision. And then you get a nice moral quandary for your characters. I think moral quandaries are so much fun.

They are they are throwing a moral quandary where there's when it's at best, it's a bad option, or a worse option, and you get to decide which is which. Yeah, it makes her some some fascinating gameplay.

What does it mean to be an Inquisitor is there kind of a class system or

The character types are pretty, pretty cut and dried, you've got the melee fighter, the distance fighter, you've got the thief, the assassin type, you've got the thinker. They have a very technologically encapsulated society, we're only certain people understand technology. So you could be like a tech priest, you could be a professional data gatherer or a researcher and a sage. But any one of those, it's kind of like pre law, any one of those could become an Inquisitor, which is fun, because you can make up an Inquisitor, or a throne agent who used to be an assassin. And this one used to be a bureaucrat than this one. He used to be a priest, and this one used to be a cop. Very different feel Rhadamanthus aka Asher has got tons and tons and tons of skills, skills and talents. He's great with weapons, he's great with distance and blade, all the languages. He's got a really high charisma fellowship score, really high intelligence, not the strongest person in the world. But above average skills, toughness, agility, willpower, very, very intellectually curious, again, because the more he knows the better decisions he can make. He's got his fingers in so many pies as far as factions, there's, you know, a triple handful of factions in the game, everybody from the military to the Adeptus Mechanicus, underworld, nobility all different groups, indomitable will True Grit, Total Recall command, air of authority, ambidextrous so he's, I don't like the term Mary Sue, because I think it's demeaning and sexist. But then when you realize that Dante did self insert fiction, it's like, yeah, and then I went to hell with the coolest guy ever. Who said I was the coolest guy ever. And all my enemies were like, burning. Yeah, it was kind of cool. You know, it's like yeah it's self insert fiction.

Going into morals a little bit, the Inquisition, like I said, I associated with the Catholic Church. Is this a religious institution?

Yes, officially, again, misguided good. The Emperor when he took power, he's like, I'm not a god. I'm not anything special. I'm just trying to unify humanity in the face of these horrible, horrible, horrible adversaries, of which there are a double handful. And that lasted amount long enough for him to be ensconced in his cyber throne, before religion started springing up about him. So the ecclesiarchy the Church of the emperor is another major, major, major player. So the Inquisition is kind of stacked on top of that. Some of the Inquisitors are quite religious and fervent in their belief in the emperor as a god. Some of them are not honestly I think the original designers tapped into the whole rule of cool with the Inquisition. You know, the guys in the funny hat. So with flame throwers and massive amounts of power, and honestly, I don't lean into the the religious aspect of it again, if a player was like, Oh, I'm going to be really religious and really, okay, that's fine. And we could explore that. But, again, it's fascinating to me that the subject of the religion said, please don't do this. Okay. And of course, the first thing is very human. The first thing everybody did was, Oh, what did he say? He's not the Messiah, only the Messiah would say, he's not the Messiah, for being our future aliens and blasters and flame throwers, and demons, it's got a very human thread through the whole thing, you know, we're just perverse.

Is Asher religious?

Not at all. Not at all. I see Asher as one of these people who there's a certain personality that says, there's something that needs to happen. You see this in organizations all the time, somebody's like, hey, you know, we really need to work on the cleanup after our events. And they're looking around and they go, there's nobody really taking charge of this. They all volunteer, I'll be in charge of cleanup after events. And of course, they're very Oh, no, that's very nice of you. Right. And there's a kind of a superiority to it, because maybe there's a trust issue. They don't trust anybody else to do the thing as well as they could. But there's also some competence to it, because they'll do some things and see some positive results, which is positive feedback on the well, maybe I should be, maybe I should be in charge of this other stuff. Especially if you see somebody incompetent, trying and failing. And you're like, hey, let me just take that off your plate buddy Rhadamanthus slash Asher rose up in the ranks, just by being ruthlessly competent, you know, when things are really, really big and bad, and you can put yourself to bed at night going, this horrible thing could have happened, and I prevented it. And I can sleep well at night kind of a thing. But it is, again, he's kind of self appointed. But he's got a lot of data to back it up.

What are the ends that Rhadamanthus slash Asher are trying to accomplish?

Are you familiar with the concept of rat killing? This is one of my mom's favorite phrases. What do you do a mom says I'm doing some rat killing, rat killing includes dishes, laundry, feed the dog, car maintenance, anything, I finally figured out that rat killing meant something that you got to do today, that if you don't do it today, it'll be worse tomorrow. But even if you do it today, you're probably going to have to do it tomorrow to just maintenance. Again, if you let it get away from you, bad things are going to happen. So in a universe where literally, the tagline of 40k is in, in the far future, there is only war. So when you're dealing with millions or billions of planets, with millions of billion of inhabitants, each trying to stave off the Incursions from literally every direction, inside and out. Inquisition also has to do with things like rebellion, and heresy, et cetera, et cetera. So when literally, every hand is raised against you, the rat killing is just try to keep a lid on it one more day, try to keep it from just all going to hell, for one more day, one more minute, one more week, carve out a moment of grace in there. So there really is no, I mean, there's an ultimate end, you know, the extermination of all non human life in the galaxy. Unfortunately, very, very, very xenophobic. But even then there would still be problems with, you know, rebellious planets, and people going down dark paths, and using magic and summoning demons. And there's no end to that, the only thing you can do is get your broom and try to hold back the tide. Again, pretty grim dark, it's actually got kind of a Lovecraftian vibe to it. You know, you're fighting these massive and monstrous entities forever and ever and ever. And you can't hope to win, but you can put up a good fight

In the TTRPG space. You know, a couple of things come up for me, one of which is I think everybody wants to be the rebellion, and not the people in power. And I also think people who play TTRPG is often well, and just in stories in general, you want to have kind of that big showdown that solves the problem. You don't write stories about the people who are are sweeping the floors and you know what I mean? How does that work within the context of crafting a story?

Episodically a new situation arises that has to be dealt with, you know, the old starfish story, right? The kids out on the beach, and it keeps bending down and throwing something out to sea and bending down and throwing something out to sea. And the old lady says, What are you doing, and he says, I have the starfish on about washed up on the beach, and the sun's gonna get hot, and they'll die. And so I'm throwing them back into the water. And she's looking up and down 10 miles of beach, and she says, why you'd spend all day and you're not going to make a difference. And he picks up one. And he goes, I made a difference on this one, and throws it out to sea. So again, maybe it's a reskin of reality, sometimes we can't make a difference universally. But we can make a difference for the people around us, we can make a difference for a stranger whose day we brightens. My other background is education. In 12 years of teaching, I know that I helped a student, I know that I was there for them when they really needed it. I know that I gave a student a tool that they took and later went on and did something with, I just don't know which ones they are. So in the microcosm of I can't save the world. But I can save my corner of it. I can't save the world, I can save my family can't save the world, but it can save my best friend. And I can't kill all the zombies, but I can keep them away from the house for another day or week or month. And again, if you want to get real deep, we're all fighting against forces that we will not inevitably be able to succeed against. There's a writer by the name of Steven Jenkinson, who talks about he was in hospice care for decades. And he says, When death comes, and it will, you can fight it. And the Bible is full of stories of people wrestling angels. But when you wrestle an angel, you're not going to win, you can tire yourself out mightily, but you're not going to win. But sometimes the point is to wrestle with the angel, and maybe earn your own respect, and maybe earn the respect of the angel, even if the results are inevitable, just a matter of time. So maybe the point is the little victories, our lives have got little defeats and little victories, just as humans, and so we should celebrate every little victory, oh, my gosh, resting something against entropy, and making a bright spot are a beautiful thing, we should celebrate that it because, again, I'm a storyteller. And we're the only species we know this tell stories, and we tell stories, to understand ourselves, to understand our surroundings, to understand other people. And if the understanding is you don't have to win. But that doesn't mean that the fight isn't a good fight.

And that makes me think of political activism. Because often, you know, as a leftist, you're up against some very powerful forces, but that there is joy, even in the struggle. You know, I think when we're talking about telling stories about these kind of day to day battles, yeah, I think that there are probably people who are like, this is too small, or this is not doing enough in the world. And so it's really interesting approach to me to tell those kind of smaller stories. And it sounds kind of like a little bit of a survival context within the game.

Yes, part of the lore is, you're fighting against forces you can't imagine. And when you die, because you're going to die. There might be, you know, a nice line written about you, you know, served admirably and well, posthumous medals, etc, etc. But most of the time, no one's ever going to know your name. And most of the rank and file are going to be afraid of you because you have way way, way, way way too much power to wield and can use it in some have use it indiscriminately and how power doesn't corrupt, but it does attract the corruptible. So there's an aspect of the story is we're all stronger together than we are separately. There's an aspect of the good guys might not be that good. But that doesn't mean you don't get to be a good person. I hadn't thought of the political structure of that. But yeah, and it's interesting that you mention it. Yeah, nobody plays the Empire in Star Wars games. Because again, they're one of these, oh, we'll just throw, you know, 100,000 troops at it. They've got all the cards. And again, the rebel nature of it is, we know that that's us. We know that we've got forces arrayed against us the point 00000 1% believe literally, I mean, they're dragons. They're Cthulhu, you know, they're inevitable. They're out there, and they're changing things. And we don't have any massive impact by ourselves. And the group nature of most RPGs is you're good at this. You're good at that. I'm bad at this. But we're going to work really, really well together to achieve our goals. Gosh, I hadn't even thought of using it as like leftist propaganda. You know, it's all there. It's not that every government is bad. But they are the government. And if they ever get away from us, if they ever stop paying for the people, by the people and other people, then we're going to have problems. We already do. When we're sliding from oligarchy, to kleptocracy, and those people have their hands in each other's pockets so deep, they can't pick a third, if you're aware at all, you're aware of that dynamic. Let me throw something else out here. When I got certified as a therapeutic Game Master, Dr. Anthony Bean, Geek therapeutics, look him up. He's amazing. One of the things they pointed out is the part of your brain that feels emotion does not consider a source. So you read the book, and you nothing happens and you cry, and you watch the movie and the thing happens and you cry, and you step on your dog's foot and she goes, and you cry. The emotion part of your brain just knows you're sad thinking part doesn't consult. So one of the big deals about running role playing games as part of therapy is you can put characters in situations and of course, we pack bond with everything, you put their character in a situation where they can practice a skill set, or, you know, use a psychological tool that they've been given by their counselor and get practice at it. So if Ragnar the barbarian gets pissed that the arch mage threw a drink in his face, he's got to work on his, you know, anger management. Arch mage isn't a bad guy, you know, I don't know what's going on in his head. And everybody's the hero in their own story. You know, count five, you know, five years from now, it's not gonna matter. You know, your brain can't tell that that was a practice run. Your brain can't tell that. The emotions you're feeling and sublimating and dealing with in the moment, they can't tell. So you can practice it that best story on that I heard was the seventh graders. The skill set was self advocacy. And they go out and do all the things and they save the princess and they get the sword and they come back and the Barons like, Oh, I'm so terribly impressed with you. I'm so impressed. I'm going to give you a boon. What do you want? And they're like, Oh, no self advocacy, but they got practice, in a safe environment. So maybe some of this is practice. For we've got to think community. We've got to think outside our tribalisms. We've got to think outside our mundane existence, we got to realize that there are far more people in our boat than there are in the dragons boat, and that it's like Chesterton said, you know, fairy tales don't tell children that dragons exist that monsters exist. Children already know that. Fairy tales present the possibility of a dragon slayer. They say that dragons can be defeated if we're creating stories where people are facing literally insurmountable odds. But we can carve out one little space one little haven, safe places for other people to show up and make more safe spaces. Until the sea nibbling away at the shore forever and ever and ever until we have sand instead of Cliff. Maybe that's the story. Maybe that's the thing. Maybe we can defeat the dragon. Somebody pointed that out with the Hunger Games and the and the divergent and all that. They said we're feeding our children's stories about how small groups of dedicated people, young people can change the world in a positive way. More of that, please, let's get that in their heads and give them some heroes to look at. And at the same time. This psychology says the more you read the more you interact with characters that aren't like you. Your empathy levels get higher. This scenario in my head is Little Timmy is reading this LGBTQ and little Timmy is cis and straight and Mark in the story is falling in love with Larry and Mark's like. Oh, Mark looked over at Larry and his heart went pitter Pat. And Little Timmy goes oh, he's at the dance the other day I saw Marcia, my heart went pitter Pat. And he's like, oh, and then his hands got clammy and he felt like he was sweating and he felt stupid. Gosh, every word that came out of his mouth was just dumb. He's like, Oh my gosh, I felt that too. Love is love. Oh yeah, that's exactly what that feels like. Oh, but he's gay. Didn't matter. Oh, he's trans. Doesn't matter. Love is Love is Love is Love is love. And if you if you hit that concept about six or seven times, saying hey, we maybe Maybe people are people, people get mad and people get hurt. People fall in love and people have joy. And it all feels like that. Wow. Talk about subversive. Don't read that book, burn that book. Why? Because they ain't people who were they didn't matter. Anybody knows, okay, now you can go away and everything, people or people or people or people,

You mentioned that the Empire is xenophobic. And there's a lot of people who don't want to play in a game that has things like xenophobia in it. And so I'm curious why you made that choice why you chose to play a game where xenophobia is kind of central? And how do you play a game like that and make it safe to your players?

Lots of different ways. First of all, since the Inquisition is not monolithic, that you do have and it's funny because you can set the bigger bads that way, too. They've got the factions that are extremely this is the way it is and humanity predominant, blah, blah, blah. And then you have the radicals. And the radicals keep that a secret from the other inquisitors. And so the radicals who use all sorts of things, they don't have any problem dealing with the various alien species, they don't have any problem with pursuing quote unquote, questionable methods. So invariably, all the people in the direct chain of command of the party are radicals. They agree, yes, humanity needs to survive, but kind of like Catholicism. I don't know if you know, a lot of Catholics.

I went to Catholic school.

Oh, you're Catholic.

I'm not Catholic.

Every Catholic says this is like, Oh, I'm Catholic, but I don't believe everything they believe. Really? Yeah. Okay. I don't believe everything they believe there's a wide variety of things to choose from. I think women should be priests. Okay, cool. I think it's okay to be gay. Oh, okay. Cool. I think fill in the blank. So, again, when you come at it from that angle, when you start the party out in this, well, these are the rules. And then you're thrown agencies. We need you to do this thing, sir. We're going to be dealing with aliens. Yeah. Oh, okay. So officially, you know, everybody not us is bad. But, you know, some are not as not bad as others. And then, of course, in the supremely powerful organization, there are people that we are fighting against there, you know, I find it laughably simple to set it up where the power is being used against itself. Imagine if there was a cold war between Jeffrey Bezos and Elon Musk, officially they're, you know, hugging each other and giving each other backrubs and unofficially, they're undermining each other at every opportunity with plausible deniability. And then that gets interesting, because when you're a cog in the machine, but you are working against the real evils, when you bump into the Eldar, which are space elves basically bump into the Eldar, and they're fleeing horrible persecutions and death. You're like, well, you know, they're not bad folks. They're just surviving. And then the other Inquisitor gets up on his hind legs and says, Oh, you know, anybody who's not right handed and blue eyed, I wonder who that could be an analogue for. And then you're fighting against him while you're working with the elves. They hold our it starts to make sense, now that you make me look at it, the more there is the microcosm of, of humanity. We know that there are people out there who are racist, and sexist, and phobic, and phobic, and phobic, and phobic, and they're the bad guys, because they lack empathy. We know there are places out in the world where it's not safe to be a woman, not safe to be XYZ. But we can be that we can champion that we can stand up, we can be allies for that we can make the right choice, we can make the good choice, we can make the moral choice, we can make the empathetic choice, even to our own detriment. How many stories are there out there of somebody who stood up and said, No, do whatever you want to me, but this is wrong. And I'm gonna keep saying it until you stop me. So the inherent heroism of that to answer your question TLDR. I make it so that even if the official word coming down from on high is do horrible, heinous lack of empathy, things, you get to make choices, and I try to make it pretty obvious that you can make better choices and of course, players are going to do weird things anyway, players are going to try things anyway. One of my favorite stories is I have a homeschooling group, and the big boss fight was coming up. And the BBEG lurches to his feet and drags himself toward the party, and the one kid said, Oh, he's hurt. He says, I've got a healing potion. I've got a I've got a healing potion. Can Can I give him the healing potion and maybe he'll stop doing bad things? Roll. And of course, that's when he knocked it out of the park with a high charisma roll. And so he gave the ogre the healing potion and the ogre goes. Oh, Hey, full motion, like and stop being, you know, the bad guy. The denouement was eventually the ogre went to work for the sewer patrols down in the under city. Sure, worse things didn't come up, of course, my wife, junior high teacher, she's listening to these kids. And she's crying, you know, it's just like, Oh, no nonviolent solutions, and outside of the box thinking, oh, gosh, I'm just so proud. recession's later, the same kid threw a guy off with 12 story building. So you know, baby steps. It's great when when those moments of grace sneak up on you. And when they do something, when your players do something that is just, I had no idea you were going to do that. And that's so so there's so much wonder to that even on my side, the little choices that aren't really little choices, the little actions that are the same just ripples through the universe.

Is Asher, a good person?

That's a really good question is trying to be keys one of these greater good people. And, you know, if it's the choice between, I've got to bomb a planet back into prebiotic conditions or let a demonic incursion eat the souls of 10 billion people. He knows which way he's gonna go. You know, that's not really a question. I play him. I. Boy, there's a lot of me in there. I'm really big about second chances, and maybe even third chances. Because there have been times in my life personally, where I got a second chance that I probably didn't deserve, and was able to pick the higher road the second time through having seen the other route Asher, Rhadamanthus, he's had chances that he didn't deserve and is determined to make those worthwhile. And so if the party is doing anything questionable, he's going to rein them in real hard. So he's trying to be a good person, he's trying to fight the good fight. He's probably he's very intelligent. But he's also worried that he doesn't have enough information to make the best choices. But again, if it comes down to it, he is going to make a call, and he's going to live with the call based on the best information I have, at the time, this is the way we went. Now, again, going back to the demonic incursion, if he can send and if you teams and stomp the cultists flat and burn down the dark church, and et cetera, et cetera, and make it so never ever could happen. That would be optimal. If it gets away from he can't let it get that much worse. And again, he's got the power to do something about it, at least in his little corner of the galaxy.

So you said that there's some of you in this character, maybe a subconscious choice, not a conscious choice? Is that something that happens a lot when you're building characters where you're bringing something of yourself into it? Yeah,

Every character, every character, because, again, background in theater, one of the things that we said is, you can't lie onstage, if you're lying, everybody knows it, you've got to find the reality of the character within you. I

You know, sometimes that's all you need is a warm can tap into that, which again, is probably why the misguided good is so easy for me because it's just like, Okay, if I believed the way this character believed, if I believed that, then everything else follows if I'm Thanos, and I believe the ultimate greater good is to eliminate half of sentient life. If I believed that, then he's sympathetic. He's understandable. He sacrifices his daughter, I've got a kiddo, nothing. This is the I'm sorry, there is nothing that would make me sacrifice my kiddo for any reason. And the whole thing about the good guy will sacrifice you to save the world, the bad guy will let the world burn to save somebody he loves. So if you can get inside the head of the character and find the relatable part, the part that's true, the part that's human, the part that's honest. And even if you step back and say, I don't agree with what you're doing, as long as you can understand why they're doing it, the characteristics of myself that most often pop up and my characters are most of my life, I had secrets. I try not to have any anymore because my memory isn't that good. So it's interesting to me when a character has a secret. And so those are leavened in, sometimes good secrets, sometimes bad secrets, sometimes misguided secrets. So if a character has got a secret that they're really trying not to show anybody I can relate to that if I went back and took every character I've ever written for a story, or every character I've ever created for a game, that that numbers if they all showed up at once, I wouldn't I wouldn't be able to feed them. But if you looked for a through line in there, you could probably do a pretty good psychological composite sketch of me based on what they did and what They avoided doing even in like video games. I think anybody who says that there isn't a lot of them and any character that they make, I think they're lying to themselves. Back in the day when I was doing d&d, I would usually play fighters and mages and thieves and fighter mage, thieves and Mage thieves and whatnot, the smart guy with some physical talents. And somebody said, Hey, can you play something different? I said, Yeah, I'll do a half ogre Thrudd, the beast, half ogre, smart, but only smart for an ogre. So I played Thrudd as he had some bad things happened to him. He was a gladiator slave. And so he's like, not not big on that whole enslavement thing. But he approached everybody with compassion. You know, it was tough love, you know, eight intelligence nine wisdom, compassion, but Oh, sad pat, pat, pat, you know, booed. We don't know warm blanket and pick up stick in pocket, you know, take someplace safe. blanket and some food.

Exactly. I think that would be a through line. In every one of my characters is a sense of our shared self, a sense of our shared struggles.

Going into Asher's background, you mentioned that he's had a few second chances. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Again, the universe is very unforgiving. And you know, when the military units have political officers who can execute soldiers, for any or no reason, cowardice Blam, he's another one of these who had to have some help, who had to have a mentor who had to have somebody in his corner who was rooting for him. So I'm gonna hypothesize kind of an uncle Airo character who didn't let him go down a wrong path once, maybe he was a, a hiver. These world spanning cities, Coruscant. So if you can imagine being a gang member in a world hive, maybe somebody, you know, kid, you're smart, you don't have to do this, you can go a different direction, you're better than this. Or you could be with like, an effort might be a family thing. I'm big into family, so maybe a family thing, where he had just enough of a safety net that he wasn't allowed to hit rock bottom, that first time and was able to build a soul that could survive hitting rock bottom, emotionally and psychically. Again, built in some resilience, grit.

Building resilience, building this kind of emotional grit sounds like something that you have some interest in as a therapeutic GM,

Any tools that help, honestly, my kiddo in his early teens, when we were on a drive, and we do some good combos on our drives, and he says, Why does life suck? Okay, I've taught for years high school and junior high. I know every teenager says, Life sucks. And they're right. First time I'd ever been asked why? Why does life suck? And we kicked it around? And the answer we came up with is because everybody can see that if everybody put in just a smidge just an inch more effort to making this place better it would be if everybody did it. Literally everybody in advanced the species one inch toward peace, love and happiness. The world would be so much better, and we don't, we don't. And that's why life sucks. And because we can see, it's like the writer, you know, you write the story, and you're like, oh, this story sucks. And your reader goes, Oh, my gosh, this is amazing. It's like no, I didn't. The writer is the only one who could who has that platonic ideal in their head of how this could have been the artist with the sculpture or the paint or the theatrical production or whatever. We have that perfection in our head. That, of course is unachievable, and we didn't reach it, so it sucks. But the outsiders can't see that. Well, there are no outsiders in the world, we can all perceive. We can all see that. God life sucks. Well, if I worked a little harder, yeah, it's still gonna suck because nobody else is doing well. They're working a little harder. Yeah, but okay, let's, let's try. So any tools that we can give each other any things on like radical acceptance, nothing's gonna get better unless you admit that there's a problem. Tools of how to deal with a problem. There's only a couple of ways you can try to make it better. You can reframe it, which is really powerful. You can do nothing or you can make it worse. Those your option and I've been getting more and more and more lessons in reframing. So the possibilities are endless. If we can teach ourselves and each other that sometimes you know, Shakespeare had a few things to say about there's nothing Neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so if you can reframe it, if you can, if you can look at it in a different light, it doesn't make it any better, necessarily, but it might give you an avenue to approach it. That doesn't make it any worse.

Asher, you're good at a lot of things. What's something you had to work hard to be good at?

I'm going to treat your question as a hypothetical, as there's no reason for you to know that information. However, my superiors at one point commended me on my ability to interrogate to get vital information from a recalcitrant prisoner. That is a skill set that I am not particularly proud of, I understand the necessity of it. And I'm at a point where I can pass those duties on to others who might have a bit more of a taste for it. But it was difficult for me to put aside the parts of me that connect. In ancient times, there was a group known as the Spartans, and they carried sticks into battle, they would carve their name on both ends of the stick, and they would break the stick in half, and drop one into a bucket and keep the other on them for ease of identification of the fallen before a battle. The king said, brothers, fathers, sons, husbands, farmers, us all. That's all of us, and you are good, you are good, and kind, and generous, and loving. And I need you to leave that behind now. So when you break the twig, put all of your goodness, put every wonderful, beautiful and gentle thing into that twig and drop it in the bucket, and take with you only murder, fire and destruction so that we may defeat the enemy soundly. And when you return, the new join the two twigs together, you may pick that up again, and you may become whole and that made me grieve for the enemy that we have destroyed, and pour out the libations and pray to the gods for their Ascendance to a better place. But right now I need the murderers. I think of that before some interrogation sessions and it serves me

Owen, thank you so much for coming on the podcast for sharing your character Asher with me and my listeners.

Wonderful and I just need to have my psychiatrists listen to this repeatedly before our next session. That will be wonderful. And say saved me years of time because chapter two. This was a lot of fun. Thank you so very, very much.

Of course. What would you like to share with my audience?

Currently, you can find me on itch.io The company name is four horsemen publishing, I've got a couple of supplements for various systems up and running, they're more to follow. I'm also working I've got a complete system that's ready for art and layout before publication called Splintered Moon. Splintered, Moon is a post apocalyptic fantasy or in heaven all the gods fought against all the other gods and demons in could fill voids and elves. So elves and Orcs and dwarves and mutants and raiders and dust and clockpunk robots and basically all the post apocalyptic tropes and all the fantasy tropes though magic, lots of fun. I am available on start playing games as a professional game master. Please don't take advantage of this. But I do have a soft spot in my heart for actors, artists, writers, students. So if you don't think you have a budget to hire a professional game master, you're probably wrong. But, you know, throw a coin to your Witcher but you know, if you're broke, you know, I'll stand you to have a cup of meadt you can find me on Tik Tok. If I'm on Discord. I will talk at length about music and movies and politics and books and games and educational resources. I ran a successful game schooling program at one of my high schools. So if you're looking for resources on how to use gaming in an educational setting, and again, only you psychologists and counselors out there I am a therapeutic Game Master. I would love to work with you and your clients to get them one step up as well.

You can find me on Tik Tok at Star mama see that's S T A R Ma Ma Si. I'm also on threads, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube as characters without stories. I have now been podcasting for a whole year. It's been wonderful and I'm so thankful to you, my listeners and to all my guests for bringing their creativity to the show. I couldn't do it without you. I'm currently accepting submissions, particularly for non d&d characters. So if you'd like to share your character, you can go to the submission form at characters without stories.com Thanks for listening and may all your characters find their stories