Disclaimer

or How Is This Still A Thing?

Author’s Clarification: After a conversation with a friend about this article, I knew if one person wasn’t clear on what I meant that meant that I wasn’t clear on what I meant by that so let me clarified here. There are levels to this and that’s why there’s some confusion so let me address those in a TL;DR version that gives you a synopsis.

Literary Authors, writers of fiction, so on and so forth. The passages that hardly take up a page that are disclaimers. I get why you’re doing it, I usually just skip them because I won’t really mind that page. Skip that page and there’s two to four hundred pages more that I’m here for. You wrote it, I bought it, I’m heading in. No issues whatsoever. Readers, calm the fuck down

Literary Authors, writers of fiction, so on and so forth that write entire prologues that consist of a lecture about the author, (Lovecraft publishers, looking at you) I’m gonna skip those 20 pages because I don’t care. Keep it to a page because you’re wasting your time and I’m not going to allow you to waste mine. Readers, if a one-page blurb that serves as a disclaimer isn’t okay, why is this? Where did you draw your line?

Tabletop Gaming has it much worse and it’s the fault of a few people who managed to convince gullible social groups that don’t actually play and let me tell you, there are entire games that serve as lectures and tell you basically, you should feel bad for enjoying that world. Writers in Games, make a fuckin’ game. I’m not buying your thinly-veiled-fetish-laden TED Talk. Readers/players/game masters, go back through your libraries. Some of these have made it into our libraries.

That’s really it. If you’re putting a small blurb that tells people, “Hey, there’s some eye stuff in here.” I’m okay with that and that’s your right. Readers…have a little damn perspective every once in awhile.

Finally, Thanks to H.R. Conover for helping me out with the clarification on the article and being a real one. Check out homey’s work The Doppler House and Tiny Tales as well as his story City of Faces which is a successor/sequel to The Doppler House.

I’ve seen a lot of consternation over this small blurb that didn’t even seem to take up a full page…

I’ve also written articles like Greater Expectations where I detail the state of the fatigue we’ve all had with these elaborate trigger warnings, disclaimers, etc.

This one paragraph? I don’t have an issue with it.

When it comes to literary works of fiction, I skip this and move on into the story. Why? Because I’m not listening. I’m an adult. I know what I came for and, if your book does suck, I can put it away or toss it into a little free library box (remember, I sold the movie Sinners at a $17 loss without hesitation in this economy, baby. Money can be made back, my time can not. No guilt here.) because I don’t believe in burning or throwing books away or even donate it to one of our public libraries. When left to this little bit of text, it’s a page flip. It’s me going “Yeah, whatever, pal, make with the cyborgs, the superheroes, the mad Herbert West-esque mad scientists, the horror, the sci-fi and the smut if I so desire.”

I don’t but I like to keep options open. Besides, if I want smut, I can imagine quite a bit better.

Anywhoozles, guess what? Another book I recommend by H.R. Conover called City of Faces features a similar disclaimer, seen here.

Again, something I can flip past.

I skip all the marquee prologues bloviating ad nauseum over Lovecraft’s racism. As stated before, we get it, he didn’t think in terms of Current Year…because he isn’t alive in Current Year. Make with the stories. That’s why I’m here.

This is really the point, why are you here? For literary works, we’ve gone on record stating we’re horror, with no apologies and, as such, we explore some themes that may make people uncomfortable. We’re dealing with a dark as shit world beneath the one you and I live in.

Now, behind the scenes we know if we get too esoteric, too gory, too much of one thing or another, we will lose people and so we restrain a bit and when we don’t, we make sure that we embed it indelibly into the story so that it has proper context.

If Neferet-hotep does something blasphemous, then you and I; rational, logical, sane, mature adults with brain cells that compete for the gold every day in many respects understand that it wasn’t Rev. Dr. Raven Wulfgar engaging in violating someone’s taboos, that was the character and, the most important part, the one key thing we share and agree upon, it’s fiction. It’s not real. It’s spurious. Mickey Mouse. And it’s worth *deep breath*…fuck all.

The only genuine thing about those worlds is that I do some research into history in order to give the stories some authenticity so that you don’t have to suspend a fuckton of disbelief. If you’re going to spend time reading the weird shit RuneKnight3 and I write, I don’t want you wasting your time with it. I personally, hope you enjoy it and enjoy it enough that you want to join in because, hey! I’d love to literally just add writers to the AGA Substack and that way I don’t have to do so much work keeping up our active Table of Contents for The Nocturneverse.

That’s as much shameless plugging as I’m gonna do other than go buy some fuckin’ dice and use the code BLACKWINGS to get 10% off your entire order, just click on the pic below and you can get your own set of Frosted Crypt Dice (pictured. mine. you can’t have them.) for yourself or your favorite GM. If not those, then there are plenty of others that are damn cool, go now.

Okay, there are all the shameless plugs but let me tell you a story from the beforetimes. This was back in the late 90s so about 98/99. I was dating a girl that worked at a bar connected to a convenience store. The same lady owned both. That’s an important detail that will come up later.

At the time, I wrote a lot of things in notebooks. I’ve also had a tendency to drop them and the most anyone ever did was look for a name and then return it to me. No issues. I dropped a notebook full of my poetry and lyrics into this lady’s parking lot. Fell outta my car that night. My 20s were a mess of me trying to get my act together.

She decided to ream me over the contents of my notebook.

I didn’t work for her and told her that I didn’t owe her an explanation. She was no cop. She was entitled to nothing at all.

Things escalated. The graphic designs for menus for the bar that I was doing for free for her, I was quick to remind her that one more quip outta her and that could stop.

She proceeded to make wild and baseless accusations.

I told her she wasn’t my parent, get fucked, free work stops.

Whenever she called, I started ending the call by simply quoting prices. Never bite the hand that feeds your dumb ass.

To cut a long story short, she threw a ton of kerosene on the fire of the local rumor mill and eventually fired my girlfriend over something someone else claimed I said that I never did. This is only one of the many experiences I had coming up in that time.

Ever since that incident, every first page of every notebook has at least one short blurb that goes no further than one page, very clearly and legibly (as I can) write what the notebook is, what it’s purpose is and why it exists because if you open this one, without that, you’ll see journal entries that aren’t dated and you’re thrust into that. That was a goof on my part because I kept the dates in my head and in my notes but that’s gone on to be corrected but today, there are more people just like my former girlfriend’s boss in the world today. Granted, they claim to be from the other “side” but they’ve adopted all the same tactics and turned them way up, using the internet to make an attempt at solidifying their fortified positions only to find themselves trapped and under siege by exiles. The little blurbs here in fiction or even non-fiction, I don’t care, skip, move on. I’m here for the story. You let a blurb stop you rather than moving the hell on. Not my problem there, you do you, boo boo.

The reason I shrug this shit off? Well, because tabletop games have it much worse. Let me cite an example of a game used here…Thousand Year-Old Vampire.

I love this game. I own this game. I recommend this game. This is one of my favorite games to play and guess what? If this claim is true, then I’m gonna do something that makes me happy. Makes sense, right?

This comes from the front page of his website. The Botched Roll is that my ability to give a fuck is zero and rolling under it is impossible.

Right here, Hutchings gives another account of the situation altogether. I’m assuming this came after he printed this to his website. BTW, still nearly a million community copies available.

I’m also thinking I might purchase So You’ve Met A Thousand Year-Old Vampire because how cool would that shit be to include in The Nocturneverse? A mortal giving an account of meeting a Methuselah Vampire and getting the lowdown and funky. Christian Slater’s character didn’t even get that opportunity in the movie Interview With The Vampire.

Thousand Year-Old Vampire is a solo game. That means you play on your own. Let me break down how this goes. First, go grab a copy of the PDF so you can follow along because you might just like this game as much as I do. If you do, buy a copy of the physical book, it’s gorgeous and I do think it’s really high-quality. Understand I’m talking about the work here. It’s good. Even if Hutchings …just needs to work on his website and make it about the game. Just a crazy thought, here.

So you create a character and that, in itself is where the backstory comes in. You’re playing the character by yourself, do it however you like! Here’s the thing, play it Rules As Written because the rules are so few and the creative freedom so great that it doesn’t hurt to play TYOV RAW. Seriously, create your character. Give the character a name, give them some starting resources, give them a bit of a background, give them marks of their vampirism, get creative and get a little jiggy with it, I sure as shit did.

Now, once you have all that done, take a six-sided die and a ten-sided die. Start at prompt 1. Write out what your character does. You can make a few bullet points or you can write out detailed journal entries. That part is entirely up to you. How mysterious or not do you want your vampire to be? Once you’re done, roll both the d6 and the d10 (That’s the 10 and 6 sided dice) and then subtract the d6 result from the d10 result. What did you get? If you got a negative integer (-3 for example) then do the next prompt on that page because you can’t move back from the first prompt. If you get a postive integer say, 7 for example, move to prompt 8 and repeat this process.

It’s a game that can be played anywhere at any time and you can always pause, pick up where you left off and there you are, pages full of your imaginary life as a vampire. Felt good, didn’t it? Wanna do it again? Roll…

Now, here’s the thing. This solo game, which we have clearly established, works on a pen, a notebook, dice, TYOV in whatever form you have and whatever you have on hand to do a little historical research to give your vampire that bit of flair. Don’t want to set it in the real world? Set that fuckin’ thing in Ravenloft, for all I care! Have some damn fun! Now, in all of this, as you look through these paragraphs and you see how simple this game is for yourself, ask yourself what kind of danger you’re in while you’re sitting at a table doing that?

None. I mean maybe the junk food you’re eating, and hey, I love Loaded Taco Doritos and Sprite as much as the next guy but let’s not eat that all the damn time. Have some pita chips, hummus and tea for a change or something? Get some more sessions in.

Well, there this game includes…this fuckin’ thing!

I won’t lie, I have absolutely gone directly to the center of this flower. I took the training wheels off. Writing TYOV: The Chronicle of Thrasamund’s most recent post was like belly-crawling over concertina wire with only alcohol and salt on the other end for comfort and that ain’t saying much. It hurt to have to do what I did in that entry but it was the prompt that pulled that out. Now, that being said, let’s face facts, we’re all like Raistlin Majere when we see any mortal connecting themselves to a vampire or an Immortal from the Highlander series. They Will Not Ever Last.

That’s the nature of immortal/mortal pairings, eventually there will come a time where the immortal will have to let go of the ones they love. If this character does in fact live to today’s time, guess what? No one they ever knew will be left alive. Even their own progeny may be killed. That’s a grim reality of Vampires, Mages, Werewolves, Prometheans, Changelings, Hunters, etc.

I had to make peace with that decision.

Then I created a character so evil, she didn’t care about what she leaves behind, she moves forward whether anyone gives her permission or not and, if you’re not in, you’re in the way and you won’t live to regret that mistake…if you can even remember making it before being devoured.

Yeah, I’ve been in the red and I think what emerged from it was made better for it. Yeah, what’s in those stories from the perspective of the monster character is disturbing both in what they say and what they don’t say. Thankfully, this appendix is at the back of the book so if you never want to worry about it, you don’t have to. Seemed ridiculous at first, safety tools for a solo RPG until I looked at it. I’m still not gonna use it. The most painful and awful things from which I go back and draw for parallels into the character’s life at appropriate times makes sense to me and I get it all out onto the paper and I’m all gravy but the chicken, know what I mean, Vern?

Here’s the thing, this inclusion isn’t the most egregious. Kids on Bikes has so much worse and I detailed that in Greater Expectations (linked above) so no need to beat a dead horse into Jell-O or Glue at this point.

Small literary blurbs like this don’t bother me because I’ve seen how much worse it gets.

Take this example from Bandit Camp Games’ RPG Wicked Ones. This one is what I once called Anti-D&D and I bought it as part of a Humble Bundle on concept alone. Let’s get into that, shall we?

Okay so let’s crack ‘er open and see what she’s got under the hood.

Okay good, we got a quote from a fictional demon that sets the tone. Digging it like a ditch to bury some adventurers in, let’s go…

Like most voters out there? Okay, I’m down. Unlike those peeps, I’m just killing off imaginary characters. Go on…

I already said yes, but you keep selling me on it. Okay, that’s great. It’s like McDonald’s. I’m fuckin’ lovin’ it.

Right! I’M A HIGH-OCTANE HURRICANE, LET’S GET IT ONNNNN! (I’d like to thank Airbourne for their song Back In The Game. Please don’t sue, that was homage.)

No, you don’t understand. I’m not in danger, I AM The Danger. I Am The One Who Traps!

…What…in…The…Absolute…Fresh Turkey FUCK Are You Talking About?! After all that you’re telling me that you’re going to negate all of what you said. You amped ME and my table up to do some shit like this?

Wicked Ones is now a Mine Game. That means I mine it for ideas for other games. Thankful every day I didn’t buy all the printed material and didn’t pay full price for this. This is an example of a team of people talking out of both sides of their mouths. This is horror with apologies and groveling before us “Fohgive us our sins, we chose horror but we meant you no haaaahm!”

My singular response to this is “Get Fucked.”

You don’t belong in this genre because you’re not built for it. If you have to go this far to deflate your audience then you don’t deserve to be in the genre and you need to go back to Tumblr, write your weird-ass fanfiction and leave the rest of us the hell alone.

Now in terms of RPG books, the prime suspect in all of this is Shanna Germaine who works for Monte Cook Games and has insisted this shit infests every game that comes from their studios because the same BDSM rules for consent (which make sense in that context) because people can get physically hurt and can experience actual pain do not make sense when there are people doing nothing more unhealthy than sitting around a table once a week or so playing a game where the most violent actions happen in the brain and not in real life. The people these stupid “consent and safety tools” are written for are the ones who can’t separate fantasy from reality.

This brings the conversation full-circle, these disclaimers are there in books because there are people oversensitive and prone to violence.

Allow me to explain.

If someone writes something I find objectionable, I simply walk away. I don’t care if some radical feminist is reading prison rape fantasies. I really don’t care. I leave that person to read whatever weird shit they want to in peace.

But that same person insistent on the disclaimers, the “safety tools” etc. is more comfortable with violence than you and I are.

See if we don’t like what someone reads, we can leave them in peace and write our own shit. Let the market decide, right? Note, I didn’t say let the algorithm decide, that’s another topic for another time. In any case, we leave them in peace like any sane, rational, mature adult. We remind them that they’re free to read whatever they like and discuss it with friends, we just prefer they don’t do it in a public forum around children and families. That’s all. We ask.

If we don’t like the disclaimer or we object to it, we’re punished for it. That means everything from being called “oversensitive” “chuds” “Nazi” “Devil-Worshipper” and the list goes on and on and it’s designed to do one thing: Dehumanize you and make you a target. This way, if you’re shot, well you shouldn’t have been speaking up about it.

See what I’m saying. When it comes to RPG books, we have it much much worse. You’ve never seen infantilism like this.

Let me ask you a question for my Lovecraft fans who possess any hard copy version of his work. Go to that book right now and open it. Find that disclaimer in the prologue. Why did you make an exception for that book when modern writers are shoehorning in so much more to warn you of what you already know.

I wish to fuck that RPGs had kept it to a few lines that could be easily overlooked. In fact, I would have cut many deals at many tables to reach a compromise but we know, this is forced acquiescence and even that doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be safe. You’ll just maybe live a little longer.

So maybe you won’t pick up that indie author’s book because of that. Okay. Not up to me. Not my wallet. I get it.

I’m just saying take a good look in the mirror for a moment, talk to the author and ask about it. We’ve had disclaimers going back as far as I can remember and I’m nearly fifty (Gen-X and proud…ask me about the fucks I have to give) and we kinda looked at some things that seemed obvious to us but wasn’t so obvious to others.

Independent Authors writing fiction, by and large, don’t want to deal with extremist jagoffs and they’re everywhere these days. A few lines to fuck off those crowds is the ounce of prevention to keep them writing without a fuckton of friction.

Me? Shit, everything on Against All Odds is free and it’s all been downloaded and backed up. Take us off here, I have a backup. Take that one down, I have another. I will live to frustrate these people and still make excellent stories for all of you who enjoy them because fuck those prudes, they’re not my parents, they’re not cops, we’re not fucking and I don’t owe them any fuckin’ money so they can kiss my entire ass, to be honest.

Here’s the thing, I’m not saying you have to be in favor of these things but you need to understand where we are, not where we want to be. We are dealing with people firmly capable and comfortable with violence used to punish you for violating their decree. I’ve seen this behavior from both sides on two separate periods in my lifetime. Both sides have called for bans. Both sides have called for the restriction of the First Amendment by hook or by crook and it’s usually the latter over the former.

We all want a world where we don’t have to put that in there, goodness knows I do those authors might need our help. First one through the wall always gets bloody and they might need us to get a little bloody so that they can function as they should, not as they currently do.

If the author just opted to put that in the book, to save time and litigation, okay. I mean do any of us really need to be told that the characters are fictional and any similarity to any persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental? Someone does. Not us but it’s still gonna be there like the constant warnings from The FBI (heh, fuck off) that I shouldn’t pirate movies or TV shows…that I own.

Okay, that makes total sense to keep around…right?

Thing is, until we get more people with our sense of logic, reason and the capability, drive and desire to want to be left alone where it makes the most sense and doing the same for others, this is something we’ll have to put up with until we can change the culture.

That starts with us and what we can do.

Weigh your decisions carefully.