The Chain Roach

Tell your comforting tales of mad wizards if you like. Human perversity, after all, is small, but unnatural selection is the chain roaches' mother and perhaps yours too.

The small form is a blattid centipede of seven to twelve roaches, joined ass-to-mouth in descending order of size, moving and digesting as one.  The chitin is as strong as human skin but give it four points of defense for small size and skittery inclinations, and it moves half as fast as you can trot. It does not have hit points, rather individual roaches, d6+6 of them. When you hit, one roach is squashed, plus one for every 4 damage you do, and roll d8-1 for how close to the head you hit, maximum = number of remaining roaches; all but that number of roaches scatter from the chain.

The main weapon of a small chain roach is disgust. On a successful hit ignoring armor it climbs on you. The next round and subsequent it has a 10% chance each of finding the mouth, nose, ear or nether orifices. Throwing off a roach chain requires a successful bare-hand hit, -2 if it is on your back parts. Invasion by roaches is completely attention-consuming and requires a saving throw to expel the roach chain. Each round you have a 5% chance of contracting disease from each roach chain on you and 15% from each roach chain in you.

On occasion multiple chain roaches will knit together to create a wide scarf roach of 5d6+6 individuals. Its statistics are similar, but more roaches. The front roaches will often acquire a couple of stabbing or slicing implements: broken knife blades, iron spikes, knitting needles, and soon. Thus, when crawling on you a scarf roach does not seek to invade, but instead stabs for d3 damage each time. The chance of infection per round is 10% if a scarf roach is just crawling on you and 20% if it has opened some wounds.

If ten or more roaches are scuttling around the area - either naturally or because some chain roaches have taken damage - any chain or scarf roach in the area will regenerate 1 roach per round from this pool.

Fungi and Swine: William Hope Hodgson's Disgust Morality

William Hope Hodgson was an early 20th century imaginative writer whose fictions often show up on old-school gamers' "Appendix N" lists of inspirational material (here, here and here for example). I've been trying to come to grips with Hodgson's appeal and limitations ever since I discovered his works, most of which are in the public domain and available on Project Gutenberg.

Two themes in Hodgson's work deserve attention, both using physical contagion to achieve horror. One is found in his sea-stories, the best of which is the oft-cited "The Voice in the Night," and the longest of which is "The Boats of the Glen Carrig." In these and others, the sea and its shores, islands, sargassoes and ships adrift teems with biological menace. Whether fungoid, lignic, or cephalopod, there horrors all have a certain flabby and spongy quality. They promise death or worse by assimilating, by being assimilated, by infecting, by crawling on the flesh in the night and leaving slime and sucker marks. I consider "The Voice in the Night" the best of these tales because of its excellent framing, its focus on a single monstrosity, and most of all, the way in which the physical threat merges with a moral struggle.

This element leads us to the next theme - the strange moral cosmos of The House on the Borderland, The Night Land, and the Carnacki the Ghost Hunter stories, of which the most revelatory is "The Hog."  In this shared universe, humanity is menaced by dark forces of evil which lie outside a protective barrier but sometimes break through. The postscript of "The Hog" explains this in terms of a "defense" around the Earth that is energized by the Sun's rays and weakest at night. In the far future world of the Night Land, set after the sun has gone out, the barrier is rather smaller - a circle of white "Earth Current" that protects the great pyramid of the last known city on earth.

The evil forces are tangibly corrupting, with a very physical sense of contagion. Their most usual visual and auditory signature is porcine, in "The Hog" of course, but also in the house-besieging pig-men of Borderland, the strange swine-phantom of the later visions, and in certain of the ab-humans in the Night Land. The image of the abyss or pit also stands for this evil, and its colors are sickly greens and yellows. It is difficult to read Tolkien's description of Minas Morgul and Mordor without seeing an echo of Hodgson's infernal visions published thirty years earlier.

What fights against this evil? The most ordinary struggle involves the individual with courage to resist the darkness, physically and mentally. When people find each other in these tales they almost invariably band together, the stronger helping the weaker. Technology sometimes helps, whether the electric apparatus of Carnacki or the far-future devices in The Night Land. But less often, when it is most needed, there is a mysterious supernatural intervention that almost certainly symbolizes the theological grace of God - as when, at the climax of "The Hog" when the foul entity is about to break through, a green-banded blue barrier manifests itself to dispel the evil.

Interestingly, there is no human moral dimension to this evil. People do not come to it by their deeds, at least not against each other; but they can be infected or possessed by mere contact with it. There is no hint of the strong theme, running through Tolkien, that lust for riches and power is the root of evil, nor even the glimpse of a possibility that evil might tempt people to use expedient but morally corrupt means to fight it. Hodgson's evil is one of contagion, one of disease, one of disgust - man against the Other, having nothing to do with man against man.

This, I believe, explains why Hodgson's vision is only partly compelling in the modern day. In our everyday experience, what stands in for the Other, the ab-human? We cannot really hate nature that way any more, nor can we hate people of other races, cultures, and social strata just for what they are with a clean conscience. After the hundred horrible years that began with World War I - in which Hodgson lost his life, and Tolkien survived - most of us now understand that the Enemy is not the inhuman, but the all-too-human, our normal lusts to level, exalt, defend or attack magnified into systems of slavery and genocide. Disgust is no longer enough; anger at injustice must fuel our outrage for it to be justifiable.

I also think Hodgson put a wrong foot down in choosing the pig as his symbol of Otherly evil. This became evident this weekend as I performed a dramatic reading of "The Hog" to my wife. I am afraid to say that we couldn't help laughing at passages like this:

A sort of swinish clamouring melody that grunts and roars and shrieks in chunks of grunting sounds, all tied together with squealings and shot through with pig howls. I've sometimes thought there was a definite beat in it; for every now and again there comes a gargantuan GRUNT, breaking through the million pig-voiced roaring - a stupendous GRUNT that comes in with a beat. [...]

'And as I gazed I saw it grow bigger. A seemingly motionless, pallid swine-face rising upward out of the depth. And suddenly I realised that I was actually looking at the Hog.'

Or in Hodgson's Mythos-tome equivalent, the "Sigsand Manuscript," where the following passage occurs:

If in sleep or in ye hour of danger ye hear the voice of ye Hogge, cease ye to meddle.

I guess in an era when very few people have heard the cries of slaughtered pigs in the city or countryside, the pig has become a figure of fun, a cozy barnyard animal, bdee-bdee-bdee-that's-all-folks. As Lovecraft, a big fan of Hodgson, realized to good effect - it's the invertebrate Horrors from Outside that have real staying power, the tentacled and flabby and chitinous things. If Hodgson had used his marine horrors for his metaphysical threats we would indeed have something very close to Lovecraft.

Instead, the pig's enduring horror is that it is too close to human, close enough to transplant organs, as smart as a dog, and its fate is uniformly horrible - of all the animals of the farm it alone has no purpose except to be slaughtered for meat. William Golding understood this when he called the doomed boy in Lord of the Flies Piggy, and had the marooned boys erect a pig's head totem. Margaret Atwood's abnormally intelligent pigoons in Oryx and Crake are disturbing because they are us - engineered to carry human genes and twice the normal complement of organs for transplant purposes. I guess the pig as metaphysical unclean evil might fly better with a Muslim or devout Jewish audience, but for those that eat swine, the pig's potential for horror is that it is us; within, not outside.

Next: Why is Hodgson's fiction so appealing to the old-school style of adventure gamers?

Moral Disgust III: The Perverse

There's one last feature of moral disgust that might be worth exploring. It has to do with desire.

An up-and-coming theory in moral psychology says that we can make three morally relevant judgments on any behavior: the desire of the actor, the action he or she actually took, and what the consequences are. For example, someone might want to do something that hurts someone (bad desire), nonetheless carries out an action to help them (good action), but without meaning it, that helpful action actually backfires and hurts the person (bad consequences).

What this research tends to find, with a few exceptions and glitches, is that people tend to base recommendations about punishment and reward on consequences; base judgments of the action on what the action did; and base judgments of the person's character on his or her desire.

WHH: big in Japan

I want to focus on this link between character and desires because disgust, responding to people as "things" rather than actors, seems to have a link to desire. Those who are aficionados of weird literature know of William Hope Hodgson, and maybe have read what I consider his best story, The Voice in the Night. Without giving away too much, at one point one of the characters in the story gives in to a physical need that he knows will doom his humanity. What is particularly horrifying about this is the desire with which he succumbs to this temptation - "immediately filled with an inhuman desire" in Hodgson's words - and his struggle and self-loathing.

Meanwhile, on the social science side, some colleagues and I have been running a study that, if it works out, will back up some ideas we had about they way people can be seenless than fully human based on the emotions they feel ... well, now that the corpus callosum between the gamer and psych sides of my brain has fully fused, I can present this to you guys as a fully fledged villain-ology.

There is the Misguided Villain, who has the full range of human emotions - including the ability to feel disgust, remorse, hope. This one may be doing the wrong thing, but has the right desires.

There's the Animalistic Villain, with none of the higher emotions, only the bestial ones - lust, anger, fear, pleasure.

There's the Mechanistic Villain, with no emotions at all. Perfectly rational, with cruelty only as a side effect.

Finally, and most relevant, there's the Perverse Villain. This one has all the emotions but feels them at the wrong times: joy at people's suffering, disappointment at their success. This is the classic stage villain, and the one who most forcefully reveals the wrong desires that I suspect lead to moral disgust.

Horror - fear and disgust - both these emotions compel someone to flee. The more distance you put between yourself and the scary or disgusting thing, the more the emotion subsides. The horror of desire - of sweet-smelling corruption, of the desirable body with the skeleton face - is that you willingly bring yourself closer to the vile thing. But the vile thing is not so disturbing as what your self-conscious mind reveals about you. You are perverse. Your desire is corrupt. Like Hodgson's castaway, you yourself are the monster.

Do I use this in my campaign? Well, my players may remember an amorphous thing with mouths in the cellar of the millhouse ... a thing that radiated a smell of honey and fresh meat.

Moral Disgust II: Purism

In the last disgust post I went over some of our research showing that moral disgust mostly protects moral codes concerning the body. But I don't think that's all to disgust. I just haven't figured out the experiments to prove it.

See, there's a grab bag of other things from various other published studies out there that elicit disgust. One study of the role of emotions in attitudes toward various social groups found that disgust was predicted by two things. One is kind of obvious: the perception that a group threatens physical health (so, HIV patients, for example). The other is less obvious: the perception that a group threatens important values (gay men score high on this as well as, via the HIV perception, the disease kind of threat).

And then there's esthetic disgust, or I guess esthetic-moral disgust. This is not the esthetic disgust from a painting of rotting meat, but the disgust that comes from seeing something as "contaminating" a moralized esthetic category. And what sets apart a moralized esthetic category from the usual kind? Fortunately, Zak has just drawn a cartoon that explains this very point.

It's the disgust face that fans of black doom grindcore metal make when confronted with symphonic black doom grindcore. It's the disgust face that fans of the game with clerics and no thieves make when they come across the game with thieves and no clerics.

The second most subdivided form of entertainment there is.

Values, moralized preferences, cultural norms about sex and food and body decoration ... I suspect that what binds these all together, what throws those who violate them on the midden of disgust, is that these are learned primary associations to the concepts of "good" or "bad" that are hard to justify.

After all, it's hard to articulate why freedom is good or why your country is or why the greatest band in the world is that way or why exactly men get circumcised in your culture. There's always some after-the-fact reason like "it's just good" or "it's more healthy." But the truth is, you probably learned all these things as a primary, Pavlovian link between whatever it is - the flag, the band, the physically weird - and the concept of "good" or "bad." And you probably prefer to associate with people who share the same associations.

This is why, in our studies, people specifically have a hard time explaining their disgust at sexual transgressions, apart from self-referential concepts like "it's just disgusting" or "they're just evil." Other studies show that people also have a hard time explaining why their core values, like freedom, equality or tradition, should be followed.

Extending this to all kinds of values, it then stands to reason that you're less likely to be disgusted with someone who who agrees with you that racial equality is good, but thinks that school vouchers (or whatever solution you prefer) are not the way to get there; you're likely to feel anger, because that person is at least in your community and just being frustrating. But if the person comes out and says that racial equality is not a highly valuable thing, not even good - they're an outright racist - that's more likely to feel disgusting. That person has shown themselves to be outside your true community.

Would you rather people play XBox?

One thing I find interesting about this moral-preferences-esthetics-values disgust is that it has a very weird reaction profile. If my esthetics are pragmatic, then (let's say) I love strawberry ice cream, will make do with raspberry cause it's kind of like strawberry only raspier, and just loathe chocolate. But if they're moralized, I will actually love strawberry, hate raspberry because it's a pathetic imitation and mockery of what strawberry is supposed to be, and be indifferent to chocolate. I think this is a vestige of contagion fear that comes from applying disgust to these moralized preferences. But this has abolutely nothing to do with nerds, fans, and gamers right?

All this is because the disgust reaction forms the boundary of the community. (I don't set these posts up, I swear...) So I won't give suggestions for working today's lesson into your game, because really, it applies more to your life as a gamer.

Moral Disgust I: The Body

One theme of my lab's research that is smashing into print in a esoteric, university-library-only journal near you this year (4 papers out or in press, 3 more under review) is the distinction between moral anger and moral disgust.

Two of Paul Ekman's research faces.

The first thing to recognize is that anger and disgust correlate highly across moral situations. So, if someone sees something and says they're "disgusted" they're also likely to say they're "angry." A less finicky language might just call both emotions of moral condemnation something like "outrage" and leave it like that.

Except what people call "disgust" also seems different for different kinds of outrage. What our research tends to find, using carefully varied scenarios, is that moral violations that involve harm or unfairness attract high levels of anger, and a kind of "disgust" that's very highly related to anger. But when you factor out the effects of anger, disgust really stands on its own mainly as a visceral response to moral codes about the use of the body.

In other words:

• I tell you about greedy corrupt politicians - and you may say you are disgusted, but go "grrr".
• I tell you about someone who has cloned his or her own muscle cells in order to eat a consensual, harmless, ethically sourced human steak - now you say you're disgusted, and go "yuck" - nobody is harmed, so you only go "grrr" a little - but importantly, most people (not all) feel there's something morally wrong about this technical cannibalism.

Jack Chick's "Gay Blade"

We came up with examples like the human steak to test, even for the most liberal of our respondents, the true limit of moral tolerance. If you're liberal and you want to know how conservative people feel about sexual immodesty or same-sex marriage, think about your own reaction to the human steak. Nobody's rights are violated, but there's a sense of wrong about it.

Back to imaginative literature and gaming. There's a tendency, most pronounced in works that aspire to  "epic" or "traditional" storytelling, to stack the deck with both moral anger and moral disgust - and to help that along with liberal lashings of physical disgust. Think of Frank Herbert's Baron Harkonnen, with his boils (physical disgust), catamites (moral disgust) and underhanded cruelty (moral anger/disgust/outrage). That works, if the reader plays along with the assumptions of the work. If the reader doesn't, this all-in-one moral universe becomes a nagging flaw. I mean, I love me some Jack Vance and in particular Lyonesse, but damn if "queer = villain" doesn't get tiresome in that series.

The body is often also moralized, and overlaid with disease and deformity arguments, to feed a dehumanizing and xenophobic political agenda. Just one very obvious example: the Nazi caricature of Jews encompassed disgust at alleged physical uncleanliness, strange dietary practices, physical abnormality, and sexual licentiousness. All this came to a sharp and pointed end with the final accusation to justify the Holocaust; Jews were not just gross but dangerous and malicious. Indeed, some of our recent unpublished studies implicate fear and moral anger, as well as disgust, in the tendency to dehumanize members of other social groups.

Yeah, yeah, so fantasy heroes are little Nazis slaughtering orcs. We've all heard that before, so that even the counter-cliche itself is at risk to get worn out. In my creations, I'd prefer to keep to hand the power of bodily-moral disgust, avoiding both cliches, letting the audience draw its own conclusions. These strange customs, they are weird and gross; the high priest marries his sister, ritual scars are salted to a fine purple hue, here's a feast to which everyone contributes a slice of their own flesh. Are these marks of villainy, or of mere strangeness? Our explorers of the unknown have signed up for encounters with both, in any event, and the interpretation is up to them.

Gore Disgust

There seems to be a trigger of disgust with a biological function that goes beyond protecting us against infection. Known picturesquely as "violations of the body envelope," and more prosaically as "blood and gore," such revolting things include blood, viscera and other signs of injury. Far from being infectious, these things instead are in danger of being infected, if the person is still alive, so it kind of makes sense to keep your distance from them, which the disgust emotion encourages. Extreme forms of gore disgust have been implicated in blood and injection phobias.

Researchers have found one interesting biological marker of gore disgust that's different from others; when most people react to blood and injuries, the heart rate goes down, rather than up as it does when seeing infectious or immoral things. This makes some sense as an automatic reaction to blood that could be your own; if that's true, you need to stop pumping it out so quickly.

Blood and gore is also fear- and anxiety-provoking. It reminds us of our bodies' mortality and tells us that right here and now, we could be next. This blend of disgust and the fear emotions has been identified as horror. Although research is lacking on this topic, I believe that many people see the ability to feel horror as a marker of moral standing, a guarantee that the person will not resort to violence because of revulsion at its consequences.

Certainly, lots of parents are OK with their children killing hundreds of people or creatures in a video game, as long as there's no blood or gore. It's hard to convince someone by reason not to be disgusted, but one of the better ways is to repeatedly expose them to the disgusting stuff until they get used to it. The concern aroused by gore in games and earlier media, such as comic books, is that children will become hardened to the disgusting signs of violence, and become more violent as a result.

The infamous EC Comics baseball story.

Is this concern justified? I'm not so sure. One group of people that needs to get used to blood and gore is doctors, nurses and EMTs, but this lets them help people more effectively. I do believe that many people have an effective, emotional brake on committing violence, but this doesn't respond to the aftermath of violence; that would be too late. Rather, it responds to the act of physically harming another person.

Army psychiatrist David Grossman made this case in the book On Killing, gathering historical and clinical evidence that many soldiers actually avoid directly harming the enemy - an aversion eliminated in US ground forces since Vietnam through human-target conditioning. His concern, which made the media around the time of the Columbine massacre, was that first-person shooter games were doing the same job on the youth of America. More solid experimental work in recent years has pinpointed an emotional reaction in the brain that makes people reluctant to end one human life even to save five others. This reaction is strongest if the scenario forces the person to actually apply personal energy to the killing, as opposed to pushing a button. Both these lines of research identify the key aversion as happening before the violence, not afterwards when gore is strewn around.

One of the few RPG systems that acknowledges this is Lamentations of the Flame Princess, with its portrait of the fighter class as someone who has become accustomed to violence, and as such can uniquely deal it out most effectively. Indeed, part of military training from Roman times on has involved not just teaching soldiers how to strike accurately, but how to overcome their aversion to doing so. Rather than indulging in blood-soaked wish-fulfillment, a mature approach to combat in games will acknowledge this unpleasant moral fact in one way or another.

Getting back to the topic of evoking emotions in a game, signs of death and gore should evoke horror in your players, but more on the fear side than the disgust side. They're a time-honored way to signal that Something Nasty is about ... the encounter may not be level-appropriate ... your characters may want to consider turning tail and running. In any event, apart from the odd grindhouse edition, gore in tabletop games remains enacted in the theater of the imagination, of little moral danger to anyone.

Why, then, the moral concern about the gruesome and macabre? All will be revealed - when I conclude the disgust series with a look at the moral uses of repugnance.

Deformity Disgust

Some scholars have argued that bodily deformities, asymmetries, and mutilations arouse disgust because they are cues to disease. They point to studies showing that seeing any kind of deformity makes the concept of disease more accessible and available, as measured by psychological tasks similar to free-association. This is true even of deformities that science tells us have no relation to contagious infection, such as birth defects or missing limbs. The idea is that our cultural/biological immune system thinks we're better safe than sorry, loading us with a tendency to get disgusted about any sort of strangeness of body.

That may be so, originally. But disgust serves another purpose than just protecting us from disease. It's a response protecting our fragile self-awareness from existential strangeness, from things that blur the human category, and from people who violate the cultural practices that are required to set us apart from the animals. One such practice was the blackening of teeth by the aristocracy of Heian-era Japan. By the strict biological interpretation of disgust, rotten or missing teeth are a cue to disease. But Lady Murakami, in her diary, wrote of the revulsion felt at seeing the white teeth of a commoner, which were like those of an animal.

Fantasy literature and gaming abound in animal-humans and other monstrous beings that cross the boundary between people and other. Disgust is one reaction to such creatures.

Some monsters are more likely than others to be disgusting: crossbreeds with disgusting animals, like fish, pigs or octopi; creatures with key aspects of humanity altered or missing, like bones or a face. Some mutants are fairly normal in fantasy, mainly because they are crosses between humans and domestic or noble animals that we semi-humanize anyway (centaurs, satyrs). They take on a disgusting aspect only when we think of the possibility that they were created through human-animal sex, as the mythical Minotaur was. Regulating our sexual possibilities, of course, is another way society makes our bodies human rather than animal. In most societies, even the most liberal, disgust at monstrous, unnatural or indiscriminate couplings is a mainstay of social order.

Disgust is not just a marker of the nonhuman, but an active route to dehumanization and extermination. Pig-face orcs bring with them a mandate to be killed in a way that pigs or humans do not. Their very existence offends the natural order, they mingle Platonic forms in a way that must be exterminated, though we cannot articulate why. We still have primitive reflexes, conditioned by fiction and the way we talk about the world, that draw an equivalence between what's natural (actually, what fits into our human idea of nature) and what's moral. Picture the following exchange in fantasy land:

"I've found the source of those strange monkey-slug-polyp things. They come from a vast, bubbling pool of slime in the swamp, surmounted by a swaying, tentacled pillar of flesh."
"How amazing! Let's go there to observe and celebrate the diversity of life in this magical world!"

Not very likely, right?

A more sophisticated development turns the simple association of physical deformity with evil into a story, where the physical deformity is a consequence of evil. This kind of narrative can even take on a populist slant, as in the urban rumors of pig-faced women that circulated in previous eras, where the deformity is a punishment visited on the child for the mother's lack of charity.

Unlike fantasyland, reality presents us with no such physical cues to evil. People who present a monstrous aspect usually got that way through no fault of their own. This leads to a second, more liberating impulse in fictional treatments, itself by now also a cliche - the sympathetic, misunderstood, even heroic monster, from Beauty's Beast to the Elephant Man to the Swamp Thing.

Weird or heroic fantasy follows the first two patterns, where the monstrous is to be exterminated as a reflex. Science fiction, though, often follows the sympathetic pattern. Think of Gamma World's scheme where everyone's a mutant, or the typical galactic romance with its teeming variety of aliens. In the words of SF author Jeff Noon: "Pure is poor."

So we get one more insight into the much-discussed flumph: as a good-aligned creature, its monstrous aspect (those tentacles, that mouth) is anathema to the conservative physical-moral equations of fantasy, but fits right at home in science fiction.

Basic Disgust

The best scholarship on disgust recognizes that it's made up of many "layers" - responding to a variety of unseen threats that have arisen over the course of biological and cultural evolution. There's no evidence, however, that any form of disgust is completely hard-wired. Like language, we have a built-in system of learning disgust responses. After we have learned them, from other people's reactions, they seem to come automatically and naturally. But very young children don't show disgust, and what exactly is disgusting seems to vary from culture to culture. With some primary objects (like feces or rotten meat) it makes good sense to recoil from them, because they can carry disease. Others are more variable; urine, for example, is seen as a health product in some circles in India.

The disgust that attaches to disease-carrying substances or people is known as basic disgust or core disgust. It's clear that people in earlier technological ages had a much higher threshold for this than we do now. In medieval European cities, waste disposal was done in the street. Late-medieval advice on courtly manners seem to be made for a modern five-year-old, telling adults not to wipe their nose with their sleeve.

"Dennis, there's some lovely filth down here."

The rookie mistake that's often made when re-creating such an environment, in fiction or a game, is to put all of these gritty, grimy aspects front and center. Lurching lepers, brimming chamberpots, rats and lice, skewed and missing teeth, all mark out this sophomoric "keepin' it real" approach.

All of this misses a huge point: disgust is a language. It needs to be translated to produce the right emotional effect against the cultural background of the audience. In just the same way David Milch, writer of the HBO series "Deadwood," recognized that his characters would have historically sworn by God, Christ and Hell. But because those oaths sound mild to the ears of a more secular 21st century, he intentionally replaced them with the Tarantinoesque obscenities that series is famous for.

The effect of putting a crap bucket in every kobold lair in gaming, too, is rarely as intended. It drives a wedge between the modern sensibilities of the players and the medieval disgust thresholds of the characters. This fights against absorbing play, which depends on making the players feel what the characters might be feeling. Worse yet, in gaming you are only depicting or talking about disgusting things (thankfully). This can lead to another unwanted response to second-hand gross-outs - laughter.

To be truly effective, disease-related gross-outs in a game should be few and far between. They should have the rules back-up to make both players and characters recoil. The rot grub in AD&D has been much maligned. But knowing it is out there did make players a lot less willing to root around in dung piles. It visibly stands for the invisible diseases that disgust at its most basic level protects us against. Rats, mummies, anything foul that gives a chance to catch a disease, likewise add to the keep-away factor.

Try grubby instead of gritty ...

Rolling chances to catch a disease for living in a city have never been satisfactory in gaming, even if they are historically accurate. The city is just too attractive a destination for your adventurer's purposes. Its disease perils are too abstract, failing to arouse burnt-out medieval sensibilities about squalor. But ordering disease rolls for too-cheap lodging, or hit point losses for sleeping rough, gives players something they can avoid, giving meaning to their fastidiousness.

There's one other thing about disgusting objects that most old-school rules don't model: they're contagious, like those invisible diseases. Once you have players figure out that someone with a disease has a chance of transmitting it to anyone nearby, you bet that curing them and setting a quarantine will take on urgency. A green slime that kills you instantly is bad enough, but one that settles on you and keeps you alive just long enough to send spores out to land on your friends is worse, a gruesome kind of living death.

Next up: Mutations and mutilations!

The Emotions: Disgust

My posting is going to be less frequent over most of the summer as I hit the conference trail, a Powerpoint-spangled stairway to the stars that's already taken me to Limerick and Amsterdam and will end up in Kyoto (and probably, complete exhaustion) after four or so more European venues. At the same time, all this activity makes me think about those magic moments when my scholarship and fandom identities merge.

I mean, when my hosts at a three-day course google me and find my number three hit is as a talking head expert on the indie documentary "True Fan" (I tried to explain the social identity of convention Klingons and stormtroopers) .... and then I end up talking D&D with one of the grad students over beers ... that's got to be telling me something.
There's no doubt that the most interesting emotion my lab studies is disgust. We find that disgust is an irrational emotion that defies our attempts to explain it reasonably. Disgust is also a many-branched emotion. Many different things that we learn by association set it off, and there really is no one way to sum up the kind of perceptions that will and will not cause disgust.

Really, any kind of environment creator - game designer, author, filmmaker, game master - works best with a ready handle on the audience's emotions. One of the easiest to manipulate is disgust. I mean:

This gimmick from the Modern Toilet restaurant chain in Taiwan relies on the inflexibility of disgust. Even though you know you are eating from a clean metal dish in a clean porcelain bowl, the toilet shape brings up all kinds of associations and disgust can't help but happen (worse if you are eating splashy, green-brown curry).

It follows that, while it may be hard to get angry, feel pleasure, or fall in love as your character in a game, disgust more readily pierces through the "Just a game" barrier. We feel disgusted even at blatant simulations of things that make us disgusted.

But does this mean we really get disgusted in character? Or just that we transfer our own revulsions to the setting? I'll explain how to work with this gap next time, when I write about Basic Disgust.