Twin Peaks

I just finished Twin Peaks, part of an impromptu scouring of Lynch's stuff I've been doing recently. I really disliked large parts of the 2nd season, but man, the last couple episodes really pulled it together, especially the last one. It's surely hyperbole to say that that its the scariest thing in the history of TV, but I found it pretty intense (albeit at 4am after a couple drinks), and can't think of anything offhand that matches it. While I couldn't quite call the final wrapup satisfying, I was somehow pretty stoked by it.

Just to give a little bit of game-oriented content, I found myself really inspired with regards to the RPG system / setting I've been working on, now and then, for the last year or so. It started as a swashbuckling kind of game, focusing on over-the-top acts of derring-do. But I find myself adding an undertone of pseudo-Victorian high-society, whose members include gatekeepers of places beyond reality. The players, as duelists, brawlers, inventors and great orators, seem powerful compared to the coddled controllers of the port towns they visit. But these patricians and magistrates know of realms long lost, and the forces that dwell therein.

It would be fair to call the concept Lovecraftian, but I'm thinking less about chaotic realms of unseeable geometry and more about Twin Peaks' subtly twisted dreamworlds, or House of Leaves' merciless infinities. I'm hatching icy worlds with internal logic stronger than reason. The endless streets of identical, stark white pueblo-style houses. The long, clean hallways, leading to the well-dressed artisan, who crafts hundreds of marble statues of you. I want to build worlds inside the world, and ensure that they have their own compelling consistency, however strange.

This long-term RPG thing is less of a real project than a mind-occupier for dull moments, an exucse to dump out world ideas without being constrained by devising elegant game rules. But Twin Peaks certainly did a great deal to make me think bigger, and provided some inspiration about how to tease and trouble.