Chad Perrin: SOB

This is part of my RPG series of entries here at SOB. See the inaugural entry in the series for more details.

I got an email today from Paizo about the impending release of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game that talks about how one can make sure one gets a copy of the game when it comes out. I've already signed up for a Pathfinder RPG Ongoing Subscription, which ensures that I get all the core game products as they are published, so the SigO and I will get one core gamebook this August already. We want two of them, though, so we're planning to buy a book elsewhere as well.

We took the advice in Paizo's email; I called a local store called Gryphon's Games and Comics to ask whether the people who manage the store were ordering any Pathfinder RPG core books for this August. As the Paizo email says, telling a local retailer before 13 July that you want the book gives them time to order it so they'll have it right away when the new book is released. I get the distinct impression that Paizo's basically saying "Tell your local retailers what you want in time for them to order from us so we know how many to print."

When I called Gryphon, the answers I got gave me the impression the people who run the store weren't planning on ordering any copies for the store. I was told they'd order one to hold for me, and they would give me a call when it came in so I could go pick it up, though. I sent an email to the mailing list I maintain for my local gaming group telling them all about this, forwarding the content of the Paizo email as well, so they can call Gryphon to reserve copies as well if they want to. Maybe, if enough people call the store to request copies, they'll decide they should order a few copies to put on the shelves too. How many is enough in a case like this — three? Four? Maybe the smart thing for them to do would be to order 1.5 times as many as people request. That'd be my guess.

I hope they get enough interest to decide to just start stocking Paizo/PRPG stuff in general. Wizards of the Coast could use the competition, especially considering that many people regard D&D 4E with profound disappointment.

Anyway . . . the following is the content of the email I got from Paizo:

With the August 13 release date for the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook approaching, I'm reaching out to ask for your help. While there's a little over a month until the book is released, we're just a few short weeks away from shipping the books to our distributors. Why is this important to you?

With today's difficult economy, retailers and distributors have generally cut back on the amount of inventory that they are carrying. So if you plan to buy your copy of the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook from any place other than from Paizo, we ask that you inform your preferred retailer of your intention to buy from them before Monday, July 13, and encourage them to place an order with their distributor by that date. This will help ensure that their distributor will place an order with us, and that you'll have a book waiting for you on August 13. Nobody wants to see the distribution channel understocked on the Core Rulebook on the release date; restocks can take as long as two weeks to make their way through the distribution channel–and even longer internationally–so a retailer who sells out might not get more copies until September!

So if you're planning on buying from your favorite local game store, please talk to the owner before July 13 and let him know you intend to buy your copy of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook from him. If you're ordering online from a place other than paizo.com, please place your preorder by July 13 so they know how many copies to order. If we all work together, we can get the right number of books out there so that you can get a copy of the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook from the retailer of your choice.

Those of you who are planning to subscribe to the Pathfinder RPG line or preorder the book directly from paizo.com have a bit longer: you should place your order or start your subscription with us before August 3 to ensure that your book will arrive as close to the release date as possible. (We're also planning to bring plenty of copies to Gen Con in Indianapolis.)

So please take the time to let the retail venue of your choice know about your desire to purchase the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook from them as soon as you can.

We also wanted to let you know that the PDF of the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook will be available at paizo.com on August 13. We've priced it at just $9.99, which we hope allows those who want the book in both print and electronic form to feel that you can still support your favorite retailer and purchase the PDF without breaking your budget. (Of course, those who subscribe to the Pathfinder RPG line will get the PDF for free with your Core Rulebook.)

Finally, we'd like to let you know that Paizo is celebrating our 7th anniversary today, and we appreciate all the help that more than 52,000 of you provided by playtesting the Pathfinder RPG, and that even more of you have provided by supporting Paizo as a company with your purchases and friendship on our messageboards over the last seven years. Thanks!

I really like this game, this company, and the relationship the company maintains with its customer base. The production quality of Paizo books is amazing — even the "cheap" stuff is slick and fancy and feels high-quality in my hands, a welcome change from smearing-ink problems of some WotC publications and other cheap production quality from many other game publishers (don't even get me started on the crappy bindings on Steve Jackson Games books). The prices aren't exactly bargain-basement, but so far, the books are worth every penny — and then some. I want to support the company and the product lines I like; hopefully you'll do the same.

If you want to see the kind of stuff you can expect from the upcoming Pathfinder RPG, you can still download the free Beta test PDF of PRPG from the Paizo Website.

Last Wednesday, I gave the SigO a ride to work early in the morning. I then ran some errands to get ice and other supplies, finished packing, and loaded up the car. I headed out to pick her up from work. We left town for a cross-country trip to Kentucky.

Weather had been stormy in northern Colorado lately. It was pretty good as we drove away, sprinkling on us a couple times but never getting very bad. When we got into Kansas, heading east on I-70, the weather got increasingly hot and humid.

We drove straight through to St. Louis, MO, then turned south. By this point, of course, we were in bug country: heat and humidity contributed to an abundance of nasty bugs in the air and crawling around on the ground. It helped remind me one of the reasons I like relatively high-altitude, dry, bugless northern Colorado.

We took the long way around Illinois — key word being "around". Everywhere we would go on this trip has concealed carry permit reciprocity with Colorado, so I could just stick my Kel-Tec P32 in my pocket and drive through those states with impunity. Illinois, on the other hand, is one of the red-headed stepchildren of the Bill of Rights. Apparently, IL lawmakers forget the number 2 when counting to 10, because the Second Amendment is essentially ignored there. In fact, a case has recently been appealed all the way to the Supreme Court to deal with the issue of whether the Second Amendment is applicable to the states, specifically because Illinois laws in general — and Chicago laws in particular — violate the rights protections of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution. I guess we'll see what the SCOTUS will do about it in the near future.

Kentucky was hot. It was really hot. The sun beat down, and every time we got into the car it was like opening the door to a blast furnace. Luckily, the hotel — the Hilton Garden Inn — was quite nice. We had good, reliable wireless Internet access, a refrigerator, cable so we could catch some of the Wimbledon tennis tournament, and a good shower. I don't remember having any complaints about the hotel, except maybe the fact that finding it isn't really obvious. It was while there, though, that I realized that no matter how expensive a hotel may be, it seems no hotel has really great toilet paper. It's always this single-ply cheap stuff.

We arrived on Thursday afternoon, and that evening we had lunch with an uncle and his wife, who live in KY. It was good to get back in touch with him; I hadn't seen him since he first married his wife back in '91.

The reason we went there was to attend TechRepublic's 10th Anniversary Community Event, essentially a mostly social tech business conference that was more about the community than about the business. It was fun, and I got to meet some people I would probably never have met in person, though I already "knew" many of them from our online interactions at TechRepublic. A lot of people had nice things to say about me, my involvement in the TR community, and my articles for TechRepublic. I got good swag. I ate a lot of good food.

Sunday afternoon, we finally got around to visiting a game store. It wasn't really anything special, but we satisfied our tradition of going to game stores when we visit cities away from home. Afterward, we left town, and started the 20 hour drive home. Again, we swung south to avoid driving through the middle of IL (what an appropriate term for the state — though it needs another L to be perfect).

After turning westward on I-70 at St. Louis, we found ourselves driving toward an increasingly ominous stormy horizon, with numerous, frequent, dramatic displays of lightning flashes. At one point, there was a lightning strike that looked notably closer than 500 meters off the left side of the highway. After it hit, there was a bright white glow where the strike happened that looked for all the world like a magnesium fire. After a bit, it went out, and I had a purple afterimage on the left side of my vision for a while.

We got hit by torrential rain at one point so bad that everybody was pulling off to the shoulder, turning on hazard lights, and waiting for the rain to lighten up enough to see for driving.

A last stop before getting home was at Sportsman's Warehouse not far from where we live. We picked up the Ruger 10/22 rifle I've been planning to get before the end of the month. That was Sunday afternoon.

We got home and settled in. We decided we don't want to do any long, multi-day road trips for quite a while now. They're fine once in a while, but this should about do it for us this summer. We're done.

The account of North Korean tyranny described by a former political prisoner in Defector's Testimony on North Korean Prisons: The Trials of Sun-ok Lee sounds similar in many respects to some of the accounts of the horrors of the Soviet Union in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn's book is basically a gigantic tome detailing the terrible consequences of maintaining a government founded on revolutionary communism in excruciating detail — not excrutiating because it's detailed, but because of what those details reveal about the terrible cost of revolutionary communism as the basis for a system of government.

I'm the kind of guy who, when someone says "I tried to read such-and-such a book and had to stop because it was depressing," tends to laugh it off because I breezed through the book in a couple days and enjoyed it. The sole exception was The Jungle: I seem to recall that I struggled through it for a month, but finally finished it, despite the fact it's trite crap from end to end. That has nothing to do with the fact it's "depressing", though.

Despite that, however — despite the fact that "depressing" books often quite interest me, so long as they're well-written — the relentless, hellish despair elicited by page after page chronicling the miseries and horrors of Stalin's rule in the Soviet Union eventually built up significant weight to the point that I wasn't making any real progress. I stopped reading it to take a break and read something else.

I didn't stop reading it because I decided I didn't want to finish it. I still want to finish it. It's interesting, and very clear. I just needed a breather from its relentless, merciless grind through the terrible sociopathy of the Soviet Union.

In Growing Up Without Guns, former Soviet subject Leyla Meyers explicitly ties the horrors of the Soviet Union to its almost-total monopoly on modern tools of lethal force. She does so by way of contrast with what she has come to regard as "normal" after being introduced to a culture of liberty in the United States, and she briefly expresses her confusion at the notion that some US citizens don't seem to realize that they have a right to the tools of self defense. Her closing statement is a powerful one:

Most people at least once in their life said or heard someone say, "I wish I could bring my childhood back." I might have said it too. Not now, not anymore. The Second Amendment to me, then, is one guarantee that my past will never become my future.

There's kind of a chicken and egg problem with explaining away the tyrannical excesses of the Soviet Union, however. There are certainly causes other than the prohibition of the tools of resistance to tyranny — not only tools of physical violence, but those of the free exchange of ideas as well. Restricting the ability to effectively communicate ideas freely and defend oneself against state enacted violence is more a method of ensuring the continued domination of the nation by tyrants than a cause of tyranny, from the most obvious perspective. On the other hand, those restrictions are a significant part of the tyranny itself. On the gripping hand, with the passage of every year that no successful rebellion arises, that one can mark off another few million people who have been hauled off to the gulags, that the insanity of Stalin's state socialism continues, this can be attributed in large part to the lack of the most effective tools to fight the machinery of tyranny.

The other causes that I gracefully glossed over in the preceding paragraph are subject to some speculation. In the following paragraphs, I'll try to address that somewhat.

There are those who simplistically attribute it to "communism" or "socialism" without having any clear idea of how such things might contribute to tyranny. These are the opponents of pinko commie sensibilities who fail to differentiate between correlation and causation, seeing that explicitly communist regimes and crushing tyranny appear to go hand in hand and assume that means that tyranny is caused by communism itself, without fail or other contributing factors. They similarly tend to be the same people who fail to make much distinction between "communism" and "socialism". Of course, while an explicitly communist regime may practice state socialism, the two terms are not strictly synonymous, but don't let that deter you from treating them as though they are in your desire to simplify the relationships between philosophies and outcomes to the point where only unsubstantiated faith in culturally imbued assumptions holds your understanding of the world together.

There are also those who simplistically assert that the communism and/or socialism (there's a fair bit of conflation of the two on the leftward side of the philosophical aisle as well) of a state is completely orthogonal to the tyranny of the Soviet Union. They assert there is no causal or contributing relationship between the political and economic philosophy of the nation and its tyrannical character, claiming that the excesses of Stalin's Soviet Union are purely the result of people manipulating the ideals of communism or socialism to their own ends, undermining them and corrupting them without any reasons related to their intrinsic character at all. Their "proof" for this seems to largely derive from their desire for it to be true.

Ultimately, the problem is not "communism" or "socialism", nor is it strictly divorced from communism and/or socialism. There is another factor involved that creates a very specific need for a tyrannical regime to arise, and it is common to the biggest explicitly communist regimes to have existed. It is the revolutionary factor.

Revolutionary communism — not communism as a whole, in the generic, but specifically revolutionary communism — simply cannot survive at the level of the state without resorting to a tyrannical domination of the populace. The legitimacy of revolutionary communist leaders is immediately called into question once they are clearly installed as the new status quo. To simply accept that the revolution is over and the communists have won is to assume that perfect equality of the quality of life is the new state of the world, and that true power rests solely with that segment of society that has no leadership capabilities or aspirations. Such an assumption, however, flies in the face of the reality that such equality cannot be had without someone organizing it — and someone organizing it necessarily wields greater power than someone else who simply "benefits" from it. The idea of revolutionary communism ever truly reaching a final state of victory, then, is self evidently paradoxical, unless one assumes that, once a state of perfect egalitarian utopia is reached, it is self-perpetuating without any conscious guidance by any member of that perfect society.

One person plants a crop, another harvests it, another turns it into food, another serves it to people who eat it, another cleans up after dinner, and so on, and it all happens in perfect harmony and order without anyone coördinating these efforts. The efficient dance of interacting contributions of labor spontaneously arises from the purity of revolutionary communist ideals in the minds of society's participants. Resource management is a matter for mysterious serendipity, without requiring any actual people involved.

This is, of course, a patently ludicrous notion of human society, short of developing a truly universal and egalitarian hive mind.

Lacking such beautiful perfection of spontaneous, coincidental organization, the leaders of revolutionary communism after the bloody part of the revolution has been won must simultaneously ensure they remain its leaders so they can see to the work of keeping society humming along and give people the impression they are not in fact maintaining prominent positions for the purpose of keeping the whole rickety mess from falling apart. To do this, they resort to perpetuating the appearance of a revolution that has not yet been completed. They must justify their positions of power with the (at least implicit) promise that they will surely step down, and relinquish the reins of leadership, the moment the revolution itself has been completely accomplished.

It should be obvious to the thoughtful reader at this point that this necessitates manufacturing enemies. Any regime whose legitimacy depends upon having an enemy to fight must ultimately fall to a real enemy, fall to the admission that there is no longer any significant enemy to fight, or manufacture enemies against which it can fight and win time and time again. Manufacture of enemies, of course, means sacrifice. Such enemies that can trouble a state as powerful as the Soviet Union must be so numerous that the sacrifices required to demonstrate a successful battle against them necessarily achieve the scale of genocide.

Ongoing cycles of pogrom after arbitrary pogrom like this, targeting "enemies" identified through manufactured evidence of their perfidy, on a genocidal scale, simply cannot continue without a true enemy in the form of a counter-revolution that really does threaten the revolutionary communist leadership arising unless the very capacity for revolution is eliminated. This being the case, one should certainly expect that any state founded on revolutionary communism must inescapably either fall to other ideals, collapse when evaporating ideology leaves it without internal supports, or enforce strict prohibition of free expression and exercise of the right to keep and bear arms.

The correlation of revolutionary communism to state violation of the rights enumerated in the 1st and 2nd Amendments of the US Constitution is undeniable and, if the revolutionary communist state is to survive, inescapable. Tyranny itself, in all its despair inducing horror — as revealed through the writings of people like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Sun-ok Lee, and Leyla Myers — is inescapable in a revolutionary communist state.

The oppressive character of other, more sober forms of state socialism and communism, however, is much more banal.