After a week and a half of deathly illness, and then a day and a half of being crippled, and a week with my girlfriend’s parents, I’m finally writing what I should have finished on the 17th at the very latest. The truth is, I could have pushed through the pain but I was really trying to write a post on the Gestalt game setting, which was interesting and fun, and of high quality, but not really striking. Most games can do what Gestalt does with a decently designed story arc and a GM so inclined, so I really just have a few short things to say that Gestalt brings to the table(Pun intended).
Superheroes have always participated in political struggles, but oftentimes their role is more about the ideologies than any other party. The military of most nations, officially speaking, is politically unaffiliated, it just creates violent conflict between parties, but superheroes, even soldiers, are representatives of an ideal. This is what makes superheroes important, they give ideas a face. Likewise, the best villains aren’t one dimensional killing machines, but multifaceted avatars of madness and corruption. Those are the principles of the Gestalt game setting in a nutshell. At times it takes itself very seriously, at times not so, but I think that playing an alternate history game would be amazing using the principles of the Gestalt game setting.
Imagine what would happen if superhumans lived among us as representatives of ideologies and archetypes. Whom would you expect them to be? John F. Kennedy, Emma Goldman, Adolph Hitler, Albert Einstein, Osama Bin Laden are all easy answers, people who use their beliefs as the tool of their leadership, rather than leadership as an end in and of itself, for good or ill. The Gestalt game setting provides a premise where Superhumans could be leaders, championing their archetypal power source for the world. An excellent teacher, or a dedicated police officer, or a hippie might be more realistic player characters, fighting for justice, however they perceive it. Re-imagining history is a matter of course for superhero comics.
The Gestalt character is the epitome of a given archetype, or perspective on an archetype, and encourages it’s players to play up their archetypal status. Gestalts get their power from the plane of collective unconscious, where they gain influence over that idea’s place in the world. The thing is, most ideas have very subtle attributes, rather than the most powerful and overt archetypes. Even something so extreme as a a Gestalt of tyranny might only have the ability to influence people supernaturally and the ability to inflict pain at will, both very easy to explain in mundane terms. Would we even notice the difference if histories great leaders simply had the ability to ‘push’ crowds to follow their lead?
Want to learn more about Gestalt? Read on…
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