The Myth of Vagrantsong | Board Game Biographies Episode Two

the world is full of stories if we're lucky we get to learn the traditions and tales of our families and cultures through prose poetry and songs then as we grow we get to learn the stories of others different stories that help us make sense of our world the story I want to tell you today is of how the Bubonic plague still influences laws in the United States how Blues were sung by hobos Across America why Spider-Man isn't usually drawn in the style of Picasso and what this all has to do with vagrant song this is vagrant song a game of ghostly mishaps on a freight train you've been welcomed aboard but the only way to leave is to restore Humanity to ghostly figures in an endless series of train carriages there is a story to discover but whose story is it and why is that important take these folks here with their limbs looking like spaghetti that's been thrown at a war it's a style called rubber hose you probably know it from some of your favorite cartoons as a kid but it has a bit of a complicated history that maybe belies how this game wants to be seen then there are the vagrants themselves a tenacious and methodical team always willing to lend a hand and help each other one look at vagrant song and you'll know what Herculean task is taken on most games have mac covers this one comes in a Sleek gloss no Miniatures here instead there are acrylic standees proudly displaying their gorgeous artwork no peace turtles or goblins or Mediterranean or trading inside instead vagrant song in a field of tens of thousands wants to Stand Out by being different but different comes at a cost nothing about this video is gonna be fair the people who made vagrant song don't deserve it they had the ghoul the audacity to make a board game without any zombies and instead filled it with adversaries like the turned faces where no matter which way you turn the stand D they're always looking away emotional resonance with my Dyson cardboard how dare they I think you can tell I'm smitten I look at the setting the playable characters the hints the artwork and I want more well thankfully there is more because vagrant song achieves different by pulling on real world myths cultures and histories but when you do that you also represent something whether consciously or not so no the people behind vagrant song absolutely don't deserve this video but I think the game itself does foreign song features a host of characters all on the train for different reasons there are two hobo characters the Wayfarer and the song Smith who comes complete with four string banjo there's also the runaway who honestly comes across as a bit of an idiot there's the revivalist and the curse Bearer who are both running for reasons of The Ether real and finally there's the empress an angry militarist a little more on her later hobos for what it's worth are an entirely separate group of vagrants with their own culture and ways of living the hobo Museum in Brit Iowa describes them as mostly white men with wonderlust but there's a bit more to it than that take the songsmith for example he's a happy-go-lucky character whose ultimate goal is to play on the grand stages I don't know if he was based on an actual person but the reality was often quite different there was a very real threat when riding these boxcars in the game this is represented by the hangs you'll have to try to keep your Humanity whilst restoring theirs if you lose all your Humanity you become westbound a term used for dying amongst hobos and effectively turn into one of the hangs if all players become westbound you've lost or have you the real world counterpart of this threat was the railroad police and unfriendly breakmen and conductors they definitely lacked Humanity often threatening or even killing those they found but occasionally a Breakman would let a musician play or sing a song in lieu of a ticket the music was literally helping to restore their Humanity one way of avoiding the Gaze of the authorities was to keep moving and this is where the freight trains come in vagrancy was mostly illegal but was sometimes overlooked when someone was traveling to a job deemed useful like seasonal farm work the railroad police were inclined to make fewer arrests [Music] Century England you've probably got knit and share your house with farm animals and between a third and half the whole population have died of Bubonic plague also it's really windy in the 14th century but it's not all bad news there are so many jobs ah but if you're found wandering around looking for a better job or a better way of life that's a bit of a No-No unless you really like prison so why are we talking about all this with regards to a game that's set in the 20th century and in America well because you all know by now we beat our way around the globe looking for spices we'd never use and one of the things we brought over to the nascent United States was our vagrancy laws you're welcome I mean it would be a good while before we stopped chucking our poo in the street but we thought we had a pretty good idea of how to treat the poor or anyone that we didn't like really you know who's poor and who we really didn't like the thousands of people brought over torn away from their homes to grow crops after the Civil War it was a real bother being able to control the newly freed population particularly for landowners who found themselves without a free labor source despite a gap of 500 years and a whole continent similar laws were still being used to discriminate against people deemed abother the 13th Amendment to the Constitution passed just after the Civil War stated that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except as a punishment for Crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction meaning that all you have to do is not give people jobs make vagrancy a crime convict them and then you can put them back into involuntary servitude and that is exactly what happened in an interview about the history of policing with NPR Khalil gabran Muhammad author historian and teacher Des describes it like this the Black Codes for all intents and purposes criminalized every form of African-American freedom and Mobility political power economic power except the one thing it didn't criminalize was the right to work for a white man on a white man's terms the language used places it in the Southern United States and it was certainly true that a huge amount of migration occurred from the south to the north with people looking for Better Lives or just trying to escape miserable circumstances and the best means of free travel was by Freight and this is exactly what you're doing in vagrant song it's just that this particular train has some unexpected passengers to keep you company I mentioned that there are different types of vagrants in the game the hobos The Runaways the escapists and this was true some people became itinerant workers for their entire lives some hobo just for parts of the year and then went home and others ran away from something and then went back once a situation had called it can be hard to find statistics for the amount of hobos at any one time records show that they tended to be young white males but many black itinerant workers were undocumented formerly some were overlooked for others it was a conscious choice but they created a record of their experiences that is still influencing music today take a look at these lyrics of County Farmhouse by Sun house down south when you do anything that's wrong they'll be sure to put you back on the County Farm put you down in a ditch with a great long Spade wish to God that you hadn't never been made or this from Mississippi John Hurt Blue Harvest Blues getting low and weary Lord I've got trouble in mind everything's against me everybody's so unkind I'm a weary traveler roaming round from place to place if I don't find something death will end me in disgrace songs like this give us an idea of what was really going on it wasn't all exciting an adventure there was Perpetual danger and fear in this way of life talking about hobos and vagrants is complicated on one hand homeless people can be incredibly resourceful vagrant song has a camp phase where you can share skills and swap them amongst the characters so if you realize something's not working for you you can leave it in the camp for someone else to pick up later hobos really did have camps or jungles where they traded information about jobs and people and places to avoid some camps were definitely better than others but it's a motif that's been repeated over and over in human history when Society refuses to help you what can you do but help each other on the other hand unlike other itinerant workers or nomadic cultures there is nothing in law to protect their way of living or what it means to be part of that community in fact the reverse is true they're still being punished and penalized a problem to be dealt with they're only valued when they're seen as you useful like when they're going out to the Farms to work the land or when maybe they are Helping Hands restore their Humanity what's great about this game is that the vagrants get to be the heroes of the story something we don't often see in games or in media generally but while I'm grateful for the representation I'm not so sure about how it's been implemented I said I'd come back to one of the characters the empress in an interview the designer said that she's Loosely based on the Emperor of America a famous hobo in San Francisco it must have been very Loosely based indeed because the real person Joshua Norton who called himself the emperor of the United States wasn't a hobo at all but an eccentric figure who spent most of his life in Sunny San Francisco if they'd wanted to use real figures as inspiration I'd much rather have seen someone like the poet w.h Davis or any one of the number of Blues musicians who also hobo'd like honeyboy Edwards or John Lee Hooker if you're gonna make characters up fine but if you're gonna give us a game about hobos maybe don't make four of the six playable characters not hobos and if you're gonna base them on real people base them on real people who were hobos the first scenario is called Shelter From The Storm while it is the name of a London homeless shelter it probably alludes to the song by Bob Dylan who famously fibbed about being a hobo in interviews and the line itself is probably inspired by John Fogerty who despite singing about working the cotton fields and the Bayou was born in Berkeley California and actually was in a band with a bit of a racially insensitive name don't get me wrong I love them both but this stuck out as a little bit out of place other scenarios get their names from places like esop's fables a story by a 17th century English poet and uh a meatloaf song but I'm getting distracted this isn't just a game about hobos it's about vagrants remember I said it's an important distinction but it's a distinction that the gay game itself doesn't always communicate for example within the rules we have something called the hobo code in this case a bit of a didactic nonsense about having fun that assumes Not only was the hobo code a set of rules it wasn't but also those who don't consider themselves hobos should follow it but hey it's only a game right wow things got tense in chapter one could go and do chapter two or I could just sit here in this cupboard where it's safe and there's definitely no ghosties I'm gonna go and do chapter two now vagrant song doesn't just take place on any train there's already one or two board games out there that cover that ground the cargo these carriages carry are ghosts and folklore but first something even more terrifying board game as I mentioned before your goal is two in any given scenario restore Humanity to a fallen figure which come from the stories of a variety of cultures and peoples this sounds great learning about cultures and traditions through stories is often how these Tales were originally passed down but many of the Haynes bear little resemblance some aren't the same creatures some are artistically very different and one of them seems to reference a Batman quote muddled in with actual folklore many of the identifiable Spirits aren't actually ghosts in their Original Stories the game is making its own law doing what oral Traditions do best creating unique embellishments and changes there's nothing wrong with taking a folk tale and adapting It Disney made a career of it and this is also fine if it comes from Britain we stole your country but it takes on a different meaning if it's misrepresenting stories of the people who are already marginalized this is a wendigo one of the besties you'll battle with you might recognize it it's been used in horror fiction a lot it's instantly identifiable insatiably hungry with a gaunt face and large horns the wendigo comes from the stories of speakers of the Algonquin family languages such as the ojibwi and Blackfoot groups and you know one thing all these stories have in common none of them describes a creature with horns the anthers may have originated in a 1910 short story by Alden and Blackwood this has influenced popular culture far more than the stories it originated from but Mr Blackwood like many of his contemporaries had certain views the issue is that firstly it helps in perpetuating and popularizing the myth of associating indigenous people with the other and with Savage creatures and secondly the more times this creature is photocopied the more it loses its original qualities disconnecting people with their Heritage here's where things get clunky the wendigo is not a ghost but the game treats it as such furthermore the game uses the term haints as shorthand for how the Western World sees ghosts there's a lot of muggled nomenclature that interconnects with strands that pull on real world culture to create its own mythology so who are these Saints anyway the rule book describes them as the Lost Spirits hanging on to both life and death and within the mechanisms of the game this is true the word haint though most likely comes from a very specific group the gulligichi people these are the descendants of Africans who by the very nature of the isolated area in which they are enslaved retains some of the customs of home and developed unique cooking art music and language this tells me that the word should be respected in its usage but Google also tells me that it's just a general term for ghost in the South this is obviously nonsense I'm from the south and I'd never heard of it I don't think they mean slow Elaine oh right what's the difference using the word hate to mean nondescript ghost might just be a case of natural linguistic progression but it's still a word that has certain connotations and its usage here comes across as a little bit novelty folklore isn't just about spinning a yarn and I think it's worth taking care so as not to come across as unintentionally disrespectful something we see throughout the scenario book is blue a color associated with haints for as long as the folklore has existed so that makes sense paint blue originated with the Gula people and was used to paint houses to trick hate and stop them from crossing a threshold again the term has had some of its roots burnt away over time but its usage here is still a little weird almost every ghost has paint blue in the illustration so something that was used to Ward them off is now what they're made of it's like if I were to draw a slug that was made entirely of salt I haven't really mentioned how you restore Humanity to the hands each character has different skills they can use you'll roll some dice and try to reach a target number if you do hurray Humanity you could play the haint songs give them a staring speech but all the characters have one skill in common punching the humanity right back into them to quote the rule book Sometimes the best thing to remind ahane about their former life is just giving them a good old-fashioned walloping literally until they break until all the fight has gone out of them the more they get hit the more it will remind them of who they really are it sounds like Secondary School all over again the designers have clearly tried hard to create a cohesive story from its many disjointed Parts most train cars you enter will contain different types of malevolent spirits who bear no relation to each other in the real world you'll get a highly stylized snippet of their story to lead you into the scenario but that's it rarely do discover much more about them who they are why they're there initially there seems little to link them all together but as you progress you'll see hints at previously themed characters and there is an overarching story it can get a bit lost as you jump from Scenario to scenario but the end manages to tie it all together I'm gonna be super vague here to avoid spoilers but the game itself is like a song with repetitions and unexpected Parts some discordant and some harmonious and it crescendos as you reach the final scenarios but what happens at the end depends on what you've done previously the portrayal makes sense as a reveal but only if you know what inspired it if you don't know who the actor is you're not going to get excited when you see them in a cameo the game wants you to be in on the jokes the references where you exclaim excitedly oh neat that's from the thing I know about but it also seems to want you to ignore anything you come across where you think hang on that's from that thing I know about it gets you interested in things you've never heard about the history the terminology but then as soon as you go to find out more you realize it's all a bit of a slap Dash mishmash but hey it's only a game right let's not beat the elephant in the bush the art style is a divisive choice and here's why pictures have meaning if Spider-Man was suddenly drawn in the style of Picasso it take on a very different feel and we might struggle to interpret what the comic is trying to communicate on the other hand just because an art style has an iffy history it doesn't mean that it's inherently problematic nor are the people who made it but it is still a choice and when you use a well-known style you have to accept its failings as well as its achievements rubber hose is without doubt well known it's a style that we remember from our childhood cartoons with their arms and legs flailing about like they're trying to catch a bus after a good night out for a lot of us there's a Nostalgia attached to it and I'm not here to spit on anyone's sandwich but it's worth thinking about what that Nostalgia might also be hiding from us when it came out in the 1920s it was pioneering although Max Fleischer didn't invent it his deep sense of The Surreal along with his technique of emulating real movement helped to popularize it and brought us cartoons like Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor whilst huge strides were being made in equality and suffrage the 1920s were also really flooding racist around 15 of the population were members of that Infamous group that targeted just about anyone that didn't fit their mold because you know Prejudice doesn't discriminate and even those who weren't part of the group were subject to the media riling up tensions waffling on about purity and freedom fortunately the group was losing popularity by the mid-1930s but so was rubber hose meaning that these cartoons are forever linked with these attitudes not all cartoons at the time were awful many had clever gags and animation and great music but others made use of race social and cultural stereotypes we often hear the argument that comedy makes fun of everyone but the problem comes when the only way that you ever see a certain type of person is derogatory for every white man who is represented as boorish narcissistic or rude there are multitudes of white men who are kind altruistic or generous for some people the only representation they'd ever seen of people who didn't look like them was these incredibly damaging media depictions depictions that persisted throughout the following decades through cartoon and film even where black Americans were involved as voice actors singers or artists these stereotypical elements continued so if art style is used for a reason then The Logical question is why this style of art in vagrant song you could assume that the creators chose it because it was different and totally radical but that would be dismissive right surely they didn't pick something with enough baggage to sink the Titanic without care and attention to what it says about the themes and tones of the game well tonally it works a treat it cleverly intermeshes the moods taken from old animation from folklore and from traveling by Freight the surrealism the music the uncertainty the difficulty in retaining Humanity when faced with adversity the coming together for greater success only to be torn apart later and the cartoony nature of the inability to die it might feel like an odd pivot when we're discussing artwork but we have to talk a bit more about vagrant songs mechanisms specifically mechanisms that are intrinsically linked with rubber hose and its common tropes when you want to take an action you place one of your three coins on it or two or all three of them often the more you place on an action the better chance you have of succeeding when you roll the dice the more eggs you put in a basket the more likely you're gonna get a chicken but the heights never played dice they never gamble on their future there's a sense of determination about them like they feel they always have the upper hand and this was a theme seen in these cartoons over and over again the naive character being tricked and teased by the antagonists you have a bindle containing various tokens they're drawn for both players and ain't randomly but for the players their usefulness will vary for the hate they're always useful and sometimes depending on scenario you'll also add certain events to the bundle some of these are great and some of them feel like an utter waste of time because you've drawn them at the wrong moment you'll spend action after action trying to get to the right token or event that you know must be in there but it's just not coming out and without it you have no hope of succeeding at the scenario this isn't really a criticism as with any game that has randomized sizes sometimes you'll luck out and sometimes you'll crap out but it can be a bit frustrating if you worked so hard together and you are nearly there for everything to freeze at the last hurdle dice gambling making a bet for your life making a deal with the devil that's more than recurring Motif in rubber hose often in reference to or including links between Black Culture gambling and inference of immorality lots of games use dice as randomizers so I'm not sure there's a link but it's interesting that the randomization mechanism is also a gambling device your funds are limited but as they say the more you bet the luckier you get you can choose the actions you want to take but you have a limited amount of coins to place on your action spots you're literally placing money on an action and taking a bet on it the more you spend the more likely you are to succeed of course this could be coincidental but what are the odds it certainly feels odd considering the Revival of rubber hose animation sprung from the Smash Hit success of cuphead a video game that courted similar controversies over its use of the art style and has been extensively covered by others I'll leave a link here to a video by YouTube's most famous talking skull Sean and yet here we are again rubber hose gambling making a deal with the devil if you have a look at the artist's original Concepts the style was very different maybe it was changed to give it a sillier less threatening tone and it does achieve that while being stuck on a train full of ghosts tapped into a surrealist dream like nature reminiscent of Fleischer at no point does it feel like a nightmare it feels like an adventure and one that you succeed on together and Adventure is what I want the style is what I want but I also want the game to understand what comes with it frankly I want it to get away with it I don't think there's even anything particularly wrong with borrowing so many disparate Concepts from Real World History or cultural mythology many artists have done that and have gotten away with it because they understood what the stories were trying to say what sprung them in the first place and they use their own work to continue continue those conversations adapting topics to the current times I want board games that are richer than cubes in space but the problem with Rich adventurous settings is that they need more work than just picking apples for Your Meme basket vagrant songs seems to incorporate a variety of North American socio-cultural experiences but doesn't present any of it as such I don't expect games to be bastions of education but for me learning stories of other people is a joy and so far all that vibrant song has taught me is that the people who made it well they thought some stuff in the world was cool but hey it's only a game right few that was a tough video but I hope you enjoyed it board game biographies requires an extensive amount of research on a multitude of topics so if you would like to see more please consider propping us up in any way you can like subscribe or comment or best of all talk to other people about it you can also support us through patreon.com forward slash no pun included where you'll get access to our lovely friendly Discord community and a few other bits plus you also get to see your name at the end of our videos or whatever name you choose to give us thank you so much for being part of this journey foreign [Music] [Music] foreign

Channel: No Pun Included

Views: 31,331

Keywords: no pun included, board game, review, npi, boardgames, boardgamegeeks, brettspiel, brettspiele, jeuxdesociete, tabletop, games, juego de mesa, gamenight, 2022, susd, shut up and sit down, watch it played, dice tower, efka, elaine, vagrantsong, board game biographies, wyrd miniatures, wyrd games

Id: cphK0L8swQI

Length: 31min 2sec (1862 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 09 2022