Grayshade: Dark Fantasy Novels and RPG for 5E

Grayshade--who he is, and who I am.
over 2 years ago – Mon, Jun 20, 2022 at 12:33:17 AM

Hi all,

As we continue with Day 3 of the Grayshade Kickstarter, we continue to be in excellent shape in terms of overall funding, and we're so grateful to all of you who have joined us so far. If you haven't already done so, a comment on the Kickstarter here and spreading the word with #GrayAssassin makes a big difference--thanks for helping to make this project even bigger and more comprehensive!

I originally planned to do an update regarding my vision for Grayshade...and then, something happened yesterday which made me realize something even more important about these books, the game, and the world of Grayshade. So I'm going to share the thread I sent out late last night after thinking about Grayshade's importance for me, formatted for regular paragraph reading; it's a bit intense, but I hope it will resonate with some of you as it seems to have resonated with people on Twitter. And be on the lookout for our update tomorrow from Brandon O'Brien, who has a truly extraordinary update on faith and redemption you won't want to miss.

Yesterday, @karohemd said something on Twitter I've heard many times before: "the assassin on the cover even looks like you." In the past I've kind of handwaved that comment away: "I don't think he looks THAT much like me, I certainly didn't plan it that way, etc. etc. etc." I'm not offended by the suggestion...and there is a certain, I don't know, family resemblance. :P But this time, something struck me. I'm not sure I was aware of it, but it's true: Grayshade, in a real way, IS me, and I need to admit it. 

I'd like to think I get along well with lots of people. I genuinely LIKE people (well, many of them), and my friends are important to me. But if I'm being completely honest, I've always kept myself at a bit of a reserve. I had to, when I was younger, to survive. I was terribly bullied as a kid, basically from 7th grade through my junior year of high school, when it started to get easier. But for that five year stretch, I had every bad thing you could imagine thrown my way, and not many ways to protect myself or get help from others. I'm a Gen X-er, and every Gen X'er knows that bullying then was largely sanitized by popular media and ignored by figures of authority. It wouldn't even occur to many of us to ask for help--we were the Latch Key generation, who had to figure out stuff on our own anyway. 

So I tried. I failed. And as people flicked my ears in the hallway, spit in my salad during lunch, pushed me downstairs, shoved me into lockers, punched me in the stomach, hit me in the head with 2x4s (none of this is hyperbole; this all happened), I felt I had nowhere to go. 

Even after it got better, there were relapses. Alcohol-induced rages in my college dorm from floor residents, pounding on my door, *BANG BANG BANG* "Open up you mother-f*****, I saw you staring at me" (I wasn't) "judging me" (I wasn't) "you piece of s***" *BANG BANG BANG* My college roommate, also drunk, a shot put athlete, pressing me into the couch, threatening my life because I beat him at Street Fighter. I was told these things were partly my fault: "You weren't drinking, can you see how that made them feel?" My feelings were irrelevant. 

I knew of no one to appeal to, no one else who would listen. So I retreated behind a smile. I couldn't survive more hurt, so I wouldn't allow others to hurt me. I would be kind and caring--always--but preserve my safety behind a wall of reserve. There, inside my fortress, I would suffer, but surely the pain inside the fortress was better than annihilation outside of it. The years passed, I got married, I had children, and the reserve with them lessened, then fell away. For them, the risk seemed worth it. And it was. 

But the hurt, the pain, the trauma remained, in physical and psychological ways working on my body. I told no one outside my family, because I was afraid. Tell my colleagues, and what will I get but pity and doubt of my abilities? Tell my friends--especially writing ones--and what will that do but mark me as an unstable, odd person whom you can't trust with a friendship or a career? And God forbid I tell readers. Reveal weakness and everyone will use it to hurt you. Everyone always has. 

Then came Grayshade, a book which I began to write after the birth of my daughter, inspired by an 80s TV show about an agent who goes rogue because he can no longer suffer in silence, wants only to help people, which I thought of at first as a simple secret agent tale. It is, in a way, a simple tale about a rogue agent in a dark city, and you can certainly enjoy it on that level. But what karohemd's comment finally brought home to me yesterday is that I've been avoiding talking about the other levels, levels which cut far deeper. 

Grayshade himself retreated behind a wall of reserve long before the book begins, the result of the need to pull back from others, to protect himself from the corrosive effect of death upon death, even those he thought were righteous ones. He can have allies, not friends. But as the book tries to show, this is a fool's game. You cannot have a conscience and be protected from monstrous actions. You cannot face trauma after trauma and not pay a price for facing them. Eventually, even the strongest walls fall, and the carnage is terrible. I know. Eventually, there will be a reckoning. The result of that reckoning is much of what occupies The Gray Assassin Trilogy. It is also much of what occupies my real life--sorting through the destroyed remnants when the wall of reserve falls. 

I fear it is a mistake to publish this thread, that I am exposing far too much--not that I worry any more about bullies, but that I am not being professional enough here, careful, cautious, as is my personality. Yet I think it is important, because I want to talk about hope--yes, hope, that strange, foolish, ineffable thing. Even through all the darkness, there is a thread of hope in Grayshade, one born of defiance and conscience despite all his misjudgments. Perhaps he can have a family and friends--ones to protect instead of orders to follow. And I have hope too. Trauma remains, but I am seeing it, and learning about it, and working to integrate it and heal from it. Pain endures, but so do I, and I don't have to do it alone, behind a wall of my own making. I can step outside, and join friends and family there. I will.

So: Grayshade is indeed me, or at least a part of me is within him. I hope I'm a better person than he is, and I could never do what he once did. But I admire him--the part of him which endured, and the part of him which ultimately rejected that endurance as antiquated. 

We think our #GrayAssassin Kickstarter has many things you'll like, no matter what your background is. But for those looking for a tale of hope from despair, I hope you'll consider it. It is partly my story, and it turns out, I am proud to tell it.

From Brandon O'Brien: Why I Love Grayshade
over 2 years ago – Mon, Jun 20, 2022 at 12:32:45 AM

Hello, all! It’s me, Brandon!

Thank you all for supporting Grayshade! I’m sure I speak for the rest of the team when I say that we are thoroughly impressed by the love (and the big numbers!) you have shared for this trilogy and TTRPG so far. I’m excited to see this story continue, and I’m even more excited that so many of you are as well.

I’ve only known Greg for a few years at this point, and he has proved to be an astounding triple threat: a brilliant and careful writer, a thoughtful and considerate teacher and critic, and a dear friend. Talking about fiction and poetry with him as a colleague and playing roleplaying games with him as part of Speculate! has been one of the highlights of my writing life, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But let me tell you: to me, Greg also being the writer of a book like Grayshade is a kind of serendipity to me.

Without getting into the whole long story, I have a lot of very strong personal feelings about faith, how it can be used as a tool of hurt and coercion, and what it means to be faithful in the world. I don’t presently identify as religious, in part because my experience of religious life—growing up in a religious household, attending a denominational high school as a teen, and at one time having strong personal relationships with deeply devout folks—has been fraught, at once full of remarkable beauty and courage, alongside deep acrimony and terror. Religious thought and practice can be a tool for profound wisdom as well as extreme control and violence. Often it can be hard to even broach the topic of what makes someone a religious extremist, how one escapes that cycle of violence, and whether they can still reconcile their belief with that past.

So the story of a man having a similar experience is really moving to me. What I really love about Grayshade as a character is that he not only learns that there is a depth to the world he had scarcely imagined in his prior beliefs, but he is still struggling to believe in something. It isn’t the story of a man who has lost faith that there is anything wonderful in the world—only in whether that wonder was being concealed from him this entire time, just to keep him as an unknowing tool of state violence.

Society loves to tell the story of people who join cult organisations, or extremist militias, or even just children of an incredibly puritanical religious household, as if they are either pitiful, gullible lost souls who will always waver in spirit, or reckless, brutal people whose troubles are a lot for us to share compassion with. They’re either lost or filled with darkness or too destitute for our help to get them through—always too much, too weird, too dark, too far gone, in too deep for us to truly invest in. “Such a shame,” we might say—“but what can you do about it?”

Grayshade, to me, extends so much more compassion to the people who find themselves in such spiritual places. It imagines them as conflicted, yes, but never incapable of experiencing true wonder in the spirit. It imagines their journey back to faith as a struggle, yes, but it doesn’t consider its protagonist to be too naïve to settle on a belief, nor too closed-off by his traumas to open his spirit to one. It imagines the journey back into belief as a long one, filled with sorrow and ache, but also with absolution and restoration, with potential comfort and learning as its destination.

I’m excited to see this trilogy come to life because I am excited to read more of this grizzled assassin’s journey through this very particular struggle. I’m sure I have told Greg this to his face already (and it’d be weird if this update is the first he’s hearing of it), but Grayshade is the kind of book I wish I had read when I was a teenager, and I am grateful to have read it now.

Your support will help us tell the rest of that story, and I hope that it can do for many readers what it had done for me in reading it, and what I’m sure it’s done for Greg in writing it.

Please follow Brandon O'Brien on Twitter and check out his poetry book Can You Sign My Tentacle?

Find books and social media links for Atthis Arts at atthisarts.com and please consider subscribing to our new Atthis Arts Sketchbook on Patreon, featuring global experimental fiction. Thanks for your support!