{"id":124,"date":"2007-01-02T03:48:49","date_gmt":"2007-01-02T06:48:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/index.php\/2007\/01\/02\/the-core-of-the-houdini-thing\/"},"modified":"2007-01-02T03:48:49","modified_gmt":"2007-01-02T06:48:49","slug":"the-core-of-the-houdini-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/2007\/the-core-of-the-houdini-thing","title":{"rendered":"The Core of the Houdini Thing"},"content":{"rendered":"

From The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero<\/em> by William Kalush and Larry Sloman:<\/p>\n

One particularly alluring performer was the beautiful Evatima Tardo, who would allow herself to be bitten on her bare shoulder by a rattlesnake, be impaled on a makeshift cross, and have her face and neck used as a cushion for dozens of pins. Her amazing tolerance for pain and resistance to poison came from an incident in her childhood in Cuba where she was bitten by a fer-de-lance, the most poisonous snake in the hemisphere. Houdini was smitten both by her beauty and her showmanship; while undergoing some of these tortures, she would blithely laugh and sing. Her end was grisly, however. Although immune to pain and poison, she fell victim to love and bullets, dying in a double-murder-suicide love triangle.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I can’t find any pics of this fascinating character. A tragedy. So, imagine, if you will, a fiction game in which the protagonists are each a performer in a wandering troupe. Maybe they’re a circus, or maybe they’re a traveling family. But two things we know for sure: they’re almost supernaturally competent at what they can do, and they’re jealous, angry, in love with, and fearful of each other in varying proportions.<\/p>\n

First run around the barn will use The Mountain Witch<\/a>‘s very elegant rules. Things will evolve as required, I’m sure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero by William Kalush and Larry Sloman: One particularly alluring performer was the beautiful Evatima Tardo, who would allow herself to be bitten on her bare shoulder by a rattlesnake, be impaled on a makeshift cross, and have her face and neck used as … Continue reading “The Core of the Houdini Thing”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-design"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/35"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}