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Archive for December, 2010
Thursday, December 30th, 2010
Continuing the series I started on Monday, I’m wrapping up the things I enjoyed most from the past year. It’s been an eventful year for pen-and-paper rpgs, with the resurrection of not one, but two beloved franchises. There’s been a lot of chaff too, but let’s concentrate on the good stuff.
Dark Sun once again graces the table of people who like their fantasy post-apocalyptic and dark. I’ve praised this before in these electronic pages, and it should be no surprise to see it in my list for top picks this year. It is, simply, the best use of the 4e engine so far, modifying the set-up to create a world that feels on the verge of total collapse.
On the Post Apocalyptic front, I finally had a chance to play the new version of Gamma World. It’s just as over the top and crazy as it has always been, and possibly even more so. Mutations rise and fall in the heroes, while technology is dangerous and unreliable. Character generation is random and quick, and players aren’t expected to live long. It’s a blast.
My winner for great games this year though has to be Fiasco. It’s a loose, narrativist rpg designed to set up the kinds of nightmarish failed heist stories that make for some of my favorite movies (Big Lebowski, Snatch, Fargo and the like.) Invariably, it spirals out of control and everything falls apart, and in the breaking becomes even more entertaining. Highly recommended.
Of course, any recap of the year in RPGs would be empty if I didn’t mention Paizo’s Pathfinder, for which I’ve written a bit of fiction. If you like your D&D more pulpy and a little old school, (but not retro-clone levels of old-school). It’s a good time, with some great settings.
Tags: Best of 2010, Dark Sun Rocks, Fiasco, nerdPride, Pathfinder
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Monday, December 27th, 2010
2010 is almost in the history books, and with it the first decade of the 21st century. (Sadly, still no flying cars.) I’m still trying to figure out where the time has actually gone. It seems like February was just a few weeks ago, not most of a year. Little to do but go forward, though.
I’m taking a break from the normal format here at the blog to give a recap of things I’ve loved that came out in the past year. It’s been a great year for a lot of fields, and certainly there’re plenty of things to point out on the off-hand chance you haven’t managed to find them on your own. Today I’m going to talk about ParRom, Wednesday will be Gaming, and Friday will be whatever oher things happen to pop up in my mind (as befits a potpourri day).
Two great new series kicked off in 2010, and I am hard pressed to decide which I enjoy more. Stacia Kane’s Downsider series (Unholy Ghosts, Unholy Magic, City of Ghosts) are a gritty post-apocalyptic supernatural series that doesn’t flinch away from the ugliness of life on the low. Chess Putnam is an addict, and makes Sookie Stackhouse look like the queen of good decision making. She’s a great heroine, and her foil/partnering with the criminal enforcer Terrible makes for compulsive reading. Further, Kane has given us great world-building, where the truth about life-after-death has been laid bare, and the world’s religions have collapsed as a result. Great stuff and highly recommended.
Completely different and no less addictive is Zoe Archer’s Blades of the Rose books (Warrior, Scoundrel, Rebel, and Stranger, plus a novella in Half Past Dead) are tied together by their world and themes, rather than by a specific character. Part Adventure-Romance, part Paranormal-Pulp, and all phenomenal her series follows the members of a secret society dedicated to protecting the world’s sources of magic from those who would corrupt them. The books span the world, including stories in England, the Canadian Backwoods, and Outer Mongolia and Archer manages to capture the feel of her locations and make them another character in her stories. The romances in each are as different as the characters involved, and don’t feel tacked-on as sometimes happens with adventure romance. I’ve loved each one of these books, and cannot recommend them enough.
So there you go – two great new series that have kicked off this year, and exploded onto the scene. Go, find them, and if you haven’t done so yet, buy and read them.
Tags: Best of 2010, Blades of the Rose, Downsiders, writing
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Friday, December 24th, 2010
It’s Christmas Eve, and in the spirit of such things, I feel it necessary to share a tale of Christmas Past, when I first saw the Holiday Classic “It’s a Wonderful Life”. Your humble narrator was but a wee lad back then, and was visiting his grnadparents. In those golden days, in the frozen north, my Uncle and I had decided to try out a new hamburger establishment while getting in some last minute shopping (and a spot of pinball for the holidays).
I remember it distinctly, even the relative deliciousness of the burger. It was a high point in my young life. Followed by one of the lows. About 3-4 hours later, both my Uncle and I were laid low by savage food poisoning. We spent our Christmas Eve in Quarrantine in his room, and we watched “Wonderful Life” on a scratchy black and white tv, through a haze of retching and anti-nausea drugs. I still claim that’s why I’ve such affection for that movie, and Jimmy Stewart in general.
And now, a few links -
- First, It made the rounds last week, but I didn’t get it linked in time, so if you’ve not seen it, now’s your chance to catch up – I love parrots, and I love Heavy Metal, but maybe you need to play a different song once in a while.
- No discussion of Birds and Metal would be complete without the original, the unstoppable Death Metal Rooster.
- Earlier in the week, I discussed Rare Exports. The feature length film got its start as an equally dark Finnish short film, which you can still find on YouTube. Warning – Features a fair bit of naked Father Christmas.
And with that, for those that celebrate them – Happy Holidays, whatever your holiday of choice may be, and to All a Good Night.
Tags: Ancient and Unspeakable Horrors, Birds Love Metal, Holiday Havoc, Media Tie-Ins, Potpourri
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Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010
Solstice is behind us, and the days are once again stretching out towards summer (even if it doesn’t particularly feel like it yet.) In that spirit, I’ve gone a little Holiday Mad around the electronic homestead, and all three posts this week will be in the spirit of the holidays. But I’m trying to remain faithful to the spirit of the planned days as well: Writing on Monday, Gaming and Knitting on Wednesday and the Friday Grab-bag I like to call Potpourri.
I could talk a bit about my holiday knitting – in fact, my original plan was to discuss one of my proudest knitting gifts. Watching a now-adult brother still wear his Hogwarts House Scarf in the winter because he’s so proud of it never fails to bring me a smile and a little feeling of awesomeness in my chest for coming up with the exact right gift. I could say a lot about it.
Then I saw Raw Exports: A Christmas Tale, and I threw that idea out the window.
Let me be clear – I love horror gaming. It’s hard to do well, and I’ve been blessed to have a string of groups that came together for those magical moments of genuine terror. Most of those came around some variant of Call of Cthulhu (or more recently, the superlative re-imagining “Trail of Cthulhu”) and it is that sense of digging too deep into things Man Was Not Meant To Know that really made Rare Exports come alive.
For those not in the know, the plot of Rare Exports is this – An American Mining Company breaks open the ancient tomb where the Laplanders managed to imprison Santa Claus, and all hell breaks loose. Because this isn’t the friendly Santa that Coca Cola sold you on. This is Joulupukki, the Yule Goat, and he’s come to punish the wicked children, rather than reward the good. The Lovecraftian weirdness pervades the movie (beyond the rendering of Santa as an ancient evil), and there’s even the requisite Tome of Forbidden Knowledge (appropriately The Truth About Santa).
I came up with a half-dozen ways to ransack Rare Exports for a one-off scenario –telling the story from other points of view, or letting other Holiday symbols run amuck (The Krampus / Zwarte Piet occupies a place of honor on my holiday tree, right below Gordie Howe). I suspect I’ll put my friends through the holiday wringer sooner rather than later.
As for Rare Exports – the film is in limited US release (I am fortunate to have a very good art theatre locally) but if you get the chance, go see it. It may not dethrone the Holiday classics (like Die Hard and National Lamppon’s Christmas Vacation), but it’s earned a place alongside them.
Tags: Ancient and Unspeakable Horrors, Cthulhu, gaming, Holiday Havoc, knitting, Movie Views
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Monday, December 20th, 2010
The long night of Winter Solstice is almost upon us, occurring for the first time in over 400 years in conjunction with a lunar eclipse. There’s a lot to be said for that sort thing. It just feels momentous. The majority of writers I know personally are a superstitious lot – with writing in favorite rooms, or with certain brands of pens, or after observing certain rituals. Over and over I’ve heard tell of the nightmares of trying to produce new words while Mercury is in retrograde, or how good or bad someone’s relationship with their muse might be.
One of the things I try to think about when I create a character is their little superstitions. Whether it’s a common “wives tale” in a fantasy setting, or simply a particular habit of an individual, it’s the little superstitions that make characters feel more rounded. It sometimes also makes them come off a bit eccentric, but that’s the point.
I’ve been working on a new story, with limited success (no doubt to the aforementioned Mercury in retrograde) but one of the things I’ve tried very hard to do is throw away some of my superstitious crutches. I write in other places than my office. I push myself out of my comfort zone, partly to remind myself that I don’t need those other things. Partly, I am reinforcing the belief in my mind that “A writer writes. No matter what.”
I encourage each of you to stretch yourself in some way, as the days stretch out once again. Write with joy and write with abandon. Most of all, just write.
Happy holidays, whatever your holiday of choice may be.
Tags: character, Holiday Havoc, my methods, Write with Joy, writing
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Friday, December 17th, 2010
Three weeks in a row. I think I may finally be back in the swing of things with this whole blog posting thing. Of course, now it’s the holiday season, when things promise to be much harder. Regardless, it’s another Friday, and that means it’s time for the glories of Potpourri link-dumps.
- First, as I pointed out, it’s the holiday season. Still not sure what to get your loved ones? How about some awesome Sci-Fi Romance? Impulse Power (featuring moi) is out in Print, just in time for the Feast of Alvis.
- So it turns out Fruit Flies show a biological type of Free Will (as opposed to philosophical Free Will, or Freewill off Rush’s seminal album Permanent Waves). Given identical sets of stimuli they tend to respond in predictable, but different, patterns.
- Pregnancy blog Pregnant Chicken did an entry on Awkward pregnancy photos – it’s… awkward actually sums it up pretty well. Let us say that the WTF is fast and furious. (Warning – one artsy NSFW photo at the bottom of the page)
- (With thanks to writing partner C.A. Young) I learned this week that, once again, the Glastonbury Thorn has been vandalized. People who do this sort of thing sadden me beyond words.
- While speaking to epic legends, the first real trailer for Thor is out. I’m guardedly optimistic about this one. Certainly, if you want to capture the Shakespearean melodrama of the old Thor comics, you could get a worse director than Brannagh. And certainly, our norse hero looks suitably impressive in the armor. And out. Rowr.
Tags: Hearts and Minds, Impulse Power, nerdPride, Potpourri, Rush, Samhain, SF Romance, Some things shouldn't be photographed
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Wednesday, December 15th, 2010
Yes, it’s two game posts in a row. My knitting isn’t going well, so you all have to suffer the consequences. Besides, I realized when I mentioned Shock last week, that many people may not have heard of it (or indeed most, as like most Indie RPGs it has far too small an audience compared to the big dogs). This is my attempt to hopefully let even one more person know this exceptional game is out there.
Superlatives actually fail. I say things like exceptional or best or incredible far too often around here, and that weakens their sting. If I ever meant the words before, I mean them here – Shock: Social Science Fiction is the hands-down best SF rpg ever written. The reason why is simple – most SF games concentrate on the bang-zoom factor, the spaceships and laser guns and everything else. Shock turns that on its head by concentrating on the social issues the technology brings. Players choose a single “Shock” – the big SF thing that makes the world most different from now – and then each proposes an issue (often ripped from the headlines or science section of the paper) to be one of the issues explored in the game.
For example, if Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner were a Shock game, the Shock would likely be “Near-/Super- Human Replicants” while the issues might be “Nature of Humanity,” “Slavery” and “Fallibility/malleability of memory”.
Each player creates three characters , their primary character, and two minor characters (the ally of one player and the antagonist of another). Further, each of the primary characters is tied to a specific issue (so Roy Batty might be tied to “Nature of Humanity” or “Slavery” for example) guaranteeing that the issues get explored in that character’s scenes.
If it sounds like heady stuff, it is. I’ve never played a happy game of Shock, but I have also never played a game of Shock that wasn’t thought provoking and insightful. It plays like the greatest SF stories read, filled with fallible characters stumbling towards their own personal redemptions, against a backdrop that reflects their struggles rather than feeling divorced from it. If you are interested in a different RPG experience than the mainstream, I cannot recommend it enough.
PS – in pulling up the link for this, I learned that Shock: Human Contact has passed its Kickstarter goal and will be out in February. Suffice to say, I’ve already got mine ordered.
Tags: Best RPG Ever, gaming, Indie Press, obsession, Social SF
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Monday, December 13th, 2010
I love cyberpunk, and near-future sci-fi of all stripes for that matter. I’ve been writing a bit of that, lately, and in so doing I began to think about how much the world has changed since William Gibson first coined the phrase cyberspace.
Time was, cyberpunk tended to confine itself to the pacific rim nations – Japan, California, and the ever-popular Seattle. With the exception of George Alec Effinger’s brilliant Marîd Audran series (set in the Middle East) cyberpunk showed a decidedly Western view of the way things were headed. It was the 90s, the dot-com bubble hadn’t burst and the future was heading towards us full throttle.
Now the Naughties, or the Nothings, or whatever we want to call the first decade of the 21st century are coming to a close, and the prospective for the world and the future is significantly different. America’s technological edge is waning, and other countries are nipping at our heels. It makes the cyberpunk of our past seem quaint and antiquated.
Cyberpunk is growing to meet this changing world, however. For example, Ian McDonald’s River of Gods – set in India on the hundredth anniversary of its statehood. In addition to showing a future of decidedly non-western bent, it does much with the changing sexual topography of the world and with increasing tensions between religions.
When working on my current story, I needed to come up with a setting that recognized both the changing current world and reasonable future. Rather than India, I’ve picked out the glittering jewels of the UAE. Overflowing with wealth and with a significant class dichotomy between the Emiratis and the migrant workers who live there – it is a playground for the glitterati and is easy to transform into what I hope makes for compelling and believable cyberpunk.
Tags: Cyberpunk, Sci-Fi Now, SF Romance, writing
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Friday, December 10th, 2010
It’s another week, another linkdump of random awesomeness. I’ve seen plenty to keep me scared this week, and that’s no lie. But I’ve also seen some awesome, for which I am partly responsible. *grin* I’ve decided to share both.
- If somehow you’ve missed it, this week saw the print release of Impulse Power. If you like your SF with a healthy dash of Romance, this is the collection for you, it features Nathalie Gray’s Metal Reign, Robert Appleton’s The Mythmakers and of course my own Hearts and Minds. Go get a dead tree version for your shelf! http://samhainpublishing.com/print/impulse-power-print
- While we’re talking Space Opera – it’s the holiday season, and what better way to show your geekly spirit than with a few Star Wars Paper Snowflakes: http://dancell.cwahi.net/star-wars-paper-snowflakes.html
- My Writing Partner recently sent me a link to Saya in Underworld, a translation site for dark and horrific stories from Japan. The author also has a love for cursed videos, though I’m not foolish enough to have watched any of them. If you’re braver thanI, go check out http://sayainunderworld.blogspot.com/
- Finally, nothing chills the heart like the end of an Empire, especially when the Empire is your own. For fascinating and all-too-easy-to-believe discussion on the Fall of America as a global power, check out http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-12-06/taking-down-america
- I lied – I’ve come back to add another link this morning, after reading it swelled my heart with pride, and made me proud to be a dyed-in-the-wool Star Wars Geek: http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/12/09/katie.starwars.geek/ May the Force be with you, Katie.
Tags: Hearts and Minds, Holiday Havoc, Nightmares of Mine, Proud to be Geek, Samhain, SF Romance, Star Wars
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Wednesday, December 8th, 2010
So I am a lucky nerd, or so I’m told, and have had occasion to balance not one but two game nights in my monthly schedule. Sure it’s not the heyday of college, but when you’re a band of professionals old enough to know better, well, it’s a goodly amount. Regardless, the important point is that in addition to my Dark Sun game (currently on hiatus for the holidays) I am also playing in a second group that has recently started up Diaspora.
Diaspora, for those not in the know, is a Hard(-ish) SF game using the Fate system. Players represent people from a collection of systems linked together, but otherwise separate from the rest of the broad spectrum of humanity, which goes through phases of growth and collapse. It does a lot of things right, and gives an opportunity to make some great SF along the way (Not Shock-level great, but that’s a different review).
One of the things I like most is the way it handles world and character building. All the players are involved in creating the systems, and finding linkages between them that explain their sometimes unusual connections. Character development requires you to create ties to the characters around you, with each character playing a pivotal role in another character’s moment of crisis. In all, it’s a compelling game, with a lot to offer for folks who like independent games or science fiction. Set up takes a long time, but the investment in the setting makes it rewarding and worthwhile.
Tags: Diaspora, Fate, gaming, Indie Press
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