| Speaking of Christmas Gifts... |
[Dec. 16th, 2009|10:46 am] |
Speaking of Christmas Gifts...
It's still a really good time to get that gamer you know a gift subscription to Dungeonaday.com.
Every weekday, the gift recipient will get a new encounter, building an entire campaign. These encounters are all organized by hyperlinks to each other and a massive glossary so the information is all right there at the member's fingertips. Each week there's at least two new journal entries from me with behind the scenes information, design explanations, and DM tips. Each month there's at least three or four special bonus encounters and articles offering adventure hooks, player information, and background. There's also a podcast, forums, and more.
Like all yearly members, the new member will not only get new content every day but will be able to download the compiled PDFs of each level as we collect them. |
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| Poblano Corn Chowder |
[Dec. 16th, 2009|09:42 am] |
Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there. This is an alternative version (though not much changed) of a recipe I found by “Mudflower” over on Recipezaar. I change a few methods here and there to make the preparation easier, and often make a one and a half times sized recipe, which just fills our ten quart pot (so you’ll want a reasonably large one even when making the regular amount). The soup that results is really damn good — spicy, for sure, but with a lot of flavor surrounding that heat, lots of nicely developed corn flavor.
You can look at the original recipe if you like at the link above, but I’m going to supply my take on it here, embellished by the experience of making it several times. Takes between 1 and 2 hours to get to the result, depending on how slow you are (I tend to be a bit slow). Enjoy!
Read the rest of this entry » |
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| Blood and Guts In Carthage |
[Dec. 16th, 2009|09:20 am] |
Can you ID, without the aid of Google, the author behind the following passage of heroic bad-assery?
Matho had at first refrained from fighting, the better to command the Barbarians all at once. By degrees he had drawn near; the smell of blood, the sight of carnage, and the tumult of clarions had at last made his heart leap. Then he had gone back into his tent, and throwing off his cuirass had taken his lion's skin as being more convenient for battle. The snout fitted upon his head, bordering his face with a circle of fangs; the two fore-paws were crossed upon his breast, and the claws of the hinder ones fell beneath his knees.
He had kept on his strong waist-belt, wherein gleamed a two-edged axe, and with his great sword in both hands he had dashed impetuously through the breach. Like a pruner cutting willow-branches and trying to strike off as much as possible so as to make the more money, he marched along mowing down the Carthaginians around him. Those who tried to seize him in flank he knocked down with blows of the pommel; when they attacked him in front he ran them through; if they fled he clove them. Two men leaped together upon his back; he bounded backwards against a gate and crushed them. His sword fell and rose. It shivered on the angle of a wall. Then he took his heavy axe, and front and rear he ripped up the Carthaginians like a flock of sheep. Is it Robert E. Howard? Fritz Leiber?
Those of you with the smug smiles on your faces already know the answer — it’s Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary. This is from Salammbo, his 1862 follow-up novel, a thrilling exercise in blood and thunder set during the mercenary revolt against Carthage in the third century BC.
I was not hip to this until recently, when I came across a reference to it in the midst of some research into the surrealist movement of the 20s and 30s. According to the Wikipedia, it’s not well known in English. (It’s perhaps better known as the source of several abortive operas by Mussorgsky and Rachmaninoff.) Its failure to earn a reputation in the English-language world isn’t surprising. Its unflinchingly gruesome violence is still shocking today, and it’s hard to imagine it earning an appreciative audience in Victorian literary salons. I was reminded in some ways of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Here, however, we get less of a sense of apocalyptic moral degradation as an immersion in an alien era that predates our sense of morality.
Flaubert exhaustively researched his subject matter, and any history or fantasy buff should check it out for the evocative density of its descriptions. Any GM worth her D20s will find it packed with eminently stealable images and situations. Take the battle that swings against the Carthaginians in the following manner:
They were re-forming their lines enraged at having been conquered without a fight, when they discovered a vat of petroleum which had no doubt been abandoned by the Carthaginians. Then Spendius had some pigs carried off from the farms, smeared them with bitumen, set them on fire, and drove them towards Utica.
The elephants were terrified by the flames and fled. The ground sloped upwards, javelins were thrown at them, and they turned back;—and with great blows of ivory and trampling feet they ripped up the Carthaginians, stifled them, flattened them. The Barbarians descended the hill behind them; the Punic camp, which was without entrenchments was sacked at the first rush, and the Carthaginians were crushed against the gates. It’s on Gutenberg, but the effect may be stronger on those around you if you grab a print copy. While you’re home with the family this holiday season, impress them with your literary prowess by busting out some Flaubert on them. They don’t have to know how pulpily thrilling it all is. |
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| Sha’Daa: Tales of the Apocalypse Review |
[Dec. 16th, 2009|12:45 pm] |
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/FlamesRising/~3/fqtBeioqhxo/ http://www.flamesrising.com/?p=4997
Available at Amazon.com
In his introduction to “Michael H. Hanson’s Sha’Daa: Tales of the Apocalypse” author Mike Resnick sates that is “not quite a round-robin novel by its many authors, but is somehow more than an anthology.”
That statement is an accurate one. This book has a total of ten separate stories, and ten additional short “interludes” between each story written by Michael H. Hanson. Hanson wrote one of the ten stories, as did editor Edward McKeown. The remaining eight stories are written by eight separate authors.
Each story is connected, however, by one over-arching theme and one or more re-occurring characters. For a 48-hour period occurring once every 10,000 years, a variety of demonic creatures known collectively as the Sha’Daa break through their Hell-dimension and come Earth. Each of the stories is an episode during the Sha’Daa attempt to come into this world. However, the mysterious character known as Johnny the Salesman appears in each story, often providing an item or artifact to one of the characters that will likely be helpful during his or her battle with the Sha’Daa, whether or not the character knows that item will in fact be used for that purpose.
Furthermore, the individual stories are sort of “bookended” by a prologue and an epilogue which deals with the goddess-being Akasa and her son Prana. Prana also appears in the last two stories as well — “Prana” by Hanson and “The Salesman” by Rob Adams — which lead into the final denouement of the epilogue.
Like most anthologies, some of the stories in Sha’Daa are better than others.
The first story is “The Dive” by McKeown, which is about public works department personnel fighting ape-faced demons in the New York sewer system. “Tunguska Outpact” by Deborah Koren is an excellent character study of a woman who accompanies her semi-abusive boyfriend to the famous Tunguska site in Russia. “Lava Lovers” by Wilson Pete Marsh has a married couple visiting a volcano near Greece when an eruption with demonic consequences occurs and their only hope of survival lies with an ancient sea captain. Arthur Sanchez’s “The Way of the Warrior” may be the best story in this book. This humorous story is about a young boy at a Buddhist monastery who, armed only with a mop and bucket of soap, must defend the compound from a demonic onslaught. “Breaking Even” by Jamie Schmidt has the fate of the entire universe at stake during a poker game between two higher (or is that lower?) beings. “Dixie Chrononauts” has Civil War re-enactors actually sent back in time to Gettysburg, along with an evil sorcerer and the professor who is trying to stop him. Adrienne Ray’s “The Great Nyuk-Nyuk” is also a humor-laden story. It is about a sarcastic boy who may be the only person to save the world if he can get a powerful demon-lord to actually laugh. “The Seventh Continent” by Lee Ann Kurganti is about the demomic invasion of Antartica at a military base. “Talking Heads” by Nancy Jackson is set on Easter Island during the Sha’Daa awakening and a group of students and islanders must stop it.
“Prana” is next, and is an interesting story about how a god could (or should) interfere with the mortal world. “The Salesman” provides the history of the most re-occurring character, Johnny, and that proves to be an excellent conclusion to the book.
Overall, Hanson and McKeown set high goals for this book. It is a hard-to-classify literary experiment and it deserves high praise for trying to break the mold of what constitutes an “anthology” or even “novel” of speculative fiction because it can be viewed either way.
However, some of the stories fall short of the goal they had set up for this book. Some of the stories are a bit longer than they should be, and some of them are simply not engaging enough. The same holds true for the interludes as well; some are interesting, and others make the reader simply wonder why they are part of this book.
Sha’Daa is worth the read if you are looking for something that is bit more experimental than the usual fare, although be aware its goals are bit more than its reach.
Review by Chris Welch
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| Irony |
[Dec. 16th, 2009|01:11 am] |
Me: Richard Dawkins Foundation is having a fundraiser.
Theist E-mail: If atheism is so popular, why do they need to ask for money?
Me: Why does God keep asking for it? |
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| i was here |
[Dec. 15th, 2009|11:07 pm] |
but i disappear
wait for somethin new in this space. around june. |
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| What You Get |
[Dec. 15th, 2009|09:39 pm] |
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http://gameplaywright.net/?p=1091 My four-year-old son has a saying: “You get what you get / And you don’t throw a fit.”
He brought it home from daycare. His teachers say that he didn’t learn it from them, so I can only assume that another kid in his classroom picked it up from parents who’re wiser than my wife and I. It’s a great saying.
I try to avoid reading forums like RPG.net. I imagine that a certain segment of said forum is currently soiling itself with distaste for the new Dragon Age RPG’s ability generation method, which boils down to randomly rolling 3d6 for the game’s main abilities. Its single deviation is that you’re allowed to swap two of your rolls once you’ve generated all eight. Rob Donoghue has written intelligently about this on his blog; make sure you continue reading down into the comments if the topic interests you.
My local gaming group has been playing Dragon Age for a little over a month, now. I’ve had the rules since August, when I started helping Chris Pramas develop material for the game. Set 1 was essentially locked down when I signed on; I’ve been working on downstream products.
On the day we created characters, one of my players (Hi, Kevin!) pointed out that RPG designers pretty roundly rejected totally random characteristic generation, oh, about 15 years ago, and were phasing it out well before then. Others were more sanguine about the idea that unexpected characteristics sometimes provide interesting roleplaying opportunities—your proverbial grain of sand giving rise to your proverbial pearl.
I definitely appreciate the benefits of both build systems and random systems. Random generation gives you fast character creation, and unexpected results that can provide rewarding opportunities, the kind of creative limitation that often leads to really great stuff. But randomness can also completely hose you in critical gameplay situations. A character who’s bad at combat in a deadly game is often screwed from the get-go. Build systems can be fun mini-games of their own, and there’s no doubt that they let you get excited and make just the character you want.
Each approach’s basic benefits and drawbacks aside, I think the characteristic generation system in Dragon Age is exactly correct for the game that it is. The basic premise of Dragon Age—the roleplaying game if not the computer game—is that you make moral choices that matter. But the choices apply inside the setting, not outside it. In Thedas, you’re dealt a hand—and sometimes it’s a crappy one, where all the options are bad—and you make choices about how you’re going to play it out. What are you willing to give up? What are you going to champion even if it literally kills you? Which of two horrible options are you most okay with?
Put another way, the Dragon Age world isn’t a “point-build” setting, and so Dragon Age characters aren’t point-build heroes.
You get what you get, and you don’t throw a fit. |
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| Christmas card on line |
[Dec. 15th, 2009|08:40 pm] |
I've put this year's Xmas card on line, once again a triumph of Victoriana:
Illustration here
Double sided PDF (print double-sided then fold double) here
Single sided teeny PDF (print single-sided and fold twice) here
They're all fairly small files. |
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| Knights of the Hidden Sun: Inspired by Star Wars Done Right |
[Dec. 15th, 2009|03:01 pm] |
Originally published at Mobunited.com. Please leave any comments there. It started with a Star Wars game. I loved the old West End version of the RPG but had always run and never played. I was ecstatic when I found a handmade poster in my LGS requesting players for a local game. I was so elated a friend ordered me to “stop beaming.” The next week, I met up with this new group and that session changed the way I saw RPGs forever.
Before Star Wars, my modules worked much like a standard Knights of the Dinner Table session. The PCs would be a group of strangers who united under some nebulous pretext. We’d find a dungeon filled with traps and monsters. We’d avoid the traps, kill the monsters and take their stuff. Along the way the PCs would try to outdo each other in carnage. Crits were politely applauded, fumbles would be met with mocking scorn. I’ll admit it was fun and besides, I had no idea there was any other way to play.
The Star Wars game I walked into was a new kind of beast. The GM ran it like a movie. He had a soundtrack, celebrity portraits for NPCS and detailed maps that were drawn to look like something out of an official supplement. What truly stood out however, was his pacing. He kept the game moving. Our characters ran from one scene to the next at breakneck speed. He didn’t give us time to argue rules. We didn’t measure out 5 foot blocks on dungeon maps in order to calculate the volume of our grenade explosions – we threw and prayed. An action round involved more than move, hit and damage. We had to weave through traffic, leap across rooftops and dodge explosions in the thick of the fight. The GM seemed intent on using the universe to kill our characters. We loved it.
The players in this group were amazing. Something happened with them that I had never seen before. Near the start of the first session our characters had to chase down a rebel leader on a monorail. It was leaving the station when we arrived. Every character but mine succeeded on the roll to jump on the train. My ended up clinging to the side for dear life. In my old group she would have just died. Everyone would laugh and the game would continue while I found a new sheet. This time, without hesitation, a player informed the GM that his character was smashing through the window, grabbing my character, and pulling her in. I was floored by the idea of a party where PCs looked out for each other. Of course, the GM had given us a good in-character reason to work together form the start. We were an Imperial Special Ops team who had worked together for years.
Needless to say, it was one of the best gaming experiences of my life.
This has coloured how I run my games since and it’s also heavily influenced how I’ve written Knights of the Hidden Sun. I want my game to play like a movie. I want Knights to look out for each other, and I’ve designed tools to help other GMs do this:
- I’ve added a Hazard System to the Ready 2 Run core rules (used in Aeternal Legends) so that characters can jump through windows, pull innocent civilians from harm and run through an exploding dreadnought in the midst of combat.
- Characters start the game knowing each other; they’ve trained together for five years before starting their first mission.
- The reward system is designed to encourage teamwork, not showboating. Of one person does something cool, everyone wins.
If you can easily run this game like a high-octane action flick then I’ll consider this project a success. |
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| Some Last Minute Gift Ideas |
[Dec. 15th, 2009|01:39 pm] |
Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there. I tend to leave my Tuesdays and Thursdays blank on Deadly Fredly; it doesn’t look like I have it in me to post daily, at least not yet. Need to get those creaky-tired muscles operational again, and need to leave time for stuff that isn’t blogging. You know, the stuff that gets me paid. As such you’ll see me occasionally fill these days with really short posts-of-the-moment, while the Monday/Wednesday/Friday stuff gets some greater length and forethought.
Today I push two things at you that deserve your money, and which may well work as excellent, cheap, last minute gifts.
I’ll likely return to these subjects again in later posts, but for now, I’m focusing solely on putting them out there and getting your eyeballs on ‘em.
Jennifer Rodgers’ Etsy Store: Jennifer is one of my favorite people and a very talented artist. When it turned out that we wanted to go for color in the Dresden Files RPG instead of our original notions of a black and white book, Jennifer’s the first artist I thought of, and with good reason: she has an incredible eye for color, and her art trends towards the twisted, supernatural, and dark. All good things in my book, and she did not disappoint with the DF work. Her Etsy store features gift cards and the occasional print or other art object. Anyway: Give her your dollars, stat, via her store!
Josh Roby’s Rooksbridge: Josh has designed some great games that bang around in the “indie” scene — Full Light, Full Steam and Sons of Liberty to name two. But so what? He has clearly missed, and now hopefully found, his calling as a fiction writer. Rooksbridge is his venture into this, publishing a series of interlinked but free-standing short stories set in a fantasy world that’s a lot of dirt and politics and a little bit of magic. Sort of like an episodic fantasy TV show in text form. Really solid stuff. I’m still reading through the stories, but I was taken with the free-in-PDF story Dirty Work and I think you will be, too. (I’m less taken with the audio versions of the fiction so far but there’s a lot that goes into whether or not that presentation will click for an individual. For my taset I’d rather Josh focus on the text alone.) The rest of the Rooksbridge stories can be bought cheaply, which makes them perfect stocking stuffers in an age when stockings can be virtual and your friends and family are scattered all over creation. Take a few minutes to become part of the Rooksbridge audience — if not as a holiday present to you or family and friends, then as a present to Josh for the work he’s doing here. It’s worth noting (and perhaps legally mandated) that I mention that I got my hands on the Rooksbridge stories for free via Josh, but there’s no way in hell I’d be talking about them if they hadn’t punched my buttons. |
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