Robin D. Laws

The Once and Future Vice-President

2012-02-28T09:20:00.001-05:00

A Ripped From the History Books scenario premise for Trail of Cthulhu

It is 1936. Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace, hailed for his New Deal innovations, is easily the most mystical of cabinet secretary in US history. A self-proclaimed spiritual seeker of Theosophist bent, he openly connects his occult beliefs to his liberal politics. He even convinced fellow mason Franklin Roosevelt to pluck the Great Seal, with its eye and pyramid design, from obscurity to a new spot on the back of the dollar bill.

Neither man knows it yet, but in four years Wallace will become Vice-President. Someone who does know this is the New England dowser and sorcerer Eliphas Haslam, who has learned to perceive non-linear time. Using spells of soul migration acquired from Joseph Curwen, the terminally cancer-ridden Haslam aims to possess a new body before his old one dies.

Both he, Wallace and at least one of the PCs are on the guest list of a seeker’s conference outside Arkham. The action begins when a car crashes into a telephone pole outside the resort hotel where the conference is convening. Haslam, the sole passenger, is dead inside the car—but impossibly, seems to have been dead for hours!

The horrible truth is that Haslam managed to anchor his soul in his dead body long enough to reach the conference and migrate his soul to another of the guests. (The spell only works on hosts who have opened themselves to occult perception—which includes not only every participant at the conference, but any PC with a rating in Occult or Cthulhu Mythos.) He’d hoped to take Wallace’s body, so he could ride it to the coming Vice-Presidency, then kill Roosevelt and become President. But, despite the setback, the weekend is young, Wallace is still at hand, and Haslam may yet body-hop his way to the White House.

Core Book Structure

2012-02-27T09:23:00.001-05:00

Or, How To Design RPGs the Robin Laws Way (Part Five of Several; see part one for introduction and disclaimer)

Having determined the core activity and design throughline, I outline, and thus structure, the book. I ask myself first of all if either of the fundamental elements call for a nonstandard structure. If not, I start with a chapter order arising from the idea of a core activity. A roleplaying game is about the characters and what they do. Ergo, the book should start with character generation. Often this entails the provision of enough context about the setting to make decisions about the characters players are designing. So I likely kick off with a quick overview of the world, universe or what have you. The rest of the first section of the book follows the step-by-step of character generation. Into this process I try to build mirrors of the design throughline: the listed decisions, and the order in which you make them, arises from the core subject matter and emotional experience of the game. HeroQuest wants you think of your characters as part of a narrative and so (among alternate choices) asks you to start with a 100-word prose description of your character. DramaSystem focuses on drama and so asks you to first establish your role in relationship to other characters and the two opposing poles that will drive your actions. GUMSHOE privileges investigation over other activities and so presents the investigative abilities before the general ones.

Subsets of character generation then appear, from most to least important, from universal to those germane to only certain character types. Almost every designer does this, whether they articulate it this way or in some other manner they find intuitive.

After this come the core rules, which enable you to understand the stuff you've just written on your character sheet. For complex resolution systems an introductory precis may appear up top, with more detail later on, so that players understand enough to make good decisions.

After this I usually cover the setting material, because it's more fun to read, and perhaps more specific to the game, than explanatory material like GM support and play style advice. The further into a book I get, the less I expect players, rather than the GM, to grapple with its contents.

Then, if the game uses them, comes the sample adventure. Given the choice I try for as complete an example as possible. I look on the sample scenario as an extended play style example and setter of expectations. My feeling is that a truncated or perfunctory scenario that merely tries to teach you the rules is a missed opportunity at best and actively misleading at best.

Last come the appendices, reference sheets, and other bits of useful support material that aren't part of the body of the book per se.

Whether you order things like I do or not, the careful thought you pour into this question may not matter. A certain percentage of people jump around in roleplaying games to find the bits that most interest them, and then fill in the gaps. But even as they do so, they likely notice the structure and, subliminally if nothing else, learn what you're telling them from your placement order.

Momentum, With or Without Fiery Motorcycles

2012-02-24T09:19:00.001-05:00

Okay, so I was stoked for a Neveldine / Taylor take on Ghost Rider. Here’s how to enjoy Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. Wait for DVD or another fast-forwardable medium. Skip every moment, except for those in which a) something is on fire or b) Nicolas Cage is delivering lines (voice over not included.)

The goal of Johnny Blaze, like so many Marvel heroes, is to stop being the character we’ve signed up to see. He becomes a tag-a-long in his own movie, with the weirdo priest Moreau, played by Idris Elba, supplying most of the motivation. For a movie patterned on Terminator 2, in which the hero has to stop the devil from capturing a child, there’s way too much explanation going on. In other words, the script, apparently cut down from a much more elaborate version predating the original film, sadly leaves the duck in.

It’s still way better than the first one, low bar that this may be. The action is agreeably gonzo and there are some great gags. For additional entertainment value, imagine that this Johnny Blaze is not the guy from the first movie, but rather a cursed version of the Cage character from Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Hey, they both went out with Eva Mendes.

I bring this up not to slag the movie, but to look to the lesson in narrative construction it provides. Films, action flicks in particular, live and die not only on the content of the set pieces, but on the momentum between scenes. Whether they build in one direction, or converge from two or more, it’s the way the scenes connect that keep us engaged.

This doesn’t apply only to films featuring flaming skull-headed vigilantes. The genius of Citizen Kane, and the propulsion it sustains despite its achronological story order, derives from the brilliance of its scene transitions.

Here lies a key distinction between movies and roleplaying sessions. In the latter, players value freedom of choice and action over momentum. They want to control the pace, often stopping to slow it down so they can go back and add interstitial action a screenwriter would cut to elide. For the GM, the trick is to ensure that the action moves a median pace that splits the difference between methodical players and those who prefer to keep it moving.

The Birds: Poorly

2012-02-23T09:24:00.001-05:00

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Leaving the Duck In

2012-02-22T09:25:00.001-05:00

In their book How To Write Movies for ~~Fun and~~ Profit, Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon explain why so many Hollywood movies quote, suck donkey balls, unquote. Studio pictures notoriously cycle through writers as execs quest for the chimerical ideal balance between elements that will draw in audiences, leaving those who greenlit them unfired. As projects go through draft after draft, characters and concepts accrete to the screenplay. When a film feels like an unrealized mishmash, it’s because those elements survived to the shooting script, when though the moments they were meant to support didn’t, and are now nowhere to be seen.

The example they cite concerns the for tough-guy-meets-kids comedy, The Pacifier, which, when they first worked on it, was meant to star Jackie Chan. In their version, Jackie brings the children a live duck. Their faces light up in excitement. Jackie gets out his meat cleaver, ready to cut off the duck’s head, to prepare it for dinner. The children, being westerners, react in horror. So that's why The Pacifier prominently features a pet duck. Except that Chan dropped out of the project, which ultimately starred Vin Diesel. The meat cleaver gag got cut, because it made no sense with a non-Asian actor.

But the duck stayed in the movie.

We can extrapolate this into a saying, which we can mutter knowingly to one another as we depart in disappointment from a film that obviously lost its coherence during development hell.

“Wow, that one sure left the duck in.”

The Classical Monster No One Wants To Fight

2012-02-21T09:20:00.001-05:00

A common project of the AD&D days was the scouring of classical and world mythology for creatures that might be statted up and sent off to duke it out with dungeon-exploring adventuring parties. Some imaginary beasties, it transpires, are more equal than others. No death could be more honorable than that faced by characters falling before a chimera, basilisk or hydra—especially if temporary. Other classical creatures, like the peryton, seem like candidates for a monster reboot. It’s especially embarrassing to be killed by a creature that is likely not classical at all, but a recondite joke of Jorge Luis Borges’.

The divide between the purely mythical creature and mistaken belief about real animals also blurs the picture. Linnaeus, as he systematized taxonomy in the 18^th century, still accepted the mermaid as a likely animal, if not a hybrid of woman and fish.

Earlier still, Aristotle’s confusion over the identity of the European buffalo led him to record the existence of one creature no one wants in a roleplaying bestiary, even though it’s totally clear what its attack form would be. This animal was given various names, including the catoblepas, and confused for an entire menagerie of creatures. Here’s the animal Aristotle assigns to one such name.

Aristotle described the bonasus as being capable of “projecting its excrement to a distance of eight yards…the excrement is so pungent that the hair of hunting dogs is burnt off by it.”

– from Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science, Carol Kaesuk Yoon

Despite the delight of twelve year old boys everywhere—or rather, because of it—the poor, imaginary bonasus never made it to the pages of a Monster Manual. And doubtless never will. Among the deaths too horrible to contemplate, demise by bonasus ranks humiliatingly high on the list.

Top Ten Movies 2011

2012-02-17T10:07:00.001-05:00

With Oscar season barreling down upon us, it occurs to me that I haven’t yet posted my 2011 Top Ten Movies list. I was thinking I’d get out and catch a last few likely candidates, but, as always, they will have to go sit in the asterisk pile.

The Tree of Life
Poetry
13 Assassins
Drive
Incendies
Hugo
Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
Into the Abyss
The Trip
House of Pleasures

Foreign-language and indie titles led my list this year. Because the rolling—that’s how I do it. I was going to link to the obscurer picks, but hey, you have the same Google I do. Most of these are already on disc. My highest-ranked blockbuster would be X-Men: First Class, coming in at #13.

Might have made the list if I’d seen them: Melancholia, Take Shelter, Moneyball.

Film festival screenings still pending theatrical release are not included, but may pop up on the 2012 list. Some of these I saw at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival, although they came out last year. As always, because I live in a great film town and know how to pick films I’ll probably like, I dub 2011 a good year for film. I have 43 films on my 2011 list and would recommend thirty of them.

The Birds: No Idea

2012-02-16T09:23:00.001-05:00

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In Defense of the Whiff Factor

2012-02-15T09:23:00.001-05:00

The pacing of roleplaying sessions improves when the GM follows a simple principle: never ask for a roll if failure would lead to a dead end or other uninteresting result. This principle appears in various guises in GUMSHOE, HeroQuest, and the 4e Dungeon Master’s Guide 2.

Sometimes though, as in this recent discussion of what the DNDNext team might profitably nick from GUMSHOE, it becomes important to distinguish between an uninteresting result and a setback that makes the player unhappy.

Specifically, the so-called “whiff factor”, or prospect of rolling during combat and missing, is unrelated to the null result issue. Swinging and missing represents a loss for the player. In a mainline roleplaying game, the number of actions you can take in the course of a fight acts as an uber-resource. When you use them successfully, you whittle down your opponent’s supply of another resource, usually hit points. (Or free slots on a wound track, or whatever.) When you roll and miss an opponent, something has definitely happened—you’ve fallen behind, losing a chance to score.

Likewise, a shot on goal in a hockey game never leads to a null result. The player either scores, or has lost a chance to score, a resource the dynamic of the game works to restrict. In either case, the emotional crescendo becomes apparent in the stands. If the player scores, his team cheers. If he misses, the defending goalie’s team cheers.

Criticism may be leveled at a combat system where characters fail too often, dragging out the fight and undercutting the players’ sense of vicarious competence. But that’s a matter of striking a satisfying balance between success and failure, not of eliminating non-events.

A system may try to overcome its whiff factor by granting consolation prizes to players, in which they deal a lot of damage on a success and a smaller quantity on a failure. The question to ask here is whether that’s blunting the emotional rollercoaster of success and failure, or merely putting a new coat of paint on a skewed ratio between the two.

Informational Rescue

2012-02-14T09:24:00.001-05:00

A Ripped From the Headlines Scenario Premise for Ashen Stars

As this article reveals, the conversion of mortgages into complex financial instruments did more than provoke the 2008 global financial meltdown. The data-tracking process used to spin fragments of mortgages off into a tradeable derivative—creating a sort of mortgage slurry, if you will—now makes it impossible to determine whether homeowners, banks, investors, or anyone at all really owns certain real-world property. A nebulously owned property can’t be used as collateral, undermining a key value of everyday finance.

Speaking of slicing and dicing, this springboards a scenario that perfectly fits the Ashen Stars setting, where information loss has been one of the prices paid by a former stellar utopia torn at the seams by recent warfare.

Unlike most planets of the Combine, the synthculture planet Trump’s World practiced 20^th century capitalism –albeit in idealized, tourist-park form—even before the Mohilar War. Private ownership of property underpinned this historical reenactment economy. Now info-saboteurs have struck at the heart of the system, scrambling the worldwide property database. The PCs are hired to track down the McGuffin on which the entire economy rests—the single accurate copy of the pre-disaster real estate registry. Complicating the mission: plenty of Trump’s World moguls want the database back up—after they get a chance to fiddle with it, just a little…

Why A Core Activity Is Not a Straightjacket

2012-02-13T11:55:00.001-05:00

How To Design Games the Robin Laws Way

(Part Four of Several; see part one for introduction and disclaimer)

In the last installment of How To Design Games the Robin Laws way, I mentioned off-handedly that D&D is a game about killing monsters and taking their stuff, and that this determines the way it approaches certain sub-systems, like Perception. Another game, which has a different core activity or design throughline, might do these things differently—as GUMSHOE does.

The idea that D&D is a game about killing monsters and taking their stuff provoked some consternation. Gamers who are used to having their tastes slagged because they like D&D may be used to thinking of this as a slam*. Perish the thought! Without this clear, simple, escapist core activity, and D&D’s focus on it, we wouldn’t have a roleplaying hobby today. Nor would we have a huge swath of the video games that exist now. The phenomenal success of Warcraft, Skyrim and the like testify to the ongoing popularity of this core activity.

Nor does this mean that D&D can only be played as a game about killing monsters and taking their stuff. Because it is a roleplaying game—in some sectors, still the default roleplaying game—you can completely set aside that core activity, so that your D&D becomes a game about meeting people and learning their secrets. Or building your own power bloc as you whittle down those of your adversaries. Or of mapping dungeons and running away from monsters.

But it’s much easier to establish your alternate core activity if the one provided as a baseline is readily apparent and strongly realized. If told that they can do anything in a game, players get stumped. If told they can do X, they may do X, or they may decide to do Y instead. The presentation of a choice, even if that choice is rejected, orients players and allows them to test their desires against the expectations the game presents.

Because so many people know it and are comfortable with its assumptions, D&D is more likely than later games to be used in service of an alternate core activity. One of 4e’s strengths, its coherence and focus, became a stumbling block when some player constituencies found it hard to reconfigure to an alternate core activity. From this you might conclude that the platonic ideal D&D gets people playing with its entertaining and straightforward hook, but also remains elastic enough so that groups can decide to abandon that hook in favor of something else.

Newer games don’t face the burden of having to serve as default RPG and can afford to err in the direction of too much focus on the core activity. But, like D&D, they can’t do without one.

*Others raised semantic objections to the term killing. Because we all know there are tons of games out there in which the hardbitten adventurers mostly tickle the monsters and take their stuff.

The Birds: Bright Line

2012-02-10T09:21:00.001-05:00

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Scene Study: Luck

2012-02-09T09:15:00.001-05:00

With DramaSystem now out for playtest and wending its way toward crowdfunding, I’m kicking off a new occasional feature. In Scene Study, we look at dramatic scenes from other narrative forms, see how they tick, and look for lessons we can apply when playing Hillfolk, or roleplaying games in general.

The new David Milch / Michael Mann HBO series Luck follows an ensemble cast of race track habitues, from trainers to jockeys to owners to degenerate gamblers in pursuit of diverse agendas, all of which depend on the titular quality.

In episode two, freshly paroled gangland figure Chester Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) and his right-hand man Gus (Dennis Farina), recap events of the recent past while on a car ride. Gus drives, with Chester in the back. In Hamlet's Hit Points terms, the scene acts as a reveal. It tells us what both men already know about the events that led Chester to prison, and which motivate the revenge he’s now plotting against Mike, the confederate who let him take the rap for him.

On paper, you’re never supposed to write a scene in which two characters reveal information they already know. On screen, this plays as a transcendent acting duet, with the music of Milch’s stylized dialogue perfectly executed by two great actors.

It’s also a dramatic scene, in which Gus, the petitioner, seeks for something other than the facts. They are the pretext for something deeper. He’s drawing out the account of why Chester let himself take the fall to answer a question for himself. What he really wants from Chester is reassurance, a staple dramatic goal that often arises in Hillfolk games. He wants to know that they’re doing the right thing, that he shouldn't have killed the other guy, as Gus was willing to do.

Chester grants Gus his petition. By conceding that Mike would never have done the same for him if their positions were reversed, Chester shows Gus that he understands the situation. Reassured, Gus accepts the matter as closed. In a DramaSystem game, Chester’s player would earn a game currency called a drama token as reward for having satisfied the petitioner’s emotional need.

The scene shows that low-key interactions can be just as memorable as the higher-stakes confrontations that appear around them. No great heat passes between the two men. They remain cordial throughout, and Chester winds up giving Gus what he wants. The moment affirms the tightness of their friendship. A compelling scene needn’t turn on heated conflict. Here the answering of an audience question supplies all the interest we need to care about their exchange, to enjoy hearing these two guys talk.

Latest Update of the Yellow Sign

2012-02-08T09:23:00.001-05:00

For these past few months a mantle of quiet has settled on New Tales of the Yellow Sign, the collection of weird tales that will serve as my trial venture into ebook self-publishing. If the search terms section on my traffic stats is to believed, you, the Internet, have been anxiously looking for an update on this project for a while now. So here it is.

On Monday morning I found a delightful surprise in my inbox: the foreword to the book, written by master of mythos erudition Kenneth Hite. Entitled “I Pray God May Curse The Writer: Robert W. Chambers and Robin D. Laws” it is at once a lovely piece of writing, an incisive exploration of the stories and their horror pedigrees, and a source of great chuffedness around these parts. As Ken says:

All of these New Tales of the Yellow Sign orbit lost Carcosa, black star points poked through the white scrim of consensus reality by the force of Chambers’ book. But each swings past on its own trajectory, a mix of styles and concerns in counterpoint to Chambers’ unified “Gallic studio atmosphere” of the Yellow Decade. Each story launches itself in fugue from one (or more) of Chambers’ originals, passages that Laws plays adagio or largo on different instruments, plays for modern dancers and not Victorian wallflowers.

With this chip off Ken’s busy schedule gratefully in hand, I’m now ready to move forward. Next steps: a solid, professional proofreading, and finalizing the cover. Jerome Huguenin, the illustrator and graphic designer responsible for the distinct visual presentations of The Esoterrorists, Trail of Cthulhu, and Ashen Stars, has created a beautifully creepy modern take on the pallid mask image central to Robert Chambers’ King in Yellow mythology. Now we’re hashing out title treatment, with an eye to the punishingly small 88 x 135 size book images display on the Amazon website. It’s much like designing a postage stamp. If you zip over to Amazon or any similar book site, you'll quickly note the covers that work in that format and those that resolve into a blur.

I look forward to sharing our process with you as we shoot for the former and shrink from the latter.

Ashen Stars Combat Options

2012-02-07T09:22:00.001-05:00

The Jan/Feb See P. XX includes, among previously mentioned goodies, additional combat options for Ashen Stars. Start with this consideration of suppression fire as it applies to non-lethal beam weapons. Then move onto a collection of optional butt-kicking rules adapted to Ashen Stars from the Esoterror Fact Book. Add extra space opera flavor to them with a series of viroware enhancements.

Or start with the zine page for a cornucopia of columns, updates, announcements, and at least one cannibal conspiracy.

The Birds: Objectivist

2012-02-06T09:47:00.001-05:00

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Five Keys To Punchier Prose

2012-02-03T09:20:00.000-05:00

Although I’m not a line developer or editor for the GUMSHOE line, the Head Pelgrane occasionally asks me to comment on manuscripts in progress. Over time I’ve been able to see certain issues crop up in the work of multiple authors. This process has improved not only those books, but my own work. It’s easier to see problematic material in someone else’s draft than in your own. Manuscript review has also crystallized my thoughts on how GUMSHOE, and particularly its scenarios, might be refined and better presented.

Continue reading at See P. XX…

Or jump to the See P. XX Jan/Feb zine page for a cornucopia of columns, updates, announcements, and at least one cannibal conspiracy.

Hillfolk Now Open For Playtesting

2012-02-02T11:47:00.001-05:00

After months of teasing here on the blog and in sundry precincts of the gamersphere, Pelgrane Press and I are now soliciting outside playtest reports for Hillfolk, the first DramaSystem game. Hillfolk features the saga of iron age raiders struggling to protect and enrich their clan at a time of clashing empires. DramaSystem fosters a dynamic between players and GM allowing them to collectively create a compelling, serial story of emotional need and personal conflict.

Its features:

Long term story play. DramaSystem arises from the story games school of roleplaying game design, which privileges the exploration of narrative over other design goals, such as strategic decision-making, tactical butt-kicking, or the simulation of imaginary environments. Story games typically focus on delivering a fun and challenging one-time story that wraps up in a single sitting. DramaSystem shines in long-term play, in which a group unfolds an improvised narrative over an extended period, during which they come to relate to the characters as they would to the protagonists of their favorite ongoing television drama.

Easier to GM: Unlike some justly acclaimed story games, DramaSystem retains the role of Game Moderator, a participant apart from the rest who guides action and pacing and provides necessary rules interpretations. In this it is more like a mainstream or traditional roleplaying game. However, its events are entirely created in the moment, sparing the GM the usual lengthy prep work required by those games.

Harder to GM: Where GMs in traditional games have nearly unlimited power to shape the narrative by determining the obstacles PCs face, DramaSystem doles out their interventions in measured quantities. That makes the effort of pushing the story in the direction you want more of a challenge, with game-like tactical elements. Working within the limitations becomes part of the fun. You can never predict the outcome of any episode, giving you a sense of surprise and suspense you don’t get in games granting you near omnipotence.

Click the tag for previous Hillfolk / DramaSystem posts. Here’s an early actual play report.

My main goal for this playtest is to learn how much of the game is already on the page, and how much additional guidance and exegesis the text requires.

To participate, please contact Beth Lewis at Pelgrane.

We’ll be launching a crowd-funded campaign to fund the project next month.

Haywire

2012-02-01T08:24:00.001-05:00

Those of you who like their formalist art films punctuated by bouts of vicious hand-to-hand combat are advised to hie themselves to Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire. MMA fighter Gina Carano stars as a private contractor at the cross-section of crime and espionage who embarks on a mission of vengeance after her employer and ex-lover (Ewan McGregor) sets her up for a hit. Like many of Soderbergh’s genre pieces, its classical narrative acts as a framework for giddy stylistic exploration.

The dusty, desaturated color palette and score by David Holmes recall a 70s that never was. A sonically muted firefight on the streets of Barcelona presents a fresh take on the gun battle. Like any action director of note, he goes wide for the fight sequences, allowing us to see the choreography. It draws on the MMA style in an opened-up way that isn’t just grapples, balancing realism with bone-crunching impact.

For an obvious source of inspiration, see Jon Boorman’s classic revenge drama Point Blank, with Lee Marvin. Soderbergh appears on the commentary track in conversation, raising it above the default back-patting to a master class in atmospheric crime drama.

Today, rather than trying to teach fighters how to act, we tend to see actors trained to fight. Roles that might once have gone to Steven Seagal now go to Liam Neeson. In that light Carano represents a bit of a throwback. She’s not super-expressive as an actress, even after extensive post-production manipulation of her vocal track. But she does have presence, and unmistakable plausibility as a bad-ass, even in the non-combat sequences. In that she’s a throwback to Bronson and van Damme.

See it for its own hyper-cool virtues, and for the atmospheric inspiration it might lend your Night’s Black Agents series.

The Birds: Immoderate

2012-01-31T10:04:00.001-05:00

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Reboot Lab

2012-01-30T09:37:00.001-05:00

In an October Legends and Lore column that in retrospect veritably drips with hints, Monte Cook contemplates the legacy of the D&D property through its four editions worth of monsters. Should nostalgia for iterations past require updates of old beasties, or are certain creatures too lame to preserve?

Here one might take a page from the world of comics. The reboot that makes a previously lame character cool and creepy has already gone from an innovative move pioneered by the likes of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman to a decadent cliché attempted by just about everyone.

As we’ve yet to run this idea into the ground in gaming, it might be fun to reconfigure the silly monsters of yore into dread beings no party wants to meet in a dark dungeon corridor.

To dip into the 4E continuity while it’s still current... when the mind flayer empire of Nihilath dominated the world, its rulers made a terrible example out of rebels. Their champions were borne to experimental laboratories, where illithid wizards created horrible new forms of life. They removed prisoner’s brain tissue, using it as the basis for vat-grown guardian organisms. The resulting creatures can still be found, aeons later, floating through the Underdark. Appallingly, they retain fragments of their original identities. Their eternal torment manifests as a psychic aura that assaults the minds of any hapless explorers who come upon them. The vat survivors never truly die, but if defeated in combat fall over onto their jelly-like backs. During their torpor it is possible to gain flashes of insight into their ancient lives, which sometimes prove useful while exploring the ruins of Nihilath. Or sometimes drive the experiencer to madness. Folios of monstrous lore refer to these entities as soulscreamers, or by their name in the gnomish tongue—flumph.

The Forest Game

2012-01-27T09:35:00.001-05:00

A Ripped From the Headlines Plot Premise For The Esoterrorists

When viral videos appear on the Internet documenting a mystery sound heard in farflung locations throughout the world, skeptics declare them obvious fakes. It doesn’t take a sound engineer to tell that they’re electronically generated, possibly from a sample of the Godzilla scream.

But the Ordo Veritatis knows that a hoax, no matter how transparent, can touch off supernatural events, if it opens vulnerable minds to the possibilities of the supernatural. As its governmental contacts take the videos down, the PC investigation team heads to the Alberta first nations reserve where some joker has been broadcasting weird noises in the forest. But as they attempt to triangulate his location, they realize that a portal to the dreaded Outer Dark has already opened—and they’ve just walked through it. In a borderland mixing qualities of Earth with that of the terrible beyond, hunted by predatory entities, they must find and neutralize the hoaxer’s speaker setup—and hope they wind up on the right side of the gateway when it closes.

Style Notes for Anthropomorphic Prose

2012-01-26T10:02:00.001-05:00

[Posted without context, but also, by popular request.]

Fable convention has it that we meet one member of each animal type, and his species name is treated as his given name:

Frog and Badger went down to the lake where they saw that Duck had polluted it with his motorboat.

Treat the species names of such characters as proper names, capitalized accordingly, without the indefinite article. References to groups of creatures would not be capitalized, and would use the definite article:

“I am happy to be a bald eagle,” Bald Eagle said.

That is all.

The Design Throughline, and How To Implement It

2012-01-25T10:10:00.001-05:00

Or, How To Design RPGs the Robin Laws Way (Part Three of Several; see part one for introduction and disclaimer)

After a longer-than-planned hiatus, let’s jump back in. Last time I discussed the design throughline, the central concept underlying game play, as one of two fundamental elements I want to determine as the very first step of creating an RPG.

During the design process, the design throughline becomes a benchmark against which I test new rules. It's easy to get sidetracked when designing a subsystem and lose track of the entire rules set's ultimate purpose. To do this it often becomes necessary to articulate additional principles that flow from the design throughline. GUMSHOE's design throughline concerns the facilitation of investigative play. For this reason it seeks to emulate mystery-based fictional sources rather than simulate reality using a physics engine. It aims to be simple, to allow players to focus their brainpower on the overarching meaning of the clues they assemble. In turn, for both of those reasons, it strives to make its rules player-facing. For example, rather than have adversaries roll to see if they detect you when you're hiding, players roll to beat a Difficulty, expressed in the adversary's stats, to see if they've successfully hidden.

D&D doesn't do that, which makes sense, because Dungeons and Dragons is a game about killing monsters and taking their stuff. Having the stats for monsters operate independently of, while interlocking with, the stats for the characters, fits that game's implicit design throughline.

Sometimes I find myself falling back on the core assumptions of previous games. They're familiar and understandable to current players. Compromises with the design throughline may sometimes be justified for this reason: people can absorb only so much new stuff in one go.

As I revise a rules set—either during original design or over time in follow-up products—I often find myself altering material to bring it line with the throughline. Sometimes it takes a while for the implications of the throughline to become clear. We've implemented the player-facing principle more consistently over GUMSHOE's various iterations, as it has become clearer to us.

When a rule causes trouble, or starts feeling wrong, I ask myself if it has taken on a logic of its own at odds with the design throughline. The first iteration of GUMSHOE space combat got away from me because I fell into a level of detail that, while not exactly simulative, set aside the simplicity and abstraction found in the rest of the system. The new version succeeds by back to the design throughline and its implications and restoring those qualities.

The Birds: Shirk

2012-01-24T10:11:00.001-05:00

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DoubleGoogle+Good

2012-01-23T10:18:00.001-05:00

Last summer, Internet-shaking events of cataclysmic import took place within weeks of one another. One, Google launched its social networking site, Google+. Two, in a long overdue move prompted by repeated denial of service attacks at LiveJournal, I switched this blog’s main venue to Blogger.

Had I anticipated the benefit of Blogger’s better analytics, I might have switched way earlier. Given the timing, those beautifully formatted traffic stats have mapped the incredible progress of links placed on Google+ as a driver of traffic to the site.

Social media links now bring the vast majority of readers to this site. The days of following a blog, either by RSS feed or repeated visits to an aggregator like the LJ friends page, are gone, at least for this virtual clubhouse.

At first, the three sites drove traffic to the site in roughly equal measures. This itself is amazing when you consider the brand-newness of G+ at the time. Since then Facebook’s share of that pie has shriveled to nearly nothing. Last week’s referring sites tally (as of Tuesday evening) ranks Twitter at 47%, G+ at 37%, and Facebook at a mere 6%.

Twitter’s share goes up when a post gets a lot of play, as The D&DNext post did last week. Retweets evidently carry more weight than shares on Google.

By contrast, here’s the pie for the Blogger site to date:

Here Twitter and G+ are nearly equal, with the newer platform actually squeaking out ahead of its blue-feathered elder. Facebook’s slice is bigger than in the weekly chart, reflecting its greater pull during the site’s first months. LiveJournal links are from the old site to the new; these have tapered off as readers have adjusted to the shift. The Google slice represents search results. I’m not sure whether the Bit.ly links are strays from my own social network links or were created by others.

What I conclude from this is that Facebook has fallen away as a mechanism for people like me to communicate with a broader audience. This is unsurprising; Twitter and G+ were designed for this purpose, where Facebook’s focus has always been on assembling, decompartmentalizing, and cross-pollinating your personal contacts. The surprise is how quickly the change effected itself.

What you might conclude from this is that if you are also trying to maintain contact with an audience and are not on Google+, you probably ought to be. I might enjoy some first mover advantage for having dived in right away, but it’s still early days for the new platform and there still appears to be mindshare to spare.

Who Killed SOPA?

2012-01-20T11:35:00.001-05:00

SOPA died last night.

If you’re a member of the MPAA team tasked with shepherding this bill into Congress and getting it passed into law, you started the week hoping the bill would move quietly through the system as an uncontroversial piece of commercial regulation.*

Uncontroversial bills have to be bipartisan. So you appointed as your legislative spearhead a Texas Republican, and worked to get congressmen and senators from both sides of the aisle to support the bill.

Depending on which conservative interest he favors, a Republican lawmaker might align for or against balls-to-the-wall intellectual property enforcement. It advantages** a lucrative industry, one in which America enjoys a worldwide upper hand. On the other hand, that industry is Hollywood, whose content social conservatives love to hate.

Unfortunately for you, MPAA lobbyist, there's a primary on. The primary system may be a crazy way to pick a president, but it’s a fabulous way to figure out which stances work with voters. And last night all four primary contenders intuited that slamming Hollywood played better for them than supporting its industrial interests. In one brief round of answers they cemented the anti-SOPA position as the Republican default.

This doesn’t mean that Democrats will line up in favor of SOPA. They too can pick either side of the fight and remain within their interests or ideology.

But even if you keep the Democrats on board, you second-person MPAA representative, you, the issue won’t go back to being bipartisan again. Worst case, you lose both parties. Best case, you get a partisan battle, which will be protracted, heavily publicized, and, with the system’s profusion of veto points, is unlikely to resolve in your favor.

The Internet generation may have whittled down SOPA’s hit points with blackout day, but it was the Romney-Gingrich-Santorum-Paul adventuring party that scores the kill-steal.

*To nurture this hope, you would have to forget that the sector you want to regulate, information tech, is as big if not bigger than the entertainment industry, and better positioned to mobilize public opinion. But let’s leave that aside for the moment.

**If it works as claimed. But let’s leave that aside for the moment.

Uncrossing the D&D Setting Streams

2012-01-19T09:32:00.001-05:00

Reverance Pavane, regarding my earlier D&DNext wish list:

Forgot to ask about what you are looking for in an official setting...

I don’t so much have a single clear preference as an awareness of the difficulty the D&DNext team faces in harmonizing the streams on this one. You want DMs to create their own worlds from the set of assumptions the rules build into any D&D game—there are wizards and gods and orcs and demons and this particular spell list and so on. At the same time, a canon of lore has accumulated around D&D, so that its audience expects certain characters, places and situations as part of their experience. Obvious examples: Sigil, the drow and their Underdark cities, and the roster of demon lords that slightly shifts with each new take on the setting. To many fans, these are as much a part of the D&D feel as magic swords or the fireball spell.

3E’s original vision had a vaguely defined Greyhawk (which each DM would make up as he went along) as the default world, with the classic settings depicted in walled-off supplements. 4E split the difference a bit, leaving the material world undefined but concretely populating the otherworldly spaces.

A unity edition suggests a breadth of approach, giving fans of the classic settings the tools to play around in them, and kitbashers the leeway to disentangle the intellectual property elements from the rules. Perhaps the team will find a way to treat past continuities in parallel, so you can adventure across the Forgotten Realms in original, reboot, or rereboot modes. A take on setting that is, if you will, officially unofficial.

So, where setting is concerned, my hoped-for keywords would be familiarity for current fans, accessibility for new ones, and flexibility for all.

The Birds: Remember

2012-01-18T09:58:00.001-05:00

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Community, Comedy & DramaSystem

2012-01-17T09:53:00.001-05:00

Benjamin Hayward asks:

After watching the first season of Community sequentially, I was struck by how much it's characters resemble Dramatic Heroes much more than Iconic ones in their decisions despite the show being advertised as a sitcom. Reading the DVD box reveals all. The show is supposedly about how attending college changes the characters through the lessons they learn. In this way, the characters all slowly change throughout the season, with some doing so more than others in each episode. Have you watched enough of Community to comment on how Drama System might fit it? Or perhaps how Drama System might fit serial comedy in general?

I haven’t subjected comedy to the same analysis that I have drama and the procedural, so consider these thoughts provisional. Blame Aristotle for losing the treatise on comedy that originally accompanied The Poetics. If only he’d backed up to a USB drive!

Comedies tend, like procedurals, to threaten the characters’ status quo and then return to it. The leads aren’t solving external problems as the iconic heroes of procedural stories do. Iconic heroes encounter disorder and tame it. Comedy protagonists tend to instigate disorder (often by pursuing an internal flaw, just like tragic heroes), which continues to spiral out of control in response to their efforts to control it. Finally the disorder reaches a culmination. The hero, undone, confronts his flaw and all is forgiven and order restored.

The equivalent of the procedural would be the slapstick or physical obstacle: the accelerating conveyor belt, the clock hand from which the hero dangles, the damnable road runner who won’t be caught. Moments of character comedy play out just as dramas do—there’s a petitioner who wants something, a granter who does or doesn’t give it to them. Because of these similarities you could play a sitcom format with DramaSystem—though I’m not sure who really wants to. It’s easier to be funny by riffing on a putatively serious game than to keep the jokes flying on purpose.

Community creator Dan Harmon sets out to subvert sitcom conventions and as such bends his characters much further out of their original molds than the audience’s comfort level might permit. This becomes all the more apparent after Season One. Still, you could argue that whatever changes the characters go through, or surprising qualities they reveal about themselves, the study group itself—the real community the show’s title refers to—is restored to harmony at the end of each episode.

D&DNext Wish List

2012-01-16T11:07:00.001-05:00

The announcement for the upcoming new version of Dungeons & Dragons positions it as an Ecumenical Council for tabletop roleplaying's flagship title. Reuniting the disparate partisans of the dread Edition Wars under a single new banner is a tough brief. The Mearls-Cook-Cordell-Schwalb team comprises a formidable brain trust--one well-wired into the sometimes paradoxical demands of the gamer tribe. So I'm very curious to see what they draw from each past version as they assemble this Uber-edition. Given my past freelancing for the line, the possibility exists that I might get to see what they're up to—and thus be unable to talk about it. So, before that happens, here's my list, untainted by actual information, of what I'd hope to see swept into the new iteration.

Of course the vastness of the challenge is that everybody will have a different list.

Concise, manageable, easy-to-design creature stat blocks

On-line tools add ease of play

Alignment simplified and detached from mechanics

Open license as focus of community excitement

2nd Edition

Emphasis on setting (though this is a double-edged sword, as splitting the line into multiple settings started the great D&D diaspora)

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons

baseline tropes of the D&D feel (whatever that is, leaving out the dysfunctional ones)

prose style brimming with idiosyncratic personality

serves as introduction to the fantasy canon

Blue Box Introductory Set

fast combat

feeling of being a kid again

Comments that ignore the above conceit to simply stake out a prior position in the Edition Wars are permissible, but will be silently judged.

Headlines as Story Beats

2012-01-13T09:47:00.001-05:00

Hamlet's Hit Points identifies three basic story beats relating to the presentation of information. The pipe beat hides info for later, and as such is strictly a creature of fiction. The other two beats, the question and the reveal, are central to any narrative communication that seeks to attract and hold audience interest. Questions cause emotional friction or longing; reveals relieve these feelings. The first is a down beat, the second an up beat.

New stories can be broken down with beat analysis, too. The shoehorning of information into a storyline with emotional ups and downs becomes most apparent on television news. However, it’s present in print reporting as well.

However arranged, a newspaper or magazine headline poses a question. As much as it may seem to lay out the basics of a story, it’s really working to excite your imagination and formulate questions about its further details. The body of the story then proposes to answer that question, along with the core journalistic five Ws: what? Who? Where? When? Why? (And the red-headed stepchild, How?)

If you’re using social media to spread awareness, you can garner more clicks by hooking into the beat structure of headline and story. When you write a blurb on Twitter, Facebook, G+ or whatever to a post you want people to read, compose it so that it poses a question, in the reader’s mind if not directly. Reference to one of the 5Ws never hurts.

The hidden dynamic of the headline, and how to harness it.

Why ghouls are the next vampires.

Who are the players of the future?

When to eject dysfunctional gamers.

Of the 5Ws, the most clickable is the H. People want to know how to do things.

Other classic headline tricks attract clicks. Citing a number poses an implicit question. If your headline reads “Ten Mistakes GMs Make”, I’m immediately wondering which items you’ve chosen.

The Birds: Sorry

2012-01-12T09:20:00.000-05:00

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Cthulhu and Me

2012-01-11T09:25:00.001-05:00

Benjamin Hayward asks for my cthredentials:

You've been posting often about H. P. Lovecraft and Cthulhu on Twitter, Facebook, and here. Would you mind doing a blog entry talking about your first exposure to, favourite part of, interest in, and history with H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos?

I am among the first wave of readers who caught the Lovecraft bug from gaming. Call of Cthulhu came out when I was in high school; I bought it right away and was soon off to the Orillia public library to track down their copy of the Arkham House anthology The Dunwich Horror and Others, with its Lee Brown Coye cover. When Sandy Petersen’s game helped spur a resurgence of interest in Lovecraft, I grabbed the paperbacks as they showed up in the small Ontario city of my birth.

The story that I find most brilliant, innovative and influential as a piece of writing is “Call of Cthulhu”, with its documentary realism and disorienting, stories-within-stories structure.

The one that scared me the most was “Whisperer in Darkness”, perhaps because I mentally set it in an area I knew well from my childhood—not New England, but the stark landscape of Ontario’s Muskoka district. I also retain vivid sense memory of my first reading of the subtle and brilliant “The Color Out of Space.”

Lovecraft interests me on a couple of levels. The kid in me loves the outlandish details of its creatures. The geek responds to the quasi-continuity he builds as he adds to his corpus of stories, so that knowledge of one informs one’s responses to others. The group collaborative aspect with his peers is also appealing—and the reason the mythos sits in ambiguously in the public domain for anyone to play with. I appreciate him as an exponent of intellectual horror: it is as much about our fundamental aloneness as the fear of being torn apart by a star vampire or hound of Tindalos. In his mature work he is also a top-notch stylist, marrying prose to content in an uninhibited way we could use more of today.

For all of these reasons, I am glad to get to dip my toes in the icy Lovecraftian pool, both with works for Trail of Cthulhu, such as The Armitage Files, and as editor of the upcoming Shotguns v. Cthulhu fiction anthology for Stone Skin Press. There are also some other short fiction projects in the offing, which I’ll announce when the stars are right.

Minotaur Planet

2012-01-10T07:47:00.001-05:00

According to a conspiracy theory both odd and oddly un-sinister, a youthful Barack Obama, as part of a secret CIA program, used to teleport to Mars. Why, the official denials only serve to confirm it!

To rip this from the headlines into an Ashen Stars scenario...

Teleportation technology doesn't appear in the game setting. It's a notorious plot-hoser. And in a roleplaying game you never have to leave out an establishing shot of a shuttle for pacing or budgetary reasons.

With this in mind...

A wealthy woman hires the lasers to locate her missing daughter, Rika True. Like many missing persons contracts, the arrangement calls for them to bring to justice anyone responsible for any harm that may have come to her. Rika, they learn, was last seen applying for employment with the utopian Eden Corporation. They find the uncharted company world that serves as its headquarters: a lush paradise that provides Eden settlers with a life of ease and luxury. They discover that Rika won the coveted right to participate in an Eden teleport experiment. The experiment turns out to be a scam to feed willing volunteers to a bi-dimensional predatory entity. The twist: it's the entity that makes the planet inhabitable. If they destroy it or drive it away, the atmosphere immediately becomes toxic. Should the lasers reveal this to the populace, the residents decide that they'd rather continue the modest sacrifices than abandon their paradise. Do the lasers bring the system crashing down, as their contract demands, risking the lives of thousands?

Bring Back the Old-Timey Political Nickname

2012-01-09T09:26:00.001-05:00

I've started in on The Game of Thrones of political biography, Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson. The first volume, The Path to Power, begins by establishing the Texas political scene prior to LBJ's birth and during his childhood as the son of a Populist state representative.

As a savorer of political lore, I have to say that the modern era has lost one great element from the early part of the last century—the old-timey nickname. Honest Buck. Old Oxcart. Cactus Jack. Heck, I would settle for Pinky.

The trick is that the nicknames have to be favorable, bestowed by admirers. In the modern media environment unironic affection for political leaders is harder to find. Reagan had “the Gipper”, but he got it on loan from Hollywood. Margaret Thatcher's “the Iron Lady” cut both ways.

I'm too much the satirist to come up with straight-faced, old-timey-ish nicknames for current figures. Hillary “Pant Suit” Clinton? Michelle “Crazy Eye” Bachmann? Rick “Santorum” Santorum?

The best I can do is Barack “Long Game” Obama. Fans of the Steve's Dad candidate might go for Ron “Gold Standard” Paul.

What moniker would you bestow on the politician you admire?

The Birds: Coalition

2012-01-06T09:33:00.001-05:00

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Avoiding Foot-Mouth Proximity Incidents (Creator Interaction Edition)

2012-01-05T09:25:00.001-05:00

Now that you've had time to check out the podcast episode mentioned in yesterday's post, it's time for me to lay a little Rashomon on Joe's account of an awkward Gen Con moment . To recap, Joe remembers me looking at him like he was a “total douchebag” because he hadn't yet wrapped his head around Hamlet's Hit Points. Co-host Nicky avers that this is because Joe was indeed being a total douchebag.

I wouldn't say it quite like that.

Joe led off with a faux pas, to be sure, and I, wag that I am, let him twist in the wind over it. To paraphrasing from memory, he started by saying that he didn't like HHP as well as Robin’s Laws of Good Gamemastering. I laughed at this, in an oh really kind of way, and then proceeded to tease him about this for the remainder of our chat. And am teasing him a bit more now, because that's how I roll. Another creator in similar circumstances might conceal his dudgeon, or get genuinely shirty with you.

Which brings me to a general service announcement. Here are a few handy tips on how to maintain mutually comfortable foot-mouth separation when talking to creators you meet at conventions, signings, and similar events.

The apparent intimacy of the Internet, and the opportunity it provides to express your judgments on art and entertainment products, may lead you astray when it comes time to engage in person people whose work you admire. You may think that creators want to hear critiques of their work expressed with the same frankness you'd use when talking with friends or posting to a forum.

They do not.

Even the necessary process of getting notes from collaborators and trusted readers can be emotionally fraught. Unsolicited notes during a casual social encounter? Etiquette breach! Etiquette breach!

That doesn't mean you ought to fawn, or claim that you like stuff that you don't. Remember though that the unwritten rules of casual interaction remain in force.

When in doubt, ask yourself if you'd expect a good reaction to a comment were the subject swapped to something more mundane.

“I don't like that shirt as well as the one you wore last week.”

Or, given that creative work is a labor of love riven with self-doubt and setback, test your remark by recasting it in a more deeply personal vein:

“I don't like that new baby of yours as well as your first kid.”

If you have an issue with the work, you might succeed in smoothly raising it, if you are indeed a master of diplomacy. Phrasing it in the form of a question might help. “I didn't believe it when Josie went back into the house,” comes off as a note, and is socially assaultive. “Why did Josie go back into the house?” expresses the same thought but doesn't play as a critique.

Roleplayers are luckier than fans of passively consumed work; they can describe practical problems they had in play, or anticipate having in play. “How do I make combat crunchier?” obeys the etiquette of casual interaction. “I still don't like your combat system,” violates it.

Some become unnecessarily anxious when meeting people whose work they like. No one in this field is a Clooney-level celebrity who needs social insulation from fans. I sure want people to feel comfortable approaching me for a chat. I strive to make myself accessible, and so do the vast majority of my colleagues.

On occasion this anxiety leads to a related faux pas, in which an embarrassed speaker tries to defuse the situation by backhanding the compliment, inadvertently converting it into a jab. Never feel you have to apologize, or undercut yourself, when saying something nice.

If a creator makes you feel bad for being excited about his work, they're the douchebag.

Not that Joe, in our inciting example, was being a douchebag, total or otherwise. He just had an unfortunate foot-mouth proximity incident (FMPI), which happens to all of us now and then.

And now we are all well-equipped to avoid similar FMPIs of our own.

2 GMs, 1 Mic On Hamlet's Hit Points

2012-01-04T12:33:00.001-05:00

In episode 20 of their 2 GMs, I Mic podcast, the irrepressible Joe Wolz and Nicky Helmkamp tackle the issue of pacing in roleplaying games. In the process, they give Hamlet's Hit Points a thorough and gratifying examination. Those of you already familiar with the book may be most interested in the examples they give of applying its lessons to actual play.

Joe tells a funny story on himself in which, when talking to me at Gen Con, his comments on the book led me to look at him like he was a “total douchebag.” While it is true that he led with a wee faux pas, I would, and will, characterize the moment somewhat differently. But before I turn the anecdote into a remake of Rashomon set at the Pelgrane booth, I'll give you time to listen to the Wolz-Helmkamp version.

Shotguns v. Cthulhu Cover Preview

2012-01-03T11:07:00.001-05:00

Here's a peek at the cover for Shotguns v. Cthulhu, the upcoming anthology of action-oriented Lovecraftian tales from Stone Skin Press. Jason Morningstar brilliantly captured the bold, graphic look we're pursuing for the line with his double-barreled, multi-tentacled retake of the skull and crossbones motif. Sans text, the design would look great on a T-shirt. Alas, that's a category of merchandise publishers have difficulty shifting, so you'll just have to keep an eye out for the book when it arrives later in 2012.

The Birds: Virulent

2012-01-02T10:13:00.001-05:00

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A New Year's Tale

2011-12-31T13:31:00.001-05:00

Scene: a new preserves and charcuterie shop in Kensington Market, Toronto. In keeping with the place's friendly vibe, the counter guy tries to engage a customer in conversation. The customer, in his mid 50s, dressed in a natty overcoat, sits on a bench eating the sandwich he's just been served.

COUNTER GUY: Do you have any plans for New Year's?

CUSTOMER: [has a mouthful of sandwich, unable to talk.]

COUNTER GUY: Any special plans?

CUSTOMER: [indicates that he's eating and can't reply]

COUNTER GUY: Anything special you're doing for New Year's?

CUSTOMER: [rising] My wife wants to divorce me, because of my girlfriend.

Sleigh Bell Sign-Off

2011-12-23T09:20:00.000-05:00

The presents are wrapped, the Christmas pudding cooked, and it’s time once again for my holiday sign-off. As visions of sugar plums dance in my head, I’d like to thank everyone for hanging out here, or dropping in from your redoubts at Twitter, Google+, and Facebook. I’ve been grateful for your attention as I launched Ashen Stars and The Worldwound Gambit. Hamlet's Hit Points, released in 2010, continues to find new readers, which pleases me to no end, proving that a labor of love can make good in our long tail world.

The big news here on the blog was my pre-Gen Con flight from Livejournal to Blogger. The latter’s better analytics and the immediate success of Google+, have helped me to keep the joint alive as eyeballs shift from blogs to social networks. Highlights of the year in blogging include the wrap-up of the Korad world-building experiment, a Kovalic-led encounter with a classic Wisconsin smelt fry and its requisite brandy old-fashioneds, a two-pronged assault on creative paralysis, and a Cthulhoid victory in the annual Gen Con buzzword competition, and the traditional TIFF Capsule Reviews. Together we hated on haters, reconsidered secrecy, and feared the rising of the dread mascots.

I’ll be back in the new year to keep you updated on Hillfolk and The Gaean Reach, to share the scoop on new fiction projects, and to kick off the impending “Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff” podcast. With a US election cycle fully swinging, I may dare to disturb the dusty padlock on the Politics Hut. How To Design RPGs the Robin Laws Way will resume, as will the usual talk about movies, narrative, writing and the gun-toting despond of deadpan avians.

Until then, enjoy or survive, as the case may be, your holiday time with friends and family. Imbibe judiciously and beware of road hazards, whether they consist of black ice, drunk guys, or Heat Misers.

Merry Christmas, Internet!

See P. XX

2011-12-22T09:20:00.000-05:00

Down the non-Euclidean chimney comes Santa Cthulhu with a big bag of year-end See P. XX. Find the sneak peek at the Shotguns v. Cthulhu cover amid sundry other gifts from Pelgrane Press:

My column on information flow in GUMSHOE.
The horoscope of the mysteriously dead Augustus Darcy, occultist author famed for The Book of Smoke.
The conspyramid contest for Night’s Black Agents.
Winners and answers for the Cthulhu Apocalypse contest.
New releases and a peek at Pelgrane’s 2012 slate.

All gather round the eldritch fireplace!

Ironic Hero, Absurdist Villain

2011-12-21T09:20:00.000-05:00

If an iconic hero remains true to himself and thereby changes the world around him, the ironic hero hews to his inner compass and is disappointed by the way the world changes despite him. We don’t see the ironic hero much in fiction, because that pattern is too much like life.

As is apt for a playwright, the life of Vaclav Havel divides readily into three acts—from avant garde dramatist to dissident to head of state. In that third act, he becomes an ironic hero. The act begins with heady early days, scored to deep Zappa cuts, as he strives to infuse his office with an artist’s humanism. From these scenes of bohemian promise, the story shifts tones. He presides as a constitutionally weak President over a society quickly bored by his ideals. Despite his efforts, his country splits in two. He urges the dismantlement of the lucrative Czech arms industry, and is rebuffed. Havel remains a hero to the outside world, and certainly to me. To the home audience, not so much. Heroes get tiresome when they stick around too long. We prefer them when they to ride off into sunset in timely fashion.

The ironic hero is sadder than the tragic hero, and leaves the stage without catharsis. The tragic hero falls from greatness, brought low by his telling flaws. The ironic hero fades, due to ours.

In a bid to provide easy contrast for blog posts, Kim Jong Il died on the same day as Havel. By immiserating an entire nation and killing millions by famine in order to maintain his cult of personality, he leaves a legacy as one of the era’s most monstrous real-life villains. The scale of his crimes makes him almost too monstrous for fiction. Another of his qualities definitely disqualifies him as a fictional bad guy—despite his enormous body count, he was as ridiculous as he was menacing. This is a consistent trope of the modern mega-mass-murdering dictator. Comic characters become funny through a gap between self-perception and the way others see them. Mussolini, Gaddafi, and Saddam Hussein all embodied not just the banality but the absurdity of evil. It’s not always the case—Pol Pot managed to be straight-up sinister, and the publicity-shy goons running Burma are no barrel of yuks. Kim, however, might have been a character in one of Havel’s allegorical plays.

A Contrary Life

2011-12-20T09:20:00.000-05:00

A motif emerges in friends’ reminiscences of the alternately brilliant and maddening Christopher Hitchens. At some point they all have to note that they didn’t agree with Hitchens on everything. In fact his barbed-wire views were so various, so untethered from standard ideological allegiances, that it is mathematically impossible to agree with all of them.

Many of the tributes mull the question of whether Hitchens was, in the end, a man of the left or right. If you go by the degree of discomfort eulogists of both factions display toward him, he winds up on the left. His liberal friends may have a tough time accepting his unrepentant touting of the Iraq conflict, but that pales compared to conservative distaste for his atheism and general loathing for hierarchy. Lots of young Trotskyites wound up as neoconservatives. Hitchens didn't so much discard one for the other as fuse the impulses together, with ferocity of judgment the bonding agent.

Admiring individual contrarians, as opposed to contrarianism itself, can be a fraught business. When summoning a pithy Mencken quote one has to keep in mind his pro-German sentiments in the lead-up to WWII. In late career, the contrarian may reveal himself not as an all-around puncturer of fuzzy thinking, but a much less interesting creature, the hedonistic Tory.

Still, one can look to figures like Hitchens and Mencken for the aspiration to question assumed truths, and to pursue logical propositions to their pitiless conclusions. To defend itself, even a culture of empathy needs the ability to construct an argument. Relying on cant or empty pieties leaves you only able to sputter when challenged. What does not kill your argument makes it stronger.

No matter how intense a detractor one might be of one Hitchens stance or another, the techniques he uses are transferable to the support of any position based on facts and reason.

If you look at him as a practitioner of the vanishing art of debate, his weak arguments become as informative as his strong ones. There you see the dodges you might skewer when deployed against you. In neocon mode, Hitchens cheats wildly, engaging his opponents’ worst arguments or resorting to untestable counterfactual assertions. This is where you see his twin passions, his hatred of tyranny and religion, combining to overwhelm the skepticism that anchors his best polemical writing.

I certainly envy the legendary Hitchens recall—virtually everything he read went straight to the memory bank and stayed there. As someone who makes his living as a writer, I can only gasp at his mammoth output, mysteriously squeezed into days given over to the voracious pursuit of Johnny Walker-fueled conversation. One account clocks him at a hard-to-credit 10,000 words per day—all the more staggering when you consider time spent on reading and other research.

With his prodigious intake of Scotch and cigarette smoke, Christopher Hitchens embodied the romantic image of the hard-drinking, hard-typing man of letters. I’m happy to identify with that so long as I don’t have to do it. His early death from esophageal cancer illustrates the real-life hazards of that image. As any contrarian knows, being a romantic figure is a dangerous business.

The Birds: Christmas Cake

2011-12-19T09:20:00.000-05:00

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[Classic Post] Christmas Pudding

2011-12-17T12:44:00.001-05:00

As a backstop against information catastrophe, I assign to Internet posterity the ineffable taste of the season.

Grandma Hannaford’s Christmas Pudding
1/2 cup shortening
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 cup flour
3 eggs
1 cup soda cracker crumbs
1 tsp salt (scant)
1/2 tsp soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp allspice
1/2 cup Welch’s grape juice
1/8 cup brandy (plus plenty to soak fruit in)
1 1/2 cup raisins
3/4 cup currants
3/4 cup dates, cut up
1 cup glacee cherries
1/8 cup mixed peel
1 package slivered almonds
10 oz. can crushed pineapple

The night before, soak raisins, currants, dates and cherries in brandy.

Cream shortening, brown and white sugar.

Beat in eggs.

Mix dry ingredients: flour, cracker crumbs, salt, soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice.

Add dry ingredients to wet.

Mix in brandy and grape juice, then soaked fruit and almonds.

Spoon mixture into greased cans, leaving a couple of inches for expansion. Place cans on racks in a pan of water. Cans should not be immersed. (As with so much else in this extremely forgiving recipe, the size of the can doesn’t hugely matter; I tend to use 19 ouncers.)

Cook at 300F for 1 hour, then 275F for 2 hours. Replenish water as needed.

White Sauce For Pudding
1/2 cup white sugar
1 generous tbsp flour
1/2 cup milk
1 egg
2 tbsp butter
1/2 tsp vanilla

Beat egg white to stiff peak.

Thoroughly mix sugar and flour in heavy saucepan. Stir in milk and egg yolk. Add butter. Bring to a boil on medium heat, stirring constantly to prevent scorching. Boil for 2 minutes. Remove from heat. Add vanilla. Fold mixture into beaten egg white.

Can be served hot or cold. However, the former choice is, in the opinion of the transcriber, utter blasphemy.

There is also a hot caramel sauce. In the words of my mother, “That’s just brown sugar melted in water, isn’t it?” Unless I'm completely mistaken, there's now no one left in the family who prefers the hot sauce on the pudding, though my dad always has it on its own.

Hillfolk of London

2011-12-16T09:20:00.000-05:00

On my return from London, the players in the ongoing Hillfolk game wanted a full report on what went down in the one-shot I ran for the Pelgrane crew, pre-Dragonmeet. Who were their alternate universe counterparts, and what did they get up to? As the game moves into outside playtesting, it’s an issue I’ll be looking at with curiosity. Are there a near-infinite number of different Hillfolk casts, or are there common parallels between the various groups?

I expect considerable overlap in the roles players choose for their characters within their villages. A raider clan at the dawn of the iron age offers only so many conceivable important roles. Greater variation is possible when it comes to dramatic poles. But will we see it?

For a refresher, the poles of the in-house crew are here.

By contrast, here’s what the London players came up with.

Character	Role	Dramatic Poles
Skyrancher	Owner of many flocks	Family vs. Tribe
Ironarm	Blacksmith	Greed vs. Generosity
Rootgrinder	Healer	Healer vs. Raider
Lionclaw	Warrior	Bravery vs. Self-Preservation
Foxface	Shaman	Inspiration vs. Madness
Bigback	Salt-Carrier	Duty vs. Fulfillment

Even the roles varied a good bit, with only two overlaps. Between the two groups there appeared some similar poles, but no exact matches.

In play, I’d say that Foxface’s dramatic poles wound up being Stickler vs. Helper, and that Lionclaw’s poles also became Duty vs. Fulfillment. This might be only fitting, as both he and Bigback pursued a forbidden love for Rootgrinder, the wife of Skyrancher—and stepmother to Bigback.

Core Activity and the Generic RPG

2011-12-15T09:20:00.000-05:00

Or, How To Design RPGs the Robin Laws Way (Part 2 of several; see part one for introduction and disclaimer)

Professor Coldheart asks how the core activity comes into play in the case of a generic rules set:

How does the above mesh with designing a setting-free or generic RPG? I'm thinking of the last iteration of Heroquest, which was divorced from the Glorantha setting. Also, I presume DramaSystem might see a standalone book at some point after Hillfolk is released. It would appear that these don't have a "core activity" as you define it - or do they?

With a single notable exception, generic rules sets appear as follow-up products to existing games. Hero grew out of Champions. D20 Modern was an alternate D&D build designed in part to show the system’s flexibility. Like Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying, they may serve as reference documents for GMs who will use them as a basis for their own games. They are a chassis on which the game is built; it remains incomplete until someone creates the core activity for it.

HeroQuest might be described as a hybrid of both models. It serves as a reference document showing you how to build your series, effectively enlisting the GM a collaborator in a simple game design process. At the same time, it’s as much a supplement to previous iterations as a new and improved version of the rules. And with its Glorantha chapter, which arose from the realization that most people buying the game would be using it in its established world, it backgrounds but still expresses the classic Hero Wars/HeroQuest 1 core activity: you play heroes fighting to shape the turning of an age in a world where myth takes on fantastic reality.

Skulduggery likewise grows out of The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game and exists as a reference document (preserving that game’s system at a time when it seemed like Pelgrane would not continue the license) and a blueprint for making your own Skulduggery mini-games. Although it has done rather better than Simon expected, it was never expected to become a flagship game the way DERPG once was, or Trail of Cthulhu has become.

Implicit in this approach is the argument that generic games are a hard sell, both to customers and to players. That’s why the first DramaSystem game will be called Hillfolk and not DramaSystem, and will present itself on the basis of the core activity. Even if we wind up including additional settings in an extended appendix. Otherwise we’re trying to get you to adopt a game that communicates on an intellectual level but lacks an emotional hook. Even the issue of visual presentation depends on a core activity, from which the graphic designer and illustrators can tweak the imagination and weave an arresting look. The rules are so short and simple that they can reappear in follow-up products without raising buyer ire.

The aforementioned exception is, of course, GURPS. It essentially marketed itself on the strength of its design throughline. It was the one game where the core activity legitimately could be “You can do anything!” Again the supplements become the games that elaborate the rules chassis into a playable experience. This was possible at the time because it addressed a gap both in the market and in the state of the art. No one had done a ground-up design meant to be generic from the jump, as opposed to the usual serial iterations of a core rules system. Having filled that gap, it removed the necessity for anyone else to attempt the same. Thus the return to the iterative model.

This has gone long, and there are still some more questions to cover. Let me know if you’d prefer that I steam ahead, or stop along the way to answer queries like this one.

It’s Okay Till the Russians Do It

2011-12-14T09:20:00.000-05:00

With Kenneth Hite’s GUMSHOE vampire spy thriller Night’s Black Agents now percolating out into the gamer bloodstream, you may be seeking resources for your real-life geopolitical chasing and shooting needs.

One site to bookmark is In Moscow’s Shadows, the blog of Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russia’s criminal underworld, its national security apparatus, and the intersections between the two. (If the name sounds familiar, you may know Mark from his secret identity as a stalwart of the Glorantha community and author of the Mythic Russia RPG.) Watch also for his column, Siloviks and Scoundrels, in the Moscow News.

An example of the blog’s NBA utility can be found in this recent round-up of the various police and security forces we may see deployed if the anti-Putin protests escalate.

The Birds: Nordic

2011-12-13T09:20:00.000-05:00

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Branches and Consequences

2011-12-12T09:20:00.000-05:00

Cosmicgoose is back with another question. If I may take the liberty of paraphrasing (and I may, because this is my blog and here there is no law save for my iron will) he asks:

In Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering, you talk about possible story branches from the characters' success and failure, and how it helps to think ahead about what these might be. In the case of failure, should you plan for characters to suffer additional negative consequences, or is the sting of losing bad enough?

Ideally, you want some but not all failures to bring about lingering negative consequences, and some but not all successes to bring positive ones. In a compelling ongoing story, those consequences arise directly from the story and make themselves self-evident. If you fail to claim the island you sailed for, you lose the queen's favor. If you succeed in capturing the magic sword, you now get to use it against your opponents.

To complicate the equation, sometimes successes ought to provoke negative side consequences, emulating the costly victory: you take the hill, but with heavy casualties. Likewise, a failure might, in a surprising twist, lead somewhere helpful. You get beaten up and captured, in the process learning something about the bad guy's plan.

Too few consequences and a session's episodes seem weightless and disconnected from one another. However, if every event brings about a lasting outcome, they will pile up and bog down the developing storyline. After a while, you and your players find it hard to come up with fresh ideas for consequences. It becomes difficult not only to bring all of them into play, but simply remember them all.

Some of my game rules tell you, as part of the resolution system, when consequences attend to an action. HeroQuest and DramaSystem both do this. During in-house testing for the latter, I had to junk any early version of the procedural system because too often led to a single result—player victory, with a negative consequence. Having fixed that, they crop up enough to add interest and weight, but not so often that the weight becomes burdensome.

That Tagline Earned Him Three Refresh Tokens

2011-12-09T09:20:00.000-05:00

“You lost a good opportunity to shut up.”

Upon hearing that Nicholas Sarkozy recently said this to David Cameron, the obvious became evident: the current Euro rescue talks are a Skulduggery play pack waiting to happen.

You play leaders of European nations attempting to prevent an implosion of the continental and/or global economy while at the same time pursuing your localized political goals. Sadly, that font of comedy inspiration, Silvio Burlesconi, has decamped for the moment, but there’s no shortage of potential PCs. Where the restructuring effort is concerned, the Sarkozy player aims to divert the burden to Germany and the credit to France. Straight-laced Angela Merkel must ensure that everyone but the German banks pays for their irresponsible loans. Cameron plays to Euro-Skeptics back home. Whoever’s running Greece this week complains about taxes he has no intention of paying.

European readers whose leaders have not been mentioned above are invited to characterize their underlying goals for the scenario.

It’s a natural for your holiday pick-up gaming!

The Two Fundamental Elements of RPG Design

2011-12-08T09:20:00.000-05:00

Or, How To Design RPGs the Robin Laws Way (Part One of Several)

I've been asked to describe my process of RPG design, so let's kick off what will surely be a series of posts illuminated by your further questions. Should this need be said, this is my process and not a commandment for others to do likewise. If it sometimes seems like I'm making Olympian pronouncements it's because qualifiers are boring and I will have no truck with them.

Sometimes I pitch a game to a publisher (Feng Shui, Mutant City Blues, Ashen Stars); other times I am presented with a brief and asked to develop an approach (The Esoterrorists, Rune, HeroQuest.) The distinction between these two starting points is not always clear-cut.

The first step is to refine the initial brief, by identifying the design throughline and the core activity. Without the second, resulting game will be hard to pitch to gamers and to play. Without the first, it has little reason to exist in the first place.

The core activity I've talked about before. It tells you who the characters are and what they're doing. You're heroes fighting to shape the turning of an age in a world where myth takes on fantastic reality. You play troubleshooters for hire on a war-ravaged fringe of an interstellar empire. You lead an isolated tribe of raiders at the dawn of the iron age.

The design throughline is the central concept underlying game play, and your reason for creating a new rules set (to the extent that you are.) The game evokes the spirit of Jack Vance's stories of the Dying Earth. Or streamlines investigative play, so that the solution to mysteries depends not on finding clues but putting them together. Or provides a simple framework for the building of dramatic storylines.

The Birds: Shakespearean

2011-12-07T09:20:00.000-05:00

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Lowering Cain

2011-12-06T09:20:00.000-05:00

I enjoy observing politics—that is, the politics of nearby other countries whose results I suffer only indirectly —as a venue for real-life drama, of clashing personalities and personal flaws heightened by stakes and pressure.

When it comes to men of power, no flaw is more classical than hubris. It takes that and chutzpah, too, to know that you’ve been carrying on a long-term affair and had a series of sexual harassment claims filed against you, and to think that you can run for President without either of these things coming to light. You might think that the solipsistic miscalculation of a Herman Cain is somehow off the charts. And it is, insofar as it got him hoisted from nominal front-runner to footnote.

According to this podcast interview, of controversial Republican campaign manager Ed Rollins, conducted by Alec Baldwin, hubris might almost be a prerequisite of the mindset required to run. [Engage paraphrase engines!] Rollins says that the first thing a would-be campaign manager asks a prospective candidate is if they have any skeletons in their closet. And they all lie.

(The seasoned campaign manager, Rollins continues, knows this and hires a private investigator to dig up the truth on his own client, as it will otherwise come out from an unfriendly source, timed at the worst possible moment.)

True tragic heroes must not only be afflicted with the flaw that brings about their downfall—they must also embody greatness, lending piteous significance to the final plummeting. In an age of political cable and radio, a candidate can get close to the sun free of that pesky quality. Instead he can shape himself into a hot button cartoon character, vivid enough for TV but without the dimension for drama, and rise at least to the level of primary contender. At first blush, this seems to add entertainment value to the proceedings. But as Aristotle might tell us, it’s not as profound when the players come pre-satirized.

All the Investigative Men

2011-12-05T10:47:00.001-05:00

Rewatching Zodiac recently, I was struck by the desire to see David Fincher similarly tackle the Mothman incidents of 1966-1967. This is no swipe at Mark Pellington’s The Mothman Prophecies, which I quite like for the way it evokes the enveloping paranoia of paranormal inquiry. It does, however, impose a cinematic structure and sense of resolution on a series of bizarre incidents distinctive for their lack of either quality. Zodiac, however, stands as a masterpiece of negative capability, focusing as it does on a mystery that seems explicable but always tantalizingly out of reach.

I then happened to move onto the underrated Breach, the 2007 film about the apprehension of FBI mole Robert Hanssen. Although investigation occurs in the background, the dramatic action focuses on the relationship between Hanssen (Chris Cooper, in a brilliant performance) and the young agent assigned to get close to him by acting as his assistant.

The two movies share a stylistic touchstone: All the President’s Men, the classic recreation of the Woodward and Bernstein investigation into the Watergate break-in. Zodiac even employs its composer, David Shire. Alan J. Pakula’s brilliant direction wrings incredible suspense out of simple phone calls, in the heroes press reluctant witnesses to cough up essential scraps of information.

Throughout the film, we see Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, as the two protagonists, use a full range of GUMSHOE-esque interpersonal investigative abilities. Like Mutant City Blues or Ashen Stars characters, who must not only figure out what’s going on but be able to prove it, they have to confirm what they know by wringing confirmations from multiple sources. We see them use Flattery, Flirting, Bureaucracy, Inspiration, Reassurance, and even a touch of Intimidation. Bullshit Detector comes out as official denials are issued. They also use social discomfort to get information out of people. By simply refusing to take no for an answer, or to do the polite thing and go away, they exert a subtle pressure on their sources, one distinct from real Intimidation. A journalism-focused GUMSHOE iteration might add this as a new interpersonal ability—perhaps called something like Journalistic Chutzpah.

Olympian/Cyclopean

2011-12-02T09:20:00.000-05:00

When seen as concept drawings or CGI animations, Wenlock and Mandeville, the mascots of the upcoming London Olympics, look merely bizarre. As if they, like the 2012 logo, sprang from an advertising agency in-joke run disastrously out of hand. Or perhaps resulted from a concerted effort to create the most peculiar and unrelatable mascots in sports history. However, now that they're all over the city of London in plush toy form, their Lovecraftian heritage becomes all too apparent. I mean, one of them has a head full of tentacles, for Hastur's sake!

Over the course of Dragonmeet, Ken, Simon, Steve Dempsey and I strove to pin down their exact rugose branch of the Cthulhoid family tree. Finally, over tagine and rosé, we worked it out. Wenlock and Mandeville can only be an advance delegation of the insane flautists who orbit around Azathoth, reflecting back on him in atonal, aural form his limitless madness. In other words, I think we'd better check the alignment of the stars for ominous coincidence with the date of next summer's opening or closing ceremonies. I wasn't placing any credence in this whole Mayan end date business, until I saw at bin full of these fuzzy horrors by the exit to Foyle's bookshop.

The Birds: Catch Phrases

2011-12-01T09:20:00.000-05:00

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Dragonmeet Panel Audio

2011-11-30T11:54:00.001-05:00

The fine, rugose folks at Yog Radio have kindly supplied to a waiting public a surprisingly clear audio recording of the “Ken and Robin and Simon Talk About Stuff” panel from Dragonmeet 2011. Hear us discuss new Pelgrane hotness, flintpunk, the deceptive allure of a GUMSHOE compendium, the psychology of the point spend, and more.

Also, check out Paul of Cthulhu’s interview with Ken and Simon.

In Which I Accidentally Survive

2011-11-29T03:16:00.001-05:00

Check out the latest edition of the Accidental Survivors podcast, wherein I am interviewed about DramaSystem, tailoring RPG design to the material, the differences between gaming work and fiction, and the genesis of projects from GURPS Fantasy II to GUMSHOE, and more. We wrap with a discussion of Aki Kaurismaki, Werner Herzog, and 3D cave paintings.

Put it in your ears!

See P. XX

2011-11-28T03:48:00.001-05:00

In a burst of understandable pre-Dragonmeet zeal, High Pelgrane Simon Rogers dropped the latest issue of the See P. XX on American Thanksgiving, an event many of you surely missed on account of turkey-induced torpor. Said zeal provoked him to unleash a veritable floodgate's worth of columns by your humble correspondent:

How to do costly successes with GUMSHOE's information-gathering mechanic
How the game's ability to get information into character hands makes mysteries richer
Plus a round-up of GUMSHOE GM troubleshooting

Is that all? Of course not! We get some Ashen Stars actual play, Will Hindmarch's intro to the new GUMSHOE game he's doing for Evil Hat, and a WWII Trail of Cthulhu setting from Michael Daumen. As always Simon updates us on the progress of myriad projects, And the Black Book GUMSHOE character generator makes its debut.

Go there now!

Dragon Met, Despite Planned Service Disruptions

2011-11-27T03:12:00.001-05:00

LONDON — Never mind local authorities’ scheme to add a puzzling extra dimension to Ken and Robin’s tube journey to Kensington High Street with a shutdown of the Circle line. Once more we triumphantly descended upon Kensington Town Hall to chat, sign autographs, and generally hold court. Dragonmeet is an event that bubbles along nicely at its maximum current capacity. It could perhaps grow by renting a bigger facility—or for that matter, more space in its present venue—but this is central London we’re talking, so that’s prohibitively expensive. Keeping the participation at about 600 attendees lends it a sense of a comfy reassembly of the tribe. I saw many familiar faces and in certain instances successfully connected them to their familiar names.

Speaking of facility limits, I took part in only one panel this year, a Q&A formatted round-up of all matters Pelgrane. I talked DramaSystem, the potential pitfalls of a GUMSHOE compendium, and how to get your players to key into investigative spends. Simon tantalized the crowd with two potential blockbuster Trail of Cthulhu supplements from Ken. Both aroused palpable booklust, with Pulp China scoring a clear edge over Southern Gothic. Assuming that Paul of Cthulhu’s sacrifices to the audio gods were all in good order, a recording of this talk should become available in the proper fullness of time.

As always, Dragonmeeters, it was a pleasure to catch up with you, and I hope for the continuance of this developing tradition.

A Clan Gathered For Conquest

2011-11-26T03:24:00.001-05:00

LONDON – Last night there was feasting, both by the hard-bitten peoples of the craggy Southlands, and by the assembled Pelgranistas playing them in a rousing game of Hillfolk. One group got more sticky toffee pudding than the other.

This was my first time grappling with the one-shot format for the game, which in general is tuned for extended play. I wondered how much intervention on my part would be required to make it work in this format and decided to play it by ear. As is its wont, the game subtly did our work for us, creating a dynamic that escalated naturally into a climactic struggle over clan leadership. The session will help enormously in writing the convention run section of the final rule book. It also has me thinking that the way the current manuscript suggests kicking off the series is too interventionist, and that the players may be better left to their own devices.

Speaking of which, it’s time to navigate a partially closed tube system on an eerily balmy late November London weekend, and hie ourselves to Dragonmeet. Looking forward to a fine gathering of another wild clan—though perhaps without quite so much iron age sturm und drang.

The Birds: City Planning

2011-11-24T09:20:00.000-05:00

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Premise Concealment and the Overvaluation of Secrecy

2011-11-23T09:20:00.000-05:00

D&D’s status as the progenitor of roleplaying as we know it has sometimes led RPGers to overvalue certain of its elements. Or rather, to adopt in their entirety bits that absolutely apply to the core activity of D&D but don’t automatically translate to all others.

For example, the baseline assumption has always been that you roll to see if you get information because that works really well in a game where you’re going down into dungeons, killing monsters, and taking their stuff. Should you fail to detect a secret door, you can always find another door to bash down instead. If you don’t find the treasure hidden in the hollow in the portico, them’s the breaks.

This assumption doesn’t carry over into a game where the core activity is solving a mystery of whatever stripe. It leads to the bottlenecks and workarounds GUMSHOE was designed to eliminate.

Secrecy in general works splendidly in D&D. In the old school days, you had the mystique of the map, which the GM has hidden in front of them, and which the players must painstakingly strive to replicate. The physical process of making the map marks the group’s collective progress in killing the monsters and taking their stuff. The world in general is a giant question mark, which you whittle away at by exploring.

This has led us to overvalue secrecy in general. One extreme manifestation comes with the campaign that withholds even its premise from the group. The GM tells you only to create modern-day, more or less ordinary characters. When you show up to play, you learn, as your characters discover their true situation, what the core activity of the game is.

If you have fun running or playing under this set-up, I’m sure not going to tell you that you’re not. However, you might want to ask yourself how much of that fun occurs due to this arrangement, and how much comes in spite of it.

First, let’s face it. Once you’ve been around the block, the surprise isn’t so surprising anymore. Your players know the premise, mostly. They’re almost invariably signing up for a survival horror game—perhaps with aliens, fellow survivors or mundane soldiers in place of the default supernatural entities. If not, you’re playing a superhero game in which they all develop powers during the first sessions. Even when players are truly surprised, the benefit lasts only for a chunk of the first session, while the costs linger for the remainder of the series.

Second, by separating the core activity from character creation, this style of play reduces collaboration and shifts the narrative burden onto the GM. The GM must keep the plot machinery constantly turning to keep his random cast of PCs engaged, rather than inviting players to suggest their own compelling, personal reasons to take part in the core activity. For a dominant GM and passive players, the withheld premise may work out fine. With one or more resistant/defensive players, you'll get turtling. When you’re lucky, active players improvise connections to the core activity on the fly, back-engineering the decisions they would have made when conceiving their characters. Otherwise they may discover that their PCs frustrate them, leading them to ditch them in favor of replacements tailored for the now-revealed campaign premise.

Back To Browning

2011-11-22T09:53:00.000-05:00

Unless they’re also paying attention to what’s being marketed to the art house crowd, fans of horror cinema may not have Pedro Almodovar’s latest, The Skin I Live In, on their radar screens. Nonetheless, you may see no film more deeply steeped in the horror tradition this year. Almodovar has in the past channeled such filmmakers as Douglas Sirk and George Cukor. Here he goes to the well of Tod Browning for a tale of obsession, madness, and body distortion. Insane scientist Antonio Banderas, abetted by his suspiciously loyal maid, keeps captive the beautiful subject of a forbidden medical experiment. If you doubt the Browning connection, Exhibit A is the fact that he wanted to shoot the film as a black and white silent. Exhibit B is the secondary villain who shows up wearing a tiger costume.

In North America Almodovar is sometimes seen as as a lighter filmmaker than he is, because we embrace his sunniest works, like Volver and Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Most of his films take a darker tone and take place in a world where passion spills over into sexual menace. His 1986 film Matador, for example, plays as the giallo Luis Buñuel might have imagined.

The Skin I Live In is a compelling exercise in the outre and highly recommended to film-going horroristas.

Beer Knowledge Me (London Edition)

2011-11-21T09:20:00.000-05:00

As previously and thrillingly recounted in these blog pages, I recently underwent a hopsy conversion on the road to somewhere or other and now find myself a liker of beer.

As likewise announced, this weekend I will once again be jetting to the reserved yet splendid embrace of London, England, for the Dragonmeet convention and related Pelgrane summitry.

A visit to the Pelgrane’s nest largely concerns itself with the free flow of wine, a tradition with which one would be a fool to tamper. But let’s say, for the sake of hypotheticality, that I at some point wind up in a pub. You also, by remarkable coincidence, happen to be in this fine establishment and are either an English enjoyer of beers or an enjoyer of English beers.

If I’m having what you’re having, what am I having?

The Birds: Category

2011-11-18T09:20:00.000-05:00

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The Three Reveals of Gen Con Meet the Three Updates of November

2011-11-17T09:52:00.001-05:00

Hey, Robin, you may be asking, what’s up with those three projects you announced in August? Here’s a progress report. All are looking more winter ‘11-’12 than fall ‘11 at this point. In an event unparalleled in human history, it has transpired that certain elements of a project take longer than initially thought.

I’ve been talking about Hillfolk / DramaSystem a lot in these blog pages. The manuscript is now in great shape for outside playtest. Given the upcoming Christmas rush, it may make more sense to punt this to 2012. Simon Rogers and I have been discussing, and will soon be revealing our crowdfunding approach.

Kenneth Hite has kindly agreed to write the foreword to my book of King in Yellow-inspired fiction, New Tales of the Yellow Sign. The project awaits the moment when he can squeeze this valued and volunteered effort into his fraught schedule.

Speaking of matters Hitean, the third item, the “Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff” podcast, awaits the design of a companion site. We have lovely illustrations in hand from a certain acclaimed and Muskrat-adjacent cartoonist, and a rough sketch of how we want it to look.

So all are still moving ahead. I’ll keep you apprised on each as developments develop.

Deceit and DramaSystem

2011-11-16T09:20:00.000-05:00

Commenter Carl, over at my See P. XX intro to DramaSystem, asks about the role deceit plays in the game. Is there a mechanism to ensure that characters who are deceived act accordingly?

It depends on whether the interaction is procedural or dramatic. In the first instance, it occurs in pursuit of a pragmatic goal, free of emotional content, with a minor, GM-run character we don’t much care about. In this case you can con the character and he’ll act as if conned.

In general deceit occurs in DramaSystem because the core interactions mimic drama in fiction, which in turn is a condensed version of the way we behave toward one another in real life. One person seeks an emotional payoff from another, and in the process may choose to lie, dissemble, or hoodwink. If you’re playing a dramatic scene, you can make the choice to act as if the character is deceived, or not. Unlike Skulduggery / Dying Earth, the system does not force you to be fooled. This is because the character who acts on false information belongs more to the melodrama than the drama. Drama is about choices; deceit robs characters of true choices. Deceived characters work in drama when they are, perhaps subconsciously, choosing to be lied to. When Lear buys Regan and Goneril’s flattery and rejects Cordelia’s frankness, he is, on one level, fooled. But really he’s allowing himself to be gulled, because he’s petitioning them for ego gratification and wants to get it. In the DramaSystem version of this scene, Lear’s player decides to act as if fooled—he isn’t required to do it by a die roll.

If deception belongs to melodrama, its equivalent in drama is self-deception.

A Shout-Out (With Errata)

2011-11-15T09:20:00.000-05:00

The gang at the Pulp Gamer podcast tackle Mutant City Blues, GUMSHOE and much more in episode 192. Jason dropped the linked, explicable super powers of the default game setting in favor of the Marvel universe’s jam-packed cavalcade of weirdness, and still got the premise to work.

As I point you to the episode, I do have to pipe up with a small correction. There’s a touch of mis-speaking in the segment, giving the impression that you have to pay investigative points to get core clues in GUMSHOE. Readers familiar with the game already know that investigative point spends only occur to get cool but tangential information or other tangible benefits. Core clues are always available without a spend, fulfilling the game’s purpose of eliminating investigative logjams.

The Birds: Black Hipster

2011-11-14T09:20:00.000-05:00

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Embracing Blow-Off Day

2011-11-11T09:20:00.000-05:00

If discipline is the writer’s best friend in any field, it is as crucial in the neo-pulp realm of gaming and genre fiction as a shotgun is during a zombie apocalypse. To make a living on a modest word rate, you can’t let time tick by while you wait for inspiration to strike. You have to sit your butt in the chair and make it happen. If that requires rituals, routines or caffeine to get your brain activity jumpstarted, so be it.

That’s true almost every day. But I’ve found one circumstance where the brain’s demand for a blow-off day must be honored. At the midpoint in any novel, I invariably find that the creative engine goes completely AWOL for a day. I can’t predict exactly when that day will come, except that it will be somewhere around the middle of the first draft. The outlined scene might seem perfectly right and ready to be laid down in prose. I might be riding on the best possible night’s sleep, be in a positive place in my exercise regimen, and otherwise as physically ready as I get. But still the usual uphill battle to get down the first couple of hundred words never leaves the mire. The slogging just gets worse.

I used to try to power through, annoyed by my sudden failure of discipline. Now I realize that the sustained concentration required for a novel demands this rest stop. I have embraced blow-off day. Recognizing it when it comes, and giving my brain the day off, is as much part of the craft and discipline as any other part of the process.

A single-author roleplaying game, like Ashen Stars, is certainly longer than a genre-sized novel. But it entails enough task-switching to keep the creative wheels greased without calling a one-day strike. The starship combat chapter requires different muscles than the GM advice chapter, while the scenario represents yet another change of pace. A long fiction work draws from the same well, day after day.

My blow-off day on my current, unannounced novel came on Friday. I saw that it was coming and headed downtown to check out the delightful new Aki Kaurismaki movie, Le Havre. When I got back to the manuscript on Monday I had my flow back. Also, I saw a great scene that ought to have gone before the one that was stopping me short.

You can’t go lateral as an excuse not to work. But sometimes, in order to work, you have to go lateral.

Grimm Tidings

2011-11-10T09:20:00.000-05:00

Where Mutant City Blues nerdtropes the police procedural by mashing it up with the superhero genre, the new NBC series Grimm does the same thing with a dose of urban fantasy. In the premise-establishing first episode, police detective Nick Burckhardt discovers that he’s a hereditary fighter of evil creatures obliquely referenced in fairy tales. With his partner Hank Griffin and acerbic new wolfman pal Eddie Monroe, he investigates mysteries involving his ancestral foes.

In GUMSHOE terms, Nick clearly has a bespoke investigative ability called Grimm Sight, a sort of supernatural version of Bullshit Detector that allows him to detect people who are disguised supernatural beings, but only when they’re under stress.

Over the course of the first two episodes, we’ve also seen the following abilities provide additional insight, or act as core clues bringing on new scenes:

Nick: Cop Talk, Forensic Psychology, Inspiration, Reassurance

Hank: Anthropology, Data Retrieval, Evidence Collection, Research

Eddie: Occult Studies

In the case of Hank’s Anthropology, we see the classic justification for a needed ability that seems outside the character conception. Down-to-earth cop Hank, after identifying an exotic tribal artifact, explains to his partner that his second wife was an anthropologist.

After two episodes, it’s hard to guess if the series will make good on its early potential as a fun blend of recognizable formulas. I am however looking forward to seeing what else is on these guys’ character sheets.

Hateful

2011-11-09T09:20:00.000-05:00

Sarah Darkmagic brings to gamerdom an ongoing discussion highlighting the ambient level of misogynistic rage women encounter when they make themselves known on the Internet.

It would be nice to believe that the sense of community we feel at gaming events, and the hobby’s aura of relative innocence, protect us from having to deal with predators, creeps and abusers. Really the surprise is that we don’t have it worse. Gaming, providing as it does a structured form of personal interaction, has always offered a haven to folks flummoxed by social demands others take for granted. They certainly aren’t the only gaming constituency. Most graduate from this phase, sometimes with the help of a lot of d20s, and move on with their lives.

But among the socially marginalized, there is a smaller slice still who are that way for a reason—because they’re so emotionally stunted, frustrated and consumed with bitterness that they can only reach out by lashing out. We can’t be welcoming to the shy and gloriously eccentric without also drawing in a certain percentage of the truly messed-up.

Hate mail is nothing new, but the net lends verbal assault a global audience and one-touch convenience. My assumption is that this hate impulse is more or less the same, no matter who’s being targeted. The hate junkie types the most vicious stuff he can think of. When it’s a man going after a woman, the language of sexual menace is only too readily at hand. Does it matter that some of these losers are moved to hate by their inability to connect with women in real life, while others some conduct their harassment in a calculating and impersonal way?

It would, I guess, if this were a problem solvable through exhortation, peer pressure, or other forms of social suasion. But hate junkies have already exempted themselves from the social grid, or have never managed to get onto it in the first place. I imagine that a surprising number are closet cases: able to show apparent empathy in their day-to-day dealings, but turning into covert, touch-typing Mr. Hydes with the blinds drawn and the computer booted up.

Misogynistic harassment, like other outflows of hate addiction, is the vengeance of the emotionally marginalized. We can speak up to offer solidarity and support to those subjected to it. I just wish that awareness campaigns, formal or otherwise, stood a chance of getting through to those who spew the stuff.

The Birds: Community

2011-11-08T09:20:00.000-05:00

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Essential Elements of a Player Character

2011-11-07T09:20:00.000-05:00

A question over the transom from blog reader The Cosmic Goose:

When you sit down to create a new character, be it for a story or game, what aspects do you consider core to that character’s persona? Its emotional and spiritual, so to speak: the place from which the character moves, that influences their choices and decision making process? Background is certainly a part of this, but I find that its almost an afterthought. Background tells you why the character is the way he is, but not the more basic question of what or who he is. This is all from a gaming perspective, of course.

As the truism goes, Cosmic, character is action. We experience a character through what he does and, to a lesser extent (in forms that allow for interior monologue) thinks.

So to create an interesting gaming character you have to have some sense, broadly speaking, of what he is going to do. This is why it is so crucial for an RPG to come with a built-in default activity: exploring the spaceways, rectifying paradoxes in the timeline, solving eldritch mysteries, or killing monsters and taking their stuff. If your GM hasn’t clarified what your character will be doing, find out before you create him.

(An older school of roleplaying would have it that the willingness to undermine the game’s core activity represents true dedication to characterization. This “my character wouldn’t do that” syndrome came about for a particular set of historical reasons I may talk about later, but by now has clearly established itself as dysfunctional.)

So, knowing what your character is going to do, find as compelling, unique and urgent a reason to have him do that as you can. In certain GUMSHOE games, this is hardcoded into the character creation system as the character’s Drive, allowing you to grab a core motivation off the shelf. For other games you'll need to create one.

Then work outward from there, developing the backstory that adds detail and perhaps an origin to the Drive. Everything from his appearance to his gear to his special powers can arise out of this.

This covers you for the procedural narratives that are roleplaying’s bread and butter. For dramatic characters, stay tuned for my upcoming DramaSystem, as seen in its debut game, Hillfolk.

Dragonmeet 2011

2011-11-04T09:20:00.000-04:00

With less than a month to go before London’s ever-delightful Dragonmeet convention, I am behooved to confirm that I will once more be in attendance. Thanks to the beneficence of Pelgrane Press and its magic spreadsheet, not only I but my esteemed colleague Kenneth Hite will once more descend, Oyster Cards in hand, on one of our favorite cities, to regale attendees with our wit, charm, and signatures. Those of you who’d held off making plans pending this news can now breathe easy and see us there. Amid all the other lovely folks and fun games, of course.

Dragonmeet takes place on Nov 26^th, unfolding once again in the slightly chill bosom of Kensington Town Hall.

Dramatic Poles of the Walking Dead

2011-11-03T09:20:00.000-04:00

At first glance, the survival horror cable series “The Walking Dead” would seem clearly procedural, devoted as it is to the efforts of a small band of people to tough out a zombie apocalypse. Certainly, many of its most memorable scenes pit characters against practical problems: finding a missing party member, snagging needed medical supplies, and the ever-popular hiding from undead. To run it in DramaSystem, you’d need to up the lethality level, replacing, for example, the rule that characters only die with their players’ consent.

Despite its emphasis on the procedural, it is also a dramatic show. As the second season gets underway, we can identify the dramatic poles of its key ensemble. You might peg them differently, but here’s what I’m seeing:

Rick: heroism or doubt?

Shane: altruism or selfishness?

Dale: wise old man or old man?

Andrea: survival or suicide?

Rick’s wife Lori has been written as mostly a foil for Rick and, to some extent, Shane. We tend to see her acting as the opposing force telling other characters not to do what they’re considering. Hopefully we’ll see her drawn as more of an individual, with her own clear and consistent poles, as the series progresses.

The redneck bad-ass Daryl at this point appears to be, in DramaSystem terms, a GM-controlled supporting character. His purpose is to provide relief by being an enjoyable rock of confidence, in contrast to Rick’s doubt and Shane’s concealed dark side.

Shane’s poles are turning out to be very familiar in both gaming and fiction. He shares them with Rick Blaine of Casablanca (as seen in Hamlet's Hit Points) and two characters from the in-house Hillfolk series. I expect to see them appear a lot as DramaSystem rolls out to the public.

The Birds: Insulting

2011-11-02T09:20:00.000-04:00

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Vampire Disappoints Area Man

2011-11-01T09:20:00.000-04:00

At the risk of a pterodactylian reminiscence, I will now look back to an era before the YouTubes, prior to torrenting and VOD and even the humble VHS. (Though not so many years before the latter...)

Like many a monster-loving kid, my main school in cinematic horror was Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. One could hope for the afternoon movies from the Buffalo TV stations to roll around to kaiju flicks or go on a Harryhausen jag, but to learn the cultdom’s deep classics you had to consult its newsprint pages. I remember in particular a still from 1935’s Mark of the Vampire, with Bela Lugosi in Dracula outfit, accompanied by a white-clad, crazy-haired she-vamp. The text breathlessly extolled the rarity of this item, if nothing more. That only enhanced the coolness of the image. It was near impossible to see, so it must be great! And the movie was by Tod Browning, an extra point in its favor.

Flash forward * ahem harummph * years. Mark of the Vampire has been on DVD for a while now, as part of a collection of early horror rarities. I finally catch it on TCM. And you know what’s coming...

...it’s utterly terrible!

To spoiler-alert a 76-year old dud, the first two acts are a charmingly clumsy elaboration on the Dracula structure, with a supremely hammy Lionel Barrymore taking on Van Helsing duties, and a larger-than-previous coven of bloodsuckers preying on our ingenue. Then comes the twist, in which the monstrous doings are revealed as a hoax. Almost all of the characters but one are party to a righteous Scooby Doo-ing, in which a faked vampire infestation provokes a murder suspect to give himself away. Here the rational explanation is way more implausible than the supernatural one.

It’s not the first time I built up an expectation for a work of art that fizzled when confronted with the real thing, but it’s doubtless the longest chronological gap between hope and reality.

Consider this your invitation to share your experiences of building up to a letdown.

NeoExodus Fiction

2011-10-31T13:20:00.000-04:00

Speaking of crowdfunding, Louis J. Porter of Louis Porter Jr. Design Inc has enlisted me to write a fiction piece for the NeoExodus setting. The outcome of a Kickstarter campaign to launch LPJ’s fiction line will determine its scope. Full details here.

See P. XX

2011-10-31T09:20:00.000-04:00

For a look at how DramaSystem handles scene framing, check out my eponymous column in the brand-new edition of Pelgrane Press’ webzine, See P. XX.

Among other included goodies are Adrian Bott’s look at the upside of failure, Steve Dempsey’s Trail of Cthulhu demo “Ritual Pursuits”, an assortment of Ashen Stars and ToC wallpapers, and a build-it-yourself apocalypse. Check it out!

Crowdfunding and You

2011-10-28T09:20:00.000-04:00

Usually a single person’s buying preferences mean little in the grand sweep of a product roll-out. This doesn’t stop us from ascribing our desires to large numbers of other people when we wish an item was priced differently or had some other suite of features.

Crowdfunding changes all that. It allows a single person, by financing a goodly chunk of a project’s expenses, to become a significant portion of its market. Though no one thinks of it in this way, that’s one of the movement’s primary appeals: it ushers you into a realm of statistical significance. For once, your anecdotal data about your own purchasing history is relevant!

Simon Rogers and I are currently mulling the various perks we might offer as we crowdfund Hillfolk, the first DramaSystem game. With that in mind, I thought I’d pick the brains of those of you who have contributed to crowd-funded projects.

My assumption is that most people who contribute do so because they want a copy of the product being offered, and want to feel that they’re helping to bring it into existence. According to this thoroughly uncontroversial theory, the most compelling perk would obviously be the book itself, in both a modest and a premium version. Being credited in the book and elsewhere as a funder, I am also assuming, is another key incentive.

Aside from these central pillars of crowdfunding, are there other perks you’ve found particularly enticing? Conversely, what perks arouse your indifference? Are there perks that once inspired you to pledge, but have since paled in your estimation?

I’m not going to shoot you with my comment gun if you’ve put up a project for crowdfunding and have insights to share about the process. However, I am hoping for discussion primarily led by pledgers, past and future.

The Birds: Make Sure

2011-10-27T09:20:00.000-04:00

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Toppled Silo

2011-10-26T09:20:00.000-04:00

King of Dragon Pass sold as many units in its first six weeks of release as the game’s desktop incarnation did over its entire lifetime. As Sarah Newton pointed out over on the Twitter:

I guess it just shows the difference in reach once you break out of the "silo" into the global app market.

I think that’s exactly right. Moreover, KoDP serves as an exemplar of a shift in marketing eras. Back in the old-timey mists of 1999, computer games were items primarily sold in brick and mortar stores, packaged in largish cardboard boxes full of nothing. These stores ran on a pay for placement basis, renting out prime endcap space to manufacturers. Glossy magazines provided the main avenue of promotion. To snag coverage, you had to fit within one of four sharply delineated categories. King of Dragon Pass, with its mixture of storytelling and resource management, is and was sui generis. In the era of silos, originality turned out not only to be a minus, but a powerful barrier to entry.

Today we have shifted from the silo era to the recommendation era. Computer games are digital files sold through portals for whom a wide assortment of categories and deep stock are competitive advantages. Through social networking, creators can alert core customers for a niche game like KoDP to the portal, and let it do the rest. The portal provides the opportunity to break out of the niche. New players who have never rolled a d20 and have no idea who Greg Stafford is are now discovering the world of Glorantha.

And not all of them are even Scandinavian.

Paparazzo Drift

2011-10-25T09:20:00.000-04:00

Like most governments, South Korea keeps more regulations on the books than it can afford to police. Its solution: offer small bounties to private citizens who report commercial infractions. The result: a growing industry of so-called “paparazzi” who, with video cameras in hand, act as freelance inspection officers. (NYT link.)

First, this presents us with a lovely example of linguistic drift. The term paparazzi originates in a work of fiction, the iconic Federico Fellini film La Dolce Vita, in which a photographer who hunts local celebrities and gossip figures with his camera is nicknamed Paparazzo—which means buzzing fly. It soon entered the English language, transmuted into a general term for celebrity-stalking photographer. And now it has mutated again, moving to Korea to describe these for-profit regulators.

South Korea’s film industry has been on a roll lately, turning out great genre flicks. How long will it be before this real-life situation, rife with cinematic promise, supplies the premise for a movie—and what genre will it tackle?

Crime drama: A budding regulator winds up over his head when he records the wrong infraction at a mob-owned factory.

Spy thriller: A paparazzi flees North Korean agents when his tape of food stall infractions accidentally captures their activities.

Comedy: The cat and mouse game between a paparazzi and his business owner target turns into an escalating series of reprisals.

Romantic Comedy: An unlikely pair of freelance regulators fall in love when they compete to expose the same dumping scam.

Horror: Terror abounds when a team of young paparazzi discover that the secret hidden of an abandoned factory is something far worse than drums of toxic waste...

The Bit.ly Info Page Is Your Friend

2011-10-24T09:22:00.001-04:00

Here’s a plug for a tool I’ve found very useful in calibrating my net presence. If yours includes links, and constitutes an outreach effort of some kind—that is, you care how many people respond to your links by clicking on them—you may find it equally helpful.

We all know the main purpose of link shorteners. Before Twitter embedded its own URL-shrinker in its interface, bit.ly was clearly the leader in the field. I still find it the service to use, because of the metrics it gives you when you create a link while signed into their site. If you add their bookmarklet to your browser, you get a fast way to generate links from pages, which then propagate to Twitter and Facebook. One presumes that Google+ will join the list when its API goes public.

The bookmarklet gives you a handy 140-character editing window and allows you to pick thumbnails for Facebook.

The thing I’m finding really useful about bit.ly is the ability to go to a list of one’s links, in what is called your public timeline, and see how popular each item has been. For each link you can consult an info page that lists other Twitter cites, tells you when clicks occurred, and from what platform.

It was through these info pages that I first saw how effective Google+ was in driving attention, even a few weeks into its launch. Though I’m sometimes surprised by how much (or how little) mileage a given link gets, it provides an ongoing reminder of the sorts of subjects my readers are interested in—or not.

Those who link purely out of self-expression won’t find much to care about here, unless they feel irresistibly drawn to pie charts. But if you link to your own blog or other articles to maintain a profile or get a message out, your bit.ly timeline will assist in fine-tuning your choices.

The Birds: Ultra-Complicated

2011-10-21T09:20:00.000-04:00

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How a DramaSystem Episode Plays Out

2011-10-20T09:20:00.000-04:00

Last week I presented a series of synopses from the in-house Hillfolk playtest, to show the sort of narrative you might develop over the course of a DramaSystem series. This time I thought I’d zoom in a bit with a detailed account of the action that unfolds during a single episode.

This is from our second season. For list of main characters, pop back here. We’ve now added a new PC, the warrior Flint (played by Scott.) He’s returned to the Horsehead clan after a year's captivity at the hands of the loathed and feared neighboring people, the Tridents. Though still finding his footing in a home that has greatly changed during his absence, he’ll soon start acting on his dramatic poles: loyalty vs. ambition. Close readers will note that this is the same opposition that drove the chieftain, Thickneck, during the first season. His player is away attending classes this fall, so I’ve had to step in to play him as a recurring character. Other characters not mentioned in the above-linked post are also recurring characters, played by the GM.

The episode title is also its theme, chosen by the player who frames, or calls, its first scene.

SE02EP03: “Unity”

Skull seeks the cooperation of Staffholder, the child shaman who now serves as the clan’s spiritual advisor, in his bid for southern unity. She embraces his plan enthusiastically, thinking it will allow them to impose Horsehead-style worship on the region—by violence if necessary.

Flint dreams of the torturer who loved him, the cruelly beautiful Trident matriarch Pierces-the-Sky. He awakens in horror.

Twig seeks her husband’s plans for the coming moot, where southern clans open to unifying under the northern king will meet to mull the details. Thickneck provides slim assurance, revealing that opposed clans and rebel bandits likely intend to attack the moot or the northern procession to it.

At a meeting of the inner circle, Redaxe demands a clear long-range objective for the clan. Thickneck agrees to his scheme to unify north and south against the Tridents.

Flint confronts Farhawk, demanding to know what he must do to prove he’s not a spy. Farhawk reveals that Skull was until recently making overtures to the Tridents, and advises Flint to kill him.

Farhawk goes to his wife, Raging River, for a dose of realpolitik. She lays out a chilling vision in which all choices lead to civil war.

Skull seeks Redaxe’s aid at the moot. They hatch a plan to parley with their mightiest rivals, the Stoneforts.

Godtalker, a northern priest invited to Horsehead by Twig, petitions her for redress, after the northerner’s sacred tablets are profaned by someone throwing dung. She agrees to find the culprit.

It’s a young woman, perhaps put up to it by Staffholder. Twig goes to Godtalker seeking forgiveness for her. Godtalker compromises from his original demand that she be stoned, instead jumping at the chance to deliver an exhortation to the entire moot.

Redaxe meets Oldcrag, his opposite number among the Stoneforts, and finds him less interested in fighting Tridents than his traditional foes, the Horseheads.

Flint demands that Skull tell him the truth about his Trident dalliances. Skull placates him, minimizing the consequences of his prior meeting with the dread Trident warrior, Tall-As-A-Spear.

A religious riot pits Horseheads against Northerners. In its aftermath, Farhawk upbraids Twig for starting the whole mess, by inviting in Northern priests. She vehemently defends her actions.

Skull seeks out Thickneck, who turns out to be equally disturbed by his wife’s spiritual meddling. He appoints Skull as the man to solve the strife.

New Hero Cover Revealed

2011-10-19T09:20:00.000-04:00

Here’s a peek at the cover for The New Hero. As you’ll recall, this is the first of the fiction anthologies I’m shepherding for Stone Skin Press, Pelgrane’s new fiction line. We were lucky enough to snag the services of comics artist and illustrator extraordinaire Gene Ha, who more than met our expectations with the fabulous image you see below.

Gene went above and beyond the call of duty by closely reading each and every one of the fourteen great stories in the collection, placing each protagonist in his composition. He pitched us the idea of a Greek vase as emblematic of the book’s theme, which combines the time-honored structure of the iconic hero tale with fresh new characters, settings, and voices. The individual elements will also appear in the interior, as part of the title treatment for each story.

The first volume of a new line carries a lot of freight. We couldn’t be more thrilled.

Link Round-Up: Dracula Notes, Sendak Quote, Lennon Tooth

2011-10-18T18:13:00.001-04:00

Stoker great-grandson finds Dracula notebook in Isle of Wight attic.

“I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.” — Maurice Sendak provides the quote of the day.

Reliquary not included: John Lennon tooth carries £10,000 auction estimate.

The Arsenic Eaters

2011-10-18T09:40:00.001-04:00

As with other GUMSHOE games like The Esoterrorists and Mutant City Blues, Ashen Stars GMs are encouraged to look to the news for episode inspiration. Like the writers of the various Treks and the nouveau Battlestar, they might use the space opera form to examine issues of the day.

Alternately, they can start with pop science articles and either work their way to political allegory, or not, as desired.

For example, a recent study indicates that drug addiction piggybacks on the same neural impulses that lead animals to crave salt.

In the episode this inspires, the crew is hired to investigate a series of attacks on Combine ships near the Bleed’s far edge. They discover that the hostile party is a heretofore unknown advanced species called the gretherin. Although at first they seem merely xenophobic and implacably hostile, a twist reveals their motivations. A gang of human and cybe drug runners has infiltrated their home world, engineering a synthetic drug by hijacking the gretherin’s necessary craving for arsenic, a trace metal they require to regulate metabolic function. The gangsters aim to addict the entire planet to a substance only they can manufacture, draining it of its wealth. The gretherin take this for an act of war waged by the entire Combine. Can the PCs avert a nasty local conflict by taking down the drug gang and destroying the technology used to create the drug?

Link Round-Up: Hasbro Financials, Goodbye to Celluloid, Owning History

2011-10-17T23:54:00.001-04:00

Hasbro struggles to meet Wall Street expectations despite soaring licensing revenues.

Major manufacturers have ceased production of celluloid film cameras.

Emma Thompson film lodges pre-emptive lawsuits against rival claimants to historical story.

The Birds: Colloquialisms

2011-10-17T09:20:00.000-04:00

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A Look Back at Korad: II: The World

2011-10-14T09:20:00.000-04:00

Last week I talked about the process behind Korad. Now let’s examine the content.

The risk with any creative collaboration between a large group is of a plunge into the mushy middle. If the hallmark of superlative work is individual vision, crowd-sourced creation threatens to settle on bland consensus.

Yet Korad is anything but bland. It sidesteps trad fantasy tropes: for example, by choosing as its major inhuman races discorporate “body snatchers” and a refreshingly sympathetic take on the ghoul motif. Though its general vibe is more ancient than medieval, it eschews the influence of any one identifiable earth culture. Koradi culture has the depth and internal contradictions of any historical empire, without owing too much to any one of them.

It’s certainly not a world I would have come up with on its own. The unpredictability of its creation lends it the lived-in feel, the paradoxes that lend it believability.

In any vote-based project, a pattern soon makes itself apparent. Decisions tend to fall on a sweet spot in an emergent spectrum. Where a particularly brilliant or engaging choice comes up, the vote result may fall outside the sweet spot, serving as a distinguishing exception.

For example, in the old Angels and Operators play-by-blog game, the continuum was between caution and heedlessness. Instructions for our delusional-or-is-he protagonist showed a marked preference for seeking more information over other choices. Because this was so clear and obvious a choice, I learned to write the choices to take it out of consideration. After that, voters arrived at a collective compromise between risk and inaction.

Here the ends of the continuum were the practical and the whimsical. Votes generally clustered at a compromise point between these two extremes. Anything too prosaic lost out, as did the most far-out or absurd choices. The many-headed voter preferred a fantastical world anchored in an accessible logic. But not too logical—collective wisdom wanted their magic stones fungible and poetic, rather than basing them a rigorous extrapolation.

A secondary tension arose for Koradi culture. The brief was to create a strong-seeming empire with a glass jaw, one on the verge of a centuries-long ideological collapse. Ultimately the group chose to make Koradi culture largely unsympathetic to a modern audience, in its austerity and opposition to frivolity. Yet a strong faction worked to make the crumbling empire somewhere their fictional protagonists and player characters would like to live.

Although a changing blogscape promises diminishing returns for a continuing Korad experiment, we made a pretty cool world along the way. If you contributed ideas or voted on those of others, now’s the time to give yourself a pat on the back. Or perhaps toast yourself with a fine Winecoast vintage.

Hillfolk Synopses

2011-10-13T09:20:00.000-04:00

For a look at sort of broad-strokes narrative that might emerge over longterm DramaSystem play, I thought I’d provide you with the following synopses. These cover the first distinct chunk of episodes, analogous to a season of a serialized drama.

The system doesn’t impose a particular arc on the group; rather, it provides a framework allowing the group to improvise its own storyline.

In retrospect we can see a pretty clear arc, though: after we establish our clan of iron age raiders and its immediate neighbors, they come into contact with the richer, more sophisticated nation to the north. They start out fighting it, and wind up joining it.

These synopses leave out a lot of the individual character arcs in each episode. Considered together, though, you can see the season arcs for the various PCs.

At the beginning of each episode, one player calls the first scene, and specifies its theme. The episode titles originate in these themes.

Hunger

When a harsh winter threatens the Horsehead clan with starvation, the clan chieftain, Skull, seeks a solution aided by other prominent Horsesheads (the shaman Roll-the-Bones, the mighty warrior Redaxe, the shepherd Thickneck and the hostler Twig).

Outsiders

The Horseheads learn the price of success when their raid against the neighboring Lavender clan wipes out their entire male fighting force, leaving them vulnerable and the Horseheads responsible for their protection. Skull faces a challenge from the intemperate warrior Treeclimber, who demands too great a share of the loot. Horsehead leaders solve two problems at once by arranging for Treeclimber’s daughter to marry Farhawk, adolescent son of the slain Lavender chieftain.

The Injustice of Randomness

Disease strikes the village, sending Skull to his sickbed. Members of a recently absorbed clan, the Greensnakes, seize on his weakness in an attempt to kill him and seize power. Skull demands the expulsion of the Greensnakes, but, in a move vehemently opposed by Roll-the-Bones, wishes to keep their three most attractive women as concubines. Skull wins the debate, alienating the wise woman, only to see the women struck dead by lightning.

Redemption

A trip to Lavender reveals that the neighboring clan has fallen into violently opposed camps. After much contention, and the reluctant subordination of the Lavender firebrand Farhawk to Skull, the Horsehead leaders absorb the Lavenders into their ranks, to the apparent approval of the spirit world.

Fear of the Unknown

The arrival of the shattered remnants of the once-proud Swift Hare clan, led by the redoubtable One-Eye, presage the arrival of a terrible new force in the Southlands. A thundering army of the Northern king, Goldenthrone, is on the march, with conquest its aim. Skull discovers a split in the enemy ranks, between the gruff general Blunt Helmet and the eunuch politician Slipper. Going with the man they understand best, they decide to offer their aid to the former.

The Spear of Truth

Talks with the two Northern leaders bring the Horseheads to an about-face: they decide that Slipper is actually the smarter bet.

The flashy northern warrior Shieldheart appears and begins immediately to pitch woo to Redaxe’s lover, Twig. As a demonstration of the new alliance with the north, Shieldheart leads the Horseheads on a raid against an anti-northern clan—one that serves merely as a premonition of a bigger fight against the full enemy force closer to home.

But the real threat to his romantic happiness comes closer to home, when, traveling on a diplomatic mission to another tribe, feelings surface between Twig and Redaxe’s brother, Thickneck.

On his return, Thickneck goes to Redaxe to tell him what happened—and gets an answer in the form of his brother’s upraised axe.

Reckonings

Thickneck accepts a beating from Redaxe but won’t give Twig up.

An attempt to build ties with the north goes sour when the Horsehead ally One-Eye kills their hostage, the general Blunt Helmet, in front of the influential matron Straight Scepter, who has come to ransom him. One-Eye’s apparently rash action turns out to be revenge, in keeping with his clan’s tradition, for the rape and murder of his wife.

When they lean toward leniency for One-Eye, Farhawk explodes in rage, challenging Skull’s authority and leading to his ejection from the talking hall.

Justice

Called to repay a blood debt, Redaxe agrees to save One-Eye, engineering his faked death in a trial by combat. Before leaving for a wandering exile in which he will fight the north in the guise of the bandit called Ghost, One-Eye confronts Skull. His supposedly fake alliance with the north, he angrily predicts, will become a real one—making One-Eye his enemy.

Thresholds

The Horsehead leaders journey north to the king’s capital, Dais, where they behold its wealth and explore its politics. After vehement debate, the group decides. In keeping with One-Eye’s prediction, Skull bows down before Goldenthrone and declares the Horseheads his vassals.

Corruption

On the journey back from Dais, Redaxe begins to forgive his brother. But on return to the clan, it turns out that the people, roused by a reinvigorated Roll-the-Bones, stoutly oppose vassalage to Goldenthrone. A contest of prophecy between Roll-the-Bones and Twig leads to the latter’s humiliation, when Twig correctly predicts Horsehead’s success in a raid against the fearsome foreigners to the west, the Tridents. Roll-the-Bones exiles herself from the clan.

Power Struggle

Twig reveals a new taste for power when she encourages Thickneck to step up and depose Skull as chieftain. She fails in her own bid for power, however, when Staffholder, Roll-the-Bones’ precocious attendant, beats her in a contest of prophecy. Meanwhile, in Dais, Skull and Thickneck fend off Shieldheart’s scheme to have Twig appointed as a permanent courtier/hostage there. When Skull petitions Goldenthrone over the matter, the king, frustrated by his evasions, declares Thickneck the new chieftain.

Recent Activities of the Esoterror Street Team

2011-10-12T09:20:00.000-04:00