Blood on the Snow Contents Description

[My Kickstarter page has reached its character limit. To give it space to breathe, I’ve moved the original contents of the Blood on the Snow: A DramaSystem sourcebook here. Blog overflow, if you will.]

Contents:

How To Write a Series Pitch: Robin shows you how to design a Series Pitch for publication—and tells you which pitches not to bother with. Approximately 2000 words. 

DramaSystem Master Class: design notes and troubleshooting tips. Approximately 21,000 words. For this section we’ll be soliciting contributions from the early adopter community—yes, that means you—describing issues that confronted you in DramaSystem play and how you overcame them. Robin will then respond with his own notes and observations. Think of it as Actual Play Plus. (In addition to providing nuts and bolts troubleshooting and inspiration, it also provide an opportunity for emerging roleplaying writers to establish themselves with a paid professional credit. Stay tuned for details.)

LARPing with DramaSystem: a 5,000 word exploration of DramaSystem as a LARP engine, from designer extraordinaire Emily Care Boss. 

Series Pitches: (~2,000 words each):

Pedro Ziviani (Chaosium’s Mythic Iceland) shows you how to weave an Icelandic saga in Blood on the Snow. Justice, feuding and strangeness as only the Norse can do it!

John Rogers (co-creator/producer, Leverage) brings you all the glamour, opium and intrigue of Shanghai 1930. Gangsters, spies, imperialists, revolutionaries and emigres strive to survive the 20th century's most dangerous time and place.

Scott Bennie (Testament) intones Darke and Stormy Nights: feuding aristocratic families are confronted by terror when an implacable supernatural evil awakens!

Steve Darlington (Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd ed, There Is No Spoon) cries “stat!” in System Shock: Galatea General Hospital has always been on the cutting edge of cybermedicine and bionics, but now its new staff have patients wondering: can I trust a robot to save my life?

Paula Dempsey (The Book of Smoke) lays on the equestrian glam for The Chase, a soap opera set in the glossy, moneyed world of high-end horse racing.

Cedric Ferrand (Wastburg) changes your name at Ellis Island in Grave New World, as banished European vampires seek refuge in 1850s New York.

Richard Iorio II (Colonial Gothic) presents Dolphin. The Blue is threatened. The Blight and its warriors amass. The only thing standing in their way are the dolphins dedicated to dedicated to The Way. Finding Nemo meets The Lord of The Rings.

Jack Norris (Marvel Heroic Roleplaying: Civil War, DC Adventures Heroes & Villains) presents Gangs of Old York: Saxons commoners and deposed Anglo-Danish nobles plot, battle, intrigue, and turn outlaw while battling starvation and Norman conquerors and their supporters in the shadows of William the Conqueror's Harrowing of the North.

Aaron S. Rosenberg (Asylum, Spookshow) runs the Family Business: A family of crooks, con artists, and thieves has to rely on everyone's skills and loyalty when the Law closes in, trying to shut them down for good.

Plus two more Series Pitches from Robin:

Mutant City HCU: Ten years after 1% of the population acquired super-powers, the cops of the Heightened Crime Unit live, love and occasionally put away a genetically enhanced perp or two. A dramatic game set in the heretofore procedural world of Pelgrane’s Mutant City Blues.

Against Hali: Student revolutionaries mix love, ambition and revolution in a dictatorial alternate present warped by the eerie power of The King in Yellow.

The book starts at 128 pages (6 x 9 format) with room for expansion as our final-week stretch goals take us beyond Pagemageddon and into the great unknown. Creators standing by on deck to be stretched into the book include: Josh Roby, James L. Sutter, Andrew Peregrine, Lester Smith, David L. Pulver, Kevin Allen Jr., Jeff Richard, Gareth Hanrahan, Mark Diaz Truman and maybe another superstar or two we’ve yet to fully wrangle.

[Classic Post] Christmas Pudding

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.

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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.

Classic Post: Dramatic Poles

I’ve talked before about the iconic characters and how they are driven by an ethos. By recapitulating it, they triumph over external obstacles, affirm their selfhood, and restore order.

But what drives dramatic characters?

When we care about a fictional character, we hope for X and fear for Y. X is the positive condition; Y is its opposite. In a procedural, we hope the character will succeed in reaching his procedural goals and fear that he will fail. In a drama, we perceive a positive and a negative potential. We want the character to reach the former and avoid the latter.

Compelling ongoing dramatic characters possess dual natures, or internal oppositions. We want them to overcome one of these and realize the other. Another way to express this is to say that the characters are torn between two internal forces or impulses. These are the poles of a dramatically active character.

• Rick Blaine (Casablanca) selfishness or altruism?

• Shelley Levene (Glengarry Glen Ross) winner or loser?

• Nora (A Doll’s House) subservience or selfhood?

• Tony Soprano: family man or Family man?

• Nate Fisher: (Six Feet Under) freedom or responsibility?

• Frank Gallagher: (Shameless US) dissolution or dignity?

• Walter White (Breaking Bad) virtuous weakness or anti-social power?

Our feelings toward the two poles may be clear-cut, or divided. Dramatic characterization deepens, and our reactions to it become more complex, when our reaction to the dual nature becomes ambiguous. Part of us wants Tony to be the good family man, but part of us takes dark vicarious pleasure in his sociopathic side.

[Classic Post] Neologism of the Moment: Nerdtrope

nerdtrope
verb

To make an old genre palatable to a contemporary, audience through the addition of fantastical, geek-culture elements.

Deadlands nerdtropes the western. 7th Sea and Legend of the Five Rings nerdtrope the swashbuckler and chanbara genres, respectively. Mutant City Blues nerdtropes the police procedural.

We’re used to seeing nerdtroping in the definitionally geeky of hobby gaming world. Now that geek culture has gone mainstream, we’re seeing it in big commercial films. Cowboys and Aliens nerdtropes the western as Deadlands did before it. Reel Steel nerdtropes the boxing flick.

Classic Posts: A Meta Note

Efforts to fully port the entire LiveJournal over to this here new blog mothership have proven fraught. I’m declaring this an official disguised blessing. Much of the 7+ years of material on the LJ is ephemera and doesn't need to be preserved forever. I won’t be deleting the LJ, so if you still want all my backdated tomfoolery, you can still find it there. Until such time, that is, as the platform deletes itself and sails forlornly to its post-digital Valinor.

However, I will be reposting key entries from the LJ here, as I need to refer to them.

These “classic posts” will be called out as such in the post titles for easy skipping by those reading from an RSS feed. Nor will you have to worry about my link-announcing from Twitter, Google+ or Facebook, as I do the fresh posts.