Consider That Stolen, Music Fan

As one would hope and expect at an establishment where all the sandwiches are named after Wilco songs, the chat between counter guys and customers at Sky Blue Sky usually revolves around music.

(Come to think of it, they may actually pay the guys who hang around passing the word on cool new bands. Like the performers who wander amusement parks dressed as cartoon animals.)

The other day, as I was waiting for my Kingpin, I overheard the following revelatory exchange.

Counter guy: You’ve never heard of Jack White?

Music fan: (shaking his head, but smiling) Nah, that’s not my real flavor.

“That’s not my real flavor.” It’s what you say when you want to indicate your lack affinity for something without dissing it. A friendly acknowledgment of taste’s essential subjectivity.

The complicated die mechanic in that story game? Not my real flavor.

I tried to watch that adaptation of the classic ghost story last night, but it was not my real flavor.

It carries the same meaning as “not my cup of tea” but without the aging pedigree, and the unspoken connotation of withheld condemnation.

Now, that saying, music fan, that is my real flavor. Thank you. And consider it stolen.

A WaRPed Character

To celebrate-slash-publicize Atlas Games’ release of WaRP, the underlying rules system for the Over the Edge game, under an open license, here’s a character in the WaRP stats. If you sense the presence of the Cut-Ups Method in the concept, you just might be onto something... While the WaRP license doesn’t grant the right to publish material based on the Al Amarja setting, hey, this is a blog entry and I’m a friend of the family, as it were.

Jewel Broussard

Weirdly Normal Person

Ever since she first saw the cartoon character Tiffany Trilobite on television as a young child and sensed weird depths in her, Kipton, OH native Jewel Broussard has instinctively pursued the random and offbeat. Now twenty-nine years of age, working as a substitute teacher, she has lived her entire life in this small village, never suspecting that the mundane events of her workaday existence play out in exaggerated parallel on the mysterious island nation of Al Amarja. When she spoke up at a village meeting for an increase in the firefighting levy, a new crew of violent, privatized emergency workers, the Broussard Clarions, sprang up on the island. When she caught a fellow teacher stealing money from her school’s prom fund, the dean of D’Aubainne University was arrested and executed by the government.

A few days ago, a plane ticket to Al Amarja arrived in the mail. Though usually cautious, Jewel has chosen to go to this place she’s never heard of, in hopes of discovering why someone would have sent it to her.

Mirrored Existence Events of her dull but happy life in Ohio reflect or create dramatic outcomes on the island. What happens when she gets there? 2

Substitute Teacher Knows a little about everything, but mostly how to earn the cooperation of unruly groups. 3

Inspiring Speaker Confidence and innate goodness make those who listen to her want to do as she suggests. 3

Sweetly naïve (flaw)

Hit Points 14

The Birds: Dinosaur

Click here for the complete strip archive.

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I Have Combat Advantage, Therefore I Am

Earlier I argued that an RPG resolution system can—and should—help convey the game’s emotional message.

This raises a question: can we look at existing systems and ascribe an emotional message to their various interactions of arithmetic and die rolls?

We have no reason to believe that Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax were thinking about this stuff when they codified the “to hit” rolls. Nor was it an issue when designers of later editions expanded it into D&D’s unified core resolution mechanic. But what does a d20 roll do, emotionally?

A d20 is very swingy, offering the biggest range of results possible in the standard polyhedral toolkit. Its raw result introduces a high degree of randomness. You use the rules, in which a +2 bonus is consider mathematically significant, to try to shape its fundamental unpredictability. Stacking up bonuses from magic, items, feats, skills and situational modifiers, you try to move the needle from succeeding about half the time to instead about a 66% chance of success.

In other words, you are incrementally assembling small advantages into one big advantage, in an attempt to impose order on chaos. Through a kitbag of step-by-step accumulation you strive to dampen life’s fundamental arbitrariness. Roll well, and rationality prevails. Roll poorly, and you are reminded that disorder can never be conquered, only forestalled.

Years ago I argued that D&D is a celebration of naked capitalism, red in tooth and glaive-guisarme. Can it at the same time be our foremost existentialist roleplaying game?

Flying Swords of Dragon Gate

Tsui Hark’s latest wuxia flick, Flying Swords of Dragon Gate, is now available wherever you buy your Hong Kong video imports. (Remember, co-continentals: Asia and America share the same Blue Ray region.)

This sequel to the 1992 classic Dragon Inn serves up a study in contrasting eras of flying-people. The original is fast, energetic and sometimes technically crude. Flying Swords drips with mammoth production values, is Hark’s first foray into 3D, and relies as heavily on CGI-animated fu fighting as on wirework.

In plot embracing full convolution of its literary sources, Jet Li plays a eunuch-busting guerrilla who, after destroying the evil East Bureau, is hunted by the bad-ass prince of the even more evil West Bureau. Their paths take them to Dragon Inn, where the white meat in the noodles is people. Add a woman warrior disguised as him as an expression of unrequited love, a pregnant girl escaping the prince, and an assorted complement of treasure-hunting bandits, and you’ve got more story than you can shake a throwing dart at. And oh yes, there’s a gigantic sandstorm headed their way.

I wish this was as complete a return to form as Hark’s previous Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. But here early reels that ought to be investing you in the characters instead spent time throwing computer-animated objects at the 3D camera. Would I sooner see Jet Li in his athletic prime, fighting a dude in widescreen with a locked-off camera? Yes, but that was nearly twenty years ago now. If you’re a fan, lesser Hark and Li are still Hark and Li.

The trailer prominently features the opening cameo from a corrupt eunuch Gordon Liu.

My Favorite Sendak Quote

The late Maurice Sendak, who along with Theodore “Dr. Seuss” Geisel elevated the children’s book to high art, was often referred to as charmingly irascible. When people call you irascible with no further adjective, that’s usually a nice way of saying that you’re extraordinarily difficult but have somehow earned it. Charmingly irascible comes into play when your crankiness becomes entertaining—when you say the what we wish we had the cojones to say. Sendak wasn’t so much irascible as dead honest, and bracingly unconcerned with what you thought about that.

I’ve pointed it to again, but as we celebrate his life and work, here again is my all-time top statement of the governing ethos behind such classics as Where the Wild Things Are:

“I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.”

We should all be so irascible.

The Birds: Online

Click here for the complete strip archive.

Stuck in mobile mode? Click here for image file.

Core Resolution and Emotional Dynamics

How To Design Games the Robin Laws Way

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

With the core book outlined, it’s time to tackle the question of the game’s core resolution system.

(The reality isn’t so linear; thoughts about the book’s structure generally arise in parallel to ideas about the resolution system.)

If you’re designing a new game based on an existing core rules set, the choice is simple—let’s use that one. It might be dictated to you by the publisher, or a decision that you make as a designer. In the latter case, you'll obviously be constrained to the core rules sets available to you. Most likely, you’re working with a rules set by the same publisher. Or you might be using one available through a license, open or limited. We’ve already talked about the process of fitting a new game to an existing rules set; you’re presumably doing the Game X take on Y genre/setting.

If, however, I’m working from scratch, I want to design a core resolution system that creates the emotional dynamic implied by the core goal. Dying Earth, with its rolls and rerolls, evokes the comical back-and-forth of the source material. DramaSystem emulates the basic construction of dramatic scenes and otherwise gets out of the way. HeroQuest zooms out to a broader emulation of story construction, including the pass/fail cycle I later refined in Hamlet's Hit Points. GUMSHOE asks why it feels cool when heroes gather information in a mystery story, and brings that to the gaming table.

I never start out with a novel or abstractly intriguing mechanical idea and then try to build a game around that chassis. It starts with feeling. The mathematical construct is secondary; what the players are feeling when they use it is everything.

Recently I had the experience of switching from one core system owned by my publisher to the other. Before digging into the research for The Gaean Reach, I figured it would be Skulduggery-based, with bits of GUMSHOE sorted in. After reacquainting myself with Jack Vance’s delightful source material, I saw how the structure of its stories differed from the superficially similar Dying Earth tales the core rules were originally designed for. The SF novels played were more about investigation with the occasional setback than the constant picaresque reversals undergone by the likes of Cugel and Rhialto. So I shifted gears, to a GUMSHOE core with appropriate Skulduggery elements grafted on. Again this was a matter of creating the right feel, whether or not the crossover between the two systems introduces brand confusion.

Toronto-Area RPGer Sought For Thursday Night Playtest Group

As happens from time to time, a slot has opened in up in my weekly Thursday night game group. We meet from 7-10 pm in the Annex area of downtown Toronto. The game of choice shifts depending on what I’m playtesting or familiarizing myself with at any given moment.

At present I’m running a follow-up playtest of my new DramaSystem game. This will not use the standard Hillfolk setting, but will instead follow the conflicts and desires of a traveling circus troupe in Depression-era America. The players have asked that their carnies have supernatural powers. (I asked the group what setting they wanted to play and they settled on an homage to Carnivale. This blatant act of premise appropriation is for in-house purposes only and not for publication, so rest easy, HBO legal department.)

Once I’ve given the post-playtest rules draft enough of a spin, we’ll move on to Dreamhounds of Paris, a Trail of Cthulhu campaign in which you portray the major figures of the surrealist movement, after they discover the capability of consciously reconfiguring Lovecraft’s dreamlands. Goodbye Dunsany pastiche, hello melting clocks.

If interested, please shoot me a message on whatever platform you’re seeing this on. Give me a quick sense of your RPG tastes and experience. We’ve had a ton of fun over the years and look forward to bringing in an enthusiastic new player whose time commitments allow for reliable attendance.

Extreme Zombies

I’m pleased to announce that “Susan”, my story of undead unwholesomeness set during a queasy recovery from the zombie apocalypse, will be reprinted in Extreme Zombies, an anthology from Prime Books. Editor Paula Guran has packed its pages with impressive names, meaning that I’ll be sharing a masthead with such worthies as George R. R. Martin, Nancy A. Collins, and Joe R. Lansdale. Lest you conclude that only the middle initial users need apply, the book also makes gore-spattered room for Stone Skin Press contributors Jesse Bullington and Monica Valentinelli. Check out the full roster on the Prime Press site.

The Birds: Acid

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The Treasure of Far Thallai

The Wormwood Mutiny, part one of Pathfinder’s latest adventure path series, “Skull and Shackles,” has now dropped piratical anchor. With it comes the first installment of my new serialized novella, “The Treasure of Far Thallai.”

Challys Argent was once a cloistered scholar, pledged by family tradition to the pursuit of knowledge. But when her order’s seaside eyrie was razed and looted by pirates, her fellow pedants put to the sword, she swore to avenge her brethren and recover the precious artifacts the ravagers stole.

Now, years later, hardened, implacable, calculating, she plies the seas, pirate captain and venture-captain. She sails a captured galleon, the Aspidochelone. At her side fight four unwillingly champions—Golarion’s  notorious pirates all, bound to serve her by the magic of a mighty named weapon, the cutlass Siren Call. They are:

• the cannibal ogre Otondo

• the depraved noble Adalbert Aspodell

• the rum-guzzling, mutton-chomping, avaricious Seagrave

• and the vindictive, deposed pirate queen Rira, her face permanently hidden by a metal mask

In Chapter One, “Hell Come Ashore”, Challys and crew land in the village of Moonplum, as it is plundered by a rival pirate band. There they seek her latest quarry—the sadistic captain Kered Firsk.

See P. XX

In my promotional flurry for The Birds: There Goes My Dream Job I have been remiss in directing you to the April edition of Pelgrane Press’ webzine, See P. XX.

My eponymous column previews The Gaean Reach design process, explaining how a game I thought was going to be Skulduggery with a dash of GUMSHOE asserted itself the other way around.

But that’s just for starters! Also included:

• an inquiry into the love life of the doomed Augustus Darcy, from Book of the Smoke
• an introduction to the gorgeous artwork of new Pelgrane illustrator Phil Reeves
• tradecraft and character dossiers for Night’s Black Agents
• playtesting opportunities, including The Gaean Reach
• tantalizing first looks for the 13th Age, Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet’s upcoming love letter to dungeon-crawling fantasy adventure
• and as always, Simon’s update on what’s new and in the works at Pelgrane

Playtest Hillfolk With Me On Google Hangout

Do you have a webcam, a free evening this Thursday, and a hankering to try out Hillfolk, my upcoming game using the new DramaSystem rules set?

The playtest will take place on Google Hangout from 7-10 PM Eastern this Thursday, May 3^rd.

To indicate your interest in taking part, leave me a private message on Google+, setting yourself up on G+ if you haven’t already.

In Hillfolk, you play tribal raiders at the dawn of the iron age, torn by conflicting desires in a time of hungry empires.

In your message, tell me who you want to play, providing:

• your role in your small, hardscrabble tribe

• your character’s name. Names in Hillfolk are metonyms—understandable words that reveal something fundamental about you. Examples: Skull, Thickneck, Farhawk, Rolls-the-Bones, Twig, Redaxe.

The rest will be revealed during play.

Feel free to list alternate choices for your role in the tribe, in case of duplication.

If I get more than six takers, I will choose between them by means inscrutable.

I’m going to try recording the proceedings, possibly using snippets of sound and video in the crowdfunding video. It might also wind up as an Actual Play resource. Respond only if that’s okay with you.

John Kovalic's The Birds: Vengeance

It’s The Birds Week!

To celebrate the release of the second volume of The Birds, There Goes My Dream Job, friend of the blog John Kovalic has pitched in with a week of guest strips—which also appear in the book.

Click here for the complete strip archive.

Stuck in mobile mode? Click here for image file.

The Birds: There Goes My Dream Job is now available from the Pelgrane Press store, and is winging its deadpan, gun-toting way to wherever you purchased The Birds Volume One.

John Kovalic's The Birds: Realistically

It’s The Birds Week!

To celebrate the release of the second volume of The Birds, There Goes My Dream Job, friend of the blog John Kovalic has pitched in with a week of guest strips—which also appear in the book.

Click here for the complete strip archive.

Stuck in mobile mode? Click here for image file.

The Birds: There Goes My Dream Job is now available from the Pelgrane Press store, and is winging its deadpan, gun-toting way to wherever you purchased The Birds Volume One.

John Kovalic's The Birds: Cuter

It’s The Birds Week!

To celebrate the release of the second volume of The Birds, There Goes My Dream Job, friend of the blog John Kovalic has pitched in with a week of guest strips—which also appear in the book.

Click here for the complete strip archive.

Stuck in mobile mode? Click here for image file.

The Birds: There Goes My Dream Job will be available within mere hours from the Pelgrane Press store, and is winging its deadpan, gun-toting way to wherever you purchased The Birds Volume One.

John Kovalic’s The Birds: Lively

It’s The Birds Week!

To celebrate the release of the second volume of The Birds, There Goes My Dream Job, friend of the blog John Kovalic has pitched in with a week of guest strips—which also appear in the book.

Click here for the complete strip archive.

Stuck in mobile mode? Click here for image file.

The Birds: There Goes My Dream Job will be available within mere hours from the Pelgrane Press store, and is winging its deadpan, gun-toting way to wherever you purchased The Birds Volume One.

Jonathan Tweet Forewords The Birds

I couldn’t be more pleased that the second anthology of Birds strips, There Goes My Dream Job, includes a foreword by seminal game designer, and my frequent collaborator over the years, Jonathan Tweet. Jonathan, who these days makes Google+ his social media HQ, wanted to post it to the world at large. So here it is.

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If you’re reading this book, you’re one of the lucky people who have discovered Robin D. Laws. In The Birds, he distills his insights into the human predicament down to a hilarious comic strip. It’s all about sex, death, family, lies, and popular culture—doled out in carefully measured doses. It’s rewarding to be one of Robin’s fans, whether you’re playing his games, following him online, or reading his comics. He’s a game designer by trade, but his curiosity and expertise slosh out in all directions. Robin usually has something right (and possibly funny) to say about politics, culture, media, or literature. You can count yourself lucky for knowing Robin’s work, but I’m even luckier. I’ve been a fan of Robin’s work for over twenty years, and he’s contributed to several of my own game designs. My collection of roleplaying games includes many of his innovative and original works. In one of his early games, the supreme god of evil is a twisted version of everybody’s favorite Disney-owned stuffed bear. Robin never bothers to do things the way somebody else has already done it. In another game, one that only Robin could have written, players extemporaneously invent a story that tests their knowledge of cinema genre conventions. Some of his roleplaying games sit on the very small shelf where I keep only those few RPGs that I actually play for fun. In addition to his games, my collection includes his fiction, the Iron Man and Hulk comics he wrote, and the first collection of his comic strip: The Birds.

The Birds reminds me of another cartoon strip written by someone who isn’t a cartoonist, David Lynch’s The Angriest Dog in the World. In Angriest Dog, each strip had the same art and only the words changed. Given how unsatisfying Angriest Dog is, I consider it not so much a comic strip as a work of time-distributed visual art in the structural form of a comic strip. Like Lynch, Robin gives us repetitive, static scenes, but Robin’s strips have the distinct advantage of being funny. The Birds is not just a comic; it’s actually comic.

While the birds in Robin’s strip are often the same from one panel to the next, each character has two distinct expressions. A cartoonist would probably base the two expressions on emotions, such as “happy” and “sad,” or “happy” and “angry.” But Robin isn’t a cartoonist, he’s a Canadian. The two expressions he gives his birds are “gun” and “no-gun.” In practice, the “no gun” expression actually means something more like “no gun (just yet).” With all this gunplay, plus the lies and the spare staging, Robin’s strip reminds me of Quentin Tarantino’s debut film. Maybe it should be called Reservoir Birds.

Cartoonists take pains to show that their cartoon subjects are in motion. They use dynamic poses, motion lines, and spelled-out sound effects to get across the idea that, for example, a little boy and a stuffed tiger are on a runaway wagon careening down a steep hillside. But Robin is not a cartoonist, and that’s what makes his cartoons so outstanding. The poses of his characters suggest not motion but stasis. In the typical scene, each bird is standing still, probably with hands in pockets, possibly leveling a handgun at the other bird.

The instantaneous switch from the “gun” state to the “no-gun” state might be Robin’s way to avoid drawing motion lines. Based on my estimation of Robin, however, I suspect that it’s actually his homage to quantum physics, in which electrons jump from one state to the other with no intermediate step. Reading the latest installment of The Birds is like opening the box to see whether Schroedinger’s cat is alive or dead. “Who drew on whom this time?” we want to know. Like a radioactive isotope, the “no-gun” state inevitably “decays” to the “gun” state. Presumably, the “no-gun” state has a measurable half-life, telling us how many panels it takes, on average, for the gun to appear.

With all the motion happening either off-stage or between panels, the characters are static. These static images are reused from one strip to the next. At risk of overthinking a humorous enterprise, let me suggest that Robin’s subtle humor goes along so well with these motionless, repetitive images because his comic strip is about people being “stuck.” Figuratively, they’re stuck in bad marriages, stuck in bad affairs, stuck in bad friendships, stuck in a bad families—crazy people stuck in a world with other crazy people. The visuals reinforce this theme: the characters are stuck in place. The repetition of the same bird in the same pose pulling the same gun reminds us that these characters have been stuck where they are since the strip began. Application of this insight to the one’s own life is left as an exercise for the reader.

While Robin displays many varied sources of inspiration, in the last analysis, his strip demonstrates his debt to French existentialism. The moral of his comic strip is that, as Sartre succinctly put it, Hell is other birds.

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The Birds: There Goes My Dream Job will be available within mere hours from the Pelgrane Press store, and is winging its deadpan, gun-toting way to wherever you purchased The Birds Volume One.

John Kovalic’s The Birds: Existential Genie

It’s The Birds Week!

To celebrate the release of the second volume of The Birds, There Goes My Dream Job, friend of the blog John Kovalic has pitched in with a week of guest strips—which also appear in the book.

Click here for the complete strip archive.

Stuck in mobile mode? Click here for image file.

The Birds: There Goes My Dream Job will be available within mere hours from the Pelgrane Press store, and is winging its deadpan, gun-toting way to wherever you purchased The Birds Volume One.