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

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

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

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

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A Look Back at Korad: II: The World

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

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.

Recent Activities of the Esoterror Street Team

The Birds: Horrible

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Link Round-Up: Ashen Availability, Fringe History, Sun Surrender, Ferry Wine

If you’ve been waiting for Ashen Stars to show up for sale at RPGNow or Flames Rising, wait no longer.

Nick Mamatas examines the historical provenance of Fringe’s Walter Bishop(s.) (Link good for one week only.)

The Toronto Sun is just phoning it in now.

If I learned that Bryan Ferry could drink wines with ugly labels, my faith in humanity would have been shattered.

A Look Back at Korad I: The Process

Since June 2010 this blog has hosted the Korad experiment, an exercise in group world-building. The final fact we learned about Korad concerns its nominal future. We selected the three candidates for a future ideology which will one day supersede the empire's dominant worldview. As determined by you, they are:
Candlism, a stoic blend of religion and philosophy.
Satirism: a working-class magical movement subverting official opposition to frivolity
Symbotomism: a movement determined to eradicate Aesigil influence, at the cost of also destroying written language
My original intention was to use the world creation as a prelude to another play-by-blog exercise, along the lines of Angels and Operators. As you may guess from the opening clause of the previous sentence, I’ve reconsidered and will no longer be going ahead with that.
It used to be that an ongoing feature, like Korad or Angels and Operators, offered me an acceptable trade-off on the time versus inspiration scale. They took more time to write than the average blog post, but they reliably provided a guaranteed topic for one slot a week. The Hamlet analysis proved even more fruitful, leading as it did to a gratifyingly successful book, Hamlet’s Hit Points, and acting as inspiration for my upcoming new game engine, DramaSystem.
Even more so than a year ago, a blog designed to attract an audience thrives on one-time clicks from social media platforms. Ongoing features did well back when LiveJournal was still a growing concern, and users reloaded their friends page on a habitual basis. Readership for LJ has been slowly deflating over the past year, in part prompting my exodus to the new blog. In the social-click driven environment, which I can now measure with a reasonable degree of accuracy, repeat features lose attention after a while. Those with a play-by-blog format suffer doubly, from what might be called the Babylon 5 effect. They require a high degree of investment and are hard to catch up with if you don’t jump on board from the outset. Given the challenges of LJ’s decline and timing of the move to the new blog, we still had great participation on the world-building end. However, in the new environment or paradigm or whatever it is, I don’t see a play-by-blog series as the best use of my limited outreach time in future.
What I was going to do was have commenters play, to whatever extent they wanted, influential members of the chosen ideology. I’m betting the collective would have chosen Satirism, with few participants rooting to play either stoics or destroyers of literacy. Each play session would present a turning point, where the group would have to decide how to handle a crisis affecting the movement from within and without. Each turn would jump forward in time, allowing for multi-generational play as the ideology adapted itself to changing historical circumstances.
If I had the time to do this, which I’m sure I don’t, I might attempt to do the play over on Google+. It’s new and shiny; its circle feature and discussion orientation might prove more amenable to play-by-blog than a standard comments arrangement.
I’ll do one more blog post, looking at what we’ve learned about world-building from this collective process. In the meantime, though, it’s time to throw Korad’s fate open to you. My final version of the resulting world bible, has now been uploaded to Scribd. The document and its underlying intellectual property are, as always, public domain. You are free to do what you want with it. Peruse it. Change it. Use it as a setting for fiction, your home game, or a published RPG. If you do choose to do something with it, be sure to check in with a report.

Hillfolk Characters and Their Dramatic Poles

As an example of the sorts of characters you’ll play in Hillfolk, the first DramaSystem game, here’s the roster from the in-house playtest. They are stalwarts of the Horsehead clan, highlands-dwelling raiders at the dawn of the Iron Age.

The most important element of any DramaSystem PC are her dramatic poles—the two contradictory emotional impulses she’s torn between.

Redaxe (played by Paul) is the clan’s bad-ass war champion, a confident berserker with axe in hand, but an often confused man in the confusing realms of love and politics. Poles: man of peace vs. man of war

Thickneck (Justin), Redaxe’s brother and the clan’s most accomplished shepherd. His desire for himself and the clan is tranquility; so far, events have given him little of it. For the first season, he served as self-appointed conscience and advisor to the chieftain. Now he is the chieftain. (He’s also for the moment become a GM-run recurring character, as Justin has had to bow out for the fall semester.) Poles: ambition vs. loyalty.

When we first met Twig (played by Lisa) the clan’s willowy young hostler, her lack of confidence led her to seek the approval of others. She started out as Redaxe’s girl, then realized her true feelings were for Thickneck. As last season closed, her confidence issues seemed to disappear, as she sought power for herself and Thickneck. For the first season, her poles were conformity vs. adventure. Now, as she becomes more political and materialistic, she’s shifted to selfishness vs. altruism.

Skull (Christoph) was, for the first season, the brash and maneuvering village headman, who by fits and starts negotiated the Horsehead clan into vassal status with the northern kingdom, only to be set aside by King Goldenthrone. Skull’s search for a new place after losing his authority will doubtless drive much of season two. During the first season, Christoph expressed his poles as assimilator vs. protector. As GM, I would have asked him to adjust these to something more personal and less abstract—were he not in practice playing the more gripping set of poles: arrogance vs. wisdom. In his new renegade state, his poles have shifted to vengeance vs. the people.

Farhawk (Chris) is a young firebrand, and a burr in the saddle of the other main characters. His father, headman of the defunct Lavender clan, was slain by Redaxe, who has sworn to train Farhawk in the art of combat, so they can fairly fight to the death later. Though generally distrusted and disregarded, Farhawk may have the keenest political instincts of any Horsehead. His poles: becoming a Horsehead vs. destroying the Horseheads.

Chris started out playing Roll-the-Bones, the clan’s wise woman. But after she proved dramatically inert—her sole tactic in dramatic scenes was refusal—he was dragooned into playing the powerfully double-edged Farhawk, first introduced as a recurring character (an important NPC.) Roll-the-Bones then became a recurring character, where her obstructionism suits her for the role of nemesis.

Link Round-Up: Shoggoth Remorse and the History of Keeping Calm

History of 'Keep Calm and Carry On', from non-use in WW2 to current trademark fight.

Shoggoth remorse: is it ever justified?

RPGamer Interview

Hear me interviewed by Scott “Fowl Sorcerous” Wachter over at RPGamer. I provide the lowdown on Ashen Stars, spill additional beans regarding DramaSystem, and dole out nuggets of GMing wisdom.

Put it in your ears!

Link Round-Up: Lego Protest, Punisher Praise

Bike lane reduction prompts Lego protest.

Punisher: War Zone is an unheralded masterwork?!? Why was I not informed?

The Birds: Geo-Minarchist

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Link Round-Up: Golden Geeks, Hero Researcher, Horror King, Wendig World

Thanks to Golden Geek Award nominators, who gave nods to The Armitage Files (best supplement) and Ashen Stars (best art). Bookhounds of London is up against Armitage, prompting me to wonder what the word is for a mixture of pride (that Ken got a nom as well) and vexation (that the two books will split the Trail of Cthulhu vote.) Irrichuffment?

Cancer-stricken researcher devises treatment, extends own life, dies, days later gets Nobel nod.

Laurent Bouzereau documentary covering Stephen King’s take on horror movies, first airing tonight on TCM, looks pretty promising.

As I prepare to lay down my group world-building stick, Chuck Wendig is picking his up.

Seeking Toronto-Area Gamer For Thursday Night Playtest Group

I am once again looking to augment the ranks of my Thursday night playtest group—hence this open call for one new recruit.

To join the group, you’ll need to be reliably free on Thursday nights and able to get to the Bloor-Bathurst area in downtown Toronto. We meet from 7 pm to 10 pm.

You will also need a saintly tolerance for my playtesting needs. I run games I’m either designing or need to familiarize myself in order to do freelance work for. In the early going a new game may crash and burn, mandating a return to the drawing board. Often I’ll have to suddenly abandon a successful series in midstream to go on to the next thing. We usually play RPGs but there’s always the chance you may be asked to test-drive a card or board game along the way.

At present we have just entered our second season of Hillfolk, the first game using the new DramaSystem engine. It works within the storygame tradition, focusing on narrative and character development, setting traditional butt-kicking and problem-solving by the wayside. This game will continue until at least spring. Next up will be Gaean Reach, a game of interstellar mystery and vengeance using the GUMSHOE system, with touches of Skulduggery thrown in for good measure.

Please put yourself forward only if you can realistically make a long-term commitment to showing up every Thursday night.

If you’re interested, get in touch either by leaving a comment on this blog, or via private message on Facebook or G+, or DM on Twitter.

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.

See P. XX

Proving it still counts as the September issue if it comes out on the 29^th, the latest edition of the Pelgrane Press webzine, See P. XX, has now escaped from the nest. My eponymous column introduces you to the whys and wherefores of DramaSystem and Hillfolk.

The first of several exciting Ashen Stars demos appears, in the form of Kevin Kulp’s “Stowaway.” This had folks coming up to the booth raving (and then buying the book) when he ran it at Gen Con, and it’s great to see it made available for a wider audience.

Also: Jonny Nexus takes aim at red herrings, we get a peek at the Night’s Black Agents layout, Graham Walmsley continues the Cthulhu Apocalypse, and Beth Lewis debuts her Q & A column by soliciting some Qs and laying down one of her own. And as always, head Pelgrane wrangler Simon Rogers updates you on new and forthcoming projects.

Check it out!

Season Two

After an overly long summer break, my Thursday night playtest group will reconvene, continuing to put the first DramaSystem game, Hillfolk, through its paces. At this point, I’m confident that the main mechanism works well. This is the framing and playing out of dramatic scenes, in which one main character seeks an emotional concession from another. We’re still discovering new things to do with it, which will play into the final manuscript’s explanatory passages. The bit that might or might not now be in place is the less-used procedural system. This comes into play in the surprisingly few cases where you need to determine whether a character succeeds at an external, practical goal—what has always been the bread and butter of traditional roleplaying.

Knowing that we were headed for a hiatus, we tried to steer the previous episode to some climactic moment analogous to the season-ender of a serialized cable show. (The game uses the TV series as a reference point but doesn't try to impose specific television tropes or structures on your evolving narrative.)

That big shift point seemed elusive throughout the session. Then, with the magic gestalt that attends a multi-author improvised narrative, we suddenly got there in the last scene. For much of our first season, the Iron Age raiders of the main cast have been contending with an incursion from the culturally similar but more economically and politically advanced nation from the north. After going back and forth as to whether to ally with or fight the forces of King Goldenthrone, our heroes eventually threw in with him. To make a long story short (and simpler) the chieftain skull (played by Christoph) bowed down to him as a vassal, in hopes of eventually becoming king of the southern badlands, and then challenging him. In a surprise scene at last session’s end, Goldenthrone tired of Skull’s maneuverings and fired him as chieftain. In his place, he elevated Skull’s adviser/frenemy Thickneck (played by Justin.)

Tonight, we’ll add a new player. This will dovetail with the cable series tradition of adding new regulars to series in progress. We’ll start the session by deciding how far we want to jump ahead in the narrative, most likely to a revised status quo with Thickneck in charge and Skull looking for his new place in the clan.