Link Round-Up: Dragons Love Ashen, MJ’s a Mutant

After the hosts wrestle with combat, the house dragon of the 2gms 1mic podcast gives Ashen Stars two wings up.

Impossible Mary Jane pose, mocked by wags.

Korad: Ideology Vote Redux

Okay, the process by which we vote by liking comments clearly isn’t panning out. It requires people to remember to give a blog post a second look. When I put it that way, the flaw inherent in the system becomes obvious. So, one last time, let’s review the choices and vote with a poll over on the old mothership.

One of these ideologies will grow from obscurity to change Korad. Two others will do likewise to test the mettle of the eventual victor. I have taken the liberty of renaming some of the choices into handy -ism forn. They are:

Candlism. “The Candle in the Darkness” is a stoic path that blurs the line between religion and philosophy. The Candle in the Darkness is a school of thought that focuses on sharp rationality and observed phenomena. Gods are discussed in the same tone as ghosts and chivari apes - to be studied and respected exactly as much as direct observation suggests is necessary. While not, strictly speaking, an atheist movement, The Candle in the Darkness has the scorn and hatred of the religious organizations for the way it denounces faith and prayer.

Gentility. The Gentle Prince, a warrior demiurge, turned his back on the strife and violence associated with the Black Goat of the Fens and built a land of peace and ease. All who accept his path have a place prepared for them there. The Gentle Prince teaches loving submission to those greater than yourself and forgiveness for all who ask it. Surrendering to the will of the Gentle Prince (and his clergy) guarantee a place in paradise after death, and protection from the violent and hateful ways of the Black Goat and her angry children.

Nonism: Based on the teachings of nine masters who have since elevated to divinity through perfection of their philosophical purity. Themes include grace, beauty, and aesthetic excellence in one's duties. The Glorious Nine teach that a useful thing is wonderful, but a thing that is useful and beautiful brings us closer to unity with the godhead, and that a joyful heart is as important as a clever mind.

Satirism: Koradian freedman culture is often overlooked, largely because of the permanent second-class, yet not actually oppressive, citizenship that it imposes. Still, it was probably inevitable that certain of its members would turn to magic (the traditional pastime of slightly disreputable social classes everywhere); and it was probably also likely that said magic would break a mainstream Koradian taboo (in this case, the one against frivolity). Needing to keep said frivolity hidden from obvious discovery meant that its practitioners needed to grow adept at hidden meanings of texts and subtle shadings of speech: a Satirist spell is typically a well-disguised mockery of an existing artistic form, with a direct ratio between the power of the spell and the subtlety of the mockery. It is said that a true adept can transmit a blessing or a curse in a simple "Good morning." And then it was discovered that the spell for ensuring the sex of a child was easily within the powers of the adepts... provided that the woman who was the target of the spell accepted the central teaching of the Satirists: "Life is absurdly good." Which sounds a lot more transgressive in the original.

Symbotomism combines anti-Aesigil views with extreme devolutionism. They believe that the Aesigils have had undue influence on the development of human civilization and culture, and it is now necessary to expunge all symbols used to adorn bodies, clothing, architecture... even going so far as to advocate the destruction of all written records and language itself. Humans will become perfect when they develop their own thoughts and language without Aesigil influence.

Head over to LJ to vote for your favorites.

Link Round-Up: Repairer Reviewed, Santeria Smear, Detective Dee

The Repairer of Reputations scores a gratifying review at RPGnet.

Mirror appliques on mayoral campaign signs prompt Santeria smear.

Tsui Hark's delirious return to wuxia form, Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame, starts its limited US theatrical run tomorrow. One of my faves from last year's TIFF. Reindeer fu!

Illustrations and Expectations, or the Four-Gun Kch-Thk

In what might be our first Ashen Stars FAQ, I've been asked if Jerome Huguenin's cool image of a kch-thk warrior means that player characters of his locust-like species get four Shooting attacks per round. As the questioner pointed out, the illo will have his players making an impassioned case for it.

The reality is that Jerome came up with a great idea for an illustration independent of a specific crunchy bit in the rules text. Getting a roleplaying game out the door and into your hands is a long enough process without a stage where we look at the art and see if we want to rebalance character abilities based on what it seems to promise players. The ever-hungry kch-thk already come with a nifty array of unique schticks, not the least of which is being able to migrate their discarnate identities into new, fast-growing larval forms when they get killed. The idea of immediately adding yet another bit of defining crunch without testing for balance fails the caution test.

For the moment, let's say that some kch-thk fire four-handed, but that this is a style move. Holding four weapons is easier than coordinating them, even if the shooter sports a set of compound eyes. In the end the four-handers are no more effective than any highly-trained marksman carefully firing a single gun.

The four-handed stance might also show us what it looks like when kch-thk crew members make Intimidation spends. Sure, maybe their accuracy leaves something to be desired. It's still a hell of a way to bust into a room.
(Or he might just be holding four special scanning devices. But that would be too much of a buzzkill, wouldn’t it?)

Link Round-Up: New Policy, Three-Act Cat

In a world of ever-declining standards, sometimes it becomes necessary to draw a line.

And, look, I don’t normally do this. But what can I say? I’m a sucker for a perfect three-act structure:

Korad: Call For Votes

Suggestions are in for the three ideologies that will rise to challenge the old order in Korad. If you haven’t done so already, pop over to the original thread now, and vote by liking your favorite of the comments.

The Birds: Ask

Click here for the complete strip archive.

Stuck in mobile mode? Click here for image file.

Dead Enders

While this exploration of an abandoned Libyan state security station is overall as chilling as you'd expect, a surprising poignancy attaches to certain passages. In the maw of the beast, Walter Mitty daydreams:

Hidden away inside the door of a filing cabinet, in a spot where few eyes would see them, were pictures and postcards from places a Libyan security staffer might only dream about: England, Lebanon, the pastoral countryside of rural America.

Having boldly declared that I would be on the record as having supported the Western support campaign for the Libyan rebels if it turned out to have worked, I can now courageously declare myself to have been right all along.

The fighting's not over yet, unfortunately. Where in Iraq regime supporters melted away in the face of Western ground troops, Libya's civil war remains hot. At first the ferocity of the dead-enders seems inexplicable. Why not attempt an opportunistic last-minute pivot to the winning side? Presumably the guys who are still shooting know (or at least believe) that they were in so deep with the old regime that they're irreparably screwed in the new one. Resistance, no matter how desperate, seems the only good option. Or perhaps the dead-enders are simply as psychopathic as the man and regime they loyally followed until now. Certain last minute massacres may be exercises in killing the witnesses.

Iraqi resisters vanished to fight another day, knowing they'd have a foreign occupier to mount an insurgency against—and thus at least a plausible path back to power. This strategy ultimately failed, but wasn't crazy. Their Libyan counterparts know they'll only face the people they oppressed, and who despise them. As Irony and War are long-standing drinking buddies, it maybe shouldn't come as a surprise that an environment that starves a long term insurgency comes at the cost of near term savagery.

The Hearing Trumpet

As devoted as they were to the triumph of the irrational over the conventional, of the anarchic and revolutionary over conventional authority, the fractious assemblage of artists who called themselves surrealists were notoriously a boy’s club. The artist Leonora Carrington, who died this year at the age of 93, elbowed her way into their movement, deflated their chauvinism, and outlived them all.

Her 1976 novel The Hearing Trumpet (which appeared first in French, in 1974, and was subsequently self-translated) has yet to find the full readership it warrants. No doubt this is because Carrington was reaching out of her visual arts box.

The book opens as a kooky first-person account of the admittedly ancient and eccentric Marian Leatherby. When a friend gifts her with a prodigiously effective hearing trumpet, she learns that her family intends to send her to a home. The institution, run by a pair of parsimonious, judgmental Christian mystics, houses its inmates in bizarre structures in such shapes as a lighthouse, an igloo, and a circus tent. Marian’s fascination with the dining hall’s portrait of a leering, winking nun leads her to a mysterious medieval text of sorcery, corruption, Templars and a Holy Grail that serves as a font of suppressed women’s magic. And that's where it gets crazy.

Experimental in content but clear in its narrative presentation, The Hearing Trumpet is not just daffy but genuinely playful and funny. At the risk of spoilerage, its final cataclysm earns its expatriate author a uniquely feminist (not to mention lycanthropic) spot in the literature of cozy British apocalypse. A neglected classic that deserves sit on any shelf where the literary and the fantastical collide, alongside Borges, Calvino, and Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars.

Korad: Tomorrow's Ideologies

Last week we asked ourselves which crises threaten the empire’s stability, making room for the new ideologies that will soon arise to threaten the dominant ethos.
According to the new comment-and-like system, they are:

1. Debates between religious scholars erode faith
2. Imminent invasion by long-absent powerful aliens, in clandestine partnership with the scholar-lords of Montvale
3. More men are being born than women, sparking to a patriarchal, atheistic youth protest movement

A new belief system has been born somewhere in the Koradi vastness. Today it is obscure and tiny—much more so than the rapidly growing patriarch movement. Over the next few centuries, the new way will rise, persevere through a period of tumultuous struggle, and in the end eclipse the old order. Over the course of this transformation, it will change in response to the tests it faces. It is not the only nascent ideology. Two other competing belief systems will rise alongside it, challenge its hold over the people, but ultimately fall by the wayside.

This week we'll define those three nascent belief systems. Propose your idea for a new belief system using the comment system below.

To add a new answer to the question, start a new main comment thread.

To add a modifying riff or detail to someone else’s answer, append a reply comment.

Show your approval for an idea by liking the comment in question. Like as many comments as you want.

The original author of any main idea can count a riff on his or her idea as part of the main idea by saying so in a reply to the modification. If the original author does not make this approval, it is incorporated anyway, when the number of likes on a modification equals half or more of the number of likes on the main idea.

Link Round-Up: Qadhafi Mana, Diamond Planet

Recently discovered diamond planet sounds like something out of Jack Vance's Gaean Reach books.

Libyan rebel triumphantly acquires Qadhafi's mana (in numinous headgear form):

The Birds: Book

Click here for the complete strip archive.

Stuck in mobile mode? Click here for image file.

Link Round-Up: Ouija Payoff, Lager Reveal

Universal pays Hasbro $5 mil not to have to make a Ouija movie.

Secret origin of German lager traced to creepy-looking orange galls on Argentinean beech trees.

FanExpo

I’ll be making one appearance at Toronto’s FanExpo later this week. The DMing Mastery panel features Ed Greenwood, Phil “Chatty DM” Menard and myself, and happens this Friday, at 4:00 pm, in room 715B.

Despite great attendance last year, the show’s upper powers have this time around scaled back tabletop panels to this one event. I’ll be dropping the show from my commitments list from next year onwards, so if you want to see me there, this will be your last chance for the foreseeable future.

What Attack the Block Nerdtropes

Earlier, I discussed nerdtroping, the process of popularizing older genres via the addition of geek-friendly tropes.

The delightful SF-horror-actioner Attack the Block (go see it, right now in mid-sentence, before continuing to the rest of this post) nerdtropes a surprising genre: the social realist docudrama. The genre represent the underrepresented, placing its working class or underclass characters in struggles typical of a broader struggle against difficult social circumstances.

Its classic presentation, as seem in the films of the Italian Neo-Realist movement, emulates cinema verite documentary in its pursuit of polemical credibility. The genre has long held a fascination for British filmmakers working from a leftist perspective. Pioneering films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (both based on Alan Sillitoe novels) continue to shape UK film today.

Attack the Block concerns itself throughout with the social conditions that made its delinquent heroes who they are. The council housing project that defines them is the object of alien attack—a dynamic mirrored when the police come calling. The final character turn that brings the alien-conquering protagonist salvation from outside authority comes when the audience viewpoint character finally understands the circumstances of his upbringing. It wraps the message in thrilling chase scenes, bloody surprises and refreshingly lo-fi monster effects. The realism may be dustbinned, but the social message throughlines the script from alpha to omega.

[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.

The Three Reveals of Gen Con (Part Three): DramaSystem / Hillfolk

At Gen Con, brave questioners heard details on up to three unannounced projects. Over the last weeks, I’ve been making those revelations here.

The first: New Tales of the Yellow Sign

The second: Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff

Now the third and final reveal: my new rules engine, DramaSystem, as expressed by its first game iteration, Hillfolk. The tagline for the project is: If Hamlet's Hit Points is the theory, DramaSystem is the practice.

Specifically, it picks up on the HHP observation that the core scenes of any narrative can be broken down into two categories: procedural and dramatic, and that RPGs have traditionally excelled at the former and given short shrift to the latter. You know those magical sessions where the rules melt away and you just find yourself freely interacting for four hours? And next week you can’t recapture whatever lightning found its way into the bottle? DramaSystem makes the free-flowing story-making happen as a matter of course. It changes the roleplaying dynamic, allowing you to create ongoing collaborative stories that unfold like serialized drama shows (“The Sopranos”, “Six Feet Under”, “Shameless.”) I’ve been in-house testing this for most of the year and am beyond excited by the results.

The first game is Hillfolk, in which you play the core members of a clan of uplands raiders at the dawn of the iron age. Their personal stories play out in a crucible of competing civilizations. Do their histories change the world forever?

Pelgrane Press will be publishing; I’ll be talking about it in stages in the weeks and months ahead. For the moment, here’s a peek at the character sheet. This is my playtest rough and has yet to undergo graphic design beautification. But you get the idea.

Link Round-Up: HHP Goes Boardgame, RPG PhD, West Memphis 3 Released

Chris Farrell applies the Hamlet's Hit Points method to board game analysis. See if you can spot the line that is exactly what I'd hoped a reviewer would say about the book.

Dissertation by Doctor of Roleplaying Michelle Nephew now available in affordable e-form.

The West Memphis 3 are to be released today, thanks in large part to a series of documentaries about their clearly unjust murder conviction. The third installment is due to play the Toronto International Film Festival in a few weeks; the directors are now rushing to add an updated ending. Among the celebrities helping their cause, it turns out that Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh provided funding for the forensic tests that finally forced prosecutors to act. The three were released under something called an Alford plea, which stops short of an exoneration, leaves some charges on their records, but does not (contra early reports) require them to admit guilt.

The Birds

Click here for the complete strip archive.