Why Hillfolk Lacks Magic, Laser-Wielding Dinosaurs

Some gamers interested in DramaSystem have expressed a preference for an intial setting even more deeply geeky than a reimagined early Iron Age. Though no two ask for the same alternate setting. This excerpt from the rule book explains the choice of introductory setting.

In many classic roleplaying games, the characters become vehicles for the exploration of deep, endlessly fascinating settings. DramaSystem aims for a different sort of pleasure, one in which you leave the game remembering its people—the people you collectively created—and the things they did. To bring this experience to the forefront, it lets the background recede into, well, the background.

Hillfolk’s iron age setting is designed to appeal to at least one spectrum of geek-culture tastes, what with its swords, archaic period, imagined history, and epic clash of empires.

However, it does quite intentionally set aside a central element of popular nerdly properties. It takes place in a world without fantastical powers, whether granted by magic, futuristic technology, super mutations, or their various equivalents through other genres.

Beneath their genre-specific skinning, all of these function the same way. They’re super powers. They add flash, glamor and unique, trademarked detail to procedural stories.

By omitting the super powers, Hillfolk helps you to move faster to the heart of DramaSystem, the creation of dramatic narratives. The first time you play it, the group will, instinctively and understandably, lean toward the procedural scenes that drive other roleplaying games. Over time, as the play style manifests, procedural scenes become less frequent. Eventually you’ll start skipping over them, agreeing that certain practical outcomes have already occurred, in order to get back to the character interplay.

Having habituated yourselves to the style, you can move on to as outlandishly geeky a setting as your heart desires. Whatever flavor of super powers you choose will by that point support the game's core dynamic, instead of keeping you from it.

Tomes Fantasy Improv Show Postponed

The fantasy/gaming-themed improv show I plugged last week has been indefinitely postponed. When organizers announce a new date I’ll let you know.

Make the Tabletop Forge Gang Think Up New Stretch Goals for their Kickstarter

When the intrepid adventuring party behind Tabletop Forge, the app that turns Google+ Hangouts into a gaming table, announced their Kickstarter on the weekend, I figured I’d wait until weekday prime time to give their campaign a shout-out. Now I am late to the party, as they blew through their funding goal at jaw-dropping speed. Now they’re near to their stretch goal. Since further development will make this promising tool for online play an indispensable one, I say let’s test their ingenuity and see what other key inducements they come up with when they the top off that, too.

See P. XX, June Edition

The latest edition of Pelgrane Press’ See P. XX now waves for your attention in modest yet dignified fashion. As always, it features an edition of my eponymous column, in this case devoted to the three ways in which we read RPG core books.

Alongside it in the grab bag of Pelgraney goodness: crowdfunding, Night’s Black Agents achievements and competition winners, playtest updates and opportunities, Owl Hoot Trail notes, and Simon Rogers’ latest progress report on the increasingly bustling world of Pelgrane. Check it out.

The Birds: Rehearsal

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Improv Goes Fantasy – With a Hint of Hamlet’s Hit Points?

Toronto’s coolest comedy venue is without a doubt Comedy Bar, at Bloor near Ossington. Although my favorite of the various sketch and improv formats is Catch-23, a competition in which teams have to play exactly that number of minutes worth of scenes before judge and voting audience, I may shortly have to revise that opinion, out of raw self-interest. Comic Doug Sheppard and a marauding band of fellow improvisers are unveiling Tomes, in which the group improvises based on the back cover copy of a fantasy novel they have never read. Curiouser still, Doug, who one must assume has some d20s under his furniture somewhere, got in touch to tell me that he drew some inspiration from Hamlet's Hit Points. I’ll be checking out the epic first performance on June 20^th at 8 PM and reporting back afterwards. Keep up with Tomes events by liking their Facebook page.

Update: This event has been indefinitely postponed. When I get word of a rescheduling, I’ll let you know.

Atomic Overmind Announces New Tales of the Yellow Sign Print Edition

You asked for it, you got it. New Tales of the Yellow Sign, my upcoming collection of short stories inspired by the classic weird tales of Robert W. Chambers, will be available not only in ebook format, but in a print edition from Atomic Overmind Press. I’m happy to be able to accommodate the reading and collecting habits of the bibliomanes among you, and proud to be part of a line including Kenneth Hite’s Tour de Lovecraft and Cthulhu 101. Adding to the bragging rights, New Tales represents Atomic Overminder Hal Mangold’s first foray into straight-up fiction.

The print edition is scheduled for a September 2012 release, but we’ll sneak some advance copies to Gen Con, allowing attendees there the first shot at forever blasting their fragile mental conditions.

Once we go from cover mock-up (seen here) to finished cover, I’ll get the wheels in motion on ebook distribution. This is my first adventure in that format, and I’ll keep you updated as the electronic version wends its way to market.

Here’s the announcement text, as also found on the Atomic Overmind site.

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In the dying years of the 19^th century, a book changed the world—or worlds. A slim, sinister text called The King in Yellow drove those who read it to madness. Despite suppression by anxious authorities, it spread through global culture, and history itself, like a virus. Now the contagion bears hideous fruit.

Disturbing, dissonant and riddled with negative capability.

- Simon Rogers, Pelgrane Press

New Tales of the Yellow Sign expands the classic horror mythos of weird tales pioneer and Lovecraft precursor Robert W. Chambers into new vistas of unease and imagination. Over the course of eight troubling stories, writer and visionary game designer Robin D. Laws lures you into diseased timelines, impossible pasts, and the all-too-terrifying present.

Poison and beauty lie before you, in any color you want.

– Kenneth Hite, author, Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales

Sterilize your suicide chamber, harken to the remorseless clicking of your black box, and whistle for the monstrous creature that lives in your basement. The pallid mask awaits.

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.

– Kenneth Hite, from his Foreword

New Tales of the Yellow Sign is a 170-page trade paperback from Atomic Overmind Press, acclaimed publishers of Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales, and Cthulhu 101.It will release in September of 2012, with a preview release at the Gen Con Indy 2012.

The novels of author and game designer Robin D. Laws include Pierced Heart, The Rough and the Smooth, and The Worldwound Gambit. Robin created the GUMSHOE investigative roleplaying rules system and such games as Feng Shui, The Dying Earth, The Esoterrorists and Ashen Stars.

Atomic Overmind Press is an Alexandria, Virginia-based publishing house, founded in 2008. The Overmind and his creative partners are dedicated to bringing the best in esoteric science-fiction, fantasy, horror, fringe culture, and hobby gaming to a global audience.

90% Vampires

As someone who has himself been guilty of diagramming out narrative structures, I recently had my attention directed to an infographic alleged to depict the thematic content of a particular book. On first glance, this looks cool, and not unlike the slow downward progress of a Hamlet’s Hit Points beat analysis map.

When you check out what it actually measures, the wonkiness surfaces. Welcome to the blissfully obtuse world of the Book Genome Project, which measures the quantity of certain tropes and motifs, which it seems to think are the same thing as themes. It bases itself on the already peculiar assumptions of the Music Genome Project, which powers the Pandora streaming service. The MGP thinks that people choose music based on abstract, objective criteria like “major key tonality” or a “dynamic male vocalist.” Actually we respond more according to cultural aspiration, identity formation, and the indefinable talent of people working within the styles we’re already drawn to. When Pandora works, it’s because of its user fine-tuning.

Gene-sequenced music seems downright on-point compared to judging a book by the quantity of attention given to a motif or trope in a work of literature. This leads to such hilarity as the following gem, from the Book Lamp FAQ. (BISAC is the standard subject header system, as seen on a book’s front matter page.)

A book with 90% Vampires is a very different book than one with 5% Vampires, but both would probably receive the same label in the BISAC classification. 

Clearly the above was typed by an android.

We as readers might respond to certain tropes and motifs, seeking some and staying clear of others. But they are externals, and tell us nothing about why one story using a motif becomes a staple of the canon and countless others vanish from the collective imagination.

Believe me, I didn't want to take the glasses off for this one. But if we’ve learned nothing else here today, vampires are not a theme!

With New Hero 2 Cover, Gene Ha Out-Awesomes Himself

For the fiction writer, the process of having one’s work illustrated serves up anxiety by the bucket load. You are not only at at a remove from the art direction process, but often out of the loop altogether. Instances of character images being shaped more by inattentive illustrators than the text abound in genre literature. And that’s for novels. The idea that you’d have significant input into a short story cover lies beyond the silver veil of authorial dreams.

That an artist would take it on himself to communicate with the writers of a short story collection, taking heed of their input and making adjustments accordingly—why, that’s got to be a crazy myth, on the order of the unicorn. That the artist would then labor to include every single lead character in a collection of fourteen—often with sidekick? Why, that’s a chocolate unicorn riding a platinum unicorn atop a prompt cable installer.

Unless we’re talking Gene Ha, in which case it is just Gene being Gene. Here’s his cover for Stone Skin Press’ The New Hero 2.

As part of our deal when I agreed to sign on as Stone Skin’s Creative Director, Simon Rogers required that I occasionally include my own stories in these anthologies, no matter how unCanadian that might make me feel. The yellow dude with the German shepherd is Longthought, my mutant hero of the semiotic apocalypse, from the story “Among the Montags.”

The Lion and the Aardvark cover reveal

As previously touted hereabouts, Pelgrane Press is launching a fiction imprint, Stone Skin Press, with yours truly serving as Creative Director.  The fourth book in our series of genre-busting anthologies will be The Lion and the Aardvark, a collection of modern fables from an impressive talent roster from writing scenes near and far.

Today we unveiled a cover mock-up to highlight the splendid illustration by Jim Zub, of Skullkickers and Udon fame. It brings a 1900s editorial cartoon style to the dueling laptops wielded by the opposed protagonists of Ekaterina Sedia’s title story.

I’m sure you’ll agree that Jim’s work more than meets the gold standard already set by Stone Skin cover artists, Gene Ha and Jason Morningstar.

We’re slating this for a Christmas release, so save space in your stockings.

The Ancient Scroll Presents Storycraft

Today The Ancient Scroll, a site specializing in RPG story ideas, launches the inaugural edition of StoryCraft, a column of scenario outlines written by well-known game designers. They’ve engaged me to write an installment every two weeks. Subscribe to their RSS feed, or keep an eye out for my links here on the blog or from whichever social media platform you use to track my doings.

The first installment, “By Fate Enslaved”, keys off an intriguing passage in Edward Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to present a tale of sudden slavery, a decadent imperial metropolis, and daring rescue. Check it out... in the original English, or in Polish translation.

The Birds: Made Gay

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Shortlist For 2012 Diana Jones Award Announced

RPGs, LARPs, a board-game and crowdsourced funding vie for hobby-gaming’s most eclectic and exclusive trophy.

The committee of the Diana Jones Award has announced the shortlist for its 2012 award. The list contains five candidates that in the opinion of the committee exemplify the very best that hobby-gaming produced in 2011. In alphabetical order, they are:

BURNING WHEEL GOLD, an RPG system by Luke Crane, published by Burning Wheel.

CROWDFUNDING, with particular acknowledgment to Kickstarter.

NORDIC LARP, a book by Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola, published by Fëa Livia.

RISK LEGACY, a board game by Rob Daviau, published by Hasbro Inc.

VORNHEIM, an RPG supplement by Zak S, published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

The winner of the 2012 Award will be announced on Wednesday 15^th August, at the annual Diana Jones Award and Freelancer Party in Indianapolis, the unofficial start of the Gen Con Indy convention.

ABOUT THE AWARD

The Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming was founded and first awarded in 2001. It is presented annually to the person, product, company, event or any other thing that has, in the opinion of its mostly anonymous committee of games industry luminaries, best demonstrated the quality of excellence in the world of hobby-gaming in the previous year. The winner of the Award receives the Diana Jones trophy.

The short-list and eventual winner are chosen by the Diana Jones Committee, a mostly anonymous group of games-industry alumni and illuminati, known to include designers, publishers, cartoonists, and those content to rest on their laurels.

Past winners include industry figures such as Peter Adkison and Jordan Weisman, the role-playing games Nobilis, Sorcerer, and My Life with Master, the board-games Dominion and Ticket to Ride, the website BoardGameGeek; and the charity fundraising work of Irish games conventions. Last year’s winner was Fiasco by Jason Morningstar. This is the twelfth year of the Award.

More information is available at www.dianajonesaward.org or at the Award’s Wikipedia page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Jones_Award.

CONTACT

For more information or an invitation to the announcement of the 2012 Diana Jones Award you can contact a representative of the DJA committee: committee@dianajonesaward.org

The Warehouse of Dorian Gray

Insurers specializing in high-end art have become increasingly worried by the proportion of their clients’ art collections stored in a small handful of warehouses, mostly in Switzerland. By stashing their art at a so-called free port, the hyper-rich avoid taxes and customs fees.

To rip this story from the headlines, we can see an obvious plot for a heist flick, in which the PCs plot a single score allowing them to scoop up enough masterpieces to stock a world-class museum.

Let’s bend it a little into a premise for a Night’s Black Agents scenario. A venerable vampire, who perhaps once shared absinthe with Oscar Wilde, has transmitted his soul essence into a painting. You know the drill—it ages, he doesn’t. The only way to destroy him is to burn the canvas. He’s stashed it in a free port, confident that its experts will give it all the security they’d provide to a Rembrandt or Picasso.

The mission: under the guise of an ordinary heist, get in there and grab the painting—either to end him, or gain leverage to squeeze favors out of him, in furtherance of your broader war against the international bloodsucker hegemony.

The Birds: Retweeted

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Gaming on Google+ Hangout: After Action Report

A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to gather a great group of players to test Hillfolk via the Google+ multi-webcam Hangout feature. Here’s how it went.

Like any poorly designed experiment, I was trying out three things at once:

1. a new, simpler set of procedural action rules

2. one-shot play

3. the webcam game experience

First of all, we had a fun time, leaving group members hoping for a follow-up—which my schedule unfortunately doesn’t quite permit. Maybe we can get the band back together in the event of a quorum failure for my in-person Thursday night playtest.

#1 went fine. The rules felt simpler and easier to explain even given the complication of displaying tokens and playing for online play.

In the case of item 2, I stripped the rules back even further than for the one-shot I ran for the Pelgrane gang in December. My conclusion is that the game still works without key elements, which is nice to know, but doesn’t offer quite as broad an experience. The written section on one-shots will recommend a suite of features closer to the previous run.

Similarities between the two runs suggest that by default a single-session game develops into a power struggle to destroy and replace the clan chieftain. This offers a clear narrative everyone can take part in, and a definitely shaped conclusion. It works and it’s fun. But I’ll need to add some text showing the GM how to direct the storyline in other directions, so you can play in multiple one-shots without having them all follow the same dynamic.

Thoughts on #3: the Tabletop Forge app, which I used to present the flow of tokens and cards, and create a simple graphic allowing us to remember who was playing who, proved invaluable. At present its interface hearkens back to the clarion days of chat, with command lines and all. The creators of the app are planning a crowdfunding campaign enabling them to add the needed UI interface and other features. As this tool becomes more robust, so will Hangouts as an RPG platform.

One remains at the mercy of each participant’s computer and peripherals, especially where sound quality is concerned. A couple of the players fought with choppy audio streams and had to repeat themselves a lot, which impeded the flow.

Because it consists almost entirely of dialogue between characters, DramaSystem felt like an ideal match for the platform. Despite the kinks, I’m happy to be able to mention this in the rules as a viable way of getting a group together, for one-shots or the longer-term play the game is tuned for.

On the Isle of the Cyclopes, the One-Eyed Man Wants To Kill and Eat You

Raiders of the Fever Sea, part two of Paizo’s Skull and Shackles Adventure Path, is now raiding its way to your purveyor of fine game products. Included among its high-grade swashbucklery is part two of my serialized novella, “The Treasure of Far Thallai.” In “Butcher’s Rock,” captain Challys Argent and her unwilling sidekicks journey to Butcher’s Rock, so named due to its shape, and its population of ravening cyclopes. Furious battle and grim prophecy ensues. For more info, sail your galleon to Paizo’s product page.

Characters of the Greasepaint Series

In response to playtest comments, I’ve simplified one of the core systems of the DramaSystem engine, which powers the Hillfolk game. To test this, I’ve started up a non-Hillfolk game with the Thursday night group, because we already laid that epic series to its fitting conclusion. This time I threw the choice of setting open to the group, enabling us to collectively create something that isn’t intended for publication. The gang arrived at Carnivale with the serial numbers filed off, and thus are portraying members of a traveling show in dustbowl-era Texas. I’ve dubbed this series Greasepaint. Here’s who they’re playing.

Player	Character	Role	Relationships	Desire	Dramatic Poles
Paul	Jo-Jo the Wildman	Freak	Dr F is his father B is his rival	Acceptance	Human or freak?
Rachel	Barboa	Snake Charmer	C is her childhood friend J is object of pity	Control	Independence vs Neediness
Chris	Dr. Fritz	Impresario	Sees B as a daughter C is rival for status	Protect the show the way it is	Arrogance vs. Wonder
Damian	Caravaggio	Magician	Owes J a debt lionizes F	People to trust	Honor vs. Suspicion
Scott	Foster	Aerialist	Wants power from Dr. F alliance from J	Dr. F’s job	Short-Term vs. Long-Term

The Birds: Software

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Wu Xia

Forensics meet fu in Peter Ho-Sun Chan’s Wu Xia, my favorite martial arts film of the last year. In a premise that somewhat recalls History of Violence, modest paper maker Liu Jinxi (Donnie Yen) tangles with and dispatches a pair of dangerous thugs who descend on his rural village. Detective Xu Baiju (Takeshi Kaneshiro), a hyper-rationalist laden with the emotional and physical damage of a mistaken act of clemency performed early in his career, realizes that Jinxi’s story doesn't hold up. Applying his knowledge of physics and Chinese medicine to the crime scene, he comes to suspect that Jinxi is a powerful master of qi energy. And if he is that, the Imperial law enforcement system isn’t the only an organization who might want to know about him and his new family...

Set in 1917 but with nary a firearm in sight, Wu Xia executes a gorgeously-shot slow burn before escalating into a satisfyingly emotional fu epic. CGI effects appear, but only to add grace notes to physically performed stunt sequences. The CSI-style forensic recreations, based on Eastern instead of Western anatomic principles, show us what Xu Baiju is thinking as he peels the deceptions away from Jinxi’s story. Yen delivers a career highlight performance, as a man who has discovered his real identity but still has vestiges of another one moving below the surface. Kaneshiro undercuts his matinee idol status as a man with a brilliant mind trapped in a weakened body. Jimmy Wang Yu, classic star of the Shaw Brothers era (One-Armed Swordsman), makes his first film appearance in eighteen years as a climactic heavy as rife with pathos as he is with menace. And he can still fight!

Two equally generic English titles, Dragon and Swordsman, have attached themselves to the film, suggesting that someone at some point was hoping for a North American release. Snag it wherever you stock up on Hong Kong home video imports.