Background

After his excellent Mistborn trilogy and being tapped to finish The Wheel of Time. Brandon Sanderson has risen swiftly through the ranks of fantasy authors.  Personally, Mistborn is my favorite series of all time.  When I found out that a new novel set in the same universe was coming out, I was excited.  The magic in the world revolves around using metals to have significant, but limited, magical effects.  Whereas the first novel took place in a fantasy dystopia with apocalyptic rumblings, this novels problems are decidedly more limited in scope.

Setting

With the same magic system firmly in place, Sanderson moves out of medieval stasis into a Wild West/ Industrial Revolution era in a novel that smartly extrapolates a world’s progression even if it fails to capture the grand scope of the original.  Alloy of Law starts in the Wild West (called the Roughs), but spends most of the time in a bustling metropolis.  Although Sanderson’s new characters lack the variety of powers found in the first trilogy, he uses his magic system adroitly to come up with formidable (and interesting) twists on what existed in his original Mistborn trilogy.  Coupled with very cool newsprint/dime store inserts between some chapters, the setting is one that easy to enjoy.

Story

Sanderson spoiled me with the Mistborn Trilogy.  It was a series that carried  immense scope and grand design, but managed to make the grandiosity expertly personal.  I expect the same from him in his other works.  In this instance, the story is a drama involving people grounded in a world of laws and high society.  A rough lawman must come home and assume his responsibilities as a noble.  Along the way, we meet haves and have-nots, urban and country folk, and even a few old characters make brief cameos.

In Alloy of Law, only a few characters get enough focus to experience significant growth and development.  The protagonist, his sidekick, the damsel in distress and the bad guy are the only developed characters in the novel.  Even then, their characterization is consistent, but more defined by their roles than their personality.   Make no mistake, they are portrayed convincingly, but somehow this novel doesn’t live up to the expectations I had for it.  The reader moved from a story about saving the world from a cascading set of terrible evils to stopping a flagrant band of thieves.   It left me disappointed.  The narrative is logical, brisk, and entertaining, but aside from some quirky moments the story goes just about the direction you expect it to.  I know Sanderson can do better (he wrote the best trilogy climax I’ve ever read) and the book feels just how he billed it: a side project.  Ultimately, its flaws are not so great that it hampered my ability to enjoy the novel.  Sanderson’s setting has evolved , characters we knew have become legends, and the magic system is still awesome, but this feels more like a stop-in than a true worthy sequel.  I found myself reading as much to discover snippets about the immediate legacy of the characters from the original trilogy as much as the new character’s story.

Overall

B. If you’re a fan of the Mistborn trilogy then reading this is a no-brainer.  If you haven’t read Mistborn yet, pass over Alloy of Law for now.  If for some strange reason you didn’t like Mistborn, well, you’re crazy, and this book won’t change your mind about Sanderson.

What I Took Away from this Book

I have always been a fan of creating ‘lore’ for the setting ala Dune.  I’ve used the trope before, and avoided it other times, but when you’ve established yourself like Sanderson its really awesome to see the graphic design, layout, and illustrations of ‘era’ newspaper broadsheets in between chapters.  It makes me want to create some setting lore documents ahead of time for the next novel I write, not necessarily to shoehorn into the novel, but have as a resource to draw on as I plot things.

Conversely, I think I learned about staying true to the world and mythos you as an author created.  You can write a book about a heist, or a murder mystery, or life on the streets, but when your the story of your world is grander and bigger than that you set up that expectation in the reader that the scope and grandeur will continue.  If this book had been released before the Mistborn trilogy my opinion on it would have been completely different.  Its not only important to think about what your next step as a write may be, but also to consider what it is the reader expects out of you having traveled with you thus far.

Low Town is the debut novel of fellow Dickinson alumni, Daniel Polansky.  Mr. Polansky knew many of the same people I did in college, but even in a small liberal arts school like Dickinson our paths never crossed. It’s a damn shame because Low Town is a rollicking mash up of two great genres: noir and fantasy.  The author skillfully weaves a first person narrative in a way that vibrantly develops the setting into a living, breathing, festering, and foul supporting character unto itself.

Setting

The book is named after the impoverished underbelly of the Imperial Capital and the vast majority of the action takes place in this fetid urban sprawl.  The book follows a man simply known as The Warden: an independent drug dealer with a wonderfully checkered past.  He ends up caught in a tangled web of child murders where his own conscience and the machinations of others forces him into solving one last mystery.  Although we only see things through the eyes of The Warden, we get a good feel for the supporting cast and an incredible appreciation for the misery that is Low Town.  The author pulls no punches depicting graphic violence and frequent drug use.  There is a sense of history to the world, but the author walks the tight rope of unfurling the past slowly and only inasmuch as it bears an impact on the story of The Warden.  Proper nouns and slang give Low Town its own feel without impairing the readability of the novel.  However, only three or four characters besides The Warden manage to stick out.  This did not bother me though, as the same word count that often goes into character development was instead packaged as setting development.  Low Town was great, but if you like your fantasy noble then stay out of Low Town.

Story

The narrative is decidedly noir, with a bit of magic thrown in.  It works very well.  Insert magically themed substances for common street drugs of today and a few wizard-types into your typical hard-boiled story and you probably wouldn’t be far off from the feel of Low Town.  As you might expect, The Warden ends up getting deeper and deeper into trouble. The author does a good job of causing problems for The Warden without undermining the strength and competence of his character.  However, there a few slight missteps.  The Warden does get high on his own supply, and other than giving him hyper-focus and hangover cures there seems to be little ill effect.  The problem being, the setting and my own baggage as a reader suggests that drug abuse has negative side effects.  Those downsides never really manifest for The Warden.  Furthermore, I always have trouble gauging how surprising a story is because I smugly assume myself to be pretty Genre Savvy, but there were some points where I said to myself it can’t be this simple, and I was proven right.  On the one hand, this is more easily forgivable because the narrative is first person and thus the ‘filter’ of our information is inherently biased, but I can’t help but feel there were a few things that surprised the narrator that didn’t surprise me.

Overall Rating

A-.  I feel bad dwelling on the parts that were less than perfect, but believe me, this is a very high quality and fast-paced story.  The rich setting that Mr. Polansky built in his debut novel leaves me eagerly anticipating more.

What I Took Away from this Book

I envy the natural ease in which the setting flows.  By carefully doling out information and writing dialogue peppered with slang that, in context, makes very good sense, Polansky makes his world leap off the page.  Although setting slang can easily sound hokey or forced, when done right, it is just too great a tool to ignore.  Essentially, small phrases of dialogue that were used to convey annoyance, disgust, etc. can now pull double duty as world-builders.   So, despite my misgivings about my own ability to ‘make it work’ I am going to change my story so instead of common expletives and exclamations, I will have a host of world-specific slang.

Low Town’s first person narrative and limited number of characters is a double-edged sword.  It works here because of its blistering pace and The Warden’s inherent likability despite his profession, but it does cause the ‘plot space’ to be small.  What I mean by that, is if you’re looking out for twists and turns, there are only so many places it can go by the latter portions of the book.  I think the increased development of the main characters, and the Warden in particular, makes this choice a good one, but for what I’m writing having too limited a view of my world might defeat what I’m aiming for.

The reality for most aspiring authors is that their writing has to give way to the realities of a full life outside of it. Most of the time, that means squeezing in time in between your job that pays you and other life activities. However, sometimes you can get lucky and have the opportunity to spend a large dedicated chunk of time writing without work getting in the way. Having neglected to use my vacation time much over the past few years, I found myself with time off to spare and resolved to take a work week off and write. And so, between Christmas and New Years I had nothing to do but write…  and do family things for the holidays, of course.

This column is about getting the most out of your time during those brief times you ought to be able to dedicate to writing and coping with the inevitable interferences that will crop up.

Prepare the Environment

This is actually two-fold and refers to both your literal setting and social situation. Everyone has different things that help them focus, but for me, I like a clean working space. I can have piles of things, but they need to have a purpose. A few days before my work session I took the occasion to clean the closet, organize the shelves, and throw out what I could from my office. Some people need less, some people need more, but the best thing to do is make sure that the place you work won’t get in the way of you working.

Secondly, I managed social expectations. I told people I was off, but working around the house. I committed to family activities, while keeping my non-holiday vacation days mostly clear. I even told my girlfriend (whom I live with) to plan on me not being around as if I were at work, because even if I was around and I would love to get lunch with her, I did not want her to be disappointed when I was mostly toiling alone for the week.

Set Appropriate Goals

When you’re trying to get as much as you can in a limited time, there’s already a bit of pressure, but there’s also opportunity. For me, my list of goals were a wish list. I listed all the writing related tasks that I had to do and prioritized them. I had a ‘must-do’, a ‘should-do’, and a ‘can-do’ list. For me, I find that I rarely misjudge my wish list so grossly that I end up working too fast, but prioritizing my list gives me a few advantages. First, it motivates me do my ‘must’ list, but it gives me some other things to consider in case I need a break. As I lagged behind on my ‘must-dos’ I approached them with increasing urgency and a self-created ‘need’ to complete them. Secondly, it ensured that no matter how productive a spurt I had, I never felt that I could slack off during my specially allocated time.

Manage Expectations

Inevitably, real life will interfere in your work. You want to break up your writing to run needed errands, exercise, and interact with people. I find a few flexible chores each day are good because when I really got stumped I had a change of pace ready to help clear my mind. It helped me return to my project refreshed.

Unfortunately, things crop up that are unexpected and unpleasant. I watched a whole day slip away dealing with lingering Comcast Internet problems. It was incredibly frustrating, but when other things needed to get done even, the best thing to do is accept the setback and work hard to still meet your ‘must-do’ list. This is easier said then done. When I was forced to deal with these things I was irritable and cranky, but ultimately, I accepted the inconvenience and thought about getting past it.

So how did I do? My “must-do” list included a line by line revision based on a red-lined hard copy of Roland’s Legion from Andy and rewriting The Religion Subplot. I had about seven other things to do as well. In the end, I only got done my ‘must-do’ list and even that I had to use one of the days I had off for actual normal time off to finish. I was disappointed in the work I still had left to do, but ultimately, I completed the essentials and could live with that. My next column will be a book review and a companion piece on how I always read with an eye towards my own writing.

So now, with all the self-important preamble out of the way, its time to cut to the heart of this column: killing what you love. It’s easy, academically, to understand you need to tweak and change sentences to make a novel more readable. Over the course of thousands and thousands of words you are almost certain to put down some downright incomprehensible sentences.  Maybe you fall in love with a few, but diction is not the issue I’m covering here today. No, instead we’re talking plot.  Some readers questioned the purpose and execution of what I will call The Religion Subplot.  At first, I rejected the notion it needed to be changed. I could fix it, tweak it, and make it better. I would show my friends what it was that I meant in my brilliant manuscript even if they were too stubborn to see it. In fact, my first revision did see me overhaul and improve the The Religion Subplot.

However, my friend Andy, who was insane enough to read my draft a second time, still had some rather well-reasoned criticism of the The Religion Subplot. I had thought that I had fixed it, but his renewed complaints planted the seeds of doubt. After overcoming my own wounded pride, I decided to look at The Religion Subplot with as much objectivity as I could muster and judge it based on the following criteria:

Did it add to the world’s depth and history?

Not really. The words were dedicated to ‘selling’ the subplot.

Did it provide character drama and attract reader interest?

Yes, there was drama, but it seemed dangerously close to being the much-maligned Sansa chapters of my book as it distracted from, rather than enhanced, the major plot points in the novel.

Did it reinforce the major themes that I had worked on developing throughout the novel?

Not at all. I had written a novel about growing up too fast, moral boundaries in wartime, and lots of cool magic and explosions. This really did not add to them.

I am very lucky that much of The Religion Subplot can be rewritten modularly. By that I mean, much of it is divorced from the events taking place with much of the main cast, but has the effect of moving characters and altering situations that the main plot threads pass through. Even so, the prospect of taking between twenty and twenty-five thousands painstakingly crafted words (that I had already rewritten once) and throwing them in the trash hurt. All I can say, is follow your instinct. In addition to this raw ‘rewrite’ my whole novel will need to be reviewed, considered, and rationalized with the new story direction. I just made work for myself and that does not feel great. What feels worse is sticking with something you know isn’t as good as it can be. We all have to make compromises at our jobs and with our loved ones, but when you’re still in the infancy of your writing career I think its insane to go with anything less than what you think is best.

When I started my story, I thought that I had a cool and unusual subplot. And you know what? I still do, but its just not meant for Roland’s Legion. Every word is precious in a manuscript. Dropping a 250,000 word manuscript on some one’s desk, having them tell you its like Dune and Lord of the Rings had a baby in your brain, and winning awards would be great. However, as someone who has never been published you need to have a word count in mind and be disciplined about it. It forces you to cut through the crap, take out what matters less, and hone what you do have to the utmost of whatever writing ability you possess. And so, that is why, on December 22, 2011 I now pronounce The Religion Subplot to Roland’s Legion dead.

Next time I’m going to talk about working in short concentrated bursts amidst a busy life. For the first time since 2009, I have take off a full week of work and because I believe myself to be a writer, rather than enjoying time off in a warm place with my beautiful girlfriend, I am going to lock myself alone in a room and play with words on a computer. Hopefully, I will have some good news to report about how I managed to effectively use my limited time off to progress on things that are more difficult to work on during limited workweek situations.

If you want advice from guys that have actually been published in the gaming world, frankly, there are plenty on this site.  None of my work has seen publication. My efforts are focused more on fiction writing.  However, even in that regard, I have also struck out.  I never tried to get the first novel I wrote published. I realized it was deeply flawed and I lacked the dedication to fix it.  My second novel was better, and after a major overhaul I even had agent representation, but my agent never did get it published.  Now, years later, I am nearing the completion (read: temporary stoppage in editing) of my third completed novel and seeking once again to find an agent and get published.

The Pain of Publication is a journey through this process.  I emphasize, again, that this is a process.  I can offer no advice on what works, because nothing has for me, but what I can do, is discuss my regular activity related to this subject.  This column’s focus will range from the obvious (getting an agent), to related (how do I make my novel worth publishing), and all the way through tangential subject matters (I have not yet fathomed what those might be).This first installment is going to focus on how I found an agent.  There are literally books written on this, and agents out there with information on how they find and evaluate talent.  Those books and resources are more qualified to speak on things as an expert, but its my hope that my own anecdotal experiences and lessons learned will be useful to some people out there.

My second novel sprang from a scene I did in a creative writing class in college.  After quitting a job in sales, I found part time work as a tutor to tide me over until I could go to law school.  With nearly a year before law school started I decided to focus on writing fiction.  I wrote without much of a plan and let the plot evolve.  The novel ended 3 months later at close to 200,000 words.  I did not see a problem with this.

I diligently compiled a list of agents that were accepting query letters while I honed my own.  Sending a query letter is a lot like screaming into a bottomless pit.  Typically, the only thing you hear back is an echo, but when you hear something other than the sound of your own voice it provides high drama.  It’s impossible to say what is going to strike a cord with an agent, but make sure the query is true to your novel, you offer some way to contextualize what it is your story is and why its special, and that have as many people as possible comb over the query letter to make sure it is grammatically correct.  My own grammar can really suffer over the course of a novel (or maybe even a blog post), yet it helps to show that you know how to write properly in a highly limited format.

Out of fifty estimated email queries I heard back from maybe ten.  Of those ten, six to seven were just polite enough to tell me no thank you.  That left about three people that wanted more.  One of them asked for the first twenty pages.  I sent that and waited nervously. Before they asked for the whole novel they commented it was too long.  I sent the novel anyway, only to find out weeks later, that they wanted to read it closer to the 120,000 words.  So, I cheated.  

I had the novel end abruptly, with a small denouement as my “ending.”  It made my novel worse, but I thought if she read it she would just want to see the whole thing.  Then, my original ending would wow her.  My agent read that version of the novel.  She loved it, but called me out on the ending and said it was abrupt and pretty obvious I just wanted to hit her word count.  There was no anger from her, yet I can see where some others might have been angry in her place.  It never occurred to me at the time that it would be so easy to see through that ploy.  She said she would represent me and that I needed to conclude it more satisfactorily.  If you’re in a similar situation regarding word count, I urge you to consider your story under the criteria I did:

1. Does the whole of your word count work either directly or indirectly to strengthen the core themes and plots of your story?
• I found that I could tell a similar tale if I cut out the fat.  I would be discarding some important subplots, but they were not strictly necessary in this installment.
2. Is the ending a satisfying across-the-bow climax, or is just where you stopped writing?
• Ending a novel is hard, and mine stopped, both in the version for my agent and the full length monster version.  Major plot threads were resolved, but I could not honestly say this was the ending that the novel required to be complete.
3. Do you have an idea about how to shorten the story, and if so, would it compromise your vision of the tale?
• This was what I struggled with most.  I worried that I was “selling out” to get an agent.  For over a week, I had not come up with a natural climax to my story. However, once I did, everything fell into place around a new, stronger ending.  That made my decision easy.

So, I sold out.  In one feverish weekend during my the summer of 1L year of law school (some 9 months after having started the agent search) I locked myself in my room and I wrote.  And wrote. Even moreso I read to make sure my changes transitioned smoothly with the other parts of the novel.  I am proud of my work that weekend, but it was an exhausting frenetic affair.

>And still, the novel never got sold.That’s the lesson.  One editor said the world I built reminded her of Dune, but there was no place for it at her publishing house.  That made me feel good, but ultimately, I think that even if you do get published, or don’t, you have to live with what you’ve done.  With writing a novel, there is no blame game at this stage.  You are solely accountable.  I was lucky because this process made me a better writer, made my novel stronger, and taught me lessons for my next project.  However, that does not mean every request by every “insider” is ultimately what your writing needs.

In the next installment of the Pain of Publication, I will go over what I’m up to now with my writing and what my hopes are for the future.  If you have any topics that interest you, please comment and leave a suggestion!

Well, it was lame. I the PC’s hit it a few more times, and then had their next hit kill it. In retrospect, I’m reasonably sure I violated the Code of Good DMing – Article 5 Subsection 34e – which states that the NPCs should not be more important to the story than the PC’s. As it happens, it’s not my mistakes that weigh heavily upon me this week. Those have been acknowledged and will hopefully improve with practice. My mind keeps going back to my dragon, kept alive only by dark DM magic. The players were rolling dice in earnest, hoping their combined powers could defeat this fell beast, and it was for nothing.

You Can Never Go Back

I started thinking about hearing some of my more experienced DM friends talking about adjusting hit points and fudging die rolls. As a DM, I didn’t have to follow any rules, and I could just make it up as I went along. How much of the combat my characters have participated in over the years was real? (And yes, I understand the duality of this term used in this context. Please do not make a TV movie about me and turn me in to Fox News for trying to cast Mind Bondage on my dad.)

Talking to my best friend (and former DM) Dante officially Did Not Help. “Don’t feel bad about cheating,” he said. “If you don’t let on, they’ll never know.” He confirmed that many fights had been Adjusted and that many dice had been Fudged over the years. Well, that’s just great. All those memories, suddenly put under harsh fluorescent lights. This was worse than when I found out there was no Santa Claus. How could I ever go back to being a player again?

I Have Seen The Matrix. Put Me Back In.

I asked Dante how he deals with this, as he’s been a player in a few campaigns with me. He confirmed that being a player was different for him after being a DM. He also made a crude analogy about it being like going to a strip club, and not caring what was fake. (He always knows how to make me feel better.)

Even so, I’d been wrestling over the last few weeks with the general feeling that combat was just getting in the way of storytelling. It was frustrating before. Now, it was false. Useless. A waste of my players’ time, and a breach of their trust. It was good to see all the melodrama exercises I’d been doing were paying off. Still, I had no idea what to do in order to make combat OK again. I kept thinking about how much effort had been put into balancing the combat in the various editions of this game and other RPGs, and all the millions of hours spent by players over the years rolling up character stats that effectively meant nothing.

I have to admit, I was not expecting to enter the “existential quandary” phase of my DM career before my fifth session. So it was that I once again turned to the ever-cryptic wisdom of Dave Chalker. Even he admitted to fudging.

The fights might not be fair, but that’s not really your job. Your job is to create an exciting story for them to take part in. You’ll just have to make sure their actions mean something.

That’s great! But how? How do I do this?

Wax on, wax off.

Renovations on Dave’s bathroom should be finished by Gen Con.

The Way Home?

I’ve gotten some good advice on this, but I’m still shell-shocked. I’m still going to keep DMing, of course, and trying to make this game as fun for my players and myself as humanly possible. Half the fun is just getting together with your friends, after all. I can’t believe I’ve been playing this game for this long and none of this ever occurred to me. I place a high value on good memories, and seeing them all in a new light was jarring. On a purely cognitive level, I can understand that I’ve played under some excellent DMs if nobody ever noticed and we all tell epic tales of battle years afterward.

I don’t know whether or not I would erase this part of my memory if given the chance. Since I find this prospect incredibly unlikely, I will file it along with my desire to time-travel back to before I asked that girl out in high school starting with the words “if your mom says it’s OK” and replace it with something way smoother.

In the short term, I have a plan. Since the “cheating” aspect of running combat is what’s disturbing me so badly, I’m not going to use it unless I have a damned good reason. That reason will always be “it makes the game more fun.”  Wait, isn’t that why I was doing it in the first place? Yup, I’m screwed. (Note to my players: from now on we’re handling all combat via competitive eating contests. Anybody know where I can buy hotdogs in bulk?)

As if all this weren’t enough, I learned one final brutal lesson last week: it’s a terrible idea to get all sugared up on E.L. Fudge cookies when you’re trying to DM. It is really hard to concentrate. You have no idea how disappointed this makes me.

Photo Credit

• Music
  I keep planning to try it, but every session I remember to do it as everyone is walking out the door.  I think I am going to list out my encounters – combat and otherwise – on a sheet of paper along with a track to play. I haven’t been using a computer for anything (aside from Kmonster on my phone), so keeping Grooveshark open on my tablet with all tracks one press away shouldn’t get in my way much. Who knows if it will be awesome or annoying? Probably never me. I anticipate serially forgetting about this for at least another six or seven months.
• Initiative
  I’ve been writing out the initiative order on a sheet of paper, trying to guess based on their rolls how much space to leave on the rows above and below. This is clunky, I don’t like it much, but to be honest it’s not really getting in my way too much. I plan to get some index cards this week to try, having the PCs write down their defenses, hit points and bloodied value, and other info on them. Then I’ll make enemy cards and combat order should be much simplified.
• Bloodthirst
  I haven’t once wanted to kill a PC. Truth be told, I don’t really like combat that much. It’s not really a surprise to me, I used to wish the combats were over so I could roleplay some more when I was a player. I’ve caught myself wanting to halve an enemy’s hit points just to get things over with a couple of times. Some of my players are really into combat, so I’m going to avoid that.
• Better DMing Through Technology
  Maybe I’m just oldschool. Maybe I’m not using the right tools. But, as I said before, I hardly use any tech at all in the actual running of my game – certainly nothing I have to enter info into. I don’t have to fight notebook paper to record something really fast. I don’t have to open the right window, or enter things in any particular format. I scribble something down, possibly circling it. This surprises me a lot. I was half-expecting to look like something out of freaking Neuromancer while running my game – sitting motionless, speaking to my players only via voice synthesis, and updating a digital battle map. With my brain waves. I feel like a hippie or a luddite or something.
• Frequency
  We’ve had to swap weeks a couple of times, and last week’s board game “D&D off-week” night found every last person with a scheduling conflict. Overall, though, I think we’re proving somewhat flexible. One of our group has his son’s soccer practice to go to on our D&D nights for the next month, so we’ll be doing some dancing around that. Keeping him in every week during this might not happen, but I think it’s safe to say we’ll be playing.
• Expectations
  This has probably been the hardest to bear of the lot. You’d think after blogging in one form or another for nearly a decade would give me immunity from worrying that people will think what I come up with is stupid, but it’s more nerve-wracking for me when the people you’ll be attempting to entertain for the evening are mere feet away from you for hours on end. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun. I love it. But it’s making those little insidious self-doubt demons  come out to have a picnic in my brain a lot more than I’d like. They make me second-guess the story I’m writing and bring out my Anxiety-Fueled Perfectionist who doesn’t write things other people understand (in a bad way). They make me want to procrastinate. They make me worry I will be the D&D equivalent of Forever Alone. They must die.

It’s a little different than where I expected to be at this point, but I feel like I’m getting better and people are having a decent time. Now I have different concerns and goals to put into bullet points:

• Player Engagement
  I have some players new to D&D who are somewhat shy at the table. I want to try to get them out of their shells. I realize there are a lot of different types of people, and that means there are also a lot of different types of players. This also inevitably means some won’t like the things I do, so I can’t just fire up the Master Roleplaying Computer and determine their optimal RP algorithm. Stupid free will. So, my task right now is to watch my players carefully for signs of delight, and to exploit these weaknesses in their psyche to… well, give them more delight. I am never going to pass the Evil DM exam at this rate. 

  I’ve also been considering several reward systems for good roleplaying or teamwork. One idea was to use Fortune Cards as a reward. Another is to give out story awards like I saw used at the Living Forgotten Realms events at DDXP. It’s been my experience that it doesn’t take much to light a little fire in a player’s heart. Or maybe I’m just extra flammable. We’ll have to see if my group is.

• Loot, Or Lack Thereof
  One of my players made a point to remind me that they hadn’t gotten any loot yet. I’d forgotten about it entirely, what with my head being firmly up my precious story’s ass. In the interim, I came up with nifty Weapons O’ Light for them to use, the powers of which may scale with the players’ level. I don’t think this is enough. It’s a weird state of affairs when everybody has weapons made of pure light and I’m worried nobody is going to feel special. I need flavor for these items. I want offbeat things that make this story belong to the players. I used to do this with magic items all the time. It’s harder to come up with them, for some reason.
• I Prefer Rolling My Own
  I’m starting to think I might be a masochist, or an egomaniac, or both. I have heaping mountains of sourcebooks and articles and other pre-made materials to choose from, but I want to come up with something brand new 99 times out of 100. I tend to prejudge pre-made material as a whole as “boring”, and I think this attitude needs to change. I know an awful lot of very bright people with excellent ideas waiting to be appropriated for the good of all playerkind. And it’s not as if I am a neverending fountain of The Best Ideas. If I hadn’t been introduced to the concept of reskinning, I shudder to think how combat might have gone these last few sessions. I think this problem stems from a few times in a previous campaign where our DM decided to drop in a pre-made module and we all couldn’t wait for it to be over. I also need to remember another campaign we were in, made completely from scratch, that was far worse. This is not really helping my anxiety.
• 4 x 2 x 7 x 1
  The “fast and loose” approach I’ve been taking the last couple of sessions has rained cosmic destruction upon the delicate 5×5 plot diagram I’d made in the infancy of this campaign. I’m having trouble figuring out how to guide them where they “should” go without chasing them around with a horde of cement zombies. I tried to lay clues for them in our last adventure, but they didn’t take the bait. Upon complaining about this, the Internets graced me with the Three Clue Rule and the knowledge that players are neither master detectives nor inside my brain. I’m not going to feel so bad about gentle use of the Clue Bat or letting Leopold, the Dancing Plot Point earn his keep. I’m going to try sprinkling a little more structure into our game, and hopefully it’ll go somewhere. I think the trick is not to care exactly where, as long as you are still tracking it via DM plot-satellite.

I’m certain that, as long as I am a Dungeon Master, I will always have a bunch of bullet points in my head. There’s an old saying we have in karate. I can’t remember it, so it is possible that I will not have all my teeth this time next week. What I do remember is that it describes the search for perfection of one’s character as neverending; as being in a boat atop an ever-rising sea; as playing Pac-Man and never splitting the screen. So too shall I approach the mastery of my dungeon.

In the end, there is only one truth: don’t use dry-erase markers on a battlemat.

Photo Credit

I have enlisted someone to help me look into those questions.  I first met Alana Abbott while writing adventures for the Living Kingdoms of Kalamar campaign, where she was the campaign’s director.  Even then, before I knew her well, I was impressed with her chops as a writer.  When I heard that she’d written a novel as a tie-in for an RPG game and setting, I was intrigued.  I read that first novel called Into the Reach, and I was taken with how much the characters and the story drew me into that world.  Despite my love of fantasy RPGs, I was never much a fan of fantasy fiction.  The field is no doubt full of talented authors, but the redundancy of the tropes within the genre just didn’t do it for me.

At the time, I was also teaching fiction writing at the college level, so my brain was engaged in a sort of “read and feedback” loop that led me to contact Alana, offer my admiration for the work, as well as providing some (hopefully) constructive criticism.  I was surprised and flattered when Alana suggested to her publisher that I take over as editor for the second novel in the trilogy.  It was a pleasure to do so.

Alana’s talents have been noticed by many others, and her resume speaks for itself.  As long as it is diverse, her list of credits includes the Origins Award-winning supplement Serenity Adventures for the Serenity RPG from Margaret Weis Productions.  She was also the writer for the comic Cowboys and Aliens II.  (A film version of the original Cowboys and Aliens hits theaters soon, starring Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig.)

The first two novels in “The Redemption Trilogy” — Into the Reach and Departure — are available now available as e-books at DriveThruRPG, and they are well worth the read for fans of well-written fantasy literature.  Alana’s vision of the setting, game, and characters is expertly rendered on the page, and I hold the novels up as an example of what can happen when a very talented writer finds a way to turn an RPG into excellent fiction.

I recently got the chance to ask Alana about the intersection of RPGs and fiction, as well as a number of other topics of interest to gamers, fantasy fans, and would-be writers.  I hope you find the results enlightening:

Shawn Merwin: Alana, thanks for taking the time to talk with me about your experiences with RPGs and fiction.  When did you first get involved with RPGs, when did you start writing fiction, and how do you combine the two?

Alana Abbott: I started writing fiction long before I was introduced to role-playing games (outside of the type of “let’s pretend” games kids play on playgrounds).  Like many young writers, I wrote what wasn’t yet called “fan fiction” (these were the days before the Internet) in elementary and middle school.  I typed up a script for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon on our electric typewriter, and later wrote about half of a Star Wars novel on our then-new Commodore 64.  I also wrote an original superhero novel, which I finished my freshman year of high school, and started writing fantasy short stories about humans with dragon powers around that same time.  It was, I suspect, passing around those stories that got me invited into a D&D group with some of the older high schoolers in my drama club. The activity of creating stories in a group was fantastic, and designing new characters every time one of mine died (frequently) was great fun. I still have a folder of dead character sheets somewhere that contains all those early characters—and prose profiles on nearly every one of them.

From this sort of background in playing in other people’s worlds and doing a lot of writing that tied into my own D&D campaigns, it was never a great leap to write D&D-related fiction. I wrote a few short stories based on characters during college, and even after I graduated and got a job in publishing, I kept playing D&D with local friends. My first real game-writing experience was for the Living Kingdoms of Kalamar campaign, and I got so involved in the writing and volunteering aspects of that campaign, I ended up as the director for two years. I also wrote a d20 campaign setting (Gallia) and was the co-writer on the Steampunk Musha campaign setting.  Then I later had the opportunity to contribute to Margaret Weis Productions’s Serenity Adventures. During this period, I got involved doing some work on the Realms of Eranon campaign setting for Chronicles of Ramlar, and the publishers liked my work so much, they invited me to write a novel trilogy.

The novels were meant to really feel like the game—which, since I’d worked on the setting, wasn’t hard to do!  I did work in some elements on purpose that I might not have without the game’s influence: there’s a scene in Into the Reach, the first novel of the trilogy, where the characters all get armor upgrades. In the system, armor was really important to how the mechanics of combat worked, so I wanted to show that importance reflected in the story.  I tried to focus on telling a story that would make people really want to explore the setting more in their own games, while also just telling a good story that resonated with my own interests.

SM: I’ve always had one issue with RPG-driven fiction: the work may capture the setting, but it rarely succeeds in capturing the game, or even the spirit of the game.  And too often when it tries to capture that spirit, it might even succeed, but often at the expense of it being good fiction.  Even in RPG-based fiction that is really popular and well-regarded, some aspects of it just fall flat to me.  For example, I am bored to tears with “fight scenes,” even though they are supposed to be the exciting parts.  I actually remember the armor-upgrade scene from Into the Reach, and I was amazed at how much it worked both as an element of the fiction and as an interpretation of the game.  Do you have any tricks or processes for turning those game elements into good fiction?

AA: One of the tremendously helpful things in making that particular scene work was the phenomenal artwork by Lindsay Archer.  I’d known I wanted to do something with armor because of the rules, but it wasn’t until I got early images from her work-in-progress that would become the cover art that I started to formulate what I wanted to do.  At the beginning of the story, Lydia only wears a leather jerkin—and it’s something she gets teased about by the other characters, because it’s not very good protection against the kind of threats she faces in the Reach.  In Lindsay’s art, Lydia has this beautiful armor.  Where did it come from?  What sort of significance did it have for her character?

That question really became the key for what I was doing with working in the flavor of the game—what does this particular element mean for the character?  If it’s a fight scene, what’s the emotional experience happening here, as well as the action?  If it’s shiny new equipment, why does it matter to the characters that they’re getting something cool—besides the fact that they’re getting something cool?  For Nara, getting her armor ends up tying her more closely to the rest of the party, because they’ve made her feel like one of them, included, and she’s been on her own for a long time.  For Lydia, it’s this element that brings her closer to the home she had to run away from—a way of embracing her history while also moving forward.

With fight scenes, along with the emotional aspects that drive them, I actually choreographed a lot of the footwork and strikes with my husband.  I’ve done a little bit of stage combat work, and we both study kempo karate.  Working out placement and targets helps the fights feel more grounded in what could actually happen than they feel like rolling dice.  So while that might be a step away from the game, I’ve always appreciated game masters who can make combat in the game feel more like a story.  You know the game masters I’m talking about—they’re the ones who look at your die roll and create an image of the moment, so it becomes about how your character has caused a gaping wound in the enemy’s side, leaving him only barely able to fight on, rather than about the number of hit points the boss probably has left.

With Nara, particularly, I tried to do the type of thing I would do as a game master with a PC who wanted to pull off all sorts of crazy stealthy stuff that would never work. The first thing she tries to accomplish in the Reach is designing a cover story, and she does it with her usual sneaky tactics. But she’s not in a big city, where she can create a back story and just blend in — she’s in this little town where the sheriff knows everyone, and, more than that, makes it his job to know everyone. So when he calls her out on her bluff — not with any particular animosity, but just in the way that he wasn’t fooled by any of her work — it’s like the game master saying to the arrogant, super stealthy character, “Well, sure, everything you did worked.  But it was so completely over the top that somebody was going to figure it out eventually, don’t you think?”

SM: Sparring as a way to write the fight scenes?  In the next book I want to see the disclaimer: “No spouses were injured in the creation of this novel.”  Speaking of families, you are now a proud mommy.  True gamer and writer test here: are you still playing RPGs and writing despite the obvious draw of family?  The final straw that led to my stepping down as an LFR admin was a sad-eyed daughter, soccer ball in hand, saying to me as I typed away, “Dad, why are you ALWAYS working?”

AA: Well, luckily my little girl can’t talk yet, so I probably have a few years before the guilt trips start…

Seriously, though, I am still writing — it’s a job I can do with flexibility, which enables me to be a stay-at-home parent. I’m not getting as much writing done, I’ll admit, but I have gotten more review work, and reading is an even more flexible form of work than writing.  (I’m a professional reviewer for Publishers Weekly and School Library Journal.)  My work as a history columnist appears weekly at Branford Patch, and I write articles for reference books and the occasional comic script.  Keep an eye out for Star Cruisers, coming out from Platinum later this year—if the first issue takes off, I’ll be writing space opera on a regular basis!  There hasn’t been a lot of game writing coming my way, but I’m working on a couple of fiction projects — along with the editorial stage of Regaining Home (the final novel in “The Redemption Trilogy”)—that I have high hopes for.

As for gaming, I run two monthly home games in 4e based on real-world mythologies.  One is set in mythic Greece, and the other is a Viking saga game that uses Celtic and Norse mythologies.  I’m a huge myth nerd, so it’s fun to be able to play with those old stories in a D&D setting.  My gamers are a great bunch, too, spread out between New York and Boston, and it’s fantastic to have an excuse to get together regularly and create a story together.

SM: Speaking of creating a story, on a scale of 1 to infinity, how excited were you to be the writer for the graphic novel Cowboys and Aliens II, and what did you think when you found out that they were making a movie based on the first one?

AA: I hadn’t caught the original comic run before getting asked to work on the sequel, so the initial excitement just came from being asked to work on an ongoing comic gig.  I had such a fantastic time, which makes getting to work with the Platinum team again on Star Cruisers a true treat.  Dan Forcey is a really fantastic editor to work with.  The best part about the movie coming out is how often my name winds up in articles about the film!  I literally have nothing to do with the Hollywood side of things, but every so often a Google alert shows up where my name ends up alongside Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig.  The fangirl in me squees every time.  I’m definitely looking forward to the movie release, and I’m particularly interested to see what they gave Adam Beach to do—it looks like they cut a lot of the role of the Apaches that had been in the initial comic, so I hope that Beach’s character has some real meat to it to at least open the conversation about the traditional “Cowboys and Indians” trope.

SM: With all the different projects you have worked on, from fiction to comics to adventure design, what would you say to people out there who love writing and love RPGs and want to get involved in creating content?  What have you learned over these years?  And what have you taken from RPG gaming that can be applied to any of your work?

AA: I got the best practice writing for games by volunteering to create content — and the volunteering lead to professional opportunities later on. Being willing to go around at a con and say, “Hey, I like your game – are you looking for writers?” was also a huge help in getting me started in the industry.

I do think some pieces of game writing translate over to fiction and comics, particularly in formulating the frame for a plot (which is something that’s never been my strong suit).  The big difference in the different mediums is space: in a game, you have to leave a lot of empty space so that the players are the ones who decide what to do – the plot isn’t set in stone until they make it so. As a writer for comics, you have to leave space for the art to tell the story – not every panel needs words, but every panel needs to show what’s happening and help things progress forward, and the writer and artist have to be able to communicate well on how that’s happening. In fiction, filling the space is pretty important, because all the reader has to go on is the words on the page and what they can infer from those words.  A little bit of inference is a good thing, but if you’re not clear enough, things you as the writer know about the story might never get through to your readers. I think learning how to delegate the space in the different forms is the key to keeping track of writing in all three mediums.

I would like to thanks Alana for taking the time to speak with me about her experiences.  Now I put the question to everyone: what are your best examples of fiction that best captures the spirit and play of RPGs, while still being what you would consider good fiction?

I’ve been mulling over in my head how I want the story to go first, because I want the story to drive the encounters I create. I’m sure there will come a day when I make up an excuse to use some cool monster I saw in a book in my campaign, but right now everything is supposed to Make Sense and be For A Reason. I’m certain this is going to come back to haunt me, but I haven’t put my finger on how or why yet. It may simply be that a little organized chaos spices things up. Some of the best battles we ever had were when my old DM would decide to wing it and roll on a random encounter table. I’m reasonably sure a lot of the things we fought over the years weren’t integral to the main story in some way. I think I’d like to provide a little foreshadowing for these encounters via side quests, just so the experience and setting feels cohesive. Then again, a random Owlbear ambush never hurt anybody.

A Brush With The Dark Side

This story-driven approach found me in a place I never thought I’d go. I was developing the character for this new major bad guy NPC, and he’s so full of Proper Villainy that his armor barely fits. I had mapped out what drives him and what he would do, and this led me to start thinking about how he might interact with the leader of the army the PCs had joined and I started coming up with all these story concepts and it was making me all giddy — but I was having a real problem coming up with how I was going to tie this in with the PCs. Technically, what I had in mind eventually made sense. However, there was a 15-step process that happened behind the scenes before the players even got remotely involved. It was at that point I realized the horrible truth: I was planning an adventure in which the PCs were not the main focus. I suppressed my urge to self-flagellate (in the interest of time, of course), and scrapped the idea in favor of something my players might give a crap about.

I don’t think the problem was that the story was bad. I think something marginally worth reading could have come out of this, had I taken the time to develop and write it. I think it just wasn’t right for D&D. I had similar problems as a player when coming up with character concepts. A few years back, I played a necromancer with a heart of gold. His name was Lionel Pureheart, and he wanted to use the black arts for the good of mankind. He’d let you speak with dead relatives, raise skeletons to help plow the fields, and reunite families with a beloved dead pet (at least, whatever parts were still available.) I still think he’s a funny idea, and I’m probably going to write some fiction about him at some point. In practice, he was unbelievably frustrating to play for various reasons. My DM found it appropriate to make the local populace flee in terror and/or attempt to lynch him whenever he would offer his services of Gentle Necromancy. This made sense, but it pointed to other “you need to work with your DM before you come up with this kind of thing” issues. That, and 3.5e wizards specializing in Necromancy don’t have much in the way of attack spells at low level. Or defense spells. They’re just sort of like goth punching bags. Lionel was a good idea. Just not for D&D, at least in that form.

It seems to me that a D&D adventure, when done well, is not a standard kind of story. Regular stories, once written, generally follow a timeline. They often don’t work right in D&D because the DM doesn’t have any idea what the players are going to do. They can kill somebody important to the plot. They can lose an important artifact. They can accidentally polymorph the royal family into weasels, throwing the country into civil war. They can all die, and nobody lives happily ever after. As DM, you can stop all of this from happening to preserve the story — but it’s always been my experience that you wind up with a bunch of grumpy players if they have no real impact on the world other than killing what you tell them to. Ever been in one of those campaigns where the world is incredibly detailed, the NPCs are the stars, the outcome of everything has been predetermined, and you would rather commit seppuku than play one more session of this? If I wanted that, I’d play World of Warcraft. Blizzard does, at least, make an effort to make the single-player experience seem like the PC’s actions have some effect on the world (especially with their new phasing tech that lets the world change only for that player when certain quests get completed.) However, the problem still exists. No player can ever be as big a badass as Thrall. Your PC never appears in any cutscenes. Some super-awesome NPC is doing all the cool stuff. That’s not the kind of D&D game I want to run.

Bullet Dodged, Another Bullet Please

This is all well and good, but now I have to figure out a better way to go. The first session with my new group was, admittedly, firmly on rails. I don’t know what I would have done if they decided to deviate from the plan, so I had a giant mixer-horde of cement zombies chase them back to camp. Effective, but ultimately lame — especially if used again. I have a decent idea of the major things I want to happen from using Dave The Game’s super-cool 5×5 method (the hype is real!). Thinking of things as an outline that you fill in as you go along makes the prospect of changing a future line-item to suit the game that is unfolding considerably less terrifying. At least, as compared to watching lots and lots of meticulous work unravelled by one PC inadvertently pulling the string that will bring it all down. I know it’s possible. I’ve been that player. I bear the scars of being repeatedly bludgeoned by a Dungeon Master’s Guide. (And, since I am using the Essentials paperback books, I do not know if I can produce “learning”-class impact force.)

At least I’m not quite as nervous as I was last time. Even when I dropped the ball, it sure seemed to me like we were having fun. I know I was. It’s good to know everything’s going to be OK even if you fail. Unless you’re a player, in which case you should have your DM come read this article. Damn, I’m good.

Photo Credit

The end result of this, of course, is that I am scheduled to start playing with a brand new group in two days’ time. I’ve played D&D in some form since the late eighties, but almost exclusively as a player. I’ve dipped my feet into the DM pool a few times, though. There were plenty of ridiculous Monty Haul adventures in high school with a friend of mine, in which we rolled up characters and killed all the Greek gods (hooray for Legends and Lore!) As an adult, I’ve run a short games twice before, but they lasted no more than a handful of sessions. Regrettably, things went way off the rails during both and I decided to start letting everybody do whatever they wanted. The results were spectacular, but disappointing. In one campaign, a player polymorphed into a giant gorilla and defeated the main villain by — well, let’s just say it’s illegal in most states, at least when done by humans. (Feel free to contact a lawyer to find out other specifics.)  In the other, I don’t remember exactly how it happened but somebody got the ability to set everything on fire. So they did. I think they won, if you can call it that. I can see in retrospect that I did what I tend to default to when nervous – go completely nonsequitur and hope people laugh. While I succeeded in making the table have a few laughs and what I believe to be a good time, it’s clear to me that this is an untenable strategy for the long haul.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t shaking in my boots. I have to come up with a cool plot, make (reasonably) balanced encounters, roleplay multiple characters, draw maps, track initiative, AND try to make sure everybody has fun…. it feels overwhelming right now. There are many bullet points flying through my brain right now. Look!

• Music
  Is it annoying or worth it? Do I play it during battles or just when I think it might help the mood during roleplay? Am I wasting too much time thinking about the ramifications of music on my campaign? Is Chris Tulach right about the soundtrack to Bram Stoker’s Dracula being amazing for horror campaigns because it’s intensely oppressive? Do I have to worry about my players fainting?

  Regardless, I think this ought to be one of the last things I consider. It’s just one of the easiest to think about.

• Initiative
  My bane in previous efforts, I always had difficulty keeping track of who went when. I’ve seen several excellent methods of dealing with this recently, not the least of which was the use of colored index cards the DM rotated through. It seemed ecologically unfriendly, but easy to track. My old DM Dante had a little dry-erase board with magnetic pieces he moved around. I’ve seen other DMs do it with just pencil and paper. I have to find a way that suits my way of thinking. It may involve pepperoni. Only time will tell.

• Bloodthirst
  I’ve seen so many Dungeon Masters over the years curse when one of their monsters failed to hit a player. This always struck me as odd. They’re not trying to win… are they? Will I find myself consumed with finding ways to TPK that don’t seem too suspicious? Will I use secret knowledge about their backstories to blackmail them? What will I buy with all this ill-gotten GP? What will I become? What will I have done?

• Better DMing Through Technology
  I am happy that I live in the future. Now I can have players create and/or level up characters quickly with the Character Builder instead of waiting forever for the people that forgot to do it the previous week. (Although, since I’m DM now, maybe we won’t have that problem…) I’d tried other automated solutions over the years, like PCGen. I never fully appreciated the complexity of a character builder app until using PCGen. It was like staring into the Abyss. While I have to administer props to those guys for making it work, there are a couple of my players that would self-destruct if they tried to use it. Say what you will about the new web-based CB, it will spit out an Essentials character for you in about 30 seconds flat. For a group of newbs, that’s a good thing.

  I’m also planning to use Obsidian Portal to organize and track all the stuff in our campaign. We used to use a similar service. We called her Stupid Ranger, and while her notes were very complete, they were not available over the Internets. To be honest, I’m not even sure where to begin. OP does a lot of stuff. For now, I’m going to get through our first session and hopefully bribe someone into being the party stenographer in the Adventure Log section. I’ve considered asking Stupid Ranger to listen to our sessions over Skype and then emailing me her notes. She’s very good at notes.

  I’ve considered several ways to harness the power of the Intertrons to make my job easier, like for handling maps, but I’m not convinced at this point that they won’t just get in my way at the table. Not everyone is going to have a laptop, and WotC’s tools are all built with Microsoft products that hate everything but Windows. So much for my dream of every player with a tablet computer and a battle-map. I’ve considered trying to roll my own solution for this, but it is definitely not going to happen in two days. Even with caffeine.

• Frequency
  We’re trying something I haven’t done before in our group: we play every week, but D&D only happens every other week. The alternate sessions are for board gaming and other leisurely pursuits. We have a few players that either can’t commit to a regular D&D group or just don’t want to play D&D, and this lets them join in.

  I’m also fielding a somewhat unique situation in that my wife is gunshy about playing D&D, but said she might join in on occasion. I’m willing to accommodate this because getting her to love something I do is one of the things I enjoy most in life. I’ve asked her to let me know several days in advance if she plans on playing, and I plan to adjust the encounters accordingly. There are a few obvious problems with this arrangement, not the least of which is I barely know how to set up encounters, much less adjust them. However, I was able to make sense in the story of her coming and going via the party being part of a larger army. My wife’s PC would simply get assigned and recalled (or I would take over if it didn’t make sense to have her disappear). I have every hope that I can make this work. Time may prove me a fool, but that never stopped me before.

• Expectations
  I think it’s safe to say I’ve reached the “oh my god what am I doing here” phase. I hope it’s not like this every session. I’m trying to gear up for being a DM not so much as a rules-arbiter but more as a fun-causer. Dave the Game talks a lot about saying “yes” to your players whenever possible, and while I don’t want any more gorilla-incidents, that is what I plan to do. I plan to fail. Badly. Then, I plan to get up and try again as many times as it takes. That’s what they’re going to put on my tombstone. “Weird and Stubborn.”

I hope you enjoyed this glimpse as to what was in my brain during its last processor cycle. They say a man thinks about sex once every 10 seconds. Be glad it wasn’t that one.

Though I am nervous, I have a really good group of friends playing and I’m pretty much surrounded by the RPG equivalent of G.I. Joe Headquarters. I’ve got a lot going for me and I am so excited I might warp space-time. My group gets together on Thursday night. Some of them haven’t met, so we’re going to say hello and eat pizza, go over a social contract for the group, and I’m going to spend the rest of the time doing my damnedest to hook them into the story before we all turn into pumpkins promptly at 11pm (fact: pumpkin magic is all based on Eastern time.) It’s been awhile since I played on a weeknight.

Wish me luck! I shall recount the events that transpire in next week’s column.

P.S. if you’ve got any advice, for the love of Pelor, NOW’S THE TIME.

Photo Credit

This is how the sunrise looks in the Shadowfell. Are you depressed? Yeah, me either.

For those of you who missed last week’s recap of my trip to DDXP 2011: SPOILER ALERT! I had a seriously excellent time. Today’s article continues my account of my adventures in beautiful downtown Ft. Wayne, IN.

Learning the Hard Way

As I said yesterday, I had an awesome time playing in the Battle Interactive at DDXP. I’d played in one Living Forgotten Realms event at Gen Con a couple years back, but (somehow) until last weekend I didn’t realize LFR games existed outside of conventions. I will admit that finding out that this sort of thing is playable at your FLGS by attending the Organized Play seminar at DDXP seems kind of the most backwards way possible, but that is how I roll. Now I am chock full of knowledge about things I have no direct experience with. It is not unlike graduating from community college.

Coming in a little late to the game, I don’t really know how well-received these events were before, but the refinements I heard discussed sounded pretty cool. There were plans to have more roleplay and more story in these sessions, as well as a hook at the end to keep you coming week after week. As story and roleplay are my Kryptonite, just the mention of those made me want to camp out in front of my FLGS until they let me play. Thankfully, I soon remembered I was at a convention and did not have to go very far to get my fix. I got to play in a couple “living” adventures, though about half of them were for the new Ashes of Athas setting (which is living Dark Sun).

There was a lot of discussion in the Q&A sections of several seminars I attended asking if D&D Encounters, a short-session game played each Wednesday night, could be moved to a different night as necessary for an individual location. Each time, the WotC staff said they understand there’s a desire for this, but they want everybody to just reflexively know that Wednesday night is D&D Encounters night, so you can just wander over to your FLGS and play. The idea is similar to their Friday Night Magic program. (I would, of course, be remiss if I didn’t mention 4e Home Encounters, which aims to fill this hole for folks who need a more flexible schedule.)Encounters is primarily intended for new(ish) players to get them interested in the game, and I was intrigued to see that they are going to the complete other end of the spectrum for more experienced players. This new event, which is as-of-yet unnamed (some would say “NAMELESS”, perhaps in a creepy voice), is for experienced super-tactical types and is supposed to be extremely difficult. I think I even heard somebody use the word “Gygaxian”.

What I Played On My D&D Vacation

The first game I played at the con was a “D&D Classic” event, a term whose full meaning I haven’t grasped yet but it still sounded like fun. I didn’t know I could roleplay at 8am (7am my time!), but apparently I can. I played a revenant binding warlock named Lorel. I had no experience with binding warlocks and my only previous experience with revenants was from the AD&D Fiend Folio. (Bonus fact: it was the first time I ever saw somebody cast Grease as an attack spell. They died.) Apparently I wasn’t the only one, because I heard several people complaining later that they didn’t know how to play this character. Me, I saw the part on the character sheet about all the voices of the people she’s killed talking to her and her talking back and I was all set. The adventure wound up being a great deal of fun, and I was really shocked about 3/4 of the way through the adventure when I realized that we were all bad guys (it DID explain why we were hanging out with hobgoblins, at least). I was talking with Greg Bilsland later about the adventure, and he told me we’d accidentally roleplayed our way past two potential battles and that we really lucked out on defeating the final enemy. He told me some of the other alternate ways things could have gone, and it made me want to go stand and watch some other groups go through it.

Sadly, I only got to play through two Ashes of Athas adventures (I missed the second of three), but what I got to play was pretty awesome. The only real problem that I saw with it, and I think this might be more with the setting itself, is that I saw multiple people self-destruct when they had to deal with difficult names, and Dark Sun doesn’t really lend itself well to names under 40 characters or having at least two apostrophes. My DM for part 1 kept referring to people as “Big A” and “Big C”, and it made it hard to get properly immersed in the story. Once I did, though, I was in for a treat. We were infiltrating bad guys’ camp and had to come up with novel ways for starting diversions and then unexpected things happened and it was awesome. I have to say though, of the two I played, part 3 was my clear favorite. It started off with this amazing chariot battle that I won’t forget anytime soon. I’ll be using that as inspiration when I want to make an unusual encounter for my own games. It wound up in a temple where we had to fight and solve puzzles at the same time (which had effects on the fight), and it was just challenging enough to be really exciting and a lot of fun. I must administer mad props to the guys who designed AoA (including our own Chris Sims!). It was way fun. And sandy.

My favorite part of these “living” adventures was definitely the story awards. They’re so simple, but they can take a cookie-cutter character and give a player a reason to roleplay. The Knight I was playing for AoA opened a chest and a wee little fire elemental came out and embedded itself in his chest. Now he has some extra flamey combat stuff he can do, and he can feel the emotions of this little elemental (which bleed into his emotions a bit). It wants to burn things, it’s very brave, and it has a really short temper. I can think of about a dozen things I want to do with this guy now, and since I can take him and play elsewhere, the ideas don’t die at the con. You get story awards at the end of adventures, too, and it’s really cool to have your character’s experiences have a lasting effect other than the normal leveling process. I fully intend to do something like this in my own games.

As I’d hoped, I did get to try out Gamma World with a bunch of game designers and bloggy-types. I’d heard a lot of people tell me this game was like someone opened up the inside of my head and made an RPG out of it, and I can see why. The crazy crap that character generation makes alone is worth the price of admission. We had a gelatinous bird-creature, a cockroach-android, a narcissist Transformer, a life-sized Barbie doll, an exploding sphere, and (my favorite) a tank of cryogenic ooze that would occasionally pop a tentacle out and blast people (and was good with the ladies… somehow…). It really does lend itself well to the players doing crazy things and the DM saying yes just because it would be awesome. I’m not sure how feasible a long campaign is, but I can definitely see putting this in the rotation as a change of pace or if you’re down a couple players one night. Although next time, I’d like to play it in the privacy of someone’s home. I was sure we were all going to get arrested, and I didn’t want to have to smuggle dice anywhere uncomfortable so we could continue the game.

I also got to playtest this year’s D&D Game Day adventure, run by Greg Bilsland. It was kind of cool hearing him say things like “haha I love modules that aren’t fully developed” when things would go slightly awry. The NDA-chip WotC implanted in my brain says I can’t say any more, so I will simply leave you all hanging, except to say that it was a lot of fun and I think people are going to enjoy it.

Throat Leeches For Everyone!

By the end of the convention, I was seriously pumped. I’d seen so many cool things and heard so many good ideas. I’ve been without a regular D&D group for awhile since my Stupid Ranger cohorts moved to Colorado, and I only DMed a couple of times. I thought it was too stressful, or I didn’t know how to keep organized, or a bunch of other reasons. I played under some really good DMs at DDXP, and I realized something: I can do the things I really liked about these DM’s (the animated storytelling and roleplay and immersion). I can learn to do the other stuff. (And it’s not like I don’t have really good help nearby, too!)

I heard one of the WotC guys say during one of the seminars last weekend that one of their goals was to create new DM’s. Congratulations, guys. You’ve succeeded.

Photo Credit

A Night Panther Knight stabs an Ooze Orkkh with a plasma glaive!!!

The moment that everybody has been waiting for is here, and it is now time to see the preview of the most exciting RPG that is coming up! This is Refuge in Audacity! It is time for EXTREME ROLEPLAYING!!! Go explore the galaxy-sized city of Audacity as a Mechadragoon Corruptor or an Amazonite Ultra-Anarchist! Your fate is in the hands of the Karma Fates, and of the Karma Fate Destiny Master! You can go fight in the Blood Nebula and learn more kung fus and spells of magic!

The people on the world wide web told me that the best way to make your game popular was to give it away for free in the digital universe. So I am trying that with a preview version of the game. YOU CAN GET THE GAME ON THE GAME PAGE RIGHT HERE BY CLICKING ON THIS TEXT THAT IS HIGHLIGHTED.

I have been working on this game for a long time, since the mid-1990s. I will be soon putting out the leatherbound, 1,200-page rulebook really soon, you guys. So make sure you buy the book because this isn’t a way to make money with the free internet things. Also there is a Donate button on the page for the game, so give me money cuz that would be awesome. It would really suck if you all bought the game for free on the web and didn’t ever buy the game book when I put out the book. But still, for now you can get the preview version that has a lot of important rules cut out because you can’t have them all for free.

Anyway, I think you will like the game. It is inspired by all my influences from games and comics: Raven cs McCracken, Rob Liefeld, Kevin Simembebebeda, and Fletcher Hanks. All of them made things really awesome and epic and this game is like that. So go get it!

[[Out of Character]]

I created this game on a lark after I found a file on my computer from several years back with a list of stupid race and class names. That formed the foundation of the game, as I very quickly hammered out the rest of a semi-playable game. To be clear, this is the whole game. The 1,200-page leatherbound full edition isn’t something the author character will ever complete.

The World of Synnibarr was a big inspiration for this game, as were bad nineties comics. (I actually have the first and second editions of Synnibarr, as well as the Ultimate Adventurer’s Guide!) My intent was to boil those down—to provide the fun of rolling on tables full of ridiculous crap and over-the-top powergaming of a second-tier multi-genre RPGs without the typical unwieldy game systems that came with them.

So the top priority was getting the feel of flipping through a bad rulebook. After completing the class and race tables, I skipped the rules and went straight to the character sheet. I went with a ton of checkboxes (again inspired by Synnibarr, which had boxes for “deaths left” and “wishes”) and cryptic nonsense. All the hallmarks of too-complicated RPGs went in: defense rolls, damage multipliers, called shots, saving throws against all sorts of weird things, and so on. Soon after, monsters and adventure creation got the same percentile-table-based treatment as the character creation system.

The name, by the way, is taken from a page on TV Tropes. The usual warning about that site: Don’t click the link if you want to get anything done today.

Jared von Hindman (file photo)

I had a strange little mutant of a system, and I needed strange little mutant artwork to go with it. Of course, the only choice was Jared von Hindman of Head Injury Theater! We shared a strange rapport working on this project, continuously coming up with the same ideas for illustrations and building on each other’s odd ideas. Our conversations kind of went like this one about the image for the cover (edited for length and language):

Jared: Give me a second & I can share one of the doodles. It’s so very Mouseketeer Cable

Me: I’d suggest a few more pouches, and make the cigar glow like it’s radioactive. And spikes on the front of the surfboard.

And maybe the mouse ears are little radar dishes.

Jared: I was thinking of Frankenstein suturing the thing to his head, but yeah, definitely will throw in a few more manly details no matter what

Me: Did he just fly through the sun? It should be splitting perfectly in half and falling apart.

Jared: The exploding/shattered sun is there, just not fleshed out. Split in half? Classy.

Me: Yeah. Like a samurai cut it and ten seconds later it falls apart.

Jared: So, while I’m still tweaking the angle/details, is the general vibe right here?

IE does is need the hot babe glued to his thigh? Should it be more nonsensical like teh Synnibunn cover?

Me: It doesn’t HAVE to have boobs. It’s not Heavy Metal.

Jared did some great work. (I especially like the girl with the beehive hairdo and the waist twisting with Liefeld-style anatomy.) His cohort Noodle Soup also contributed a rad piece that is definitively not Colossus.

Stuck in the Past but Looking at the Present

For all the retro inspiration, I wanted to distribute this in a modern way. Just printing off some black-and-white ashcans and selling them at cons would have been more in-character for my “author” persona, but would be pretty damn silly. I’d like to have other people bolt on subsystems and house rules. Have an idea for an Erotic Arts subsystem? Want to write up what Rings of Power are for? Come up with a use for Psi Tokens? I want to see you put all that stuff out there. Send me a link on any of the addresses mentioned on the product page. I’ve released the whole shebang under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, so hack to your heart’s content!

One thing I really want to put together: A gallery of people’s character drawings. Roll up a character, whether you intend to play or not, and doodle a picture of it in your notebook (the more pouches and radiation glows the better!) and send it along.

I hope you enjoy the book, whether you play it, read it, or just get inspired to look at your old X-Force comics and play some Mortal Kombat. Accept it in the spirit it was given: a very dumb one.

Quick dramatis personae reminder:

• Jack Knife (Yan): Jack of many trades and Body-Artist.
• Paul Demetrios (PM): OCD Investigator, think “Monk”.
• Coleco (Franky): Recycler and builder, “the old fashion way”.
• Flint (Mike): Decked out Enlightened Interface Fetishist. Think Cyber-Jesus

Challenge 3: I’ll Know What I Want When I See It.

Mike: I want Flint  to infiltrate the Grindstone Cowboys compound, do some snooping around to find where stuff is, find the guy he doesn’t remember and get his Interface!

Chatty: Yeah, you’re familiar enough with the way the Station works that you suspect your memory was altered since yesterday. That’s a good challenge. After that you guys will do something about the stolen toy’s designs?

Franky: Exactly!

(Total Transparency: I’m taking significant artistic liberties with the actual dialogues.  I tell an accurate true story but I will fictionalize the details… because I can, he he he)

A note on team challenges and the task resolution system I alluded to in the last post.  In order to initiate a challenge, a character is better served by having the proper skill or one Geneline tags fit with what they wish to achieve. In our case, Flint had the Ghosting skill (Stealth + Thievery) while the others had Genelines tags that could help. For example,  Paul’s “Investigative” and Jack’s “Creative”.

Pixel-bitching aside: Yes, that means that there’s going to be some sort of “tag” whoring going on at the table… at least, I expect some because it’s part of what I consider  part of the “entertaining your GM’ experience.

Chatty: So are you joining this challenge or not?

Player X: I don’t know… I don’t see anything relevant…

Chatty: Oh come on, you aren’t allowed to be boring, entertain  me! (/Aside)

Thus, Flint and Paul infiltrated the HQ (the game suggests to always handwave the “getting there/getting in” parts of ghosting challenges and focus on the actual jobs). The other PCs monitored things remotely, ready to jump in if things became violent.

It’s also worth mentioning that generating NPCs in this game is wonderful.  You either assign stats on the fly or follow a fast series of card draws from the GM’s deck to generate Genelines, Experience, Interface and Technology (always relevant to the challenge at hand).  You then assign a Flow score, name the character and you have a NPC to keep for the rest of the campaign.

Anyhoo, with a series of awesome hands (and a crappy one on my side) the players aced the challenge yet again…

Chatty: Okay you found the guy you were looking for and tailed him to a “blind” corner of the HQ, now tell me how Flint’s going to rip a piece of interface from him!

Mike: Hmmm, how ’bout it’s a brain chip with a very particular design?

Chatty: Cool, so you knock the guy senseless and rip it out of his skull!  Good job, next challenge!

Challenge 5: Buggy Forbidden Pleasures

Franky: We want to hack the Cowboy’s protected systems to corrupt the design of the sex toy they stole.

Chatty: That’s going to be a great finish to end the game, let me generate the security expert of the system.  He’ll represent the HQ’s overall security, the systems counter measures and the protective layers of software between you and the designs.

(i.e. mechanically that just means the NPC’s stats, the game makes no true difference between stats/tools/setting when representing opposition)

Once again, the players won by a large margin.  I drew badly again (there are times like this). Just so I don’t sound more like a broken record, here’ s an example of how narration and the mini card game interacted.

While Coleco was busy hacking the system, Flint was sneaking in the compound, looking for places where he could weaken security and cause diversions.At one point he met a burly guard and Mike (Flint’s player) drew point scoring cards, which usually translated in successful mini-scenes.  Looking over Mike’s character sheet I saw that his Geneline is “The One” and has a whole cult thing going, so…

Chatty (As the guard): It’s…. YOU!  I can’t believe it!

Mike: Huh?

Chatty: The guard shows you he wears a pendant of the cult of the New Order.

Mike: Awesome!  Can I ask his help?

Chatty: Fire away!

And thus Mike sent the guard to pull a general alarm, emptying the MRCZ’s huge compound while the rest of the party finished their job.  At the end of the challenge, Frank decided to change just one tag of his original design to make it slightly less interesting than his own revised one and not overly awaken suspicion.  This also gave them enough “victory points” left to spend on full Flow rebates, putting everyone well over 30 each and scoring them a piece of “data”, the game’s other currency (data can be analyzed, gifted, injected as memories, etc).

And so I give you:

The Toy: Ephemeral, Inconvenient, Pleasurable

Yeah, my players are still shy about the game’s possibility.  In a world where death is a minor inconvenience at best (often only making you miss your next appointment), I would have LOVED to see “explosive” or “infected” as a tag instead of “inconvenient”.

And thus was our game completed.  We managed to play 1 challenge per player which is an average session and the game lasted about 3-4 hours which factored in some book digging and general goofing around.

Are we to be Freemers?

I’ll let the players chime in if they feel like it, but based on the feedback I got, my players were willing (and some even eager) to keep playing next month.  I really would like to see how the game evolves over a few session.

More specific feedback:

PM thought the game played out a LOT better than his expectations.  While initially confused about the skills and actual “mission” of the game, the relative smoothness at which everything meshed together delivered a very satisfying experience for him.  He got to act out mini-scenes as an hyper-focused OCD character and we all enjoyed it.

Franky was blown away at the sheer madness of the adventure hooks and the fast pace of the game.  He NEVER expected that I would choose his “Sex Toy” memory to drive a session, much less have it generate hours of fun and mirth. He did have some trouble “getting” the mechanics of the game from how scoring worked to how each experience could be used.  His was a good example where what a player thinks a skill should do, and what the designers decided it would, can clash.

Yan liked the mechanics of the game.  He was intrigued by it and I saw his tactician’s brain engage into furious activity a few times, confirming that he grokked the game fine.  He did mention that he felt the setting was far too constrained for what the game’s engine could achieve.  In that he felt he could tweak the skill list and general assumptions a bit and make this into a full blown “British Sci Fi” game capable of emulating the stories of Vernor Vinge and Peter Hamilton.

(I think it would take more work as the game system is a lot more interconnected than what they experienced so far… but I consider it a good sign when Yan’s dormant designer genes wake up)

Mike didn’t offer direct feedback, but he’s become my “mine canary” to detect a game’s “frustration pocket”.  I saw his steam level rise when he played bad hands over several challenges.  That’s why I’m happy that the last 2 challenges that featured him on the front line turned out nice and that he got his spotlight time.  He does seem to have some trouble finding ideas and ways to create a narrative with the game’s mechanics… but I think that’s a challenge of story-driven game themselves and I know he’ll warm up to it…

Hell, he did blow us away during our Fiasco game.

And me? I love the game.  I’d totally play a 2-4 session mini-campaign like we did with Apocalypse World before moving on to either Burning Wheel, Leverage or possibly that new game I’m working on.

Props:

• The game is one sweet piece of play tested integrated clockwork engine with a simple yet rock solid setting
• The pace is perfect and answers my current needs as a time-pressed gamer.
• The ways you can screw with players even when they “win” is sublime and I can’t wait to turn the “evil” dial a few notches.

(Slight) Cons:

• The rule book’s landscape format and layout, took the “easier to learn, harder to reference” approach that makes for more page flipping hunting for Flow costs and the like (Index is very solid though, I need to tab the book with posts it)
• I’m still unsure about a few things about running challenges (like using bugs, and what to do when running out of options when you have no bugs) but one or two sessions more and I feel I could run the game at cons without any problems.

I hope you enjoyed this little series.  Don’t hesitate to ask questions!  I’ll do what I can and I’m sure the designers aren’t too far.

Herb the Frost Dragon discovers why it is bad to use his breath weapon with a sinus infection.

Usually, about this time of year, I get really depressed. There are specific reasons for this. First and foremost, I hate winter. And snow. And ice. And cold. And coats. And January. I hate January. Christmas is over, it’s colder than ever, and there’ no end in sight. But most of all, January sucks because Gen Con registration takes place eight months before the actual event, and the one-two punch of reminding me that my yearly pilgrimage to Indianapolis is so far away via a reminder in the form of having to pay for my badge is almost too much to bear. Call it “seasonal affective disorder”. Call it “the Spellplague”. I don’t care. I’m very unhappy. I take morale penalties to all my skill checks. Me are best writer this time year.

But wait! Not this year! At the end of this week, I’ll be attending DDXP, and doing the very thing I love the most at Gen Con: meeting up with friends and playing games until I run out of hit points. I’ve never been happy during a January before. I’m a little scared.

Gen Con has traditionally been for me what some folks refer to as a “mancation”, where I don’t have to be a husband or a dad or really do anything aside from have fun. Some people like sun and sand. I do too, but I like d20′s and harsh convention hall lighting more. I’m very much looking forward to that at DDXP as well, but to hear some of the regulars talk, this experience promises to be a bit different. Smaller. Friendlier. Full of more secrets. Baldman Games’ DDXP website implies there will be much up-close and personal contact with the people who design the games I love so much. The 15 year old side of me still wants to squeal and pass out when I read stuff like this, but my frosted side is a little more used to meeting industry professionals after a couple years in the ol’ blogging trenches. It got easier when I realized they’re usually very nice guys with interests very similar to mine except they have really cool jobs that I want. And don’t let Chris Sims scare you. He may look like a Viking.  He might even inflict unspeakable horrors on your party (who ends the name of their con adventure with “BITCHES”???). But rest assured, he is a very nice man provided you do not under any circumstances look him directly in the eyes.

I wish I could say I had a giant list of events I am Definitely Going To Attend, but I sort of… how do I put this…. completely forgot about the whole event pre-registration thing until it was too late. Woops. That’s OK. I’m told there will be more to do there than I can swing a dead catoblepas at. What I’m looking forward to the most, oddly, is finally getting to play Gamma World. Yes, that’s right. One of the fathers of the mighty Junkulator hasn’t played the game yet. To me, it’s just a big pile of random wonderful, but I’m told it can really spice up a good GW game and I would like to taste the radioactive fruits of our labors. I’ll be helping Dave The Game with the game he’s running throughout the con. Well, actually, I don’t know that “helping” is the right word. Let’s just say I hope he doesn’t kick me out of the hotel room after the first day. Regardless of my lodging situation, we’ll be introducing our junkulating friend to lots of people.

I’m really looking forward to playing a lot of D&D, especially the brand-spanking-new Ashes of Athas Dark Sun living campaign setting, co-authored by our own Chris Sims. There’s some Ravenloft games going on just in case I want to remember that it’s January again, and many boardgames in which I fully intend to roll many dice and move many little tokens about while grinning madly. I’d also like to get some Magic: The Gathering drafting done, and I’ll be bringing my World of Warcraft TCG decks in case anyone is brave enough to face my Elekk-Spark Shaman deck.

Whatever happens, I’m going to be on full alert for new games to try, knowledge to soak up, and new people to meet. I am excited. I think I might be more than excited. If time travel were real, some people would go back and kill Hitler. I would simply make it Thursday morning.

Hope everybody going to the con has a safe trip, and I’ll see you all there! IN THE FUTURE!

Photo credit. Poor Herb.

We finally got to play the Freemarket characters that we made a few weeks ago. The game was supposed to be a 1 session demo as we have been doing during our Pilgrimage of new games these last few months.

Well, the session turned out a LOT better than most of us expected given how alien some aspect of the game appeared to us before playing it.  Chances are this may become a short campaign instead of a one-shot.

Let’s dive in.

Dramatis Persona:

Jack Knife (Yan): Multi-Talented Body-Artist.  Experienced creative printer, ephemerist and interface designer (hard/software Implants) who’s been around the station a few times.

Paul Demetrios (PM): OCD Investigator.  Hacker and Thin-slicer that NEVER lets something go unsolved (unless made to forget it, an apparently common occurrence).

Coleco (Franky): An Old-World Tools Replicator.  A cultivation and recycling expert, can create tech pieces of unparallel beauty with discarded scrap.

Flint (Mike): An Enlightened Interface Fetishist. Illuminated by the sayings of the Prophet of the New Order, he seeks perfection through Interface!

Welcome Home Bros!

The game strongly encourages the GM to introduce the setting by describing the PCs new digs.  As a Tier 1 MRCZ (an archaic acronym from the Station’s construction era, pronounced “Mercy”), the characters get an upgrade from capsule pods and communal areas. They get to share living and working areas with another Tier one MRCZ in a wagon-sized cargo container.

The game also urges the GM to create tension right off the bat by making the other MRCZ into something completely different (and possibly at cross-purposes) from the players’ own.  That why I made the neighbours into a small Krishna revivalist cult using their songs and millennial manipulation techniques to create a second coming of whatever they thought  Krishnas were supposed to be about.

I didn’t have to do anything else… Jack Knife was already sick and tired of the endless droning chant and dove for the matter printer on their half of the pod.

Challenge 1: What’s that Smell?

Chatty: So what’s your goal here?

Yan: Jack wants to create a soundproof partition.

Chatty (Thinking aloud) : Hmmm, is it enough of a stake to make it into a challenge?  Hells yeah! You’re all broke Flow wise (the Station’s influence-based commodity) and I want to drive you nuts with this shtick! Let’s do this.

Freemarket’s task resolution system is called a Challenge.  You only do them when players (or key NPCs) want to bring about change to anything on the Station and there’s someone at the table opposed to that change.

In our case, all the players chipped in some Flow to create a bitchin’ flexible soundproof partition out of the dog-sized matter printer.  This was a team challenge, with all players playing against me.  I represented the flaws in the badly maintained printer and some hidden viruses left by playfully malicious ex-occupants of the cargo pod.

Challenges are performed by having players play a narrative-splashed card-scoring mini-game using the decks packed with the game (explaining, in part, its 60$ price tag).  Going into the details of this mechanic would derail the whole post away from its purpose, but suffice it to say that once we grokked it, everything became a fast-paced, engrossing risks-vs-benefits scoring race against the opposing team.

In our case, I brought the printing challenge to an end  by conceding a Minor success to the PCs.  After describing how everyone got the printer to work semi-correctly, I explained to Yan that their margin of victory was so slim that all they could do was impose one of three tags to the freshly printed partition… I’d get to set the other two.

I also indicated that nobody’s Flow would be reimbursed, sending some players into negatives and putting them in danger of being voted off the Station.

(You read that right, Freemarket has some Reality TV elements. The actions of all MRCZ are, usually, public and subjected to going viral, becoming trends or subject of intense scrutiny.)

Chatty: So what tag are you…

Yan: SOUNDPROOF!

Chatty: So, that leaves two… lets make them…. Smelly (all players groaned) and… Inflammable!

Aside two: I made a mistake here.  I forgot that all pieces of technology built in the game must have one tag corresponding to one of the 14 “skills”… I’ll fix it here.  The partition stats are thus:

NullNoise MRCZ pod partition, Tags: Ghosting (that’s Stealth), Soundproof, Smelly.

Interlude 1: Family Memories Pileup!

While hilarious, that last challenge didn’t really create a lot of hooks to start the adventure, so I dug in my Memory Mashup notes (the process I described at the end of my last post) to pull a few hooks to get things started.

Chatty: Franky, Coleco’s brother Miro, who you thought was somewhere else in the Solar System just pinged your PC. He needs your help with some piece of old tech he ‘found”.

Franky: What the hell? He’s on the station? Let him come…I guess.

Turns out Miro had a piece of ancient motherboard that he wanted the players to hack and extract data in it.  When the players realized how much Flow it would cost them to do that, they all balked! They all had low balances, some only barely above zero by having friended (yes, like in Facebook) most of the MRCZ’s members.

Seeing that they would likely have to postpone this task, I dug back into my pile of Mashed Memories (I had 3 more) and pulled the next one.  It ended up being a boring dead end (It was too vague and had no fun leads) so I picked the next one.

Miro: Yeah so, I don’t know if it’s any help, but have you guys heard about the Grindstone Cowboys MRCZ yet?  They apparently got their hands on a new “Sex Toy” design and have started mass producing them. They’re going to gift them all to a 2nd Gen dude named Korg who makes wild experiments with Blanks (i.e. Printed, artificial humans).

Mike: Hey, Korg is Flint’s creator!

Franky: WTF!?! I made that toy yesterday and it was supposed to be discretely delivered to a member of the Ambassador MRCZ.  I wanna ping her!

Chatty: She says she never got it and she’s about to “frown” you for reneging on a contract.

Franky: What’s frowning?

Chatty: Oh, a frownie is a formal token of disapproval…it’s worth  -3 Flow.

Franky: Crap no, I’m at 1!

See that? That was all done with the players long/short term memories. It took me about 10 minutes before the game to come up with these hooks.  So awesome.

So what the players decided to do was to handcraft the Ambassador a new, better toy.  In order to generate the needed flow to undertake this endeavour, Coleco gave his Retro-Phasor gun to his brother (everyone knew he was a no good, two timer… but hey). Thus Coleco gained an instant 10 Flow.

Yup, you gain Flow in Freemarket by friending people, gifting them stuff, filling contractual obligations and winning team challenges by a large margin (the central computer, in its programmed socially-driven benevolence, rewards cooperation). Flow is then used to start all challenges (or survive challenges against you) and to petition the Central Computer for a MRCZ tier upgrade.

The other players exchanged more friendship requests among themselves and braced for the challenge.

Challenge 2: Are Those Brass Keys or Are You Just  Happy to See Me?

Chatty: Okay, what’s your goal?

Franky: We want to create a better, sleeker sex toy for the Ambassador.  Something made of Clockworks and Brass!

Others: Yeah!

Chatty: A Steampunk Dildo huh?

After we recovered from generalized hilarity, we agreed it was a good challenge. By then, everyone had huge stupid grins.  The game’s mission was accomplished, Freemarket had been adopted.

The challenge pitted everyone in the party, helping Franky hand craft his “masterpiece” by merging together (i.e. Recycling) two different pieces of tech, namely pieces of the busted matter printer and knick-knacks of dumb material strewn here and there in the pod.

My side of the challenge represented the material’s low grade, distraction caused by the partition’s smell and the challenge of achieving Franky’s vision with so few good parts.  They won the challenge by a landslide, each scoring a lot of Flow.

Chatty: Well done gang, you now get to give it three tags, one of which must be one of the 14 skills. I’d saw that a sex toy is definitively “ephemera”.

(Sniggers)

And I give you:

The Steam Stallion Mk I, Tags: Ephemera, Filling, Orgasmic.

Yes, we’re a bunch of 13 year olds… sigh.

Interlude 2: Plowing and Plotting

Coleco gifted the toy to the soon to be very happy Ambassador. Bolstered by all that Flow, the group set out to plan their next move on those thieving Grindstone Cowboys.

At that point, I had noticed that Mike had had a very unlucky card streak so far and had been, more or less, the only player yet to have some spotlight time.  So I nudged the group so he got involved in the next scene’s planning.  Oddly enough, according to his recent memories, he had a very good reason to visit the Grindstone Cowboys… He wanted to obtain someone’s interface. Except he couldn’t quite exactly remember which one… and on whom.

Did I tell you I really like this game?

Up next, Ghosting and Breaking challenges within the Grand HQ of the Tier 6 Grindstone Cowboys MRCZ!

I had the privilege to play a 4 hour demo game with Luke (thanks to Gnome Stew‘s DNAPhil who invited me) and the game blew my mind away.  I was dumbstruck by the originality of the game and its sheer scale  as an engine for trans-human Sci-Fi stories… Even though the action is entirely confined within a lone space station.

I finally got a chance to play it with my friends about 3 weeks ago and I’ve been wracking my brain to find a way to convey my impressions of the game without falling all over the details of the game.

Then I decided to dive in and share how our character creation session went.  But first, context!

The implied Setting

Freemarket follows the adventures and tribulations of members of a MRCZ (pronounced Mercy) who strive to bring change and new trends on board a Space Station parked at a Lagrange  point between Saturn and Titan, one of it’s moons carved out and turned into one ginormous solid-state data storage vault.

The Station is home to 80 000 nigh immortal, cyber-wearing, telepaths who thrive on access to instant Data and a strange mix of status, influence and power called “flow”.

The parallels to current social media is evident, that’s why I once described it as “What if Humanity and Facebook merged and caused the Singularity?”

Apart from that (and a few more details about the Sapient computer running the whole place), the setting is left undefined, open for players and GM (called users and superuser respectively) to build a different one with each campaign.

Founding The Fixers MRCZ

Like many recent RPGs, character generation is a group activity that supposedly takes about 2 hours. We ended up spending more than 3 hours, getting confused and hung up on some elements and being challenged with a few sprees of analysis paralysis to the tune of “gee man, I don’t know what the game is about so I don’t know what I should create”.

Aside: That’s where I see what mastering the rules of a game can be very useful for a GM.  Luke breezed us through it in less than 2 hours by pushing us at just the right places and not sweating that we didn’t get everything perfect… just “right enough”.  The lessons I learn from the guy never cease.

Character generation is done by following very well described steps. It is one of those supremely clever combinations of setting creation, party cohesion and character background building.  Here’s the rundown and what my players (Yan, Mike, Franky and PM) chose.

Clade and Generation

While nominally the “job” of the PC it’s actually the character’s concept in a short phrase.  Players choose it first to help them conceptualize what they want to play.  Generations represents how remote each character was from the original settlers of the stations (that’s about 40-45 years old now): Seconds (kids of originals), Thirds (kids of seconds), Blanks (Artificial humans with implanted memories) and Immigrants(Born off Station). The group ended up with:

• Mike: Blank, Hardware Interface Fetishist
• Yan: Second Gen, Body Artist
• Franky: Immigrant, Old Tools Replicator
• PM: Blank, OCD  Investigator

Geneline

Up next came the character’s genelines which are names representing what “genetic family” you ail from and 3 “tags” that defined your genetic background.  Tags are adjectives that qualify the inherent potential of your character like “flexible” or “Lightning Quick Reflexes”.  They  have a direct impact in the game as any character can invoke thematically adequate tags as the driving ability of a challenge.  The book provides example Genelines with pre-selected sets of three tags each, but players are encouraged to design their own.

Our MRCZ:

• Mike, “The One”: Obsessive, Wired, Religious
• Yan, “Michaelangelo”: Creative, Serene, Sure Handed
• Franky,”Dell Amico”: Merciless, Technical, Old World
• PM, “Monk”: Investigative, Obsessive, Chameleon

Experience

Each character has experience in a few fields which represents the game’s skills used in the card-based challenge system (more in part 2).  The game has 14 such skills, ranging from Breaking (destroying objects and structures or hacking into software), Ghosting (Stealth, stealing, tracking), Mobbing (Creation and installation of Interface) to Wetwork (Temporarily killing).

Aside: Yeah, dead people get re-printed and lose memories, depending on how completely”deathed” they were.

This is one of the places where the game explodes in story possibilities.  The players can do SO much with these 14 skills it’s unbelievable and they can only bring about changes in the setting and story by playing challenges with  those skills.

For example, they could use Ghosting  to track a sneaky, discrete courrier they heard about. Then, they could play a Wetwork challenge to discreetly wipe him out and grab that ancient computer disk it transported.  They could then use breaking to find and extract Data from the disc.  That data would then be Thin Sliced (another skill) to give the Data specific meaning within the setting.  That Data could then be flooded (another skill) in someone’s brain by stealing one of the target’s memory (yet another challenge). Finally the players turn that stolen memory into a song (using the Ephemera skill) and blare it across the station to create a new Meme.

That would be a pretty typical Freemarket session. This is pure Peter Hamilton, Wiliam Gibson and Vernor Vinge Sci Fi stuff.

Our crew chose a mix of experience that gave them a pretty badass rep.  Their choices told me that they wanted to create cybernetic/software implants and tech,  repair and create tech with tools, create art, investigate interesting data and do some killing on the side.

I think my gang wants to be a futuristic A-Team.  I’m cool with that.

Interface and Technology

Each character has several pieces of Interface (Implants, both hardware or software) and technology,  pieces of equipment that help characters in various ways in challenges.  Interface are involved in error correction, helping circumvent failures during challenges while technologies can support (or replace) the experience used in a challenge.

Players can select them from the book, but they are also encouraged to create their own by making up snazzy techy names and adding three tags to each that identify what skill they are related too, what their function and so on. This is another great occasion to have the players define the setting by introducing trademarks and designer names to some of the tech they used.

Here’s a few from the group:

Interfaces:

• Morphological Retina: Breaking, Ocular, Duplicating (Used by PM’s investigator)
• Swiss Army Hand: Recycling, Old World, Technical (Used by Franky’s Old Tool Replicator)
• TAC 10 006: Wetwork, Neural, Reflex Booster (Used by Yan’s Body Artist)
• Optic-BF (i.e. Brain Fryer): Wetwork, Optical, Scambler (Used by Mike’s Fetishist)

Technology:

• Light Katar: Wetwork, Sword, Plasma
• Adaptive Perfume: Flood/Bleeding, Chemical Scent, Adaptative
• Mech’s Bench: Recycling, Mechanical, Old World
• Monofilament Garrote Nail Jewel: Wetwork, Close Range, Stealth

You can see that my players are expecting to fight a lot… I shall try not to disappoint them.

Memories

The last part of character creation is the creation of long term and short term memories.  This is the aspect of the game that made my head explode. Players are required to create 2 long term memories (one life changing, the other from childhood/creation) and 1 short term one (form the day before).  Each memory is a sentence made up of three out of five imposed elements: person, place, object, MRCZ or action.

The sheer genius of this is that the GM then uses those to create his adventure by mix and mashing them up (more or less eliminating prep time).  But the game takes an all new level when you realize that since the technology exists to steal, inject, influence and blend memories of all station residents, including the PCs, there’s really no way to know how real each memory is, if it’s your own or who the hell put it there!

So let me conclude this post with my PC’s memories:

OCD Investigator (PM)

Long Term:

I was fired from the Operators MRCZ because I wouldn’t stop investigating the theft of the Micro Nova Missile Schematics

I created the buzz around the popularity of the KIS3 MRCZ by discovering the band’s emerging music style.

Short Term:

Yesterday, an anonymous passerby told me that my memories about one current investigation had been replaced.

Old Tool Replicator (Franky)

Long Term:

Miro, my brother, involved me in a failed old tech transaction and forced me to flee and go into hiding on Freemarket

I found specs for a FTL starship on an old computer I was recycling

Short Term:

Yesterday, I built a sexual-tool for Serina of the Ambassadors MRCZ

Body Artist (Yan)

Long Term:

I printed  Shanon Apple, an extremely popular Blank that is part of the Kis3 MRCZ

I created  a revolutionary, very efficient Blank design that I hid in a old relic satellite

Short Term

A negotiation session with the Arachne Textile MRCZ went badly as members of Gunz4Hirez stormed in and deathed almost everyone before getting gunned down themselves.

Hardare Interface Fetishist

Long Term

Korg, the 1st generation creator who printed me incorporated numerous interfaces as an experiment but ended up rejecting me, horrified with what he created.

I found an ancient brain chip interface containing the Prophet’s proselytizing of  the Coming of the New Order.

Short Term

Yesterday, I pinged a member of  the Grindstone Cowboys MRCZ and found an Interface I MUST possess.

What now

So now all I have to do for the next game (tomorrow) is to create 4 plot hooks (one per player) by mixing and mashing all those memories by, for example,  picking the name in one memory with the place of another and adding an object from a third one.  Then present it to the players and see how they’ll react.

I just can’t wait to see how it’ll turn out.  Expect a play report!

Of course, such things were not without cost. Me doing more fighting and less healing meant, well, more people (myself including) running a little low on the HP. Also, this was the first time I ever tried roleplaying a bad stat roll, so poor Lumbar had a CON score of 8. We referred to it as his “delicate constitution”, and a frequent side effect of combat was that Lumbar would wake up afterward and ask if we had won. This worked for awhile, at least until about 10th level or so. I’m not sure if our DM was doing it on purpose or whether the monsters just started to get more bitey and kill-y, but Lumbar’s leanings toward rushing into battle without much strategy (or using all the tools Uthgar gave him) were starting to become a liability.

For me, changing Lumbar’s tactics turned into a really exciting opportunity to draw on his backstory and build his character. He started out as a warrior, exiled from his tribe until he passed a combat rite of manhood. Once he needed to change, I took this as him learning his place in the world and how to live up to his full potential. So it was he started being a better person. Less, alcohol and rage, more cuddling of puppies and taking care of wounded party members. My wife’s character in particular almost died of poisoning from a Drow arrow, and this was a turning point for Lumbar. By the end of the campaign, Lumbar still liked to smash things with his dire flail and roast some undead with Searing Light, but buffing the party and keeping everybody standing became a priority. I daresay we all started fighting as a team, and wound up saving the world.

Fast forward to 2008, when I started my World of Warcraft account. I didn’t really know what class to choose, but after reading up on them, I liked the Shaman’s versatility. And by that, I mean I liked the Shaman class’s ability to heal himself if he does something stupid (a trait I desired based on three decades of gaming experiences of doing stupid things and wanting not to die). I was told the best spec to level a shaman with was Enhancement, which involved a lot of close quarters combat and beating the hell out of things. This reminded me a lot of Lumbar. All of it. So I made an orc shaman named Lumbertha, after my beloved battle-cleric. Wrath of the Lich King had just come out, so I leveled her all the way up to 80.

Then, a funny thing happened. I started running dungeon instances with some of my friends. And I was almost always at the bottom of the damage charts. Or dead. Actually, I was dead a lot. Part of it was that I wasn’t playing as much as my friends, and didn’t have as good of gear as they did. But a large part of it was that I was simply having difficulty seeing what the hell I was doing in the middle of a gigantic battle with lots of spell effects going off and character models all mashed up on each other. My eyesight isn’t great but it’s far from terrible. I think I just lack the ability to process that much visual information at once. Consequently, I would frequently stand there and think I was swinging madly at a boss, but really I was too far away. And I wouldn’t do enough damage, and I wouldn’t know where I was or where to run, and occasionally I might pull a few adds and get everybody killed. My friends were a lot nicer than most pickup groups and did not immediately boot me from the party, but the end result was that I got really damned frustrated. That, and the spectre of having to run the Sons of Hodir quests for rep until I was old and grey just for the right to buy a shoulder enchantment eventually got me to quit the game.

As some of you may have noticed, many of your friends have disappeared due to the Cataclysm expansion coming out. As I had some fond memories of Azeroth and heard that some big giant dragon was going to go muss it up as if it were the emo-haircut of the world. So began my retreat from the outside world as well, several weeks before the expansion was released, and I reactivated my account. I immediately wanted to quit, to be honest. It was just as frustrating as I remembered, and now my gear was REALLY outdated so I couldn’t even do any instances. Fortunately, this problem was significantly alleviated by the worst items in the new zones being better than most of the very best items that Wrath of the Lich King had to offer. (Wow, glad I didn’t work real hard for those, huh?)

Then I decided to try something new. Since Enhancement wasn’t doing it for me, and it was now cheap to dual-spec your character, I decided to ditch it entirely and go with Elemental and Restoration. For those not familiar, Elemental is frying the crap out of enemies at range with lightning and fire, and Restoration is more support and healing-based. I leveled up to 85 as Elemental, and now I don’t have to see exactly how close I am to hit something. I press a button, and lightning shocks it in a delicate place. I am also much better armored. I enjoy this, as it keeps me from being dead.

Then, another funny thing happened. Some of my friends wanted to run an instance, and we didn’t have a healer. So I got talked into it. And I really liked it.

In all the time I’d played Lumbertha, I’d never even so much as turned on that spec for longer than it took to haphazardly dump a talent point into it. (Fortunately, by level 85, you just sort of fill it all in with only a point or two missing at the end.) And now here I was in instances I’d already run, focusing madly on keeping these little green bars from shrinking into nothingness. My heart was racing. My adrenaline was spiking. I hadn’t had this much excitement in a dungeon, well, ever. And once again, I am reminded of Lumbar’s journey into a better man (and combat-effective PC). Except this time, maybe the journey is into an experience playing WoW that doesn’t end in me ragequitting the game for a year. Given that a whole group of people is going to be depending on me to keep them from dying and the drama that usually results from such undertakings, I find this unlikely. But it’s fun for right now, and so I shall give it a try Until It Stops Being Fun.

Of course, the part of me that likes to roleplay can’t help but think Lumbertha’s character has come of age as well. Is healing the niche she was meant to fill? Or is she resigned to eternally farm Savage Leather until the next expansion? In the end, I suppose it doesn’t really matter, because I’ll be pretending to play her in the WoW TCG regardless of whether my account is active or not. And she’ll play happily with her Spirit Wolves until the cows come home or the enemy’s entrails make a happy face. Whichever comes first.

Tron: Legacy is a fitting sequel to the original for a handful of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it makes the idea of fighting each other with frisbees seem really freaking cool again. The movie is an amazing visual and auditory experience that has some of the most entertaining action sequences I’ve seen in the last few years. The only thing that I really missed in the movie was the layer of real world computer references and ‘nerd-insider’ feeling that was pervasive in the original Tron, but in a 2010 world where computers are much more common place I’m not sure this layer is as necessary as it was back in 1982. Tron: Legacy is a mainstream and updated version of the original vision of Tron, but it is also very much a sequel and avoids retelling the exact same story as its predecessor though the structure will feel quite familiar.

Though the visuals and audio are the highlight of the film, the characters are not far behind. Jeff Bridges does a good job of mixing his age with the wit and slacker attitude that he created for Kevin Flynn back in the 80′s as well as playing the younger part of Flynn’s program CLU as a single minded but efficient entity. Garrett Hedlund performs extremely well as Flynn’s son, Sam, and even noticeably attempts to take on an aspect of Jeff Bridge’s personality in several parts of the film. Olivia Wilde is my hands down favorite of the film as the program Quorra, adding a bit of innocent humanity into the still entertaining habits of programs that we saw some of in the original film, while Michael Sheen is a close second for his small but scene-stealing role as the quirky and hilarious program Castor.

Though I’m not a fan of every new movie coming out in 3d, I am extremely pleased with our decision to see Tron: Legacy in 3d but I won’t be able to accurately compare it until I’ve seen the film in non-3d and determine what is gained or lost between the two. What I can say is that the action sequences and stunning visuals were incredibly enhanced by the 3d treatment and the directing surprised me with the ways it used what I previously thought was mostly just a gimmick. If you have the chance, I highly recommend seeing Tron: Legacy in 3d because I did not notice it detracting anything from the film but it certainly added quite a bit of excitement to the film. Perhaps because of its focus on dark colors highlighted with bright lines of light or its extensive use of 3d environments to begin with, but it really seemed like Tron was one of the ideal films for the 3d medium.

This movie is much more mainstream than its predecessor, but it still manages to deliver an endearing digital world and populates it with interesting characters. The movie was satisfyingly peppered with references to the original film, but also introduced a handful of new ideas and concepts to Tron that I’m happy to see. In the end the little things that I may have found lacking with the film were more than made up for by the interesting designs, incredible visuals, and kick ass lightcycle races and identity disc battles on a new and improved game grid.

We were spending the night in
an old, ruined school
after looting the place
seeking ammo and tools

A cardboard box we found today
marked “XMAS” then two thousand one
just what that meant no one could say
my hope was food or maybe guns

Inside was lots of sparkly stuff
a string of tiny colored lights
a fake tree, which bewildered us
one book of tales to read that night

“‘Twas the night before Christmas”
(or so the book said)
not an Ancient was stirring
(because they’re long dead)

The story inside was a tale borne of fear
of a telekinetic and eight mutant deer
who breaks into houses and steals people’s food
and mind-controls children to make them be “good”.

A red coat he wore, and with ludicrous speed
he travelled the whole world to do his heinous deeds.
A sack did he carry, with a rip in space-time
to store all his “presents” that controlled children’s minds.

The party was nestled all snug on the floor
and I took first watch, and I guarded the door.
Then what should I echolocate with my big dolphin head
but that evil red bastard, in a big flying sled!

Each of the party I screamed for by name,
pulled out my rifle, and took careful aim.
Suddenly then did the man disappear!
I ordered the android to cover the rear.

And then in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
the pawing of  tentacles, talons, or (I suppose) hooves.
As we readied ourselves for a massive attack,
he fell through the roof, and lay flat on his back.

He clawed at his face as he shrieked in the night
and we smiled as we knew there would be no fight
It seemed fate had dealt us incredible luck-
the Red Bandit’s plan foiled by an Alpha Flux.

What used to be man, now made awful sounds
was now something hideous (yet jolly and round).
And then where there used to be torso and face
grew ten tiny reindeer, all vying for space.

And down in his pants was a terrible fight
(more reindeer, we hoped, or we’d shoot it on sight).
It all looked so joyous and furry and warm
the giant, fur-coat-wearing caribou swarm.

At last the mass rose and invaded our minds
and spoke to our brains in a voice strangely kind:
“We came here to give presents to everyone,
so would it be OK to lower your guns?”

We laughed at the deer-mass’s loaded request
and continued pointing our guns at its “chest”.
Though it was transformed and no longer a man,
it seemed that the Flux had not altered its plan.

My cohorts and I then considered his fate
(a fortnight of venison gracing our plates!)
but somehow his reindeery hive-mind did know
of the threat, and their noses then started to glow!

We dashed out the door as the building went boom
(barely escaping our fiery doom)
and what from the blazing school should appear
but a sled full of pants-wearing swarming reindeer!

And then over us he made one final run
and tossed out enough “presents” for everyone.
We realized our error as we watched them fall-
Genuine Red Ryder Fusion rifles for all!

We thanked the kind deer-swarm as it streaked away,
finally understanding the spirit of the day.
Then he spoke in our heads as he flew out of sight,
“Gamma Christmas to all, and we hope we’re all right!”

Last Time, On Albion Hills 90210

Those of you who were reading my column last week (and for some reason decided to come back for more) may remember me venting a wee bit of rage at Lionhead Studios and their new game, Fable 3. Some of you thought I was perhaps being a bit harsh. The expressions system that I so vocally excoriated was not, in fact, necessary to complete the game. I can concede this point. I still think it is intensely stupid, but I could probably have skipped the majority of it. Believe it or not, I actually do like it when our readers keep me honest. (Sometimes, I consider it a challenge, but that is beside the point.)

With a newfound sense of peace given to me by our faithful readers, I once again immersed myself in the world of Albion. In both previous Fable games, you could buy property. When I was playing Fable 2, I found it interesting that the rent and/or business profits you collected would accumulate over time, even if you were not playing. You got paid every 5 minutes (or a lump sum when you loaded the game again). I decided to see if this same thing worked in Fable 3, so I bought up a bunch of property. It did not, which was a little disappointing. But it was getting me enough profits that I decided to do it a lot. It beat playing Lute Hero or the other “job” mini-games. Those would have been fun, but the interface would stutter or skip frames (which is, in my opinion, the kiss of death on timing-based games) so I hated playing them. So I went around questing and completing more of the story and buying up properly and having myself a very nice time for a night. My rage died down. Perhaps this game would have a happy ending after all.

Suffice it to say, the opposite of that happened. Actually, there will be no sufficing. Those of you in the first five rows will find a tarp located under your seats. You might want to hold that up so your clothes don’t get messy.

The Glorious Reign Of King Vanir

Soon, it was time to take back the crown from my rampaging dire butthole of a brother. He apparently only had the budget for like 12 guards, which I promptly set on fire. Then I was king! Hooray! I decided to be a very nice king, and to undo all of the horrible things my brother did, and make wise financial choices and make the kingdom prosper. LONG LIVE ME!

Oh, wait. It seems that there’s some Giant Evil coming to kill us in a year, and the reason my brother was being a jerk is because he was trying to raise money for an army to stop it. Yes, I’m sure that’s why you killed my girlfriend because I was insubordinate in the beginning. Jerk. And apparently, there are 6.5 million citizens in Albion, and it just so happens that I need 6,500,000 gold to raise a sufficiently large army to stop the Giant Evil. How tidy. OK, that’s cool. Oh, wait. It seems we start 750,000 gold in the red. Well, I’ll just set smart financial policies, and we’ll fix this right up. So I go into the throne room and prepare to be Excellent to All My Subjects.

Oh, wait. It seems all of my choices revolve around living up to a promise I made to someone else earlier, which always involves me blowing a crapton of gold OR letting the sexually deviant industrialist that tried to kill me earlier in the game at his weird orgy do something tremendously horrible but profitable. (As an aside, whose sexual fetish is balverines? Don’t answer that.)  Your choices are things like “let the mountain people hunt again and restore their lands” which costs 200,000 gold for some unknown reason, or let Thrusty McProfitable strip mine the entire thing and use the resulting crater as a high-priced water park to get you a million back. There’s never any boring or sensible choices to be made. You can either A. do the bad thing and you get money so your people will live at the end of the game, or B. do anything else and lose a ton of money and have someone constantly remind you that your people will be happy and very dead at the end of the year. Fantastic. I get it, it’s the “heavy is the head that wears the crown” narrative, and you’re forcing me rather heavy-handedly (crowndedly?) into it.

If I was playing D&D right now, this would be where I’m getting creative. I’m the King, dammit! I get to decide how these things work. So you say either I have to pay 50,000 gold to open a school or earn 1,500,000 gold by opening a brothel on the same property? I say it’s a school during the day and a brothel when the kids go home. You live in an industrialized society. It’s called hide-a-beds, people. And the ladies of the evening could help grade papers in their off-time. Everybody wins! What’s that? We don’t have a way to deal with the sewage problem? We don’t have to ruin the marshlands by diverting everything there. That is a silly idea. There’s a Giant Evil coming. Who needs an army? We’re going all B.A. Barracus on them, and making POOP CANNONS. Don’t f*#k with me, Giant Evil. I’ll cut you.

Better Living Through Real Estate?

Wait! I have a plan! A real, sensible plan! A plan that lets me escape from your stupid narrative! You can contribute gold from your personal funds into the royal treasury – and, as it happens, I have been buying up all the property I can get my Heroic hands on. Since I get paid every 5 minutes, I should surely have enough money by the time a whole year passes. Right?

Well, the first thing I learned about being the King of Albion is that 30 days passes in the blink of an eye once you make your rulings for the day. And apparently, I need to fire the Royal Real Estate Lawyer because he completely missed the clause that lets all my tenants go rent-free when I black out for a month. OK, that is infuriatingly stupid, but I can still win this thing. It’s become clear to me at this point that Real Time and Time Before The Giant Evil Kills Anybody are two separate things, and my personal coffers are filling up nicely, so I decide to buy everything in sight and jack up the rent just a little bit (with the full intention of making it ridiculously low after, you know, we’re not all going to die). And it’s working great. I’m questing, I’m raising my skills, I’m occasionally making some rulings and letting a month go by, and the money keeps rolling in. Before I know it, I’ve got 2 million gold, and another 2.5 million in real estate I can sell. It wouldn’t be long now. I would beat this stupid game at its stupid game. I’ve got almost 90 days left, and the clock on my living room wall read about midnight, so I decided to make one more set of rulings before I went to bed.

It was the worst decision I could have possibly made. Aside from, you know, purchasing Fable 3.

The Facepalm Of The Gods

At this point, I wish I had heeded the advice of my readers, as one of them warned me of something very important. I ignored his comment after reading the first few words, not wanting to ruin the experience. What a horrible idea.

Turns out when you make a ruling, it’s not always a month that passes. Actually, there’s no consistent amount of time that passes. In this particular case, with 90 days left, I had just made the very last set of rulings before the Giant Evil shows up. Guess what? I wake up, it’s suddenly the one-year anniversary of my taking the throne, I’ve got a crapton of gold sitting in my personal treasure room that hasn’t been used for buying an army, and everyone in Albion is dead. Better yet: the game thoughtfully autosaved for me after I made my rulings, so there was no going back. A week of gameplay, wasted. Hours of careful planning and managing real estate, wasted. Remember Fable 2? When you were going to go to a critical part in the story, and it puts up a message that says in big bold letters “HEY THERE IS NO GOING BACK AFTER THIS! ARE YOU SURE? NO, SERIOUSLY.ARE YOU SURE?” Did that not test well with the focus groups this time around? Maybe they did tell me, but it was through expressions? I knew I should have paid attention to that copiously-farting businessman back in Bowerstone Market!

So, after the whole total annihilation of millions of people bit, me and the four guys I was hiding in the castle with went to go fight the Giant Evil, handily gave it a good thrashing, and took its Evil Lunch Money. I kind of wish we’d done that, you know, before it killed everybody. You know. Advanced battle tactics and all. Anyway, I rush back to the castle to find my wife. She is waiting there in the Royal Bedroom, as she always is, to greet me. Somehow her “approval rating” meter is well into “Happy”, but clearly something is amiss because she decides to divorce me right there on the spot. That’s right, everyone. If you accidentally get everyone in the kingdom killed through no fault of your own, your wife is programmed to automatically divorce you. A final twist of the knife. I loved you, Freedom the Eco Warrior. Even if you never bathed.

The Final Analysis

This is why, dear reader, I am compelled to give Fable 3 the worst review any game has ever received.

I genuinely believe Fable 3 to be a threat to our very way of life. If you give this to your children for Christmas, you should be thrown in prison. If you buy this game for your significant other, you should probably start hunting for an apartment now. If you bought this game for yourself, do not remove the shrink wrap from the game box, lest some of it gets on you and causes you lifelong depression and anger management issues, and that is IF you do not suffer an explosive aneurism that levels everything in a 2 mile radius. I will never be the same. I am a broken man. My pants will never be the same, and neither will what used to be my guest bedroom. I will approach every game I play, every experience in life, every breath I take with the fear that it will be as bad as Fable 3. There are proven links to the spread of Restless Leg Syndrome across the world and the development of Fable 3. The Black Plague that ravaged Europe in the 1300′s was actually caused by Fable 3 sucking so badly that it travelled backwards in time, where a bunch of rats played it. All of these things are 100% true and backed by SCIENCE.

Don’t do it. Don’t hurt yourselves or the ones you love. Don’t play Fable 3. Really, don’t do it.

Also, it will make you mad because stupid things happen in a lot of very critical parts of the game. I don’t recommend it. But mostly, never play Fable 3.

Photo credit. Please do not blame the photographer for this awful game.