Sometimes, in any fantasy world where you have invested a large amount of your imagination, you start to append your real-world experiences to those of the characters being portrayed. For example, in the Star Wars universe, characters such as Luke are relatable, in that most people understand the story of “the everyman.” He is compelling because of the extraordinary destiny that lies ahead in his life. People generally like to feel that there is a greater purpose for them, and as such, they always cheer for the protagonist that achieves this greatness. As we cheer on we also become invested in the story. No matter how far removed from reality the elements of the story are, there is a humanization that brings us right back in. We love this. We want this to continue. We want to never break the feeling we first received while experiencing that story.

Everyone experiences this in a different way. What we pull from a story will differ depending on our life’s experiences. Continuing with Star Wars, one might feel more attached to Han Solo, the brutish scallywag that really has a heart beneath his crusty façade. Or, maybe it is Leia, the strong-willed and persistent princess, one who can get things done, regardless of the testosterone that flies around. Maybe you even felt a connection with Chewbacca—a big cumbersome brute that protects his friends with furious devotion, but is cuddly and cute once you get underneath the fur. Regardless of how you made the connection, you connected. You became invested in the story, and you want nothing to scramble that experience, even if you’re willing to give little ground.

Continuity of a game world works the same way. Consumers of fantasy become invested in the characters, and they begin to sense the world around them, taking in the descriptions and feel an author has provided. R.A. Salvatore, New York Times best-selling author and creator of the renegade drow Drizzt, is fantastic at bringing in the reader and giving them what is needed to relate to his characters. It is undeniable that Drizzt is popular, and for numerous reasons, people keep coming back to hear what will happen to him next. They want to maintain that feel, and have the protagonist overcome adversity.

The Ultimate Power In The Universe

Consumers of fiction care about the setting of which their protagonists reside, and they want to see that maintained to a certain standard. When large swaths of their protagonist’s world are rewritten/overwritten/removed, it begins to deteriorate their experience, and becomes a frustration. Imagine, if you will, in Star Wars, that the snowy planet of Hoth was retroactively rewritten to be a tropic world. The explanation is that the Empire developed a terraforming device, the LifeStar, to make planets inhabitable so that the Empire could more easily expand their reach and develop larger populations. First things first, this is lame. It is so lame that I’m getting pissed just writing it. No matter why this was created, or what justification there is for doing it, it just plain sucks. It feels foreign, is not relatable (never found in any of the popular movies, or in the novels), and completely distorts our mind’s eye view of the Star Wars universe.

I admit, that would be big change, and I used it more to illustrate something extreme. Surely that would never happen, but the point remains. Let’s take an example that really did happen. R.A. (Bob) Salvatore, someone I am blessed to be able to call a friend, was tasked with killing off one of the most iconic characters in the entire Star Wars franchise: Chewbacca. At its concept, it is huge. It is almost exciting, right? Killing off an iconic character!? Oh, my God! Imagine the ruckus this will cause! Surely it will be good for sales! No, it is a kick in the nuts. Remember where I said Chewbacca was a cuddly and cute? People generally like bad-ass characters that are also cuddly and cute. How about Ewoks? Not so much. Kill them as much as you can. Yeah, I’m looking at you Wicket! Don’t even get me started on Jar-Jar Binks. Messa gonna have an aneurism.

Continuity of a shared world is difficult, however, and it is not without some major constraints. The longer the world exists, and the more people who contribute to it, the more it becomes a cumbersome beast. Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) used to employ continuity editors. In fact, Erik Mona, one of the big honchos at Paizo and one of my game design idols, was originally hired to be a continuity editor for the Greyhawk world. How freaking cool is that? His job (I assume) was to make sure things made sense and that the world of Greyhawk wasn’t devolved into something that would rebuke fans.

Continuity Cops: Protecting and Serving

Making things more difficult are fans like me. I have spent a good portion of my free time, prior to being a game designer, connecting the dots of continuity in the Forgotten Realms setting. Even with my dedication, I am but a speck when compared to others—such as my older brother, Brian R. James. So, if someone like me can devote a large amount of time to the Realms, imagine what a large group of like-minded individuals could accomplish? Fans like me tend to be viewed as a thorn in the side of editors and game designers. We are quick to point out inconsistencies and errors, and we are unforgiving in our relentless quest for purity. We’re not always right, and we’re certainly not always fair, but the intentions of such fans should be viewed as an asset to a publisher. I’ll explain.

Without fan-sites and discussion boards, I would have to comb through my large library of books for the nuances of what an author wrote. It could have been written 20 years ago. I feel these sites should be viewed as a resource, and not a burden. It’s much easier to see the collective discussion on a topic than it is to hammer it all out in your own brain. I can’t count how many times I have relied on these communities to pin-point an exact piece of information that I can use. As the game designer, it is my duty to remain true to that experience, and to be the judge in forming its creation.

The beauty of large and vast worlds is that there should, theoretically, be plenty of design space to create new and interesting stories. It may be the case, and I have been guilty of this, that writers want to butt up against something that is already established. This is not inherently bad, but it does open up a can of worms if proper due diligence is not employed.

After all is said and done, continuity is an important aspect of consideration that publishing companies should consider carefully. While the downsides are clear, and include a larger overhead (much larger depending on the setting), the benefits of taking the time to do it right can return ten-fold. What are your thoughts? How important is continuity when it comes to the imaginary worlds (or universes) you use?

Background

Spirit of the Century is a successful and well-regarded gaming line done by Evil Hat Productions. Only being vaguely aware of the original game, I believed it was about airships during the turn of the century time. When given the opportunity to review a complimentary advanced review copy of Spirit of the Century original fiction by Chuck Wendig, I leapt at the opportunity. I was curious how I would perceive it knowing little about the license. Simply put, I was impressed. With Wendig’s mixing of pulpy goodness and a dash of panache, he effortlessly cooks up an exciting story set in the Spirit of the Century universe that stands on its own without knowing the original book.

Setting

Dinocalypse Now takes place on earth like our own, but subject to every zany pulp trope you have ever read about. Dinosaurs, primitive cultures, talking apes, wonky technology, magic, time-travel, and practically anything else you can think of exists alongside a timeline and setting that (mostly) mirrors our own. As the title implies, the particular threat of this novel is the sudden prehistoric influx of apocalyptic proportions. Once I fully immersed myself in a setting that relies on the Spirit of the Century background, I found myself treated to a real page-turner. There are some elements of the setting where I was left to assume or infer background information (whether that’s due to my ignorance with the property or the author’s choice, I am unsure). Regardless, the setting is whimsical without being lazy with the right amount of exposition balanced against assumption to keep the story snappy and the plot crisp.

Story

The story follows a small group of “Centurions”, the heroes of the setting all born in the year 1900, as they attempt to thwart a dinosaur invasion in the early 20th century. In some ways, that’s all you need. Wendig is careful to introduce individual character conflicts and motivations with each new character in focus. Make no mistake, the novel lives up to its name and delivers a dinocalypse, but it also makes the most out of every word by creating compelling characers very quickly to raise the stakes of the action. The story does rely on a few improbable plans, but ultimately these feel true to the genre and the story. Given the scope of the work, there’s not much else you can ask for. However, there were a few times where I wished the novel was a bit more in depth.

Overall

I give this novel a B grade. The story is shorter than a lot of today’s fantasy and science fiction and for me I think the brevity did impact the robustness of the story. However, the novel skillfully walks a tightrope of throwing you into the action verses contextualizing the setting. Brisk, enjoyable and entertaining I would definitely recommend this to fans of the author or the setting.

What I Took Away from this Book

Wendig writes using simile and metaphors so frequently and skillfully, he’s almost a victim of his own abilities. Early on, I kept noticing and admiring his use of them, but as the novel progressed I began to expect his clever wordplay and almost take for it granted. Well-crafted simile and metaphors really have a way of spicing up exposition and explanation and even though its a personal weakness of mine I have to take more chances on using them if I want to get better at spicing up my own writing.

If you are interested in the book, you can get your own copy by backing its Kickstarter, as well as helping to fund sequels and tie-ins.

These people understand.

I was born in 1975, so I got to spend the entire 80′s fully cognizant of the gigantic vortex of awesome I was daily marinating in. Once the entire Star Wars trilogy, He-Man, the Thundercats, and Ghostbusters came into play, my imagination was pretty much stocked. There are certain part of my childhood that, after knowing some history, I can’t believe existed. For instance, we had a D&D Saturday morning cartoon and we could walk into most toy stores and pick up official AD&D action figures and monsters. In the 80′s. During all the Satanism scare WTF.

Today, we have D&D merchandise, but it’s much more limited in scope. What happened?

Called Shot: Gamers?

Either my parents didn’t know about all the D&D/Satanism hullabaloo in the 80′s, or they rightly dismissed it as stupidity. Either way, my brother and I had lots and lots of D&D stuff to play with. Oddly, though we did have a Red Box set, I don’t think I ever actually played the actual D&D roleplaying game with my brother until my late teens. Had lots of adventures in the Forgotten Realms? Battled evil monsters from the Monster Manual (though we didn’t know it)? Yes, both of those, and lots.

The strange thing about the cartoon, the toys, and a lot of the other random D&D stuff we had was that it really didn’t feel like it pushed you toward playing the tabletop RPG at all. I remember seeing the occasional ad for the games, and the toys shared the same art style and graphic design as the later AD&D books, but they weren’t marketed as supplements or anything directly game-related at all. They were toys, and games, and books with an awesome fantasy flavor.

Sometimes, liberties got taken from the original source material. For instance, Lolth appears in the D&D cartoon as less of a dark goddess and more of an evil lady who tricks people and turns into a gross spider with the face of an angry Winona Ryder.

Sometimes the material was true to the books but only those familiar with the books knew it. I always thought the Acrobat and Cavalier were strange class choices until I read Unearthed Arcana a few years later. The really bizarre thing is that the D&D cartoon was cancelled the year UA came out — previously, those classes had only appeared in Dragon Magazine and the D&D cartoon. Today, we have D&D Insider for these things. Back then, all we had was a magical teenage pole-vaulter with a fur bikini and an awesome perm. And Ralph Malph.

Marketing Tie-Ins

It seems to me like D&D was being marketed to a much broader audience than gamers back then. Though I’m absolutely certain someone will prove me wrong within nanoseconds of writing this, it doesn’t seem like D&D gets a lot of spotlight time outside of gamer circles. Which, on the surface, is double extra weird because, back then, D&D was owned by TSR (a game company) and now WotC is owned by Hasbro (a much larger toy and game company).

These days, we have tabletop games, board games, and videogames. And belt buckles. Now, don’t get me wrong. I want a D&D belt buckle. But I long for my favorite game not to occupy a niche I have to explain to people. (At least, in the 80′s, all you had to explain was how you weren’t casting real spells using your immortal soul as the currency of the damned. I don’t like explaining things, OK?)

I do not have a marketing degree, nor do I have any idea what WotC could do to put a Dire Chicken In Every Pot™. (P.S. I get royalties if that gets used.) What I do have are desires and silly ideas.

Let me get this out of the way first: I cannot believe that we’ve had 4 blockbuster movies about sparkly vampires and werewolf emotions and the best Dragonlance movie I can get appears to be the product of  a compromise between two warring animation houses that couldn’t decide on 2d or 3d. We can shrink Sean Astin to hobbit-size, we for damn sure can shrink Ryan Gosling to kender-size or just hire Snooki or something. (Maybe Gosling’s body but Snooki’s voice? Gotta get the kender-taunt just right.) Technology has finally invented Benedict Cumberbatch, so he can voice Lord Soth too when he’s done with Smaug.

Obviously, I’d grant my son all the D&D swag I had as a child and more. I want my son to be able to buy a Sword +5, Holy Avenger in a toy store, and have it glow unless he steals something or lies to me. I want to buy big, cool plastic monsters right out of the Monster Vault. I want a plush owlbear. I want good quality D&D cartoons (rendered in either 2d or 3d but not both!) and I want him to be able to tell tales of the Forgotten Realms and Eberron and Dark Sun like I tell about Eternia and Thundera and Cybertron. I also hope their plots hold up better than the cartoons of my youth but that is beside the point.

Those of you who’ve attended Gen Con probably know how fun this is: I want D&D themed food, especially at fast food places. I want to eat the McIllithid and drink Sahaugin Shakes. I want Beholder Bites. I want Fries +2. I want themed cups, and I for damned sure want cool Happy Meals with neat monsters and treasure. C’mon, I still have fond memories of the Astrosniks. Give me an Elemental Princes of Evil Happy Meal. I wanna see all the crazed soccer moms who used to hoard Beanie Babies lining up for days trying to get the elusive Cryonax figure.

Tears Shed For Decades Of Swag That Never Were

Eh, who am I kidding? I would have hoarded it just like the other stuff I actually did hoard and the majority would likely have the same honored place in my closet and crawlspace. But it really would have been cool and I do hope we see a few tendrils of our favorite game snake out into the mainstream.

Thinking about how vastly different D&D’s marketing approach has become over the last 30 years has really intrigued me (and may warrant a future article in which I am not full of crap). If you are chock full of this info, please let me know so that I may mine the contents of your brain.

Until then, I will wait for the day I can buy an Otiluke brand refrigerator.

Photo Credit

It all started off fairly innocuously. I was at my parents’ house, waiting to go to a weekly board game night at the local community college with my dad. I really wish this existed. It was like a little mini-convention, but everyone there was really laid back and the lights were low and it was really mellow and it made me feel like how adults looked to me when I was a kid. I say this never having gone there in the dream, just remembering it, because my dad was taking forever. I was getting impatient enough to wander around the house, which apparently had become the Christmas village in a department store since I’d moved out. After pacing a few times around a few snowy gumdrops, my dad decided it was finally time to go.

When I was very young, probably 5 or 6, I read an article in Parade magazine called “You Can Control Your Dreams”. I didn’t really understand what it was trying to tell me to do at the time, but the concept that I could take a bad dream and decide to take it in a much better direction was extremely appealing to a little boy who would sometimes wake up terrified in his parents’ bed not knowing how he got there. I tried to control the nightmare I had that very night — Darth Vader had taken over the playground at my school, and several Imperial Stormtroopers had their blaster rifles pointed at me. I made it so their blasters could only fire Finger Pops. I was ecstatic. However, that was about as far as I could take it, and I soon woke up all freaked out as Vader and his men were about to get me.

So it was from then on. I’d get a little nudge, but not full control. I’ve managed to erase tornadoes from nightmares, only to have the storm continue or find another threat emerging. I’ve managed to summon the Sword of Omens to smite my nemesis, only to find it’s made of plastic. Having a useless power is almost worse than being completely helpless.

So it was that my dad was finally ready to go, but instead of going to the Community College Weekly Mellow Game Con, we went to K-Mart. I think we were going to go buy a swingset, and we were in a really bizarre truck that had the engine in the back, no windshield or doors, and pretty much exposed you to all the elements. I think it had seatbelts. I remember being very keen on making sure of that. It was wintertime in the dream, so I wasn’t real happy about riding in this truck to begin with. Fortunately, we somehow found ourselves having the argument about riding to K-Mart in front of said K-Mart, so we just sort of went in. (Arguments as an alternative source of clean transportation energy?)

I can’t tell you what shifted in the dream just then, but I noticed something odd in the dream. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Whatever it was, it shifted everything toward the worse. I became aware of the fact that the FBI was coming for me, because I’d mistakenly hacked into a server somehow and looked at a secret file that I didn’t understand. I remember my conscience being clean, it all being just a big misunderstanding, but knew they wouldn’t see it that way. They were coming for me, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I saw my son happily running around the lumber section of the K-Mart, and I cried knowing I wouldn’t get to see him grow up.

I heard someone pull up outside. For a moment, my heart rose, thinking it was my mom come to pick me up and whisk me away. It was the police, and they had replaced my dad with an agent meant to act in his stead wearing a weird leisure suit. Weird Leisure-Dad explained what was about to happen to me, disingenuously pausing to call me “son” every few seconds, and then a Clearly Evil person in charge showed up. I apologized and cried. He laughed and had me stand on a large couch cushion. “For science”, he said. I didn’t understand. Shaking his head, he declared the experiment a failure, and told me to go sit on a nearby porch swing. I noticed it was rusting and ready to fall apart. ”For science,” he gestured toward the contraption, leering cruelly.

I’ve seldom been happier to wake up.

Even today, I haven’t mastered lucid dreaming. On the rare occasion that I realize I’m dreaming, I’ve usually got about 15 seconds before I wake. I’ve had people suggest looking upward and spinning, scrambling the dream somehow and putting you in control. That makes me dizzy and in a dark, dangerous place. I used to try pushing my temples in to wake up. That was a nice thought, and it got me dream-killed a couple times.

The other fun part of sleep apnea? Sometimes it comes with sleep paralysis. That’s when you wake up (or think you do), and you can’t move, and you can’t breathe. Sometimes, your brain is still in dream-mode, and the stuff my  subconscious makes when I’m scared ain’t nice. I’ve dreamt or hallucinated so many ghosts, serial killers, monsters, and packs of ravenous wolves coming to claim my paralyzed body that I feel like I’ve really stimulated the supernatural economy over the years.

I had a really mild bout of sleep paralysis that night, as well:

I felt like the bed was at a 45 degree angle, and I was slowly sliding off, only it never stopped. I figured out I was dreaming and calmed down a little when the aliens from They Live were holding a potpourri party.

Shortly thereafter, I drifted back to sleep to find myself in a world under attack by aliens. Or tornadoes. Or energy trees. This part was extremely chaotic. It was like watching a sci-fi movie where I really had no control over what was going on, and I wasn’t entirely sure if I was there or watching it. What I do remember is a bunch of guys dressed like the Ghostbusters giving each other high fives like they’d saved everyone and a bunch of government types sneering at them and calling them losers.

Then, I felt it again. The same shift I’d felt before, only less subtle. More deliberate. I saw something gold skitter past the corner of my vision, but then it was gone.

The shift wasn’t quite as traumatic this time out. Well, for me anyway. Suddenly the tone of the dream is pretty mellow and most everything is rebuilt. I’m driving around my small town making sure every building and structure has a colorful kite or enormous hair tie stuck to it. Apparently, this was how the aliens were defeated. The scene cuts to a ruined house, where one of the Ghostbuster-type guys is milling about  when he finds one of the female scientists featured prominently in the  earlier movie-action part. Then he says “so when did you find out you were pregnant?” and then her belly suddenly goes from zero to “we better go shopping at Target right now“. This didn’t seem particularly unusual to either of them, but as a father I wondered where they would find a duffel bag to hurriedly pack with a bunch of things they will be completely wrong about needing at the hospital later.

Then, I feel that weird shift again. Then, I see a gnome in full plate mail, gold and glittering, drop from the sky to land right in front of me. He hands me something purple. Then I wake up.

I woke up knowing full well what the gnome had given me.

He was an agent of the GM running my dream. He gave me a plot point. Apparently, my subconscious runs Cortex+.

I’d like to think this was all an elaborate night-long multi-dream joke my subconscious played on me, but more likely it just sort of progressively interpreted some earlier stuff into the golden plot-gnome. Either way, my son looked very strangely at me when I woke up laughing.

Photo Credit

Having written three novels to completion, and having none of them published, provides ample opportunity for self-reflection. One thing that consistently impresses me is how bad my first drafts are. There is a startling lack of crispness and terrible sagging portions of the book that really don’t tie together. Even though revisions are a pain in the ass, there’s a feeling of wizardry when you combine two throwaway characters into one quirky minor character or change a few proper nouns around to create foreshadowing. It almost feels like cheating. Knowing that revisions will be made should inform how you write a draft. I have learned to prioritize certain aspects of writing in my first draft and give other considerations lower priority.

Characterization

Don’t expect every character to be fully defined from the moment they walk into your story, but as you go forward, develop a feel for each character. Get comfortable stepping into their skin, internalizing their values, and understanding their point of view. Ideally, as the plot moves forward, you want to be able to look through each character’s lens and judge events. The plot is not monolithic and you may find the the character you have crafted does not fit as neatly into the story as you had expected. If you recognize this as you are writing, adjust the character’s role in the plot accordingly, but more importantly, by the time you have a draft you should have mastered the character. Pay attention to make sure that each character behaves appropriately throughout the story. Ultimately, if you throw tough situations and drama at well-developed characters you will gain an understanding on how they would react. Well-developed protagonists will begin to move the plot along seemingly of their own volition as you intuitively know what they would do given the trouble you have cooked up for them. It’s this internal sense when cultivated in a draft which shine through on later revisions.

Overarching Plot

Although you can always change your story around, its useful to have a destination in mind. Its even better to know a few plot beats along the way. A few early plot points guide the early stages of the writing process. Whereas characterization is an ongoing endeavor that evolves in strange ways, the plot itself should have a strong impetus at the start of the writing process. Start with a major “event” in mind that kicks off the heart of the story and work on building succinctly to that point while keeping the reader intrigued. Once the first major plot beat has been reached, figure out what consequences make sense and set your goal for the next one.
Oftentimes, starting with limp plotting leads to uncertainty about what to do next and leads to the dreadful feeling of writer’s block.

For me, writer’s block comes in two varieties. The first is when you know approximately what you want to happen but its hard to get words down. The second is when you stare at what you have written and are unsure about what to do next. Lack of an overarching plot can cause this dilemma. While the former writer’s block is frustrating the latter suggests that you still need to do some serious work on the planning stages of your book. For me, that is very frustrating and discouraging to have happen early on. Even worse is when you have most of a story and no clue how to tie it up. That process of revisiting and restructuring the entirety of your novel can be even more time consuming and exhausting than writing it in the first place.

Dialects, Details, Speech Syntax

Meticulous plotting and over-planning aside, at some point you just have to sit down and write. For me, I find that that by not sweating the small stuff I can approach my first draft with a bit more vigor. Your characters may be outlined, and you ought to be working on developing them, but as long as they are kept true to their core its less important to worry about them sounding precisely as they should be. Similarly, worrying about specific details of setting and continuity issues as you are writing can be crippling. It’s important to get a story down on paper first. It’s often easier to fill in the details and polish the continuity later.

One of areas I found this to be most helpful was developing the setting specific proper nouns, slang, expletives, and flavor. I have tried them before and only ended up with hokey “gadzooks!” moments, but in one instance I wrote colloquially. My first draft was peppered with all sorts of phrases and words that, in all likelihood, would not be appropriate for my setting. Rather than dwell on my characters using decidedly out of place modern idioms, I powered through. And lo and behold, a few powerful themes, historical events, and elements of back story emerged with more clarity. From there I created a whole lexicon and plugged them back into my story where it was appropriate.

Pacing

Pacing is a fine art and requires a lot of polish. Having a moment of brevity in an otherwise tense novel, or interspersing some character drama during an action set piece can not only give readers a nice change of pace, but help the writing around it shine. The trick is, first drafts change a lot. For me, the term rough draft is perhaps too generous a term. My first draft is a lamb conceived for a red ink slaughter As such, the attempts at balancing the action may well be useless or undermined by significant changes that occur later on. By no means ignore your instinct in this regard, but it’s not worth fretting over perceived issues as you cobble together a first draft. There will be plenty of time to get the pacing right once you pull out your red pen.

Ultimately, as you work through the process you will find your own areas to focus on and gloss over, but I believe if I had followed this advice with my past work it would have strengthened and streamlined my revisions.  By prioritizing aspects for a first draft and saving others for the inevitable revision process, you can help save work for yourself down the road all the while crafting a better novel.

Everybody thinks being powerful enough to slap-fight the gods themselves would be completely awesome. There’s a reason epic-level D&D breaks down. Actually, there are ten. And NONE OF YOU have thought of ANY of them. Unless you’re future epic-level me. In which case, you probably have.

1. Hygiene

I don’t care if you can move mountains with your epic elbows or travel effortlessly through time and space with your god-butt. You need to wash both, or you’re going to be epic-level disgusting. Since opponents typically scale with the PCs, these will be no ordinary corynebacterium or staphylococcus epidermidis. Epic-level heroes have to face down bacteria that resist all mortal soaps and could eat a Shetland pony within seconds. Most epic heroes have a special combat waterfall for these purposes, and have to quest monthly to find cleaning agents mighty enough to remove the beastly micro-organisms but gentle enough on skin to leave that epic glow.

Clipping epic nails is also a problem, and any instruments used to do so must be +3 or greater. There are epic emery boards available, but, as they are made of the hide of the World Serpent, Jörmungandr, they are in somewhat short supply. Especially on planes of existence without Norse gods.

2. Awkward Thanksgivings

Woe betide the fool who ascends to godhood at a family reunion. Does your family worship you now?

“Please pass the green beans, Sun Lord.”

Awkwarrrd.

Plus, your uncle Jorgen, half-blind with mead and the other half with politics, is inevitably going to try to push your buttons like he always does. Is it OK to smite him? What about your filthy heretic cousins?

What do you do if your mom worships you but still kicks you out of the house for smiting people?

3. Keeping Up With The Epic Joneses

Seldom do you see a laid-back epic hero. They’re badasses for a reason, and they prefer to be the biggest badass on the block (because the number of extradimensional threats that will come seeking a challenge is much smaller than the number who will be scared off by a mighty reputation.

Unfortunately, this means keeping up appearances. If Zagnar the warrior uses his mountain of accumulated platinum and builds a mighty fortess 200 feet tall out of skulls and living fire, then Ramulik the epic wizard neighbor feels compelled to a tower of  lemon-scented faerie glitter fire-ice 300 foot high and surrounded by a moat of breakdancing aboleths. Then Zagnar hires fire elementals with interior design degrees and Ramulik travels to the quasi-elemental plane of Feng Shui. Zagnar tears down his fortress and hollows out the inside of the world itself to live in, and Ramulik becomes a being of pure time so he can live in every single moment (and birthday party) anyone has ever experienced.

Eventually, everyone either hates their existence or dies. Of embarrassment.

4. You Can’t Use Comfortable Blankets After 23rd Level

Read the rules closely. I was shocked too.

5. Epic-Tier Pets Aren’t As Fluffy As Heroic-Tier Pets

When epic-level heroes were just children, they petted bunnies and kitties and puppies. Now that they’re older and super-powerful, they have what? Hippogriffs? Pygmy hydras?

And you can’t just go back down to the pet store in the city and get a dog. The dog will lose its damned mind when you take it home and one of your enemies attacks the fortress. It’ll see a monster with seven heads that speaks to it telepathically and it will flip out and dig all the way to the center of the Earth and Zagnar isn’t gonna have any dog food waiting. They’re not built for that. Cats won’t even go with you. They still think they’re superior. And bunnies simply disappear in the presence of magic. I know what you’re thinking. Magicians pull rabbits out of hats all the time, right? Those guys are charlatans.

6. Very Limited Restaurant Choices

Being epic-level takes a lot of calories. So many, in fact, that a high-level hero could eat mortal food all day and still starve. That’s why the gods have ambrosia. It’s supposed to be the most delicious thing in the multiverse. And it is, until you have it for every meal for 200 years. Then you’re like, trying to season it with oregano and maybe trying some hot sauce, but the fact remains that it’s still ambrosia. And you hate it.

That’s assuming you’re not allergic to ambrosia. Because then, you’re just hosed (regardless of whether you can die or not). Epic-level hives suck.

 7. Nobody Lets You Talk Normal Anymore

When you’re epic, you can’t just be all “Hey, I’m gonna head over to Waterdeep for some tacos.” Your voice booms like thunder. Cattle scatter and creatures under 3HD have to save vs. wetting themselves. Plus you just sound weird talking like that unless you’re questing for tacos. But you shouldn’t be eating tacos anyway. You have to eat your stupid ambrosia. AGAIN.

8. It’s Probably Not OK To Throw Parties

You’re going to invite everybody you know. And because you don’t get out much and only meet people at work, everyone will think the freaking world is ending. Especially if you have friends from the Abyss. Those dudes can party, but they have a way of possessing people and turning them into 50ft tall hulking flesh golems that dance the Macarena. On the other hand, their extraplanar Tequila is top-shelf.

Do us all a favor, and spare us the effects of Arraku, Pestilence Incarnate getting drunk and puking in the mouth of a nation’s freshwater supply. Spare us the Avatar of Nature getting tipsy and making out sloppily with a desert. Spare us the God of Fire trying to see if he can burn a whole city down by lighting epic farts.

Have a nice cup of ambrosia, and have a nice quiet evening by the fireside. With your cuddly pet neo-otyugh. For all our sakes.

9. Your Friends Will All Think You’re An Ass

Sure, you grew up together and they partied with you when you saved them all from a life of eternal servitude picking Underdark Bananas for a bunch of vegetarian Illithid. But now it’s 5 years later. You come home to visit, and tell your stories of vanquished dragons and princesses with questionable lifestyle choices, and they just roll their eyes. “What do you want, another parade? Get over yourself, hero! I’m making a derisive statement!”

They’re just jealous of your power and what you’ve become. You should crush them.

10. You Have To Wear A Funny Hat

You didn’t know you had to wear a funny hat? You must not really be epic, then.

Photo Credit

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.