The Pain of Publication: How I Got to Where I Am
For those of you who don’t me, I was one of the original group that started writing for Critical-Hits, but as my life changed, my time as a DM/GM dwindled. As such, my status as a regular columnist shrunk to that of a mere guest columnist. I grew up with TheGame and Bartoneus and can even be seen grinning foolishly in a few Ennie Award pictures. My column, the Pain of Campaigning has languished and faded into obscurity, but from the ashes of that experience I would like to introduce my new column: The Pain of Publication.
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. [Read the rest of this article]
Innocence Lost: The Price of Omnipotence
A funny thing happened at my D&D session last week. The PC’s were fighting a dragon that was extra-tough due to being all Dark and Corrupted™. I figured a level 4 elite green dragon with enhanced stats should be at least somewhat challenging for a group of 5 level 2 characters. I was wrong. They were mercilessly kicking its scaly butt. I didn’t know what to do. The exciting combat encounter I had planned – complete with NPC intervention after a few rounds to remove the corruption so they could kill the beast – was going to be over even before I could do anything. So I decided to cheat. That dragon now had unlimited hit points until I decided otherwise. And I decided to make him get bigger and do way more damage to make them all think they were going to die. Then, I had my super-cool NPC show up and he removed the corruption and…….
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.
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Week 4: I Have Lost Six Dungeon Pounds
This week will be my D&D group’s fourth session. I’m starting to get the lay of the land a little better. I’ve learned that a plot won’t burst into flames if not kept on the rails the entire session. I’ve also learned that tacking it down in a couple of spots sure won’t hurt, and drawing a path in the dirt with a stick where you might like it to go isn’t such a bad thing. I decided to go back to my first article about starting a gaming group and look at the things I was concerned about with a few sessions under my belt.
- 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.
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RPGs and Fiction: An Interview with Alana Abbott
I have spent the better part of the last three years with my head buried deep in the Forgotten Realms, a game world that lives and breathes at least as deeply through its fiction as through its game products. My background and education are tied to fiction-writing, first and foremost. As I become more familiar with the craft of designing games and adventures, the contrast and the synergy between the stuff of games and the stuff of fiction always leaves me pondering: What game design skills carry over from fiction-writing skills, and vice versa? Can fiction capture the essence of a game system or a game setting, while still working as good fiction?
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: [Read the rest of this article]
That Almost Sucked
In retrospect, it should not surprise me that my procrastinatory tendencies extent to my DM planning sessions. Last week was a lovely off-week board gaming session with some Give Me The Brain (the original $2 “on pink card stock” version) and Cranium. The latter had been sitting unopened in our closet since Sarah and I got married in 2004. The purple Cranium clay was growing… something on it, so we drew pictures for the “sculpture” cards too. And somehow, a new week snuck up on me and I find myself with only a couple days to plan the party’s next adventures.
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.
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Weird and Stubborn: A Tale of Omnipotence
My trip to DDXP last month did a lot for me, not the least of which was to make me hunger for playing D&D like a vampire in a carotid artery factory. (They come pre-filled.) It’s been over 2 years since I had a regular game going, and I was a bit lukewarm (read: had every popular misconception) about 4e. I played under some really good DM’s at DDXP, ones that emphasized the story and had lots of little tricks to make combat go smoothly. At one point, a little voice in my head started whispering “hey, you can do that too”. By the time I got home, it was very insistent. I had to have a talk with it. We’re friends now.
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
DDXP 2011 Recap Part Deux: THE EXCITING REMAINDER
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
Take Refuge . . . IN AUDACITY!!!!!!!!!
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.
Chatty Plays: Freemarket Part 3, Ghost’N'Breakin’
This post chronicles the second half of our Freemarket game. You can follow my post on character creation here and my recounting of the first half here. Let’s conclude our David vs Goliath story of stolen sex toys designs, covetous enlightened blanks and subtle revenge.
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. 
A Cure For The Januarys
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!
