The Ocean at the End of the Lane

I just finished Neil Gaiman's new novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and find myself on the edge of tears. It's not a sad novel, not really, but there's something so very melancholy about it, about reflecting on the past, and the decisions people make, and the things they forget, and the other people who make them who they are.

It's not swords and sorcery, but as pure a fantasy as you might ever read, more akin to Stardust than American Gods, though it is set in the here-and-now (and the then-and-there). The Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone make appearances, and are both mundane and magical in surprising ways. Mostly, though, it's just a story about a little boy, and his brush with the infinite, with a cursory glance toward the man he's still becoming. That said, I shan't spoil it with details; I'm still working through them, myself. This is a book that has invisible pages, if you know what I mean, and I'm still looking for the word, the line, the way (with apologies to Mr. Bukowski). I love it when a book does that to me.

I recommend it to you without reservation. It's a very short book, but perfect in length, nonetheless. Mr. Martin, you could probably learn something about that from Mr. Gaiman, I think.

I've been reading a few other things, as well, and I'll be reporting on them soon.

Numenera, GenCon Swag, and Other Thoughts

Last weekend was excellent. Even though I was battling my first cold of the year (which does suck), my spirits were kept high by the receipt of two packages in the mail.

First, I got my Kickstarter pledge reward from the Numenera campaign. To begin with, the core rulebook is gorgeous. The cover is unusually bright and cheerful (lots of orange and yellow), and the layout of the book is well-conceived and executed. I like the artwork, though I understand that some people have bitched about it. Overall, the book itself is slick and beautiful. I have not had much chance this week to look at it, though, between work and feeling like crap. I will have a more thorough review of its content in a later post.

Special mention goes to my friend and compatriots +Wayne Snyder and +Harley Stroh, who gifted me with many fine things in the past week or so. Thanks a lot to both of you. You don't suck nearly as much as people say you do. (I kid, I kid!)

Wayne was my man on the scene at GenCon, and picked me up a bunch of swag at the Goodman Games booth. Two 'Con-only adventures (Well of the Worm and Tower of the Black Pearl), as well as the GG program (which also has adventures in it), a DCC button (Party like it's 1974), the gold foil edition of Harley's new adventure, Fate's Fell Hand, and--have mercy!--several books: Three Kane novels and on Morigu novel. I'm looking forward to those.

Harley, on the other hand, only sent me one thing, but it was... incredibly awesome: An early Doug Kovacs sketch of "The Band," the ever-changing group of adventurers depicted in Goodman Games' products. That sucker is getting framed as soon as payday comes, and going up on my wall.

I also got my copy of the Seclusium of Orphone of the Three Visions from +James Raggi's crowd-funded adventures campaign. +Zak Smith has already offered a review of the product, which seems like a pretty fair-minded read on it. It's a very pretty book, but one I'm not sure I will get a lot of use out of. However, it does provide content that could be adapted quite easily to our Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad DCC campaign. Wizards in that game need to be a little bit (okay, fine, a lotta bit) crazy. The seclusium generator provides a convenient starting place for making that happen. Crazy wizard towers? Check. I'll be thinking on this a bit before I try it out. If it happens, you'll hear about it here. +Vincent Baker has made a solid effort with the book, IMHO, and I'd like to see where I can take it. I can't wait to see Broodmother Sky Fortress, also from that crowdfunding campaign.

In other news, I already mentioned my intentions to go to GenCon next year. I'm also getting ready to crank up a bit of scholarship in preparation for that trip. I'm going to try for a two-fer: Work and play. The "work" part of it is under consideration right now. I'm already working on something related to hangout gaming and ConstantCon, about which you will be hearing more soon. However, I'm becoming more and more interested in the persistence and development of the OSR as a distinct cultural enclave with its own communities, products, debates and drama and petty high school bullshit, etc. I most likely will be attempting to interview members of the community on topics related to that research, and perhaps doing a bit of survey research as well. More on that later.

The die is cast!

+Harley Stroh has cast "Summon Edgar." Do you think you can handle the result, man? Do you? Don't you know that your immortal soul is in peril?

I've already booked my room for GenCon 2014. The Hilton ain't cheap, but what the hell.

Truth be told, I've never been to this kind of conference, only academic conferences. I think (just maybe) this one is going to be a lot more fun than the National Communication Association. Just a guess. It is, however, at a very unfortunate time for me, professionally. You know how professors have to gear up for the new school year, what with registration & advising, course planning, meetings, etc? Yeah, well, that happens the week of GenCon (i.e., the week before classes start), at least at my school.

Nonetheless... Sacrifices must be made!

(Yet Another) Review: Ambition & Avarice

With all my peeps up at GenCon, gaming has been a bit sparse of late. On top of that, the school year is revving up again, and I'll be returning to the classroom after a three-semester absence for administrative work. Take those things together, and I haven't had much to post on the blog, lately.

However, I recently received my copy of +Greg Christopher's Ambition and Avarice, and wanted to provide a quick review and some editorial feedback for Greg (not solicited, but hopefully recognized as a good-faith statement on my part).

Given the sheer number of D&D-like products that have been produce by the OSR community over the last few years, any new offering in the "original fantasy" genre would have to do a few things differently, and Ambition & Avarice does so.

Characters

The first difference in A&A is the available player character races, which include "barbarian" races like Orcs, Hobgoblins, and Lizardfolk, among others. This opens up the ranks of player characters to characters taht could take your campaign in a vastly different direction. Here, we have "monster" races, and the ability to figure out what makes a "monster" campaign work differently from a campaign with only the "normal" races included--Or, perhaps, exactly the same: We're all murder-hobos here, after all. It's also nice that the different races actually manifest unique traits, with real in-game mechanical effects. For example, Dark Elves are good with poisons and with lock-picking. Dwarves are good at recognizing unusual stonework and finding traps.

A&A's take on the "normal" player character classes is also pretty cool. The game dispenses with clerics entirely, making them another sort of mage. Frankly, I like that approach. Even though a play a cleric in many games, I've never really understood why clerics had to be a separate class. They're magic users, pure and simple, but their magic is in a particular vein. Hence the Priest, Shaman, and Cultist magic using/religious classes, each with its own particular twist on the magical and the religious. This is true across the selection of classes provided. Something particularly new, though, is the notion of class-specific "companions"--henchmen/followers in the player character's service. These are mechanically intrinsic to the class itself, and not something related to 9th level domain play, as in D&D. I like this a lot, as it makes explicit the ways in which one learns the trade of fighter or priest or thief, and makes the PC a bit more... heroic in tone.

Updated Game Rules & Mechanics

Greg's take on the regular ways of accomplishing combat, magic, and dice rolling mechanics, generally, is somewhat different from normal. Yes, it's still a combination of d6 and d20 mechanics, but articulated in a way that is updated and somewhat more rational than the Original Game and its closest imitators. I'm not going to enumerate every single instance of this, as A&A has revamped a lot of the mechanics for doing what we do when we loot a dungeon. Here are a couple of brief examples.

Some mechanics are aided or focused by specific items of equipment. For example, a crowbar makes it easier to force doors. A helmet makes it easier to survive "blast" effects.

There are a lot of these little things, many of which are only modest changes to how things work in other games, a focused exposition of the results of this particular author's experiences as a GM. They may work differently from "normal," but you get the sense that it's not just because Greg's trying to do it differently just to make it different. Rather, it seems to be the result of what he's learned and how he makes things work better, an expression of his particular wisdom. While not everyone would reach the same conclusions in house-ruling their own flavors of D&D-like games, this ruleset does a nice job of articulating his approach in a clear, well-organized, and explicit way. It's worth reading in full, even if you're an experienced OSR player/GM.

Equipment Lists are Cool

The equipment lists included in this game are actually a lot of fun. They are extensive, specific, and really seem to be oriented toward making players think about what they carry into a dungeon and why they carry those things. Every weapon, armor, or equipment item is not only listed, but explained in ways that make their potentials clear. Again, sometimes these potentials even include linkage to specific types of die rolls are other means of achieving in-game mechanical effects. I think that this sort of thing would be particularly useful for GMs and players who haven't really played an old-school fantasy game, and need to make the shift in their thinking about how to approach such games differently from, for example, 3.x and 4th edition D&D. It's a small detail, but one of those things that makes explicit what many old-schoolers leave implicit. It helps to articulate the difference between these approaches in a way that makes clear that thinking and resource management (and interacting with the environment in general) are important to successful gameplay.

GM Advice

"The Judge," Christopher's take on how to be a GM is one of my favorite parts of the book. He does a great job of articulating what is different about the OSR approach, including discussion of railroading (and why it sucks), maintaining objectivity, the importance of randomness and unpredictability, and articulation of some important basic principles for world-building and sandbox play, and different ways of thinking about "dungeons" as spaces for play. I also like the section in this chapter that deals with "tropes," those narrative devices we use to create a sense of narrative frames and the characters' places in them. There's a lot more to this section, and I encourage you to take a look at it.

He also provides a sense of the reasoning behind his advice, and I think this really adds a lot of value to the product, especially for those players who are less experiences with Old School styles of play. However, even experienced players and GMs will find something to consider and/or use in their own games, in most cases.

Layout and Design

Ambition & Avarice fills a brief and useful 97 pages, including spell listings (though there are no monsters included, which tends to depress the page count a bit, certainly).

The content itself is well organized and features a detailed table of contents. There is no index, though probably a book this short doesn't necessarily need one. Use of color and tables helps to present summary information in a easy-to-spot and digestible manner. You won't have to scour this manual to find out what cool things your character's race or class furnishes, for example: They leap right off the page.

The artwork is black and white, and features line drawings of thematically appropriate content. I like its simplicity. While it's not sophisticated or complicated (or completely overwrought, for that matter), it provides a sense of thematic unity with the textual content. It provides "flavor" more than literal illustration of the textual content.

Editing (My Only Beef)

The only real negative thing I take away from A&A is poor editorial execution. As I read through the text, the number of typos and malapropisms was a bit startling to me. Now, mind you, I'm sort of a stickler about this stuff, as I edit a lot of people's work, so understand that this is something that bugs me a lot more than it might other people. That said, I was pretty disappointed at how poor a job was done in proofreading the document. Prime example: "it's" is not a possessive form; it's a contraction of a pronoun/verb pair. It's important to make that distinction correctly.

Little problems like this are minor, certainly, but after you've seen them ten or so times in the span of two pages, they start to seem like much bigger problems. I've given +Erik Tenkar shit a couple times about this (and, look, he was one of the proofreaders! Hehe hehe...), so it will come as no surprise that this is what I choose to harp on. I make plenty of mistakes, myself, but there's a big difference between doing so on a blog and in published works for which you charge money.

I think it's a good ruleset, and I think the price he's charging is very, very reasonable. Certainly, I don't mean to shit on this product because of the typos. That said, I find them distracting and I think Ambition & Avarice would be a much better product without them. I hope that Greg will take the time to fix these errata for future editions of the book. Given that it's a print-on-demand product, there's no reason not to do so. Hell, I'd be happy to go through and make another editorial pass for him, if he'd like, so I'm not just complaining.

Summary

• Neat book
• Decent art
• Well worth the price of admission
• Great starter game for people new to OSR
• Some interesting new takes on old mechanics that could be useful to experienced GMs and players
• Please re-edit this thing, and be a bit more careful next time.

Brief Review of Stars Without Number Supplements, etc.

I took advantage of the "Christmas in July" sale at RPGNow, probably spending a bit more money than I probably should have. But, hey, it's a sale, right? The more you spend the more you save! I'll keep telling myself that, at least.

In any case, I finally picked up the print version of Sine Nomine Publishing's Stars Without Number Core Edition, which I've wanted for some time, but I also purchased two supplements: Skyward Steel and Suns of Gold. Skyward Steel provides additional rules and setting information for interstellar naval campaigns, and Suns of Gold does the same, but for merchant campaigns.

These slim volumes are supplemental to Stars Without Number, and provide a ton of content despite a relatively low page count. In each case,, as with Stars Without Number, there are a ton of useful tables to help the GM put together a campaign relatively quickly. Each also provides the same post-apocalyptic setting/history set forth in the core game, but from the perspective of its particular focus. What happened to space navies, and what happened to interstellar trade?

I must note, here, that (once again) +Kevin Crawford's work on these books is really amazing. I am especially impressed by his advice for developing campaigns in particular genres. For example, a merchant campaign could take on a "space truckers" theme, with players navigating between star systems, moving cargo, passengers, and the like, legally or not, always chasing the next cargo and the next payoff. Crawford describes it this way:

One of the most popular forms of merchant campaign is the classic “space trucker” model, where the PCs are just small traders trying to make a living carrying goods from world to world. They may not even own their own spaceship and might be constantly pressed to make enough money to pay off the loan installments. They may strike it rich on a deal now and then, but the money usually slips through their hands without fundamentally changing their lives. (Suns of Gold, p. 56)

This makes me think about Firefly, about the Millennium Falcon, and, sadly enough, about BJ and the Bear and various iterations of Smoky and the Bandit. That would be a weird mashup, to be sure, but fun.

What strikes me most about what follows is how well the author seems to understand the sorts of situations and choices that will confront the players and GM of such a campaign. He suggests what might happen, and what the players might want as the campaign develops, and how, mechanically, the GM can deal with the evolving situation. His advice is useful and easy to read, and, as is the case with the rest of this line of products (from what I've seen, at least) Crawford has a very detailed but flexible vision. The implied setting is well-developed and interesting, but you needed feel tied to it. And these supplements just provide new ways to express your own interests, and a few rules/mechanics to manage the particular focus of the campaign. They are not stand-alone systems, but bolt-on modules to be attached to the SWN Core rules.

If you haven't checked out Stars Without Number, you should. It's a neat system. I especially like the 2d6 skills mechanic. The PDFs are relatively cheap, and the POD versions are nice looking. I enjoy having them at hand, and not just on-screen. These supplements to SWN are useful additions, and provide a lot of flexibility for GMs who are trying to put together their own space-based campaigns. There also are supplements for cyberpunk (Polychrome) and espionage (Darkness Visible), for anyone interested in adding those sort of things to their campaigns. I've also noticed that Sine Nomine has a metric fuckton of free campaign materials, including adventures, up on the RPGNow site. So, picking up SWN or Other Dust or whatever other game you might want to play means you also will be able to get additional, useful materials, right away and at no additional cost. As an added bonus, Stars Without Number also has a free version, so you don't even need to purchase the core book to play it. Nice!

So, if you haven't done so, pick up some stuff from Sine Nomine. I don't think you'll be disappointed. The products of of good quality and good value.

Oh, and another cool thing: I also picked up a hardcopy of Nova Praxis, a FATE-system-based game which I reviewed in an earlier blog post. The physical book is very nice. I'm one of those very few people who doesn't own an iPad, it seems, so I appreciate having the print edition. It's just as pretty as the enhanced PDF, but with the added bonus of me not having to sit at my computer or laptop in order to read it. I even picked up an extra, to pass along to a friend. It's not cheap, mind you, but it's very, very nice.

Just to be clear, I've been doing a few reviews on this blog, but I never seem to say that anything sucks, and that you shouldn't buy it. At some point, I suppose I'll post a negative review of something. So far, though, it seems like I'm buying things that I like, so it's pretty difficult to accomplish.

What's in it, then, and why should I care?

I just read a thoughtful piece by +Shoe Skogen, over on her blog (highlighted by +Zak Smith), and it got me thinking about why I game the way that I do, why I enjoy what I enjoy, and similar matters of the heart (as applied to gaming more generally).

To begin with, and I think my readers will probably agree, I play games to have fun. If I'm not having fun, then there'd better be some other reason to continue. Now, what is "fun" can vary widely. I've had fun as a player and as a GM. I've had fun having my characters killed, cursed, or otherwise fucked up beyond repair. I've had fun being on the verge of TPKing my players, and then had fun watching them defeat my fiendish plans through a combination of lastounding luck, teamwork, and sheer audacity. In short, there's a lot of ways to have fun with an RPG. My fun may not be your sort of fun, nor yours, mine. That's okay.

But here's what I like.

I Like Stories

The main thing that I like about RPGs is the story. I've been an avid reader since I was about 9. To quote myself (of all people) about myself:

Miss Hopkins, my first grade teacher, read to us every day. She read a lot of stuff by Beverly Cleary: The Mouse and the Motorcycle was my favorite. I was learning to read as well, and the first books I would read myself were those read to us by Miss Hopkins. We also were learning to write. That was a very different matter than reading. Each day, before lunch, Mrs. Hopkins would write five sentences on the board. Our task was to copy them into our notebooks, using one of those oversized pencils the little kids used back then. I never finished the job. Not once. It was tedious and boring, and I just couldn’t make myself do it. Instead I sat there, thinking, looking out of the window, bored out of my head, and filled with more than a little fear that I would get in trouble for not doing the work. Miss Hopkins never said anything though, not a word. Flash forward.

I was in third grade, at a new school. I had no one to hang out with, having been betrayed recently by my “best friend,” Ernie. It was lunchtime, and I was in the first floor hallway. On some impulse, I walked into the library. The librarian saw me standing there. I probably looked very small and a little lost. She walked right up to me, and asked if she could help me find a book. She was very nice, and even asked me what I was interested in. I walked out of there with The Sword in the Stone. It was a thick, heavy book, but easy to read. I read it in just two days. My life would never be the same. Within the year, I would be going through books like most people go through socks. Reading became my entertainment and my refuge. To this day, I cannot sleep at night without reading at least a few pages.

That state of affairs has persisted to this day. My shelves groan under the weight of my books. I'm always looking for new ones, and rereading old ones. They are weirdly important to me. I had a roommate at one time who was standing in our living room, looking at the TV. I was on the couch, doing the same. Then I noticed that he was standing on top of a book, which was on the floor. It was a discrete math book, if I recall correctly. I think I'd sold it to him. "Kyle," I said, "don't stand on the book."

He looked at me, uncomprehending on some fundamental level, what I was about. "Why not?"

"It's disrespectful," I replied.

This went on a bit longer, my arguing my (admittedly irrational) argument, and he his (which was more practical and which had no regard for my bibliophilic anthropomorphism). Eventually, just to humor me, he relented. So, yeah, books are that important to me. The idea that someone would destroy books is abhorrent.

Anyhow, for me, gaming is about telling stories. Given my proclivities, those stories tend to combine some elements of grittiness, intrigue, fighting, theft, wondrous objects and machines, treasures with potentially fatal flaws, villains worthy of love and respect, genre stereotypes done just a bit differently (but to the hilt), journeys to Some Crazy Place to do or retrieve Some Crazy Thing, lots of peril, long-term consequences for failure (and even for success), at least some character deaths (I'm not out to get you, I'm trying to tell a good story. It's not personal.), and as many "What the holy hell is that shit?" moments as possible.

As a storyteller, I most certainly am performing a piece. Not in the sense that I'm hamming it up. That happens, but there's only so much I can do with just the one, vaguely Eastern European character accent I have for my use. I mean I'm trying to perform more in the sense of a magician's performance. I'm trying to make like a conjure-man of skill and grace, to put this detail in the setting, to trigger that thought in the players' minds, which causes them to pursue this goal or motivation, which makes everything go fucking nuts. This usually results in my being completely stressed out for an hour or so, trying to keep track of and manage the three or four plot lines I'm working to bring together at a climax of some sort. All through this process, I have a group of people who are there for their own reasons, doing things their own ways, and my job is to try to bring all of that into the fray, as well. Sometime it works. When it works, it's like eating a good meal or getting laid or hearing a new song that rocks you all the way down to your marrow.

So, this is, for me, about telling a story, and making it as epic a tale as possible. Over time, the players in my campaigns will have a sense of the world, and (more importantly) a sense of their place in it. Even when I play in others' games, I like to make a place in it. When I play a cleric, I want to be more than a dispenser of healing. I want to witness my faith. I want to smite the unrighteous. I want to make the world a better place in which to provide glory unto my chosen deity. When I'm a thief, I want riches and to be legendary in some respect, to pull off the capers that will give people reason to be awe-stricken by their audacity and execution. When I'm a member of a party of adventurers, I want us to play like we mean to win. I also expect that we'll play our characters in ways that make sense (not meta-sense), and that, even though we might know that playing in-character could be fatal, damned if we don't do it anyway. That's the difference between telling a story right, and being more interested in winning than in making it fucking awesome. Give me awesome all day, every day. I don't care if my zero-level funnel characters are dying. Just make it awesome. I'll go roll up some more. And if an established character dies, then I will damned well mourn that character like it mattered, even if (as GM) I was the bastard what killed him.

As an addendum, I must say that I love gaming books. PDFs are fine, but give me a big, printed tome and all is right with the world. If it's got fun art and lots of little bits to play around with, all the better. A tale for another time, I think.

I Like Tweaking on Details

When I write adventures, I take it very, very seriously. I like to have them completely written before I even start playtesting. I like to write and edit and revise, over and over. I like to build in little widgets and subsystems. I like to use the details to paint in parts of the larger picture of the campaign world, and imagine the implications for the player characters and their places in that world. I like to create real-seeming NPCs with motivations and goals. I like to make monsters. I like to make places and neighborhoods, and to put people in them. Basically, I like to put into my adventures the same sorts of details that matter in a good story. Characters, settings, structural imbalance requiring some sort of resolution, and (ideally) some level of indeterminacy as to what that resolution might be.

For me, there's a strong element of craftsmanship in this task, and the process of drafting, editing, revising, and so forth, is much the same to me as what happens when I build a piece of furniture, from the rough carpentry, to the finer finishing carpentry, to the sublime joy of watching the development of a fine finish, putting on the the stain, then the polyurethane, then fine sanding, then more urethane, then increasingly fine grades of steel wool, and then polishing cloths and wax, until that finish just glows. It makes for a thing of beauty, that level of detail, whether its a game or an end table. The great thing about gaming is that I don't have to provide all of the details. I have players who help me do that, and take me places I wouldn't otherwise have gone.

When I finally get an adventure ready to go. When the maps are drawn/drafted, and the narrative established, and the NPCs settled, and the adventure areas keyed, and the monsters and traps ready to rip the party to shreds... it's just so shiny and beautiful. There's not really another feeling like it, and I find it tedious, difficult, entrancing, obsessive, and completely addictive. Getting, then, to play that adventure with a bunch of people who really want to be there, as well... that's an incredible bonus.

In fact, much of my gaming life, until recently, included more writing of adventures than actually playing them; making characters rather than actually playing them; imagining rather than playing. It's a lot more fun for me to play, but I still get a lot of personal satisfaction just from having crafted something that could be played.

I Like Love Dice

You'd think at this point that, given my obsessive control fetish with regard to adventures, I'd want to maintain as much direct influence over the happenings in my game universe as I can. That's not precisely true, as I've learned in my encounter with Dungeon Crawl Classics. DCC is incredibly swingy in terms of its dice mechanics. Those mechanics can turn shit into gold and, subsequently, turn that gold into plutonium that will FUCKING KILL YOU. I recently watched the Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad guys go from being on the cusp of a (very sad) TPK, to rolling like the very Metal Gods were on their side, and somehow avoiding what seemed like certain death. That never would have happened without the dice (a dice simulator, actually). While some people hate that sort of randomness, I love it. I like being surprised, and I like having to deal with unintended consequences of seemingly predictable actions and situations. I even like it (though less so) when it makes me fail. And fail again. And fail again. Just as an aside, I'm a shit cleric. When I cast my spells in DCC, I fail entirely too often. It's become ludicrous. Still (as I said above), that can make for a pretty good story, in itself.

I also like making things that you can do with dice. I like creating game subsystems, improvised tools using dice, and I really love random generators. I especially love random generators that use all of the dice. Most recently, I've been working on some tables that use literally "all of the dice," including d3, d4, d5, d6, d7, d8, d10, d12, d14, d16, d20, d24, and d30. No d100, though. I'm not a fucking masochist.

Finally, I love the dice themselves. I like their physicality and their various forms. I like my dice to be both useful and decorous. I like to have sets in all the colors. I like to have all the kinds of dice I could possibly use. I like to have dice I can simply give away to my players. I have so many dice. I want more dice. I want some of those metal dice, and some natural stone dice. I want all of the dice.

So I bought all of the dice.

Still, I somehow think I could use some more dice. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with me? Enough is enough... but I need some more green ones, and some purples, and...

I Hate Like People

Okay, that's not true. For the most part, I find most people fairly tedious. My job forces me into situations (teaching, committees, etc.) where I have to be "on" pretty much all the time. It's exhausting, mostly. I'm an introvert, and doing that sort of thing for long periods of time is draining to me. However, if those people are providing the absolutely correct vibe, if they're all putting out the right energy, then I actually am energized. In most of my life, outside of my wife and kid, and a few close friends, I much prefer my own company.

That said, I've been lucky to find the people I've found on G+. I never would have met them, otherwise, and I'm quite thankful that I have found them. These are the people I really like to game with, because they are people I like to talk to. I like the cuts of their jibs (to paraphrase Monty Burns). These are people with whom I think I could share a beer in person, and not just virtually. These are the people who make me laugh and laugh at the stupidest gaming shit in the world. "Herbgerblins" is a word that now makes me giggle incessantly, and my regular Metal God of Ur-Hadad group would probably laugh even harder. Even people with whom I game infrequently are a lot of fun.

There's a certain level of cross-pollination that occurs as well. Really good writers are never alone. They read other authors, and steal bits of their approaches, making them over in their own ways. Most recently, my gaming has stolen bits from +Adam Muszkiewicz's work on his Ur-Hadad setting. We've had an incredible collaboration, and our work together has taken me in very, very interesting and creative directions. Some time soon, you all will have a chance to see some things that the Metal Gods crew has been working on.

My hangout games on G+ have really been fun, too. I've gotten to play +James Aulds's version of Stars Without Number. It's a blast. Even though it's not the same adventure I would have written myself, I've learned a lot from his approach. I've also had a ton of fun playing it. I frequently play in +Shawn Sanford's Saturday games. That group is a lot of fun, as well, and I've particularly enjoyed playing with Barry, Alexei, Chris, Steven, and the rest of the Saturday crew. We've been through a lot together, and they can attest (as I've already mentioned) that I'm a shit cleric whose gods hate him.

I Love My Characters

Right now, I have two main characters, and I love both. 

My "oldest" character is Kormaki Lemmisson, a 2nd (almost 3rd) level DCC cleric of the Metal Gods. He is based, in turn, on my old AD&D cleric (also named Kormaki, but no last name) who reached 8th level. I can't find his character sheet anywhere, though.

Zehra the Archer is a 2nd level DCC thief. She's very, very good, and a lot of fun to play. She's impetuous and prone to misadventure, but she's gotten a lot better at using her best skills, lately. She earned the sobriquet "The Archer" for acing The Emerald Enchanter (with her bow) in the Joseph Goodman adventure of the same name.

There are others, though. I've got Berzerker Joe (1st level Warrior), and Grogar Nox (4th level AD&D fighter, recently killed by a shambling mound), Jotun Vargo (1st level S&W Ranger), and Lily Lardbottom (3rd/3rd level AD&D halfling fighter/thief), and a few others. They've all got some possibilities, I think, but I don't get much chance to play them.

I believe very strongly that characters, not setting, not plot, are the very heart of what makes a good story. If the characters don't drive the story (whether PC or NPC), then it's not going to be a very good story, and the players aren't going to have a very good time. At the same time, who the character is ought to be intensely personal to the player. It is derived from the players imaginings, and from what happens when those imaginings are enacted (responded to) by the GM and his/her setting, adventure, NPCs, random dice stuff, etc. I really dug something that +Zak Smith said a little while back, about character development in games without mechanics for character development: 

I think games with extensive personality mechanics expect that your character starts one way, undergoes Character Development in play (like they teach you in creative writing courses), and emerges another way. 

With most games I like, the character starts no way at all, undergoes experiences which reveal character and then are proved to have been a certain way all along. Then, maybe, if they survive, undergo some character development. ... 

I like the artlessness of it. I'm not choosing a character to play. I am, literally, exploring the character, as one might a dungeon--going into it to see what is there. Not pushing it along, just knowing that I can dip a toe in at any time and see who somebody is.

The "like they teach you in creative writing courses" part of that is right on with my sense of what a character is/does in his/her development. It's especially great when that happens with a bunch of other people with whom you're having the same experience. Sure, not everyone will treat character development in that emergent way. Some people have very clear character concepts, even if those character concepts don't seem to work very well in the setting. Hell, the world's got plenty of people who are the same way, so not that big a deal, is it? My ideal is fiction that's as real as reality (minus a few tedious unpleasantries, of course), about people who have the potential to be as fully-realized as you wish to make them. If they survive. Many don't, but that's why the ones who do survive are special.

So, there you go. These are a few of my favorite things. Thanks to everyone who makes my favorite things possible, from the kid in China who makes my minis, to the the authors of my gaming books and modules, to the player and GMs whose time I am lucky enough to share. My life's a happier place because of you. And thanks +Shoe Skogen for helping to prompt me to this get out on the page. It's easy to forget to celebrate the small delights, even when they are the ones that make the biggest differences. 

Of Elves and Iron

I'm working on a new adventure, and it concerns the early history of the world of Ore, where the Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad campaign takes place. In it, I explore the early attempts by elves to colonize Ore, their struggles against the Old Ones and their reptiloid kindred, and (most importantly for this post), their ongoing battle against the effects of iron on the elvish metabolism.

The Effects of Iron on Elven Characters

The Dungeon Crawl Classics take on this issue goes like this:

Elves are extremely sensitive to the touch of iron. Direct contact over prolonged periods causes a burning sensation, and exposure at close distances makes them uncomfortable. An elf may not wear iron armor or bear the touch of iron weapons for extended periods. Prolonged contact with iron causes 1 hp of damage per day of direct contact. (DCC Core Rules, p. 57)

At first glance this seems like something that could be annoying to the elven character, but not actively dangerous. Iron is a bit like poison ivy. It's nasty stuff, and it can cause a person some pain, but it's really not that bad. Mechanically, the in-game effects are about nil, unless you do to equivalent of stuffing your pants with iron nails (or poison ivy for that matter). It's not likely that an elven character is going to put him or herself into a position where iron contact is constant, so my guess is that the intention is to make it more likely that elven characters have to quest for non-ferrous armor and weapons, don't just get to pick up the armor they find, and more or less find self-protection via increase to armor class a bit harder than, say, a wizard. That's all well and good, but it lacks a certain something. I'd like to address that lack in this post.

Heavy Metal Poisoning in Real Life

No, for your information, I'm not talking about that terrible song by Styx. Seriously, that song sucked and was weird and preachy and totally sucked. I'm not gonna link it. Did I mention how much it sucked? Because it did. Anyway...

Medscape Reference suggests that, "The toxicity of heavy metals depends on a number of factors. Specific symptomatology varies according to the metal in question, the total dose absorbed, and whether the exposure was acute or chronic" (Adal, A., et al., 2013).

A quick read-through of a FAQs document on heavy metal poisoning written by the Oregon Public Health Division Office of Environmental Public Health lists symptoms. They include some of the following:

Headaches
Weakness
Fatigue
Muscle and Joint Pain
Constipation

However, more specific information about the various metals suggests we could add these effects to the list:

Diseases of the organs, brittle bones, permanent nervous system damage, manifesting as, "mental retardation, brain damage, cerebral palsy, blindness, seizures, and inability to speak," or other acute and chronic effects like, "abdominal pain, convulsions, hypertension, kidney dysfunction, loss of appetite, fatigue, and sleeplessness... hallucinations, headache, numbness, arthritis, and vertigo" (http://www.lef.org/protocols/health_concerns/heavy_metal_detoxification_03.htm#symptoms)

Clearly, if elves have to deal with this kind of shit, iron exposure is an ongoing nightmare for the lot of them, and would force them to avoid or to find adaptations for situations that would result in iron exposure. With that context, let's consider what the elves of Ore would have to deal with and how they might adapt.

Iron Exposure: Acute and Chronic

In most cases, since we're talking about a fantasy RPG, "acute iron exposure" would result from getting various pieces of cutlery shoved into one's body, or being cleaved with an axe or polearm, or being shot with a bow/crossbow arrow/bolt with an iron or steel head. The vector for infection is a sudden, massive increase in the level of exposure. 

While some of the fantasy literature about elves and the fae in general suggests that iron weapons are deadly to them, DCCRPG doesn't model that mechanically. Getting your Elf taken out with a one-hit from a glancing dagger strike probably would result in a pretty shitty game for the elven character. So, they don't model that. If I were to do something to account for what acute exposure might do, I think perhaps a damage bonus is warranted. Elves hit with weapons of iron or steel take 1 HP more damage than non-elves. Alternately, they might have to pass a Fort save versus poison to avoid damage (make it DC 5, maybe). So, acute iron exposure is dealt with pretty easily. However, my real concern is chronic exposure and its effects. 

As some of the symptoms above suggest, chronic exposure affects the mind and body in some painful, dangerous, and frightening ways. Add to this the fact that elves use magic, and you have an interesting recipe for delusional, psychotic magic users. So, yeah, fun stuff. I imagine that chronic effects of iron on elves would include everything from lost Stamina, to additional corruption tables for elven characters, to magical casting penalties for iron-infected characters, among other things. I'm not exactly sure how this would play out in mechanical terms, but I'd tend toward a table of results that would crop up when the Elf in question has been too long among Men, too long on Ore. How would we model this?

Modeling the Effects of Iron Infection

The easiest way to model progressive iron infection would be to link it to experience. Just as characters often get perquisites for going up in level (e.g., increased hit dice, high deed die, etc.), the elven character might also have an "iron effects" chart, by level. So, as the Elf gets more powerful in game terms, he or she would also be dealing with the slow degradation of body and mind, and the corruption of his or her magic. This is a simple and elegant answer, and it could actually make playing an elven character more interesting. As it stands, the Elf in DCC is not that much different than any other race. Yes, they have the racial abilities, certainly, but actually playing an Elf doesn't require much difference in how the character approaches the game. If it were inevitable that an Elf would be affected by iron over time, and that those effects would be consequential, it opens up a whole different way of running that character. It also would result in research, quests, equipment, an so forth designed specifically to deal with those effects. 

Simply, if iron exposure could totally fuck you up, then you'd be pretty concerned with how to avoid it in the first place, or to ameliorate the effects once it happens.

It's Tough Out Here for an Elf

So, what do elves have to do to adjust to life on Ore? A few things spring to mind, but I'm sure there are plenty of others.

• Elves tend to congregate together in enclaves where iron exposure can be limited. This results in neighborhoods built from particular materials, development of a variety of rituals and procedures for cleansing, dressing, eating, and other everyday activities that will seem weird to non-elves.
• Elves tend to be quite vigilant towards potential vectors of infection. They find ways to seal themselves and their homes off from those vectors.
• Elves also tend to be quite vigilant toward other elves, and alert for their manifestation of the symptoms of iron poisoning. An infected Elf is dangerous in a purely practical sense, but he or she is also part of what makes the other people of Ore afraid of the elven race. They have a reputation for madness and for sudden, catastrophic violence.
• There is a whole area of arcane study concerned with iron exposure and its effects on spell casting. Iron makes magic work differently. The elves of Ore have had to make changes to their approaches. This also serves to make the elves of Elfland treat them differently, further alienating them. They aren't natural to the world of Ore, but they also are different from "real" elves. They exist somewhere in between the two worlds, lending to their sense of outsider status, to their feelings of alienation. It also makes them appreciate their expatriate brethren even more, and to be incredibly protective of each other.
• There is a whole area of healing/medicine concerned with iron exposure and its effects on elven biology. This area of study is guarded from outsiders, and elves have been known to assassinate any non-Elf who tries to pry into these mysteries.
• There is a thriving industry in quackery, holistic approaches to healing from iron exposure, and other quasi-medical scams. Because iron is so dangerous, and infection so inevitable, some elves will believe nearly anything in order to cope with their fears, even if the cures offered are ineffective or even worse than iron infection itself.
• Elven artisans are becoming more and more concerned with, and adept at, crafting devices to limit their exposure to iron (e.g., filter masks, special garments, etc.). This tends to make them look even more otherworldly, and sets them apart from the other races even further. Given the history of the elves as I've written it before, this means that they are even further excluded, and that others' views of them as dangerous outsiders is exacerbated.
• Non-elves know that infected elves are potentially dangerous. The more powerful the Elf, the more likely he or she is to be a problem. As a result, there is strong anti-Elf sentiment in some quarters, and even some political impetus to exclude elves from Ur-Hadad entirely.
• Elves often return to Elfland in order to seek respite from the effects of iron infection, and to attempt healing of some sort. Some never return. They elves don't talk about this to outsiders. Elves who talk about it to outsiders usually disappear without trace.

In any case, when iron infection becomes a constant fear, the elven culture is forced to make a variety of adaptations to account for it. This constant concern manifests itself in weird ways, resulting in an elven culture that is very different from the cultures of the other fantasy races. To extend a point I made in my prior post about the elves of Ore, we also have groups of elves who become corrupted by iron, by acute exposure or by birth defect. These mutants are additional complications for elven culture. I suggested that orcs, for one example, actually are elves who have been mutated by iron, driven mad, and made dangerous. I can see how that constant threat would affect elves' approaches to reproduction, create a constant concern about "purity," would increase elven secrecy about the nature of these problems, and so forth. Again, this would tend to make elves even more insular and suspicious of outsiders. It would also, of course, result in making them seem weirder and less trustworthy to the outsiders they spurn. This cycle would certainly result in strong intercultural tensions between elves and the other races. This fact, on top of the prior Imperial history of the elves of Ore, would create a lot of potential problems, conflicts, and so forth with men, dwarves, halflings, etc., and the potential for prejudice, violence, and even civil/race wars based on these differences. 

I'm a little scared about where all of this thinking might lead, but am nonetheless fascinated by how much richer would be the world in which such complications occur. I these elves a lot more than vanilla elves, but I worry about what it means for the world of Ore. If, for example, the Grand Vizier were to foment anti-elven hatred, to require that elves be registered with the state, to liven only in designated elven compounds, etc., all of a sudden we're in the kind of dangerous territory that humans have been in before. It never ends well, but it does make for an incredibly interesting story. 

Still, when the fantasy races are conceived through lens of prior human thinking about Race as a concept, then you find yourself confronting all sorts of real life horror, up to and including genocide. Thinking about racial issues as they apply to Appendix N fiction (and the RPGs that follow from it) really concerns me, as I've said before, but I worry more about NOT thinking enough about it. It's become a bit of a focus lately, simply because I'm working on an adventure that forces me to confront what might happen if the elves really were different, and what might result because of that difference.

References

Adal, A., et al. (2013). Heavy metal toxicity. Medscape Reference. http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/814960-overview

Oregon Public Health Division Office of Environmental Public Health. (2011). Heavy metals and your health: Frequently asked questions about testing, treatment and prevention. Oregon Health Authority. http://public.health.oregon.gov/HealthyEnvironments/HealthyNeighborhoods/HealthyHomes/LeadPoisoning/MedicalProvidersLaboratories/Documents/HeavyMetals.pdf

The Elves of Ur-Hadad

I just noticed how long it's been since I posted something. I'm technically on vacation right now, but have had to go into work a couple times already this week. I'm chairing a search committee for two positions in our department. Deadlines don't care about no stupid vacation. I've also been working on a couple of adventures, on short one (zero-level funnel) and one longer one, both for Dungeon Crawl Classics. It's been distracting. I don't like to go more than a week without a new post, usually, but here I've gone and done it. Well, it's time to fix that.

+Adam Muszkiewicz and I have been batting around ideas for a long time about the Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad setting. We agree on most everything. Even when we disagree, it's more like he has a story about something and I have a story that's different or even contradictory. Our solution is to say, "Well, probably there's truth in both of these, or maybe they're both bullshit" and we just roll with both versions. It works pretty well, because it grants us a lot of freedom in how we approach our individual installments to the Metal Gods campaign. Even more fun, each of us tends to use what we write to introduce new... complications, shall we say... to the setting. Even the bullshit can have permanent effects, in-world. It's pretty neat. It also give me more impetus to write more stuff, as it can become a real part of the story that our group is busy telling through the adventures we have together.

The longer adventure I've been working on deals with reprecussions of the history of elves on Planet Ore (where Ur-Hadad is found). In this history, the elves had enslaved the humanoid races for their own purposes. They were cruel masters, but they reaped a bitter harvest in the end. Here's a bit of that history. It mixes the elves, their political battles, Lovecraftian Old Ones, the reptiloid races, and the peculiar iron allergy affecting the elves metabolism.

I've been meaning to post it for a while, but have delayed doing so for a variety of reasons, some to do with the subject matter, discussed in this post. At this point, I'm not sure how much I want to play elven characters when I'm not GM. I'm weirdly affected by my ideas about them, to the extent that I asked last night if I could play a different character in one of Adam's other campaigns, instead of "a stupid elf." Very strange.

Anyway, here it is:

The Elves of Planet Ore

What we now refer to as "Elfland" isn't just on another plane. It's on another planet, orbiting a binary star, and is impossible to reach from Ore without arcane means. However, the elves of the Old Kingdom were masters of arcane magics and amazing technologies capable of bridging the distance between the realities.

The race known as Elvenkind first came from out of space and time, bent on the conquest of Ore. Man only recently threw off their Dominion, ironically with the help of other elves, sent by the King of Elfland. The conquering elves of Ore were the Dominionists. They were part of a faction of elves within the Old Kingdom who were in favor of expanding the dominion of the elves into a universe-spanning empire.

This Dominionist contingent was also pushing back against the elven caste system. They came from all walks of Elven life, and believed that Elven culture had stagnated to nothing but tradition and formality, and that even those things were hollow and symptoms of a culture in decline. They saw the ruling caste as infected with malaise and ennui, and unable to see beyond the narrow confines of their particular obsession with cataloging and reproducing, with narcissitic abandon, the relics and practices of the past. The Dominionists wanted remake the world in a new image, in which a new way will emerge, and one's position in life will be according to merit and not birth. They believed that their Elven Dominion would be the greatest empire in the history of everything, everywhere.

The elves of the Old Kingdom, and especially the Dominionists, were students of other, less savory technomancies, and these allowed them to dabble in manipulating the very stuff of life itself, breeding sentient starships and a variety of servitors and subject-races. The mainstream elven civilization now regards these as abominations, as they are machineries animated by magic and by the souls of the dead, who are thereby enslaved.

The elves arrived on Ore in two waves. The first consisted of Dominionists who did so in an ark ship (others of which went to other, unknown locations). They arrived hundreds of millennia before their planet-bound brethren of the Old Kingdom would.

Upon their arrival, the Dominionist elves found themselves locked in a savage war with the Old Ones of Ore, a race of god-like creatures and their various minions and subject races (including the serpentkin and lizardfolk, and various other reptiloids). The Dominionists also had a hand in creating humans and other humanoid races to be their slaves, and to build their armies. After many milennia of war, pretty much their Vietnam, the Dominionists sent the Old Ones packing, and the Old Ones fled Ore to find refuge among the stars or into the depths of its hollow core. The Dominionists, now trapped on Ore, set about securing the Dominion, and their bloody rule would last for many more milennia, up until the rebellion of Mankind.

While the first-wave Dominionists battled with the Old Ones, civil war broke out in the Old Kingdom of the elves, between the Perfectionist and the Dominionist factions. The war went on for milennia, resulting in the fall of the ancient elven empire, and effectively leaving the Dominionist Elves of Ore to their own devices. Eventually, the Perfectionists won the war, but it would be many thousands of years before they recovered from the conflict. By this time, they had developed new means of transport by way of arcane gateways, but had made it the highest of treasons to dabble in the technomagical manipulation of life essences, punishable by death of the body and soul.

The Perfectionist doctrine was another casualty of the elven civil war. The Elves of the New Kingdom, as they were now called, for the most part did away with the traditional caste system, but another hierarchy quickly replaced it, one based on power. Those who were the greatest warriors and the most powerful mages now ruled as a confederation of warlords and their retainers, all vying for position. Secret societies also emerged in the New Kingdom, some of which were offshoots of the Dominionists. Most of those secret societies had little real power. However, an extremely powerful group emerged very early in the history of the New Kingdom, a secret society of the most powerful magic users. This group had membership in other secret societies and in mainstream society, using their involvement in civic affairs to mask their actual activities. In truth, this group, the Coulara Mak'Shi (Winds of Eternal Change) controls the direction of the New Kingdom's activities and politics. However, they seem (so far) to have little interest in the poisonous planet of Ore.

The elves of the New Kingdom arrived on Ore to find that several of the Dominionists' servitor races (Dwarves, Men, and Halflings) had banded together to fight both their Dominionist masters and the remnants of the Old Ones' most loyal minions, the lizardfolk and serpentkin. The newly arrived elves of the Old Kingdom joined the fight, but not as part of any stated alliance with the humanoid races. They had a grudge to settle, but were not particularly pleased at the rise of these primitive races, which they considered abominations of the highest order. Subsequent generations of Ore-born elves have become more tolerant as they've been assimilated into the dominant human culture. Still, there's a healthy streak of elven supremacism among even the "nice" elves.

The presence of iron, unknown on the elven homeworld, was the downfall of the Dominionist elves of Ore. Iron changed and corrupted elven magic, driving elves with particularly weak constitutions mad from exposure, causing low birth rates and terminal birth defects, and occasionally producing outright mutations among the children born to elves. These iron-mutated children and their descendents are a long-held secret of the elves, and their ancient shame. Some of these creatures escaped into the wilds of Ore, and are hunted relentlessly by elvenkind, but they are a more prolific race, and not as prone to iron infection. They have thrived in their new environment. Some call them Orcs.

Review: Nova Praxis Enhanced PDF

I don't do a lot of reviews, but I feel compelled to do so in this case. The game I'm reviewing, Nova Praxis, a FATE-based ruleset, is just that good. And the delivery system, an enhanced PDF, is really amazing in terms of its clean aesthetic and overall usability. Color me very, very impressed.

What is Nova Praxis, anyway?

Nova Praxis is dystopic human future-based world produced by +Mike McConnell for Void Star Games (listed as such on RPG Now, though Void Star Studios is the company).

All of the major sci-fi themes seem to be allowed for, from Cyberpunk netrunning to safari-style dinosaur hunting on distant colony worlds. From transhumanists yearning for post-human perfection to body-Puritans who bomb the labs where that post-human potential is realized. The information about the setting is based on a "default setting." You are members of a group of operatives working for one the major corporate "houses" of the Coalition, engaging in a Shadow War against other Houses and their operatives. You do the dirty work that makes things work for the Houses, that keeps people in their places, that preserves the Powers That Be from shame or blame, while further helping them to cement their influence.

The default setting is interesting in and of itself. It reminds me quite a bit of elements of Cyberpunk mixed with with the various versions of the space opera genre embodied in our favorite TV shows, comics, films, RPGs, and other sources. The author is very clear about this in his response to critics claiming he ripped off other systems/settings:

Eclipse Phase didn't invent the concept of the Technological Singularity (ask John von Neumann who first talked about it in the 50's), nor the idea of transhumanity. In fact, Eclipse Phase very clearly "rips off" aspects of Altered Carbon, Revelation Space, and many others. And so did Nova Praxis. And Nova Praxis also goes on to "rip off" Mass Effect, Deus Ex, and other inspirational sources. That's how fiction works.

Yep. Couldn't agree more. Ain't nothing new in the world that ain't been said already, and I think that's absolutely awesome. That's why we can have things that we share. That's why we can make cool things together. That's why subcultures like the OSR exist. That's why everyone can take something old and make it new again in very personal and interesting ways (or, alternately, in stereotypical and boring ways. YMMV.).

Also, props to Mike for doing a great job editing his text. It's easy to read, well-organized, and almost completely free of spelling and grammatical errors. This warms the cockles of my little, black heart.

How useful would this setting be to me?

The setting is detailed and well-realized, and the elements of the setting are diverse. There's a lot to see here, and a lot of possibilities for tweaking the setting to one's own personal tastes. You get bits like this, about the colony world of Proch:

Large reptiles and ferocious mammals still roam the forests of Proch. These large, at times massive, creatures have become a source of much interest for many of the Coalition’s people. The creatures have provided scientists with many hours of amusement, and a gruesome end to more than a few would-be adventurers.

Land of the Lost/King Kong in motherfucking space, people! That's what I'm talking about.

And this about Earth:

Today, it is believed that no human remains alive on Earth. Mankind’s cities are dens of technological terror, shattered wastelands haunted by murderous machines. Even rural areas are patrolled by aerial recon drones that are programmed to kill anything larger than a house cat.

Hello, Terminator! And the possibilities go on and on.

The description of the rest of the setting provides all sorts of possibilities for just about anything from sci-fi and beyond. You could run a fantasy game, for example, or space pirates, or palace intrigue, or bodice-ripper romances, fergawdsake. Now, mind you, you'd have to come up with ideas for your own, but I think most of my readers are already able to do that, and used to doing so.

Given that it's a FATE-based system, you literally can play just about any character imaginable and any setting imaginable. You could be a giant, monster-fighting robot, a hard-bitten investigator, an technomancer, whatever. If you can imagine it, and you can tie it to the sprawling sci-fi setting embodied in Nova Praxis, you can play it. So, bottom line, this is a very dynamic setting. There are a lot of fiddly bits that you could develop to make it into your Perfect Game. You could do that a whole bunch of times. The number of plot hooks available in the setting descriptions just about guarantees that.

What about this FATE thing? Why would I play it?

I'm fairly new to FATE system-based games. I was somewhat put off by it, initially, as it's a bit complex, and the terminology and assumptions so different from what I'm used to. I had to tweak my brain to deal with the idea that The Story is what's important, that having fun means everybody being able to tell that story (not just or mainly the GM). Mind you, I'm making sweeping declarations with that sentence. I know that. I know that all rulesets allow for that, provided that the GM/players roll it that way. However, just like some other games I've been intrigued by in the last year or so, like +Joshua Macy's SFX! system and its various permutations (e.g., Zap! or Zounds!) or +Rafael Chandler's Disciple 12 system for Spite, this is a ruleset that aims at a cinematic/narrative aesthetic for the gaming experience.

What that means for the GM and players is a bit more flexibility in applying the ruleset. The rules are more procedural than canon, if you see what I mean. They don't define what you can do, but how you accomplish doing what you want to do. I like that. I like it a lot. But it took me a few read-throughs of these kinds of games to really grok the point of it all. At first, it seemed to nerf the deadlier aspects of other RPGs, making the games more about cool shit than about consequences of doing that cool shit. Like there's nothing in there specifically about wounds and death and hit points and specific rules for magic and that kind of thing. The flexibility of the ruleset in application actually put me off! Where the hell was the crunch?

However, I've come to realize that was a bit more about the failure my imagination to capture what I could do with the system. It was about me and my players figuring out what's cool for us, not about having to adhere to what I've come to associate with story-gamey sorts of things I don't much care for. I think I had it wrong. I could use the FATE system to play any fucking game I wanted to. That's what it's designed for. If you can't have fun with it, then you probably need to figure out why you are no fun to be around.

Oddly enough, I think I arrived at this insight by playing DCC, which is almost the opposite in terms of how it accomplishes the very same thing: Make the characters awesome and make the setting random and gonzo. Oddly enough, they are very similar in the way they "feel" to me. There's a real sense of wide-open space here, a feeling that I could explore a lot of different territory in gaming. Maybe it's that the main influences seem to be about the stories (e.g., Appendix N fiction in DCC and the codification of narrative/cinematic structure in the FATE system), rather than the rules.

As a side note, I'm intrigued that FATE creates a linguistic/cinematic language to describe gaming behaviors. It uses generic game actions and character and setting building options to allow the players and GM to build and do just about anything, as I've said already. It also codifies that stuff into terms that are of professional interest to me, personally. I deal with rhetoric and persuasion, the relations between symbol-systems and power. This system seems to codify, in many ways, how we use archetypes and memes and various aspects of game theory to build conceptual worlds, objects, aspects, and so forth for real people. These people are given a way to think about and embody things found in our Internet-based versions of community and collective identities and so forth. I'm not certain where I want to take it, but I'll be damned if that's not fascinating.

What's this enhanced PDF thing?

You can get Nova Praxis "pay what you want" on RPG Now. However, the enhanced PDF is only $14.99, and it's pretty amazing. This sort of thing may be old news to some of you tablet-slinging veterans of the Nook/iPad wars, but I'm a humble lover of gigantic desktop towers. I've only recently gotten a laptop, even, and that's for work.

Anyway, the enhanced PDF consists of about 270 pages of material, and embedded system of menus and links that's intuitive an easy to use, standard PDF book marks, standard, linked table to contents, a fillable, savable character sheet, among other features. It took me a little bit of time to get used to (I'm only a simple cave man and your advanced technology is puzzling to me.), but now I don't know why everyone's PDFs aren't like this one. It's groovy!

Why should I go out and get this thing?

I don't know. Maybe you shouldn't.

If the idea of playing in the FATE system makes you queasy for whatever reason, then probably you are ill-disposed to begin with. However, the setting itself is a very interesting one for any kind of sci-fi based game. You could use it with rules from other systems pretty easily,  I think. For fifteen bucks, that might be worth it to you.

If you like well-written and elegantly produced games at low, low prices, you should get this.

If you like sci-fi gaming in general, get it.

Fuck it. I'm not going down the entire list for you. Just go check it out. The regular PDF is pay what you want. Pay or don't. If you like it, and if you're intrigued, buy the enhanced PDF. It's very nice.

Pulp Fiction Conceptions of Race and Fantasy RPGs

I am in the midst of reading the complete collection of R. E. Howard Conan stories, and something that keeps popping up in the story, in the sense that it's a constant element, is the eugenic conception of Race.

[Note: the Capitalized Word is used to denote that we're talking about ideology, not biology, and signifies that the word functions as an ideograph, in the rhetorical sense. My old teacher, Michael Calvin McGee coined that phrase, and defined as a "building block of ideology." Essentially, you take a term like <Race> or <Justice> and you have a term the definition of which is not only ambiguous, but which also tends to lead to competing (ideological) definitions.]

Race as a concept in R. E. Howard should be understood as emerging from the broader philosophical background of late 19th and early-20th century conceptions of biology. Race, back then, was thought about, particularly in popular culture but also in the emerging eugenic "sciences," as a concrete thing. A person belonged to a particular Race. Races have particular traits. Races are hierarchical in terms of their relative worth or usefulness. Races can be "diluted" or "corrupted" or otherwise fucked up through admixtures of blood (in the sense of breeding). For most folks in that time, and even up to the very present day, this notion of Race was consequential and durable. It colored the way they viewed themselves as human beings, and served as the basis for white supremacism. Even more importantly, it tended to locate Nation and Race very close to one another conceptually, or even not to distinguish between Nation and Race at all, conflating them into one overarching gestalt concept.

I find it particularly interesting in Howard (and Lovecraft, and C. A. Smith, and others from that era) how frequently that variations on this eugenic conception of Race keep popping up. The damsel in distress is never just a damsel in distress, she's racialized, contrasted with those unlike her (particularly when, inevitably, she's captured by those of darker skinned races). In Conan, however admirable they might otherwise be, supporting characters of another Race are used as foils, to contrast what is clean and pure (in Conan) with what is primitive or mongrelized or tainted or otherwise impure (in those who are from other Races). One very interesting exception is Howard's creation of a special category to encompass what would be his Persian and/or Arab analogue races. These, he treats as White, though of somewhat lower stature than the mighty barbarian, what with his blue eyes, steel-belted thews, and whatnot.

It's also jarring to read this stuff when you know exactly where all of this Race talk led. For all of the faux-science trappings of the eugenic terminologies encountered in these works, the focus on Nation and Race are very much supremacist; they would find their ultimate expression in Hitler's genocidal program, but also were found in various other expressions of nationalism based on a Nation-as-Race understanding of where genetic heritage comes from (e.g., Mussolini's interest in reviving what was, for all intents and purpose, the New Roman Empire and Hitler's use of political names, boundaries, and symbols of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Japanese conception of themselves as unique, racially and nationally). It's not innocent stuff. It was the basis for a lot of incredibly Bad Things that happened because people took Race too much as true and given facets of human heritage, rather than simply outward aspects of particular genetic expressions of skin, eyes, hair, and other heritable (but not particularly significant or functional) traits. Hell, look at how the Irish and the Italians (let along Eastern European immigrants) were treated during that time period in the United States. Nation-as-Race was made to be consequential in a lot of ways, to a lot of people, and usually in ways that tended to preserve "Whiteness" as a unalloyed and supreme category.

Anyway, all of this reading I've been doing has triggered a renewed attentiveness, a sensitivity, to instances of Race popping up in other places, whether it be news and politics (which I'm done talking about here), or in talking about character races in gaming. That's where I'm finding this to be the most interesting, right now.

The last couple of days have seen several posts on G+ about dwarves, their essential nature, what sets them apart from the other fantasy races. My own recent thoughts about my part of the Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad campaign has me considering elves in ways that are somewhat different than usually is the case. Particularly, in my consideration of elves, I've been imagining them as at best uncaring toward humans and at worst actively genocidal against them. As a fantasy concept for a game, this makes sense. It creates an interesting tension in the game world, making the PCs' racial belonging consequential, not simply decorative or mechanically advantageous in game terms. Being an Elf (as a Race) in Ur-Hadad is, in my mind, problematic. Elves are symbolic of the ancient, oppressive Empire that kept Men in bondage for untold millenia. Dwarves are symbolic of those who aided Men in casting off their chains through metalcraft. The Lizardmen and Serpent People are otherworldly, alien Races, servants and soldiers of the Old Ones.

In any case, the character races used in fantasy RPGs are usually treated as if they simply are window dressing with mechanical advantages of some kind, in game terms. However, if we think about how human beings have lived over the last 200 or so years, and how important Race has been as a concept in driving how we have treated each other (usually barbarically, of course), then it may be that our game worlds could be a lot more politically incendiary than they usually are. When Elves, and Dwarves, and Men, and Orcs, and... whatever, are in contact with each other, the non-human races are not simply reskinned Men with a few new traits. They are, in fact, The Other. They are mysterious, threatening Others bent on who knows what, with potentially real ill-will toward Men.

This distinction is rife with possibilities, some of them incredibly dark. If we take Race seriously in RPGs, we get a lot of marvelous texture to our game worlds: Old alliances and enmities, shared histories of conflict and cooperation, literal Blood-feuds among the game's Races, and (of course) Race-as-Class. Just kidding about that last one, if only just barely. However, I worry about taking such things too far in a game. I trust myself, and I trust my current crop of players, not to turn my game into an exploration of the worst excesses of what happens when Race and Nation serve as the basis on which we are found worthy (or not). I don't want genocides in my game; at the same time, I find myself saying, "But that's what happens. You can't simply ignore it because it's repellent. You MUST SHOW WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE THINK THIS WAY!"

I also worry that I (the bald-headed white guy) will be misunderstood in my intentions. I'm not a skinhead, people, I'm just a bald guy. I'm not White. I'm a European mutt of incredible admixture. I have no illusions about how stupid it is to take Race seriously as a scientific/biological fact. More than that, I know that Race is a cultural construct more than anything else, one with a history, with a bloody history, to be certain. As such, Race is a dangerous concept, because people can make (and certainly have made) it a powerful cultural signifier. Hell, just look at the commentary on coverage of the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman incident that has recently gone to trial. Look at how African American culture and Race get conflated. Even worse, look at how my fellow citizens talk about Those People in that particular case. It's foul, and I'm disgusted by it. I find it difficult that such attitudes can persist, even now.

Anyway... It's going to be a whole lot harder, now, to think about Race in gameplay as just another entry on the character sheet. It's going to be a lot harder to simply think about non-human races as just like Men, but with different skin. It's going to be a lot harder to be comfortable with that, frankly. It makes me uneasy, because I know how bad it can get. That said, I also can't pretend that ignoring Race in my games, and concentrating on making it happy and inconsequential, are anything more than willful ignorance on my part, a dodge at best and an elision of politically potent and dangerous thinking at worst.

In the end, I have to do it as honestly, as truthfully, as I can. I have to approach this with open eyes and with a willingness to take it very, very seriously. I must speak about things instead of assuming that others will simply "get" my gist. But I can't ignore it. When you ignore it, Bad Things continue to happen.

Wow, this really got very serious. That wasn't intentional, but it was, perhaps, more productive than I'd anticipated.