A Janus view of my games.

I’m looking forward to the new year, and looking back at the year gone by. Last year I played in 33 games, 5 run by other people.

Though it was under construction all year, I’ll lump Fictive Hack games together as 1 game; I had 20 sessions of that. Masks had 2 strains, but together there were 11 games in that system family. Then, 2 experiments.

Fictive Hack

• Breathing World
  • Awesome Isles. 5
  • Widow Dragon. 6
  • New World. 1
  • World Between. 7
  • Fictive Avengers. 1

 Masks

• Edge City. 10
• Fantasy. 1

Rules Light Fantasy Experiments

• Narvin’s Reach. 1
• Into the Grinder. 1

I do not know for sure what is coming this year. If I had to predict right now, I’d say heavy strains of World Between for Fictive Hack, with Shaun’s Awesome Isles backing that up, and possibly Kristy’s Ravensgate setting making a few appearances.

Will I get Edge City back in the rotation? Or Fantasy Masks? Will I develop Fictive Hack along Avenger lines and Warhammer 40K lines? Will I dig in and make that Harrowfaust sourcebook for TWB:FH?

We’ll just have to see which way the crazy squirrels dart.

My friend Paul.

Today would have been Paul’s birthday. He passed away on November 2. I miss him.

I met Paul because he was in the game group of a friend of mine. I wasn’t playing in that group, but that’s how I met him. I invited him to hang out with me and my wife, and we became great friends. Almost every Saturday we’d get together and talk about all sorts of stuff, and I’d show him my latest wacky game project, and we’d hang out.  He loved my family, and the games we played in our game group, and he held me in a high regard for reasons I never did fully understand.

He played in everything I ran. The two of us would go have supper and talk about leadership and management, about games past present and future, game theory, plans and dreams for work, popular media and stuff we found on the internet, and stories of past exploits.  He agreed to pitch in so I could back the Dungeonmorph Dice project, and he was a financial supporter that made it possible for me to get The World Between for Fictive Hack out to you guys. He was a tremendous support to me in so many ways, it’s enough to say that he was invested in my creative life and my family. Someday I hope to be in a position to pay that endless gift forward.

Now that he is gone, I’ve felt his absence keenly. Fortunately, we talked about all sorts of things, we never had any conversations we never got around to, we didn’t have unfinished business. Just regular type friend stuff. No drama, no suspense, just trustworthy presence and mutual interests.

His passing has left a hole. I feel like I can slide down into a place where I am less and less available to people, less and less socially involved. Or, I need to expand my social circle, add to the number of my friends, and breathe fresh life into my friendships. This is just where I was when I met Paul in the first place, and where he was too.

I tried to get an online game together over Christmas break, and just could not get it together. This isn’t that surprising, but it is disappointing. I’m looking for other ways to engage, that don’t cost money and aren’t far out of my comfort zone. Wish me luck on that one…

Anyway, Paul was the best friend I’ve ever had. He never betrayed me, or hurt me, and he was a great steadying and appreciative influence in my life. He enjoyed coming over to my house, becoming part of my family, and sharing in our real-world and imaginary-world spaces.

I can never replace Paul. But knowing that kind of friendship is possible, that there are such cool people out there… I’ve been fortunate to have a friend like Paul. It expands my experience of what is possible, and it put a drain in my cynicism about people.

I thank Paul, I wish him the best on the next leg of the journey, and I selfishly mourn him and the loss in my life now that he’s gone.

Happy birthday, man.

VALHALLA!!!

We have decided our little boy is an elfling and our little girl is a dwarfling. Here are pictures of her training hard so she will be ready for Valhalla. She loves Valhalla. We holler the word and shake our fists in the air, and she GRINS.

Thanksgiving 2012

I have a lot to be thankful for. I’ll focus on game things, here on my game blog.

This year I have tightened my focus dramatically. I’ve stepped away from Masks, and homed in on Old School Hack. In that process, I homed in on Fictive Hack, breaking from the original so I could take what I wanted and leave the rest behind. In that process, I needed to focus on a single setting first for working out the kinks. I chose the World Between (not least because my wife thinks it is cool).

Normally I have a primary game, a secondary game, and a few one-offs here and there. Right now I have tightened down to a single main game, with the expectation of the occasional one off here and there. I’ve been trying to do this for years, and I’ve finally managed it.

I have completed a plateau in my game design work for Fictive Hack. I have released “The World Between for Fictive Hack” with the blessing of Kirin and Jack both. They even wrote a foreword for the book. If I were to vanish right now, that book is a pretty decent capstone to a lifetime of game design. I am very proud of it, and proud to be in a place I can offer my players stability in my rules with no update fatigue. Considering I first became aware of the World Between on April 1 when Jack released his first compendium, releasing my comprehensive rule book at 315 pages about seven months later is amazing, especially since it incorporates content from both his compendiums.

I am grateful I have found a game that my whole group, bar none, can enjoy. My wife can revel in the dark Gothic tones and themes, the players get to feel like their characters are cool, I can run an unapologetic horror theme under everything… I am not feeling the itch to shift games right now, and neither is anyone else (that I know of.) I just got this shiny toy box together, let’s play with it for a while before we move on.

I am grateful that I had a chance to be close friends with Paul for years. He died this month, and I have been involved in dealing with the fallout of logistics that even the tidiest life leaves behind. His parents have been kind and great to work with, but they live in another state. The situation could be a lot worse. I fiercely miss my best friend, but I am fully capable of looking at the good times we had together and being intensely thankful that he was in my life. There is no question I am a better human being for his encouragement and presence, his generosity and kindness. He loved my whole family, and he was part of it. (He was the guy who played Tulip, the dragon-slaying gladiator. I am grateful we finished off the Death of the Widow Dragon before he left my group. Far as I know, his 15th level character is still the highest level of any character in an Old School Hack or derivative system.)

I am grateful for the assistance of my wife Kristy in working on the game projects you see on this blog. She gives me time and space, understanding that it is my escape, my creativity, a life beyond my meatspace. She helped with things I needed help on, and her love of the setting is a gift to me.

I am grateful for my game group. I have worked hard to create a game where we can all have fun together, where the rule changes will now be minimal at best, where the tone is something everyone can enjoy, where there is incentive to work together. I would lose all interest in gaming if my players did not come to the table prepared and expecting to have a good time, and succeed in that goal. I can say without question or hesitation that you can now experience something at my game table that you’ve never experienced before, and it will lead to stories that will come up when you talk gaming with your buddies from now on.

I am thankful for Lulu and the amazing software and options of the internet. I can build an entire book, fill it with public domain art, share it on a blog, and ultimately create a hard copy you can order. I can do all this for almost no money at all. That takes my breath away.

I am thankful that my lack of access to art has spurred be to take up digital art again, after a few years off. I feel I have been very productive with creating images, and I think it adds to who I am when I successfully make art. I feel you all will not take my work very seriously if there are no pictures, so I gotta make the pictures to get people to look at my work. The up side is, I can make pictures, and this has motivated me to sink the time and effort into doing so.

I am grateful for the people who are consistently present in my online life: Matt Jackson, Simon Forster, Jack Shear, and Kirin Robinson. I don’t know if we are friends in the meatspace sense, but I love having some people who I follow who are willing to interact and talk about what projects we are all up to. I also deeply appreciate Telecanter, Dyson Logos (thank goodness he’s back!), E. Wilson, Tim D., Karlen, Tenkar, and shortymonster. When I feel like I’m interacting, this blog stuff is great. When I feel like I’m throwing treasures off a cliff to a restless, senseless sea in the dimness below, I feel stupid. You make the difference.

I am thankful that I have gotten into making Arkham Horror custom stuff again, and with software (see, pictures!) that lends my work credibility.

I could go on and on. I could go into the Santicore project, my thoughts on Strip D&D, on getting involved in G+… But this is as good a place as any to stop.

Thanks everybody. Even when things are dark, we have so much to be thankful for, it is important to reflect on our blessings now and then.

 

The relative roles of conflict and violence.

A while back, I made peace with a fundamental departure from my previous understanding of what was needed in a role playing game session. I decided that while combat was traditionally the centerpiece of the hobby, I was going to reduce its assumed prominence to one tool in a toolbox.

This reflected a change in my gaming that had happened anyway. However, I would feel anxious if I did not provide my player characters with enough fights. I felt that I was playing outside the norm by focusing on conflict rather than violence. Combat remained something player characters could initiate, but I usually worked in an alternate solution as well. My players instinctively realized this, and as combat is dangerous (and time-consuming at the table) they frequently took the non-combat route.

This idea is not brand new. White Wolf had a lot of story gaming focusing on conflicts besides violence, and any good game with lasting appeal has conflicts on several levels beyond combat ability.  While it is true that I have not come up with a new thing here, it is also true that I needed to give myself permission to change my style without feeling self-conscious about it.

I grew up in the 80s. All the toys I played with that portrayed a fictional setting were violent. I was heavy into G.I. Joe and Star Wars toys, supplemented with some TMNT and He Man and Star Com. I played with toy guns, toy swords, toy shields. I had LaserTag and longed for paintball. I read fairy tales and absorbed all the fantasy material I could. My young mind was steeped in battle, equating adventure with combat. When I was playing, I was fighting.

As I grew up and became a writer, I was faintly bemused to hear one reviewer describe my work as “hyper-violent.” I realized that the reason for that was I was using the same level of violence from my comic books and movies, but I was imposing realistic consequences on those actions. Wolverine didn’t just “battle” with his claws, but he cut through bone and muscle and people dropped with a hoarse scream, clutching at their now-useless arm as it unleashed an arterial spray. Someone who is strong and ruthless, armed with blades that can cut through nearly anything, vulnerable to red rages… you won’t just “lose hit points” to an assault like that.

If we are going to revel in violence, let’s not sanitize it. I find it shocking that the difference between PG and R ratings in movies that are violent is blood. If you have one character battering another character and there is blood, it is R, but if there is no blood, PG. So, it is better for our children to witness fighting with no consequences rather than understand that it is not playful, but damaging.

Skilled martial artists are less likely to get in brawls because they know what they can do to an opponent. Some jerk with a chip on his shoulder may have something to prove, but someone skilled in hand to hand knows that there are consequences to fighting that may not rest easy on the conscience and will likely have permanent repercussions for one or more people in the fight. For another example, consider the “glory of war” from the perspective of new recruits and experienced veterans.

As a writer I aimed to lure people in with the flashy violence, then have them fall in love with the characters. In a strange reversal, the combat that lured readers in became undesirable because their beloved characters could face permanent consequences.

In a way, that same philosophy carries over into my role playing games. Only people who have played with me for years have learned that they can relax and make characters that don’t focus on violence. In my World  Between game, I have a noble woman and a thief with no more than average fighting ability, who have found many other ways to navigate the conflicts and exert their own kind of power in the setting without stabbing people in the face.

If violence downgrades in prominence in the game, then conflict must be centered elsewhere. I like running mysteries. I like running horror games where the characters can’t improve their situation with violence alone.

I design game systems that have robust ways of dealing with competition, uncertainty, and conflict that allow characters to excel in those areas. Intimidation, investigation, persuasion, seduction; if all your character sheet says you can do is fight, and you make up the rest, then you will be focusing all your character advancement on what happens on the character sheet.

Give the players ways to reflect social power, detective skill, and cunning on their character sheets, they are more likely to develop along other lines.

I’m not saying combat is gone. I am saying it is less assumed, less prominent. And when it does come, it can be scary, because something bad may happen to you. I don’t want to get rid of the violence. I do, however, want to show it with all the blood and pain and loss that go with it. Along with that, I can offer the players another way, most of the time. And most of the time, they take it.

This is not a bug. It is a FEATURE.

My Wife Likes “Thief.”

Yeah, she has been into the thief and rogue scene since she started. She loved the Thief game as much (actually more) than I did. When it was too nerve-wracking to play, she’d watch me go through it.

Here is one of my favorite of her self-portraits, from around the turn of the century when we were both doing electronic music. The cloak she’s wearing in the picture? She made it herself while she was in college, inspired in no small part by this video game we’re talking about. So, the “Thief” game is in its own way a love letter to my sweetheart.

Yeah, she’s a fox…

Randomizing in complex systems.

Let me share with you why Tarot and Tarokka and random tables AND ROLE PLAYING RULES IN GENERAL are compelling to me. Oddly enough, the solution was best articulated in “Mostly Harmless” by Douglas Adams.

“I know that astrology isn’t a science,” said Gail. “Of course it isn’t. It’s just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or–what’s that strange thing you British play?”

“Er, cricket? Self-loathing?”

“Parliamentary democracy. The rules just kind of got there. They don’t make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It’s just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It’s like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that’s now been taken away and hidden. The graphite’s not important. It’s just the means of revealing their indentations. So you see, astrology’s nothing to do with astronomy. It’s just to do with people thinking about people.”

I found that insight stunning years ago, and to my fellow dice-slingers and rule-thinkers and table-makers, I share this gentle wisdom.

While that’s sinking in, check out this incredible rune-spinner! Use it while thinking about people, fictional or otherwise.

Creativity and Condensation

At some point, all creative projects go from being passionate fun to being work. Accept this, or face that all your projects will reach a certain point and then be abandoned.

There is pain in this process. I think of it as condensation. When you put a cold drink out on a hot day, all the moisture in the air is drawn to bead up on the side of the glass; you go from filmy misty possibilities to dense liquid drops of the final product. When that happens, all the possibilities that are NOT chosen are lost, but what IS chosen is accessible and tangible in a new way.

There is cause to mourn this. You had a hundred ways your story/setting/adventure/etc. could go, but this is the one you ended up with. So yes, you could have done a lot of other things–but then you wouldn’t have done the one you now have in front of you. This is one reason creators are hard on their work; those who see the finished product have a much more limited vision of what could have been done. They don’t feel the loss of all the things that were excluded by the decisions to include what is in the finished product. So, they judge it on its own merits, without as many ghosts of “could have been” wafting around.

I’ve been thinking about this as I work on the World Between setting. Jack Shear set out an evocative flavor, but if I was a new DM sitting down with the book and getting all excited, it would be hard to find a way in, a place to start, somewhere to begin. There you are, all enthusiastic, but unable to answer basic questions unless you make it up from scratch; and there, you face the sad fact that you’re not the mad genius Jack Shear is, so there is a sense of disconnect and loss as your improvised stuff feels a lot like the rest of your improvised stuff, even as you reach for madcap Gothic fantasy.

So I’m working on a description of areas of the world to help people who are not mad geniuses get tools and locations and situations that they can get their teeth into. The great setting guidance at the end of the Compendium (newly revised with more great stuff) is very helpful, and having cities, areas, history to hang around it would be helpful to someone putting a game together.

I want to bridge the gap between the exciting flavor Jack projects into the DM’s fevered brain, and the experience of the gamers around the table, by providing more infrastructure and tools that project the themes and sensations closer to where the player characters are.

In a way, this is reminiscent of a D&D written for wargamers and rule designers, and a D&D written to be authoritative for kids new to the hobby. Jack knows how to play the style he likes, and he has enough support to give him the tools he needs to pull that off. For people with more slender toolboxes, they might want more help. It’s a shift in audience, in a way.

Of course Jack is still coming out with stuff on the World Between. I’m not psychic enough to really understand the details of how he runs his games, so there will be a disconnect between our versions. Still, he’s cool with having a multi-verse full of versions of his world, so we can have our adjacent sandboxes and it’s good clean fun.

I feel like I’m condensing all the cool possibilities for how each area could be, from a fine mist that’s ephemeral and intangible to droplets of water you can feel and taste more concretely. I do mourn all the possibilities that go away when I do that, but at the same time I think that for me (as someone running the game too) and for others who want in on this awesome world, it’ll be helpful.

Jack came out with four major saints for the Church of the Lady. I’ll need to think about how to fit them in. I think I’ll make each one a patron of a Midian city… That’s easier because I have names, locations, histories, and flavors for them already.

I have a direction.

I do not believe it is necessary to defend the size of my Fictive projects. They are full of good stuff. It is not bloat, it is not splat, it is not crap. Still, I got to thinking.

I will make a version of Fictive Hack that is no more than 50 pages long; that’s 2 pages short of double the original Old School Hack game. But with a LOT more stuff in it. For example, 10 templates for normal humans, then 6 more; 4 for races, and 2 for spellcasters. The additional 6 can be used as-is or used as overlay templates on the others. From 60 templates (plus, if you count World Between and other innovations since “Talents and Templates” came out) down to 16 for the one-shot version.

I will also make a longer version of Fictive Hack with all the rest of the good stuff in it; I’m tentatively naming it “Fictive Hack, Campaign Book, Official TL:DR 2013.”

That should satisfy the one-shot itch, and also have the great resources for those who want more. So maybe I can get more of an audience among those who feel that 26 pages is the perfect length for a game and the rest bloats it up.

As part of that effort, I am working up a monster-builder to include in the one-shot book. I think it will be one of the best gifts I’ve given the Old School Hack community; so I’m clearly excited about it. More to come soon.

Kreativity

I find the story of the origin of this award to be interesting, you can see it here. I am sure there is more to it than that, but it was a quick Google to get there.

My thanks to Jack Shear for nominating and/or awarding me!

Seven questions -

1. What’s your favorite song? That’s like saying “Who is the world’s most beautiful woman?” So many different kinds of beauty! Rather than weasel out, I’ll pick… “Can You Trip Like I Do,” the version with Crystal Method and Filter, on the Spawn soundtrack. It reminds me of my version of Peter Parker.2. What’s your favorite dessert?  Hm. Possibly Dairy Queen ice cream cake.3. What do you do when you’re upset?  Retreat and reframe. Or, crash out and watch tv. Struggle against depression.

4. Which is your favorite pet?  A rock. Or, my wife. If that’s offensive, my apologies, and one of my children. Still offensive? Let’s go with rock.

5. Which do you prefer? Black or White?  They both show dirt.

6. What is your biggest fear?  There really is no way out.

7. What is your attitude mostly?  Make it funny.

Ten facts -

1. I have written a lot of novels.

2. I actually have one novel in print. (It is too expensive for me to recommend you buy it online, but one of the best parts was the free copyediting!)

3. I have written over a million words of fan fiction. And it’s all available from this site. I very much doubt it is like any fan fiction you’ve ever read before.

4. People think I’ve added bloat to Old School Hack? Hah. I have a volume of house rules for a White Wolf game that transformed the way it plays, opened up dozens of modular power sets, and clocks in at over 500 pages. Compared to that, and the remixed fantasy version I did of that, this Old School Hack stuff is child’s play. Yeah: for me, this is simple rule stuff, keeping it light.

5. I wrote a Western themed fantasy game that has gone through a half dozen major versions. It’s pretty cool, but I eventually gave up on it for a variety of reasons. It’s still in the background.

6. I have survived two significant surgeries that gave me wicked scars.

7. I have three tattoos.

8. I used to write poetry.

9. I am seminary educated.

10. At one time, my family owned three roosters, five hens, two beagles, two cats, a gerbil, ten mice, a tank of guppies and betas, and a goat. All at once.

Given the ambiguity of the award, I like Jack’s term, so: Seven Bequeath-ments, in no particular order:

1. Shadowfell. My wife’s blog, as she works out how to get her creativity out in front of the internets.

2….the Sky Full of Dust. Whimsical, lots of creative stuff going on, and I think he should be recognized for his great blogging. I recently was inspired to make spiders an Old School Hack template by this guy. He also has a new blog on the City of Bones–yeah, I’m going to award the blogger AND both his blogs!

3. Blood of Prokopius. For the peculiar effort to reconcile Dungeons and Dragons with Christianity, and also for the inspirational mining of the Christian tradition for D&D material. Also, I love his efforts at revisioning the slaver module, and want a copy of that when it is done. (Rationale, temple, island, castle, rumors; do a search for “slave” and you get the goods!)

4. Dyson Logos. He may be absent again (hopefully not going through love and surgery, like last time; only so much a fellow can survive) but he’s left us enough creative material to get by on for years to come. Great stuff.

5. lapsus calumni. I was about ready to give up blogging when he mentioned my blog on his, and I got readership for the first time after long weeks of posting daily content with few if any hits. He is still the most enthusiastic supporter I ever had for my Old School Hack efforts, even if he has since moved on to other systems. He does book reviews, and posts great maps all the time. Good stuff!

6. Telecanter’s Receding Rules. This guy’s playful and thoughtful deconstruction, reconstruction, abstraction, and recombination of the D&D game is incredible and you should keep an eye on him. He does silhouettes to add visuals to a game without usurping the imagination, he works out minimal ways to add modular rule sets to make the game more interesting (like his current series on travel) and he’s generally a very pleasant online presence constantly offering up cool stuff.

7. The Dungeon Dozen. Seriously useful, wildly wacky, and randomly generatoriffic. My only complaint is that I can detect no way they plan to codify and offer sets of what happens on this magnificent site. Entire inspirations for a campaign might be on a d12 list, or just a handy inspiration for restocking an area of the dungeon or awesomeing up your magic sword. Check them out.