Evil Hat Productions

• Shock:

  2009 Nov 24

  Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

  This is a sort-of follow-up to my earlier Vinge post.

  I’m the sort of guy who wants to love Shock:, the role-playing game of social science fiction by Joshua A. C. Newman. It has a simple but potent engine for generating Big Ideas for science fiction — “situation” of a sort.  It should get me excited, and the ideas that can come out of the method often do, but the (admittedly) few times I’ve played it the experience has just come out feeling pretty flat.  (This is definitely a “for me!” thing, so let’s skip the impassioned defenses.  I’m 100% certain Shock: works great for many people who I’m not!)

  Shock:’s idea generator is a simple grid, one that lays out social issues vertically (you might list, say, “racism”, “socialized medicine”, and “gun control”) and “shocks” horizontally.  Shocks in this case are shocks-to-the-fabric-of-society ala science fiction: time travel, alien visitation, medical immortality, that sort of thing.  Shocks are usually few (unless you’re planning on running a monstrously long game).

  The juice happens when you look at how these two axises intersect, and work as a group to determine what circumstances arise from that intersection.  In one game I played, we had an issue “AIDS in Africa” and the shock “alien first contact”.  Some crazy-beautiful ideas came out of that: our aliens were living, sentient microbial colonies, shape-shifters as far as we were concerned at our level, able to take on a humanoid form or something monstrous.  Their landing happened over Africa — no big ships over the world’s major cities, here — so there was plenty of regional volatility primed to explode in the face of their arrival.  We also talked about them “precipitating” through the atmosphere, travelers on a one-way vessel sent to colonize our planet, the “sac” they were traveling through space in dissolving upon entry.  And questions arose as to whether or not it was an earlier colonization by their kind that gave birth to some of the planet’s worst diseases.  Some pretty meaty stuff to tear into, there; big ideas.

  But the characters and, consequently, story that arose from that point didn’t do much of anything for me.  In Shock:, ideas get explored by creating a protagonist at those intersections, with the rest of the table doing the antagonist and supporting-cast work when that particular intersection has the focus.  So your cast can rotate around a lot (though it didn’t in the session I’m talking about: we focused on the one protagonist, the one intersection).  Which is probably one of my first points of disconnect: the thin connection between me as a player and any character I might play is a sign, overt or otherwise, that I shouldn’t invest much attention/affection/interest in him or her.  This mirrors a lot of sci fi out there that I’m already not interested in, where the Big Ideas are so much bigger than the characters that the characters end up being incidental.  When ideas trump characters, I’m yawning and setting the book down.

  Likely in service to this idea that the cast of a Shock: game is big and likely to shift around as focus moves around the grid, characters in Shock: are not extensively detailed in terms of system.  Coming as I do from the Fate background & perspective, that’s deeply unsatisfying — I don’t have a lot on my sheet to invest in, nor to communicate to others.  So again I’m left with ideas trumping characters, and characters that feel as thin as the paper of the character sheet.

  So let’s keep that in mind while reflecting on what I had to say about Vernor Vinge’s fiction.  He’s definitely a Big Ideas kind of guy, but his ideas don’t trump the characters.  Really, his ideas sneak in around the edges. He hits you with the interesting, investment-worthy characters in the foreground, but populates the background with those crazy-beautiful ideas that draw people to science fiction in the first place.

  So this is the important lesson, and the critical place where I think Shock: missteps — characters first and foremost, ideas second.  Shock: has that the other way around. Which is not to say that the game should have players creating characters before the grid that makes the situation; it just needs to make the characters more important, more three-dimensional, instead of using them simply as the tools for exploring the ideas.  I don’t want to play (or read about) a tool, I want to play (or read about) a person.  My problem as a reader with those sorts of stories is that they can end up feeling awfully antiseptic, and they really require the ideas to be wall to wall stellar.  A good but not great idea and this treatment can fall apart fast.  A good but not great idea and a characters-first approach on the other hand can still rock.

  In my next post, I’ll talk about Diaspora and how I feel it can (and already does) conquer this problem — and what it can learn from Shock:.

• Vinge

  2009 Nov 23

  Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

  I started reading Cheri Priest’s Boneshaker recently.  About 8 or so chapters in, I had to admit it has a well detailed steampunk world, nicely grimy, and focused on an interesting tale of parents and children. But I just wasn’t gripped by it, so for the moment it’s been put aside on my “promising, but I’ll work on it later” pile.  Good stuff, well done, yes, but not grabby.

  I’ve been tweeting back and forth with Brad Murray about many things (the Fate game Diaspora that he and three other gents worked on being a big part of it), one of which is our mutual admiration of Vernor Vinge’s novels A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness In The Sky.  I am not a hard sci fi sort of guy when it comes down to it, but Vinge’s novels really grabbed me. Yes, there’s bits of science and intriguing speculation flying fast and furious at your face, but he also has a master’s touch in pacing and character.

  It’s been a while since I read those books, but their fingerprints were all over Diaspora.  So Brad pointed me toward Vinge’s earlier work, Marooned in Realtime.  I saw that The Peace War was essentially a prequel story to Marooned, so I picked up both and got to reading War.

  Vinge owned me all over again.  I’m prone to the occasional mild bout of insomnia, but that wasn’t the case while I was reading The Peace War.  I came to bed dog tired and ready to sleep.  Then I’d pick up the damn book, and I’d be up past three A.M.  While not all of Vinge’s work grabs me this hard (I’ve never managed to get into Rainbows End, but I might give it another try later), those failures to grab are the exception.

  The Peace War was written before the end of the Cold War, so it has some “future history” anachronisms in it based around that, and they just do not matter.  It’s a solid thriller with a future Earth that’s been irrevocably changed by a bit of technological blackmail and the regrets of the guy who made the technology possible.  I’d summarize more, but Vinge’s ideas are the sort that are difficult to describe without spoiling some of the essentials.  Highly recommended.

  I’m starting into Marooned now, and I’m at that crucial 8 chapter mark. No chance of this going on the Later Pile, though — I’ve been staying up past three again.  The grab is in the characters, at the end of the day: I care about the characters first, and get lulled into the exploration of the hard(ish) sci fi ideas afterwards.  Which is really the way it should be: give me a great story about interesting people first, and explore ideas second.

  Which has me thinking about Shock: and Diaspora both, and how my preferences relate to ‘em, but that’s a post for another time.

• The New Chapter

  2009 Nov 20

  Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

  Time to start blogging again!

  After I discovered Twitter, my blogging in general largely fell by the wayside. Really, I think that’s something that’s good about Twitter, when it comes down to it: like a magnet, it draws away much of the content that really had no business being a blog post in the first place. But I digress.

  I’ve been watching with admiration as a few of my friends — I’m thinking of Rob Donoghue in paticular — have taken up the habits of deliberate, daily posting. I’m not sure yet if that’s the thing I’m looking to do here, at least not that “aggressively”.  I can’t switch over to a new mode where my blogging becomes as much of a time-demand as the stuff I’m getting paid to do.  But all the same, given how well it’s been working for Rob, something in the same ballpark will work as an initial goal.

  Part of the trick I think is that while blogging is suitable to content too big for twitter, that doesn’t mean it should rise up and demand incredibly lengthy posting.  Or as Rob quite nicely put it:

  … the big lesson has been that I need to write less. Not less often, but rather, shorter material.

  So that’s going to be my initial aim here at Deadly Fredly.  Short subjects, quick snapshots of thought, done as regularly as I can manage. Once I’ve done enough of these that I can get a grip on how often is reasonable (twice a week? three times? once a day Monday to Friday? the daily insanity of my good friends?), I’ll turn that particular emergent property into a policy of practice.

  Baby steps, for now. Stay tuned.

• Gobsmacked

  2009 Nov 19

  I am somewhat gobsmacked that RPG.net did something very productive, and also exactly what it did.
  
  So, if you start reading this thread, it is a complete and total clusterfuck for about 200 posts. Basically, someone saw the cover of a game by Outlaw Press and recognized the art as being work under copyright by someone other than the person given credit, and called foul in pretty strong terms. What follows is about 200 posts of people demonstrating which way their knees jerk and playing armchair lawyer. But then something very curious happened - an artist popped his head up and said "Oh, hey, those guys are using one of my pieces too." Then another on. Somewhere around post 251 someone put up thumbnails of a number of covers, which included art by Storn Cook and Ursula Vernon, as well as a bunch of other folks. Suddenly the clusterfuck became something practical and useful, with people identifying and contacting artists.
  
  I had been reading that thread as a sort of masochistic reminder of why I don't go to the forums. It is nice to be suprised from time to time. (Tip of the hat to fade, thanks)

• [s7s] Where Wingcloaks Come From

  2009 Nov 18

  Batman (firstly) but also this:
  
  http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427341.300-dont-pack-your-parachute-totally-free-fall.html?full=true
  
  Enjoy!

• [Do] New Liz Arts!

  2009 Nov 17

  

  

  Liz just posted a new art for Do! Look for the Jeruba!

• [s7s] New (Podcast) Review!

  2009 Nov 13

  On the Voice of the Revolution...
  
  The Voice of the Revolution #36: October 2009, Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies Review and Kevin Allen Jr. Interview
  
  Check it out!

• [Do] I broke Google Docs!

  2009 Nov 11

  

  In my quest to write around 40,000 words of examples of play as a part of NaNoWriMo, I have inadvertently discovered a limit in Google Docs. Apparently docs can't be more than 512k!

  So I've split up the current draft into two google docs here and here.

  It'll be a little trickier adding up my word count each day, but no big deal otherwise. Just surprised that Google Docs has any kind of size limit in the first place.

  Currently, the draft is around 71,300 words. About 20,000 of which are examples of play. With luck, I might actually break 100,000 words, which is pretty much ridonkulous.

• Crazy Busy

  2009 Nov 06

  Well, November is packed with (writing/editing) work:
  
  * Freelance editing project, at my day-job rate.
  * Starting DFRPG edit work Real Soon Now. [1]
  * Working on STotC at odd moments. [2]
  * UA PDF project progressing. [3]
  * Day-job editing of many, many 2 yr old DOCs.
  * Once again, pondering Hyperworld. [4]
  
  I think that this weekend is the last anyone will see me in a social context until December.
  
  NOTES:
  [1] That would be the Dresden Files RPG.
  [2] That would be the Strange Tales of the Century sourcebook.
  [3] That would be the Thin Black Line, the Order of Saint Cecil sourcebook.
  [4] That would be the revisiting of my "Hyperworld vs. the Invadroids" CiaB. . . and a backdoor new edition of T&J under the PDQ# rubric.

• [Do] 1 in 100.

  2009 Nov 03

  

  In a further attempt to make Ryan's job as hard as possible, I'm spending this month adding the long-delayed examples of play throughout the live doc of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. I'm following a vaguely NaNoWriMo daily schedule of 1500 words a day. Without the examples, the doc is about 55,000 words. I plan to add about 40,000 to that, entirely focused on examples of play.

  In all likelihood, with some final fleshing out in December, the doc could be around the 100k mark by the time it falls in Ryan's lap. Yeah, it's a lot, probably too much, but I'm following a 50 pounds of clay philosophy here: Quality emerges from quantity. Or, in other terms, if the final book has one good word, there's probably 100 words that got edited out in an earlier draft.

  You can keep up to date with the word factory here.