Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Kenneth Hite's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012
4:34 pm	Origins Comes Early This Year It does, it does! Origins, as an aghast look at my desk calendar reminds me, is just eight days away! Here, as far as the event grid on the website can tell me anyhow, is my seminar schedule for the show: Thursday, May 31 11:00 a.m.: History (Invented, Alternate, Dramatic, and Real) in Game Settings: When it comes to game worlds, the best-mapped with the thickest sourcebooks is good old Earth. From ancient astronauts to Nazi Mars colonies, starting with history lays foundations for even the wildest fantasy worlds. Kenneth Hite lays out some principles for using history in game settings, whether starting from scratch with fantasy or SF worlds, or pure historical gaming in the Wild West or WWII. What can you change for variety? What should you change for drama? Where should time travelers go to get a good deal on cinematic violence? (C212) 1:00 p.m.: Game Design Panel Discussion with James Ernest, Kenneth Hite, and Mike Selinker (C212) 4:00 p.m.: Fundamentals of Setting Design The setting -- be it a whole galaxy or a single palace -- helps define your game, your story, whether you're a game designer, a writer, or a GM. Designing a good setting helps you shape the experience you want; it can make the difference between a great game and a bunch of twisty passages all alike. This seminar takes setting design down to its fundamentals, and builds up from there. (C212) Saturday, June 2 11:00 a.m.: Game Design Panel Discussion with James Ernest, Mike Selinker, Kennith Hite, Peter Lee, and Chris Dupuis. (C212) 3:00 p.m.: Genre Emulation in Game Design How do you make a game feel like pulp, or like a martial-arts movie, or like a spaghetti Western? Recreating a genre experience in a game begins before the dice come out. This seminar examines ways to design genre feel into a game -- whether a whole RPG or just your campaign -- from the jump. (C212) When I'm not in C212, I'll be rambling around the Dealer's Room or maybe playing wargames with Doug Sun. I'm not sure where I'll make my base camp at just yet, so if you need a booth cat, leave me a chair! (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 17th, 2012
5:01 pm	MisCon Geniality What do you mean, someone has surely made that joke already? Really? It's a good thing the pun is a ritual observance, then, and unlike its close cousin humor not actually dependent on originality or incongruity. Anyhow, here's my schedule for the mighty mighty MisCon, coming Memorial Day Weekend to Missoula, Montana, where I shall be Guest of Honor alongside Guest of Considerably Greater Honor George R.R. Martin. That's right. Me and the author of Fevre Dream, the great American vampire novel. Together again for the first time. Also, Artist GoH is Rob Carlos, and C.J. Cherryh and John Dalmas will be around, too. So come on out! Friday, May 25 3:00 - 3:50 PM: Meet Kenneth Hite Come meet Kenneth Hite, MisCon 26's Gaming Guest of Honor. Great Hall (Upstairs) 4:00 - 4:50 PM: Gaming Mishmash Pros and Guests: Bob Davis, Justin Farrington, Ryan Goble, Kenneth Hite (Moderator) You got Science Fiction in my Mythos! You got Humor in my Grimdark! Gamers love mashing up their favorite genres and games. Are there some that work better than others? The Cave (Downstairs) Saturday, May 26 10:00 - 10:50 AM: Pulp? What's That? Pros and Guests: Bob Davis, John Goff (Moderator), Kenneth Hite Pulp. You've seen the word thrown around in a thousand different contexts to define a thousand different things. What is Pulp and why can't we get enough of it? Upstairs Programming 2 (Sandbaggers Game Club Room) 11:00 - 11:50 AM: The House Always Wins Pros and Guests: Justin Farrington, John Goff, Kenneth Hite (Moderator), Sean O'Connor, Lee Shinabery Every group has their own house rules, what are yours? Where did they come from? Our panelists discuss their favorite house rules and ways to develop good ones of your own. The Dungeon Noon - 12:50 PM: The Elements of Horror Pros and Guests: Bob Davis, Kenneth Hite (Moderator), Jenna M. Pitman How do you create a sense of fear in your story, game, or film? Upstairs Programming 1 (259) 2:00 - 2:50 PM: Pixels or Player's Handbooks? Pros and Guests: Kenneth Hite (Moderator), CJ Ruby, Robert Thomson Online RPGs provide a lot of bells and whistles and are easily accessible for players. Can table top rpgs compete? Can these same technologies be used by traditional gamers to enhance tabletop games? Upstairs Programming 2 (Sandbaggers Game Club Room) Sunday, May 27 11:00 - 11:50 AM: Jumpin' the Tracks Pros and Guests: Justin Farrington, John Goff, Kenneth Hite, Lee Shinabery Everyone's had a game that went off the rails in wildly entertaining ways. Our panel of experts recount the worst trainwrecks in their gaming careers. The Cave (Downstairs) 3:00 - 3:50 PM: The Many Ways to Tell a Story Pros and Guests: Kenneth Hite, George R. R. Martin, Peter Orullian, Eldon Thompson Stories come in many shapes and sizes, from books to comics to games to television and movies. How is storytelling the same among these media, and how does it differ? What are the challenges unique to each? What makes a good book versus movie versus comic? Great Hall (Upstairs) *If the weather is nice, this panel will relocate to the BBQ Area* 5:00 - 5:50 PM: The Writing is on the Wall: The Future of Gaming Pros and Guests: John Goff, Kenneth Hite, Robert Thomson Our crack team of professional game writers and editors talk about the future of the tabletop role-playing industry. What does the future hold? The Cave (Downstairs) Monday, May 28 10:00 - 10:50 AM, Author Book Signing Pros and Guests: S. A. Bolich, Margaret Bonham, Patricia Briggs, C.J. Cherryh, John Dalmas, M. J. Engh, Steve Fahnestalk, Jane Fancher, Diana Pharaoh Francis, Deby Fredericks, James Glass, Kenneth Hite, Vicki Mitchell, Kevin Noel Olson, Peter Orullian, J.A. Pitts, Eldon Thompson, Josh Wagner Our authors will be on hand to have their work signed. All MisCon authors are invited. Fireside Noon - 12:50 PM, The Ocr Fitr: Editing for RPGs Pros and Guests: Kenneth Hite, Andrea Howe (Moderator), Connie Thomson Moderator: Andrea Howe Hey, typos hapen. But when a a transposed number can make or break a game, who works behind the scenes to make sure everything is where it shud be? Upstairs Programming 1 (259) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 10th, 2012
1:18 am	Sí, C2E2! Et tu! Just a quick post to let folks planning to hit C2E2 this weekend know that I, mforbeck, and wordwill will be holding forth on two panels on Friday: 2:30–3:30 PM: Living the Dream: Making a Living as a Kickstarter and Freelancer 5–6 PM: The State of Play in Tabletop Roleplaying Gaming I'll be around and about for most of the show, I imagine, so hope to see you there! (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 1st, 2012
8:28 pm	Odyssey Con Fabulation It looks like they've finalized the schedule at Odyssey Con aka OddCon, a lovely SF/F/etc. convention on April 20-22 in Madison, Wisconsin that I crashed last year (when robin_d_laws was GoH) to such good effect that they've invited me back this year as a Guest of Honor. (I also semi-crashed it as a gaming Guest of Regular in 2005, when Tim Powers was GoH.) Also Guesting of Honor are Larry Niven and Steven Barnes, should you be interested, and indeed you should. But anyway, the schedule as it applies to Me: Friday, April 20 2:30pm: Werewolves! Embrace your inner Beast (G. Schnobrich (M), K. Hite, J. Leinweber, M. Olson) Lycanthropy was always messy, painful and un-cool, but in recent novels and movies we are seeing its powerful, sexy, and even humorous side. Who is the first named werewolf character in literature? Is there a "metaphor" disease connected with it, like TB and AIDS have been for vampires? What about Glen Duncan's novel, The Last Werewolf? (Odana A) What about it indeed? (A: Lycaon, unless they mean something else by "literature." Or "werewolf." A: Rabies, but that's probably not what they mean. Maybe clinical depression. See what a good panel this will be?) 4:00pm: Future of Table Top Gaming (B. Curley (M), K. Hite, B. Bodden) Where table top might be headed between d20, 4e, FUDGE, GUMSHOE, and other various indie games. (Oakbrook III) Where indeed? (And we'll slot in "5e" instead of "4e," I suspect. And maybe FATE for FUDGE.) Saturday, April 21 1:00 pm: Signing: K. Hite, M. Forbeck, J. Kovalic (Dealer's Room) 2:30 pm: Star Wars vs. Star Trek (E. Larson, K. Hite, M. Nelson, M. Forbeck) I can't find a panel description, but I expect it will be a lot like mforbeck's book. Only in panel form. (Oakbrook I and II) (A: Star Trek. Duh.) 4:00 pm: Games Based on Books, Movies, and TV (G. Rihn (M), K. Hite, M. Forbeck, B. Bodden) Since the early days of 'generic' role-playing games, game systems based on popular media properties have come and gone. What makes a film or novel good for adaptation to a game? Which game adaptations have been particularly successful and which have failed notably, and why? (Odana A) 8:00 pm: Guest of Honor Speeches (Oakbrook I and II) After: Gaming the Mythos (B. Curley (M), K. Hite, M. Valentinelli, B. Bodden) There are now several board and role-playing games featuring HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. What is essential to getting the mythos right? What are some common pitfalls when attempting to emulate Lovecraft's eldritch horror? Sunday, April 22 1:00 pm: Ken Hite reading (Odana A) What, exactly, I'll be reading, I don't know yet. Maybe one of my short stories for Stone Skin Press. Almost certainly "The Chicago Working" from the World of Darkness adventure Chicago Workings. Maybe something else, or not. So come one, come all! See you in Madison in three weeks! (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, February 20th, 2012
11:58 pm	Farewell happy fields, Where joy forever dwells: hail, horrors! I think impecunious occult eccentric loners in the Bay Area are living longer. That's the only logical explanation for how I went to Fields Book Store, pound for pound the finest occult bookstore in the English-speaking world, and only found one book in the used section to buy: The Lebor Feasa Runda: A Druidic Grammar of Celtic Lore and Magic, by the legendary druid Mogh Ruith, as edited and transcribed by Steven L. Akins, who talks about Rudolf Hess in the preface an awful lot for someone who's editing 4th-century druid runery. So that's made of unalloyed win. As is the first new book I pulled down out of the "New Arrivals" section, Red Shambhala by Andrei Znamenski. Featuring such unlooked-for glories as Lenin's esoteric cryptographer Gleb Bokii and the "Red Merlin" Alexander Barchenko (as macklinr put it so aptly, "Nobody ever calls Merlin 'the Blue Barchenko,' though, do they?") along with old favorites like Baron Ungarn-Sternberg and the wacky Roerich clan, it hardly needed a sub-section headed "Mastering Brain Rays" to make me love it more. And yet it has such a sub-section. Oh yes, it truly has. But it was a thin harvest I pulled down this year, even though Fields was present in all its mighty strength: for the first time in forever, they weren't vending at Pantheacon. Nothing from "Occult Nazis" or "Blake" or "Shakespeare" or "Arthuriana" or even "Geomancy." I was forced to branch out into "Music" (Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung: A Companion by Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington) and "China" (Opium Culture: The Art & Ritual of the Chinese Tradition by Peter Lee, aka Master of the Incredibly Tactless Subtitle). Although I did go ahead and pick up Volume 3 in Peter Levenda's dense and unhinged Sinister Forces series, The Manson Secret, from the well-trod "Conspiracy" shelves. But that was it. Four new books and one used. I spent some time pondering buying the new edition of Kenneth Grant's Outside the Circles of Time, but it's still just too spendy in these parlous days of Austerity. So I guess I beat Fields. But it's a hollow victory. Where is the glory of battle? Where is the dust and sweat and potpourri of the "Overstock and Oversize" section, or the vertiginous elan of the tip-top ladder step to reach the "Left-Hand Path"? By Crom, I miss the days of the axe and wolf. Bibliophilically speaking, of course. I went to City Lights next and slapped it around a little and emerged with Creole Religions of the Caribbean by Margarite Fernandez Olmos & Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, but it wasn't the same, somehow. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 17th, 2012
12:58 am	21 Glasses Plus A Glass Plus 2 Glasses Today, the mighty Chris Hanrahan and the similarly mighty Bruce Harlick took me wine tasting in Napa. We hit three wineries. The first was the paradisiacal, upscale Duckhorn (on the veranda of which, like a certain coffee shop in Gothenburg, I could haply retire myself with Virgil and mollpeartree come to that). There, the standout was a 2008 Goldeneye pinot noir, in which one could taste the smoke from the fires that year, although I pronounced myself very fond of the big noisy merlot that my more sophisticated tablemates deprecated just a bit. Seriously, I could inhale the nose off that all day every day. Then off to Bouchon for lunch, where we were seated immediately. (Record scratch: smash cut to righteousfist shouting NOOOOOOOO!!!!!) I had the merguez special with the lentils; we shared a tureen of truffle fries that it pains me to say were better than those at Rockit. Then off to one of Bruce's finds, the remarkable Casa Nuestra winery, a sort of lo-fi 70s style place managed with affable calm by a guy in a black dress shirt. (It's owned by a big time civil rights lawyer who was pals with Paul of Peter, Paul, and Mary, so it had lots of hippie vibe throughout.) We got a fine (if dry) Riesling there and two different field blends, one of which was about 25% Negrett, which is apparently a varietal cultivated on about 100 acres worldwide. A strong, bold Charbono, which is apparently a varietal long fallen into desuetude -- the Casa Nuestrans are very fond of micro-batches from a very few acres or a fraction of an acre, planted in uncommon varietals. Tasty, spicy Cabernet Franc, that kind of thing. Then a cask tasting of the (by now I've had ten or so glasses) something delicious and red with full-on blackberry notes, all very casual and cool and NoCal. Then a little more something. Then finishing up at the Castillo del Amoroso, which is a full-on honest-to-Grayskull castle made of stones carted from Europe and reassembled in Napa. That was Italian grapes in the dungeon surrounded by tourist tchotchkes, but it included a superb, crisp Gewuertztraminer and a Moscato I liked very very much. Then back to chez Hanrahan for a glass of Junipero gin, distilled by the Anchor Steam people. Then off to the Trappist for two beers: an Allagash White and a Pranqster golden ale. This may become a thing. Top men are working on it. Tomorrow, Fields Books and (eventually) the con, but I wager after many fewer glasses. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, February 6th, 2012
4:18 pm	Ten Thumbs Up I'm just a little bit later than normal (assuming there is a "normal" to LJ postings) on this, but I had The Way Back sitting on Netflix Streaming, and if a Peter Weir film might be in the Top Ten 2011 Films I Saw, I figured I should probably watch it before I made my list anyhow. (Twenty-fifth best, as it turned out.) And so, without further ado, here are the Top Ten 2011 Films I Saw, now in list form because someone can't lay off the commas, John LeCarré I'm looking at you: 13 Assassins Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy Wild Bill Moneyball X-Men First Class I Saw the Devil Drive Viva Riva! Don't Go Breaking My Heart Captain America This may look like a pretty good crop, as we only get to A- by number 10 on the list (I've upgraded Drive from my initial review), but I felt like I had to mine the cinematic gold out of this year with my raw and bleeding fingers. That said, I did come up with gold, given that the next ten all turned out to be A- pictures: Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol, Troll Hunter, Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Fincher), Hanna, Whisperer in Darkness, Yellowbrickroad, Michael, The Skin I Live In, Haunters, and Nobody Else But You. The Bs start right at 21st place with The Trip, and don't stop until Hugo scrapes out its B- at 31st place. At the bottom of the pack? Well, let's just say that Green Arrow and the Green Lama are lucky they didn't have a movie come out this year, given the apparent Viridian Curse in effect. What of the Ten Best 2011 Films I Haven't Yet Seen? I'd have to guess something like: Tree of Life, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, The Artist, Of Gods and Men, Rango, The Muppets, Midnight in Paris, Attack the Block, Young Adult, and Martha Marcy May Marlene, but I could be wrong. As always, the films on this list are assembled based on the talent involved (or in spite of the talent involved, as with Woody Allen), but in Hollywood like in mutual funds, previous performance is no guarantee of future return. Any of the top-genre pieces I missed might make it, too: Super 8, Yellow Sea, Juan of the Dead, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. Scores can always really change, but if a Terrence Malick film isn't better than Moneyball, I'll eat my hat or an equivalent mass in popcorn. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, February 4th, 2012
3:14 am	Dun Dun Dun Dundracon Once more I attempt to throw off the weary ravages of Seasonal Affective Despond by fleeing the gray (though weirdly temperate) Midwest for the coveted sunshine of the Bay Area. Hmmm... maybe staying inside a hotel for three days isn't the best way to do this. Oh, well, too late! Because I'm well and truly booked in for DunDracon 2012, in semi-sunny San Ramon! Here, then, is my schedule as I know it: SATURDAY, Feb 18 Alternate Histories for Gaming 11:00 AM in 156 for 1 hour Kenneth Hite, Michael Blum, Bruce Harlick From Nazi zeppelins blowing up the Suez Canal to Roman galleys rowing up the Mississippi, alternate histories give us infinite worlds for gaming. How and when do you make an alternative world plausible, and how and when can you make it fun and compelling? City Building 1:30 PM in 156 for 1 1/2 hours Anders Swenson, Kenneth Hite, Michael Blum The perennial Dundracon favorite seminar about the nuts and bolts of using cities in RPGs returns again. This year, we focus on London. What's New in Indie RPGs 5:00 PM in 156 for 1 hours Jason Walters, Ken Hite, Chris Hanrahan Author and pundit Ken Hite, Endgame's Chris Hanrahan, and Indie Press Revolution's Jason Walters discuss what's new in the world of self-published and micropublished games in 2012. SUNDAY, Feb 19 Keeping Cthulhu Scary 4:00 PM in 156 for 1 hours Kenneth Hite, Ben Monroe, Ted McGavin In a world where Cthulhu appears in South Park and plushies, how can we keep the Mythos as terrifying as it should be? This panel strips off the "cute" exterior and reveals the Great Old One in his true form. Keep the horror central to Cthulhu, and vice versa. Surviving a Call of Cthulhu Campaign 5:00 PM in 156 for 1 hours Ted McGavin,Ben Monroe, Ken Hite So, how do you survive a Call of Cthulhu campaign? It's easier than you might think, if you are properly prepared. Surviving while remaining sane is harder... True to the tradition of Cthulhoid roleplaying, I shall be killed off halfway through this seminar, so that I may help conduct ... War College: Alternate Histories 5:30 PM in Salon C for 1 1/2 hours Dana Lombardy, Christopher Perello, Ken Hite A panel discussion with authors and game designers who look at possible alternate histories and what their impact might have been. Audience participation is encouraged. Hope to see all y'all, or at least all y'all Bay Areans, there! (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
11:28 pm	[RECIPE] Chicago Style Clam Chowder Not everyone is fortunate enough to live on the coasts. Even Chicago, while the Greatest City in the World by any reliable metric, is, in fact, too far from the ocean for fresh clams to appear on its store shelves. So therefore, if any denizen of the mid-continent wishes to even take a stab at replicating the amazingly good tomato-basil-chorizo clam chowder at Hog Island Oyster Bar in San Francisco, he must repair to canned clams and do his meager best to forget the taste of fresh-caught. (Certainly, if you can afford fresh-frozen clams and have a good hookup, feel free to go nuts. I'm sure it's even better if you live on the seacoast and can get actual fresh clams for love or money. This recipe began, however, with a sighting of what looked like some pretty good whole clams in cans at Trader Joe's.) That said, for mid-continental clam chowder, this turned out pretty darn well. The key to this clam chowder is that instead of the Manhattan-style "clams in tomato soup" model, this is "tomatoes in clam soup." CHICAGO STYLE CLAM CHOWDER (makes 3 mains or 6 side soups) 4 slices bacon, diced 1 TB olive oil 3 cloves garlic, sliced 1 medium yellow onion, peeled and diced 1 or 2 stalks celery, diced 1/2 red bell pepper, diced 1 medium carrot, peeled and diced 1/2 TSP salt 1/2 TSP pepper 2 bay leaves 1 1/2 TSP oregano 1/2 TSP paprika 2 Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and diced 2 CUPS clam juice 1/2 CUP dry white wine 1 CUP water 1 (15 OZ) can diced fire-roasted tomatoes 1/2 CUP fresh basil, chopped and divided 2 (6.5 OZ) cans whole clams, chopped 1 (3 OZ) tin smoked baby clams 1/4 CUP parsley, chopped horseradish Fry the diced bacon in a deep saucepan or soup pot over medium heat. Add the oil, and when it heats, saute the garlic for about 30 SECONDS. Add the sofrito (onion-celery-red bell pepper-carrot), the salt, pepper, bay leaves, oregano, and paprika, and cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, for 10 MINUTES. Add the potatoes, clam juice, white wine, and water. If the liquid doesn't totally cover the potatoes, add more water. Increase heat to medium-high and bring the soup to a boil. Partially cover, cook at low boil for 10+ MINUTES until the potatoes are soft enough you can crush them with the back of a wooden spoon. Crush some of those potatoes with the back of a wooden spoon; this releases starch and thickens the soup. Add the tomatoes (with their juice) and half the basil; simmer for 5 MINUTES. Turn off the heat now. Stir in clams (with their liquor, if any) and parsley. Let steep for 5 MINUTES. Serve with the other half of the basil and horseradish (half a spoonful per bowl seems good) to taste. Notes: Many standard recipes for clam chowder use salt pork instead of bacon. I'll bet you could do that here, too. The specific mix of clams was more dictated by what I had on hand, rather than some ideal mixture. That said, it was a pretty ideal mixture. Finally, if your own beloved is not currently on Weight Watchers, you could profitably slice up some Spanish chorizo (maybe three of those little links' worth) and add it to the mix some time about two thirds of the way through the sofrito, I'd wager. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, January 20th, 2012
5:26 pm	The Hell of Gardena: A War Story What's this? Two posts in a week? Crazy, man. It's like 2005 all over again up in this joint. Actually, I was inspired by wordwill's recent post on Gameplaywright to share this story as part of a conversation on "other things you can do with NPCs." To back up: In 1991 or thereabouts, Keith Herber (pbuh) developed perhaps the most brilliant single scenario in the history of single scenarios: "The Raid on Innsmouth." (It's in the supplement Escape From Innsmouth, which is perversely unavailable from Chaosium at press time. You know, like how Henry V keeps going out of print.) The scenario takes place in -- or, rather, as -- the canonical 1928 raid on Innsmouth by the Federal Government. The structure of "Raid" follows five separate simultaneous operations to the FBI/Navy/Coast Guard/Secret Service raid -- the submarine attack on Y'ha-Nthlei, the Treasury assault on the Marsh warehouses, an attack through the old smuggler's tunnels, a frontal strike on the Marsh Mansion and the EOD, and one I can't remember off the top of my head. It's optimized for five Investigators, one of whom gets detailed to each separate operation. That player plays his Investigator, and the other players play the "cannon fodder" NPCs who theoretically command and bring the heat in each operation, taking up new sailors or G-Men as their previous ones die or go mad. The Keeper cross-cuts between the operations in roughly real time, as (of course) things start going pear-shaped. You wind up with each player falling into "command" of a gang of ablative pals while the rest of the table can glory in the Lustmord of madness and noble death that all Call of Cthulhu players seem to harbor in their heart. In short, it's a port of Ars Magica to Call of Cthulhu (although I don't know whether Herber knew AM at the time) with a rotating cast of "magi" and doomed, tommy-gun-toting "grogs." So of course, I stole it. In 1999 or thereabouts, I was running Call of Cthulhu set in present-day Los Angeles. The players had very cooperatively played out about two months of separate investigations, so that their meetup would feel natural and organic -- we were used to rotating spotlight, in other words. They had determined that the Tcho-Tcho were opening a Gate to Carcosa deep in their tunnels underneath an few city blocks in the Tibetan neighborhood of Gardena, California. They knew that they would die in any imaginable frontal assault. So they went to the creepy, over-familiar gun store owner where they had been buying all their gear over the last few months of play, who was convinced that the Investigators were actually White Power revolutionaries preparing for the Day of the Rope. (Hence their constant need for military-grade weapons and ammo.) And they asked him if he had any friends, comrades, true believers in the destiny of the white race, who might be interested in a direct action against immigrant mongrels. They decided, in other words, to recruit some cannon fodder to die in the name of Lovecraft's racism. To this day, I don't remember if I fed the idea to my players, or if they decided on that approach. But I know I seized the opportunity to repurpose "Raid." I explained the general approach of "Raid" -- "Christian, your military background tells you that a multiple assault has a chance of working, but you'll each have to lead one fire team. The rest of you can play pregen NPCs on each assault." I drew 25 or 30 NPCs on the front of some index cards: lots of guys with short haircuts, tattoos, and trucker caps. On the front of the card, under the sketch, I also gave a one-sentence summary of their story: "Served with mercs in Angola" or "Former LAPD, kicked off the force for brutality during the riots" or whatever. On the back of the card, I wrote up stat blocks, and the true version of their story: "Wannabe, never fired a gun in anger." "BATF agent infiltrating white-power groups." "Homicidal maniac waiting to let loose on anyone." That kind of thing. The players could recruit as many of the NPCs as they wanted, and after some brief marksmanship tests and some interviews, they selected (conveniently) a multiple of 5 (or 4, whichever was the number of players) as the final team. I am proud to say that the players unwittingly selected every single "ringer" I had planted in the deck, from the BATF and FBI infiltrators (neither of whom knew about the other one) to the actual Nyarlathotep cultist who worked with the Karotechia in Paraguay. In play, it worked great. Each assault went horribly wrong, and because I could unleash complete monstrousness for an 80% party kill without compunction, the whole adventure was realistically dark and dangerous and weird. The players loved getting their disposable pregen racist bastards killed and eaten, really getting into the claustrophobia and xenophobia of the scenario. At the end, the BATF guy sacrificed his life to destroy the Gate (on the Carcosa side; the remote detonators for the C-4 wouldn't work), and the Investigators had genuinely harrowing experiences full of other people's death and madness. I think two or three of the NPCs even survived with their Sanity intact; I forget if the players killed them anyway. If you get a chance, run "Raid on Innsmouth." If you don't, run it anyway, and just call it something else. (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 17th, 2012
4:09 pm	The Unbourne Identity For those of you who have somehow been occupying yourselves with other pursuits than my game design career, perhaps I should mention that a pre-order edition of my vampire spy thriller RPG Night's Black Agents is available now from Pelgrane Press. More on that below, where the horrid, horrid stench of commercialism belongs. I've been taking some notes in my own pre-press copy (the "Dragonmeet Special Edition") based on comments and play (and some early and flattering reviews) from early orderers, and it's interesting how much the playtest comments and the pre-order comments differ. Playtesters (who, admittedly, were only working from about two-thirds or three-quarters of the text) mostly looked at either big-picture things ("reorder this") or tactical single-session concerns ("this move costs too much"). Pre-orderers seem to be addressing larger game play questions, many of them more properly GUMSHOE questions ("why don't all the mooks just unload their whole Shooting pool in one round") but some specific to elements of my design like the Conspyramid. It may just be a function of the difference between "play this scenario or maybe make one up please" of playtesting and the "try to figure out what you'd run with the game book you just bought" of new-book smell. Speaking of the Conspyramid, Pelgrane is running a Design Your Own Consypramid Contest over in their precincts. (That link includes the Conspyramid text from the rules, which I think is actually quite clever in parts.) Enter and win! Also, I added something I noticed on my umptieth viewing of The Bourne Ultimatum, plus one or two things from Robin's upcoming Esoterrorists 2.0 revision, and I'm a compulsive tweaker of my own text, so the red pen has been busy. On a recent Night's Black Agents-centric episode of The Game's the Thing, the host Ron Blessing asked me how I went about designing the game. As I believe I mentioned on that 'cast, I hit on the notion that thrillers are speeded-up mysteries ("where's the sniper?") fairly early, and then ran across the fairly common (if commonly unfair) idea that a thriller is a mystery in which the reader already knows who did it. That gave me the story skeleton, onto which I put the Conspyramid and Elizabeth Sampat's Push Pyramid from her incredible RPG Blowback, barely disguised as the Vampyramid in my game. The rest was just lots and lots of viewings of the Bourne trilogy, Taken, Ronin, Heat, and lots more spy stuff to find things that the PCs needed to be able to do, and figuring out how to do them in GUMSHOE. (Watching TV shows like Nikita, Burn Notice, and Leverage kind of split the difference: tactical in-session tools for serial storytelling models.) Although I give PK and dr_kromm a shout-out in the "Designer's Notes" section, I should reiterate here how much fun I had poring through all the volumes of GURPS Monster Hunters and GURPS Action, making sure I'd covered everything they covered. It's not all lifts, by the way. I remain quite smugly proud of figuring out all the various rules for the various modes of play -- Burn mode (emotional damage foregrounded), Dust mode (lo-fi gritty spy stories), Mirror mode (treason and betrayal), and Stakes mode (higher purpose). Every day and every way I grow slowly closer to Allen Varney's amazing job on Paranoia. I'm also very happy with my solution to the "how to get the players to build an adversary map" (that pyramid of note cards, photographs, and string you see on every cop-procedural wall from The Wire on down), not least because my own players resisted doing it. Even the stuff I lifted from other games (like the Tactics from Chuck Wendig's amazing job on Hunter: the Vigil, which became Tag-Team Tactical Benefits) I gave a mid-air twist before burnishing it into a GUMSHOE mechanic. Bottom line, I think Night's Black Agents has probably improved my actual nuts-and-bolts game design chops more than any project since the Decipher Star Trek RPG. (CODA was a much tighter design than ICON, in many ways, and I did a lot more auxiliary design work for it.) Also, it gave me an excuse to watch the Bourne trilogy any time I wanted to, or read Len Deighton novels and call it work. What's next? We're kicking around an Armitage Files style campaign book for Night's Black Agents, called The Dracula Dossier. It's going to include the complete, unredacted text of Bram Stoker's roman-a-clef Dracula, annotated by three generations of British Secret Service analysts. The goal is a vampire version of the Varo Edition, using the reader's familiarity with the original novel to provide the jumping-off points that Robin had to dole out with serial Armitage letters. I'll make mytholder do all the heavy lifting, while I re-watch Tinker, Tailor and re-read Declare and call it work. Odious Commercial Content Below! The [REDACTED] edition costs about what the eventual hardcover will cost, and includes that hardcover with your name in the credits (when it comes out), the PDF of that hardcover (likewise), and the current bare-bones PDF of the nigh-complete ruleset (right now). Also, you will get a free adventure by mytholder, so that's nice. These pre-orders will (theoretically) fund the printing of a Smythe-sewn, full-color hardback book -- we're over halfway there, the last I knew -- so if you have more money than patience (as robotnik put it) you lose nothing but the interest on that $45 by popping for the [REDACTED] edition now. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, November 25th, 2011
12:54 pm	Shiny Happy City Just a ping to let the watching world (and mollpeartree) that I am once more ensconced in the Woosterish embrace of Pelgrane Global Headquarters here at stately Spectrum House. Luncheon is pressing (as the good, if hatless, robin_d_laws reminds me) and I must soon get to autographing the Dragonmeet Limited Edition copies of Night's Black Agents to pay for my lunch. London is beautiful, even from American Airlines' cattle-car accomodations. Perhaps even especially from them. More later, post Christmas-sandwiching. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 13th, 2011
9:19 pm	Thirty Years On Top "The first copies of Call of Cthulhu were delivered to our offices amid a three-day storm of rain, lightning, and thunder on Friday, November 13, 1981. Frequent power outages and other strange happenings were numerous." -- "Designer's Notes for Call of Cthulhu" in Different Worlds magazine (Feb 1982) I have said it in every format short of skywriting that something can be said: in print, PDF, blog post, podcast, vidcast, email, drunken conversation, sober seminar, handwriting, and homage. Call of Cthulhu is the greatest roleplaying game ever made. It is not impossible that it, like King Lear, will remain the greatest example of its art form forever, although I'd like to give it a century or two before I rule out the possibility of something exceeding it. Admittedly, it cheats. It uses the single most gameable backdrop in all English-language fantasy fiction: H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. The great gameability of which resides not in its metaphysics or even its aesthetics (both of which are subtler than you think at first, but are superficially enticing and clear enough to reach new readers -- or gamers -- instantly) but in the fact that it ignores issues of character almost completely. Middle-Earth depends rather a lot on the Fellowship; the Hyborian Age is mere delightful pastiche of Victorian archaeology given life only by Conan's rejection of it; Barsoom is an empty canvas without John Carter (as Burroughs proved inadvertently), and the worlds of Star Trek and Star Wars reiterate similar points as their owners continue to desperately milk those drying kine. But since Lovecraft depended very little, comparatively, on character development, his setting leaves such details to the player. By its very nature, in fact, it is independent (at best) of the characters inhabiting it, or even antagonistic to them; this makes for great roleplaying if for very challenging fiction. But what Sandy Petersen did with that promising beginning was nothing short of transformative. He moved the real story inside the character, with the famous Sanity death spiral. He figured out how to take the nascent exploratory engine out of D&D and harness it to solid mystery scenario design, and to gently direct players down that path by nudges (the skills) and seductions (the rulebook prose) alike. Most importantly, of course, he made a game that could bear genuine moral weight, a game (as I have written at length elsewhere) about acting as a moral adult, a game of selfless sacrifice. By playing, you agreed to die tragically that others may live. Almost from the first clatter of percentile dice, everyone playing Sandy's game understood that, because he had explained it to them in the cold equations of HP = CON+SIZ/2 and SAN = (POW*5)-CM% and a Deep One does 1D6 or more damage to both. Matter, meet moral. That is how you create undying stories, or even myth. That is how Sandy Petersen created the greatest roleplaying game ever. And he did it thirty years ago, and it was delivered unto him that night, and unto us and to hundreds of thousands of the faithful thereafter. Iä! Iä! Petersen fhtagn! (28 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 24th, 2011
11:25 pm	Game Design, New-School So mollpeartree and I are visiting my sister's family in New Hampshire on vacation, which has been as lovely as you'd expect. Tonight, my eight-year old nephew asked if I'd play a game with him using his LEGO pirate ships. Since I gave him the aforementioned ships for Christmas (the Black Pearl and the Flying Dutchman from the LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean set), I felt obliged to agree. Also, for the slower students, LEGO PIRATE SHIPS. So we start sorting out the crewmen, and after he breaks out two Yahtzee dice (skeptically: "I don't usually use dice.") we set up. I figure Uncle Ken will have to work out some ground rules, and we'll spend a little time on whether the ACTUALLY FIRING CANNON are part of the game or to be simulated and are we going to play man-scale or ship-scale or if we ... And immediately, he starts explaining the rules to me. Including the die mechanic; each number rolled means something specific, and he just made it up on the fly but completely confidently (and consistently) because he wasn't even planning to use dice. (I presume the original resolution system was the one from Green Army Men, or "he shoots him".) Then he explains about jumps, and resurrections, and limited lives, and switching viewpoint characters ("move your life to that character and it takes a turn, but you can jump for free") and it's like he's downloading every FPS he's ever played right into the game mechanic. (He kicked my uncleish tail at LEGO Star Wars earlier.) Which, remember, he is essentially making up on the spot. The game even had "levels" -- there's the ship combat, which can zoom into individual fights between pirates; then there's the island level, where we race to find the treasure; then there's the concluding swordfight on the island. He argued that the LEGO Keira Knightley figure (who I selected for the final duel on the grounds that she had a LEGO sword) should take more damage from a 6 because she was a girl (I resisted manfully, feminist readers, but I lost the dispute by dint of not being eight), but then squandered his hard-argued advantage by deciding that we'd go to live-action resolution with foam tubes, where having a foot and a half of reach (and knowing what a stop-thrust is) meant I won our 7 passes by 4 to 1 to 2 ("I think we both won that one," he said twice) and thus, won LEGO Pirate Game. In short, it was amazing to see just how much game play, and sense of mechanics, is hard-coded into kids by (I assume) video games now. I kind of want to bottle my nephew and squeeze him out for some intro RPG rules. Not to mention, he hasn't seen any of the movies, but he knew who all the little LEGO characters were somehow. Osmosis, man. It's downright scary when you think about it. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 22nd, 2011
2:17 am	The Long CIFF Goodnight Another Chicago International Film Festival has come and gone, and once more it was a fest with more in the middle than at the ends. But I think the dinosaur was somewhat thicker at the near end than the far end, so that's good. Once more, his_regard was Roland to my Oliver; bigstokes80 swung a mighty bat as our occasional Turpin. And once more, I break it down robin_d_laws style although I, at least, can legitimately say I saw two "Bests" and will in fact say that I saw three. And we saw a whack, a great whack, of films this year; we missed at least two must-sees because of cross-scheduling problems (Juan of the Dead and Yellow Sea), and all the short programs looked uncharacteristically strong. Plus WXRT, the quondam greatest radio station in the free world, sponsored a whole run of late night horror, which despite some uneven offerings is still a great sign that the fest is beginning to notice that not every movie in the world is a touching drama of childhood and loss. The Best Wild Bill (Dexter Fletcher, UK) That said, this Western, set in the East End of London, was a damn-near perfect touching drama of childhood and loss. But since it was structurally a Western, it can also be about innocence, violence, redemption, responsibility, and order. Titular Bill returns to find his two sons living alone in council housing, and the local drug lord (for whom he went away) breathing down everyone's neck. Fletcher ratchets up the tension and the domesticity in equal measure, but always in service to the drama; the climax like all great Westerns (and all great drama back to Sophocles) is simultaneously inevitable and stunning. Fletcher does a little half-step there at the end to mess with Aristotle just a bit, but the last shot is an absolutely perfect capper, referencing the last shot of The Long Good Friday in a way that shows utter (and well-rewarded) trust in lead actor Charlie Creed-Miles. If he hadn't worked, neither would the film. Don’t Go Breaking My Heart (Johnnie To, Hong Kong) Robin got to see To's new crime movie, A Loss of Principle, set around the financial crisis. We got to see his romantic comedy, set around the financial crisis. To my very great annoyance, this was a letter-perfect Hollywood style romantic comedy. (That the inevitable Hollywood remake will ruin utterly, because it depends on shtick, coincidence, and yawningly vast symbolic freight that you have to be Johnnie To to have a chance in hell of pulling off.) I was so looking forward to rolling my eyes and saying "Well, you know, Toronto got the crime movie" but instead I have to grin and say "Damn right chicks dig the drunken architect." Not at all the same street cred, but a seamless film nonetheless. The Whisperer In Darkness (Sean Branney, USA) You may suspect that this movie gets something of a genre-and-adaptation bump from me, and you would be right. But it's a pretty terrific film in its own right, a black and white adaptation of Lovecraft's 1931 classic tale of Fortean horror. Said adaptation is not, actually, shot in the style of a 1931 Universal horror film, but as an affectionate pastiche thereof. (Think of Branney as ... no, Derleth is too mean ... Robert Bloch to James Whale or George Waggner's Lovecraft.) The film extends past the novella and makes some interesting choices in doing so; the Mi-Go on screen work really well until the last big effects shot, which still doesn't wreck the retrospective goodness. Branney (and co-writer Andrew Leman) expand the film in directions Lovecraft's story points at but doesn't travel down; I especially appreciated the re-casting of the story's first third or so from Lovecraft's typical Terrifying Tale Of A Man Reading Things into a radio debate between Albert Wilmarth and a jovial Charles Fort. Recommended Michael (Markus Schleinzer, Austria) A genuinely harrowing film about an insurance adjuster who keeps a young boy in his basement for, well, you can guess. And Schleinzer makes you guess, and as horror film directors have known for decades, what you guess is more genuinely horrifying than anything he shows you, which is just creepy beyond words. The actors playing the pedophile and his victim are note-perfect, capturing both their interaction and their own private hells with virtually no dialogue or even overt emotional display. Restraint, indeed. Ew. Haunters (Min-suk Kim, South Korea) This lo-fi supervillain film reminded me of Unbreakable, as if filmed by Hideo Nakata from a Korean novelization of Frighteners. Our villain can control minds; our hero is somehow immune to our villain. That's the setup, and it escalates the stakes both dramatically and cinematically throughout, moving (after an intro set piece) from grotty workplace dramedy to full-scale K-horror-action. One bit, set in an apartment complex, needs to be filed away for anyone who makes mind-control movies to homage from now on. Nobody Else But You (Gerald Hustache-Mathieu, France) Although the mystery element of this frothy cocoa of a film is tongue-in-cheekily by-the-numbers, the real joy comes from the production design, cinematography, score, and incidental dialogue and throw-away elements. In essence, it's a parody of James Ellroy's obsession with the Black Dahlia case; a French crime novelist determines to investigate the death of a local celebrity in "the coldest town in France" and finds himself investigating a (sometimes literally) shot-by-shot recreation-cum-miniaturization of Marilyn Monroe's career. A Lonely Place To Die (Julian Gibley, UK) The program book mentioned The Wicker Man, which put me on quite the wrong track for about the first half of this harrowing ordeal thriller. A multinational crew of climbers (Scots, English, American) discover a Croatian girl locked in a hole in the remotest Highlands, and their act of instinctive decency leads to, well, a harrowing ordeal. It begins to spin a bit out of track when it gets down out of the mountains -- the stuff with ropes and falling and such is just primal -- but it doesn't topple over even after a lengthy bit of exposition very late in the film. Smuggler (Katsuhito Ishii, Japan) This movie gets its bump up pretty much on style points; it's adapted from a manga by a director with visual style in spades, and no strong direction he wants to point the material. Ishii seems to think that if you throw enough awesome elements with their own mythic momentum into a movie -- badass (and batshit crazy) super-assassins, eye-rolling villains straight outta chambara, a cute moll with a heart of ice, a wacky old guy, a tough pro who lives by a code of his own, a scumbag on the make -- they'll carry it over the top and over the finish line. Despite a weirdly inert protagonist, I can't say he was wrong to think so. Good King of Devil's Island (Marius Holst, Norway/France) The poor programmers thought they were getting socialism, but they got a Christ-allegory instead. (He's even a fisherman!) Not a great Christ-allegory, but a pretty good prison break film, made better by the original setting (a cripplingly horrid reform school on a godforsaken island off Norway) and Stellan Skarsgard (as the warden, er, headmaster). Chico & Rita (Tono Errando, Javier Mariscal, and Fernando Trueba; Spain) Knowing virtually nothing about Afro-Cuban jazz, I have no idea if my response to the film is overly generous or overly vacuous. It was pretty, the songs were catchy, the story (woven in and out of Afro-Cuban jazz history from 1949 to 1961 with a coda in the now) robust if not clever. I did think it odd that the story basically ends with Castro taking power, as though the result went without saying. I mean, it does to me, but I didn't know it did to Spanish filmmakers. Kaidan Horror Classics (Masayuki Ochiai, Shinya Taukamoto, Lee Sang-il, Hirokazu Kore-Eda; Japan) Essentially the Japanese TV network NHK's version of Showtime's Masters of Horror, a brief series of four short films based on four kaidan (supernatural stories) by four acclaimed directors. Had I fully parsed that going in, I would have slightly more accurately pegged this (naturally) uneven fixup. "The Arm" was fetishistically trippy, but amateurish both in concept and execution; "The Days After" is a quietly terrifying story of parents haunted by their (or everyone's?) dead child; "The Nose" was a loud historical piece about a cursed monk, which I liked quite well at the time but think now was a little bit thumpy; "The Whistler" was a case of unreliable narration and perhaps-imagined supernaturalism, which was all well and good, but didn't really chill. Play (Ruben Östlund, Sweden) A nuanced but clearly anti-immigration film set in the parts of Gothenburg I didn't see at the con, and for good reason. (As gnosticpi quipped afterward, "I hope the Gothenburg Chamber of Commerce didn't pay too much for this one.") As an examination of white liberal responses to race, it was kind of obvious; as a narrative of a hustle, it went on a little bit too long. As a use of documentary techniques in the service of fiction (albeit based, they say, on actual police reports), though, it's pretty top-notch. Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey) Commence your mockery -- this naturalist drama won some kind of big prize at Cannes, and all the great and the good love it love it love it. I am, admittedly, just a hard sell for naturalism in any narrative art, believing that constructing a narrative should have some point other than camouflage. This film does not adequately make the opposite case to me. The tale of the boring part of a police procedural -- looking for the body of a murder victim after the perp has confessed, and the first half of the autopsy -- is essentially about truth and constructed narrative and memory; there's some thematic looping but bottom line, this movie does not earn its Sergio Leone reference. All that said, it is what it is, and it's quite a good preparation of a dish I wouldn't have ordered if I'd read the menu more carefully. On the Edge (Leila Kilani, Morocco/Germany) Had the sound, lighting, or cinematography of this film been less awful, I suspect it might have gone up a tick. (Perhaps the digital transfer is to blame.) But the low-level crime film about a self-deluding girl on the make in Tangier almost managed to keep its energy and interest up despite a few flagging patches. I think I might have missed a key reveal at the end, and I can't honestly tell you if it's my fault or Kilani's. The Destiny of Lesser Animals (Deron Albright, Ghana/USA) The first three acts of this movie are the weird, propulsive noir I thought I was going to see -- a Ghanaian cop fakes the theft of his gun to excuse his actual search for a stolen passport that will get him out of the hellhole that is Ghana, to the paradise that is America. But wait! It's actually a search for himself, or for the true meaning of Ghana, or something. Act Four is a fine conclusion, but to a different film. Nice work with a series of savior narratives in the film -- from Nkrumah to Christ to our protagonist. This final note of hope makes it hard for me to really hate on the switcheroo. Rabies (Aharon Keshales, Israel) This splatter-chaser film is not nearly as good as its high concept (which I shan't spoil), thanks to cartoonish characters and one too many unmerited coincidences. It almost pulls it off despite that, but I recommend going in convincing yourself that the "wild fox refuge" where a mad torture-killer is running amok amidst attractive strangers is actually a Zone Of Makes You Crazy. Target (Alexander Zeldovich, Russia) Once more, the Russians manage to take a decent idea and bollix it up with weird. Or maybe they took decent weird and bollixed it up with idea. Hard to say; this is one part Anna Karenina (albeit a version in which Anna suffers no ostracism, which is akin to a version of Jane Eyre in which Jane is an archduchess), one part Stalker (in which The Zone gives you eternal youth and turns you into a Tolstoy protagonist), and one part weird bollocks (goggles that let you perceive good and evil, a giant superhighway across Russia, a swear-to-god twelve-minute shaggy dog joke about a rare element condensed from volcanic gases). Okay Love Is In The Air (Simon Staho, Denmark) Or, as we put it, "Love in the Time of Poor Impulse Control." Staho hits just the right note of adolescent silliness to do a Shakespearean romantic comedy, but sorting out four star-crossed lovers doesn't work mathematically if only one of them is gay. The entire budget looked like it was about 20 grand, all of which went for fur coats and Jolly Rancher-colored gels to put over the lights. (Which, if the film stock had been better, would have totally killed. Love the Jolly Rancher gels.) The songs weren't good enough to justify the silliness on display (which cripples a musical), and the teens unappealing enough to keep the romance from frothing up properly. But good effort, Denmark. The Giants (Bouli Lanners, Belgium) Further to our ongoing theme of child endangerment, this Belgian Huck Finn puts two preteen brothers and a Huck (a local lug attached to a scary older-brother drug dealer/enforcer) alone and homeless in the bucolic Belgian countryside. And then it ends with them floating down a river. Note to Europe, and David Milch: Act Four is in dramas for a reason. Snowtown (Justin Kurzel, Australia) That this movie is a docudrama based on Australia's real-life worst serial killer, John Bunting, does not relieve it of the obligation to present characters that one cares remotely about, and ideally that are not completely inert dramatically. "Weak boy stays weak" is not one of those killer story arcs. I also found its presentation of lower-class South Australian life ca. 1997 condescending and othering, but the director apparently grew up there, so maybe he meant it in a good way or something. The only professional actor in the film is the serial killer, but he's presented as even more of a cipher than the standard B-picture thrill-killer, so the intended realistic horror is muted into a kind of clinical revulsion. I should note, however, that bigstokes80 found the protagonist's journey compelling and the killer nuanced, so perhaps it's just me. Not Good The Silver Cliff (Karim Ainouz, Brazil) Not enough sense-of-place to move this poky blob of a film up into Okay, much less Good, and there was a decent chunk of sense-of-place in it; I always knew where I was in Rio as the movie went along, which is harder than you'd think. But man, oh man, did I not care who was there with me or what they were doing. I get that a woman suddenly deserted by her seemingly loving husband is not going to react rationally. But I don't think it's crazy to hope that she will react interestingly; instead she meets a pleasant enough drifter and his young daughter, and they kick around and sing a song in the airport and then it's morning. Spoiler! Day Is Done (Thomas Imbach, Switzerland) This, conversely, is all our fault. The writeup said we were getting footage shot from one point, mostly of the back of the Zurich train station; voice tracks entirely made up of messages left on the director's answering machine. Compelling, no? But we live in hope, and our hopes were cruelly dashed early. At least Silver Cliff only spent 82 minutes going nowhere (this thing was 111 minutes and 15 years long), and all of Rio is much prettier than the back of the Zurich train station despite some very nice intermittent sky-cloud-smokestack-sunlight composition. Also, by his own answering machine's testimony, Thomas Imbach is a jerk. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 17th, 2011
3:11 pm	Convention Announcements! Contain Your Joy. Right after this word from my sponsor. Namely, me. Do, if you are eligible to vote in the Golden Geek Awards but haven't, please vote for Bookhounds of London for Best RPG Supplement and for Best RPG Art & Presentation, especially that last, because that will make Beth Lewis and Jerome Huguenin deservedly happy. Voting closes on Halloween. Oh, right, conventions. I'm a last-minute Special Guest addition to Metatopia, a game design con in Morristown, NJ on November 4-6. Lots of other great designers, too. If I can get a little time to myself beforehand, maybe I can make suitable for playtest the game engine from Casey Jones is Dead. Also, I am once more returning to Dragonmeet in London on November 26. Although details are cloudy at this time, if past performance is any guide, I shall be working the Pelgrane stand in the a.m. and barking like a trained seal through a spate of seminars in the afternoon. I cannot, at this time, assure you there will be a special con edition pre-release of Night's Black Agents at the show, but hope like vampires dies slowly. Here's hoping to see all my East Coast Sprawl and UK Smoke homies at one or both! (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, October 7th, 2011
4:33 pm	A CIFF Before Dying Herewith, my (and his_regard's) schedule as we know it for this year's Chicago International Film Festival. Consider this an open invite to show up and watch with us. All shows are at the River East 21 AMC downtown. Friday, October 7 5:45 p.m. King of Devil's Island (Marius Holst, Norway/France) Mutiny at a reform school in 1915 put down by gunfire. Take that, Dead Poet's Society. 8:50 p.m. The Giants (Bouli Lanners, Belgium) A Belgian Huck Finn; two brothers left alone to have adventures in the countryside -- with a drug dealer as the King and Duke combined. 11:15 p.m. Rabies (Aharon Keshales, Israel) Israel's first slasher/splatter/what's that in the woods chasing us flick. Saturday, October 8 2:40 p.m. Michael (Markus Schleinzer, Austria) A robin_d_laws recommendation! "Unassuming insurance man's affinity for routine detail assists him as he keeps a young boy imprisoned in his basement. Wickedly matter-of-fact take on the banality of evil can safely be called the most restrained horror film in movie history." 10:40 p.m. A Lonely Place To Die (Julian Gibley, UK) Highland-set ordeal thriller looks like it might be The Wicker Man updated to the Neil Marshall era. Cross fingers! Or don't, if that means you'll be killed by Druids. Sunday, October 9 12:30 p.m. On the Edge (Leila Kilani, Morocco/Germany) Girls stuck on the wrong side of the tracks in Tangier make a play for the "Free Zone" in what might be a sense-of-place crime thriller, or some of that. 8:30 p.m. Kaidan Horror Classics (Masayuki Ochiai, Shinya Taukamoto, Lee Sang-ii, Hirokazu Kore-Eda; Japan) Anthology of short chillers based on classic Japanese horror stories. Monday, October 10 3:40 p.m. Day Is Done (Thomas Imbach, Switzerland) Fifteen years of camera footage of one spot in Zurich meshes with fifteen years of answering machine messages to build a portrait of a place and time. Tuesday, October 11 3:00 p.m. The Jewel (Andrea Molaioli, Italy) Corporate intrigue thriller, with a full day's serving of dairy. 6:00 p.m. Don’t Go Breaking My Heart (Johnnie To, Hong Kong) Robin got the new crime movie; we get the romantic comedy. I will allow it. 10:15 p.m. The Whisperer In Darkness (Sean Branney, USA) Period adaptation of Lovecraft's great Fortean horror tale, shot as if made by Universal in the year the novella came out (1931). Attendance at this showing is mandatory. It will be in the test. Wednesday, October 12 6:10 p.m. Wild Bill (Dexter Fletcher, UK) A gangster Western set in the East End of London. It's like they know me or something. 8:30 p.m. Smuggler (Katsuhito Ishii, Japan) A man in debt to the Yakuza is forced to smuggle dead bodies. Of course nothing goes wrong whatsoever. Thursday, October 13 6:10 p.m. Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey) It's amazing how easy it is to get me to go see your movie if you just put a Sergio Leone reference in the title. This one begins as a police procedural and spirals into a drama of perception, truth, and reality. Friday, October 14 3:15 p.m. Chico & Rita (Tono Errando, Javier Mariscal, and Fernando Trueba; Spain) Animated feature set in Havana against a theme of Afro-Cuban jazz. 5:40 p.m. Nobody Else But You (Gerald Hustache-Mathieu, France) Cozy mystery set in a strange small Swiss town; Maigret meets Twin Peaks? 8:00 p.m. The Silver Cliff (Karim Ainouz, Brazil) Sense-of-place film for Rio; the city reflects the changing mood of the protagonist trying to find out why her husband left her. 10:00 p.m. Haunters (Min-suk Kim, South Korea) If the words "South Korean mind-control thief adventure" mean nothing to you, then by all means skip this. Because you're dead and dead people can't enjoy movies. Saturday, October 15 12:10 p.m. The Destiny of Lesser Animals (Deron Albright, Ghana/USA) Ghanaian noir? The hunt for a stolen forged passport takes Ghanaian policeman through the seamy side of Accra. 9:40 p.m. Snowtown (Justin Kurzel, Australia) My father figure is a serial killer! Psychological thriller ensues, as well it might. Sunday, October 16 3:00 p.m. Play (Ruben Östlund, Sweden) Another robin_d_laws recommendation! "Pre-teen trio gets dragged across Gothenburg by bullying, older immigrant kids. Coolly upsetting crime docudrama takes a despairing look at Swedish race relations." Not precisely how I wanted to see Gothenburg again, but I'll take what I can get. Tuesday, October 18 6:00 p.m. Love Is In The Air (Simon Staho, Denmark) If Douglas Sirk made a musical version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, only in Denmark, this might be it. 8:50 p.m. Target (Alexander Zeldovich, Russia) Every year we give a Russian film a shot. This is the year of the Russian film about the fountain of youth, aphrodisiacs, alignment goggles, and secret military compounds. Yes, it's Anna Karenina 2020. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
6:15 am	Tell Me About Your Playtest I just now finished going through the playtest responses for Night's Black Agents, and tweaking the manuscript accordingly. There's still a few thousand words to write, but I can see the end from here. In this business, like (I imagine) every other business, those of us who do it day in and day out blow off steam by venting to each other about our customers, clients, and patrons. And sure, there are people in every playtest I've ever been a part of whose suggestions are quite vent-worthy. ("There's too much detail, and also add more description.") It's so easy to get irked at entitlement and cluelessness, especially when they show up arm in arm. But this, man. This. This was almost entirely the opposite of that. I had playtest groups that sent me drawings of their characters fighting vampires and standing around looking cool. One group made sure to Photoshop passports onto all their character sheets. Plenty of groups sent home-brewed GM screens and character sheet designs. Lots of "we had so much fun" and "it was awesome" and "we had no real idea about how to be spies but we had a blast" and compliments that even my legendary immodesty balks at publicizing. I think my favorite was the group that wrote up the script for the opening credits of the spy thriller they played, complete with stunt-casting their PCs, and descriptions of montages and quick-cutting and blood spatters. But overwhelmingly, everyone wanted to have fun, and probably nine tenths of them wanted to let me know about their fun. I am so very lucky to get to do this for a living. I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of genuinely unpleasant interactions I've ever had with fans and readers; I can't even begin to estimate the number of warm, human, happy responses I've gotten from gamers over the years. Unless you're one of the people who do this stuff along with me (which I suppose the odds are you very well might be) you have no idea how great it is to know that your day's work is all about making other people's free time more fun, more creative, more involved with each other. And even if you are one of the people who do this stuff along with me, sometimes it takes a solid week of reading people getting excited about the fun you gave them to remember how great it is. Thanks, all of you, for that. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 5th, 2011
11:03 pm	28 Minutes Later I've got 28 minutes of free computer time on the machine in the business office here at the Sofitel San Francisco Bay, sumptuous home of Celesticon, where I've been convening it up for the last four days. The convention wound up with almost 500 attendees, which is pretty good for a first time gone wide convention. I think the seminars went pretty well; recordings of most of them should be up on the Celesticon website in the next few weeks. I got some gaming in, and chatted with some fans new and familiar; I even got to see a couple of the old ConQuest hands that I had anticipated would be at Pacificon this weekend instead. So that was grand, grand, grand. I even did a soupcon of business. It was, as always, great to hang out with James Ernest, Doug Sun, Dana Lombardy, macklinr, Carl Rigney, Chris Hanrahan, and luagha. Thanks to them, and to Dennis Detwiller, I dined sumptuously while here. Perbacco (short rib stracotto with herbed beef-marrow crust), a Malaysian place in the nearby strip mall (much of James' pineapple shrimp fried rice), Kabul Afghan Cuisine (an excellent lamb pillau with carrots and raisins, and a magnificent side of kadu -- roasted spiced pumpkin topped with yogurt and meat sauce), and New Mana Asian Cuisine in San Mateo, a great Filipino restaurant (chicken grilled on a lemongrass skewer, topped with a sweet-hot sauce reduction; stir-fried string beans and squash in spiced coconut milk), and my old standby Fuki Sushi (spider roll made with fresh delicious crab, and a salmon-belly sashimi in garlic butter topped with caviar, plus blue shrimp and an Alaska roll). And need it be said? In-and-Out, the bar none best fast-food hamburgers in America, ergo, the universe. I bought Here I Stand and Soldier Emperor and won a copy of Field Commander: Alexander; I playtested James Ernest's awesome map game Mapple (refer to it by name today!) and talked Trail of Cthulhu with folks, and signed a book or two. Can't wait to return to the Bay Area in February for DunDraCon -- mark your calendars now! (Comment on this)
Monday, August 22nd, 2011
3:23 pm	Celesticon Ho! In just under two weeks, I shall be Labor-Day-ing it at Celesticon, in scenic Redwood City, California, easily the redwoodiest of the Bay Area's cities. Joining me as fellow guests at this energetic show will be such talents as Frank "That's Mister GDW to You, Punk" Chadwick, Dana "War College Personified" Lombardy, Ryan "F*cking" Macklin, and James "John" Ernest. And yes, there will be seminars. Oh, yes: Friday, September 2 30 Years of Call of Cthulhu Friday at 6:30 PM in Salon 7 Presenters: Charlie Krank, Kenneth Hite This year Call of Cthulhu celebrates its 30th anniversary. Join Charlie Krank (president of Chaosium) and Kenneth Hite (Trail of Cthulhu, Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity, Call of Cthulhu d20) for a discussion of three decades of sanity-challenging roleplaying. Saturday, September 3 Create a Compelling Game World Saturday at 1:00 PM in Salon 7 Presenters: Kenneth Hite, Ryan Macklin, Steve Savage Attention Game Masters! How do you breathe life into a published setting or take your homebrew campaign to the next level? Join Kenneth Hite (Star Trek, Day After Ragnarok, Cthulhu), Ryan Macklin (Leverage, Dresden Files) and Steven Savage (Seventh Sanctum, Fan to Pro) as they share GM secrets, techniques and shortcuts to mastering the art of world building. Adapting a Licensed Property for an RPG Saturday at 2:30 PM in Salon 7 Presenter: Kenneth Hite, Ryan Macklin What does it take to adapt someone else’s successful story into a successful RPG? Kenneth Hite and Ryan Macklin will share their experience with the Leverage TV show, Star Trek and the Dresden Files books. Sunday, September 4 Keeping Cthulhu Scary! Sunday at 7:00 PM in Salon 7 Presenter: Kenneth Hite In a world where Cthulhu appears in South Park and plushies, how can we keep the Mythos as terrifying as it should be? This panel strips off the "cute" exterior and reveals the Great Old One in his true form. Monday, September 5 Alternate Histories for Gaming Monday at 11:00 AM in Salon 7 Presenters: Dana Lombardy, Frank Chadwick, Kenneth Hite From Nazi zeppelins blowing up the Suez Canal to Roman galleys rowing up the Mississippi, alternate histories give us infinite worlds for gaming. How and when do you make an alternative world plausible, and how and when can you make it fun and compelling? Bring your own favorite "what ifs" for Q&A. Hope to see you all there! (6 Comments |Comment on this)