Just The Caffeine Talking

A Matter of Principle

Waldo's momentum is 34,974 kilogram-meters per second.

Now you'll never find him.

Unleash The Wild Hunt!

No, not the one with mythical hounds and/or Celtic deities crossing the sky on dark nights. The one with University of Chicago students taking a break from being obsessive overachievers in order to overachieve obsessively. Here's this year's list. Can you get all these things before noon Sunday?

 

And if you haven't got the time or energy for that, you could always read my book.

Be Careful What You Wish For

It's an old lesson, but one we must re-learn every now and then.

Recently I began to suffer from "gamemaster withdrawal" after half a year or so without running any roleplaying campaigns. I was bursting with ideas for games, so finally I sent out a call for interested players, and drew up a "prospectus" of games I'd like to run. The idea was that the players could vote on which campaign appealed to them.

I kept it simple. The prospectus had six campaigns on it:

• "Unknown Stars" — a classic Traveller game of mercantile exploration in a newly-reopened subsector,
• "Beyond Tomorrow" — a D20-based "Gamma World"-style campaign of space voyagers returning to a devastated far-future Earth,
• "Against All Flags" — a more-or-less straight historical pirate game set in 1714,
• "SHIELD Stories" — a game of doughty SHIELD agents in a world of superheroes (essentially my version of the Agents of SHIELD TV show),
• "Lost Decade" — a Call of Cthulhu campaign about characters who have all just recovered from amnesia and must find out what they were doing over the past ten years, and
• "A Billion Worlds" — I kind of just threw this one in on a whim, a campaign using a fictional far-future hard SF setting I've been developing for a fiction project.

Most of them were pretty low-effort. The simplest would be the pirate game, since my own knowledge of the world in 1714 is good enough to let them just sail around and bump into people.

The SHIELD campaign was almost as easy, especially since I intended to let my players occasionally take the roles of the mysterious "Steering Committee" setting objectives and priorities for the agency's operations. Their decisions would determine what kind of missions Col. Fury would hand out to their agent characters. All I needed was access to a couple of Marvel Comics fan wiki sites, and forty years of reading comic books.

The Traveller campaign and "Beyond Tomorrow" needed a little more preparation, but they were confined to fairly limited areas so I could generate some worlds or places for the party to explore, and expand only as needed.

The Call of Cthulhu game needed a bit more preparation, but I had not only a lot of existing support material for the game, but also H.P. Lovecraft's entire corpus to steal from.

So, no matter what game my players picked, I could run it without a lot of effort. Easy-peasy.

Guess which one came out first in the vote? That's right — my unlikely dark horse candidate, "A Billion Worlds." For that one I have to come up with dozens of intelligent species and subspecies inhabiting a billion artificial habitats, asteroids, terraformed moons, and planets, with eight thousand years of history to invent.

Now, fortunately, I have to do most of that anyway for the new novel I'm working on. So the roleplaying game and the science fiction project can borrow from each other.

Maybe this is for the best, really. Low-effort campaigns don't test my powers at all. The Billion Worlds won't be easy, but I doubt I'll get bored with it.

Boskone 2019

This Friday and Saturday I'll be appearing at the venerable Boskone science fiction convention, at the swanky Westin Waterfront hotel in Boston. Here's my schedule if you want to join in.

Friday, February 15, 4:00 p.m.: The Most Alien Aliens

A panel discussion about creating aliens and what our depictions of them say about ourselves. With me, Stephen Kelner, Jeffrey Carver, Laurence Brothers, and Karl Schroeder.

Friday, February 15, 7:00 p.m.: Game Editing

A discussion of how editing works in different kinds of games, and why it's important. Featuring me, Carlos Hernandez, Melanie Meadors, and M.C. DeMarco.

Saturday, February 16, 10:00 a.m.: Classic Dungeons & Dragons

Join me for a very old-school Basic D&D game. Characters will be provided. This session is only one hour, so be prepared to think fast!

Saturday, February 16, noon: Reading

I'll be reading from Arkad's World and taking any questions my listeners might have.

Saturday, February 16, 4:00 p.m.: Signing

I'll be at the signing table with Dan Kimmel, Bracken MacLeod, and Karl Schroeder. I'll sign whatever you bring me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pop Culture: Hold On to Your Hats!

As cultures develop a large and relatively affluent middle class, they develop what we call "pop culture." The upper class have "high culture" more or less by definition, and the lower class don't have the leisure time or spare wealth to create culture at all.

Tom Wolfe chronicled this in post-WWII America, as people got rich enough to indulge subcultures like custom cars, surfing, and stock car racing. It's a damned shame Mr. Wolfe never got around to examining some other products of that boom: science fiction, comics, and (a bit later) roleplaying games.

It happened elsewhere, too. As Japan became the world's second-biggest economy, Japanese pop culture items like anime, manga, J-pop girl groups, and giant monsters became global phenomena rivaling America's. The same happened for Korea in the 1990s.

Well, in the past twenty years China has acquired a middle class of 340 million people. Three hundred million in Africa are now urban and middle class. A quarter of a billion in India. So the number of pop-culture "consumers" — and the number of pop-culture creators — has more than tripled worldwide.

This means that American pop culture and European pop culture and Japanese pop culture will soon be joined by equally huge and influential Chinese, Indian, and African creations. Not just new comic books and movies, but new genres. The as-yet-uncreated equivalents of roleplaying games or custom vans.

And not a moment too soon. As anyone paying attention to Hollywood will attest, American media are in a creative slump right now. There are a heck of a lot of remakes, reboots, sequels, and "reimaginings" going on. Not to mention an increasingly frenetic mining of older "properties" for material. A 69-page picture book by Dr. Seuss has spawned two feature-length films, when it originally required some creative padding by Chuck Jones just to make it into a half-hour cartoon.

I can't predict when, but I'm willing to bet that in the next few years an Indian "Bollywood" or Nigerian "Nollywood" film will be a global breakout hit, as big as Star Wars or Harry Potter. Some Latin American or Chinese children's entertainment will be picked up as cheap filler content by global media companies and turn into a huge fad to rival Pokemon.  

For a writer, this is an . . . interesting time. On one hand, translation rights on books now bring in almost as much as the English-language royalties. The downside is that I'm already competing with Cixin Liu for readers in both America and China, and I'm certain he will be followed by a bigger cohort of new talent. And that's just within written science fiction. I'm also competing with other media.

I think one reason science fiction magazines have been having a rocky time in the past few decades is partly due to the sheer amount and variety of other options. Even if you only like science fiction, you still can choose among Japanese anime, Japanese and European comics, Anglophone novels, American films, and European computer games to satisfy your scientifictional craving. That landscape is only going to expand.

It's going to be quite a ride. Let's see what the new Global Nerds can do.

Mr. President, We May Be Looking . . .

. . . at a wargames GAP! Apparently the Pentagon needs to find replacements for the generation of beardy wargame grognards who are starting to fail their final saving rolls. Here's an article about the problem from War on the Rocks.  

Dragon Awards!

Congratulations to this year's Dragon Award winners:

Best Science Fiction Novel: Artemis by Andy Weir.

Best Fantasy Novel: Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson.

Best Young Adult/Middle Grade Novel: Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi.

Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel: A Call to Vengeance by David Weber, Timothy Zahn, and Thomas Pope.

Best Alternate History Novel: Uncharted by Kevin J. Anderson and Sarah A. Hoyt.

Best Media Tie-In Novel: Leia: Princess of Alderaan by Claudia Gray.

Best Horror Novel: Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King and Owen King.

Best Comic Book: Mighty Thor by Jason Aaron and James Harren, Marvel Comics.

Best Graphic Novel: Brandon Sanderson’s White Sand Volume 1 by Brandon Sanderson, Rik Hoskin, and Julius M. Gopez, Dynamite Entertainment.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series: Game of Thrones, HBO.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie: Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy PC/Console Game: Middle-earth: Shadow of War by Monolith Productions.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Mobile Game: Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery by Jam City.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Board Game: Red Dragon Inn 6: Villains by Slugfest Games.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Miniatures/Collectible Card/Role-Playing Game: Magic: The Gathering Unstable by Wizards of the Coast.

Island of Lost Games: A Footprint in the Sand!

Exciting news about one of the first titles I covered in the "Island of Lost Games" series — John Hill, one of the original Droids gaming group, ran across my post and sent this reply:

I enjoyed your recent post about the game "Droids", though the circumstances that led me to discover it leave much to be desired.  The gentleman that is listed in the "Edited by..." credit of the Droid book, Derek Stanovsky, passed away unexpectedly on Nov. 1, at the age of 54.  I was trying to find leads to Neil Moore to inform him of Derek's passing.  Sadly, I, and several others that had some involvement with Droids failed to find any leads to Mr. Moore.

I find it delightful that there is a conversation and interest in this game after all these years.  And to answer the question at the end of your article, I have indeed played the game.  Sadly, Droids was developed at a time that I was very busy with my engineering degree, so I didn't get to play it extensively, but I definitely recall playing a few sessions with Neil as Game Master.

I'm attaching a photo you may find amusing.  Originally, we we're going to use photos of droid models instead of the illustrations.  I took apart several of my various tank and spaceship models and built some Droids.  Everyone loved the model, but the pictures left a lot to be desired.  If only we'd had the image manipulation stuff available now, I'm sure we could have made it work.

Thanks again for the kind words about the game.

Here's the photo of Mr. Hill's Droid model.

It's wonderful to hear from someone with a connection to the game. If anyone knows where to find Neil Moore, drop me a line and I'll forward the information to Mr. Hill.

 

For more stories about relics of the past and adventures in the future, buy my ebooks: Outlaws and Aliens, and Monster Island Tales!

Random Encounters: Steampunk Paris

I'm starting a new feature of the 'blog this week: your Weekly Random Encounters. Each week I'm going to post a new random encounter table for a particular setting. Use these for roleplaying games, story prompts, or as a kind of I Ching to predict your week. I'm also appending the Situation generator to each entry.

Our first Random Encounter Table is for Steampunk Paris, where the powers of science have transformed the city into a Vernean fantasy — or nightmare.

ENCOUNTERS IN STEAMPUNK PARIS

(roll 1d10 if the party remain in one place, 1d20 if they are moving through the city)

1. Roll Twice and Combine.
2. Plot-advancing encounter: Something or someone connected with the reason the party have come to Paris in the first place.
3. Enthusiastic Students: Claude and Mimi Ardan, students at the Sorbonne Institut des Études Extraordinaires. They are naive and helpful young mad scientists in training.
4. Gendarmes: 1d6 Paris policemen, equipped with flame-resistant cloaks and electric truncheons. They are either on regular patrol, looking for the adventurers, or responding to a call about a disturbance.
5. Giant Sewer Rats: 2d6 rats as big as Jack Russell terriers with near-human intelligence. They are stealing food, but might pick up anything small and shiny.
6. Luddite: Henri Lenoir, anti-technology terrorist armed with handmade black-powder bombs and a sharp rapier.
7. Murderous Ape: A brain-augmented Orang-outang, driven mad by surgery and armed with a straight razor. It gets around the city by rooftops and trees.
8. Robbery: 2d6 bandits on steam unicycles pull off a daring heist. They are armed with gas and smoke grenades.
9. Runaway Automaton: A mechanical man whose regulation machinery has broken. It is hostile to everyone.
10. Weather: A heavy downpour lasting 1d4 hours.
11. Abandoned Factory: This giant automated furniture plant shut down after a financial scandal. The building holds rats, pigeons, dangerous machinery, and a few street urchins.
12. Aristocratic Troublemakers: 2d6 young dandies armed with sword-canes and pocket derringers, drunk on absinthe and pineal extract, looking for amusement and/or trouble.
13. Cycle Race: There are 1d100 speeding bicyclists and a dense crowd of cheering onlookers between the player-characters and their destination.
14. Fille de Joie: Alluring young woman who is fronting for a gang of 1d8 organ-harvesters. They want a good healthy spleen.
15. Fire!: A building on fire. There are people trapped in the upper stories and the flames threaten to spread to neighboring structures. The Fire Brigade may not arrive in time!
16. Low Dive: A basement tavern catering to crooks and science-spawned mutants. Upper-class types, scientists, or detectives get a very unfriendly reception.
17. Mimes!: They appear to be street performers doing the classic "invisible box" routine. Actually they really have been trapped inside forcefield bubbles for days and are getting desperate.
18. Street Market: The next couple of blocks are crowded with vendors selling produce, old clothes, cheese, old books, live poultry . . . and whatever the adventurers really need right now.
19. Workers' Demonstration: 2d100 burly laborers protesting the Government. They are angry and it wouldn't take much to turn this into a riot.
20. Tracks/aftermath: Reroll to see what traces they come across.

SITUATIONS

Roll 1d6 on the table below, then roll on the table above to determine who A and B are.

1. A desires B.
2. A wants to capture B.
3. A wants to harm or kill B.
4. A wants to go somewhere. B may wish to prevent this.
5. A wants to solve a mystery. B doesn't want the truth to be known.
6. A wants something. B may have it, or want to get it.

 

For more perilous encounters, check out my new ebook Monster Island Tales!  

 

 

After-Action Report: Basic Dungeons & Dragons at JiffyCon

(Blogging has been interrupted lately because I bought a new computer and had to spend far more time than I liked getting it set up. That's done, so with luck I can return to my two-or-three-times-a-week schedule.)

A couple of weeks ago, on October 28, I attended JiffyCon, a mini game convention held at Smith College's Seelye Hall (not to be confused with its counterpart, Unseelye Hall, which only appears at midnight during the dark of the moon). The Northampton game store Modern Myths sponsored and managed the con this year — which was how I heard about it in the first place, since I run a weekly game session in the shop.

Since 2017 marks the 40th anniversary of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, which brought roleplaying to the masses, I decided to take the opportunity to give modern gamers a taste of history. So I signed up to run a session of Basic D&D, using my ancient blue-box rulebook by John Eric Holmes (the box has long since disintegrated).

I created a classic old-school dungeon: "Into the Catacombs." The adventurers would be exploring the cellars and crypts to Normont Abbey, which mysteriously burned down in a single night fifty years ago, leaving no survivors. The PCs know that an old man in the village nearby mentioned a vast treasure still hidden under the abbey — and that the monks had brought about their own destruction by dabbling in the Black Arts.

The dungeon had four main sections: a cellar inhabited by a band of Goblin bandits, another cellar controlled by a pack of giant rats, the actual catacombs infested by zombies (the accursed undead monks), and a hidden demonic temple where the monks called up That Which They Could Not Put Down — and where the big fat treasure awaits. The complex also boasted a half-flooded room infested with giant frogs, some giant spiders, and that classic old-school monster: a Gelatinous Cube. I figured all that would keep us busy for a three-hour play session.

My dungeon did diverge from the Gygaxian paradigm in a couple of respects. First of all, it had almost no traps. That was simply because the concept (the abandoned cellars and catacombs of an abbey) just didn't seem like the kind of place you'd find concealed pits and deadfalls. Second, the dungeon wasn't very magical. It held monsters, including accursed walking dead monks, but I didn't put in any illusions or enchanted pools that reverse your alignment or whatever. Finally, I didn't include any puzzles or mysteries. That was mostly because I knew this was a one-shot with limited time. When you've only got three hours you don't want to spend two hours and forty-five minutes trying to figure out what the anagram over the door is supposed to mean.

I also created a whole lot of pre-generated characters for the party, because low-level characters in old-style D&D games die like teenagers in a horror movie. Following my self-imposed rule of doing everything old-school, I rolled the characters up according to the rules in the Basic Set: roll 3d6 for each attribute, in order, no substitutions. I did follow the "prime requisite" rule allowing fighting-men to trade unwanted Intelligence and Wisdom points for additional Strength, and magic-users to do the reverse to boost their Intelligence.

And so at 10:00 a.m. on a bright Fall morning, six intrepid players selected their characters for the venture Into the Catacombs. The party consisted of:

A Human Cleric (Strength 8, Wisdom 14, Charisma 8, 3 hit points, Armor Class 2, wearing plate mail and shield, armed with a Mace, a Wooden Cross, and a vial of Holy Water; Basic D&D clerics don't get any spells until 2nd Level).

Human Fighting-Man #1 (Strength 17, Charisma 11, 7 hit points, Armor Class 2, wearing plate mail and shield, equipped with a sword, short bow, and 50 feet of rope).

Human Thief #1 (Strength 11, Dexterity 15, 3 hit points, Armor Class 7, with leather armor, a short bow, and a dagger).

A Human Magic-User (Intelligence 11, Charisma 3, 4 hit points, Armor Class 9, armed with a dagger; 1 spell for the day from a list rolled randomly).

The Absurdly Powerful Elf Fighting-Man/Magic-User (Strength 16, Intelligence 12, Charisma 13, 3 hit points, Armor Class 2, wearing plate mail and shield, armed with a sword, can cast 1 spell from a list of six spells known).

Human Thief #2 (Strength 13, Dexterity 16, 2 hit points, Armor Class 7, equipped with leather armor, a short bow, a dagger, and 50 feet of rope).

It's instructive to compare this crew to a "modern" adventuring party. Since Dexterity doesn't give any advantage to defense in Basic D&D, everyone plates up in the heaviest armor they can afford. Much depends on the random roll for starting wealth; this particular bunch rolled well. Their hit points are miniscule — even a modern magic-user typically starts with at least 6 hit points. Here we've got a Fighting-Man with just 3.

The team began at sunset amid the burned-out ruins of the abbey, now covered by vines and shrubs. Two of the party heard faint noises from underground, and the group discovered a stone slab which seemed to be a hidden entrance. Rather than go charging in, they elected to toss a flask of oil down and set it alight, then close the slab again. This tactic failed to kill off any of the goblins down below, but the smoke did let the party spot another potential entrance, which they investigated: a crude chimney barely wide enough for an unarmored person to shinny down.

It also alerted the goblins, and a team of them snuck out through the flooded crypt, trying to take the interlopers from behind. The party spotted them and our first combat erupted! The players learned that in Basic D&D everyone uses the same table to hit, and all weapons do 1d6 damage. (This led one player to rely exclusively on shield-bashing attacks thereafter.) The skirmish with four goblins armed with clubs and slings left the PCs victorious, with a couple of minor injuries.

They decided to split the party, because that always leads to good results. One bunch went into the flooded crypt while the second team lifted the slab and tried to fool the goblins with a dummy improvised from goblin armor and brushwood. That didn't work against creatures with night vision, and the players learned that the goblins had at least one crossbow down there.

The crypt team fought off a killer frog and found the back entrance to the goblin lair. The magic-user explored the kitchen and the room used by the goblins to pickle giant frogs (for use in pies) while the Fighting-Man and thief pushed ahead toward the sounds of battle.

The sounds of battle were coming from the other half of the party. The Absurdly Powerful Elf took matters into his own hands and went down the stairs holding the unconvincing dummy in front of him, trying to intimidate the goblins. It didn't work, but his comrades hurried down to join the fight. One goblin managed to kill the Absurdly Powerful Elf, and another took down the second Thief. The party slew all the goblins but two: one bolted away up the stairs, the other surrendered, promising to show the humans where his leader kept the loot and the pickled frog pies.

The team also rescued two captives, replacing the casualties:

Halfling Thief (Strength 9, Dexterity 16, 2 hit points. Armor Class 7, with leather armor and a short bow).

Human Fighting-Man #2 (Strength 13, Dexterity 13, 7 hit points, Armor Class 7, equipped with leather armor and a short bow).

They gathered up the goblins' loot: 2,000 silver pieces, jewelry worth 200 gold, and some expensive rugs. They left the rugs to retrieve later, but took the coins.

Then, back through the flooded crypt (no frogs this time) to examine a pair of heavy doors in there. Those led into a mortuary chapel, which fortunately wasn't flooded, but unfortunately was home to several giant spiders. The heroes tried to chase the spiders away using torches — it worked on two of them, which retreated to the upper corners of the room, but the remaining spider wasn't scared, and instead dropped down onto the cleric. A brief but spirited battle resulted, with the cleric dead along with all three of the spiders.

It was getting close to the end of our time slot, and when the thief opened the door at the back of the chapel to reveal a long tunnel lined with burial niches — and a distant shambling humanoid shape — they decided to seal it off and retire with their loot. Game over.

Everyone seemed to enjoy the session (including me). Of course, I've been running games since, well, 1977, so I could probably manage an entertaining session using baseball cards for characters and rock-paper-scissors as the combat system. The players were amused by the game's quirks, and I was fascinated by the primordial DNA of certain game features. If I were to run it again I'd set it up as a two-parter, with a second session to let them finish exploring the catacombs.

What have you played lately?

 

For more adventures out of my fertile brain, buy my new ebook Monster Island Tales!