Just The Caffeine Talking

Some Notes on Alignment

Get your tires rotated every six months.

Oh, wait: I mean Dungeons & Dragons alignments.

We all know the famous three-by-three grid, right? You've got Lawful Good in the upper left, with Lawful Neutral below it and Lawful Evil at the bottom. The middle column has Neutral Good at the top, True Neutral in the Paul Lynde square, and Neutral Evil below. On the right we have Chaotic Good, Chaotic Neutral, and (boo, hiss!) Chaotic Evil.

Social media has used this as the structure for hundreds of memes, slotting in superheroes, Lord of the Rings characters, breakfast foods, how you deploy your toilet paper roll, and far too many others.

And since the first publication of the D&D Basic Set in 1977, roleplayers have been arguing about what those axes actually mean. Part of the problem is that American society has gone through immense changes during that same period. When (practicing Jehovah's Witness) Gary Gygax put the alignment grid in the game, the definitions were pretty simple. Good and Evil were God vs. Satan, Law and Chaos were following the rules of society vs. rebelling against them. Simple enough?

Well, no. An increasingly secularized society meant that game designers and gamemasters had to slot Good vs. Evil into a non-religious, essentially subjective framework. Meanwhile the rebellious "counterculture" attitudes of many gamers meant that Law and Chaos also became subjective. Trouble is, as various authors have said over the years, "everyone is the hero of his own story." Which means if Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos are matters of personal judgement, everyone is Good and probably everyone is Lawful as well.

And just to complicate things, in the D&D world, the alignments are also cosmic factions — rival pantheons in the Outer Planes struggling for influence in the material world. So in addition to personal ethics, alignment can simply be what team you support. A bad person who worships a Good deity could be Evil (personal ethics) or Good (allegiance).

Here's my attempt to define the terms in non-religious but objective terms. I doubt this is the last word on the subject, but it is what I intend to use for my own games in the future. This is not an attempt to actually define Good and Evil, just to put them in usuable terms for use in games.

In general, Good — across all cultures — implies altruism. Helping others, treating them fairly, keeping the peace in your social group. There are plenty of complicated edge cases, hypotheticals involving non-human psychology and biology, but the core is pretty robust. Good means being, well, good to others.

Evil, the converse, is fundamentally selfish. The Evil individual (and again, we're talking about roleplaying game characters here) puts his personal interest and desires above the welfare of others. An evil individual takes things if he wants them, harms people if they don't do what he wants, and very much does not do unto others as he would have them do unto him.

Good and Evil are actually the simple ones, even though moral philosophers have been wrestling with how to define them for at least three thousand years. The troublesome D&D alignments are Law and Chaos. Does being Lawful mean you follow the law even when it's unjust? Does Chaos require you to oppose any authority, even if it's beneficial? If you follow a personal code of honor is that Lawful or Chaotic?

I've thought about this for a while and I think I've found a useful way to distinguish between Law and Chaos: time horizon. Law implies long-term thinking, Chaos is all about immediate gratification. Law plans, Chaos acts. Stalin, working through the machinery of the Soviet state, was Lawful Evil. Some asshole who gets pissed off because somebody said something to him at a party and shoots up the room is Chaotic Evil.

So let's go through the nine alignments, looking at how people in each box might behave, and how a society built on that principle might work.

Lawful Good: Long time preference, high altruism. A Lawful Good individual is pro-social, defers gratification, and sacrifices personal benefit for society. That's a pretty good fit for the most Lawful Good character class, the Paladin. A Lawful Good society expects everyone to work together, make sacrifices for the group, and help one another — a common Utopian ideal, but presumably without any coercion to make it happen.

Neutral Good: Moderate time preference, high altruism. Basically a more impulsive version of Good than Lawful Good. Neutral Good individuals would try to strike a balance between helping people immediately and helping in the long term. A Neutral Good society is less tolerant of short-term problems even though that might consume resources which could be more efficiently employed for long-term goals.

Chaotic Good: Short time preference, high altruism. Essentially nice people with Twitter. Chaotic Good individuals are always concerned about the Current Thing. Alleviating present harms is more important than any hypothetical long-term benefits. A Chaotic Good society would be inefficient but well-intentioned: groups and individuals trying to solve a variety of ills, often working at cross-purposes. Nice, but . . . chaotic.

Lawful Neutral: Long time preference, moderate altruism. Willing to tolerate harm or injustice in pursuit of a long-term benefit. A Lawful Neutral character would be rational, pragmatic, but a bit heartless. A Lawful Neutral society would probably be pretty harsh. The Legalist societies of ancient China are a good real-world example of a Lawful Neutral system.

True Neutral: This one is surprisingly tricky, and has sparked no end of discussion among gamers. Moderate altruism, medium time preference. There's two ways to look at this — either the Buddhist ideal of detachment from the world, or just a fairly incoherent muddle of conflicting drives. The latter is certainly common enough among people in the real world. The Druid character class is supposed to be True Neutral, but to be honest, that never struck me as particularly sensible. Historical Druids in ancient Celtic societies were pretty solidly Lawful Good, or maybe Lawful Neutral since ancient societies could be awfully harsh at times. The nature-worshipping Lorax/hippie Druid of D&D seems a lot more Chaotic Good. A True Neutral society isn't hard to imagine: a culture which tries to balance personal selfishness, altruism, freedom, and order. Sounds like most modern Western nation-states to me.

Chaotic Neutral: Low time preference, moderate altruism. A Chaotic Neutral person can balance personal desires against helping others, but has poor impulse control. This is the classic "issues with authority figures" personality — not actually desiring harm to people, but very unwilling to accept direction from anyone else. A Chaotic Neutral society, ironically, might be more stable than a Chaotic Good one, since while there would be more people trying to take advantage of others for their own benefit, there would be less charging about trying to solve the crisis of the week.

Lawful Evil: Low altruism, high time preference. A Lawful Evil character can control his impulses and make sacrifices for long-term goals, but those goals are entirely selfish. This is the classic Evil Overlord type character, and thus the most challenging kind of villain. He's not going to screw up with some outburst of temper or momentary whim. He's also willing to work within organizations and social rules to get what he wants. A Lawful Evil society would be highly rational and organized, but would favor the interests of the powerful at the expense of everyone else. A cynic might identify all societies as Lawful Evil, but the best historical examples I can think of would be oligarchies like Republican Rome, Carthage, and possibly Russia pre-2022. They're run by bastards, but the bastards aren't stupid.

Neutral Evil: Low altruism, moderate time preference. Sometimes in roleplaying games this is defined as "pure Evil" as it manages to include both long-term and short-term villainy. A Neutral Evil character doesn't have the patience for the Lawful Evil's cunning plots, but that actually makes him more dangerous to be around — the chance of irrational harm is scarier than a careful plotter, even though it may be a bit self-destructive. Neutral Evil societies would be similar to Lawful Evil ones, just less organized. Think of various kleptocratic oligarchies around the world, or Renaissance city-states whose rulers might go to war out of personal pique.

Chaotic Evil: Low altruism, short time preference. Selfish, impulsive, and sociopathic. The Chaotic Evil individual is likely to burn out pretty fast, as he's likely to piss off someone more powerful, possibly a whole lot of someones. If there were people devoted to Chaos as a philosophy they might wind up here, but that seems kind of self-refuting. A Chaotic Evil society . . . isn't. Basically it turns into a war of all against all. If one person or faction can take over, then they've established a Neutral Evil regime, even if the boss is personally Chaotic.

Any questions? Let the nerd-wrestling commence!

The Subsurface Agency Wants YOU!

Geoff Manaugh is an interesting writer — his book A Burglar's Guide to the City is something everyone should read — and he has a fascinating blog called BLDGBLOG. The most recent post (as of this writing) is about some ambitious projects to do large-scale surveys of the subsurface environment using ground-penetrating radar, sonar, and other techniques. Read it here.

This set off my writer/game designer's "spider sense" like a fire alarm. This is a roleplaying campaign or a series of technothrillers just ready to be written! From here on I will discuss it in terms of a game campaign, but most of the same ideas and concepts could be turned into fiction or film.

The obvious campaign frame is to have your heroes as scientists and specialists working for the International Subsurface Exploration Agency. They go to exotic places around the world and find out what's underground. There are several "lenses" one can apply to this, ranging from least to most fantastic.

Action Thriller: While archaeologists are looking for sites of historical interest, so they can go through them in painstaking detail, there are a lot of other people who hear "buried" and immediately think ". . . treasure." Put your ISEA researchers in some lawless region, then send in a gang of looters and you've got a modern-day Raiders of the Lost Ark. The looters can be crooks, corrupt officials, mercenaries, or whoever. There's also the danger of people who just don't like anyone poking around under the ground in their neighborhood. They could be religious fanatics, drug growers or terrorists who don't want their operations exposed, governments who don't want their operations exposed, or people who have buried something they don't want dug up (toxic waste, bodies, etc.).

Caper Story: Or maybe the "heroes" are the bad guys — freelancers who are looking for loot and have to evade or distract those pesky ISEA eggheads (and the cops) long enough to disable the giant boulder traps and get the gold. They also have to cope with all the perils and adversaries the legit archaeologists have to worry about (see above).

Paranormal/Science Fiction: Maybe there's something really weird buried in an out-of-the-way corner of the world. Ancient alien space probes, remnants of lost civilizations with strange powers unknown to moder science, dinosaurs in suspended animation, caves holding weird cultures . . .  This is the "Saturday Afternoon Monster Theater" campaign. The ISEA might be part of a larger secret investigation into weird stuff — and when there's one clandestine conspiracy there's likely to be others, all trying to be first to dig up the latest uncanny find.

Horror: The heroes' investigations keep turning up buried things which are scary and dangerous and really shouldn't be dug up at all. Vampires, Elder Gods, ghouls, grumpy mummies, and cultists who want to keep the world from finding out until the stars are right. Both this campaign and the Paranormal one above might cast the ISEA as archaeological "men in black" who not only have to deal with the weirdness, but also keep it under wraps. Either way, it's a great frame for a modern-day dungeon crawl with monsters, traps, villains, and treasure. Just don't disturb the context!

Island of Lost Games: Fading Suns

It's been a while since we visited the Island of Lost Games, but there are still a few old and obscure titles on my shelf to explore. Today's game is 1996's Fading Suns, by Bill Bridges and Andrew Greenberg. It's probably the most well-known and successful of the Island's titles, but it never did manage to break out to popularity, even among hard-core gamers. Even at its peak in the late 1990s, I expect you could walk up to any random attendee at GenCon and ask if they knew anything about Fading Suns, with a pretty good chance that the answer would be "no."

The game was an attempt to build what we would now call a "media franchise" spanning computer games, tabletop roleplaying games, and tabletop wargames. I can find only one tie-in novel listed on Amazon, and I've never heard of any comics or graphic novels, which is a little surprising.

So: what is Fading Suns? A slightly snarky elevator pitch description might be "Nickelodeon's Warhammer 40,000." It had a lot of the same elements of 40K — a decadent quasi-theocratic interstellar empire, people using technology they don't really understand anymore, xenophobic humans alternately oppressing and being oppressed by aliens, and a generally apocalyptic feel — but it lacked the punk/metal tone, nihilism, and over-the-top weirdness of the British game.

In fact, Fading Suns was surprisingly optimistic. The empire is stagnant, the stars are going out — but the rulebook explicitly states that the player-characters can reverse this decline by being heroes. The universe is not doomed, the actions of individuals do matter, and humanity is worth saving.

The original designers started out working for White Wolf, and the influence of the World of Darkness games is strong. The world of Fading Suns has Nobles, Merchants, Priests, and Aliens. Each of those types can belong to one of several factions. The combination of class and faction provides certain advantages or powers, which are tied to the faction's role in the world.

So if you're a Noble, you can be one of the Atreides-like House Hawkwood, the Harkonnen-like House Decados, the heavily religious House Li Halan, and so on. Priests can be part of the Orthodox priesthood, the militant order Brother Battle, the mystical Eskatonic Order, or the flamethrower-wielding inquisitors of Temple Avesti. Merchants may be space-pilot Charioteers, cyborged-up Engineers, slave-dealing Musters, and others. Either you find this style of character creation which is innately tied to the setting fascinating and useful, or you find it constraining and frustrating.

The art and production values for Fading Suns were top-notch, the design was solid, it was well-promoted and had a decent string of support products. But somehow it never took off. There are two reasons for this, I think. The first was entirely outside the control of Holistic Design, the  publishers: the release of Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition in 2000, which basically vacuumed up all the attention and money in the hobby for several years. With Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring ruling the multiplexes, everybody wanted to do heroic fantasy adventure instead of science fiction.

The second reason was built into the game itself, and was a problem shared by a lot of other games before and since: it wasn't clear what the characters were supposed to do in a game of Fading Suns. There were plenty of possibilities — intrigue among the nobles, trade, hunting heretics, etc. In fact, I think there were simply too many possibilities. In D&D you fight monsters and find treasure. In Traveller you're either a merchant-adventurer or a mercenary. In Call of Cthulhu you investigate Lovecraftian stuff. The default adventure is clear to all.

Fading Suns's greatest strength — its unique and well-developed setting, with tightly-connected game mechanics — was also its curse. Most people simply couldn't easily fit themselves into a quasi-medieval space empire setting. And the ones who could were probably already playing Rogue Trader. David Lynch's Dune film came out before most potential Fading Suns customers were out of kindergarten, so there wasn't a good fictional model in front of everyone.

This is a huge problem in roleplaying games. Everybody says they want innovative settings, but they're lying. What are the most popular game settings? The generic fantasy of D&D, the generic SF of Traveller, the generic horror of the World of Darkness, the media juggernauts Star Wars and Star Trek, and the nerd-culture favorite of the Cthulhu Mythos. Quirky, idiosyncratic worlds like Fading Suns don't draw in as many players.

I kind of like quirky, idiosyncratic worlds. I used my own "Billion Worlds" setting for a campaign, but the amount of background information I had to provide (and invent on the fly) was daunting — both to me and to my players. It's a lot easier to say "you're on Tatooine" than to say "you're in the space habitat Summanus in the shadow of Jupiter, run by a paranoid supermind with a giant laser."

The rise of online gaming should solve this problem. Players looking for weird and unique campaign settings should be able to find each other and play via Roll20 or whatever. That was always the promise of the wired world. Unfortunately, in practice the reverse seems to be true: online games seem to cater to the most well-known settings, simply because it's really hard to find those player-needles who might appreciate someting unconventional in the giant haystack of the Internet.

I only ever played Fading Suns once or twice, but I did borrow some of the setting elements for other games, as I always do. It was a good game with noble aspirations, which ran aground on the realities of the market. It deserved better.

Notes on Lovecraft's Great Race

The "Great Race" — often known as the "Great Race of Yith" or "Yithians" (but more on that later) — are the villains (?) in H.P. Lovecraft's last major story, "The Shadow Out of Time." Written in 1934 and published the year before Lovecraft's death, the story is the narrative of one Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, a tenured professor of Political Economy at Miskatonic University. The course of scholarship at that institution never runs smoothly, and in Dr. Peaslee's case his life and career are rudely interrupted on the morning of May 14, 1908, when an alien personality takes over his body in mid-lecture.

Once it figures out how to use a human form, the alien mind (still using Peaslee's identity, of course) goes on a course of intense occult and archaeological research — destroying Peaslee's marriage and family life in the process. "Peaslee" reads all the usual Lovecraftian books, sometimes making margin notes in unreadable glyphs. He travels the world, going to the Himalayas, the "unknown deserts" of Arabia, the Arctic, and the caves of western Virginia.

After five years of this, "Peaslee" returns home, builds a weird machine in his study, and — after a late-night visit from a "lean, dark, curiously foreign-looking man" — reverts to his old personality and even picks up the lecture right where he left off.

He mends ties with his youngest son, gets his position at Miskatonic back (the power of tenure!), and tries to rebuild his life. But poor Peaslee keeps having weird dreams and disturbing fragments of memory. In 1915 he resigns again and starts trying to figure out what happened to him. Through sheer dogged scholarship across a variety of disciplines, guided by his dreams, Peaslee reconstructs the story. (If you haven't read the story, the next section will ruin a lot of the suspense.)

During those five years, Peaslee was time-napped back to the Permian or Triassic Era while an alien mind belonging to a species called the Great Race was in charge of his body.

Who and what are the Great Race?

Back in the Triassic era, they were giant cone-shaped beings with boneless, pincer-tipped arms and a single three-eyed head. They had an advanced technological civilization and battled even more monstrous creatures living on Earth at the time. But they're not really from around here.

Oh, the bodies are — though how those ten-foot mollusc-like things fit into the history of life on Earth is pretty hard to figure out. (See speculation below.) But the Great Race aren't the cone-things, not really. Their minds came from a "transgalactic" world called Yith, now a "black, aeons-dead orb." The Great Race camped out in the bodies of the cone-things for a few aeons, then fled en masse into the far future to escape the resurgence of a monstrous menace they thought they had sealed up for good. Their next host species will be the "hardy coleopterous race immediately following mankind," and after that . . . who knows?

There's much more to the story, but this is the necessary background for what I really want to think about: The Great Race.

Yith

In Lovecraft fan and gaming lore, the Great Race are often called the "Yithians," because they come from Yith. But . . . how true is that? Certainly they came to Earth from Yith. But was Yith their original home? Or just another way station on their mind-hopping journey through Time?

If we assume suitable hosts for the Great Race are pretty scarce, so they have to search in both time and space for new ones, then the gap between leaving one world and taking over another (see below for how that would work) is on the order of 100 million years.

How long they stay on a given world is likely more variable. They had to flee the Triassic era because of the deadly "Flying Polyps" which came to Earth from space, got imprisoned, and finally escaped. Presumably not every world gets invaded like that — although it's worth noting that in Lovecraft's timeline, Earth has been invaded from Outside at least four times since the Precambrian era, and there's no reason to think there won't be more in the future.

The Great Race's tenure on Earth was something less than 100 million years, if we assume they arrived during the Permian and fled just at the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event. That's a good lower bound. As to upper limits, well, no planet lasts forever, and stars get brighter as they age. Earth has been habitable for about three billion years, and has a billion or two years left before the Sun cooks it. But the Great Race need suitable hosts, and complex organisms didn't really evolve until about half a billion years ago. So let's say two billion years is about the maximum interval (it's probably less than that, since I doubt the Great Race would want to take over a dying world).

So we assume the Great Race has to change planets every billion years or so. The oldest stars are more than 12 billion years old, and Earthlike planets might have started forming about a billion years later (and it's entirely possible the Great Race are not wedded to Earthlike worlds). Tack on another three billion years for intelligence to arise, and the Great Race could have started out eight billion years ago. Yith could have been the seventh in a series of temporary homeworlds.

They had to jump forward from the Triassic sooner than they expected, but the "hardy coleopterous species" after humanity could well survive until Earth itself starts to get too hot for life. And after that . . . who knows? There's nothing to stop the Great Race from jumping from world to world, species to species, until the Universe gets too cold and dark for intelligent life.

Even that might not be the end. The Great Race, after all, have conquered Time. Maybe after they've gone through the whole duration of the Universe, they can jump back in time to some species near the beginning, and go through it all over again.

The Triassic Cone Thingies

And what about those rugose cone beings the Great Race took over back in the Permian era? What the hell were they? Intelligent molluscs? Some experiment of the antarctic Old Ones that got out of hand?

Obviously they were intelligent beings, though we have no way of knowing how much of their technological civilization was their own, and how much was the work of the Great Race. They might have been philosophical hunter-gatherers, or tentacled Bronze Age-style philosophers.

There is another possibility which explains a lot of things: maybe the cone-shaped beings were themselves alien invaders. Consider: they really don't resemble any lineage of living things on Earth. They're really big creatures, which means it would be hard to miss fossilized specimens in Permian rock. And how the ruthless super-intellects of the Old Ones would put up with some conical upstarts is hard to imagine. But if the cone-beings dropped out of the sky, with their own super-science and sorcery, then that would explain a lot. They just had the bad luck to get taken over by time-jumping minds from Yith not long after they arrived.

In fact, it occurs to me that the dreadful flying polyp monsters may have had a grudge against the cone-beings, and pursued them to Earth. The Great Race never knew it, but those monsters weren't interested in them, they were trying to destroy the poor saps whose minds were cast back a hundred million years to die on Yith. 

The Great Race Invasion

So what would it be like when the Great Race invasion happens? Do they all make the jump at once, so millions (billions?) of people just fall down and struggle around trying to learn how their bodies work?

That seems like a dangerous way to do it. From what we see when Peaslee is taken over, the victims need care and support while they adjust. This suggests that the Great Race would trickle in a few at a time, using their incredible intellects, advanced science, knowledge of secrets (gleaned from reconnaissance trips to times before and after the target date), and what Lovecraft describes as a "power to influence the thoughts and acts of others" which not-Peaslee displayed.

Instead of just research and exploration like Peaslee, these invaders would work themselves into positions of influence, setting up support networks for new arrivals. Ordinary victims of the target species might not even notice at first — a few cases of amnesia, but that new charitable foundation is ready to help the afflicted ones, so it's fine.

Then, as the Great Race becomes more numerous and influential, they would begin to transform society to fit their own preferences. Government would become "a kind of fascistic socialism" like what they had back in the Triassic, while technology would suddenly start to advance very rapidly. At a certain point, when all the Great Race have made the transition, the new arrivals would make war on the remaining members of their victim species. Enslaved or exterminated, those unfortunates would watch their world become alien and unfamiliar, perhaps never understanding why.

Reproduction

So . . . how do the Great Race reproduce?

After all, their bodies are stolen. If one of the Great Race, inhabiting a cone-thing body, reproduces using the process of asexual spawning via spores described by Peaslee, that juvenile won't be one of the Great Race, it will be a cone-thing, mentally. Sure, it will grow up in a civilization of the Great Race, but will it have their superhuman intelligence? Their mysterious powers?

There are two possibilities. The nicer one is that the Great Race is based on culture and knowledge rather than lineage, so that a cone-thing raised by the Great Race becomes one of them, and can go off to possess the hardy coleopterans with all its friends when the time comes.

To me, that seems a little too humane. I would expect something grimmer: physical reproduction among the Great Race is only practiced to replace the aging bodies of older individuals. Rather than raise their offspring, they simply replace them, taking younger bodies. The dying body inhabited by the mind of a frightened infant is presumably destroyed. It just seems appropriate to me that the Great Race would do the same thing on an individual level that they do as a species.

This in turn inspires an interesting thought: if you've also read Lovecraft's short story "The Thing on the Doorstep" you know that the sinister Waite family apparently do something similar, and have been doing it for a very long time. Is "Asenath" really a rogue member of the Great Race? Or did one of her distant ancestors learn the trick of mind-swapping from a Triassic time voyager? Are they allied with the mysterious cult which serves the Great Race on contemporary Earth? Or are they enemies?

Those are my own random thoughts about one of Lovecraft's most fascinating creations. If you want to know more about the Great Race, the obvious place to start is with Lovecraft's story, which can be read online. There's also a good two-part podcast about the story and the Great Race by The Good Friends of Jackson Elias.

Chatbots and Gamemasters

The author of one of my favorite roleplaying game blogs — he uses the handle "Noisms" and the blog is called Monsters & Manuals — recently tried an interesting experiment to see how well ChatGPT could run a solo roleplaying session using his own published game setting "Yoon-Suin." Short answer: not well. 

It's worth reading his post to see how the chatbot failed.

One problem was that its scenario seemed too generic, but that could be the result of asking it to use a somewhat obscure and quirky game setting. It might have done a better job using something with abundant on-line documentation like the Forgotten Realms or Golarion. (And, to be cranky, both of those settings are pretty generic anyway, so who would notice?)

The second problem was that the GM-bot simply assented to whatever the player decided to do — while simultaneously doing its best to "railroad" the player into a specific course of action. I was very amused by this, because this sounds exactly like the style of "cooperative storytelling" gamemastering which exists at one vertex of the Game-Narrative-Simulation triangle. Amused, because the flaws that ChatGPT displays are exactly the things some gamers find unsatisfying about that style of roleplaying: no meaningful challenges, and you're stuck in a plot you can't escape.

"Artificial Intelligence" (a term which gets overused even more egregiously than "force field") has always been unsatisfying at running games. In online fantasy combat games the AI-controlled NPCs are notorious for only being able to draw from a limited menu of canned responses. ChatGPT simply expands that menu to the entire online world, but ultimately it's still just spitting back something vaguely appropriate based on keywords.

In early roleplaying games the GM was often called the Referee or the Judge, a holdover from tabletop wargames, but it's worth remembering that all gamemasters still have that job when running a game. Judging requires judgement, and that's something which ChatGPT just doesn't have.

So for now, at least, gamemasters are safe.

 

The Big Idea: Writing For Games vs. Writing Fiction

I wrote a guest post for John Scalzi's Whatever blog, discussing my work writing roleplaying games and how that affected my fiction. You can find it here. For visual interest, check out the cover of Weird War I!

 

My WorldCon Schedule

In two and a half weeks I'll be in Chicago for ChiCon 8, the 80th World Science Fiction Convention. I offered to participate in programming events, and they're really making me sing for my supper this time.

Thursday, September 1

(all times are CDT)

2:30 P.M.: Writing and Story Development for Tabletop Games. This is a game design panel, obviously, focusing on fitting story to the game system and vice versa.

4:00 P.M.: Virtual Reading. I'll be reading from my forthcoming novel The Scarab Mission via video, so anyone in the world can watch.

5:30 P.M.: Science: The Core of Science Fiction's Sense of Wonder. This panel grapples with the central issue of why and how you can have a whole literary genre based on stories about science.

7:00 P.M.: Stroll With the Stars. Come for a walk with me and some other writers around downtown Chicago. I'll point out some of my favorite buildings and discuss how Chicago influenced my fiction.

Friday, September 2

10:00 A.M.: Really Big Things. A panel on megastructures. I've used some big ones in my fiction, but how big can structures really get?

1:00 P.M.: Table Talk. What used to be called a Kaffeklatsch or a Literary Beer, but now with masks on. I won't tattle if anyone cheats.

4:00 P.M.: March of Time. A virtual panel about the ways SF gets overtaken by real-world discoveries, and how to avoid it.

Saturday, September 3

11:30 A.M.: Re-Engineering the Solar System. A virtual panel discussing how humans — or our successors, whatever they may be — may rebuild the Solar System. 

2:30 P.M.: Tropes as Tools. Tropes aren't the same as cliches, nor are they something one must necessarily avoid. This panel will talk about how to use tropes intelligently to make better fiction.

4:00 P.M.: Autographing. I'll be signing books, bookplates, magazines, or anything my pen can make a mark on.

Sunday, September 4

11:30 A.M.: Science in Science Fiction: The Guesswork of 1946. The panel will look at how writers in 1946 envisioned the future, and try to understand why they made the assumptions and guesses they did. 

2:30 P.M.: The Science and Fiction of Droids. A combination science and literary panel about the long history of robots and AI in science fiction, and how everybody gets it wrong including me.

Whew! During the few moments I can snatch when I won't be doing convention programming, I plan to look up friends, relations and familiar sights in Chicago; satisfy my cravings for deep-dish pizza, proper hot dogs, fried chicken, and other Windy City delights; and hang out in the con suite or the hotel bar to see all the people I've missed for the past three years.

See you all in Chicago!

 

 

 

Boskone is GO!

After the sad cancellation of this year's Arisia convention, I'm very pleased and excited to announce that Boskone 59 is going ahead as planned this coming weekend, at the Westin hotel in Boston's seaport district! See the Web page here for membership information.

I'll be there in person, and here's my schedule:

Friday, February 18

6:00 p.m.: Very Far Future SF — a panel discussion about writing science fiction set thousands of years in the future, if not even more remote.

Saturday, February 19

10:00 a.m.: Reading — I'll be reading my short story "Out of the Dark" from the forthcoming anthology Lost Worlds and Mythological Kingdoms.

11:00 a.m.: When Comics Characters Get Old —panel about the problems with "comics time" vs. real time, and how to deal with the sheer weight of past history some iconic characters have to carry.

2:00 p.m.: Kaffeeklatsch — fellow program participant Grant Carrington and I will hang out and drink coffee with anyone who signs up. You set the topics!

4:00 p.m.: The Mind of the Alien — a real powerhouse of a panel discussing what alien intelligence might be like and how we can (or can't) relate to them.

Sunday, February 20

11:00 a.m.: Autographing — I'll be signing anything anyone can drag into the hotel (not contracts).

12:00 noon: Dungeons & Dragons — A classic Basic D&D dungeon with traps, wandering monsters, and puzzles.

See you all at the Westin this weekend!

Postmarked From the Stars Interview

Postmarked From the Stars is an online bookstore emphasizing fantasy and science fiction. They've also got a YouTube channel with reviews and interviews. And this week you can see an hour-long interview with me. It's quite wide-ranging, discussing my earlier works like A Darkling Sea and Corsair, as well as recent titles like The Godel Operation. Check it out!

AlbaCon 2021!

It takes more than an endemic to keep Albany's long-running SF convention down. AlbaCon 2021 is going on tonight and through this weekend, but only in virtual form.

I'll be there, participating in four events:

At 10:00 a.m. on Saturday the 18th I'll be part of a panel discussing "No One Goes to Space Anymore." Given that we just watched four private passengers launch into orbit, I'm going to be questioning the premises of that topic.

At 11:00 a.m. I'll be talking about "Why the DCU and the MCU Are So Different."

After a short break for lunch I'm doing a reading from The Godel Operation at 1:30. 

And then from 2-6 p.m. I'm running an online Weird War 1 game, "The Black Khan."

Afterward, drinks in the hotel bar. First round's on me.