Well, Here I Am

I return! It's six months later, and not much has really changed. Time marches on, as does entropy. We're that much closer to the eventual heat death of the universe, and I still haven't gotten my fucking copy of CthulhuTech. But such is life, and so it goes.

I have gotten a copy of the Sailor Moon RPG put out by Guardians of Order in 1998. For, like seven dollars. Why yes, I am a huge nerd. Was there ever any question? I was actually surprised at how well-assembled it was. I got it for a chuckle, but now I'm seriously considering running a game with it.

That, though, will have to come after the Serenity one-shot I'm going to run in the next couple of weeks, and the Exalted 2e one-shot I fully intend to run sometime after that. It's been way too long since I've had an Exalted fix--since I've had a tabletop roleplaying fix of any sort, really. But that'll be rectified soon.

During my absence I've done a ridiculous amount of writing (some of it good, some of it bad, some of it poetry). My most recent endeavor has been in league with a friend of mine, and it is a webcomic called Fancy That. There's a big friendly banner for it in this blog's sidebar now, if you'd like to take a look. It updates Monday/Wednesday/Friday, like Penny Arcade, which I love so very much. Unlike PA, though, Fancy That suffers from, to borrow a phrase coined by Jerry Holkins, dreaded continuity. I hope you'll enjoy it anyway.

I'm going to try to keep this blog updated on a fairly regular basis. There are no guarantees, though the possibility of there being a post any given day will probably go up sometime in May. Just because. I'm also going to try to keep this blog closer to its stated topics. I was rather lax about that in the past, but no longer. If it's not about writing, gaming, or geekery, it will not appear in these hallowed pages.

I'm sure you'll sleep better at night knowing that.

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I'm going to run away to the lesbian circus!

A New Look

Things are looking positively 16-bit around here, now, I must admit. Similar, just 16-bit. Part of the reason was because I wanted to see if I could do it. I'd always been kind of sketchy at spriting (and both the d20 and the katana are indeed sprites, just blown up without any sort of sizing algorithm to keep their pixelated look) and I wanted to see if I was any better at it with a direct reference.

That's a fancy way of saying that I wanted to see if I could trace a picture with a computer, I suppose.

The other reason was that I had picked up those images from elsewhere on the interweb, and I figured maybe it was time to make them completely my own. I'm sure whoever took those photos would much prefer to keep them for their own use, and who am I to argue? Also, you have to admit, there is something intrinsically geeky about not only having a d20 for your profile picture, but a 32x32 d20 sprite. And I kinda like that.

In any case, I'm happy with the new look. It came out much better than I expected.

Another addition to the page is on the right-hand side, directly below the Delectable Webcomicry section, Ye Olde Podcastes. Ever since I got Pepper (the name of my iPod Touch, so called after Iron Man's Pepper Potts, even though it has a picture of Kaylee Frye* as its wallpaper at the moment)--an incident that coincided with the release of the Penny Arcade game in the Dungeons and Dragons Podcast--I've been listening to podcasts nonstop, and I figured that it was about time to share the wealth.

The D&D Podcast is precisely what it sounds like: all D&D 4e, all the time. I tuned in to it for the joint Penny Arcade/PvP introductory game, which was all kinds of hilarious even if it wasn't precisely my style of gaming.

Horror on the Orient Express, at www.yog-sothoth.com, is an actual play podcast of a group of very British folk playing through the Call of Cthulhu adventure of the same name. It certainly has its moments, though I'm only one episode in thus far listening.

Master Plan is one that I've recently picked up. It's a podcast about game design, and all the pitfalls and trappings thereof. To its credit, it gave me the idea for the game (no, this is a new one) I'm working to make on the side. I'm actually working on two at the moment, though my experiences as a fledgling game designer will have to wait for a different post. Anyway, the actual episodes of Master Plan are quite short, the longest coming in at thirty minutes.

The Accidental Survivors is four Canadians (at least, I get the impression that they're all Canadians--they might be aliens) sitting around having a drink and talking about gaming. Their topic changes from episode to episode, but it's almost always informative and entertaining.

The X-Play Daily Video Podcast differs from all the rest of these in that it actually has video, which is kind of nice. I always found X-Play entertaining (perhaps the last entertaining thing on G4...that network needs to die) but was never able to catch new episodes. The ability to watch their reviews on the go is a definite plus.

So that's pretty much it as regards updates. If I can, I'll be back later to talk a bit about my thoughts on tabletop game design. Because I'm sure you'll be wanting to hear.

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* If you don't know who Kaylee Frye is, you should be goddamned ashamed of yourself. She is only the most adorable mechanic to ever grace any screen, big or small. Go watch Firefly. NOW.

"It's Splug!"

Review: Exalted, Second Edition

Imagine for a moment that you're in the frigid north, the coniferous forest drear with the pallor of winter. In a clearing, you see a circle of fire. Inside that circle of fire a one-eyed sorceress glowing like the noontide sun and wielding a golden seven-section staff fights a losing battle against an imposing man in heavy armor wielding a massive sword forged of jade. Then, looking beyond them, you find two massive armies clashing in all-out pitched battle, blade to blade. On the left are the forces of humanity, the military might of a small frozen kingdom, and on the right are the terrible and beautiful armies of the Fair Folk, resplendent in armor of gossamer spidersilk, some mounted on shrieking birds, others on griffins screaming as they swoop through the air, and others still shepherding six fierce, bellowing dragons with jeweled scales.

Then the ground erupts beneath the faerie army as a twenty-foot clockwork suit of power armor piloted by a demigod martial artist bursts from an age-old hidden chamber below, uproots a tree to use as a club, and attacks the dragons single-handedly.

Sound insane? Sound awesome? Sound both? That was a selection from the climax of the only Exalted campaign I've ever played in, and it was insane over-the-top magical kung-fu fun. So when I went to read Exalted, Second Edition, there was a lot of good will for it to draw upon. Happily, it didn't disappoint.

For the uninitiated, Exalted is a game in which players take on the role of Exalts--the chosen of the gods patterned after great heroes of old like Heracles, Perseus, and Gilgamesh--and go forth to save Creation and bring the awesome. Bringing the awesome comes easily to Exalts, and is even mechanically supported by the game. It's the part about saving Creation that's going to be tricky.

The world of Exalted, or Creation as it's known, is beset on all sides by terrible foes. You have the Fair Folk, who are fairies and elves rendered old-school style as dream-devouring glamorous terrors that hail from the unshaped Wyld outside of Creation. Then you have the various fallen Primordials, the original shapers of Creation usurped by lesser gods with the help of the original Exalts, who are divided among the Neverborn, those Primordials killed and eternally imprisoned in the Underworld, forever seeking to bring the rest of the world to the same oblivion they have found, and the Yozis, those banished to the demon-world of Malfeas and perpetual torment. The Yozis don't tend to set foot in Creation often, but their cousins the Neverborn have powerful ghost-lieutenants called Deathlords that enter the world of mortals and do their bidding, spreading death and decay wherever they walk.

On the more mortal end of things, the largest organized government in Creation is on the brink of collapse due to the sudden disappearance of its head of state, the Scarlet Empress. Their once-powerful defenses now useless without a powerful potentate to operate them, thieves and brigands are growing bolder, as are the darker things beyond Creation's veil.

And the gods who exalt mortals in the first place? They're not going to do anything about any of this because they're hopelessly addicted to the Games of Divinity, which they play at all times in their Jade Pleasure Dome in the celestial continent-city of Yu-Shan. So it all comes down to the Exalted to set things to right in Creation, which will obviously be no easy feat.

So obviously the setting is one of the most notable aspects of Exalted, presenting a broad array of locales and potential conflicts for the players to get involved in. The chapter that covers Creation is basically candy for any GM who likes to have fluff and pretty visuals to use, which certainly includes me.

Mechanically, the game seems to be constructed pretty smoothly. Exalted uses White Wolf's Storyteller System, in which a player attempting an action rolls a number of ten-sided dice equal to the character's appropriate attribute score plus their appropriate ability score, counting those that come up seven or greater as successes. If enough successes are rolled to meet or exceed the difficulty number set by the GM, the action succeeds. It worked perfectly well for its previous edition, and I'm sure it will continue to serve elegantly.

Second Edition's combat resolution works differently from most games I have played in, however, as it doesn't operate on an initiative system. Instead, battle is measured in ticks of time, and each action has a speed in ticks. A character takes an action, and then must wait that number of ticks before they can act again. It seems in some ways to be much more fluid than an initiative system, and perhaps more realistic, but I don't see that it is in any way superior to rolling initiative. Just different. It does fit the high-speed kung-fu style of Exalted, though, and that is very important.

Stunt dice, mentioned earlier as the mechanic that encourages players and characters to bring the awesome, are extra dice awarded to rolls with particularly impressive descriptions to back them up. So instead of saying, "I hit him", the player is mechanically encouraged to say, "I slam my gauntleted fist across his face with such force that nearby trees shake from the shock" because they'll gain an advantage. Interestingly enough, this makes doing awesome things easier than doing mundane things, which seems to work perfectly with the flavor of the setting.

Something else that sets Exalted apart mechanically is its charms, magical techniques only available to Exalts and other supernatural beings that allow them to perform extraordinary feats. Each charm is linked to an ability, meaning there are melee charms, dodge charms, athletics charms, etc. These form the core of the Exalted's power, and creative use of charms can be helpful or even vital to a character's survival. Second Edition adds Excellencies to the mix, three basic charms expressly used for improving dice pools related to the ability they're taken for. Their flexibility is welcome, particularly the Melee Excellencies, which can be used to improve attacks and parries both.

The most significant improvement over its previous edition is in the way dodging and parrying are handled. In Exalted, First Edition, a player had two basic choices when their turn came around. They could defend, holding a dodge or parry in reserve and not acting, or they could attack. A sketchy third option was to split the dice pool between defense and attack, but in my experience that effectively crippled both. Both pools would be reduced to somewhere in the neighborhood of three to four dice, and for several enemies that wasn't even enough to get past the opposition's armor. Which meant that players either defended perpetually and never damaged foes or attacked, leaving themselves wide open to a counter unless they invested heavily in dodge charms, which in turn caused a constant drain on a character's essence (magical power used to activate charms). In short, it didn't work very well.

In Second Edition, a character's defense is determined by static values based on their attributes and abilities that an enemy's attack must meet to land. So there is no longer a defense action that a character must take to avoid getting their ass kicked. Instead, attacks and other actions incur a minor defense penalty that temporarily lowers the DV until the character's next action, modeling to what degree the action leaves the character open to attack. Which means that the player doesn't have to decide whether to defend or not, but how much to compromise that defense by how they act. This seems significantly easier to deal with to me.

There were only a few things that I didn't care for in this new rendition of Exalted, and those were layout-based. As always, any company professionally publishing textbook-sized RPG rulesets ought to hire a proofreader. Aside from the handful of simple typos, there was the significant strangeness of the description of cudgels and clubs in the equipment listing being precisely the same as that of slashing swords. The stat block was still appropriate to the weapon, so this seems an anomaly at absolute worst. The index was not a great help to me, though it does have a complete listing of all the charms in alphabetical order. I could see that coming in handy. There were one or two pieces of artwork that didn't quite live up to the standards of the rest, which tended to oscillate between serviceable and bloody awesome. My particular favorite is the full-body illustration of Arianna, the book's canon example of a Twilight caste Solar. But then again, I've always had a weakness for female spellcasters.

There are a number of other new and interesting things that I haven't the time or inclination to go into (like the social and mass combat rules--both of which are interesting, but I don't see myself using either very often anytime soon). I haven't even mentioned that the setting fluff that segues between chapters assumes the form of well-illustrated full-color comics. It's a full 396 pages without the index and the character sheet in the back, so covering all of it in detail would be damn near impossible. Suffice to say that I am immensely impressed by the setting in particular and the fashion in which the mechanics support it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've a Creation to save.

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"Would you rather times were better, or simply more boring?"

A Look Ahead

So I now have three things in the queue to write reviews for, if only I could thoroughly finish any of them. Of course one, the core book for Exalted, Second Edition, I only got yesterday, so I at least have an excuse of some sort for that one. Though judging from the setting material I've read thus far (and what little I know of how conflict resolution works in it) I expect I will be treating it favorably.

The second, of course, is Final Fantasy XII, which I have been having great fun with despite running into a few gamestalling moments along the way. The main reason I haven't gotten around to writing a review for this one is because the game is so bloody long. I'm over thirty hours into it and I suspect that that is maybe halfway through. It's positively mindblowing. And epic. I'd try to combine the two words, but I suspect that it would come out sounding like something a particularly gifted courtesan would be able to do after rigorously practicing for several years. Which is awesome in its own way, but not the kind of awesome that abounds in FFXII.

The third is a little Japanese doujin game called Perfect Cherry Blossom I downloaded. It's an incredibly pretty game, aurally and visually, but it's also a hard as fuck vertical scrolling shooter in the spirit of the Raiden games. I really like it, but trying to actually get through the whole thing is practically an exercise in masochism. ...Though it is very, very pretty masochism, which I suppose partially makes up for it.

So those are things I have planned just at the moment. As soon as I finish one or all of these I'll start doing my writeups of them and post them here. It's good practice.

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Jim thinks you're all pretty fucking lucky he's here.

Grues, Games, and Gainful Employment

So I now have requests in to several individuals to allow me to use them as professional references when I attempt to get a job this summer, and I'm just waiting to hear back before I start filling out online applications.

Seems like the old "sidle up to the place of employment with the classified ad clutched in hand" method of job-hunting seems to have fallen by the wayside. On the one hand I'm a bit disappointed by that, but on the other I'm glad to be saved the trouble.

In any case, I've got two projects that will also be keeping my attention for the rest of the summer, along with (hopefully) my job. The first of them is a bit of interactive fiction that I started last summer, but put on hiatus when school started kicking my ass. I picked it back up again yesterday and added a few more rooms on to it, along with at least one instant game over for the player.

In my experience, IF enthusiasts seem to like those. At least, the third or fourth time I was strangled by the janitor in The Lurking Horror, that was the conclusion that I drew. Strangely enough, it had to be the time I went to try to catch the snippet of the game where you realize he didn't blink the entire bloody game that I figured out how to beat him. Go figure.

The other project is (at the suggestion of a friend) to write my own role-playing game. I've been working on the opening fluff since yesterday, and I've got a good solid four pages or so of it (single-spaced, at that). I'm liking it. It's going to have some nice layers to it, I think. Or at least as many layers as Western steampunk fantasy can have. After I'm done writing this I'm going to post a chunk of the fluff on Literary Bushido, just for the hell of it.

So between those two and the job I'll (optimistically) get, it seems I'll have a fairly productive summer. And hey, one of my reference hopefuls just emailed me and said that he would. Just one more to go before I start putting in applications.

Then I will be gainfully employed. How about that?

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It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Finals Week Cometh

And I suppose I could make a joke about having to clean up after it, but that would require effort on my part.

In any case, here I am, a mere three days away from being a fully-fledged graduate from a state university--and I'm oddly calm about the whole business. I mean, sure I have two finals that will involve summat like two hours of solid writing each, and I still have to finish my final project for Stage Costume (only three more renderings to go!), but otherwise I'm feeling pretty good about the world.

I spent a chunk of the morning yesterday relearning how to play Magic: The Gathering by watching the videos concerning the topic that Wizards of the Coast has posted on YouTube. The acting is subpar and the humor is eye-rollingly painful, but they weren't a bad primer. If you want to have a chuckle at a guy who loves gesturing more than life itself, you should take a look.

Now, you're probably wondering, "PS, you handsome devil you, didn't you shrug off the old addiction to cardboard crack some years ago? What's got you peering into the depths of the black abyss of collectible card games again?" And that's a perfectly valid question, particularly when phrased in that precise manner. The answer is simple.

I got to reading a book called Gaming as Culture, a more or less scholarly look at tabletop RPGs, computer RPGs, collectible games, and the subculture associated with it all. It was an interesting read, one which I agreed with on some occasions (like when it asserted that there can be as real a sense of community in something like World of Warcraft as there can in meatspace) and disagreed with on other occasions (like when one essayist basically suggested that all roleplaying games are hypermasculinized powertrips engaged in by males who have been desexualized or feminized by society and in which women are at best marginalized and at worst openly degraded), but the articles on collectible games reminded me of something that I had never really gotten around to: Magic tournaments.

I'd never engaged in tournaments because my deck basically took cards from just about every set ever released, except maybe the first two, and tournaments are very picky about what they allow in terms of cards. But I discovered with this book that there are sealed-deck tournaments, in which you show up, pay your entry fee, get a tournament pack and a couple of boosters, and proceed to build your deck on site. So its playability (insofar as being legal) is basically guaranteed. It also means that nobody gets an undue advantage by slinging money around and picking up the best cards to stick in their decks. You get what you get, and that's it. There's a certain bourgeois appeal to the whole business.

So Friday after next, I'm going to attend my first ever Magic: The Gathering tournament. I'm hoping it'll be as fun playing as I remember it being.

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I'm gonna rip yer face off.

Cthulhu! In! SPAAAAAACE!

Well, not exactly, but still. I'm of the opinion that only great good can come of fusing giant biomechanical robots, human were-horrors, alien fungoid insects, and HP Lovecraft's Great Old Ones themselves. And that is precisely what CthulhuTech does. It's certainly a more upbeat form of the mythos, seeing how it is actually possible for humanity to fight back...and who hasn't ever felt the pressing desire to uppercut a great and ancient evil being from beyond the veil of reality? Because I know I have.

It seems to use some toned-down variant of the Storytelling system from World of Darkness and Exalted. Everything is rolled using groups of d10's, though the success mechanic is slightly different. The major players seem to be the military, backed up by pilots of the aforementioned biomechanical Engel mecha, an underground organization whose soldiers, Tagers, have fused with otherworldly horrors and can shape-shift into them at will, and then the Bad Guys, who are a motley collection of aliens and sanity-shattering terrors that have their own complex relationships among themselves.

I think this sounds awesome. Who's with me?

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You're naked.

The Conference

Sebastian Cross stood from his office chair and circled his desk, hands behind his back. The hologram of a dark-haired human female face mounted on the desk’s corner followed him intently.

“Well,” the face demanded eventually, “if you don’t have them, then who does?”

“I’ve been wondering about that precise question, Cara,” Sebastian said, pausing at a mirror to preen. He smoothed his suit and his long, glossy black hair, then turned back to the hologram of Cara Simmons. “And I have some ideas. I think you do, too.”

“Of course I do. Dr. Winter left in a terrible hurry.” Cara smirked. “I haven’t any idea why.”

Sebastian smiled widely. “Why should you? At the moment, he is the most likely suspect. Him and his…pet. Loathsome creature.”

“Kind of like you.”

The smile on the Aztechnology exec’s face twisted into a snarl that bared his teeth, in particular his long, pointed upper canines. “Watch what you say, slitch! I could have you turning tricks as a joygirl next week if I wanted.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

Before Sebastian could spit another invective, the desk’s built-in commlink chimed. “Answer,” he growled instead.

Another face appeared on the desk, this one older, bespectacled, with snow-white hair and a pointed Van Dyke beard.

Sebastian’s eyebrows rose. “Speak of the devil. Dr. Silas Winter.”

“Most decidedly not at your service,” replied the man in the projection.

“You have Winter on the line?! I want to talk to the son of a bitch.”

“A moment, Cara,” Sebastian said. Then, to the desk’s commlink, “Conference.”

“Winter! You were the one who had ‘runner scum trawling through my warehouse!”

“Of course I was. Who else would it have been? But I am not calling to speak with you, Simmons. I washed my hands of you when I left Renraku. I did not much appreciate the attempt on my life.”

“I should’ve had you shot in the head. Can’t replace brains with cybernetics, can you?” Cara pursed her lips smugly. “How’s it feel to not be able to sling spells anymore?”

Winter’s face remained entirely impassive. “Sebastian, I was calling to inform you that I shall soon be in possession of not only the Elder Medallion but also the only extant copy of Al Azif. I have a—competent—team working to track it down. An unorthodox team, given, but competent.

“Considering how Ms. Simmons relieved me of all magical ability when she had my body crushed under several tons of concrete and steel, I have no actual way to use either item. But considering that you have a condition you wish to have remedied, and that what we seek may contain answers to both our problems…”

Cara’s sharp laughter cut into the conversation. “I’m sorry to tell you gentlemen, but an individual in my employ has already acquired the book. Rhea has gone to retrieve it from him and should be back momentarily.”

“Well,” Sebastian said, smiling a little too pleasantly as he took a seat behind his desk. “It would seem we are at an impasse.”

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"The Pink Lynx? Is that what we're gonna call it?"

Mission Aftermath

"Aaagh, my face...God..." Legs touched the scorched, blackened swath of charred skin that covered the better part of the right side of her face. She tried feebly to heal it magically, but could only convince the edges to close in about half an inch before she felt exhaustion overcome her. "God damn them, my face..." She fell to her knees on the highway's shoulder, gripping the guardrail to keep herself upright.

Behind her were the burning, twisted remains of the team's van. The gas tank's eruption had blown out the back completely, severing one of the doors at the hinges. Helen and Sturmdrang had managed to claw their way out after Legs and were standing a few feet away, bleeding freely but still alive, looking down the highway as though they could catch sight of the other shadowrunner van.

"They killed Pretty Boy," Helen whispered. She tossed her dark hair back, revealing pointed ears, and clutched at her right shoulder. Blood oozed between her fingers. "That fragging elf killed Pretty Boy. Ripped right through his vest."

"His own damn fault," Sturmdrang rumbled. The dwarf pulled the cracked goggles off his face, revealing the mirrored eye-shields behind them. "It's what you get for bringing gloves to a gunfight. Screw him and the elf that dusted 'im. I wanna piece of that scrawny ork bastard that shot me up."

"If I hadn't been driving I'd've given him something to reckon with. Don't like shooting blind."

Sturmdrang laughed, rolling the cigar in his teeth as he evaluated the damage to the goggles. "Who does? Besides, what could you do if Martha hardly fazed him?"

Helen grimaced. "I can think of a few things." She popped her neck and sighed. " ...Mr. Johnson isn't going to like this."

"Those sons of bitches."

Helen and Sturmdrang looked at each other, then to Legs, their attention drawn by the raw venom in her voice. After a tense beat Helen stepped forward, extending a hand cautiously. "Legs? You all right?"

The magician's features, half beautiful and half horribly burned, were twisted into a horrific snarl that only emphasized the grotesquerie of the dichotomy. "They fragged up our run. They killed Pretty Boy. And then they called up a fire spirit in the gas tank."

Helen's eyes widened. "Shit. Is that what happened?"

"Yeah. That's what happened. It's all over the astral plane, I could see it blind. And when I get my hands on that mage, they're going to fucking die." Legs hauled herself to her feet and wheeled on Helen and Sturmdrang, her blonde hair flying, scorched flesh livid in the moonlight. "BECAUSE THEY SCARRED MY FACE!"