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

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Friday, September 5th, 2008
1:34 am	Piper At The Gates Of Doom I recently (two months ago, which is how far behind I am in usefully posting here) finished reading every work of science fiction by H. Beam Piper, with two relatively marginal exceptions (Crisis in 2140 and Fuzzies And Other People). This was as close as I can get to a sheer cultural lark these days -- nobody is breathing down my neck for an H. Beam Piper RPG1, I'm not forced to keep up with the vast panoply of H. Beam Piper fandom, there isn't an upcoming Paratime movie starring Natalie Portman as Dalla Hadron that I need to get up to speed on. I just did it to do it. Although I'd read a decent chunk of Piper before -- the Paratime series, Little Fuzzy, and "Omnilingual" being the only ones I'm sure of -- reading the whole stretch of it as a (relatively) educated adult instead of an omnivorous 14-year-old made an interesting comparison, not just with other SF authors, but with other acts of reading. My recent memories of re-reading all of HPL last year came back in force; I was seeing things that I'm fairly certain I simply couldn't have noticed as a teenager, or before marrying a contentious English major with an ill-concealed impatience with genre SF, or before reading a whole lot of other stuff besides. To begin with (although this observation isn't original to me by any means) Piper seems to be doing something more interesting with his future history than Asimov or Heinlein. Asimov's Foundation tells the stories of great men who meet and survive -- even overcome -- historical crises. Heinlein mostly wrote slice-of-life stories set in various future milieux. (Although "If This Goes On..." is crisis fiction to beat the band, and I'm sure other exceptions exist.) Piper, by contrast, told stories that while set at historical crisis moments almost always openly admit, well, failure. In Space Viking, Lucas can't save the Sword Worlds from becoming hollowed-out caudillo states. The ambassador in Lone Star Planet can't continue representing the Federation. In Uller Uprising, the close patterning of Uller on the Indian Raj tells us that the company's rule (maintained by nuclear genocide) is evanescent, and the solution clearly prefigures the company's eventual fall. "Day of the Moron" is actually a story about inevitable failure. (Outside the future history, nobody ever figures out the answer in "He Walked Around the Horses.") Even the triumphant stories aren't so clear: In "Graveyard of Dreams," the original version of Cosmic Computer, there is no Merlin; in "When in the Course --", the original version of "Gunpowder God" (set in the Federation future history) the planet Freya may have thrown off Styphon, but it gets Terra instead. All future histories, by writing series stories set during different milieux, are at bottom meta-stories about the ineluctable failure of human effort. Piper just foregrounds it, in a way that only Stapledon really did before him, but far more accessibly in the mainstream SF tradition. This will put many people in the mind of Poul Anderson, especially the Technic/Flandry series, and Anderson's Psychotechnic League stories, though based on a rather different set of political postulates from Flandry, still have a very Piperish feel. Anderson and Piper are a lot alike; both strongly autodidactic historiphiles with that odd American mid-century suspicion of democracy, both fans of the Competent Man, both with medieval streaks miles wide through them. (Both also write compelling, believably motivated villains on occasion; the bad guy in Little Fuzzy even becomes the good guy in Fuzzy Sapiens.) Anderson and Piper go in tandem: Anderson's "Time Patrol" comes 7 years after Piper's "Police Operation"; Space Viking comes 10 years after Anderson's "The Star Plunderer." What Piper has that Anderson doesn't is a fascination, even an obsession, with escape. "Omnilingual" is about escaping the trap of single-planet culture; Fuzzy Sapiens is about escaping a genetic trap; Kalvan of Otherwhen is about escaping the mundane present into the glorious pseudo-medieval past; Cosmic Computer is about escaping planetary bankruptcy; "Time and Time Again" and "The Edge of the Knife" are both about escaping from history itself. Escape and failure, then, are the two counterweights in Piper's fiction. The rest is merely postwar American SF at close to its finest. [1] Although... (35 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
3:11 am	In My Day, We Used To Call This A Smattering * I know it's been forever and long since we've had a single substantive post here, but post-GenCon creates almost as much rush-and-bustle as pre-GenCon does. * Especially because this is also pre-ConQuest; I'll be a guest at ConQuest SF (which will be in San Jose, or rather Santa Clara, this year) next weekend. The Guest of Honor will be John Hill, the designer of Squad Leader, which will impose a mandatory -1 penalty to my rally rolls. Other guests include Dana Lombardy, James Ernest, and (according to the website) Dave Arneson. I don't know my schedule, but I imagine we'll get up to some sort of seminars, plus the usual pickup games and goofing around. * While we were all at GenCon, I apparently published a new product: GURPS Infinite Worlds: Lost Worlds. This book covers six worlds (in standard IW format) cut for space from the GURPS Infinite Worlds manuscript, some of them somewhat familiar ("Etheria," "The Nine Worlds," and "Steel") from other GURPS books. However, it has more details on Reality Cyrano and Reality Iskander-2, from the GURPS 4e iconic character writeups, and one entirely new world, the Indian-dominant Siva-5, which was my attempt to explicate the tossed-off reference to "the Siva worlds" from GURPS Time Travel. * Sadly, it doesn't include Reality Mameluke, my alien-invasion AH tribute to Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series (and to Poul Anderson's "Soldier From the Stars"). The breakpoint comes in 1965, when President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam hires a dreadnought full of Gormelite warriors to win the war for him. Maybe SJG will publish it in another collection. * Speaking of my e-retail presence, Atomic Overmind has brought Dubious Shards and Tarot of Cthulhu: Major Arcana to DriveThruRPG, should you be interested in purchasing either fine item from that purveyor. And who could blame you if you were? Not I. * My attempt to make chicken corn tortilla soup last week was deflected by the covert metamorphosis of my dried pasilla peppers into something truly unappetizing; I was forced to make do with two ancho peppers and a cinnamon stick. The result was still pretty darn good, but I'm waiting to post the recipe until after I try it with the correct peppers. Which cannot be had for love or money in Hyde Park, apparently. Or in the Oak Park Whole Foods, which carries ancho peppers helpfully labeled "Ancho Pasilla Peppers," because somebody or other also calls poblano peppers "pasillas." Gah. * In other news, robin_d_laws has descended so far as to blog my unfamiliarity with the legendary Black Hand killer "Shotgun Man." Having noodled around on the topic since, I can assure Robin that the Wikipedia entry holds every datum available on the topic. Or perhaps more data than are, strictu sensu, available: the source of the tale is Herbert Asbury's Gem of the Prairie, (republished in 2002 as The Gangs of Chicago to take advantage of the nascent Scorsese-induced mania for all things Asburian) which shares with Asbury's other works a charming preference for lurid effect above grim historicity. (That said, Asbury is more reliable than Wikipedia; he gives the span of killings as January 1910 to March 1911, contra Wikipedia's still-sloppier source, Sifakis' Mafia Encyclopedia.) A check, for example, of the Northwestern University 1870-1930 Chicago Homicide Database indicates only three firearm murders that fit the pattern in early 1911, one of which was in a tavern, not on "Death Corner" (now part of the former Cabrini-Green). Should anyone be interested in that or any of Chicago's other death corners, I can heartily recommend Richard Lindberg's Return to the Scene of the Crime: A Guide to Infamous Places in Chicago, which manages to combine lurid effect with more historicity than otherwise. * Further to the Ongoing Interrupted Conversations File, on Sunday lhn and I were wondering just when the "mean old Normans vs. doughty stout Saxons" meme got started, the one we all recognize from reading Ivanhoe, or rather from watching Robin Hood movies made back when anybody read Ivanhoe. It sounded suspiciously like the kind of thing Hanoverians would make up to remind people that Germans were good and the French (and by extension the Stuarts) were bad, and that furthermore it had a kind of Tudor "black legend" feel to it (which was, of course, right around when all the Robin Hood gestes were being printed, along with everything else), but neither of us could remember anything relevant from Shakespeare's King John, and I resolved to look in my Robin Hood books once I got a chance. Well, I still haven't, but I did wind up looking in Leon Poliakov's The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalistic Ideas In Europe, which indicates that I'm almost exactly right. He cites the future Bishop of London, John Aylmer, fulminating in 1558 against the "lousye law brought in by the Normanes" compared to the "Saxonysche" language and customs of the people. And again, the aim is to contrast (Protestant) Germany and England with (Catholic) France. That said, neither the word "Norman" nor "Saxon" appears in King John, so it probably doesn't achieve takeoff until Cromwell (combining Protestantism with anti-aristocratic populism) and then the Hanoverians. (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008
1:15 pm	Gotta Write About GenCon ... ... before I can write anything else, including the many projects I brainstormed with various publishers at GenCon. Among them, my first Savage Worlds setting book, another Trail of Cthulhu sourcebook, two more GUMSHOE games, a third "Mini Mythos" book to follow the already-written second "Mini Mythos" book to follow Where the Deep Ones Are, and maybe a Traveller supplement if the licensing issues work out. Plus Casey Jones Is Dead, which I have now described to enough fellow game designers that I kind of have to finish it this fall. Plus other stuff, To Be Named Later. * So, GenCon. Trail of Cthulhu won two Silver ENnies! Hobby Games: The 100 Best won one Silver ENnie! And it's all thanks to you good people! All those map links must have worked, eh? * In other grand news, I'm going to be a guest at Dragonmeet in London on the Saturday right after Thanksgiving (Saturday, November 29 to non-Americans). I shall hope to see everyone there! * Or, if you can't make that, how about GenCon France? I'll be GoH-ing it up in Paris in spring 2009; more details when I know them. * Moving down the Excitement List, Where the Deep Ones Are sold over 200 copies at the show, emptying the tables at Atlas Games! This pretty much ensures that my next one is greenlit; details when I'm allowed to announce titles. * Also, Tour de Lovecraft: the Tales dropped in print at the show! I knew it would look fabulous, as righteousfist had kept me apprised of things via PDF, but holding it in my hand was a thrill all its own. It looks so good, and so professional. (Our design document: "Make it look like a real book by grownups.") Toren Atkinson's spot art is perfect, too. One only hopes the words don't let the team down. * And "Out of the Box" is (imminently) back! Sooner than any of us can believe it, my much-beloved review column will return in the virtual pages of Indie Press Revolution, in an Exciting New Format. I can hardly wait. * I got interviewed for three podcasts and was a guest on the Friday 5pm installment of This Just In From GenCon, hosted by Master Plan podcaster macklinr and podcaster emeritus ptevis. I'll post links to the other podcasts when I get them, but you can hear breaking news from the floor of GenCon as if it were last Friday today. * Speaking of ptevis, he and I were the fortunate beneficiaries of Jim Cambias' wrath at the pathetic restaurant offerings in downtown Indianapolis. Insisting that he could, and more importantly, would eat "an exquisite meal" in Indianapolis, he took the lead in finding, and driving the hellangone out to, Huachinango, a Mexican seafood place. We had the whole red snapper stuffed with shrimp, octopus, peppers, cheese, and maybe achiote among other things; the orange roughy "al ajillo," meaning in a reduction of guajillo chiles, garlic, orange juice, and brandy; and three ceviche tostadas. And bottomless glasses of sangria, all for a ludicrously small $27 each, including tax and tip. Some would call it exquisite. * The rest of the show is a haze of walking the floor when I could, talking with friends and colleagues and friendly colleagues, parties and bars (including Ike & Jonesey's, the gayest straight bar in Indiana), and just glorying in perfect summer weather and full-immersion game fun with 40,000 members of My Tribe. * I also talked with Diana-Jones-Award-winner the_monkey_king and Greg Stolze about alternative ways to finance game design (though sadly, my plan to be a fly on the wall during a convo with both of them failed of execution, just like half of all GenCon schedule plans do). Maybe we'll all talk about that question here in a bit. (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 12th, 2008
3:32 pm	On My Way To GenCon Tomorrow I ride down to Indianapolis with the delightful and talented Greg Stolze, to be hurled once more into the maelstrom that is GenCon. I've got nothing scheduled except two dinners (Wednesday and Sunday), the Diana Jones Awards party on Wednesday night, and the ENnies whenever they are. Otherwise, I shall be flitting about like the proverbial starling, with the Pelgrane booth the best place to look for me if you're looking. But you should also look for Where the Deep Ones Are, my H.P. Lovecraft-Maurice Sendak mashup, available at the Atlas Games booth! I've gotten my author's copies, and boy does it look great. (I say this, of course, because the artist, Andy Hopp, is a mad genius.) And also, Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales will debut *in print* at GenCon! (Should you be a fan of press releases, the press release to this effect is here.) Expanded and tidied up from the virtual pages of this very blog, with a Foreword by John Tynes, some all-new stuff by yours truly, and an astonishingly good look by righteousfist, it's available for a mere $14.95 at the "Cthuliana Corner" section of the Adventure Retail (SJG/Atlas/Etc.) booth, and at the Green Ronin booth. And not to toot my own horn or anything, check out that top cover blurb. But Ken, I hear you cry, how can we survive the wait until we get to GenCon to see you and buy your products? Well, feel free to listen to me in the car on the way down: my interview by Don Dehm of The Pulp Gamer podcast is posted now! (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, August 8th, 2008
1:40 am	You Can't Spell "HOLLYWOOD" Without The WTF So I see by the Internet that Natalie Portman's film company Handsome Charlie is supposedly producing a remake of Dario Argento's bizarre horror masterpiece Suspiria. More intriguingly, Natalie has been tipped as the star of said remake, which has brought a denial from her publicist: "Natalie has signed nothing and confirmed nothing regarding a role in any Suspiria remake, as she has already played her part in retroactively wrecking wonderful genre films made in 1977." [Quote may contain additives and cereal fillers.] So this is probably a crazy-making rumor of the "Priyanka Chopra is being cast as Wonder Woman" sort that exists solely to bedevil my life while fueling my Improved Alternate-Historical Netflix. Although The Dark Knight comes very close to being my (or, as it turned out, Mark Millar's, in the best writing he's ever done) "Orson Welles' The Bat-Man," so never say never, I guess. But anyhow, and more intriguingly still, indie darling David Gordon Green, who wrote and directed the extraordinary film George Washington, is honest and for true attached to the Suspiria remake as director. When first I heard the news, I was hard-pressed to think of any movie less like the wildly melodramatic, color-drenched, Symbolist gorefest Suspiria than the careful, muted, pointillist character piece George Washington. But both films deliberately privilege incident over plot, and mood over beat; both nonetheless build compelling story from seemingly broken narratives. Green has acknowledged the influence of Terence Malick, who may be something of the missing link here; I had a splendid 15 minutes or so on my walk home from Philly's Best yesterday reconsidering Malick's Badlands as a Midwestern giallo. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
1:29 pm	He Who Votes Last Votes Loudest * Which is a spectacularly inane way of saying it's the last day for ENnie Awards voting! I know you good people have all voted, but what about your buddy at the next desk over, or your pal at the coffee shop, or your mom? What are you saying, your mom isn't good enough to vote for Trail of Cthulhu for Best Writing and Best Rules, or for Hobby Games: The 100 Best for "Best Regalia"? Man, that's cold. The woman gave you life, after all ... the least you could do is let her vote for me. * But not just filial piety is available online! You can also get the Full Kenneth Hite Audio experience through the magic of clicking on things like the episode of The Game's The Thing podcast featuring not just an interview with my humble self, but a review by the estimable podcasters of Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game by Jason Hill. * And in my tradition of offering Awesome Maps as sweet lagniappes to such disgusting exercises in self-promotion, I offer this 1882 map of Transylvania. Perfect for the vampire-hunting Victorian tourist! Or, for the vampire-hunting Elizabethan tourist, this 1566 map of Transylvania. Remember ... we all have a stake in this. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
1:13 pm	Vote Early, Vote Twice * Since I know all you excellent people hurried off to vote for Trail of Cthulhu for "Best Writing" and "Best Rules," and Hobby Games: The 100 Best for "Best Regalia" in the ENnie Awards, you can imagine the joy it gives me to say that all votes cast on Monday (and Tuesday until about 8 a.m.) were entirely wasted! Hurrah! So if you were nice enough to vote for me once, imagine the fun you'll have by voting for me again! And remind all your coworkers, family members, spouses, or dogs whom nobody knows on the Internet to do the same, if you'd be so kind. * And once you've done that, you can go look at this awesome Map Of Venus With Oceans. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 28th, 2008
4:14 pm	Things For You To Click On * If you're a fan of chadu's sweet supers RPG, Truth & Justice, now's your chance to dig up the horrific past of your campaign -- or to start a new one in the badly color-registered 1940s! Yes, Adventures Into Darkness, the definitive guide to Lovecraftian Golden Age superheroism, is finally available in Truth & Justice format on DriveThruRPG. It's the only place you can see the Fighting Yank engulfed by a shoggoth -- with full T&J stats for both! (And for 32 other heroes, villains, and monsters from Nedor Comics and/or H.P. Lovecraft.) * But Ken, I hear you say, I've already clicked there! What now? Well, now, you can go vote in the ENnie Awards! While I'm sure you good people were already intending to vote for Trail of Cthulhu for "Best Writing" and "Best Rules," and for Hobby Games: The 100 Best for "Best Regalia," don't forget to remind your less-savvy friends, co-workers, family members, and passersby that those are clearly the kinds of audacious, hopeful choices for change that we have been waiting for. Vote early, but don't even joke about voting often, because if we break this award, our parents aren't going to buy us a new one, young man. * What? You want to click on something that won't benefit me in any way whatsoever? What is wrong with you people? Oh, well, I live to serve. This link is a year old, but it's still just fourteen kinds of awesome: Middle-Earth Mapped Onto Ice Age Europe. You're welcome. Now vote for me. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 27th, 2008
3:31 am	That Film Well, I saw it today and it's just as good as you've heard; possibly better than that, even. The greatest actor of their generation, forcing an emotional impact straight through all the artifice and melodrama that go (perhaps rightfully) with the role. The explosion of passion and emotion seen both as power and as terror. The deft repetition of the three-characters story element, and (in a way) of the love triangle motif; the simultaneous rescue and celebration of source material too often relegated to marginal demographics or worse yet associated purely with camp. The classic, even Shakespearean, architecture of the plot arc. What else? The music, of course; the timeless set design; the gorgeous location; the grace notes for hard-core fans; the costumes at once believable and iconic. Are there flaws? Sure; the choreography isn't up to the Asian best-of-breed work, and the director doesn't always know how to shoot that choreography reliably, depending more on establishing shots and (justifiably) on solid acting and character development work instead. Oh, and Pierce Brosnan really can't sing. (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
11:32 am	19th Century Nervous Breakdown While I'm plugging things, I should plug this. Awhile back, yojimbouk asked me: "What do you know about the Empress Eugénie of France?" I said something like "Not much more than the average Castle Falkenstein player, but I have a biography of Napoleon III and Otto Friedrich's book Olympia: Paris in the Age of Manet." "That's two more than anyone else I know. You're hired." What he hired me to do was edit a manuscript by Joyce Cartlidge, which became in due course the book Empress Eugénie: Her Secret Revealed, which was published last month by Magnum Opus Press. The book's thesis is that the future Empress bore an illegitimate daughter, and had her spirited off to Lancashire, where she eventually married into the Cartlidge family. A few decades of family sleuthing later: ta da! Having become, at one time, intimately familiar with the details, I can say that the book is not implausible on the surface of it -- the dates (including the dates of missing diary entries or letters) fit, and Lord knows illegitimate children (and the convenient export of the inconvenient ones) were not uncommon in the era. Eugénie was exactly the sort of person who would have a potentially life-wrecking affair with an older man, and her mother was exactly the sort of person who would orchestrate any number of baby shipments to keep her daughter in the marriage market. Beyond that, the historical record is pretty much silent, although Joyce managed to fill a pretty good book with what she could dig up. My contribution, as I mentioned, was the editing; people looking for my prose won't find it here. But people looking for a nice little historical hugger-mugger, with arriviste royalty and Victorian train schedules aplenty, will have a pleasant evening with it, I daresay. And you can always use it as Castle Falkenstein source material. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
3:02 pm	This Has Officially Gone Too Far So last night I dreamed a roleplaying game. It was called Splitting Bullets, and it was a gorgeous hardback designed in the coolest possible sort of retro font, layout, and color (for which I blame the Mad Men marathon), and it was about some sort of parallel-history assassin outfit. The designer (at whose apartment I was crashing for some reason, and who remains nameless in my memory) had released it as the rules beta for a much more complete version of the game he was working on, which had a different title. The worst of it is that I remember having read a really terrific mechanic for "reality fishing" in the game, although it was called something else that I can't remember upon waking. In my dream, I was explaining it in some detail to Steve Long, so imagine my chagrin at being unable to recall it now; this is even worse than the usual "research dream," from which I awaken with a sense of highly useful information read and gone. This is all probably a result of my subconscious busily developing GUMSHOE variations for the upcoming Nosferatu Gambit game, but it is still very, very irksome, because I really liked that reality fishing mechanic. So did Steve Long, so I know it must have been good. (18 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 21st, 2008
3:46 pm	Lessons Learned: Mad Men Marathon Edition 1. Thirteen straight hours of TV is too much TV. That said, the show (like many victims of the Dire Bochco-ization) likely suffers severely from pure episodic viewing. 1a. So we're probably going to watch Season 2 on Netflix when it comes out. 1b. his_regard, gnosticpi, and lhn are totally invited back for those sessions if they like. They were awesome guests. Maybe for one of those sessions, I'll actually make chicken a la king -- this time, we just ate (historically accurate) Kentucky Fried Chicken. 2. An Old Fashioned is even better with applejack than it is with bourbon, and with Basil Hayden's Bourbon, it's already pretty damn good. 2a. Note for purists: Our Old Fashioneds swapped out a splash of Cointreau for the orange bitters. This version documentably goes back to 1908, and is very much in period for Old Fashioneds in the late 1950s, although they probably would have used curacao rather than Cointreau specifically. So get off my back. 2b. I would have made Manhattans if anyone in the show ever drank one. 3. The show is actually pretty good, by the standards of the Dire Bochco-ization Era; its virtues include not actually being an ensemble show (it's a show about Don Draper), having a compelling if not particularly original protagonist (Don Draper), and of course the look and feel of a show about look and feel. 3a. That said, we caught some production-design errors, such as the font on the commuter train station at Ossining and what I'm willing to bet is an out-of-era Smirnoff bottle in one scene. A later scene shows a more-likely Smirnoff design. Also, the Selectric is debuted too early, and Xerox copiers are referenced as unbelievable a year after their debut. No doubt there are others. 3a.1. The whole World Almanac school of dialogue, full of Current Events, is not as badly done as it might be, but individual instances still stick out on occasion. Can we have some day a Nixon-Kennedy story line that doesn't mention makeup? Hmmm? But most of the dialogue was good to great; some of it was simply pitch-perfect. ("I know your generation chose college instead of service, so I'll spell it out for you...") Including one or two of the pitches -- it's nice to see the reasons that Don Draper is the big deal that the script keeps reminding us he is. 3b. That also said, we were simultaneously completely unsurprised by, and thoroughly disbelieved, the big reveal about Peggy. It's quite a feat to make something both predictable and unbelievable. Jokes about "the Bay Ridge Amish" came fast and furious. 3c. I would also note that Don's Secret Origin could have been far more believable and elegant, though again, this thing was so telegraphed that I was surprised not to see a writing credit for Samuel F.B. Morse. 4. Part of the enjoyment of this show, like that of Life on Mars (which, being much better written, earns its transgression more), comes from its great and eager willingness to transgress social norms: in this case, primarily gender relations. (Though the sheer contempt the show has for beatniks and Kennedys is interesting, too.) This insight is neither new nor startling, but it's historically interesting to see transgression-as-enjoyment applied to the mores of today's Hollywood instead of those of the Bible Belt. (Though rampant misogyny is not really that remote from today's Hollywood, so perhaps I'm wrong. Still, the pieties are very definitely violated.) 4a. This is probably related, in a lot of ways, to my previous post about the lacuna in modern theatre. Like graphic violence, there's a point at which something stops being "indict the audience for their secret joy in this misogyny" and becomes "we love misogyny." 4a.1. I say this with some degree of self-knowledge, as watching this show without mollpeartree (who enjoyed it, I should note) would probably have increased the already high locker-room component (between the televised sexism and the free-flowing bourbon) to discomforting levels. (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 17th, 2008
3:02 pm	And Speaking Of PDF Sales My "Golden Age Mutants & Masterminds sourcebook from the alternate history in which H.P. Lovecraft wrote comics for Nedor," Adventures Into Darkness, is now available from DriveThru RPG in the Atomic Overmind section! This version features handy 8.5"x11" sizing, and white page backgrounds to save your yellow toner cartridge! Adventures Into Darkness is also always available at the Ronin Arts store, as well as e23, Your Games Now, and many other fine outlets. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008
3:42 pm	Tales From The Infinite Cutting Room It occurs to me that I haven't mentioned GURPS Infinite Worlds: Collegio Januari yet. The Collegio Januari is, if I do say so myself, a rather clever thoroughgoing fantasy campaign frame for alternate-worlds adventure. (Wizards! Knights! Magic Horsies!) I included it in the original manuscript for GURPS Infinite Worlds, but Steve or someone cut it when the book shrank back down to 240 pages. And now it has been reborn, as a lovely PDF supplement. As one might expect, it's for sale at e23, should you be interested. Don't feel any pressure on my account; I wrote it "on the clock" while working for SJG, so I don't see another nickel if you buy it or don't. Well, maybe feel a little pressure: If it does remarkably well, that will be a data point in favor of my writing more GURPS products for e23 sales. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 10th, 2008
3:15 pm	ENnie Time, ENnie Place Holy cats! I've just gotten my first ENnie Award nominations. Trail of Cthulhu is nominated for "Best Writing" and "Best Rules," as well as receiving an Honorable Mention for "Product of the Year." Pedantically, and for the purposes of resumes, I already have an ENnie Award, since Call of Cthulhu D20 won the "Best Game" Gold ENnie in 2002, and I wrote a chapter of it. But in all truth, that award goes rightly to montecook and revjohn (and ideally, to Dawn Murin, who art-directed and graphic-designed that wonderful look). In a similar spirit of piecemeal claimancy, I can note that Hobby Games: 100 Best is nominated this year in the "Best Regalia" category, though the ensuing regalia will rightly go to James Lowder in the happy event. But I'll happily claim joint credit for Rules and Writing on Trail of Cthulhu with robin_d_laws, although in all honest truth, Sandy Petersen should get a big chunk of my chunk of the Best Rules nomination, since so much of the Trail design process involved me returning to Sandy's original vision for Call of Cthulhu. Online ENnie voting apparently begins in ten days; there will be machine-style mobilization here when that happens. But for right now, I'm just terribly pleased and terribly honored, as are, I'm sure, all the other worthy nominees, whom I congratulate heartily. (17 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008
10:33 am	Two Cities, No Waiting I extended my stay in the Greater Minneapolitan Area by a day to hang about with John and Michelle Nephew, friends and publishers, and as a great bonus, got to share two meals (one of them the Mandatory Breakfast) with jtidball. Before then, Michelle and I strolled through the Science Museum of Minnesota studying its devolution (common to museums of the Middle Holocene) from museum to playground. We took in the "Star Wars: The Science of Merchandising" exhibit, which had the impressive original four-foot Millennium Falcon model, among other neat props and robots and such, but the real highlight was the extraordinarily magnificent dinosaur collection, featuring as its crown jewel this Triceratops, the best one in the world hands down. Not least because Richard Wagner's grand-daughter gave it a magic ring whilst christening it "Fafner" in 1969. No lie. But only such direct contact with a mythic entity could rival CONvergence, which was my main reason for being in the area, and oh boy, did I have a grand time. I'd like to extend special thanks to weasel_king for inviting muskrat_john as a fellow Guest of Honor, since I never get to see him at conventions any more. muskrat_john led mollpeartree and myself into the mean streets of South Minneapolis for a Jucy Lucy (a hamburger cooked with a molten core of cheese), and it did not disappoint. Other culinary highlights included the "tasting tree" at La Fougasse (where John and I regaled a thunderstruck Trace Beaulieu with tales of Hot Doug's) and the lobster corn dogs at Ike's (where cajones and chebutykin regaled us with tales of the lobster corn dogs at Ike's). Other highlights almost too many to mention: I was on fifteen panels, plus the one I crashed ("Game Design"), plus attending opening and closing ceremonies. Some I may have monopolized (though I prefer to say "heavily seasoned") in my Chicagoan-amongst-Twin Citizens fashion, while on others I was one attraction among many, and on the "History and Future of Star Trek" panel I had the rare (for me) experience of being a relative (and relatively silent) mundane as Robert Meyer ("Free Enterprise") Burnett and Daren (scarily uncanny impression of Lenore Koridian) Dochterman led us where no panel has gone before, past the barrier of nerd at the edge of the Galaxy. Mention must also be made of the "Breakfast Cereal Mascot Smackdown" panel, at which petsnakereggie tried his very best to destroy the pancreas of myself, Mark Evanier, Len Wein, cajones, and three members of the Soylent Theater troupe -- we were ordered to consume all defeated cereals, and the most excellent Soylentist Joe Scrimshaw, seated to my immediate left, nearly suffered the fatal consequences of Too Much Science when he combined the lot of them with whiskey. I only goobed out like a big fanboy goober for Marv Wolfman, but I defy anyone who appreciates the true Dracula to remain unmoved in his august presence. Plus yes, yes, Crisis on Infinite Earths. Whatever. Tomb of Dracula, man, that's where it's at. Speaking of Dracula, mollpeartree and I watched (she for the first time) Guy Maddin's Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary at Cinema Rex, the great and powerful movie room of the con (complete with free Ike and Mike), where I also saw the premiere of local film-maker Bill Stiteler's hilarious film THAC0, perhaps best explained as Waiting For Godot meets AD&D. And I saw Daren Dochterman's The Empire Strikes Quack, a mashup of Star Wars First Trilogy footage to the soundtrack to Duck Dodgers In the 24th-and-a-Halfth Century. But an award-winning panel schedule and a good-faith attempt to love Cinema Rex as it deserves meant that many other things could only be enjoyed en passant: I hardly got to any room parties at all (but you know I ate food out of a replicator and drank Romulan ale), missed Connie's Space Lounge almost entirely (thanks not least to the second set by Savage Aural Hotbed and then to fireworks the next night), still haven't seen Soylent Theater (Blue or otherwise), and barely exchanged two words with fellow GoH Eric Flint. I did get to talk with Mercedes Lackey a bit, which I had wanted to do all through the show, and I explained the secret truth of Wall-E to Len Wein (among others), and I talked with lots of other wonderful con staff, con attendees, and fellow panelists -- but not enough. You know what this show needs? Another day. Five days. (Note to Anton: I made it home!) (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 30th, 2008
4:30 pm	Area Man Returns From Origins, Immediately Leaves Area Again Just a quick post to limn the highlights of my Origins Game Fair experience, an experience made possible in so many ways (not the least of which including a bed) by dwatts that I even broke actual sweat while helping him set up and take down the Hero Games booth. This year, I had but one goal: find and purchase a copy of Randall Reed and Vance von Borries' classic wargame Air Assault on Crete, which Avalon Hill published along with a bonus map and counter-set for an invasion of Malta AH scenario. I accomplished it on Thursday; ptevis converted my victory from Tactical to Overwhelming by good-naturedly playing the aforesaid Malta scenario with me on Saturday. Thanks to a lucky choice of invasion beaches, fascism was victorious. A robust, if not extraordinarily impressive or elegant, wargame of its era; the 6.1 rating from Boardgame Geek is about right if you add a point or so for people who like a) hex-and-counter wargames and/or b) invading Malta. Other accomplishments included: * Along with yukon_jack, attending Columbus' storied Comfest, featuring (in reverse order of satisfying-ness): squelchy horrid mud, an interminable version of "Rockin' the Bronx" from Black 47, two songs by fine college-rock band Sun, the rest of Black 47's set, the country cover of "I Want You to Want Me" by Megan Palmer and the Hopefuls, and the legendary fishboat. * Three pint mojitos at the Bodega, immediately following. * An assortment of business-themed chats, which may result in one or two logjams blowing open. * Responding with all due modesty to the gratifying news that Trail of Cthulhu sold very briskly indeed, and to three requests for autographs of the same. * Eating both kinds of meat banh mi from North Market. I want to see, or rather taste, a top-shelf ice cream throwdown between Jeni's Ice Cream of Columbus and Oberweis of Chicago. Jeni's Belgian Milk Chocolate (with Ashland County honey) is better than any Oberweis chocolate I've had, but Oberweis' Black Cherry is better than Jeni's Pear and Riesling Sorbet (which was delicious, but far heavier on the pear than the Riesling) or her Goat Cheese and Cherry Compote (in which the tartness of the goat cheese tended to over-amplify the tartness of the cherries). * Winning 0.0099 of an Origins Award for Hobby Games: the 100 Best, which won for Best Nonfiction Book. This raises my lifetime total to 0.65206586, by my count. * Being interviewed for two podcasts: The Pulp Gamer by Don Dehm, and The Game's the Thing by ronblessing and his lovely wife Veronica. Specific links to come when I know them. * A nice haul of half-price Osprey books. Oh, how I loves Osprey books. * Not killing myself before doing it all over again, with more parties, more movies, and more seminars, next weekend at CONvergence in Minneapolis. Hope to see you all there! (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 20th, 2008
4:22 pm	CONventional Wisdom So Summer Con Season rushes down like Jagganath's cart, leaving me chained to my keyboard as Chicago bursts forth into perfect Doing Nothing weather. Curses, etc. I can assure everyone that cart or no cart, I'll be at Origins in Columbus next weekend (June 26-29). No panels or seminars that I know of, but I'll be hanging around Hero Games or whistling through the Big Bar on 2 when I'm hanging around anywhere, if anyone wants to hook up. People looking to find me at CONvergence (July 3-6) in the Greater Minneapolitan Area will have many, many more chances to ready the sniper rifle of your regard: Thu 3:30pm - 4:30pm -- City as Character New Crobuzon, Gotham City, The Sprawl, Newford, even Minneapolis in War for the Oaks. What authors use their cities in the most interesting ways? How does the city contribute to the story? Paula Fleming, Cabell Gathman, Kenneth Hite, Philip Kaveny, John Shea, Karl Wolff Thu 5:00pm - 6:00pm -- D&D: 4th Edition How is the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons holding up? Metal detectors will be provided at the door for your protection. Jeff Hagen, Kenneth Hite, Rob Johnson, Troy Small Thu 9:30pm - 10:30pm -- Smackdown Panel Cereal Mascot Smackdown - Many will enter but only one will win. Watch out for that Captain Crunch - he's sneaky and vicious and cuts the roof of your mouth! Mark Evanier, Kelvin Hatle, Kenneth Hite, Christopher Jones, Melissa Kaercher, Joe Scrimshaw, Tim Uren, Tim Wick Fri 11:00am - 12:00pm -- 3:10 to Serenity Valley From "Wagon Train to the Stars" to Firefly, Bravestarr, and Cowboy Bebop, a number of series mix Western and SF genres, some more successfully than others. Why does this unlikely combination manage to succeed? Todd C. Hansen, Kenneth Hite, Michael Scott Shappe Fri 12:30pm - 1:30pm -- The Shadow Out of Lovecraft HP Lovecraft was the greatest horror writer of the 20th century. What does that mean for us in the 21st? Dana M. Baird, Roy C. Booth, Pat Harrigan, Kenneth Hite, Melissa Kaercher, Tim Uren Fri 2:00pm - 3:00pm -- Whither OGL? How successful are open gaming licenses? How do companies like Atlas and Fantasy Flight make use of OGL's and is there a case against using them? Kenneth Hite, Stephen J. Miller Fri 5:00pm - 6:00pm -- Indie Games Come and share your finds from independent homebrew and smaller publishers that you've discovered. Kenneth Hite, Rachel Kronick, Stephen J. Miller Sat 12:30pm - 1:30pm -- To Boldly Go: The History and Future of Star Trek Celebrate the rich history of Star Trek as we review what has come before. If you've fallen out of Trek in the last few years, come back and rediscover what you loved about it in the first place. Daren Dochterman, Kenneth Hite, Bridget Landry, Robert Meyer Burnett, Andrew Probert Sat 5:00pm - 6:00pm -- Here Be Dragons... Dragons exist in many mythologies and cultures the world over. Come and learn about the different myths and legends surrounding these creatures. Kenneth Hite, Philip Kaveny, Jason D. Wittman Sat 11:00pm - 11:59pm -- Urban Fantasy The borders of faerie have moved from pastoral England to modern cities. What is the appeal of urban fantasy? Who writes the best stuff? Kenneth Hite, Kelly McCullough, Michael Merriam, Juanita Nesbitt, Adam Stemple, Jody Wurl Sun 9:30am - 10:30am -- Game Mastering Being a successful game or dungeon-master doesn't necessarily come easy. What does it truly take to run a successful and memorable campaign? What happens when you've thought of ten ways to solve a problem and your players pick number eleven? How can you go about leaving your players satisfied and wanting more? Bob Alberti, Kenneth Hite, Rob Johnson, Rachel Kronick Sun 11:00am - 12:00pm -- Bollywood Sci-fi What's coming out of India that has a distinct sci-fi or fantasy flavor? Kenneth Hite Sun 2:00pm - 3:00pm -- Specters, Shades and Ectoplasm The ghost story is a classic tale that never seems to die out. What's the nature of the appeal of a good spooky tale about the restless dead? What do hauntings say about us? Let's talk about the good, the bad and the ugly portrayals of ghosts in genre fiction. Jerrod Balzer, S.D. Hintz, Kenneth Hite, Catherine Lundoff Hope to see everybody there! (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
3:43 pm	The Nosferatu Gambit Herewith, the final of my four proposed campaigns for my Chicago game group. We're *thisclose* to being done with "All the Circling Years" -- two, or maybe three, more sessions, although the timing gets wonky as we get into Summer Con Season -- so soon I will be running one of these four campaigns. Ahh, new campaign smell! THE NOSFERATU GAMBIT You've dwelt in a secret world for decades. Other people go to watch movies like Ronin and The Bourne Identity, but you've lived in them -- where only your skills, your wits, and your knowledge of Europe's clandestine networks of power and crime have kept you alive. But you've just seen the real shadow behind your own secret life: vampires exist, they control governments and worse ... and you've been working for these inhuman fiends without knowing it. Now that you know how the game is truly played, the only way out is to play better and to dig deeper -- the hounds must become the hunters, and follow the trail of Nosferatu wherever, and whenever, it leads. As one might expect from immortal, supernatural beings, time works in strange ways around vampires. As one might expect from the previous sentence, the trail will lead through occasional time travel of an uncanny sort. I'll bring my Michelin road atlas of Europe; the game may expand off the Continent at some point, but for right now, think "Ronin and Bourne Identity with vampires" and you'll be pretty close to the intended feel. System: The GUMSHOE system, as seen in The Esoterrorists and Trail of Cthulhu, likely using Trail's combat modifications and a few other specific genre tweaks. (19 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 16th, 2008
4:02 pm	The Rex of the Old 97 Herewith, the third of four potential campaigns for my Chicago game group. This one owes a great debt to robotnik's "Unknown USA" campaign, which has justly become legendary -- I think of this as the "unauthorized Purist prequel" to his game, which is to say, one without quite so much Nephilim stuff in it. THE REX OF THE OLD 97 The Centennial Exposition of 1876, so the word on the Spirit Telegraph goes, was a missed opportunity. The Civil War busted up America's foundations, and every Jack and Knight and Knave out there has been drawing as many cards as he can to win himself King on the ruins. What could have been a re-Founding became a secret Fort Sumter; magick thrown down and claims made that can't be unmade. The Pinkertons, fresh from smashing the Klan, are trying to nail everything down; the Informationale and the Anarchitects are trying to blow everything up. The Gold Lords and Silver Men have squared off against each other; the Trismos command their strange railway specters, though the Good Roads Club screams that the specters command the Trismos. And word has it that the Great Gray Guns, fled from the South, are massing somewhere in the West, in a town called Tombstone... My initial notion for the game is that it will run over a longish historical scope, possibly finishing up at the Pan-American Exposition in 1901. As with most Unknown Armies games, you will collaboratively determine your own narrative structure: Are you trying to enforce your own cabal's vision of the new America? Are you a band of Anarchitect heralds, or a Pinkerton squad? Do you serve Gold, or Silver, or some other element? Are you freelance heroes, riding in to save the day, or Jacks at the table playing to rake in all the chips? System: Unknown Armies 2nd ed., with magick schools tweaked for the 19th century where necessary. (6 Comments |Comment on this)