Random Dialogue

After a fashion, this past weekend felt like the first ‘real’ weekend of the year. I had a very busy week, more than making up for any sense of slackeryness from the week before. New timetables, new projects, a lot of new energy output for the new year.

Saturday night we had a going away party for Ben Davenport, who is heading outward bound this Thursday. We had our usual fun, hanging with folks we’ve known for many years now. Ben made food for us, and it reminded me of the skillz that man has in the kitchen. Ladies, he’s single! I spent most of the night talking, but there were some games played by others, and some plans made. On the way home, I picked up Katie from Jeff and Viv’s place and ended up rocking out on Guitar Hero with Elijah for an audience. While my inability to align my fingering with my picking made me only a player of only passing skill, the musicians in the house put on a great show.

Ben will be landing in Zurich, where he’ll be writing about his experiences and taking copious pictures. Make sure and give his journal of his spanish adventure a look-see if you haven’t already done so.

Sunday’s game was, for me, the best gaming experience I’ve had during the course of the game. I might go so far as to say it was the best game session I’ve run. You can read Alan’s notes on the evening, but the notes don’t quite get across the sheer fun-ness of the events as they unfold. We were all in a good mood, we got some great roleplaying moments in, and we had an extraordinarily tense combat. A character was nearly ripped limb from limb by a dragon, saved only from a grisly demise by the strength of her anger. The Cormyr game was great, the first epic task I’d set myself as a GM since high school. Shackled City feels somehow weightier. The plot may have some holes, and once we get into the thick of it I’m going to have to do a lot of thinking on my feet, but I can honestly say I feel like running this game is special.

Tonight I finally managed to kick my streak from the last few weeks. The cards were coming to me all night, and when they weren’t coming I did a good job of getting out while the getting was good. According to Alan’s results page it’s been six games since I had a decent showing. About fricking time. All I can say is, this is why we don’t play for money.

This week: Electroplankton on Wednesday (for real this time). That’s the only thing I’m relatively sure I can nail, so that’s all I’ll mention. Tomorrow should be SR, with a wedding gift and a housewarming party scheduled for Saturday.

I did some mental juggling tonight about my two RPGs, Shackled City and Metahistorical Evidence. Every GM that I know does this, using spare compute cycles to just think at their campaigns. Using these spare cycles, we can get GMing homework done for the next session while doing something else. (I like to do it while I’m at the gym, while I’m not paying attention to the TV screen in front of me.) Most of the time, I’m thinking organization and plot; (”Does the mage want to fireball them as soon as he sees them, or should he gloat first?” “Will that informant die at the hands of a fire elemental or an earth elemental?”) Tonight I thought a little bit about presentation.

For the most part, I don’t do a lot of voice acting. I have a few pitches that I ease into in order to get across the general tone of my character (women are softer and higher, paladins and warriors are gruffer and louder, sneaky bastards sound like they’re in the mob), but I don’t have ‘voices’ for my NPCs. I’ve often wondered if that gets annoying for my players. I always try to make sure that they know who’s talking by other cues, but I know that on more than one occasion I’ve used a vocal tic that didn’t show up in the future when encountering that character. I figure as long as they know who I am, that’s the important part.

When I do have a ‘voice’ for a character, it’s usually over the top. That’s the funnest part of DMing for me, when a character’s personality is so strong that I just have to do a voice. The voice I used for a fat noble woman in a wilderness city in the Cormyr game, even used for a few words, is enough to set the players from that campaign on edge. That same campaign saw me use a verbal tic through an interrogation by the players, only to drop it towards the end of the encounter when they had scared the snitch enough to drop the fake accent. The change was along the lines of ‘weak/incompetent to ’soulless/deadly’, and it set the players back on their heels quite a bit.

I also love stereotypes. While in the real world they’re annoying and should be avoided, in RPGs they’re wonderful shorthand. A quick grunt along the lines of “Whatzyouwant?” with a thick tongue is enough to establish a typical orc. My favourite characters of all time to play are (roughly tied) goblins and watcher spirits. Goblins are about medium-high-pitched, with a slight gutteral quality, and completely spineless. They’re brave, to be sure, when in groups. Playing a goblin mob is lots of fun, and allows me the chance to use interesting insults like ‘Tall Sack’ and ‘Big Nose’. Individually, a goblin is basically a skeleton trying to escape it’s meaty shell before the adventurers off it. Most of my goblins give up information willingly to the brave party members in the hopes they’ll live to see another day. Most of that information is pure fabrication, of course, but most groups I’ve run have been full of untrusting sorts. It all evens out. Watcher spirits, from Shadowrun, are basically ethereal balls of magic pulled from astral space. They’re essentially one-use spirits; You give them one task and they do it until they discorporate back into the eather. Character-wise, they’re very high pitched and (more or less) puppy dogs with learning disabilities. All of my Watcher spirits also refer to their summoner as ‘boss’, which usually leads to some eye rolling.

Ahh…to be young and have a lifespan of 1d6 hours.

Sunday was a very, very long roleplaying-oriented session. I’m glad we have RP heavy sessions every once in a while, but I think I may have let the length screw me up. In fact, I think I bored my players, which is like Rule #1 in the ‘Book of stuff GMs shouldn’t do.’ If I did, I apologize. Tarik’s Company were lauded for their bravery at the annual Demonskar Ball, and there was a good deal of in-character romance. This level of character relationship building with NPCs is new for me, and I’m still struggling with how do deal with it. This week I’m trying to handwave through about a month and a half’s worth of time with the players. I’m not sure how well it’s going to go.

Yesterday I did some shopping. While on the upside I bought two Star Wars DVDs (Episodes I and III, finishing my collection), I very boringly purchased tax and finance software as well. I am officially a boring old man. Bah.

Tonight the Shadowrun players wrapped up their time in San Francisco via a violent encounter with the Yakuza. They don’t really know why the Yaks were doing what they were doing there, but they’re sure it’s not good. They’ve (wisely, I think) moved themselves back to the Seattle area for the moment. Some perspective will give them clarity, I’m sure.

Still playing lots of WoW, but it’s really cutting into my writing time. As a result, the voice that pops up when I put fingers to keyboard has been laying into me pretty harshly of …

“Why the hell aren’t you writing a review for Electroplankton, you jackass?”, he interrupts.

“Silithus and War Effort and Felwood and level 57…”, I babble. He responds harshly.

“Shut. Up. Just put down your epeen and step away from the dwarf. Go write about something. Anything. You finally found your voice and you’re not using me, you inordinate dork. If you want to write about Massive games, that’s fine. You’ve even got that site that you spent so much time setting up. Go write something there about the relative attractiveness of Tauren or something.”

“Bah. No one is even reading the damn thing. No one reads this stupid thing either, for that matter.”

Eye rolling. “OMG. By the curls on Mark Twain’s beard you hapless git, it doesn’t matter. You write. It’s what you do. It’s that thing that you do when you’re doing things. If you’re doing something else, you’re thinking about what you could be writing. You’re happy when you write. You’re especially happy when you get to write about things you’re interested in. See, you’re smiling because you’re talking about writing. Stop using me as some sort of public inner dialogue and put me back to work!”

Oh fine.

This would be, according the calendar, the first day of the fourth week of 2006. Already, I’m wondering why I wanted 2005 to move on. I was so looking forward to 2006.

This week has been … long. It was one of those weird experiences where I constantly found myself doing stuff, but didn’t get a single thing done.

As a capper, I had a truly surreal 36 hours this weekend. Friday night, the snow was heavy enough for us to notice. It wasn’t something we thought twice about, though. This is Wisconsin, after all. Katie headed out for work around 4:30. At 4:49, I got a call from her. She was in a ditch. Thankfully, she and the car were fine. An accident had happened right in front of her, and she was left with the choice of a car’s rear-end or the ditch. She chose … wisely.

In the dark, near an accident, while it’s snowing heavily, is not the best time to get a car out of a ditch. We tried, but didn’t get anywhere. We left it overnight, and Saturday morning saw us there bright and early. Katie’s dad and I used the age-old forces of kitty litter and simple machines against the stupidity of snow. We won on the first try.

Saturday during the day saw us at Katie’s folks place, at Barnes and Noble (Katie worked again last night), at a Chinese place with my family for dinner, and at Alan De Smet’s for another game of Descent. Again, got nothing really constructive done. But, what the hell.

I’ve gone deep into the belly of World of Warcraft, and I’m not coming back. I need to play a game to have fun, and I’m finding a lot of enjoyment in content that I’ve never seen before. I’m also having a lot of fun playing with my wife. We’re pushing 15 with our Druid/Rogue duo. I’ve also decided to bite the bullet, and have joined another guild. The Concillium seems like a nice group of folks.They hold regular events, and I’m looking forward to finally enjoying the fruits of my labour.

Oh! Almost forgot; We did get one thing accomplished this week. The eternally kind Mr. Langkamp has lent us use of an armchair. I’m actually sitting in it as I type this, and the comfort level is quite high. Thanks for being a keen human, sir.

Folks should just be showing up for game, so I’ll wrap up.

This week: Book Review Monday, SR on Tuesday, Game Review and WoW on Wednesday, Editorial Friday.

Here’s hoping even half of that gets done.

In the last four days we’ve gotten back into both of my ongoing campaigns. We wrapped up chapter three in the Dungeons and Dragons Shackled City game on Sunday, with the heroes wiping up the last of the dungeon’s denizens in an effective series of sweeps. They’ve returned to the city of Cauldron with the missing wands and a buttload of loot. Next week we’re going to be spending that loot, advancing time, roleplaying, and generally making the players feel good about characters I have horrible plans for.

Yesterday we reopened the box on the Shadowrun campaign, ‘Metahistorical Evidence’. The players finished their second run with some canon-inspired flourishing. One man’s Deus Ex Machina is another’s plot-device, is all I have to say. Next week they’re starting with a fight and will likely start to figure out why the campaign is named the way it is.

Otherwise a fairly standard weekend. Monday was MLK Jr.’s day, and as a result my hooky-playing friends and I enjoyed the dungeon-crawling goodness of Descent. I have to say, I’m really digging on Fantasy Flight’s work. It’s nice that we have a boardgame maker here in the states now … all those Germans and their smarm because of Settlers was getting old.

Editorial for Slashdot on Friday. That should be entertaining.

You may recall a while back I fired Thunderbird from dealing with my RSS feeds. While I’ve used it for a while now as a mail reader (and love it with a deep and burning passion), it had a flaky/nonintuitive RSS reader. My bloglines subscription filled me with glee and happiness, and the world was as it should have been.

Thunderbird 1.5 is breaking up my relationship with Bloglines. The new RSS reader is ridiculously fast (it pulled down the info from my 200+ feeds so fast I didn’t even realize it had done anything), easy to organize, and extremely easy to use. I need to act aggressively to get my stuff on Bloglines cleared out, but after that I’ll be in T-bird heaven. Yay for technology!

The most satisfying part was the ease of transition. In Bloglines’ favour, it was a matter of moments to export my feeds as an xml file, and another moment to import them in Thunderbird. Strike against T-bird: It didn’t preserve my folders (I’m not sure if that’s possible). The upside to that was going through and pruning out dead feeds and the like. Here’s a handy tip for setting all of those ‘new’ feeds to read. Right click on the feed and hit the ‘k’ key. That means ‘Mark Folder As Read’. It will set all of the entries in that feed to read, and you can move on to the next one.

By default the reader comes with some interesting choices. You can choose to load the actual web page the RSS feed references, or just the summary. Slower connections may want the latter. It comes with the unrealistic setting of ‘check for new messages every 100 minutes’. You’ll definitely want to fix that. Individual feeds can have individual settings; If you want to archive a feed specifically, you can do that with ease.

One element that is already sending happy signals to my brain is the Search feature. T-bird’s email search is quick and painless, and the same is true for the RSS Search. You have several criteria open to you for searching, and it pops up hits as it finds them.

I’m already a big fan of this aspect of Thunderbird. I highly recommend it to anyone managing a large number of RSS Feeds.

Pulp fantasy is a genre that hasn’t seen much love in recent years. High fantasy, the ground occupied by the Forgotten Realms and the like, has been the dominating style of fantasy RPG for D&D players. Which is why I, I have to say, Eberron tickles me pink.

Gritty and rude compared to the civility of the realms, the Eberron campaign setting has loads of potential for new and interesting storytelling devices. The online game, DDO, is using the dungeoncrawl in new and interesting ways. I’ll comment on that in my review on Slashdot. The pen-and-paper format, and the novels that come out of that crowd, have more freedom to explore other pulp traditions.

The chase scene has been used to great effect throughout movie-making and novel writing, and seems to be one that the Eberron line developers are getting a big kick out of using in these early years of Eberron’s development. The official campaign modules are full of chase sequences. The novel I just finished, Marked for Death, is essentially one long chase scene. Thanks to some believable dialogue and good planning, it works. It works in spades.

This first novel in a trilogy about the long-vanished Dragonmark of death tells the tale of a young elf girl with a problem. She’s the first bearer of a Dragonmark of this kind in several hundred years, and as a result forces from the world outside her small down on the edge of the Mournlands descend to take her captive. Her adoptive father, his friend, and a band of knights are all that stand between her and decidedly dark forces.

The novel begins and ends with scenes of violent battle, a trademark of this novel’s action. The setting of Eberron is still recovering from a long war, and the hatred and pain of battle is keenly felt by the combatants in this tale. There is little to do with honor or heroism in the combat this book offers; Survival at all costs is the hallmark of most of the conflict.

Despite the bleak surroundings and sometimes gorey details, Marked for Death manages to come across as a hopeful tale. The protagonist isn’t a man of convictions or moral authority. Like most of the individuals portrayed in this setting, he is a palette of greys. Absolute black and white are hard to find here, but soldier-turned-lawman Kandler of Breland displays courage and hope in the race to save his adopted daughter. He and the other main characters are both interesting and puzzling. The ’shades of grey’ in the setting allow for far more than simple fantasy stereotypes, and it’s enjoyable to tease out the worth of a character over the course of a book.

Marked for Death is, like its setting cousin City of Towers, is better than a pulp fantasy novel has a right to be. This first in a trilogy sets up an interesting thought puzzle and introduces some characters that I look forward to learning more about. I recommend this book to folks looking for something out of the ordinary in their fantasy fare.