A new article on an unpublished World of Darkness project is right here for your perusal. Enjoy, and leave feedback if it strikes you!

Over at the other blog again. If you remember the old Y2JFK short story beginning, this is a companion piece to that.

Hey, gang:

If you're a regular reader here, you're no stranger to the fact that I like to mess around with layout and options and that sort of thing as they pertain to this blog. Of late, I've been entertaining the idea of switching to Squarespace. I've got a new entry on that blog, so if you don't mind, take a quick trip over there and have a look. Comments are on, so have at it.

In game design, "too powerful" is a myth. The actual design should reflect "It needs to cost more." A power or effect should remain pretty true to its original design. Mind control needs to feel like mind control -- you can't take a little bit away from it and hope to elicit the same in-game effect or the same player enthusiasm. A lightning blast needs to be a levinbolt that electrocutes its target, not a wee spark that sizzles foes for a li'l bit of damage. Hyper-speed needs to be fast... no, faster than that. David Bowie's cone of frost breath weapon needs to crystallize targets caught in the blast radius.
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Eddy and I talking about some vampires (etc.) up in the latest White Wolf blogcast.

If you've been paying attention to the Internet for the past 48 hours, you've probably heard about Google's upcoming Wave project. Wow! What a breakthrough.

I'm utterly in love with the creative ethic that the internet has fostered over its comparatively short life. While I certainly don't profess to be a fan of every bit of art, fiction, or other expression published to the web, the fact that it's encouraged people to make is magnificent. Now, with Wave on the horizon, the limits of asynchronous communication aren't going to be a barrier any longer.

The challenge is this, people: Let's do something together. Let's pick a night of the week to all get together and bang out an idea for a game. Then, when we're done, let's play it. No more of the developer in his ivory tower, trickling games down to the plebes below him in a one-way pipeline of you'll-play-what-I-give-you. Let's do this together, and let's have a blast doing it.

This'll probably be a good place to dust off One Hundred Kingdoms, which is as good a place to start as any. I'll post more here as Wave becomes available, so if this sounds like something you'd be interested in, consider yourself invited. 

I’ve been watching the old British Robin of Sherwood series on DVD and it’s got me sort of nostalgic. I remember watching these back in the late 1980s on PBS and fell in love with them. Sure, the production values are a pretty dated, but the patina is part of why I think it's so endearing. I even enjoy the dated soundtrack, which must have been performed on the cheapest synthesizers the band could find. My wife mocks me ruthlessly when I watch them, and she can't make it through a single episode. Watching them brings me back to a time when I had far fewer responsibilities — not that I’m complaining, but there’s a certain sense of bittersweet innocence lost when I watch them.

Some amount of that has carried over into my gaming habits of late, too. I certainly wouldn’t say that I’m one of the new old-schoolers, but getting my hands dirty with the same reckless abandon I had in middle school really scratches an itch for me. No epic storylines, no massive characterization, no commitments is how I’ve been playing recently, and it’s pretty refreshing. There are times when gaming can be a chore, and that’s the last thing I want after a long day at the office building immersive and characterized. Don’t get me wrong, because that scratches another itch that’s maybe less frivolous. Then again, maybe the problem is that I’m too itchy.

So maybe the show didn’t age well, but being able to just enjoy it is a real pleasure, just like being able to put aside the velvet and absinthe of Vampire for a while is a refreshing change of pace. There are other Robin Hoods out there — the new BBC version seemed a bit glossy for my tastes and I’m tentatively looking forward to the new Russell Crowe production — but I have a soft spot for this one and the maybe “unsophisticated” but undeniably fun game philosophy of my early years.

(If you ant to get really nerdy with me about it, I much prefer the Michael Praed episodes to the Jason Connery ones, but I think the opposite might have been true when I was younger.)

You kids and your fancy typing robots.

I don't know how much you know about Scrum, but it's the development framework we use at CCP. In a nutshell, Scrum breaks big projects down into backlogs of features, and a team of developers takes ownership of individual features in the backlog and turns them into something functional. It's the development equivalent of cutting your steak into bites before you eat it. The emphasis is on delivery of features — it lets you deliver iterations that work in some capacity or another, rather than heading toward a given date and having something incomplete when that date arrives.

This morning, as I was up preparing Madeleine's breakfast, she was watching Special Agent Oso, which is a very ugly cartoon about a talking dog that solves kids' problems. It solves these problems by breaking the issue down into "three special steps," and then singing a song as it performs the steps. There I was, at 7:15 this morning, pureeing a banana, a strawberry, and some yogurt, when it dawned on me that this magical raccoon spy uses the same development structure that I do. Obviously, it's not quite as simplistic as that, but the parallels exist. It reminds me of the time when I realized that most of my political outlooks are similar to those of various Batman villains.

Of course, fatherhood means that kid preferences take precedence over those of big people, and Madeleine genuinely enjoys Oso. Presumably, I will one day be able to tell her that Oso and I have similar jobs. I probably won't tell her that I campaigned for Ra's al Ghul.

So, since I'm working on an unannounced potentially vampire-related project at White Wolf/ CCP, it got me in the mood to bust out some of the ol' Succubus Club-style tunes. Here's a thirty-minute DJ set of EBM and futurepop for you to drink blood to.

Assemblage 23, "Decades"
Imperative, "Judas"
Cesium 137, "Agonist"
Dave Gahan, "Kingdom" (Digitalism Remix)
System Syn, "Burning Out"
VNV Nation, "Carry You"
Covenant, "Men"
 

Hey, gang, I know it's been a long time since my last post, but we've been really busy at working wrapping up a big deliverable. As it's getting toward convention season, that means I'll be hitting the party circuit again, and we're working on a little bit of a new format for the party nights. You'll still go and drink on our tab and get some hella dance-floor action going, but we'll be pacing it a bit differently.

Anyway, since I'm talking about parties and music, I can't remember if I posted this before, but enjoy it. It's decidedly not what you're going to hear at a Succubus Club party, but it's a good time nonetheless. This is me and Eric at East Side Lounge last year, working up a crowd on the floor.

I'll get back in gear soon, but there's about another week and a half of visiting parents and new release planning.

New actual play post from the lunchtime D&D game over at One Encounter.

Man, what a bunch of bull.

We're going to paint Baby Girl's room a pale pink, apparently. That's what her room will look like. Pale pink. A room for a baby girl.

What about my room? I had an eminently reasonable idea to make it a "rock room," with murals of album covers painted on the walls. I figured one could have Bark at the Moon, one could have Powerslave, one could have Appetite for Destruction, and one could have something completely out of the idiom, like Louder Than Bombs or something.

"No. That's ridiculous."

Ridiculous? A pale pink room is ridiculous. You try to sell a house with a pale pink room and who's going to buy it? Someone with a girl. You try to sell a house with some kick-ass album covers muraled on the walls and you know who would buy it? Everyone.

"Ridiculous." Please.

Crossposted here.

There is, I think, an element of historicism to the stuff I put together for a fantasy game. As much as I love fantasy as an idea, I strongly dislike a lot of it in implementation. Religion in particular often rankles me in fantasy stories, and the half-formed cultured that behave irrationally but not interestingly. Too often for my tastes, a fantasy religion is too simple or straightforward. Something potentially fascinating like a fire cult — so much potential! — has little more presentation than "Fire good! Kill protagonist." Something like a society of cannibals is... just a society of cannibals. "Flesh good! Kill protagonist."

That, then, is why I think I like this historicity so much. Robert E. Howard said that

There is no literary work, to me, half as zestful as rewriting history in the guise of fiction.

And English fantasist G.K Chesterton remarked

It is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment; to see all ages in a sort of splendid foreshortening. That is the use of tradition: it telescopes history.

I love that trade in primordial human experience. Howard's stories plainly depicted the cultures in which he set them, and he unabashedly let the reader know their real-world analogues. Tolkien's epic The Lord of the Rings draws very heavily from Beowulf and Der Ring Des Nibelungen. I did a lot of the same in Vampire — I plundered history ruthlessly, and placed the vampires inside it. I put the Nibelungs in Demimonde. I do the same in D&D because the presented pantheons don't speak much to me. I don't need Bane, Cyric, Corellon Barkchips, or their "toaster evils" and unbelievably simplistic, because-the-sourcebook-says-so dogmas.

Sure, I can accept a flying, invisible, ethereal Halfling that can shoot at-will lightning, but I have to believe why he's doing it. I don't need setting-justified gods that lead me down the path of the preprogrammed experience when I have Marduk, Thoth, Lugh, Mithras, Mars, Heimdall, and any number lunatic god-kings who placed themselves among the ranks of the divine. I don’t need Zhentarim, Calimshan, or the drow when I have all of history to draw on, like R.E. Howard did — often barely filing off any serial numbers — with his Shemites, Vendhyans, and Picts. I think they resonate more. I think they strike a chord in the cultural memory of people. And, frankly, they're just plain cooler because they actually were.

I've been in this weird frame of mind for gaming recently. On the one hand, I'm having a nostalgic trip down fantasy lane, messing around a bit with some "old-school" style gaming. I ran Rappan Athuk a while back, for example (yes, some dummy was killed by the poo monster; no, it wasn't a TPK). I've been dinking around with a pure-exploration campaign that I haven't yet had time to run. I have maps for a megadungeon concept that I think would be fun. It's vintage nerdity, and it's fun and invigorating.

(Speaking of megadungeons, have you seen Monte's project, and James' project?)

On the other hand, I've been working (admittedly sporadically) on the One Hundred Kingdoms idea, which is a much more narrative-driven experiment, and fairly antithetical to the dungeon-bash lark. I can't figure out whether it's a board game or an RPG, for example. It has goals, which the player selects at the game's outset, and it has various abstractions of traditional RPG concepts like combat, but the ultimate objective is to reach a personal milestone on a national scale. Think of it like The Tudors, and pick your personality and motivation.

But then there's more old-school. I am playing the hell out of some Street Fighter IV, which is a prettied-up version of 1991's Street Fighter II, and finally makes worthwhile use of net play and matchmaking. The underpowered characters have been beefed up, the old play styles work, and just enough new features have been added to stoke the nostalgia but give you something new to master. The new characters aren't as resonant or iconic as the originals, and the boss fights still rely on cheating rather than challenge, but being able to play, bug-free, with every other Street Fighter fan in the world makes that easy to overlook.

Summer season means a chance to add more board games to the mix, too. We've been playing a lot of Carcassone, Citadels, and a little bit of Kingsburg. I'm wanting a few more two-player options, since a lot of evenings involve me and the wife at home. I've got Blue Moon on the slate for that two-player goodness, but in a more masculine idiom, I'm going to grab Age of Conan's board game and the apple of my eye for the past several years that I haven't yet managed to acquire, Conquest of the Empire.

I don't watch a lot of TV, but Life on Mars was showing as I was running music trivia at the bar last night. Is there any sensible reason that a biopic about the historical Dracula hasn't been made with Michael Imperioli cast as Vlad Tepes? Someone out there has the power to make this happen. Maybe he doesn't have the greatest range of all actors in the world, but he's practically a body double.

Demimonde is now available for Kindle and iPhone! To read it on the iPhone, you'll need the Kindle app for iPhone, but it's free. Amazon has the book listed at only $3.99 for the time, being too, so you're already getting away with something. You can also download a free sample of the book in this format from the product page.

I hope to have a post about the whole iPhone and Kindle experience up soon, but for the time being, just knowing that it's there is enough for me.