Gamester At Large

Monster of the Week: campaign update

2011-12-17T11:41:00.000+13:00

Monster of the Week campaign at IndieGoGo.

I’ve got the next draft of the game done, and it has been sent off for editing. I’m in the process of updating the playtest files to match the changes, so funders and other playtesters can expect to see that in the next few days.

We’re only $143 off the first bonus goal, and $393 off the second, so please spread the word!

I’m particularly excited about the custom dice now – I’ve been exchanging emails with Chessex about them. They’re amazingly helpful and friendly, and have made up two prototypes for me. I really want to get to the $1500 level so that I can get these made up for you all.

Here’s a picture of one of the prototype dice, so you can see why I’m excited.

Monster of the Week campaign update

2011-12-10T16:31:00.001+13:00

Monster of the Week campaign: going very well at over $1000.

Next stop, the Summoned hunter playbook and then custom monster dice.

There's an update on the campaign page with the image I plan to use on the dice: Monster of the Week on IndieGoGo.

Monster of the Week: Preorder/Fundrasier is live now.

2011-11-28T23:21:00.001+13:00

So, if you want to help see it read and look the best it can, check out Monster of the Week on IndieGogo.

Oh, I Forgot To Mention The New Johannes Cabal Novel

2011-09-13T19:11:00.000+12:00

I have been greatly enjoying the Johannes Cabal books, and the third one - Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute - just came out. It's just as good as the previous stories. Recommended to everyone, if you don't like these you must be a bad person.

Here's Some Good Books I've Been Reading

2011-09-11T18:26:00.001+12:00

First, Monster of the Week relevant works. I seem to have been on a bit of a monster hunting reading binge recently.

I absolutely love Harry Connolly's Twenty Palaces series (Child of Fire, Game of Cages, Circle of Enemies). I really like the guy telling the story, a chap called Ray Lilly. [Astoundingly mild spoiler] He got involved in some nasty magical events and was recruited by the Twenty Palace Society, a group of sorcerers dedicated to killing all the other sorcerers who endanger the world. It's a pretty grim series, as Ray was a semi-professional criminal before all the magic and stuff. That and the fact that magic can be used for some very scary purposes. The action and mystery side reads a bit like Raymond Chandler or James Ellroy, and the spells and magical creatures are terrible and awesome. Recommended if you like the sound of the Dresden Files, but with all the cute stuff removed.

Also good are Mike Carey's Felix Castor books. These follow a London exorcist in a world where the dead have come back - ghosts, zombies and werewolves are all becoming more common. As a detective, he's as hard-boiled as Ray Lilly. The stories are generally a mystery centered around a ghost problem, although usually not in a straightforward way. As the series has gone on, it has also built on what's gone before (both in the novels and in Castor's backstory) to add more depth to the world. There's a very detailed sense of Castor's London as well - it feels like Carey might have paced out the places that chases happen, that sort of thing. The mysteries are pretty grim here too. Recommended for the same reason as Connolly's books, above.

Larry Correia's Monster Hunter International is another good one. Not as good as the other two, but good. It's in much more standard techno-thriller mode, with lots of guns and violence and a thread of libertarian "anything to do with government is bad, anything to do with private enterprise is good" in there. But the basic monster hunting ass-kicking action is great. I haven't read the other two books in the series yet, but plan to get to them soon.

In another direction completely, Harry Sidebottom has a good historical adventure series set in Roman times. They follow what the afterwords explain is a historical character - a Roman general originally an Angles from past the German frontier. It seems like the historical record is just a few mentions for the guy so there's plenty of room to add adventures, and Sidebottom has done a great job doing so. He also manages to fit in a lot of historical details as the story goes on. Recommended for anyone who likes reading Roman historical adventures.

Quick Game Review: Blowback

2011-09-11T17:26:00.002+12:00

The regular game had one missing and one sick but present, so we did a one-off of something we hadn't tried. It was Blowback, which is an unofficial game of Burn Notice.

We quickly put together a couple of ex-spies and their civilian friends, and I threw together a pretty basic plot. Character generation is simple, but I think we went a bit too quick. Additionally, two players isn't really enough for the game. I suspect the sweet spot is 3-5 players plus GM. Maybe we should have gone with a single professional and single civilian with just the three of us there.

The mission worked well, although we stumbled on a few of the rules. I really liked the way that you do a section of preparation and intelligence gathering, then make a plan and execute it, quite separately. The four skills the game uses even have totally different effects in each phase, which adds a lot to the feel of things.

One of our rules errors was one that made things a little easy for the agents, so I think we didn't get quite the feel of things going out of control on the operation that I suspect is what normally happens.

Overall impression was positive, but that we picked a bad way to try it out. Recommended if you want to play a game like Burn Notice or find the idea of the innovative preparation/operation mechanics intriguing.

Fright Night V - 29th October, Wellington

2011-08-24T16:34:00.001+12:00

Any local horror gaming fans, check out Fright Night V. A small convention of horror gaming for Halloween.

I'll be there running one half of a Monster of the Week double feature/crossover.

Review: The Fiasco Companion

2011-08-14T16:15:00.001+12:00

I am a huge fan of Fiasco, and it's one of my go-to convention/one shot games due to its simplicity and the way it almost always generates great play. So getting the new Fiasco Companion was a no-brainer for me.

The book is mainly filled with advice - some general and some specific, such as convention play advice or how to build your own sets.

I used the advice on convention play yesterday, and it was all good. Those two games got into gear a bit quicker than I was used to, and both were really good fun.

There's also four new sets included, and a softer version of the tilt/aftermath tables that can be used for games that are aiming more at "comedy of embarrassment" rather than "death and mayhem". One of the games I played yesterday was "Regina's Wedding" using the soft tables, and it was really good fun. It definitely captured a lighter but still hilarious feel (it was a bit like a wedding version of "Death at a Funeral", indeed we even included a naked drugged character who would have been played by Alan Tudyk).

Overall, the Companion is a solid chunk of new stuff for the money and anyone who plays Fiasco regularly is sure to get their money's worth out of it.

Read-through Review: On the Ecology of the Mud Dragon

2011-07-25T22:24:00.002+12:00

On the Ecology of the Mud Dragon is a short comedy game by Ben Lehman. The players are mud dragons, sort of like the swamp dragons in Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, if they could talk and make up unlikely plans.

It seems like it's going to produce a funny one-shot, with plenty of random tables to seed your silliness, including one that generates the plan that your dragons are trying to pull off. So you may find yourself in the big city, opposed by a group of humans, hoping to get some candy and respect, and your plan involves really loud farting noises.

Your dragon is rated on things like laziness, patheticness, etc. When you need to roll, you'll be trying to overcome one of your vices and be more like your noble draconic ancestors. Generally you will not.

That sums up the game, I'd say. It's short, and what's there has plenty of fodder for creating your own stupid little dragon hijinks. Long term play is not really a thing, but I suspect it will be a great one shot, or game for off nights. I will certainly take it along to run at Games on Demand type events, too.

If the setup sounds good, I'd advise grabbing a copy, especially given the "pay what you think it's worth"option for the pdf.

Kindle Update

2011-06-16T22:13:00.006+12:00

Okay, so it's six months down the track - how is the Kindle now you ask? Fantastic. It's now got to the point that I actively avoid paper type books.

It's small enough to carry almost everywhere, the battery is essentially unlimited (I have had it run out of power once, mainly because I forgot to charge it for about a month). It has effectively unlimited capacity (I think mine has around 200 books in it at the moment, using ~10% of its memory). It's pleasant to read and has boosted my reading speed a bit (I'm not sure why, though).

Downsides: it's no good for stuff you need to flip through (gaming pdfs, reference books, that sort of thing), and on the paperback sized model you might as well just not bother with pdfs (my phone is better).

If you are sitting on the fence, I heartily recommend getting one.

Here's Some Good Books I Read Recently

2011-06-16T21:51:00.022+12:00

The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie. Gritty, fun fantasy that makes a point of putting a big (or little) twist on each fantasy cliche in it. Grim but entertaining, maybe halfway between A Song of Ice and Fire and The Black Company stories? Logen Ninefingers (or "The Bloody Nine") is my favorite character in fiction for some time, a terrifying barbarian champion who is getting into middle age and just over all the fighting and nonsense. He's great.

And I finally read George R R Martin's Song of Ice and Fire books, too. Spurred on by the TV show, I suppose, although after the books I didn't feel quite so keen on watching it (possibly because so much stuff had to be cut). In any case, good but with some flaws. He's way to keen on adding point of view characters, something I'm not keen on in general. The sex and violence also grows tiresome. It's all so... sordid. And written just a little bit too larger than life to be believable.

Moving away from fantasy novels, I also really enjoyed James Gleick's The Information. It's a bit of a whirlwind tour of information theory and the way information has become more important through history. Lots of great stuff, although I felt it tailed off a little abruptly when he got to the present day.

Walter Jon Williams has a sequel to This Is Not A Game, called Deep State. It is better than the first one, and the first one was great. I recommend the pair of them to everyone interested in science fiction, gaming's growing intersection with the rest of life, and technothrillers.

My Games Site

2011-06-11T18:51:00.007+12:00

Site is now back at the expected address, genericgames.co.nz.

Monster of the Week on Twitter

2011-06-11T16:50:00.007+12:00

I just set up an account for sharing news and info as I gear up to into open beta testing. Go follow @MotW_rpg if you want to stay up to date about what I'm doing.

There's a button to mash on the righthand sidebar, too.

Monster of the Week update

2011-05-11T22:27:00.004+12:00

I've been working pretty feverishly on Monster of the Week (the Apocalypse World hack edition) for a while now, and it's currently solid enough for playtesting. Currently there are three games going, only one of which has me involved.

It's a game of ass-kicking monster hunters, inspired by Supernatural, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Fringe, The X-Files, Hellboy, BPRD, The Dresden Files and stuff like that.

As a teaser, here's a look at the Divine hunter class book.

I'm keen to get it out to other playtest groups, so if that little bit of info sounds good let me know at mike.sands@genericgames.co.nz and I'll let you at the playtest files.

Time & Temp

2011-02-04T17:56:00.000+13:00

I've played a couple of one-shots of Time & Temp over the past few weeks, enough to have some stuff to say about it.

Firstly, it is a fun and funny game. The combination of characters who aren't really good at anything with difficult to solve problems and time travel is just great. The system works smoothly, although it takes a few minutes to get into the swing of it (and I did make one major error in the first game, although it was easy to correct in hindsight, and it didn't detract from the game).

Coming up with scenarios is fun too! As the GM (General Manager) you really just need a time and place and something anachronistic to go on. My two games have been about the Dodo Liberation Front (eco-warriors going back to defend the wildlife of Mauritius from sailors) and a Norwegian supremacist who had gone back to the 13th century to create a high-tech Norwegian world empire. In both cases, the temps made good use of their "skills" to prevent both problems.

As GM, you do need to look over the paradox and challenge rules very carefully - there are a few things that aren't described very clearly. Check out the game's website - Ravachol has written an FAQ and some examples that help a lot in the understanding. I recommend checking those out too before you run a game.

Overall, great game - I really look forward to playing some more (and seeing what happens in an extended run).

Actual Play: Lamentations of the Flame Princess/Tower of the Stargazer

2010-12-20T22:48:00.000+13:00

In my Monday group's usual holiday season tradition, we are trying a few one off in the lead up to Kapcon. Last time it was a Monster of the Week playtest, this week we did a bit of old school renaissance with Lamentations of the Flame Princess, using the introductory adventure Tower of the Stargazer.

The game certainly brought back a lot of nostalgia, and I thought that the rules lived up to their promise from reading through - everything was fairly streamlined and intuitive (at least compared to actual old school D&D or the old school rulesets that pretty much just recreate the old rules. It also had a lot more flavour in the character classes than Dungeonslayers (our only other recent foray into this style). Dungeonslayers is a fine lightweight set of rules, but it felt a little flat to us after a few sessions.

Anyway, we got some characters rolled up - one player taking two after I mentioned that multiple characters and/or hirelings might be a good idea. The fighter also bought a dog - obviously a terrier given its low rolled hit points! So we had the Pants siblings (cleric of the Mist Goddess and specialist - that's a thief to the rest of us), a halfling and the fighter and dog. No hirelings, as they ran out of money but maybe there'll be some next time.

I basically set them up with the beginnings of a Western Marches style game, with a small village and nearby military fort on the border of The Empire, with only rumours and ruins beyond. The key rumour (given to the two siblings played by one player, because he put his hand up when asked "who has a wizard as a parent?") was a story about a place constantly hit by lightning containing lots of treasure and magic. This is about the most obvious lead in to The Tower of the Stargazer that you could have.

I'll hold off on anything spoilery about the adventure, but we had fun as they explored. They searched and tried this and that, finding lots of weird stuff, some treasure, some odd magical things, some monsters and a fair chunk of the story behind why it is all there and like it is. We got about half of the place explored in the evening, with a natural cutoff as they needed to retreat back to town in order to (a) heal up and (b) flog off some loot. I was happy to see the dog get the first kill of the game, and they narrowly avoided any of the party being killed (there were three or four chances that someone could have died, and the halfling only made it by 1 hit point on one of them).

Good fun, overall. Not sure if I'm ready to commit to a full on old school campaign, but I certainly want to see them explore the rest of the tower and maybe we can come back to the characters for some of the other adventures later on. Death Frost Doom also looks pretty cool, and Hammers of the God too. I should mention that I really respect Raggi's adventures, because they provide places that (from reading) look really cool to explore, they're really dangerous adding a big sense of caution, and for the GM there's a good story as to why the place is there, why things are like they are and how all the little elements fit in. The sense of logic to each place really makes them work for me, and gives you a good base to improvise extra details off when you are running it. They're fun to read, and this one was more fun to gradually reveal as they explored it.

I bought a Kindle!

2010-11-03T10:33:00.002+13:00

Kind of on impulse, kind of due to a confluence of suggestions and the current exchange rate, I bought myself a Kindle ebook reader. It turned up in the mail last Tuesday and I've been reading stuff on it happily since then - except for a now quite obsolete feeling paper edition of The Fall, received as a birthday present (note: not quite as original as The Strain was, but just as exciting).

The text is very readable, and seems to be somewhat easier on the eyes than an actual book (and much nicer than an LCD screen). I've been reading faster using it, maybe because you have to do less work (no movement of pages, etc). It has the obvious advantage of being able to hold ~3000 books in a package that is about the size of a paperback, except much thinner and slightly lighter. Another nice service is that many of the Amazon books have a free sample, allowing you to read the first chapter or two of something for free to decide if you want to buy it.

Disadvantages are that the "instant delivery" of new texts makes it easy to spend a lot of money, and that some books are restricted by region, meaning now and again I am prevented by publishing restrictions from giving people money in exchange for their goods. I assume that the publisher and author would actually like me to buy their products, but it seems that some confluence of dumbness prevents this. The screensaver is also a little annoyance, as you can't customize it at all and some of the images aren't so great (particularly the creepy picture of Emily Dickinson.... eek!).

Oh, and it's not going to be any use for pdf game texts, something I would quite like to have available in this format. I think that the ideal electronic device for these is a few years away (or maybe just too expensive - I'm looking at you iPad).

Overall, I recommend the thing. It is good, and means I don't need to worry about getting more bookshelves quite as soon as I might have.

Gaming Update

2010-11-03T10:18:00.001+13:00

Not much to review over the past few months, but I did jut buy myself copies of Time & Temp, How We Came To Live Here, Dead of Night and some Trail of Cthulhu scenarios. Expect reviews of those texts soon and reviews after play some time later.

I'm still MCing one game of Apocalypse World and playing in another. This is a fantastic game, and I highly recommend it. Even if a post-apocalyptic setting doesn't really do it for you, it's worth a serious look. In play, it generates really great, emotional character stuff all the time. As an example, one of the advancement options is "create a second character to play as well as your first one", something I have done in the game I'm playing in. The new character comes in somewhat disconnected to the existing characters and story, of course, and he spent two sessions as an outsider, really, to the things going on. Then, at the end of that second session a few move results suddenly brought him right into the centre of everything that is happening (specifically, some responsibility for causing the apocalypse and a hint of how to repair the world). It's awesome stuff, now he's got a huge plan to save the world ahead of him. The abilities of the characters to change the world (even just the local part of it) make for great play, as much when you fail a roll as when you succeed. So play it!

I didn't mention that I got my boxed set of FreeMarket in early August. It's pretty! The game is the same, so no news there, but the components are lovely. It looks like they even have some copies left, so if you were thinking about grabbing it there you go.

More about Apocalypse World

2010-08-05T18:53:00.000+12:00

I have begun another Apocalypse World game, this time as a player rather than MC. It's interesting that the experience is very different, more distinct than I had expected.

This is probably partly because I'm out of practice at just playing games, these days, almost always running things for my regular group. It's partly, too, that I built my character thinking mainly about what would be awesome but didn't spend any time thinking about who the character was and how he got there. That made positioning myself a little harder, although now I've had time to digest the game and think about it, I have a better handle on him and most importantly a plan that will almost certainly lead to chaos.

The game was shaped right from the beginning by some significant, and missed, rolls. The characters are me with a Battlebabe, a Hocus and a Brainer. We live around a bar that existed under the protection of a bike gang.

The first play-driving failure was on the Hocus's session start move, with a death and a desertion (specifically, a break with his brother) in the cult. Later, I managed to aggravate the entire bike gang and only ended that by killing their leader and taking another one hostage to walk out alive. Oh, and the brainer failed a puppet strings roll that ended with another gang member dying. So, overall it was fairly undirected chaos.

I think we maybe stepped into play a little soon, but the chaos - especially the local power vacuum - leaves us in an interesting place for the second session. We've been throwing some ideas around, and I suspect that the second game will work a bit better for all of us.

Looking forward to session two.

Regarding Apocalypse World, my high opinion stands. Very good game.

Adnan's Junkyard: Apocalypse World first session.

2010-07-19T23:33:00.000+12:00

I pre-ordered Apocalypse World a while back, and got the pdf. I have been really wanting to play since then, as this game is damn good. I've been meaning to write a review, but I didn't feel like I could do it justice without a bit of play.

Which has now been done - we did the first session of a game about a savvyhead and his assorted helpers and strays. Aside from Adnan the savvyhead, we have Jackson (brainer), Keeler (gunlugger) and Lavender (skinner). We generated quite a bit of detail about the world around them, although interestingly nobody volunteered anything about exactly what had happened to the world. There's a bit that's implicit given what came up in the session, of course.

Two of the characters had particularly interesting histories (by which I mean fuel for future complications). Adnan used to live in Grome's holding, but a year ago moved to his junkyard to be an independant operator selling his services to all comers. Jackson used to be the right hand of a hocus, from the sounds of it mind controlling recalcitrant followers and the like. But there was a coup, and after killing the rest of the leaders they threw Jackson in a river to drown, but instead he washed up at the junkyard. As the session went on we found that he'd taken in a few other random wanderers too.

The day in the life as suggested from in the MC's First Session instructions was pretty fun, as they all had a turn with the more appealing moves they had. Jackson spent a lot of time doing violation glove powered in brain puppet strings on anyone he could, for later. Lavender did similar with hypnotic, and now has hold over Adnan and Jeanette (a raiding gang member). They also uncovered a mysterious buried thing - they hoped it was a crashed, buried plane but it turned out to be a weird tunnel full of strange fungus-like stuff, and goo. They decided to seal it back up but I have a feeling that stuff is not gonna stay dormant any longer. Plus, they killed a bunch of dudes from another nearby group in the process of claiming it.

So, plenty of stuff to work on for building fronts going forward. I look forward to thinking that stuff through. We have the final chapter of our Trail of Cthulhu game to get through before we get back to this.

So, on to the game. The thing that I really like is that the character classes are filled with colour, and that the individual character books are the only background you need to read (as a player, anyhow). The MC (gamemaster) in this game... well, it's a way I've run games before, but here everything about the rules reinforces it, something I've never seen before. The style's what I think of as a sandbox game - where the player characters do their thing and the gamemaster lets things play out however seems natural based on what the other characters would do, following whatever plans they have.

Now, that may not seem like a big deal, but I've run games like this using rules like GURPS, and having everything built to support it makes it run really smoothly. The player characters have special moves to differentiate themselves, but the MC has their own set of moves that they use to make sure everything works naturally based on what's happening. And it does work, so that's good. Really nice for the person who wants to run a game without a whole lot of prep - you need to do a bit, but nothing onerous.

So, if you want to run a game that has that sort of sandbox play, I really recommend it. The post-apocalyptic setting is good too, but the game's pretty easily hackable if you want to do something different. In fact, I'm currently working through a re-write of Monster of the Week to use a bunch of the ideas from Apocalypse World there (there turn out to be some things that deal with some specific issues I had with that game design).

Parsely!

2010-05-08T13:09:00.000+12:00

Another recent game purchase has been ACTION CASTLE! and JUNGLE ADVENTURE, using Jared Sorensen's Parsely system.

These aren't really role-playing games in any normal sense. They're based on 1980s text adventure computer games, with one player as the parser (and the map and descriptions of everything), and everyone else as the person typing in commands. Each player takes it in turn to type in a single command.

I played in ACTION CASTLE! at Kapcon, and enjoyed it so much that I picked both it and JUNGLE ADVENTURE up last month.

Running the games as parser is at least as much fun as being on the other side (you get the fun of knowing what they should be doing, which is usually not obvious to the others). I've run both games at lunch hours at work for a few interested colleagues, and that was a fantastic venue for it. Silly, and short, the games were a lot of fun.

Recommended when you need a short, silly game for any number of people (my experience suggests that the more people playing, the better).

ACTION CASTLE! doesn't have much room for replay - once solved, it is pretty much done. JUNGLE ADVENTURE is a bit longer and much tougher. My colleagues managed just 50/100 points when they finished, and there are more variations available. I suspect that you could happily play this 2-4 times before you discovered everything.

Read-through review of A Taste for Murder by Graham Walmsley

2010-05-08T12:50:00.000+12:00

Mr Walmsley is kindly offering a pdf of the game for those who preorder. I sat down and read it last night.

The game simulates Agatha Christie style murder mysteries, with the focus being people at a country house in the 1930s. The game is similar to Fiasco in style, giving you the skeleton of structure that you then build on in play to create the details of the world.

You start out making up characters, and your relationships with the other characters. The first half of the game deals with the characters pushing each other to stress the relationships. I can imagine that many details will be invented here that will come back later on, often twisted.

At the halfway point, everyone writes down which character they want to be the murder victim and then a random pick determines who it was. The player of the victim returns in the second half as Inspector Chapel.

The second half of the game plays similarly to the first, with the addition of the ability to investigate people - successful investigation means that something is revealed about the character's relationship with the victim (i.e. giving them motive). Eventually, two people have enough motive to have done the deed and there is a denouement to reveal who the killer really was (determined by the winner of a dice roll - events earlier in the game determine how many dice each player gets).

It seems like a very good structure to make the game work as intended. There's some advice on things to aim for in play, in order to get the right sort of feel.

There's also a lot of information in the book about life in a country house at the time, from an overall history of the evolution of the country house to details like how to address different people and who each of the servants report to.

After that read, it looks very good. I'm keen to play it, and will be looking for opportunities to do so.

Fiasco: Actual Play (Prog Metal Hell)

2010-03-15T21:32:00.000+13:00

We played Fiasco tonight, using the "Rock band on tour" playset. It was awesome, with our three characters - the guitarist, bass player and drummer - all in the shadow of the singer/songwriter. Things almost instantly went off the rails (mainly due to the 'minimally trained grizzly bear'). The tilt let latent hatreds out and everything kept getting worse. Ultimately we were all left destroyed.

Game play pretty much delivered as promised. We finished quick with just three - I'd definitely suggest adding a few extra dice to keep the scenes going longer if you have three. Some of the scene setup and resolution was a little sketchy, as we got used to the way the game goes. This was very temporary, and by the end we were scooting along just fine.

Definitely up to play again, several times.

Fiasco by Jason Morningstar

2010-03-10T17:23:00.000+13:00

This is a odd game to read, because the resolution is quite unlike most games. I'm not sure exactly how it will play out. Given that, this has to be taken as a fairly preliminary review - I can't quite predict how it will go in action. That said, reports from the Internet are positive, in general, so I have fairly high hopes.

The game is designed to play stories like plan-gone-wrong type films - almost everything that the Coen brothers have done is a good touchstone, but Fargo and Blood Simple seem to typify the default style of the game. It's GM-less, in a similar way to The Shab-al-Hiri Roach.

Play begins with a setup section, where you pick one of the playsets to give you a basic theme and setting. There are four of these in the book, plus they're releasing a new one each month this year (you can find the current one on the home page). So far, we have "A Nice Southern Town," "Boomtown" (wild west), "Tales from Suburbia," "The Ice" (McMurdo Station), "Rock Band on Tour," "Gangster London" and "Last Frontier" (Alaska). All are filled with delicious and terrible details to set your game up.

Once you've picked that, you roll all the dice (4 per player) and allocate relationships and details to give your story its starting point. You'll begin with one relationship with the player on your left and one to the right, plus each relationship will be associated with a need, object or place. Once all that's down you sort out how these fit together and finalize your character.

Then play begins, with everyone taking turns to have a scene. When it's your turn you either get to set the scene (i.e. set your character up to do something you want to see happen) or resolve it (i.e. decide whether it goes well or badly for your character). The rest of the players get to do the other task, so if you set the scene, they decide how it ends, and vice versa.

Then you play the scene out until the resolver decides it has reached the crux and picks a black or white die to indicate if it ends badly or well. You keep playing to work out what happens and then the turn passes.

Halfway through, you add a "Tilt" to make things more crazy. This includes things like stuff being stolen, people being killed and so on (My favorite probably has to be "Failure: A stupid plan, executed to perfection.")

Then play goes on, with everything in theory coming to a head. Then an aftermath is rolled for each character - essentially how terribly they come out of it. You then narrate details of their epilogue based on how many dice you collected.

I didn't go into collecting dice - it's an important economy but I thought it would cloud a quick description of the way the game runs. The short version is that you want to collect mainly one colour, but only have limited control over what you get, so the other players can use this to screw your guy over if they think he deserves it. I suspect this will add an extra level of messing with people into the mix.

In terms of how it will play, I'm not exactly sure. I'm confident that with a proactive group it will just hum along, but there's some areas of vagueness that might stall a little. For instance, the way that you just play out the results once it's determined whether good or bad results happen might be a problem. I suspect you need people ready to step up and declare things pretty frequently, like "I guess this scene is over now". These aren't really problems, but it would be a good idea to be wary of some of these things going in.

Physically, the book's lovely. It's filled with colorful, cartoony illustrations and fun layout and typesetting that really give you an off-kilter vibe as you read it.

I'm hoping to give the game a spin soon, so I'll update with how it played when I do (possibly including a report on the "Smalltown New Zealand" playset I could not resist putting together for it).

Fiasco home

Kapcon 2010 After-action Report

2010-01-26T10:55:00.001+13:00

This year I spent all 6 official and 1 unofficial sessions in the games on demand room. Here's the games played and the good and bad of running them like this.

Bad Family. Steve Hickey ran this, with me playing. It's the newest version of his long in-development game of dysfunctional family sitcoms. It was absolutely fantastic, with the only bump being one player who was quite out of sync with the tone the rest of the table. The game itself is significantly polished compared to my previous experience of it, although (as I told Steve) I suspect that there's still rather more structure around each scene than is actually required.

FreeMarket. This game is hard to pitch to a group. I find that I can explain what's cool about it if I have a chance to talk to one or two people for a few minutes, but to get a quick pitch to a room of expectant gamers, not so much. In any case, I managed to convince four to give it a go and they created some fun characters and a great MRCZ concept: guerilla redecorators. The first thing they did was make over a public cafe (they scrounged some junk, and recycled the cafe and junk together to change the cafe from tags: "Ephemera, Cafe, Utilitarian" to "Ephemera, Cafe, Luxurious"). Once this was done we got into the flow of it and the rest of the game went pretty well. They managed to generate enough flow by the end that we had time to have a virtual second session beginning and run through a MRCZ promotion round, which they won. Not without issues in a three hour round, but overall a success.

3:16. As expected, fun all round. Not the best game, though. I found that the players seemed in a more reactive mood, which doesn't suit 3:16 well. If they are all just waiting for the next encounter, it drags a bit. I was somewhat to blame as well - beginning to run out of creative energy as the afternoon wore on. I wasn't pushing enough for cool narration too, looking back. Despite all that, everyone enjoyed themselves so that's the main thing.

ACTION CASTLE! I played in this one. Hilarious! If you get the chance, play it.

Ganakagok. Played late on Saturday. Suffered from general tiredness of everyone and the short time we had to play it. The game still generated some great myth, and I had a great time (I think ACTION CASTLE! got my creativity kick-started). After this, though, I think Ganakagok really needs at least 3-4 hours to work. That we everyone can get their head around the mechanics and there's time to get several rounds of play in, rather than just one or two.

Lacuna. Sunday morning, I was so tired that I pushed Lacuna as matching my mind's state perfectly. I used the tactic of basically not telling the Mystery Agents anything, and it worked well. Mood was perhaps affected by a very loud game of 3:16 also in the room, although the random shouts and sound effects probably contributed well to our game's nightmarish aspects. Afterwards, I had a conversation with a couple of players about the game's form and structure, how the incomplete aspects fitted into the setting and play, and how Jared Sorenson likes to mess with basically everybody.

In A Wicked Age... Played by popular request of some people who had played it the previous day. We used the "God-Kings of War" oracle and had a good game with a clash of two nations, complicated by a devil-worshiping cult, a jealous god, and a mischievous djinni. My favourite moment was when I offered "The devil kills and eats you" as a post-conflict negotiation and was accepted (the character happily continued taking part in the story as a ghost). The epic battle between the wild tribe huntress and the city-state's general was also neat to watch.

The Shab-al-Hiri Roach: OVERLORD. I grabbed three players for this in the last session. We had a good session, although it took a little while for everyone to get the hang of setting up scenes to position themselves for reputation gains - not helped by a weak first scene on my part, which was really only rescued when another player jumped in to create some good adversity for me. Interestingly, this was the lowest body count of any Roach game I have been involved in, despite being set in a commando training camp and with all characters trained soldiers (this does not hold true if we include German soldiers during the D-Day event, however).

Games on demand as a whole was great fun this year. We ran a little more smoothly and got games going more quickly. There are still a few places for improvement, of course, so hopefully will be even better next year. I enjoy that a lot of people like to come in between rounds to chat about the games we have, as well. There's a relaxed, sociable atmosphere that I enjoyed - although sometimes I was a little tired to actually contribute much to conversation.

Ganakagok - First Game

2010-01-19T18:09:00.000+13:00

To prepare for wanting to run it at Kapcon, I ran a one-shot of Ganakagok last night.

The short version is that the game worked great, play ended up pretty much as the text implied it would. Perhaps more so, as the constant turning of cards to inspire narration kept giving us ideas in keeping with the setting.

The characters had perhaps a little weak construction (in terms of building Truth-vision, Change-hope and Change-fears that prompted immediate action), but the world building meant that as soon as play began stuff began to happen.

It turned out that we had a very small number of stars, so a short game. That was fine as we have a fairly short session anyhow (especially with all the preparation). The action fairly zipped along and the characters quickly fell into a love-triangle (square?) feud rather than attempting to deal with the coming changes.

Still, it gave us a good story and lots of fun alliance breaking and so on.

I suspect that the myth we made would be told by the descendants of the Nitu as the last sins committed under the old ways, before the new ways gave them a better way of life.

Brief notes on new game purchases.

2010-01-02T14:57:00.000+13:00

I bought myself a few new games recently, and here's my impressions of them after a first read through.

The Roach Returns. Two new settings for The Shab-al-Hiri Roach. They're Oxford, 1863 and a commando training school in England, 1944. Both have a few new cards to swap into the deck to add to the flavour, and new enthusiasms and so on to create the appropriate feel. All good stuff, and hopefully I'll get to try one or both of them at Kapcon.

Thou Art But A Warrior. I picked this up as a more-accessible version of Polaris, and it looks like it fits that well. Basically the same game, but the setting is the last days of the Arabian empire in Spain. Very nice to read, and lovely art. This will sit with Polaris waiting for a good chance to play one or the other.

Ganakagok. I picked this one up due to hearing so many good things about it online, and the fact that it has a custom card deck (I am a sucker for custom card decks). Basically, you play Inuit-ish myths, with details heavily inspired by card draws. There's some dice mechanics in the resolution too. Looks very cool - hopefully I can play soon. The mechanics look like they'll really push towards mythic types of characters and events. Plus, the tribe's world is bound to change and the mechanics slowly build up whether various aspects will end up ending well or badly.

Play: FreeMarket

2009-12-21T22:56:00.000+13:00

The Monday group took FreeMarket for a spin tonight. It certainly delivered the gameplay promised by the text - I certainly had great fun and everyone else seemed to as well.

The initial round of running a pretend challenge seemed to confuse everyone as much as it enlightened them. Then we got into the basic character generation stuff, which was all fine.

MRCZ creation was a little tougher, as everyone tried to come up with something that their disparate skillsets could work together for. In the end they didn't really manage, but everyone was enthusiastic about "My Little Special Friend" MRCZ, who create customized and weaponized pets. So far they printed up a dayglo stripy cat to pay someone's gambling debt and have got themselves a request for a weaponized cat, too. They acquired the raw materials for it but we ran out of time before they got to build it.

The situation generation was effective and fun. Every character has some memories written on their sheet, and you go and grab elements from each of these to make up things that can happen - so one guy from this character's memory wants an item from another person's memory to blow up a statue that's in a third character's memory. This sounds confusing, but it worked really well. I tied them into the whole custom pet theme of the MRCZ and we just went from there.

Filling up the station with oddball types is fun too. Just finding out about their neighbours was quite fun (a metal band on one side, a mobber with tentacles on the other). I quite enjoyed a courier who delivered them a couple of things. There's going to be more to him than they have yet realised, I think.

The challenge mechanics are pretty fun, although the card draws distract a little from remembering to narrate what you are doing. It's one of those games where I'm going to have to keep reminding myself & others to narrate what happens. The card draws give you a lot to work with, though! Just things like drawing a geneline and hazard give you something to work with (i.e. your narration should incorporate your natural talents but have something go not quite right as well).

Looking forward to playing more! The next session for My Special Little Friend should be epic - they have to build their weaponized cat to give to one guy's Dad. Nobody asked him what for yet... but hey, I guess they don't need to know. What could possibly go wrong with arming a cat with a miniature flechette cannon?

Read-through Review: FreeMarket (beta)

2009-12-08T20:33:00.003+13:00

I've been waiting for Crane and Sorenson to finish this one ever since I found out about the premise. They have released the beta to anyone who signs up for the colonist program at the website (only 1000 berths available!)

So, the premise is that you are a bunch of dudes who live on this space station where death is not permanent, scarcity is no more and everyone cares mainly about reputation (here called Flow, and basically the same as Whuffie from Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom). The player characters start as a MRCZ - an group who have formed a team to do something. You can pretty much pick any goal you want - the examples in the text include people trying to make various station systems work better through party designers and professional extortionists.

What drives it all, however, is Flow. You want your Flow to be increasing, because your MRCZ only gets more Flow when the members get more. You need to risk it whenever you use the game's challenge mechanics, so you'll spend a bit as well. Plus, if you run out you can be voted off the station forever.

There's lots of cool stuff to do - making things, smushing things together to make other things, hacking people's memories, engineering memes, and so on. The world's sketched in the example tech and things like that, and there's plenty of ideas there. Still, it's overall a sandbox kind of game. And pretty much anything goes (although if you're annoying, sooner or later your Flow will tank and you'll be put in a box aimed at Mars).

I suspect what will happen in play is that the players will go a bit crazy picking a project for their MRCZ, but that will soon become an all-consuming quest (no matter how silly it is). The notes on how to run it provide lots of ways for the GM to build on what's on the character sheets and make the game rock on no matter whether you are trying to save the solar system or breeding a superior moss as a novelty item. The game's probably not for everyone, but it's certainly for me and I plan to play it the next session that someone is absent (i.e. preventing more Trail of Cthulhu play).

One more note: the beta requires a significant craftiness investment, as the game is played with 6 custom card decks. Now, the beta package includes the raw materials to print and make them (and some fans have even made versions that are more printing out friendly), but I can tell you from experience that it takes a long time to assemble the 245 (!) cards you need. I wouldn't have bothered if the boxed set was going to be any earlier than it is (sounds like next May or June is the ETA). On the other hand, you can consider making the cards your first Cultivation challenge (Cultivation: making tech items using old fashioned techniques).

Gaming Update

2009-12-08T20:33:00.000+13:00

Well, look at that. The experiment with Dungeonslayers finished after another couple of sessions. We had fun but I felt that the game didn't have the legs for a longer campaign to work well. Basically the simplicity of the rules worked against itself there - in combat, everyone soon homed in on their one or two best things to do every round, so the fights got less interesting (the advanced combat rules option on the website might help with that). Plus, as a GM, there's no real guidance as to how tough the monsters are, so stocking an adventure is hard. The only clue are the raw stats and the xp listed. I'd like to see something more structured for creating your own critters as well.

I still think it's a great game, but probably best suited to short campaigns or one-off sessions.

After that I've done a few Monster of the Week playtests. The rules are coming along pretty well, and this is steadily getting polished into something that I can can give out to closed beta testers soon (i.e. in between 1 and 6 months). Play gets a nice Supernatural style build from mystery to tracking the monster to final showdown, with a few character scenes along the way.

Then the regular group (with one person left for England and two new faces) hit the next chapter of our ongoing Trail of Cthulhu series. This time they were exploring a site off the coast of Greenland - mainly by remote control, as only one of the divers was a player character. I wanted a short, intense mystery for this one, and it seemed to happen that way. They defeated that evil below the ocean amnd now it's investigators 2, Cthulhu 2 with one more qualifier before their final chance to stop things at R'lyeh. The plan is to move on with more of this, so chapter five will be next, with a trip to the Amazon.

Old School Dungeon Gaming Time!

2009-09-15T20:48:00.000+12:00

To take a break from playtests of Monster of the Week, we've been playing some Dungeonslayers.

It's a nice old-style game, and appealed to me because it had a fairly basic, consistent core system. That's in contrast to many of the old school rules I've looked at that attempt to replicate old style D&D warts and all.

I sat down with How to Host a Dungeon and ran through one to build up some background for the game, which was fun in itself and gave me some maps and a general history of the area that provided me a lot of ideas.

First session had only two players, and I set out to run them through the starter dungeon in the main Dungeonslayers pdf. We managed to get through that in one session (with one fatality) and that left those two characters at a decent level. The system works pretty well and provides a good framework for that sort of adventuring - in our case, not taken very seriously. There was a tendency for some fights to get a little tedious as bad rolls led to things taking a long time to die. We got some creative use of tactics to split up one huge group so they could take it out piecemeal. That's the kind of cool stuff I want to encourage, so I was pleased when that happened.

Next session had a couple more players, who had to join on as basically the expendable henchmen of our higher level elves. I had planned to take them through the second sample adventure from the Dungeonslayers website, and indeed when we left off they were nearly about to begin it. The maps derived from my How to Host a Dungeon game really came into their own here, with their journey to find the bandits they're hunting full of sidetracks, getting lost in a swamp, amusing townsfolk, legends about the devilish swamp dwarves and last but definitely not least, a juvenile owlbear attack.

I'm looking forward to next time, when they actually assault the bandits (and begin to uncover clues about how much stuff they are walking over the top of).

Reading Update

2009-09-15T20:36:00.000+12:00

Kage Baker The Empress of Mars: A nice story set in the shadow of her epic Company series. Only tangentially related, but good in its own right. Feisty, outcast Mars colonists versus everyone! Huzzah!

Seth Hunter The Time of Terror: Another Napoleonic naval adventure, broadly. More specifically, it's earlier (Robespierre is the chief antagonist) and our hero spends most of the book as a spy in Paris and smuggling things back and forward. Good stuff, but grim (being about The Terror, hard not to be).

Chris Wickham The Inheritance of Rome: A big, solid history of Europe from 400-1000. Lots of interesting stuff in here, although because of the book's scope, detail is lacking. It paints a picture of the fall of Rome being less catastrophic than had been previously thought, and follows the various aspects that were preserved and the new things that arose after. I'd been aware of the revision of the "Dark Ages" into something somewhat less of an oubliette of history, and this cleared up the reasons that view has come to be.

Game Chef 2009 is now on

2009-08-31T13:02:00.001+12:00

The instructions are at:
http://gamechef.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/2009-submission-guidelines-part-1/

Read in August

2009-08-30T19:42:00.000+12:00

Charles Stross's short fiction collection Wireless is good. Several of the pieces feel like they're sketches for novels, rather than fully fleshed out. That might just be the effect of them being short.

I recently read a bunch of Le Carre - the Smiley trilogy and then A Most Wanted Man. All good, and a very interesting contrast. The earlier novels are almost devoid of politics and describe spies who seem to almost fear ideology. The newer ones (including The Mission Song and The Constant Gardener) are all concerned with wrongs going on in the world, and Le Carre definitely wants to draw our attention to them.

Karl Schroeder's Pirate Sun is another great installment in the Virga series. Very strange, very cool science fiction here.

Re-reading of Robert Low's viking stories (The Whale Road and The Wolf Sea) just confirmed my liking of them. The internet tells me there's now a third volume - The White Raven - which I must get hold of.

I also read the first of Tim Severin's viking series, Odinn's Child. It is not as good as Low's take, but interesting. He also seems to be adding a supernatural element - ghosts and the like - which is odd in a historical novel. It's deliberately somewhat ambiguous whether these elements are actually real or just hearsay, but I'm not convinced about the approach. It is good enough to look for the rest of the series, so don't take those quibbles to seriously.

Game Chef 2009 is about to begin

2009-08-30T19:26:00.003+12:00

TV shows I have been watching recently

2009-07-30T21:59:00.000+12:00

True Blood, series 1. Very mixed feelings on this one. Basically good. However, the gross sex scenes (possibly partly just the HBO sex scene tax) really detracted a lot. It also moved very slowly for the amount of plot present - if you are going to stretch a mystery over 10 hours of TV, you need more going on.

Castle, series 1. Initially this didn't grab me that much. Nathan Fillion was fun to watch, as expected, but the setup - "mystery writer helps detective solve murders" - is not exactly the most original. The show rides on the characters, and Fillion as Castle and Stana Katic as the detective forced to work with him are both good. Not deep, but fun.

Leverage, first few episodes. The setup is that an ex-insurance investigator creates a team of criminals to commit crimes in order to take down bad guys that the law won't touch. It's a good setup, but I was let down by most of the characters being one-dimensional (although to be fair, that might improve later) and more importantly by the way they set up each episode. They rely on important stuff happening off screen a lot, and magic computers that give the team all the information they need to set up a con, and stuff like that. It's the kind of stuff that could be shown being done in a plausible way, but they just skip past that and have everything fall into place instead. Currently not really interested in watching any more.

Avatar: The Legend of Aang. We got this for the daughter of the house, and she really loved it, so I got to re-watch the whole run. I enjoyed it just as much as the first time. I also noticed that there's a fair amount of foreshadowing that I (of course) hadn't picked up on when I didn't know how it was going to end.

The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling

2009-07-21T19:53:00.000+12:00

A strange novel.

Lots of really cool ideas, but the plot basically happens only in implied spaces.

The novel essentially shows you a few little vignettes in the world, and you need to piece together most of the events from those. Sterling also sets them up so each part of the novel is the aftermath and/or setup for something big.

Not really sure what I think of it.

Trail of Cthulhu: Play update.

2009-06-28T10:16:00.000+12:00

We finished another chapter of our big Trail of Cthulhu game this week. It was a narrow victory, with one PC fatality in the final hours of their attempt to prevent something bad being awakened.

My impressions of the system are less rosy after playing it this long. It's still an enormous improvement on Call of Cthulhu, but I'm not sure that the 'design what doesn't matter' approach is really what I like when running a game. A few times I wanted the system to be something solid I could lean on (as it were), but there just isn't much there.

Partly, I think, it is the sanity system at fault. I can appreciate what Hite was trying to do with this, but I don't think it quite works. Maybe Unknown Armies spoiled me for this. In any case, the erosion of sanity doesn't seem to match the way I would like it to.

The drives also seems to have fallen flat in our game. Most of those chosen have ended up leading to few interesting compels, and not really driving the character the way they are supposed to. This might be because we didn't know how the system played when we started, of course, but it seems more than that. Maybe it is that the drives are too broad? In Spirit of the Century, part of the fun of Aspects is that you have a whole bunch of them pushing you in different directions. Here, it's just one big one always pushing you the same way.

Overall: still the best system I've met for Lovecraft roleplaying, but not perfect. Tweaking the rules would probably solve most of my problems, but I don't have much patience for tweaking rules these days.

Recent books of note, June 2009

2009-06-28T10:05:00.000+12:00

I read a couple of A Lee Martinez's comic fantasy novels - In the Company of Ogres and A Nameless Witch. Both are good, well worth checking out if you are a fan of Asprin/Pratchett/etc.

I've been working backwards through K J Parker's trilogies. Unfortunately, my main discovery is that quality has been steadily improving. I simply stopped reading the "Fencer" trilogy after a completely gratuitous atrocity. The "Scavenger" trilogy was good but not exceptional - it uses the 'protagonist is amnesiac' cliche, and despite this is a fairly good story. Parker pretty much ruined it for me at the end when the protagonist - who has shown himself to basically be a terrible person - is revealed to have previously been a terrible person. It wasn't quite the shock reveal it might have seemed when the plot was initially sketched out. So, my advice on K J Parker: read the "Engineer" trilogy and The Company. If you like those enough to want more, read the "Scavenger" trilogy. If you want even more and are not utterly sick of the current fashion for adding atrocities to a story for no good reason, read the "Fencer" stories.

I'm not sure where this fashion for atrocities comes from - I wonder if Iain Banks is somewhat to blame (at least in science fiction and fantasy), as people imitate his work. If so, they're really hitting the wrong bit to imitate. I have a feeling it might be deriving from some other places too - the "Literary Fiction" genre seems to do it as well.

Dave Duncan has a third "Alchemist" novel, which is great fun. I read one of his generic fantasy novels, too, and it was so generic I couldn't be bothered with the second in the series. Strange that the same person can write both. Or maybe generic fantasy just taints all that it touches?

This Is Not A Game by Walter Jon Williams is a fantastic read... it's about a producer of alternate reality games, and what happens when she allows the real world and the game world to mix. Good characters, good story and a good understanding of how online life actually functions all feed in. Plus it is a story of this "this could, just, happen" rather than a more science fiction approach (like the near future in Stross's Halting State).

Speaking of Stross, the fifth installment of "The Merchant Princes" series is great although I'm unhappy I now have to wait a year or so for the final one.

Book reports

2009-05-23T14:52:00.002+12:00

I've decided that I'm no longer going to write something about every book that I read, as that was becoming a drag. I'll just write something about books that stand out, instead.

Actual play report: GHOST/ECHO

2009-05-23T14:52:00.000+12:00

Last game night there were only three of us, and I decided to try out John Harper's mini-game GHOST/ECHO. You might as well go read it before the rest of this report - it's only two pages long.

It was a good game - taking the starting situation "your crew is sold out in the ghost world," we established that they'd been on their way to score some metal (drugs), specifically one that was used when channeling the ghost field. They fought back, were captured, escaped and then tooled up and started tracking down whoever had sold them out for revenge. By the time we'd finished, Grip and Vixen had left quite a trail of bodies behind them and were basically sorted. There's an outstanding question about whether their fixer Venom was in on the betrayal or not. That is something that will be established if we go back to the game, I expect.

The very basic resolution system was enough for the game, so if the text seemed interesting on a read through, I'd recommend you take it for a spin some time. Not sure how well it would go for a longer term game, but there's enough inspiration for a one-shot or short run in there.

The system also seemed to encourage crazy action and filling out more details about the world. The way that things in the world are specified also brings out a lot of good stuff as you fill out details in play - as GM, I mainly did this by asking what things were rather than deciding myself.

Lacuna - Impressions

2009-04-03T15:49:00.000+13:00

I've been interested in this game for a while, but it's been out of print for a while, so when it came back into print recently (with a free Lacuna device included, no less!) I picked a copy up.

It's a fun read. Loads of colour, and a cool premise. The rules and setting definitely leave plenty of room for the group to fill in gaps as they want - the game is a mindfuck for players, just from the setting, but running it from the book basically is for the GM too.

I've played a couple of sessions of it, as we've had absences preventing our theoretical main game going ahead. Both went well, with the creepiness of Blue City seeming to be invoked from my descriptions. The main mechanic - the Agents' heart rates increasing throughout the mission up to a point at which they can die - really paces the game well. The urgency it brings to events is fantastic - especially given the fact that Agents can re-roll failed rolls at the cost of increased heart rate. I can see later missions being a lot more cautious when the dice come out (especially as our second outing had the mission fail, with all three agents Ejecting to save themselves rather than stay in the increasingly doomed confrontation with the Hostile Personality).

I can see that the secrets of the game will be interesting as they begin to come out - only two missions in, we haven't really got to that yet, but as the Agents get more proficient I can see that familiarity with the mission structure and increasing amounts of Static will lead to some of the crazy stuff in the book coming out. That of course will lead to more GM improv, as most of these secrets are merely evocative hints pointing in a certain kind of direction. Still, it should be fun.

The Escapement by K J Parker

2009-03-29T19:41:00.000+13:00

The final installment of the Engineer trilogy. Ties everything up without too many surprises, in a satisfying manner. I really enjoyed these books and shall be reading Parker's other couple of series soon. They work on a few levels, combining world-building, a little philosophy and an exciting plot. The characters aren't exactly deep but they're well-drawn enough that I got drawn into their trials as the story went along - even a couple of them who were basically terrible people got some sympathy here and there.

Evil For Evil by K J Parker

2009-03-26T21:56:00.000+13:00

The second book of the Engineer trilogy, which I liked more than the first. All the characters who seemed to be good at everything begin to lose control of the forces they had unleashed in this story, which seems much more plausible. The story itself begins to weave the characters together much more closely and thus becomes a lot more exciting.

I realised that in some ways Parker is writing about similar themes to those in Pratchett's works (particularly his newer ones) but without the overt humour - there's a certain black cynicism here, still, but the books certainly aren't comedy. That aside, there's a commonality of interest in how societies can be efficiently or corruptly structured and the effects of technological change.

Books Catch-up Post 3

2009-03-25T11:27:00.002+13:00

Moving Target (aka Marque and Reprisal), Engaging the Enemy and Command Decision by Elizabeth Moon. The next three in the Vatta's War series. All very good. The only flaw is a tendency to have the characters be a little too awesome, which is forgivable in space opera.

The Guns of El Kebir and Siege of Khartoum by John Wilcox. The next two in the Simon Fonthill series. Both good and up to the standards of the previous novels. Things are beginning to go a little less hard on Fonthill in these ones.

Cretaceous Dawn by L & M Graziano. Adventure story about some people who accidentally time travel back to the time of dinosaurs and have to trek across the countryside to a particular point to come back. Good characters, science side of things is not explained at all (which I regard as a plus - if it is never explained it can't be nonsense), think of it as a superior Jurassic Park without all the waffle about 'Man playing God', chaos theory or kids (although there is a dog).

Lords of the Bow by Conn Iggulden. Second in his Ghenghis Khan series. Good, and a lot more exciting than the first one, mainly due to this one including Ghenghis beginning to conquer the rest of the world (specifically China).

The January Dancer by Michael Flynn

2009-03-16T09:19:00.000+13:00

An absolutely fantastic read. It's superior space opera, told as a chap in a bar recounts the hunt for an ancient artifact to a bard. It takes a little while to get going but I got drawn into it more and more as it went on. The characters are fantastic and Flynn really makes you care about their motivations and histories as the story unfolds. Plus the storyteller and bard have their own little story that comes out in the interludes.

All this has as a backdrop a really interesting world, a celtic-influenced human galactic ("Gaelactic") empire that seems to be the result of a few interstellar wars over a few thousand years. The cultures of each different planet are vibrant and fun (although he does have some annoying dialect used, luckily not to excess), and feel like places that might have developed in the world he describes.

Great stuff. Read it.

The First Wave by James R Benn

2009-03-16T09:12:00.000+13:00

The second Billy Boyle mystery, this one is just as enjoyable as the first. A few of the bad guys are pretty obviously telegraphed, but that doesn't really detract from the story as a whole.

Devices and Desires by K J Parker

2009-03-11T13:12:00.000+13:00

I enjoyed this more than The Company, possibly because it is drawn on a somewhat larger scale. There's certain common elements - extremely competent characters driven to extremes by various flaws and it is possibly set in the same world.

It tells the story of an engineer sentenced to death for making improvements on a mechanical design, one of the worst crimes in the city-state where he lives (they are the renowned machine-makers of the world). This sets into motion a cascade of events that causes war and destruction, and looks set to cause even more in the following couple of volumes in the trilogy.

I also approve of Parker writing fantasy without magic, monsters and all that stuff. Just people in a different, apparently totally normal world doing their thing. Admittedly, his main characters are almost supernaturally good at everything they do, but only to an unlikely extent rather than an unbelievable one.

Gaming Catch Up - Mouse Guard in Play

2009-03-09T09:44:00.000+13:00

I've played three more games of Mouse Guard in the past few weeks. One has been with my wife and daughter, the other two with my regular gaming group.

The family game went as well as the first two, although it was somewhat constrained by bedtime. They had to defend a caravan of parties supplies from some mouse bandits - this led to a fight, which was a great success. They then had to deal with a bluejay trying to steal cake, which they had less luck with. Continues to be fun with a young kid - she had no problems at all with the concepts involved in the conflict mechanics for the fight, either.

For the regular group, we played out "Deliver the Mail" and then a mission to see what some mysterious sightings on a certain road were being caused by

The intricate details of these games aren't really such a big deal - the thing Mouse Guard really shines at is ease of play. You can sit down for 5-20 minutes and come up with some good ideas for a mission, but if you don't have time for that you can just pick a couple of things as you crack open the rulebook at the beginning of your session. The characters' beliefs and instincts give you really big clues as to what sort of things the players want to see, too.

As you play, failed rolls allow you to provide twists to the story, which is a perfect way to elaborate things as you go whenever you have a cool idea for what could happen next. The trait mechanics encourage players to choose to make rolls harder for themselves in order to gain checks to use later (I can see this becoming more common as people play more sessions and begin to really realise the power that checks have), which contributes too.

It ends up with the game seeming to reflect the choices that the group as a whole makes about where things should go, but without anyone having to try really hard to make it happen. I continue to recommend this game!

Books Catch-up Post 2

2009-03-09T09:18:00.001+13:00

The Goddess and the Bull by Michael Balter: An account of the excavations at Catalhoyuk in Turkey, and overview of what has been discovered about the stone age town there and more generally the region. Lots of information about the people involved in the archeology, too, and a history of the various fashions and arguments that have gone through the discipline (as they relate to that site). Fascinating stuff, reawakened my interest in prehistoric human civilizations.

All the other Vorkosigan stories by Lois McMaster Bujold. Solid space opera with a mystery/thriller (and occasionally romance) twist on them.

Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi. Good, but not stunning. I found this retreaded the story of The Last Colony a little too much for my liking (I realise that he wrote it for a different audience, so this probably is not that big a deal). It did, however, clear up some problems that the other novel had so it was nice to see what was supposed to be happening with those.

Billy Boyle by James R Benn. A mystery novel about a Boston cop drafted in the Second World War and attached to Eisenhower's staff through a family connection. In London, he immediately ends up investigating some unusual goings on. It's a good story with some satisfying twists and a really good main character.

The Magicians and Mrs Quent by Galen Beckett. This is from a similar inspiration as Strange & Norrell, although this story is significantly lighter. It begins as essentially a fantasy take on a Regency romance and takes a detour through gothic too. Not really very serious, but fun and exciting. I am looking forward to the second in the series.

The Company by K J Parker. A group of retired military veterans start up a colony at the behest of their old unit leader. Things steadily begin to fall apart as their old rivalries come up, old secrets are revealed and so on. The fact that the leader has kind of stolen an island off the government is just one of the problems that they have to face. An exellent character study of things falling apart, reminiscent of Fargo (without the jokes about accents).

Books Catch-up Post

2009-02-08T15:39:00.002+13:00

I've got behind on book reviews, so here are brief notes on the ones that I have read but not reviewed.

Trading In Danger by Elizabeth Moon. Superior space opera, good characters. Will look up rest of series.

Miles, Mystery & Mayhem by Lois McMaster Bujold. #3 of Vorkosigan omnibus editions. Patchy but overall good. Some of these stories written much earlier in her career, others much later, and you can tell. Later stories are very good, although the contiunity is somewhat stretched (not quite broken, though).

The Alchemist's Code by Dave Duncan. Follow up to previously reviewed story about seer's apprentice in Venice who solves mysteries. More of the same. Good, fun.

Mouse Guard: Actual play with family

2009-02-08T15:04:00.035+13:00

Yesterday and today we played a couple of sessions of the Mouse Guard RPG as a family - me GMing, my five year old daughter and somewhat reluctant wife playing a two-mouse patrol.

I decided that I'd take them through full character generation, as my daughter is still learning to read, so going through a template would probably be more hard work for her than thinking up answers to the character generation questions. Being impressed by Saxon in the comics, she made up Autumn, a tenderpaw who wants to be the bravest mouse in the guard. The patrol is filled out by Trevor, a middle-aged slacker of a patrol leader, who basically wants to hang around the pub drinking at every opportunity.

Their first mission was the deliver the mail episode from the book. We moved through it fairly quickly to account for a five-year old attention span, but managed to hit all the main points. They failed the pathfinding test and encountered the raven - as a twist on an attempt to use Birds-wise to help on the path-finding check (she wanted to get a bird to give her a ride to see the way!) So the raven decided to try and steal the mail instead, and was persuaded not to via a very definite Loremouse check from Trevor.

They continued to Gilpledge and sorted out Martin, and then had a brief player turn. My daughter had a lot of fun and quickly requested a second game (which had to be put off until the next day). She did sit down later on to draw a picture of her guardmouse.

Today, she insisted we play another game and once we had all the chores done we made time for it. We decided that Autumn convinced Trevor that they should go and get Martin's chair from weasel- territory after all (to play up her desire to be the bravest mouse), so that was their mission for today.

Their first obstacle was to get across a flooding stream, which they did by building a bridge (with two carpenters along, an obvious choice!) However, the roll was failed, so that made all the mice tired.

Next, when they got to Walnutpeck, they found a weasel watching the road for anyone coming along. They tried to sneak past it but failed, and had to run away from it. We decided to use a simple versus test as neither daughter nor wife felt like learning the full conflict mechanics just yet (today's elaboration was the use of traits on top of the basic roll mechanic). Autumn made this roll, eluding the weasel spy and leading the patrol and Martin back to Walnutpeck to pick up his heirloom chair before heading back into the mouse territories.

Another quick player turn followed with Autumn successfully testing to remove her tired condition and Trevor failing (I suspect a late night drinking was to blame!)

Overall, a great success. I've played a few roleplaying games with my daughter previously but this is the first one that really seemed to grab her. This might be partly the age she's at, and I think Chris Petersen's art plays a huge part. Plus, in play, the fact that the mechanics are fairly easy to grasp even for a kid who is just beginning to read (lots of "can you think of a way that you can help the other mouse do such and such?" and things like that). The fact that there's no plain old failure is also helpful, as I feel like rolling and being told "your mouse didn't do what you wanted" would be a buzzkill for her, but being told "well, you built the bridge but now you are all tired out" was okay.

Looking forward to more stories about Autumn and Trevor the brave and lazy (respectively)!

Cordelia's Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold

2009-01-25T20:31:00.000+13:00

After certain persons close to me going on at some length about Bujold in general and the Vorkosigan series in particular, and one of them lending us pretty much the whole of the Vorkosigan series, I have begun working my way through them.

This first omnibus edition comprises two novels that occur before Miles Vorkosigan himself is actually born, serving mainly to set up the world in general and the formidableness of his parents in particular. It's good, high action space opera. It has some of the flaws you might expect given that description - the heroes are just phenomenally awesome, for example - but accepting these conventions, it is an immensely good read.

The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

2009-01-25T20:20:00.000+13:00

Re-reading this was enjoyable, especially given that I had been thinking a lot about Lovecraft (with running Trail of Cthulhu) and it's relationship to espoinage fiction (given the Delta Green connection in my game). Plus, I've been reading a bit of Hellboy/BPRD and thinking a bit about Cold City/Hot War too, so I guess the whole apocalypti/monsters from beyond thing might be rather on my mind right now.

Anyhow, to the book itself... it's certainly raw compared to his later work, and filled to the brim with nerdy jokes about Lovecraft, information technology and spy fiction. Still, they are good jokes and it is a good story. I suspect that The Jennifer Morgue will get a second read pretty soon, too, and I'm looking forward to the third outing even more now.

Kapcon 2009 Report

2009-01-19T07:26:00.000+13:00

So, this year I was a leading conspirator in Kapcon's second games on demand event. We had a bigger team of facilitators, with last year's team (me, Steve Hickey, Morgan Davie and Malcolm Craig) joined by Aaron Caskey, Simon Carryer and Gregor Hutton. Everything went a bit more smoothly, with the benefit of having done it all once before, and overall I felt that the room had a more relaxed atmosphere.

The main thing was getting games played - I have numbers for the first five rounds, where we seem to have got 40 people through the room. In fact the games played is somewhat higher than this would imply, because with 7 of us facilitators, we all got to join in games a fair bit too. I think we had four or five games run per round, and a good selection too. Highly requested this year were 3:16, Mouse Guard, and Best Friends. I guess having Mr Hutton present may have accounted for some of that.

As facilitators, we'd made a specific decision to reduce the number of games we each offered and focus on fewer games that we were more excited to run. In the end we each had 4-8, I think. As one of those at the higher end of that range, I think that next year I'm going to aim for no more than 5-6 to offer. More focus, I think, means more enthusiasm when pitching and running.

Anyway, for some specific games...

Round one I ran a game of Mouse Guard. We played the 'deliever the mail' scenario from the book, minus one character, and had a great time. The main mission went relatively smoothly and we had time to do a follow up GM/player turn in which they dealt with the mouse Loretta and her story that had come up after their encounter with the raven and losing some of the mail. A good time was had by all, and I think that session might have sold the game to one of the players who wanted to try it out. I like this game - as GM, the rules really help build the story up as you play.

Round two, I got to play a game of 3:16 run by Gregor. I played a quiet, possibly psycho trooper in what turned out to be a squad of misfits. We almost immediately got pulled off active service due to a variety of screwups and the sarge got caught in Catch-22 by his superior officer. Eventually we got shipped to a trooper R&R brothel planet to work as MPs, which went as badly as might be expected, as we stumbled upon alien inflitrators up to no good. Our attempts to deal with them were hindered by (1) our decision that some innocent alien clams were the enemy and (2) the sargent being infected and mind controlled by a Gongaran ooze. Despite all this, we managed to wipe all the bastards out through the panicked use of lots of strength flashbacks. Take that, disgusting groin oozes! A fun, albeit absolutely disgusting game. Be glad I have left out the details of the Gongaran life cycle.

Round four, was a game of Geiger Counter. We built a science fiction film "New Eden", in which the menace was the breakdown of a utopian Star Trek-type alliance due to the danger of new ideas. Our setting was a frontier base where an alien diplomatic mission was taking place. The overall plot was that some paranoid or possibly just cautious faction in the alliance determined that the alien influence would destablize society, so attempted to destroy the contact at the source. Our characters were people on the base attempting to either escape or deal with either the 'cauterization' faction or the 'new ideas' faction. The aliens also took some part, although their motivations were 'escape from crazy humans' once everything began falling apart. The game went well, with some strong potential survivor characters and some great scenes. I felt that the pacing went as it should, and that Geiger Counter once again shone as a game for this sort of story. Two survivors, one infected with 'new ideas' and both leaving room for a sequel.

Round five was a game of The Shab-al-Hiri Roach which went very well. I had a couple of players who were, I think, new to the style of game (GM-less, one shot) but they were both experienced LARPers, and they soon got into the swing of things. We had a fairly low body count game, but plenty of social sniping and heckling people's formal speeches. Due to a combination of players who were a couple and fortuitous Roach commands, there was also a pretty funny scandalous BDSM affair between their two characters. My own character had a very satisfying arc, in which I pushed him to bring the crazy (he was Roach-possessed from the beginning) but he threw it off before the end, and I had him give up his stuffy university life to become a musician and a better person, having reformed from those dark days of 1919 at Pemberton College. I think that might be the first happy ending I have had for a Roach character!

So, four out of four good games. In each I felt like the intended effect of "introduce people to something they are interested in but might not have given a go otherwise" was met, and wholly or mostly the secondary objective of "and they liked it too". There was also generally a more sociable and fun vibe in the games on demand room this year, which was good. Plus, thanks to Malcolm, we had arranged to have a few games to give away as spot prizes (on a 'you get one entry each time you play, and we draw names out at random' process). It was really cool to be able to give some free stuff to some of the people who had come and joined us during the con.

Comments are welcome. Otherwise, see you all next year!

Mouse Guard RPG: Actual Play Impressions

2009-01-16T17:27:00.000+13:00

Just a quick post to note that I played a one-shot game of this on Monday night, with the pre-generated "Trouble in Grasslake" mission from the book. We had a lot of fun, and the game seemed to work in all the places that reading it led me to expect that it would.

We had a few rough areas with certain rules, but nothing serious - they were all things that would be easily dealt with if we had a few sessions of familiarity (or just an actual book to flick through instead of a printed out pdf). We had a major conflict, which ran surprisingly easily given that it's more involved in the reading. That might be partly because a really good early roll made it fairly short, but I think that was pretty minor - the options were pretty straightforward as we dealt with each in turn. Tactically we probably should have all been thinking more seriously but that will come in time.

Most importantly, we had a great time. The mission played out well, with the major plot and main subplot both giving a lot of entertainment. We skipped one of the suggested subplots, which never quite fitted in, so no great loss there. I also mainly hit the mice with conditions as the result of failed tests, because that was what the fiction called for. The one complication that I remember came in the player turn and led to some great drama between the guard mice as an ill-advised action by one mouse became fairly public knowledge.

Overall impressions: fantastic! I am hoping to run or play some more at Kapcon tomorrow.

The Sky Road by Ken MacLeod

2009-01-15T19:56:00.000+13:00

Well, I made it to the end of the Fall Revolution series again. This one is my second favorite after The Star Fraction. A nice, fairly hopeful end to the series.

The Cassini Division by Ken MacLeod

2009-01-10T19:54:00.000+13:00

Third in the Fall Revolution Series, this deals with the aftermath of The Stone Canal's events from the point of view of the defenders of the communist Union that controls most of the Solar System. The key question is what to do about the posthuman upload civilisation on Jupiter, that has been generally hostile for some decades and has just changed into a new phase. Our point of view character is a hard soldier who is all for dropping a few thousand comets on the planet and killing them all, but various people she meets along the way are keen to convince her that perhaps one shouldn't just wipe out other civilisations just because they might later be a threat to us?

A good one.

The Stone Canal by Ken MacLeod

2009-01-10T19:49:00.000+13:00

I remember this being the most confusing of the Fall Revolution novels, and it still is on re-reading. It is packed with more ideas than the others, and none seem quite as completely explicated. Still, it's interesting to see the story of a couple of characters you met once each in The Star Fraction played out in full over the course of a couple of hundred years here (this pattern continues in the other books, each is a story that is tangential to that first novel).

Still, there's plenty here to like, and the ideas are fascinating to think about, even if I would have liked to have them developed further in the novel.

The Alchemist's Apprentice by Dave Duncan

2009-01-10T19:44:00.000+13:00

A fun Venetian murder mystery/conspiracy novel following the apprentice of a descendant of Nostradamus. Technically it's a fantasy novel, but the magical elements are few and hardly rate compared to the romantic poltical wheeling and dealing of the main character as he tries to solve a murder, in the flamboyant manner expected of a Venetian nobleman (even if his family happens to be destitute).

Light and enjoyable.

Azincourt by Bernard Cornwell

2008-12-29T20:30:00.000+13:00

Cornwell's tale of the Agincourt campaign follows the career of a longbowman who gets made ventenar (sergeant in command of twenty archers) during those events. As fans of Cornwell may expect, he has a some diabolical enemies - some English, some French - who he crosses paths with on and off during the course of the novel. The times are brutal, and so is the story, especially his many little revisionist takes on the romanticized version of the story (e.g. Shakespeare's).

Most importantly, contains all the adventure and historical detail that you would expect. Great stuff.

Music that I got in the primary gifting period.

2008-12-26T14:18:00.001+13:00

I'm not going to say much about these, just list them. They are good! Look for them on youtube or something! Also, Graham Reid's elsewhere has lots of good reviews of most of them and usually a song you can listen to (I found out about many of them from his mailing list/RSS feed originally, and recommend both). Also, strictly speaking some of these were actually gifted to Make Tea Not War but I'm sure she won't mind sharing. Ordered by the order of the pile of CDs:

Frightened Rabbit: Midnight Organ Fight
Calexico: Carried To Dust
Samuel F Scott & the Bunnies on Ponies: Straight Answer Machine
David Byrne & Brian Eno: Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
Luke Buda: Vesuvius
Flogging Molly: Swagger, Drunken Lullabies

The Star Fraction by Ken MacLeod

2008-12-26T14:09:00.000+13:00

I re-read this on a whim, seeing it on the library shelf, and was not disappointed. I think this may be his best novel - it's certainly so densely packed with ideas it seems liable to implode at any point. Fantastic. Should be on any serious science fiction fan's must-read list. Probably the must-own list, really.

For those who are late to the party, it follows a few characters, but centrally Moh Kohn, a mecenary with a hacked together gun/AI who discovers as part of a routine 'protect university science department from anti-technology terrorists' job that he seems to be a key part of some kind of backup plan to save British (or possibly global) socialism that was put together by his father (a genius computer programmer, and author of the OS/internet substrate of the computers used in the time of the novel) and seems to have suddenly activated itself. A combination of interesting and plausible politics and technologies make this work much better than many similar attempts. Also, there's a really good sprinkling of stuff that is just damn cool (the way that Gibson can also do so very well).

Rollback by Robert J Sawyer

2008-12-26T14:03:00.000+13:00

An interesting, bittersweet novel about early life extension technologies. The main plot centres on a married couple. She was the person who deciphered the first message received from extraterrestrials, but is now 87. A response is received and she is offered a new (and phenomenally expensive) rejuvenation treatment to aid her efforts to decipher the alien's second message. She accepts, but only on the condition that her husband also gets the treatment. Unfortunately, it only works on him. The novel is from his point of view and explores the various effects that this has.

Good.

Spindrift by Allen Steele

2008-12-13T15:21:00.000+13:00

Reliably good hard sf space opera from Steele. This is in the Coyote universe but only loosely related to the Coyote stories, which I had been finding a little bogged down in their own history and characters recently, so this was somewhat refreshing. It's a first contact story, and a fun enough representative of the type.

The characters are fairly one-dimensional, and the bad guys in particular seem motivated by little else beyond the needs of the story to have some villains. On the other hand, the exploration and hazards of space sections more than make up for those shortcomings.

The Last Green Tree by Jim Grimsley

2008-12-13T15:10:00.000+13:00

A strange kind of blend of science fiction and fantasy novel, dealing with magic that is allegedly some kind of sufficiently advanced technology (although it is hard to see how it is). In any case, the characters are strongly drawn and interesting, and their attempts to deal with the clash of magicians which incidentally wipes out most of a world.

It's sort of a follow on from The Ordinary, in that it is set in the same world and answers certain questions raised in that novel, but the connections are largely incidental.

Hot Topic by Gareth Renowden

2008-12-04T09:00:00.000+13:00

A nice general introduction to climate science, what is happening to the world, and what specifically is going to happen to New Zealand. The major topics of the IPCC reports are covered here, with a bit of expansion on areas of interest to New Zealand laypeople (or at least that is how it comes across - I must admit to only having read the summary versions of some of the IPCC reports myself).

Mouse Guard RPG: Read-through Review

2008-12-03T11:32:00.000+13:00

The pre-order for this includes a downloadable pdf, so I spent yesterday evening reading the whole thing. It captures the feel of the comic very well - there is an emphasis on teamwork, on being small creatures in a big dangerous world, and on making hard choices about what you beleive in.

Oh yeah... quick aside for those not familiar with the comics... mice are like people, they have a little medieval society and talk and stuff. All the other animals are basically just animals but as mice are tiny they are effectively monsters. The mouse guard are the mice who protect all the other mice from these dangers.

I'm not familiar with any of the other Burning Wheel games, so I can't give any comparison to those, but it's certainly a lovely system. The basic way you make tests is simple (roll a pool of six sided dice, 4-6 are successes, you need X successes where X is picked by very following instructions in the skill description). The more elaborate kinds of tests and things you can do with them (teamwork, use of weapons and tools, etc) build on this base in straightforward ways.

There's also a real focus on getting into play fast - there are premade characters and missions in the book to start you off, and every kind of animal you might meet is statted out (even a bear, although I hope never to see a mouse patrol facing one). Every session each player gives their mouse a goal to try and acheive by the end, as well as the mission you have as a team. The GM sets out to put some obstacles in the way of the mission and goals. Things get interesting due to the failure mechanic. When a player fails a test, it isn't just 'do you succeed or fail'. Instead, the GM decides whether your mouse succeeds, but takes a condition (like now it's Tired, or Injured, etc) or fails, but there is a Twist in the story.

Adding a twist to the story allows the GM to bring in entirely new obstacles or sub-plots, and seems like it will make running a session go pretty smoothly while maintaining a sense of unpredictability and excitement.

The other neat thing is that after the mission is done, the players get a formal turn. This is basically the guards' down time, where the players get to finish up their goals, recover from the mission, and stuff like that. There's some limitations on how much you can do and you still have to make tests to get things done. Having this be directed by the players is a cool idea. I like it.

There's some overarching shape to the stories too - the seasons have a very pronounced impact on the day to day lives of the mice and the missions that the guard will need to do. There are a few ways suggested to use these changes to structure your games. All of them look pretty good (e.g. X sessions per season, X weather changes per season, etc). Over this there's an even bigger structure where the life of your patrol will probably come to a close as the characters retire or die.

Getting back to the point about running the game, it seems like it will fit into my preferred mode of 'think up a basic idea about what will happen in five minutes before the session and then run with it'. The characters have a whole lot of flags written in to the character sheet as well - friends, enemies, things they beleive in, things to roleplay each session, things they are good at, personal quirks, etc. These all have mechanical reasons to be incorporated into play, as well, so they'll be sure to be used.

There's plenty more in the rules, but I think it's premature to say more before play. At this stage, it all looks like it will be great.

Lastly, it looks absolutely fantastic. It is filled with David Petersen's art - some from the comics, some new (all stunning) - and printed in full colour. It's been printed through Petersen's publisher, so I expect it will come out the same quality as the comic collection, i.e. significantly more fantastic than a pdf read on a laptop screen.

The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker

2008-12-03T11:24:00.000+13:00

This book is about the language of thought - how the mind frames concepts about the world internally. Pinker uses both psychology (mainly evolutionary) and linguistics to pick apart what the language of thought is comprised of. This approach is plausible, to the extent it works, but limited given our current state of knowledge. Still, there's plenty of Pinker's usual interesting psychological facts in here.

I found the first part of the book pretty hard going. It's fairly dense and dry, and the bulk of his thesis gets set out here. The second part is lighter, and significantly more readable, and has him applying the thesis to particular things - metaphor, swearing and the use of implication in speech.

Overall, a good read.

Peter Wicked by Broos Campbell

2008-11-26T16:30:00.000+13:00

The third Matty Graves novel. Campbell seems to have really hit his stride with the series - this one was the most enjoyable yet. Graves is a refreshingly down to earth character, quite a contrast to the more usual naval hero who is honourable to a fault. The picture drawn of the United States Navy's early days and the ad hoc foreign policies of colonies in the Carribbean are fascinating too.

The Wolf Sea by Robert Low

2008-11-19T18:23:00.000+13:00

I was very impressed with Low's first novel, The Whale Road, and this second one carries on in the same vein. It's rough and brutal, with a human side from our narrator's point of view. This story begins in Constantinople, with Orm losing the sword he got at the end of the first novel. The rest of the story involves his attempts to track it (and his old enemy Starkad) across the western Mediterranean, and trying to keep his Oathsworn alive and be a good jarl.

Overall, it's a fantastic adventure, and I'm left unhappy that I have to wait at least six months for the third novel.

An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe

2008-11-13T19:48:00.000+13:00

In this novel, Wolfe gives us his take on Lovecraft. It's set in the future, and centers on an actress who gets involved in some strange goings on. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

There's a lot of fun to be had in working out what he is referring to obliquely (or not so obliquely, as with 'that darn squid god').

Trail of Cthulhu: Additional

2008-11-11T08:57:00.000+13:00

Session two of this went very well. This was more action than investigation oriented, with our brave academics confronting several deep ones behind the murders.

This gave us plenty of opportunity to test the combat and fleeing rules. These flow pretty well, and both have a good sense of the back and forward of scuffles and chases. Although coming very close to it, none of the investigators were killed (although one was seriously wounded). On the other hand, they didn't actually kill any monsters either.

After getting out of the ritual chamber (which the creatures did not seem keen to leave), they decided to dynamite the place closed and return to Arkham and ponder the discovery that something called a Cthulhu will wake when the stars are right, and that this is in about six months.

I got to have a lot of fun with the one character who has 'in the blood' as their drive, too. Good times.

Flint & Silver by John Drake

2008-11-02T19:40:00.000+13:00

I wasn't especially optimistic about the idea of a prequel to Treasure Island, but it is quite enjoyable. In his afterword, Drake says that he wanted to write the story so that he knew their history. He also has written the book for adults rather than teenagers. It's been many years since I read Treasure Island, so I'm sure I missed a bunch of stuff, but it was still a good adventure story. Long John Silver is the hero, and Drake paints an almost believable portrait of a honourable man who becomes a pirate, and how he leads a crew to be less brutal than they might otherwise. He also has to deal with Flint, a treacherous psychopath who is probably just as unrealistic a pirate in the other direction.

A good read. There is to be a second volume, as well, but I think I might re-read the inspiring work again next.

De Blob

2008-10-29T21:39:00.000+13:00

This is one of the most fun games I've played on the Wii. It has style, wit and gleeful anarchy in play (and even more so in the story that frames it).

So. Play. You are a round blob with a funny expression, and you can soak up paint and then paint things by bouncing against them. The controls are fairly simple - nunchuk stick to guide you, flick the remote to jump, Z to target things (paintbots, bad guys, buttons, etc) to jump on them. It's basically a platform game, with the added bonus of letting you splatter paint over a blank city however you like. Each level is huge (taking an hour or so to complete) and there are a bunch of challenges - little timed tasks - that give you extra points. Some of these also stop bad guys spawning, or get rid of dangerous black ink. All good, with the exception of jumping from building to building, which is supposed to be useful and give you bonus points, except instead it is utterly random where you end up.

This is all wrapped in a glorious piece of utterly mad story. The facistic inkies have taken over the city, removing all the colour via paintbot and trapped all the inhabitants in gray suits. You are a jungle dwelling blob, recruited by the colour resistance (a few other blobby characters) to strike back. The cutscenes that start each level, and some of the story-related tasks in game, are hilarious. Best quote: "They have forced all the musicians to become accountants!" The craziness is included everywhere - the way that major buildings get redesigned when you take them back, the patterns that you can pick up to make your painting more varied, the musical stings that play when you paint something, and so on.

The multiplayer modes seem quite fun too, although so far I have only played them with my daughter, so I'm not sure how they will work when ruthless competition is active. There's no reason they wouldn't be - the competitive painting one at least was pretty neat. Also, on the topic of kid-friendliness, once you have completed a level, it can be opened in 'free paint' mode, lacking all enemies and objectives. This is a bit hit with her.

Battle Fleet by Paul Dowsell

2008-10-29T21:08:00.000+13:00

Starts kind of weak, but once it gets going this is a great adventure story. A lot of thinking about life and death. This is number three in the series, I think I'll need to look up the earlier ones too (although from mention in this one of plot happenings, I'm not sure whether they will be consistently as good as this one).

Geiger Counter: Total Eclipse

2008-10-26T08:33:00.000+13:00

This game ran at the Fright Night 2 convention, 25 October 2008.

There were seven total in the group, some with almost no experience playing games with this much shared narration, and one person who hadbeen considering running it himself. As we got into brainstorming the film, things went smoothly right from the beginning. I had prepared some basic ideas - basically enough to guide where it went, or act as a fallback if people were short on ideas. This was plenty, especially as the game had been sold as an Aliens-inspired survival horror, which had everyone thinking in that mode to start with.

As we began to define the menace (a nano-machine based, infectious meme-complex) and setting (an asteroid mining facility with a population of about 13000), things really took off. The characters were a great selection of people from all over the facility, plus a couple of outsiders (a mining barge pilot and a military auditor). Inside we had a black market fixer, a prostitute, a soldier and an engineer. Relationships between all these characters quickly complicated things in a very satisfying manner.

Putting together the trailer was like a light version of the scene framing that comes up later, and I felt that it really helped get people into the right space this game. Also, I think we got almost everything from the trailer into the film - maybe we cut some of the exact quotes from the Colonel, but the spirit of the thing was there.

Once the film itself began, things just rocked along. The pacing seemed to work naturally, with everyone in pretty much the same space about how much horror to show in their scenes, and making an effort to include characters that hadn't had a scene, or waiting before returning to characters in trouble. I'd put together a soundtrack with a mishmash of spooky film scores and a few Darkest of the Hillside Thickets songs, and this managed to give us some appropriate music several times, and (even better) a few interesting contrasts... one was a kind of jazzy, romantic theme that came up just as things were beginning to fall apart.

We began losing characters as the menace got to eight dice (the first when it reached 7 or 8). Things began getting very tense as the nano-memes began infecting the whole complex. As their stories began to play out, we had some great subplots. The soldier shot the Colonel, and made a run for it, trying to rescue both his girlfriend and the working girl without them finding out about each other. By coincidence, those two were working together to escape to the very end. There were a few other subplots going on too, and they all got resolved satisfactorily (in a horror movie sense - the two-timer got his in the hangar bay as one of the women escaped in a rescue ship, for example). The barge pilot, was the other survivor, taking the ship out while getting her revenge on the (now meme-infected) Colonel who had wrecked her navy career, as they blew up the mining colony on the way out.

There were loads of great cinematic moments, too. Two characters who we thought we dead returned for some extra scenes, spaceships crashing, pursuit through tunnels and across the surface of an asteroid, the giant machinery that was crushing and cutting minerals out, and so on.

Overall, a fantastic game, and very smooth to run. This beta is noticeably more straightforward than the previous draft, used for my test run a few months back.

The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman

2008-10-26T08:28:00.000+13:00

A good, kind of relaxed, kind of a modern take on H G Wells' Time Machine. I don't want to say much about the story, as discovering it as you go is part of the enjoyment. Just read it.

Nation by Terry Pratchett

2008-10-24T18:42:00.000+13:00

A bit of a change of pace, but very good. This book isn't set on the Discworld, and it's generally more serious than those books. However, the general message of practicality in difficult situations and the efficacy of science over supersitition is about as good as the message in any young adult novel.

Cowboy Angels by Paul McAuley

2008-10-23T21:37:00.001+13:00

A fantastic read. Much more techno-thriller than science fiction, although the science fiction is fairly critical to the plot ('cowboy angels' are black ops agents trained to infiltrate alternate worlds). The story ends up being very human - the hero is a retired agent, reactivated to try and bring an old friend back in. The one thing that seemed to run through it was his determination to do the right thing - not just his duty, but the right thing for the people around him too.

The friend has been murdering alternate copies of the same woman in different worlds. As we get further and further into the plots and counterplots, things stay exciting. That keeps up all the way to the last paragraph.

The way that the alternate worlds fit together, and how the one that invented the technology to travel to others deals with it is fascinating too. The technology was invented in the USA and they used it to help out alternate, and less fortunate, Americas. A lot of that help is trade, of course, so they enriched themselves too. He shows several different facets of these interactions (including with our own world, in which they are acting covertly).

Under Enemy Colors by S Thomas Russell

2008-10-21T18:32:00.000+13:00

A new Napoleonic naval series, about a Royal Navy Lieutenant who is of mixed English and French parentage. Russell uses this to provide a new spin on the utter loyalty to the British Crown that is usual in these stories.

This story concerns itself with his time as first lieutenant under perhaps the most tyrannical and cowardly captain conceivable. The military actions seem generally less stressful than just dealing with the captain under day to day life.

I look forward to further episodes in Lt Hayden's story. There's a lot of potential here - perhaps to be as good as O'Brian?

The House of the Stag by Kage Baker

2008-10-17T22:29:00.001+13:00

Another fantasy novel set in the same world as The Anvil of the World. Starts rather more seriously, but as the book goes on it becomes more like the first one. Very good.

War Reporting for Cowards by Chris Ayres

2008-10-16T20:59:00.003+13:00

This is the memoir of basically a fairly normal journalist who seems to have kind of accidentally agreed to be an embedded journalist in the 2003 Iraq invasion. He's funny - mainly self-deprecating - and his view on things is a different perspective compared to war correspondents. The book's not just about that time, either. He talks about things that led towards the experience - his history as a journalist and his experience in New York when the World Trade Centre attacks occurred, mainly.

Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

2008-10-16T20:54:00.000+13:00

I thought I'd read some of Mosley's stuff, on the grounds that it is generally recommended. This one's certainly a good hard-boiled novel. Easy Rawlins is an interesting detective too - in this first story, he's a recently fired factory worker and takes on the detective work essentially at random.

Once it gets going, the usual sort of violence and chaos surrounds him. The one thing that was perhaps too much are the terrible revelations that in the end lie beneath everything - and they sure are terrible.

Trail of Cthulhu - Some Actual Play

2008-10-14T15:15:00.000+13:00

We played the first episode of our was Nemesis, now Trail of Cthulhu, game last night.

The 1932 Miskatonic University expedition to excavate a suspected lost city site in the Burmese highlands got off to a good start, although they had some trouble with 'deserting' local labourers. This took a turn for the more suspicious when one of them 'deserted' by being grabbed and dragged into the lake in broad daylight. A crocodile or large eel was suggested as the likely culprit, despite a lack of sightings of either type of creature in the area. Various clues were found, suggesting that the city was many thousands of years older than expected, that a nearby hostile village might be comprised of survivors of the 800 year old suppression of the city, and so forth.

In the third week of digging they broke into an underground chamber, that appeared to be a sealed annex to the temple complex, the entries since the city was razed. The upper chamber was richly decorated with grotesque frescoes depicting slaves or captives being devoured by the gods and inhabitants of the city. Our plucky heroes continued into the lower chamber, which contained a huge basalt altar and what appeared to be an underground exit to the sea (not the freshwater lake that it ought to connect to). We ended the session as the altar was found to contain the dismembered corpses of at least two people (quite possibly some or all of the missing labourers).

We only really gave a run to the investigative side of the rules, which worked very well. The sense of resource management was interesting. When I prompted players to make a spend in this or that, there was often a bit of thought - did it seem like extra info here was going to be more valuable than extra info later?

We didn't get into any fighting, although there were a few 'sense trouble' and 'stability' rolls to be made. In fact, if those sense trouble rolls had been successful, there would have been more action and possibly fewer missing labourers. In any case, the investigators have definitely alerted certain entities to their presence now and can expect a somewhat more exciting next session. Expect a report on how lethal the system is in two weeks!

Deadly Shoals by Joan Druett

2008-10-07T22:31:00.000+13:00

Another of the Wiki Coffin mysteries. Good. Coffin is perhaps a little too good at everything, though.

Incandescence by Greg Egan

2008-10-07T18:34:00.000+13:00

A good story in the "strange alien society" type of science fiction. By far the most convoluted physics of any of his books, although that might just be my inability to mentally visualize the world of these aliens - if you follow the link, you will see that Egan has both an easy guide to how it works, and also a non-easy one with all the mathematics. I found the easy version kind of gave me a bit of an idea how it works, but not enough to really get it all. The story of the non-industrial aliens discovering general relativity is compelling, and the parallel story of a post-human and his companion who are searching for the world is good too. I liked it, but you'll need to be prepared to either seriously engage with the physics or skim past those bits to enjoy it.

The Wisdom of Ravens by me

2008-10-05T22:00:00.000+13:00

So, I wrote another game. It's strange, and I don't exactly know how it will play. But I was inspired by this Murderland game contest, and this is what came out. It is pretty much a role playing poem (albeit longer than most), which is a form that I find both intriuging and strange. Perhaps I'll have a chance to try it out soon, and see if it works.

The Martian General's Daughter by Theodore Judson

2008-10-05T16:25:00.000+13:00

This story is about the final collapse of industrial civilization, in a little less than 300 years. The narrator is the illegitimate daughter of a General in an empire that grew out of the USA. The book reads very similarly to I, Claudius, and Judson uses some very obvious parallels to the decline of the Roman empire. The narrative switches back and forward between her childhood (under the last decent emperor) and a present in which her father finds himself caught in a struggle for the throne.

It's a compelling story, slowly revealing clues about how the world came to be that way and how the powerful empire collapses.

Very good indeed.

In The Shadow Of The Moon

2008-10-04T13:10:00.002+13:00

A documentary about the moon landings, based on interviews with the surviving astronauts who went there. It's comprised of cuts between them talking and archival footage related to what they're telling.

Fantastic.

If A Pirate I Must Be... by Richard Sanders

2008-10-04T13:03:00.000+13:00

This is a biography of the infamous pirate Bartholomew Roberts. In fact, it's a bit more general than that, as Sanders goes off on various tangents regarding pirate culture, the slave trade, and so on. Roberts' career as a pirate is a pretty good framework for this. Interesting, but mainly for anecdotal stuff (Sanders goes to many primary sources).

Trail of Cthulhu by Ken Hite

2008-10-04T08:14:00.003+13:00

Essentially, this game takes everything good from Call of Cthulhu and substitutes a coherent system in place of the (to me) utterly terrible old Basic Role Play one. Hite's the perfect author to extract the best of Lovecraft's gameable ideas, too. His take on things is surprisingly fresh (especially his take on the great old ones - each described by a variety of possible explanations, not all of which are consistent).

The system, Robin Laws' GUMSHOE, is all about resource management instead of skill ratings. Investigative abilities will automatically provide characters with the crucial clues to a case (if you have a relevant ability). However, to get extra information you need to spend points. So if you just want to haul ass after the monster, that's free, but if you want to, say, find out how to best kill it, or how it was summoned, those might cost you. I didn't really have very high hopes of this part of the game, but it is actually done rather well. Combined with the advice on mystery construction, it makes a solid basis for playing adventures through.

The other side of the system is a task resolution bit to cover fighting, chases, and other hazards that you will find. You roll a plain old six sided die, aiming to beat a target number of 2-8. In order to boost your chances, you spend points from your ability pool before you roll. It looks like it will play quick and the combat is appropriately dangerous when fighting people and (given their abilities and special powers) absolutely lethal when fighting monsters.

Character generation is pretty good. Like Call of Cthulhu, you pick an occupation that gives you several abilities that are easier to develop. You also get one or two special features based on it, e.g. Doctors can get access to hospital records and so on. You also pick a drive - something that is behind your desire to investigate weirdness. These are a good selection. They have a mechanical affect too - they can be compelled like FATE Aspects, with the reward being increased Stability (more on this below). Finally, you drop a bunch of points on Investigative abilities and another bunch on your general abilities, giving you your point pools to spend on clues and roll bonuses.

The sanity system (perhaps insanity system is more appropriate) is slightly more nuanced than Call of Cthulhu as well. I gather this is because GUMSHOE includes rules for Stability - how well a character bears up in the face of traumatic events - but not for a descent into madness. Hite has essentially mashed them together. Characters are scored for their Stability and Sanity. Stability is used to cope with shocks, and can go up and down rapidly. Sanity goes only down, either when Stability is reduced to 0 by a Mythos encounter, or directly when encountering the most horrifying of creatures. It reads like it will work fine.

The bulk of the book is given over to the descriptions of mythos creatures, general background and advice for play. This is all really good stuff - the creature descriptions stand out, with an effort made to have them not just a list of monsters, but with suggestions to make them more interesting all the way through. The advice on building a campaign is likewise solid, with a lot of good ideas, and suggestions for running the game in many different ways (including totally improvised mysteries). There's also markers throughout the book of rules, concepts and so forth that suit either 'Purist' or 'Pulp' style games. These seem to be well selected, and allow for a continuum of styles from one end to the other, depending on your choices of which to use.

Overall, a very nice Lovecraft game. I look forward to running it - which will happen soon, as I was about to run such a game using Nemesis, but Trail of Cthulhu just beat it for that position.

Four Days In June by Iain Gale

2008-09-27T08:31:00.000+12:00

A novel about the battle of Waterloo, from the points of view of several people in various armies. Good, although every now and again it feels more like a history lecture than a nove.

Escapement by Jay Lake

2008-09-26T19:03:00.000+12:00

This follows on from Mainspring, with further adventures in an alternate universe that is clockwork. It's a much more fun novel. I think that's partly because - the world established - there is less concern with describing how things are there. Also the stories (it follows three different characters this time) are more interesting than Hethor's quest was.

Generation Kill by Evan Wright

2008-09-14T20:49:00.000+12:00

An interesting look at (some of) the people on the front lines in the American military. Wright was an embedded journalist with the Marine First Recon Battalion, and the book recounts what he saw and heard in the invasion of Iraq. It's fairly hostile to the higher ranked officers (perhaps unfairly - via wikipedia I found a rebuttal to the book, with differing accounts on many of the events in the book). This seems likely to be because Wright was with the same small group of mainly enlisted men. In any case, it's still a great read, especially for the portraits he paints of some of the soldiers.

The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod

2008-09-08T19:23:00.000+12:00

A near future police thriller, dealing with a world that has moved into profound rejection of religion after the current 'War on Terror' just got worse and worse, and religion got blamed. The novel is all about themes around robot consciousness and religion versus rationalism, with the investigation into a murder as the plot. Good stuff, as you can expect from MacLeod, although it feels strangely more relaxed than usual (strange because the events in the story are anything but relaxing).

Also slightly jarring is the fact that some of the action takes place in New Zealand, and MacLeod has got a few things just slightly wrong - nothing that really matters, just a few things that aren't quite right (the bird is a 'tui' not a 'tui-tui'; fantails don't really hang out in flocks; etc).

Houses of the Blooded by John Wick

2008-09-07T13:04:00.000+12:00

I grabbed the pdf of this due to Wick temporarily dropping the price to USD$5. I'd thought it looked a bit too similar to Greg Stolze's Reign to look at in much detail before. I was wrong... well, kind of. It is similar in many ways, but the emphasis and mechanics are very different.

Everyone in Houses is member of the aristocracy of a passionate race of created beings called ven. They're basically humans with certain drives turned up to 11. They live in the ruins of the people who created them, and they're slowly re-taming their lands. The game is about the lives of these nobles, in epic tragedies. There's rules for vendettas, romantic affairs (kind of like the tradition of courtly love) and for building up your domains (or taking over those of others).

The domain rules are a basic framework that everything else fits into. Each season, the nobles will arrange the production of their lands and order their vassals to do this and that. It is also expected that each player character will play out 1-3 stories or adventures in more detail. This side of the game also brings in a huge number of non player characters - rival nobles, vassals, spouses - who will increasingly entangle the lives of the player characters.

Some details of the mechanics that are interesting:

Rolls are made to win control of narration, not to determine success or failure.
Players can elect to hold back dice they are entitled to roll to allow them a greater degree of success, with a lower chance.
Uses a more limited version of Aspects (from FATE 3.0 as seen in Spirit of the Century). Instead of being able to be used whenever they are appropriate, each one has specific triggers to allow it to be invoked for yourself, tagged by someone else, or compelled by the gamemaster.
Detailed rules for duels (when a Revenge or vendetta has been called), with some neat stuff in the different maneuvers available.
Detailed rules for Romance, covering everything from the initial flirtation to when it all ends in tears, heartbreak and possibly bloodshed.
Lots of cool stuff you can do in your domain. E.g. raise a secret army; explore a ruin of the old sorcerer kings; throw a party; write an opera; build a city; fight off monsters in untamed lands.

Overall, a very cool system that I hope to play with my group soon. I think we'd have great fun with it in the epic mode (tragedy with buckets of blood, like Hamlet or Macbeth).

How to Host a Dungeon by Tony Dowler

2008-09-07T12:50:00.000+12:00

This is a strange kind of thing... it's a solo game kind of thing, designed to create interesting dungeons for use in dunegeon-crawl rpgs. Basically, you work your way through various different ages, and the game tells you how things get organised.

It's really fun! That's the key bit. I've run through three dungeons now, one with the free version and two with the non-free. In each, there's certainly been a bunch of cool stuff that would make for a fun campaign. There's a lot of randomness that determines what happens in the dungeon, i.e. which monsters colonise which part and so on. There's also a series of events that each of the monsters will try each turn... dwarves will mine, dragons will hunt for food, etc. As time goes on, the humans living on the surface might even send expeditions or adventurers into the dungeon.

Dowler has come up with some great, evocative stuff in how the different groups behave, and the result dungeons have all been interesting - the results of all the events in the previous ages certainly give a lot of character to things! For example, one of mine ended up with a rich ettin lairing in the now-abandoned remains of an ancient demonic soul mill... nice food for describing in play!

Currently all my dungeons were on A4 paper (due to a lack of anything bigger) but yesterday I got myself an A3 pad, and I'm looking forward to playing again with a less cramped space (I think that may have led to my other dungeons 'finishing' quicker than they otherwise might have).

There's a nice example of how it works going on in a group dungeon making thread on story games, too.

Renegade's Magic by Robin Hobb

2008-09-02T20:29:00.000+12:00

A very nice conclusion to the Soldier's Son trilogy. Unfortunately it is extremely long, as Hobb indulges in a great deal of descriptive prose and her protagonist engages in rather a lot of introspection. However, those aren't enough to detract from an interesting story, and a surprisingly nuanced fantasy exploration of the clash of cultures. Neither the colonialist invaders, the conquered nomads, or the state-of-nature forest people are, in the end, any better or worse than each other. This acceptance that people are just people and that every group makes mistakes, does terrible things, and does good things is somewhat rare in fiction (especially fantasy).

Saturn's Children by Charles Stross

2008-09-02T19:27:00.000+12:00

This novel is up to Stross' usual standard. It follows the adventures of a bored sexbot, lost in a world in which all the humans died out (leaving her, and all the other robots, with no particular purpose). As the story goes on, it goes deeper into the reasons that the post-human society is like it is.