So, You Guys Are In This Inn...

Welcome to the Adjective Animal...

So, yesterday I spent the day doing actual work to avoid blogging. Doing actual work to get out of doing fake work, what has become of me? Anyway, since I need to write about something to justify calling myself a writer, howsabout we talk about starting campaigns?

I Want to Play This Game and Never Stop

This eagle is stunned by all the awesome

Like them or not, Muse has an awesome song called Knights of Cydonia, with an equally awesome video that you need to go watch right now. Go. Okay, back with us? Awesome, right? Yes, I know this is old news, just humor me here. I first got hip to this song through Guitar Hero III, and then to this hysterically campy video through some casual YouTube surfing. I watched, mouth agape, and in the silence I looked around at Jacko and Munin and Riff and Shade and everybody else and said, "We need to play this game, right now!" I do that a lot. I'll see some crazy thing like the Knights of Cydonia video or get really into a book (or series) and decide that I need to do some role-playing in that setting. So, let's talk about great and/or hilarious settings we want to play in, shall we?

Just In Time for Christmas!

Well, well, well. Looks like another of my Fantasy Flight assignments has dropped just in time for all your last-minute Christmas Shopping needs. This time it's The Frozen Reaches, first book of the Warpstorm Trilogy. There's a little something for every Rogue Trader player in this book. Back-room politicking for Rogue Traders and Seneschals, secrets to uncover for Explorators, objects of faith and desire for the Missionaries, and more Orks than you can shake a really big stick at for everyone else. So keep an eye out for this one, and Happy Holidays!

War...war never changes...

Let's rock!

Well, well, well...looka here! My latest book, Battlefleet Koronus, has been announced over at Fantasy Flight's website. Pay close attention to that flavour quote attributed to St. Drusus, I wrote that.

For the Emperor!

Oh, and by the way, check this shit out. Rites of Battle, a sourcebook for Deathwatch, has been announced over at Fantasy Flight. This is the Space Marine assignment I mentioned a few months ago. Go out right now and get yourself a copy of Deathwatch so you all can be totally ready to go when Rites drops! For the Emperor indeed.

Snow Day!

The view from my office...

So, we're just going to go ahead and pretend that I've been updating like normal and not been a slack-ass for the past month and a half. Let's just dive right in, shall we? Winter has come at last to the Detroit Metro Area. It snowed like a bastard all day yesterday, this heavy slurry of rain and snow that was great for snowballing and clogging the shit out of my snowblower, but not so great for staying warm or dry or shoveling without having a heart attack. Like a fool, I did all my snow removal and de-icing the walks after only five hours of constant snow, and by the time it was dark it looked like I hadn't done a thing. It was goddamned Sisyphean. Not that I have it that that bad honestly, seeing as how Ragnarok has apparently arrived for Ross and Sam up in Minneapolis where the Æsir have become manifest and the Metrodome collapsed under the weight of all the snow.

Anyway, I awoke to a blasted, frozen hellscape winter wonderland this morning with about five inches of snow under an inch of ice and a temperature of about a million below zero. Making my car drivable was more akin to getting this guy out of his glacier than civilized snow removal. So of course, as I'm standing there hacking my way through all the ice that entombed the Saturn while the dog and cat both watch me smugly from my office window, my thoughts obviously turn to using weather in role-playing games.

Something New!

Hey look! My latest book, Edge of the Abyss is now on sale. Get your ass to your FLGS or to your favorite online retailer, and lay your money down for this newest addition to the Rogue Trader library. It's chock-a-block with setting info, NPCs, planets, crazy people, and it has more hooks than a fishing trawler.

Still Not Dead

It's true, I'm still not Dead. I've been quiet lately thanks to dadding, a sort of creative malaise, and plain writerly laziness. I recently finished up another big ass project for FFG, and now I'm casting about for other paying projects. Right now, though, I'm starting pre-production on my Cold War super hero/super spy setting AEGIS vs. SPIDER. I'm looking to put together maybe a fifty page PDF covering the setting including the main agencies (AEGIS and SPIDER) and other affiliated agencies, important NPCs, player and GM guidance, and a bunch of other stuff that I think you'll think is neat. We'll see though. The inestimable Jason Richards has offered to help me with layout, since he's got some experience and I know dick about layout/design. We'll see how it goes. Right now I need to digest a bunch of OSS/CIA and Imperial Russian/Soviet intelligence history and set to work. Updates may be sporadic. No more sporadic than they've been, though.

Tuesday Filler: GTFO

Thanks for all your hard work! By the way, get the hell out...

So, a year ago today, I got laid the fuck off from Palladium Books. With one little phone call on a Monday Morning, I lost everything I'd wanted. I'd lost a job, I'd lost Robotech, and I'd lost my rudder. After a bit of heavy drinking and some beating of breasts and gnashing of teeth, I said "Fuck this" and set about forging a new direction for myself as a freelancer in the contracting and increasingly niche Trad Games industry. It hasn't been easy. It hasn't always been fun. It's been slower than I'd like. I've made some progress, though. Shall we see what the passing of a year has brought us Gentle Readers?

Gilding the Lily

You have got to be shitting me...

So, I've got this thing where I see wonder in relatively ordinary things. When you look around, you can find a lot to be amazed at in your surroundings. Little things like the fact that this computer I'm working on has more computing power than was used to put a man on the moon or build this beautiful thing, and big things like, well, the fact that we put a man on the goddamn moon. I've said it before, but if you look at something hard enough you can always find something about it that's fascinating. I find more beauty in the gaunt symmetry of a turbofan engine, and more terror in the simple thoughtless, workaday evils that we perpetrate on one another, than in a million horror movies or sci-fi epics. What drives me crazy is the tendency some writers and game designers have of embellishing something that is already perfectly awesome and, well, ruining it frankly.

Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together

What the hell is this? Awesome, that's what.

So, today's post isn't going to be very long or insightful, 'cause I've got Rogues and Traders to write about. I've got something on my mind though, and that's the time-honored tradition of the mash-up.

Class Warfare or Why I Hate Class/Level Systems

Pass me a fresh character sheet.

I guess I don't really hate class/level systems per se, I just feel like I've, I don't know, outgrown them. See, it seems the older I get, the more inclined I am toward more open ended, customizable gaming experiences. More specifically, what I like is to be able to build characters that meet my character concept without being limited by another game designer's ideas as to what makes a character. I dislike being told what skills or abilities I can or cannot take just because someone thinks that a fighter/warrior/soldier/whatever should have to pay extra for the ability to, say, read.

Gencon

Man, the costume contest was intense this year*

Okay, here it is finally. Now that I've been able to catch up on sleep and unpack everything that happened, here's my post about GenCon 2010. Let me preface this by saying that this is from my point of view, and I'm just some opinionated smartass with a 'blog. I am, in no way, objective or unbiased and I implore you not to assume in any way that this is real journalism. If I miss stuff here, it's because I missed stuff at GenCon, and I wasn't going to pretend that I was a really real reporter with a fedora and a little card that read "press" in my hatband. So, keeping that in mind and without further ado, here's my report!

Friday Highlights

x

No witty picture today. After spending a night on the floor in an undisclosed location, I'm not sure I even possess any wit. Anyway, here's a few nice things about Friday at Gencon:

• Crowd: Happy, (mostly) healthy nerds in their glory. Costumes are good for the most part. People are nice. Lots of exposed flesh, some of it even worth being exposed! Also, there are a ton of people here.
• Vendor Hall: I see game companies. They're everywhere, and they don't even know they want to hire me! But they will. The vendor hall is rockin', Fantasy Flight has a huge-ass booth with a large demo area wherein I played Descent and where I'll go mad today playing Arkham Horror. Sadly, White Wolf seems much reduced, has no product for sale, and their booth is essentially a sad imitation of a New Orleans beer hall. I've been in LARPs that were better outfitted than that booth.
• Panels: I sat one panel with Sam from Fantasy Flight discussing Rogue Trader. I attended another given by Matt Forbeck, Bryan Tillman and his afro, Owen K.C. Stevens, and Jeff Tidball. Very informative and I took copious notes. They were all, to a man, gracious, generous and hilarious.
• Ennies: I went to the Ennies last night as a guest of Fantasy Flight. Unsurprisingly, Paizo swept everything, earning about a brazillion awards for Pathfinder. Eclipse Phase and Diaspora also won some very well deserved awards, which was nice.

So, yeah. There you go. I've already had a good time, met some great people, and ended up with my business card case more full of other people's cards than my own, which is pretty good I'd say. I'll be driving tomorrow, so I can't promise anything in the way of an update. Y'all have a good weekend.

Southern Comfort

Heave to, and prepare to be boarded!

Why, hello there Gentle Readers! So, there were no posts last week because I had a furiously busy Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday then The Wife, The Kid, and I piled in the car and decamped for our annual pilgrimage to North Carolina. Now, after stops in beautiful Columbus, OH and quaint Lynchburg, VA, we have finally arrived in the Outer Banks. See, every year for the past ten or so years, The Wife's step-uncle, who is a wealthy restauranteur here, has invited us down to spend a week. We, and when I say we I mean roughly twenty adults and children, stay in a huge, fuck-off house on the beach with a pool and direct access to the ocean whereupon we cook, eat, drink our faces off and play a lot of board games and cards. Last night The Wife and I spent a nice evening teaching our nieces and nephews, fine young men and women between the ages of ten and fifteen, the finer points of Pandemic, which was awesome. So, you may ask, is there some kind of downside to ten days of concentrated awesomeness in which we travel through the part of the country where American History was invented and culminates with hot and cold running mojitos and sand in our clothes? Well, kinda yeah...

A Comedy of Errors

Welp, they made it. Our first night of Rogue Trader was a pretty rousing success. Here's last night's game log. Enjoy!

Thursday Filler: En Francais!

So, check this out. A couple weeks ago a nice young Frenchman from Guide du Roliste Galactique, a Francophone RPG blog/site/thingy, contacted me out of the blue. Seems that he discovered me in the credits of a Rifts book I worked on, and wanted me to knock together a profile for him to post in his RPG Pros section. I'm big in Japan France, apparently. Here it is, all in French of course, none of which I can read because my high-school French teacher wasn't so much concerned with teaching us French as she was with teaching us all 874 verses of the Champs Elysees song.

Worst. Post. Evar.

The Magic Cards are over there, kid...

So, I had this awesome dream last night. No, not the one where I'm standing on a pyramid dressed as a sun god while naked women pelt me with little pickles. The other one. Right, the one where I buy an awesome old two-story brick corner store with a pressed-tin ceiling in Detroit and renovate it into a kick-ass game store. See, for the longest time, The Wife and I have dreamed of opening our own game store. Someplace cool with brick walls, book shelves that go on forever, plank wood floors, open gaming areas, and maybe an espresso machine in the corner. We have this dream because every time we can be bothered to go into an actual game store our reaction on leaving is always the same; Shit, we can do better than that...

Let's Go To Work!

Meet our new art director...

Journeyman

jour·ney·man   

[jur-nee-muhn]

–noun, plural -men.

In modern apprenticeship systems, a journeyman is a man who has a tradesman certificate that required completion of an apprenticeship. This is the highest formal rank, that of master having been eliminated; it allows them to perform all the tasks of the trade within the area where they are certified, to supervise apprentices and to become self-employed.

As the descendant of hard-working and hard-drinking Eastern European immigrants, the iconography and symbology of the "working man" resonates in me like a genetic memory. For over a hundred years the men of my family have been creators. The first generation came to America from countries that don't evenexist anymore. They tilled the land, built towns, forged lives in a strange country, and toiled endlessly in the hellish steel mills of Eastern Ohio, Western PA, and Northern West Virginia. Their sweat, and much of their blood, tempered the steel that forms the bones of our great cities. Their sons were masons, carpenters, bricklayers, farmers, ironworkers, and steelworkers. They worked ceaselessly building this country, and in what they had of leisure time they built their own homes, made music and musical instruments, made art, brewed and distilled, and even found the time to win a war. Their sons, my father among them, were creators, too. Engineers, mechanics, contractors, welders, ironworkers, and entrepreneurs. Like their fathers, they created for work and they created for play. They built lasting things, great things, and took pride in a job well done. Now here I am, not a bricklayer or a carpenter, but a creator nonetheless. This is my inheritance, the creative impulse, an I'm here to tell you about a new creative endeavor that I'm about to embark upon.

Risk Assessment

I'll take min/maxing for fifty, Trebek!

Let's get this out of the way right off the bat, I love it when bad shit happens to characters. Your character, my character, it doesn't matter. When a cunning plan doesn't survive first contact, when a die roll goes bad, when you role-play yourself into a corner, whenever something unfortunate happens in game it warms the cockles of my stainless-steel heart. Why? Because that threat, that jeopardy, it makes me tingle all over. In my opinion, a game that doesn't punish as much as entertain, and doesn't have an element of risk, isn't much of a game at all.