Although its Halloween, the unofficial holiday for Roleplayers (and a real holiday for at least one of my friends...), I am not in the best of spirits today.
I can feel it trying to creep on the borders of my waking mind.
Depressive mood.
I've mentioned once, on my blog, that at least I can recognize when these things are happening. I'm not completely defenseless.
Think of the Country of the Mind (my mind). It's a concept I've made good use of in my RPGs. Anyway, think of my mental landscape.
There is a gray and iron fortress-prison there in one part of my mind. Multilayered, imposing, evil. That's where the dark thoughts are, bottled up.
Every so often, something happens that opens up a crack in the walls, or the door, and one of these dark thoughts escapes. Around my landscape this dark thought will go, trying to infect every thought I have with darkness, depression and thinking the worst.
Fighting this is hard. Losing is even worse...because once I start that road, the deeper, even more vile things in the fortress then try to and sometimes escape. You know the ones. The ones that whisper of nihilism and despair, of hopelessness.
The strongest and most dangerous one is in the center of that place, chained like Fernis Wolf. He is the last one, the last of the dark thoughts.
He is the one who desires my extinction. He's only been truly out a very few times. Thankfully, or else I would not be here now.
But today, right now? One of the lesser, the earlier dark thoughts is in my head, using its poisons on me. Thinking about my loneliness, in an SOA post, was the earthquake which moved the stones of the fortress enough to let it escape. The dreary weather is not helping me any.
But the stronger dark things are still chained up.
Both Arref and Ginger talk about where Men of Amber might find company for rent. (be it female or male).
A little bit of a digression, but its funny what winds up being emphasized, and what remains fallow in a game's background. When I created SB, I had a load of background on some things that players have never even thought of touching, especially in Amber city and its environs. On the other hand, I leaped at the chance to introduce a few PCs to a restaurant that I had designed called Gormens...since the PCs had asked a NPC (Noys) for a recommendation.
So things like the Ambassadorial residences, and the Merchant's Guild and the like have remained untouched, virginal in my game--so far, anyway. The trips to Amber City usually have been purposeful. The last character to just wander around was Antar, the Imbecile Chaosian.
And there are a couple of set-places that I wish someone would have thought or asked about, such as The Crimson House, my poor attempt at a play on words from the usual "Red light, etal".
The Crimson House is basically a House of Pleasure inside of Amber City. It's the only officially sanctioned one, actually, a holdover from the days of Oberon. He had sometimes contradictory notions of what was and was not proper, and having more than a single official place was anathema to him (although of course there are always the free-lancers). And during the Interregnum and Regency, other places did open, neither Eric nor Gerard really enforcing the law on this matter. And Random hasn't, either, but neither has he rescinded it officially.
So, the Crimson House, having the stamp of approval of the Royale Family, employs the best of the best.
It's ground floor has two major rooms, a large one for gentleman, and a smaller one for gentlewomen. There is an unspoken discretion here, the women's meeting room is considered a "meeting club". Men are not seen here at all. Assignations are done discreetly upstairs, be it with one of the men employed for that purpose, or if a woman should take a fancy to one of the hostesses.
The gentleman's side is a little more libertine, although there, too, there is a veneer and patina of respectability, as card games and other events are the "ostensible" reason for men to visit the establishment. And, indeed, there are many men who never go upstairs and have no overarching urge to do so.
Rebma, on the other hand, is a different kettle of fish entirely. (pun intended)
The literary inspirations for the Crimson House are, by the by, the Aphrodesia House from Thieves World, and Lady Sally's from the Callahan books.
Via CalpunditIt seems Atrios, one of the more left leaning of the liberal bloggers is being sued by Donald "Let's torment Paul Krugman and expose every mistake he makes" Luskin.
Why? Because of a post that the pseudonymous Atrios entitled "Diary of a Stalker", and the comments that it engendered, discussing the way that Donald Luskin haunts Paul Krugman.
And that's the motivation for the Libel suit. Seriously! It's even more laughably egregious than the "fair and balanced" suit Fox pulled on Al Franken and his book.
ANY conservative who doesn't think that Donald Luskin and this threatened legal action is absolutely beyond the pale should wash their mouths out with soap the next time they talk about "tort reform".
Kids hit with ˜Hogwarts headaches™
No, its not from a potion of Professor Snape, nor is it something you get if you neglect your Defense skills. Its basically just a name for that headache many of my readers here have gotten--from too much reading, in less than perfect conditions.
But I never blamed Tschai, Amber, or Videssos for mine own.
Still, in a perverse sense,I'd rather kids get eye strain from this than, from, say, marathon sessions of Playstation 2.
I've blogged before about the three-part Nova program based on Brian Greene's excellent book.
I've discovered that its now for sale on DVD, for those of us who don't have a VCR to tape it (or indeed decent TV reception to watch it).
Arref has an interesting "IMC" post where talks about reconciling the very different Chaos' Zelazny shows us in the first and the second Amber series.
The comment thread is as enlightening as the post itself, and I want to branch off a comment Ginger made:
The other question is why, other than "Oops, I forgot to eliminate the annoying part of the canon!", anyone who didn't care for the second series would *want* to use it in a game at this late date.
Folks like Arref and Paul, who did "canon" games before SFSP was in their orbit of accepted Amber stances, are one thing. But most people who don't like second-series Chaos (or all-singing, all-dancing powers, or whatever) have moved on, and that's one of the worst sources of the problem--the remaining Chaos-oriented players and GMs have a worldview that's miles apart from most SFSPs
I want to talk about my use of the Second Series, in Strange Bedfellows.
It's gotten me into difficulties that I did not anticipate. And I think, although I could be wrong, that Second-series was mainly considered canonical and widely used back when I started SB. These days? Pure second-series canonical games seem an exception, not the rule.
And I admit that, even given the framework of Second Series Chaos, I've tried to make it work with additions, changes, and other modifications to the edifice.
Lessima. A system of Greater and Lesser Houses, complete with rules of succession. Reasons why the Logrus was not seen in the first series. The sociological makeup of various Houses.
And still, I think my Chaos comes off much more second-series than first. One of my regrets is the loss of the player of a PC who is half-SS and half-amberite, but is very much in the mold of a first series Chaosian in her "alien" viewpoint. And I'd love to have a real Lessiman in my game, too.
But, still, the next major game I run that involves Chaos...I am going to avoid the second series as much as possible. Take bits and pieces, but I am going to try and keep the Chaos in Chaos.
Apropos the recent threads on "sticky" PCs...
Well, the President's news conference has convinced me that I wouldn't want Condi Rice as a roleplayer in one of my games? Why?
As quoted by Calpundit, Kevin Drum:
THE PRESIDENT: ....her job is also to deal interagency and to help unstick things that may get stuck, is the best way to put it. She's an unsticker. And -- is she listening? Okay, well, she's doing a fine job.
Yes, its silly, I know. It's also silly we have a President that invents more words than Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes.
Update: I found a transcript of the News Conference online. And Liz is right, he dodges the question just before the "unsticker" comment:
Thank you, Mr. President. You recently put Condoleezza Rice, your National Security Advisor, in charge of the management of the administration's Iraq policy. What has effectively changed since she's been in charge? And the second question, can you promise a year from now that you will have reduced the number of troops in Iraq?
THE PRESIDENT: The second question is a trick question, so I won't answer it. The first question was Condoleezza Rice. Her job is to coordinate interagency. She's doing a fine job of coordinating interagency. She's doing -- the role of the National Security Advisor is to not only provide good advice to the President, which she does on a regular basis -- I value her judgment and her intelligence -- but her job is also to deal interagency and to help unstick things that may get stuck, is the best way to put it. She's an unsticker. And -- is she listening? Okay, well, she's doing a fine job.
The makers of Cranium commissioned the guy who does the "Best places to Live" for Money Magazine to do the "Most Fun cities in America"
I must be a more fun loving guy than you or I might think.
#1 on the List is Minneapolis, Minnesota.
#2 on the list is Orange County, California (not a city, admittedly)
New York comes in at #41. Sin City, Las Vegas is a better but anemic #25.
You have no doubt heard and seen pictures of the fires in Southern California. And I am personally glad not to be there. But I can tell you what its like, mentally, to be in the cities, away from the fires, and having them dominate the news.
It's a siege mentality. In my experience, Californians are blase about Earthquakes, but Wildfires scare the piss out of everyone. Worse, the air of Southern California, especially when the Santa Anas pick up, is conducive to bringing the burning smell for 40, 50 miles away from the fires. That is to say, straight into the downtown, urbanized areas.
I can imagine what the air must smell and taste like right now. For asthmatics and the like, So Cal is not the place to be, even far away from the fires.
Via Atrios, apparently someone has been trying to impersonate the Riverbend Blog, one of the Blogs posted to by someone in Iraq. As you might expect, the political leanings of the fake "Riversbend" blog are a polar opposite to the original.
It reminds me of the days early in the claim-jumping of the WWW, when people would register domain names similar to and misspellings of popular sites. "Amazons.com" for example. But still, even then, those sites did not generally pretend to be their counterpart.
This business with the Blogs though...the basic look of the doppleganger is meant to confuse and befuddle. It's pernicious. It's (overused I know) Orwellian.
I'm just glad BJS is small enough that no one would ever think of trying this with me.
On the other hand, weirdly enough, Blogshares has two entries for me...using the url with and without the index.html. Odd.
Calpundit
mentions, as just about everyone has heard, that Amazon has introduced a feature to allow you to do full-text searches on the books they sell.
Sure, its "only" 120,000 of their books, but still, this is a great leap forward, as long as the sticky issues of legality and copyright an be hashed out. I don't see myself the danger--it would be far easier to photocopy or scan a book, than to try and get significant portions of the text via this system of Amazon's.
And the search engine needs some work, but this is one of those small milestones of the digital age.
It's odd that, for example, different books in a series are and aren't in this database. (The Kushiel series, for example). It's too bad that the GBOA wasn't made searchable, or else this would be superlative for the Amber community.
On the other hand, one can search Carl Sagan's COSMOS and find that, in that book at least, he does NOT use his famous phrase "billions and billions"
This time around, I am going to talk about S.M. Stirling's ON THE OCEANS OF ETERNITY, Guy Gavriel Kay's LORD OF EMPERORS and Eric Nylund's SIGNAL TO NOISE
S.M. Stirling has been moving up the ladder of writing for quite a while now. From the underappreciated 5th Millenium series books, through the Draka novels, he has carved out a niche for himself in the alternate history/time travel genres much akin to Harry Turtledove. The Nantucket Trilogy, however, are his breakthrough books, since he has since gotten books published as hardcovers first.
ON THE OCEANS OF ETERNITY is the third of the Nantucket books. For the uninitated, some inexplicable event transported the entire Island of Nantucket one day, along with a Coast guard cutter nearby,not in space, but in time. In point of fact, the island and its inhabitants find themselves roughly 3250 years in the past. A single island, lost in time, and trying to survive.
Naturally to do so, they will have to employ what technology they can, develop what they must and alter history forever. A factional breakout in the first book sets up the rest of that and the subsequent book, and this one. One William Walker has managed, by strength of guns and force, made himself King of a Greek Empire that stretches from Italy to the Balkans, and Greece. Tartessos is a second power, given aid by Walker and led by a crafty native who has learned much of Nantucket's secrets and tried to uplift his culture. The Nantucketers themselves are mainly allied with a Babylonian power that in our history fell and ended their glory.
The story of the book is World War. There are conflicts ranging from Iberia, to Greece, to Asia Minor and even in California.
Characterization is somewhat better than in previous novels of his, and Stirling does female characters enthusiastically and well. The relationship between Marion and Swindapa is believable and tender. I could quibble on a couple of turns of plot, but if you've read the first two novels in the sequence, the third is much more of the same.
Recommended, although you should start with ISLAND IN THE SEA OF TIME, the first in the series, and then read AGAINST THE TIDE OF YEARS
Guy Gavriel Kay finishes his Sarantine Mosaic duology with LORD OF EMPERORS. Set in the same world, although hundreds of years earlier, as THE LIONS OF AL-RASSAN, Kay transmorgifies 7th century Byzantium into Sarantium.
It's different by a long shot from SAILING TO SARANTIUM, the first book of the set. In that one, we follow the story of Crispin, a mosaicist who travels from the backwaters of Varena to the mighty capital of the Empire. The journey itself is much of that book, and his quest to find his fame and fortune. In LORD OF EMPERORS, Crispin gets much less screen time in favor of new characters, and the politics of the game of thrones.
Kay feels free to depart from the historical record with his fictional characters, and this gives him the chance to tell unique stories. While a student of history will recognize the parallels to Justinian, Belisarius, Theodora and others, and the characterizations are much like their counterparts in the book, the events certainly diverge, and this is a good thing.
The one quibble I have with the book is that Crispin almost seems like a male wish-fulfillment. Literally, three of the beauties of the age (and a fourth beauty) fall for him at one point or another. A tad unrealistic, I should think, even if for plot reasons it helped lubricate matters.
Still, for the depiction of a city heavily influenced by Byzantium it is definitely worthwhile to read. You can literally see in your mind the exciting race that forms one of the high points in the novel.
Recommended.
Although he has seemingly fallen on hard times by being reduced to writing media tie-in novels, I am a fan of Eric Nylund's work. I sort of liked PAWN'S DREAM, although it was clearly a first novel and needed a bit of work. A GAME OF UNIVERSE I liked well enough to steal ideas and concepts for to help build Finndo's shadow in Ad Astra Per Amber. DRY WATER, his fantasy novel, was a sweet concoction, and zelaznyesque.
SIGNAL TO NOISE is pure science fiction.
In Signal to Noise, Jack lives in a near-future that is still shaken by climatic change and other disasters. Flooded coastlines, new seas and seismic shifts have changed this 21st century's players considerably. His America reads like a far-right's dream...corporations hold the power, and the National Security Organization has exceeded all of the excesses ever dreamed by the CIA and FBI. Technology has made virtual enviroments for everyday use practical. If there is a "bubble", you could choose to see the city street of San Francisco as it looked in 1860, rather than a century and half later.
A breakthrough of Jack's in finding information in white noise leads to alien contact, and commitant problems. Wheeler clearly has an agenda of his own, and Jack soon finds himself trying to outwit his business partner, his friends, and various governmental organizations.
Characterization is not strong here, but the scenery, the vision of a world which has taken a beating and is now different, as well as the twists and turns makes for a quick, engaging read. There is a sequel, that I will pick up at some point. The book isn't good enough to make the sequel a "must get now", but SIGNAL TO NOISE entertains and entertains well. Nylund writes in an easy manner.
Recommended
Since I have a dialup connection again, I thought that I would try and play a bit with an offline blogging tool, just to see how it works.
Perverse Access Memory: WISH 70: Games That Challenge You
Ginger's WISH:
Have you ever played in a game that has challenged you in some way? What was the challenge? Do you think you lived up to it? How did it affect other games you play/have played?
I am going to steal a march from Ginger and mention my own GMing experience first.
Strange Bedfellows has challenged me. I am still, to this day, learning and growing as a roleplayer and as a person from my experience with the game. Handling a large cast of PCs, NPCs, multitudinous plots, byzantine plans and other miscellany has been a wild ride. I think I have been living up to it, since for those who give me the effort, SB is a very good place to play these days. I've learned, or adapted, to giving more to those who have given ME more, and there is a feedback loop.
That feedback loop I learned first in GA. GA is teaching me the dynamics of a troupe game, where the GM is much less in a hierarchial station than other games, where cooperation, character building and such are King. It's not just about the prurient interests.
The other game that I've played in that really challenged me is/was the Empire of the Gleaming Banner, Archard's home? How so? Well, although Arref began with a wonderful world, it was up to the early players working together to help bring it to life, before the con games in 1999 and 2000. It was a rich, new milieu, and I learned about handling a non-Amberite character, the value of extending and giving the GM ideas and toys to play with (I even developed a shadow for the Empire in that vein).
It's sad to think on such things now, but I think my relationship with Bonnie fired up and did well thanks to the crucible of the creation of EGB. We worked very well together in coming up with a brother and sister team of Rakhi and Archard.
But, really, every game has a challenging lesson, if you but open your eyes and ears. Amberman's infamous AOL game taught me that a bad GM could truly be horrific, and it gave me a negative example to avoid when I began Gming my own. Karen's TKC sessions taught me that pushing buttons need not be a bad thing in a live game, as I felt the surge when she pushed Laertes' buttons hard. And I could go on ad infinitum, but I won't. You get the point.
No, not the Great Red one, but a black one has shown up on Jupiter's equator. Astronomers are not sure what in the world it is.
But I've recently (a couple of weeks ago, at the Olsons) watched 2010...and I vividly remember the scene when the Black Monolith transported itself to Jupiter and began multiplying...
As Crooked Timber reports, today is the last flight of the Concorde.
So sad.
I find it amazingly ironic that, when I was born, we were both sending Men to the Moon and flying paying passengers between Europe and America at supersonic speeds. As of tomorrow, we can and will do neither.
I had a conversation with Scott a couple of weeks ago about RAMjets and SCRAMjets, SSTOs used for antipodal flights, and other such possible supersonic transports.
Do we need such beasts, with teleconferencing, the Internet, and other means of communication? Does someone really need to fly at supersonic speeds for anything more than just a whim? (And of course, do we need a manned presence on the Moon)?
In any event, speaking of the irony and the mixed bag of progress in transportation, I daresay that, during rush hour, it likely takes much longer today than 20 years ago to go from Los Angeles to San Diego, or Minneapolis to Duluth, or New York to Philadelphia, thanks to the rise in traffic.
You've no doubt seen this elsewhere, but Jim Caviezel, slated to play Jesus in the controversial new movie about the Passion that Mel Gibson is producing, managed to be hit by lightning, along with the film's assistant director.
He, though, had been struck already.
I don't get the casting, though. I like Caviezel, and he might actually suit for one or two of my RPG characters (especially Marcus)...but Jesus?
Sure, I know the actor is more important than the appearance...but to give you another example, would you expect Sean Connery to play Iago? Or Ice-T to play Charles Foster Kane?
Then again, as much as I like (and have a thing for) Monica Belucci, I don't think she's right for Mary Magdalene, either. Now Milli Avital (sp?), the actress who played the love interest in the movie version of Stargate...now SHE has the look.
I've joined the crew at Deck of Realities and will be posting trumps, probably primarily word-trumps there.
Now this is cool...The Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum.
A digital database of Latin texts, some are translated, others are not.
Doubtless Dorothea at Caveat Lector (she of the latin dates for her Blog entries) has long since known about it.
Arref talks about the Grand Affair, and his own fun at playing a non-royal Amberite.
I've a little experience with this, too...
Archard, from the Empire of the Gleaming Banner, was my charter Non-Amberite, Non-Chaosian PC.Scion of the Empire in shadow, Trump Artist, Dreamer, he is my pioneer in these waters.
He even visited Amber, sort of, for a few minutes. But that's a long story. He certainly interacted with Amberites, and his aunt and great aunt and uncle ARE Amberites, even if in a different cultural matrix altogether.
Laertes, from the Thy Kingdom Come world is my other (until GA) major non-royal PC. Although he is an odd bird, in that he somehow managed to walk the Pattern in Rebma. The implied reason he could, that he is a descendant of Lir and was carrying his Spear at the time, is not believed by at least one player in the game. I don't think Laertes' mother had an affair with an Amberite, personally.
At ACUS last year, I debuted a resident of Chris' Texorami, one Jonas Asherton. Alchemist with a passing resemblance to Doc Holliday, my participation in the game was cut short because of necessities of sleep and awakenings the next morning. I would gladly and eagerly play him again in subsequent incarnations of the game.
Of course that brings us to GA, and Iolaus Diotrephes. A definite outsider to Amber, from a shadow hitherto unvisited by its scions or other members of the Golden Circle, and vice versa. As Djinn put it, Iolaus has the tiger by the tail as he has journeyed alone from the shadow Achaea to Amber. And he has not developed entirely as I have anticipated. But that is part of the fun of an active, energetic character.
As Arref puts it, the folks in Ill Met in Amber deal with this on a regular basis and can vouch for the sense of story of playing someone of Amber, but not of the family.
The Babylon 5 episode "A view from the Gallery" (5th season) illustrates this, cinematically, by telling a story of an attack on the Station from two ordinary guys point of view. There is also a Star Trek Next Generation Episode which does the same thing, following a few of the lesser officers rather than the main characters.
Julia has a link to an online article about today's kids playing classic video games like Pong, Super Mario Brothers, and Space Invaders.
Their overall reactions are predictable, but its funny to listen to their complaints about the games.
Ah, Nostalgia. I remember when games like "Adventure" were the cutting edge.. Heck, you don't even have to go that far. The graphics on Front Page Sports Football, ten years ago, are nothing compared to the Madden football graphics today. (and FPS with a 3-d approach was light years ahead of the 80's 2-dimensional top-down view football games)
Bryant's unusual mashup this week involves the Boston Red Sox...
Beloved Losers of Beantown? Or cursed by some unseen force? Keeping it in a mostly real modern world suggests a couple of games to me, but someone already picked In Nomine.
Instead, I am going to pick Nobilis.
Make the PCs Nobles of a Chancel with convenient exits to the Boston area. Even better, if at least one of them is originally from Boston, and has a tie to the Red Sox as a bond. Even better if a PC is the Power of Baseball. (Sure its a small Estate, but given its influence in America and the world, it could work). Or a more general Nobilis of Games.
Now, let the PCs be exposed to yet another heartbreaking season for the Sox, and plant the idea, if they don't have it already, that they might investigate this odd "curse".
So what is the curse? Depends on how you want to play it. You could do anything from a simple spirit which follows the team, seeking to cause it misery and anguish, to another Noble who has decided to hold a grudge against the team and ensure its perennial heartbreak (the team might even be an anchor in that manner!), or if you really wanted to ramp up things, make it that the Cammorae, Lord Entropy's henchmen, are behind the annual losses.
And then the PCs can decide what, if anything, they will do about it...
Arref has a Mystery of Amber/IMC about where the populace of Amber comes from. Or more specifically, the cagey and crafty Arref tells us where they did not come from. And so it is my turn...
I've talked about this a bit in my cosmology page. At least, I've addressed the origins of Amber and its Patterns.
But I've never really talked about the people, the hoi polloi, the populace of Amber and its environs. To do that, let me focus in on what the universe was like before the Pattern was created.
In those times (I call the Age of Chaos), The Courts were the single pole of the universe, the center of its array of shadows. To be precise, the Abyss itself was the actual geographical center, the ultimate milestone and reference point, even in its own bottomless. Shadow extended outward in all directions from the Courts. The Logrus and the Courts acted as the still center of it all, and also as the template all other shadow was based upon. As you can imagine, this made for a rather unstable set of shadows. And as one drew further from the Courts, the stability and integrity of the framework of shadow is less stable.
A little digression is in order. The framework of shadow can be thought of, in my mind anyway, as one of two metaphors. The biological metaphor is the actin filament-microtubule model. Undershadow acts as the frame on which shadows lie, arrange themselves, and relate to each other just as the components in a cell do. In this metaphor, the nucleus is the Courts of Chaos, and various cell organelles are primal and lesser shadows. However, with just Chaos as a center, the integrity of this framework becomes less effective as one goes further from the nucleus. Shadows become more random, there are gaps in reality, sudden islands in the sea of night.
The cosmological metaphor deals with dark matter. It seems, according to current theory, that there is a lot of matter in the universe that we just don't see. This dark matter does exert gravity, however, and it is this "weight" that allows things like spiral galaxies to form. Thus the Chaos universe has the Courts as the hot, bright center, with other shadows arrayed as one progresses outward from that center. And galaxies tend to lose some of their definition at their farthest edges.
Anyway, Dworkin and Oberon fled the Courts, be it nucleus of the cell or center of the galaxy, and found themselves a primal plane in the middle of nowhere, on the periphery of the universe.
It is there that they two created the Pattern.
Certainly there were shadows in the vicinity of the Pattern, shadows which predate even the Logrus. Primal shadows, primarily. When the Pattern was created, it not only created shadows and aligned them to itself as a pole, but it "edited" these pre-existing shadows.
The shadow around the Amber Pattern, what we call Amber today, was devoid of human inhabitants. Oh there were an Arden, its not the first forest for nothing. But there were no people. No retainers or followers.
Oberon and Dworkin used several methods to populate Amber. Immigration from the nearby shadows. Importing people from more distant shadows. Who would miss a small village, farming community or hamlet? Oberon and his father also experimented with other ideas, uplifting native animals and polymorphing them into a human form.
(The early scenes in Willey's A Sorcerer and a Gentleman capture this well, I think, the populating of new, virgin land by Prospero).
It wasn't until one of the attacks of Chaos upon Amber that Oberon was able to flip some of the Janissary troops of Chaos, and turn them to his side that he found a population to inhabit Rebma.
But, while I am not likely to do a game a la Bloody Grievance, the early history of Amber HAS played a part in its latter history, and has influenced SB. So I've definitely given it considered thought.
Wil McCarthy talks about the Chinese manned flight into Space, and makes an exhortation that Space is indeed the place.
I completely agree with him. It's a good column, read it. It's not just moonshine, so to speak.
Inspired by an episode of Emeril Live, I tried to make a sausage-based chili in the crockpot on Sunday for Scott and I.
The problem with it, we agreed, was that I seasoned it too heavily to be eaten by itself. It needed to be tempered by something, like rice, or sour cream, or just not to go overboard as I did on flavoring it. It's not that Scott and I dislike hot, spicy food...but there was no counterbalance here, and it sorely needed one.
But the recipe itself worked well and makes a "meaty chili"...and is in the extended entry
Ingredients:
2 pounds of sausage.
--This time around I used a ring of Hillshire Farm smoked sausage, and a pound of ground chorizo sausage (possibly one of the things that made it too hot)
2 cans of Beans
--I used a can of black beans and a can of kidney beans. I think you could realistically add a third can here if you wanted, or a can of Mexicorn, or something else.
1 14 oz. can of tomato soup (Campbells)
16 oz. jar of salsa or picante sauce
-I used picante sauce since Scott likes neither diced tomatoes or diced peppers.
28 oz. of canned tomato products
--I am rather vague here because you can make your chili individualized by this "plug-in". Back in NYC, my family would traditionally just use tomato soup here, making a very soupy chili. Personally, I've learned through my own experimentation that I like having some diced tomatoes in the mix, it gives the chili some texture. Sunday, I used Enchilada Sauce and Taco sauce. (since Scott dislikes the diced tomatoes as noted above)
Instructions:
Dice or cut into chunks, and if not already cooked, cook the sausage in a pan as per normal. Even if it is pre-cooked, proceed to brown it.
In the meantime combine the remaining ingredients, plus any desired spices, in the slow cooker's basin. Add the cooked and browned sausage to this, mix together well.
Cook 3-4 hours on high, or 6-8 hours on low. Chili is one of those dishes which does better the longer you cook it, so that all the flavors mingle and infect every morsel of sausage, every bean and every drop of the tomato base.
Especially if you've seasoned it heavily, serve this with a good starch to soak up some of that spice--rice, pieces of bread, etc. You could even ladle this into a tortilla if you wanted.
Last weekend was a bit odd for me, since it was the first weekend that I wasn't moving stuff from Scott's house to my matchbox, or getting something for the matchbox, or whatever.
So, I found myself at an unusual amount of liberty, since I now have a car.
So, Saturday I went and saw a movie. Yeah, alone, after all my movie buddy is still in Florida awaiting the birth of the adopted baby-to-be. I saw "Runaway Jury", even though Grisham and law thrillers are not my usual genre by a long shot.
Did I like it? Yes, although I could see a few holes in the plot, and I thought that the structure of the groups of characters were not all equal. It has a very good cast--Hoffman, Hackman, Weisz (the female lead in the Mummy movies), Cusack (aka, he who I would pick to play me in a story of my life), and even a cameo by the guy from the Practice (or was from the Practice, anyway). The plot revolves around a trial of gun manufacturers, jury picking and tampering, bribery, corruption, ethics and morals. And of course the "big secret at the end" that one side is racing to uncover before time runs out.
Besides that, I wandered over to Borders, and also Best Buy. At the latter I found something I'd only heard of and not seen--and picked that up instead of my intended purchase of the Matrix Reloaded: A Cd-rom set of every National Geographic add-in map up to the year 1999. One of my favorite things about NGO is the maps that come in every other issue or so, and this Cd-rom has all of the ones from the previous century. Best of all, it was just $20 Sweet!
On Sunday, I decided to do the male-bonding thing with Scott. I came over, put a new experimental recipe for sausage chili in the crockpot, and we watched football (with a little Good Eats thrown in as well). I'll mention the Sausage Chili in more detail in an entry of its own.
Football was a disappointment--as Scott pointed out, we went "1 for 3" today--the Packers lost to the Rams, the Giants unbelievably lost to the Eagles on a punt return in the final minute, but Felicia's Saints won and won big. It was good to spend time with Scott, anyhow, and I think he appreciated the company.
But it was a fun weekend. Next weekend, assuming I don't get wrapped up in something else, I think I am going to go a little further afield and really begin exploring the metro area. Museums, culture, parks, and more await...and its much more practical to do this with a car of my own.
Perverse Access Memory: WISH 69: Non-RPG Games for Gamers
Despite the "numerical significance of the WISH, it has nothing to do with *that*.
Ginger asks:
Recommend three non-RPG games for RPGers. Why do you recommend these three?
Hmm, I know a couple of my choices here have been anticipated elsewhere, but here I go anyway.
1. Diplomacy
Really its a slam-dunk. Its one of those games where you need as many players as possible to make it more fun. Where backstabbing, duplicity, politics and in a sense role-play make the game. It's probably the perfect game for, say, Amber players. I've not done well in the game as I might because, well, I am not as amoral as the game really demands in order to win. But its fun nevertheless
2. Cribbage
Not so much as for the mechanics of the game itself, but the antiqueness of the game. After all, what other card game has such distinctive props as a cribbage board and pegs. A vocabulary of its own to rival poker and bridge (which would be a good alternate for this slot). There is something genteel about Cribbage.
3. Chess
An obvious choice, one that I am surprised that no one has mentioned yet. Why Chess? Well, its more accessible than other games of its stripe (eg Go), and its well known to just about everyone. And it lends itself to all sorts of styles of play, if you want to get into a roleplaying aspect. To stay within the Amber canon, consider how Corwin might play Chess, versus, say, Julian.
Gregg Easterbrook has been saying some controversial, and stupid things as of late. The whole "No doesn't always mean No" idiocy. And his column about Jews and movie violence.
Apparently, Disney, in the form of his employer at ESPN, has decided to can him. Not only that, but in possibly a fit of pique, have erased all of his TMQ columns. They are gone. All of them.
I can see if Disney wants him canned, but to erase him so thoroughly...Kevin Drum uses the word "Stalinesque". It's a good one. "1984ish" might be another. There's a latter day Winston Smith, dutifully erasing every TMQ column, or reference to TMQ, that ever existed on ESPN's website.
Only Google cached versions remain.
He brought it on himself, sure, and its disheartening and depressing. But his imbecilic political comments aside, I LIKED his football stuff, even though its gotten more self-indulgent ever since it left Slate. The likelihood of it showing up somewhere else in the future, though, are pretty damn slim. And that's a shame.
Well, its not quite a Mystery, and not quite an IMC, but its a more general set of observations, inspired by Arref's Blog entry about Celina. (See Celina's page if you miss the inference)
Moire is on the "screen" only for a short time in the Amber series, in NPIA. And yet the liaison between Moire and Corwin seems to capture the imagination of players in a strong and defined manner.
People just can't resist a child of the two. GMs as well as players seem to enjoy having this singular encounter be fruitful indeed.
Even though Amberites "have not proven to be excessively fertile", it almost seems that every game I've been in or GMed has had a child of Moire and Corwin...
In SB, its Triton, recently picked up by a player again after a long fallow period as a NPC.
In Bridgette's AOR, the callow and young Corbin fills the role.
Even in my one-shots at cons, I've had characters submitted such as Thetis, for Dreams Made Flesh.
It's a popular "meme", to have a child of these two, male or female. I've not seen twins or the like, however. The closest to that would be Arref and Anne's Rebman Twins, daughters of LLewella.
But, now, in House of Cards, its Arref's young Celina who has recently learned that she is indeed of that union. As a lurker (and hopefully one day a player) in Ginger and Michael's Epic, I should have seen it coming before Arref's announcements but my difficulties in getting and reading email meant that I didn't see a lot of HOC turns until recently, a backlog of reading material to enjoy. Still, in any event, I will be eager to see what Arref (and the Gms) do with this.
So even if its not "realistic", I still think its even odds that my next crop of games at ACUS will include a "Corwin and Moire parent" PC. There is an appeal there, the merging of two realms, the dichotomy between two very strong willed individuals as parents. The best C+M Pcs make use of this, explore it, integrate it into their personalities. Gender issues, notions of cross-breeding, and other ideas can come into play. The fact that Celina's origins were masked is a rich theme that I know Arref will play as strongly and surely as a jazz musician.
Game 7 gem: Yanks top BoSox in 11
With the collapse of the Red Sox last night, the curses striking the Red Sox and the Cubs have finished their grisly work for another year.
I guess, though, that a Red Sox-Cubs World Series would have been one of the signs of the Apocalypse, anyway.
You've probably seen the news of the S.I. Ferry crash on your local news.
I'm just stunned and in shock, myself. I rode this several times a week when I was going to College, and at least once a week otherwise. That 5 mile, 25 minute ride is something with which I am all too familiar.
To hear of this disaster just strikes me to the core. No, neither Michael nor anyone else of my family was on the boat, it was too early in the afternoon.
Tragic.
Comment Spam has gotten worse here the last few days, and I'm really Po-ed about it. Its one of the reasons why I've not implemented a "last five comments" a la Arref, I don't want my front page blog real estate to show these fetid little pieces of greffet.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden has a great entry that lists some of the IP addresses of the spammers, so you can at least IP ban this current set. Hopefully the next iteration of MT will have some tools to deal with them more effectively. I'm a little more dubious of the idea of hacking MT. I'm too new to the program to really try and overhaul it by changing the names of files and the like. However if this goes on, I may be forced to do so.
China joins the former USSR and the United States in being only the third nation to launch a man into orbit around the Earth.
I've always thought that if we pull back from exploring and developing Space, someone, sometime, will do it instead. Perhaps, if we don't do it, in a century, our grandchildren will have to get our passport stamped by the Chinese (or Japanese, ESA, or whoever seriously goes into Space and makes it worthwhile) to visit a space station. Hopefully you won't have to learn Mandarin, too. Brrrr.
The world of Firestar and its sequels seems more and more unlikely. But someone has to develop Space, right? Right? I refuse to believe the human race (barring an extinction event for H. Sapiens) will turn its back on Space forever.
One of the things I can't handle well, psychologically, is generosity. It goes back to my low self-esteem, feelings of worthlessness and other such psychological lacunae in my mental health that many of you know, either from my online persona, or from knowing me personally.
I am not sure if its intended as an early Xmas gift, something to repay him back at some point, or what, but as I sat in my apartment last night, I got a knock on the door. It was Scott and he had some groceries I had left at the Olsons house--stuff he would never eat.
He also had a brand new television for me. Its the same brand as my old one, and actually a little better than that one. And, oh, yes, it does work, since I watched Dark City on it last night.
I just feel...awful isn't the right word, I am not sure there IS a word for the emotion that I feel about the whole thing. Unworthy is not an emotion, but its the closest word I can think of to it.
Update:
Now that emotion has turned into a purer guilt and unhappiness, since I have discovered that my brother has bought (and it has shipped) an early xmas present
A television.
Now the question becomes--can I/Scott return the first television? That might be easier than dealing with shipping back the second...
The moral of this story is to shut up about my problems.
Arref is right, that's not the moral. But sometimes when stuff like this happens, that's how I feel. Even if I know its utter greffet
It's seems to have taken the status of a topic of its own, even though it grew out of the serial campaign seed. Ginger, and Jim continue the meme.
It occurs to me that it might be fairer to rate a co-Gmed game by looking at the participants and the GM's perceptions of what happened. Jim makes a good point that games that some might think were great, really did not hold water in other ways. My co-Gmed games at ACUS are, alas, no exception to this rule. Still, although I am not actively looking to do a co-Gm game at a future con, I wouldn't mind doing it with the right person.
I really don't have much to add to Ginger and Jim's suggestions except the obvious one: Have fun. If the game is not fun for the two GMs working together, then it shouldn't happen. I think it goes to the whole trust and worldview and mindset (to a degree) issue.
I think that GMs who have large degrees of overlap probably do better co-Gming than GMs who cover a larger "area", but do not have much in common. For example, a GM who is strictly a character purist, and another who builds powers and doesn't do character well probably would be a poor choice for a co-Gming team. Although they cover more bases, and no matter how well they get along, they don't have enough intersection to handle some of the other person's bailiwick--and that can be a problem if a GM has to leave, or both GMs are needed on one particular aspect of the game.
Bryant's latest Monday Mashup is none other than the Oscar winning Silence of the Lambs...
What do you think of when you think of Hannibal Lecter? Brilliance, Genius, Horror, and a keen edged madness. And of course, using an Evil to combat an equal or at least an uncontrolled Evil.
The game I would use for this is obvious: Nobilis.
Make the PCs Nobles who are either Angels or of the Light. There is a nasty imminent Excrucian plot afoot to excruciate one of the more important Estates, and the one person that the PCs need to contact and get help from...is the Noble of the Dark, Hannibal Lecter. He lives in a twisted, dark chancel, a disturbing place that combines all the worst of an asylum, hospital and jail...but everything immaculately clean and organized, even in its grotesqueness. And the personal quarters of the Noble would be a model of neatness and taste, even amid the horror of the rest of the place. The spider at the center of his lair.
Can they trust him? Sure, he's brilliant, intelligent, and deductive, but can they truly trust all that he says? Is he trying to corrupt the PCs or manipulate them for his own hidden agendas? Can they even get him to help?
The clock is ticking...
I don't often dream about Amber, my dreams are far too broad in scope and theme to ever narrow down to my RPG characters. But I did so last night...
I'm not sure which of my RPG characters I was supposed to be. I would guess Lorius from the context of the dream as you will see, but I was not in a Lorius sort of mindset. Maybe this is a new PC, waiting to be born.
Anyway, I was definitely Fiona's son. I discovered someone was messing with some of my sorcerous wards and creations, and I tracked down and met, on a shadow like Earth, a redheaded woman. (Think Cate Blanchett-type). This woman claimed that she was my grandmother, Clarissa. I apparently had as this PC never known her, although I knew of her. Clarissa urged me to be discreet about the encounter "Especially in regard to your mother".
I had the feeling my PC was going to get wrapped up in a scheme of hers, but the dream ended before it could go any further.
Well, last weekend was again jam packed with goodness. I'm now moved out of the Olsons basement, and now have a matchbox sized studio apartment over in Circle Pines/Lexington (its a bit odd how that works, the USPS insists its Circle Pines, but other sources insist its Lexington).
I don't even have a dialup connection since Qwest is horribly slow, so I am sort of internet lame at the moment. One not so happy consequence is that I unpacked my television and tried to hook it up. It's been sitting in a box for months ever since I shipped it here.
It's dead as a doornail...and worse, now out of warranty. So I have no TV or DVD watching, either. I need a new TV and can't really afford one at this point.
Just more life in the Gopher state...
Ginger's Wish this week:
Have you ever played in or GMed a game with more than one GM? What was your experience with it? What were the strengths and weaknesses of having multiple GMs? Was it positive or negative? Would you do it again? If you’ve never tried it as a GM or player, would you like to? Why or why not?
I've not been in many multiple-person GM games, actually. Oh, there has been things like Faces of a Stranger at ACUS, and there was a game that died before it really got off the ground that created the seed for my character Tynan, but until GA, I'd never really been in an email game with more than one GM.
With the shoe on the other foot, though, I've had a mixed bag with multiple person GMing. At ACUS, I've done well with it. I ran Dreams Made Flesh with Felicia Olson, since she had played a demo version of it and knew what I was trying to do. That worked very well, we GM as a team pretty well together. There was also It's a Mad Mad Mad Amber, with Felicia and also Karen Groves as my partners, and that was a LOT of fun. I mostly RPed NPCs, but I was certainly no third wheel to the other two. I also ran STORM CHASERS with Nicole at the first ACUS that I ran a con game, and we did very well as a team.
In email, however, I've had mostly bad luck with the concept. A game Felicia and I tried to run called OATHS OF THE UNICORN did not, in the end work well. We wrote ourselves into a bit of a corner, and we didn't have the time to really dedicate to the game. I didn't realize it then, but just because there are two GMs does not necessarily mean there is half the work.
The same thing happened with When it Rains it Pours. In this case, Bonnie (yes that one) and I came up with some neat ideas to run a game...but once again, time was not a friend to either of us. We had a clear division of labor, though, Bonnie handled a lot more of the creativity side, and I handled administration, since that was not her strong suit.
I suppose it was the stress and the impossibility on my part on running two games at the same time. SB fills up my GMing quota quite completely, and pushing that usually leads to grief. Gwyddbwyll didn't, but that was a small game, with a few trusted players. The email edition of Storm Chasers was mainly Nicole's baby, I was merely a senior adviser and did a few NPCs here and there.
I wouldn't mind doing another co-GM stint at a con, though. I could handle that.
Deb plays Leigh, of House Helgram, in Strange Bedfellows. She recently found an excellent picture of Laura Prepon, the actress who would play her in a casting call. What's more, sher was even wearing the colors of House Helgram.
Naturally, Deb made a trump of the picture. Go take a look.
The latest addition to the skyseastone.net family is none other than Mr. Jim Groves. A new iteration of his sometime (and hopefully will be long-lasting) blog is now up, called Through a Glass Darkly, Version 2.0
Jim is the creative voice, in SB, behind Jayson, and has a unique and strongly opinionated voice on just about everything. But he is a good egg, and worth adding to your bookmarks and newsfeeds.
ITSOG has been a hotbed and a springboard for discussions on stickiness, serial games, multiple GMs and the like. Ginger picked up the thread too, and has made a variant of it the Game WISH for the week. And apparently some of the posters are taking it to email, too.
Good stuff always at Arref's. Go over there and read it. I'm not a big factor in this discussion, because, well frankly I have far less experience with this sort of thing than Arref, or Sol, and company. After all as I mentioned on my own minor post on the topic, I only stumbled sort of into running a serial game by accident.
I know when to shut up and listen. :grin:
This time around, I am going to talk about Lois McMaster Bujold's THE CURSE OF CHALION, Jeffrey Carver's DRAGONS IN THE STARS, and Martha Wells' DEATH OF THE NECROMANCER.
The Curse of Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold
I am a bit of a day late and a dollar short when it comes to Bujold's fantasy novel. It was nominated for a Hugo last year (and lost), and other reviews in the vaguely Amber blogosphere have shown up, including both Jennifer Jackson and Michael Curry.
Scott, almost as much of a Bujold fan as he is of Terry Pratchett, has read Chalion a half dozen times.
So finally, I've gotten around to it. And I enjoyed it, highly. I'm no stranger to Bujold, having read many of the Miles Vorkosigan novels (I am a bit behind on those as of late however).
Cazaril does have parallels with Miles. While not a teratogenetic dwarf, Cazaril is something of a cripple, and like Miles does his work in this book mainly through thinking past his opponents. The milieu is vaguely medieval Italian, it reminded me of Fires of the Faithful, as well as Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana.
Throw in a pentaumverate of deities, death magic, curse-magic, politics and intrigue and a fair amount of world-building, shake well. An unexpected miracle drives the plot and the core story of the book. Plenty of humor to leaven the darker stuff. Engaging characters. High Quality Fantasy.
Strongly Recommended.
I picked up Carver's DRAGONS IN THE STARS on the strength of his ETERNITY'S END. I liked the Flux, and the alien races and human worlds of the novel and I was looking for more here, since this one seemed to have creatures that lived directly in the Flux.
I was disappointed.
The book follows the story of Jael LeBrae, star-rigger (or would be). The only people who can pilot ships in the hyperspace of the Flux. Living on a backwater world, she finds it difficult to get legitimate, licensed work because of the sins of her father.
Oh, did I dislike this book. The pacing was poor, the characters were not really believable, their actions inexplicable at times. The titular Dragons get short shrift and we only see them briefly. This is an older book of Carver's...it is clear that he has learned much between this, and Eternity's End.
Strongly not recommended.
Death of the Necromancer, by Martha Wells
Martha Wells has been quietly turning out excellent books for a while now. Element of Fire, sadly out of print, was set in a 18th century France-like royal court with magic, fae, and all the political intrigue and swashbuckling that you could want.
Death of the Necromancer is also set in Ile-Rien, although a century later. Technology and Magical Technology have progressed, and the feel is more 19th century, Dumas-style fantasy. Also, too, we look at characters on the seamier side of the city, rather than Royals (for the most part).
But still plenty of the same rich goodness. A mystery, layered with necromantic magic, sorcerous battles, a vividly described city, and complex characters with multiple motives and goals.
Strongly Recommended
For those of you who like to rubberneck at accidents, the official results of the California Recall (baring absentee ballots and the like) are now available to peruse.
Orange County, aka the Purgatory I used to live in, gave Arnold a solid (60%) majority in its voting. I'm far from surprised.
In the larger blogging world, the theme and the hot thing these days seem to be multi-person blogs, sort of like musical supergroups. Although its a collection of blogs rather than one, that sort of thing is happening at Sky-sea-stone.net. In addition to Liz and Arref's main blog, there is now Nuadha's new gaming blog, the aptly named Claimh Solais. There is also Deck of Realities, which is a trump image blog.
And I expect there will be more forthcoming. Hell, if I was still using blogger with the old edition of BJS (and without a domain of my own), I would jump at the chance to join the crew over there. And if I had photoshop, I'd try and join Deck of Realities anyway. With just poor Imagestyler, my trumps are relatively humble.
UPDATE: Word-trumps, though, as mentioned by Meera and Arref in commentary, are something I am fairly good at, having done them back to the inception of SB, if not earlier.
Apparently the latest issue of Nature has an article which proposes an unusual theory on the topology of space.:
Dodecahedronic.
It sounds something Plato might have cooked up, and I'll want to get the actual article rather than the little bit summarized in the web link above to judge myself. I just think its ironic considering that I especially like dodecahedrons.
James has apparently pulled the plug on the Roll the Bones blog, and I suppose his gaming meme as well. He does still have a more general blog, however, for those interested.
Thanks to the well-wishes of those who have wished me a happy birthday via this blog, emails, and other forms.
And I don't know who it is, or what it is (since I didn't peek that much) but a big thank you (and "why did you spend the money" nag!) to whoever bought me something off of my amazon wishlist. I've crossed off the usual suspects--my family gave me money already as a gift(for a *real* winter coat), the Olsons gave me a microwave for my new apartment (yes, that means the Olsons are now responsible for the two major kitchen appliances I own--a microwave and a slow cooker)...so I might guess or at least theorize that the secret birthday santa was one of my friends here.
In any case, whoever you are, and whatever shows up at my doorstep (even one of the paperbacks listed on my seemingly infinite wish list), I thank you.
What I really want for my birthday though, more than anything is a stable full-time job...
Is none other than the mighty Liz. Lintra's Lair has become the more theatric "All the World's a Stage".. The design is nifty, too.
Update your bookmarks, and of course perforce, I will update my link list forthwith.
Arref has a great post on Serial Amber games...trying to meld the richness of campaigns, and yet be flexible enough for both players and GMs that the same players are not strictly necessary.
Go and read the comments, before my own modest additions here.
I never intended to do it, but in a sense my Ad Amber games (ACUS 2002: Ad Amber per Astra, ACUS 2003: Ad Amber per Astra II) have turned into a serial campaign of the sort that Sol has done oh so well.
AAPA was intended as a one shot, the classic "PCs in a bottle" sort of a game. Oh, I am not sure I intended it at the time, but my own design made it clear that the world had much more to offer.
Thus, AAPA II was born in my head. Since I had a fair number of people who did NOT return, by definition this game became serial with the addition of other Amberites who had not gotten themselves caught in Finndo's trap. And because of time concerns (and having way too much plot planned for the slot), there must needs be a third game in the series, to wrap up matters with Osric.
(And I need to update the AAPA II website with a summary of events, too, I now realize). But I am more than willing to have people from AAPA I, II, and even a couple of new PCs in the third incarnation.
And creating purposefully a serial game sounds like a intriguing idea. Maybe not this year (unless I do one less one-shot) but perhaps subsequent years. We shall see.
Yeah, yeah, I know Ginger and Arref have done this...but I often use my own Blog as a reference and a resource source.
Anyway, Michael Curry apparently has a gaming blog now. In the Memory Palace of my mind, Michael winds up filed in the area along with Deb and Jennifer Jackson, since the three of them do the cooking thing at ACUS.
and
J.P. Brannan has one, too. I vividly remember him last year in the Texorami game. I'm not immediately certain if he's been in any of my modest ACUS creations.
Ginger lists other good stuff, but I'd thought I'd stick to people I actually sort of know. Even if I suspect neither Michael or J.P. could really pick me out of a line up.
Bryant's Mashup this week is the Richard Matheson classic I AM LEGEND.
Zombies/Vampires, the Last Man on Earth..its a powerful story, filmed a couple of times (perhaps most memorably as THE OMEGA MAN, with Charlton Heston). In a sense, the recent movie 28 Days takes this theme as well...a few humans in a midst of monsters...with a lot of ambiguity in dealing with the infected.
Amber would be perfect for this...but its' already been snatched up twice, by Nuadha and Ginger.
Ah well. I promised when I started doing these Mashups that I would try not to make Amber out of all of them, and so here goes.
Game system: d20 D&D with heavy use of Manual of the Planes and perhaps also inspired by Ghostwalk.
The plot: The PC's party winds up trapped on the Plane of Shadow. As advertised in the MOP book, it is a shadowy, dark place that things like Undead can feel very comfortable upon. But with a twist, I am using a less malevolent form of Undead, dropping the idea of alignments a la Monte Cook.
The PCs were transported into in a large city, let's call it Brandenburg. Brandenburg is an old city, ruled by a council of Vampires and other higher undead. Its starkly beautiful, strong evocations to the cities of the dead of New Orleans would be the visuals I would push for this place. Or the City of the Dead in McAuley's CHILD OF THE RIVER (of the Confluence Trilogy)
The kicker is...this city and all of its inhabitants are under siege.
The PCs are at ground zero, because an army of fanatical anti-undead humans are at the gates of this city, visitors from an alternate (to the PCs) Prime Material Plane...but still recognizably human. Said humans are determined to wipe out any and all undead, and have brought the battle to Brandenburg.
Naturally, the PCs are caught in the middle. The true monsters here are their own kind, not the undead which populates this necropolis-like city that they are trapped within. Can they learn to trust the Undead (and vice versa!) to keep them all alive against this powerful army of "good" paladins and clerics and other ostensibly heroic characters?
I think its an intriguing story, anyway.
My cooking experiences, cooking for me and Scott have been mixed bags the last couple of weeks. I made a ground beef Stroganoff which had zero "pep" to it, I cooked Italian sausage but used a pasta sauce Scott disliked (it had green peppers...).
One of my few successes was a stove-top version of Chicken Ole. You might recall that I've posted the slow cooker version on this site.
So for those of us without those neat gadgets, I will detail my stovetop variant.
Ingredients:
1 lb chicken breast
8 oz. sour cream
1 can campbells fiesta nacho cheese soup
1 pkg taco seasoning
1/4 cup water
1 lb jar of salsa (I used a medium variety this time)
1 pkg frozen corn
A small amount of a neutral cooking oil.
1.Chop the chicken breast into small pieces, and cook in the oil over medium-high heat for a couple of minutes.
2. Add the taco seasoning and water, and continue to cook for another minute or so.
3. Add the canned soup, salsa, and frozen corn and stir together and simmer for 15-20 minutes or so.
4. Add the sour cream and cook until the concoction is bubbly.
I would have liked, since this is a little "soupy", to have cooked some rice and combined it together as the last step, but we were out of rice. Instead, I warmed some tortillas, and Scott and I used pieces of these tortillas to dip into bowls of this stuff and eat it.
This is monstrous.
Words fail me.
And this is condescension of the worst sort.
How do you tell stories in your games? Are there character stories, overarching stories, and/or other kinds of stories? Could you tell a coherent story from games you’ve GMed or played in? Does it matter to you? Why or why not?
Robert Heinlein said that while we all know what the "oldest profession" is, the "second oldest profession" is the teller of tales.
I don't think I fall into the GNS format very well, or at least I can't speak intelligently to it. But are there stories in my games? You betcha!
On one level, and slicing the multi-layered (multidimensional!) Strange Bedfellows is the story of Valerian, and his struggles to stop the Omphalos from doing to the Amber universe what happened to his own of Crimson. Although this was and is the major overarching story of the game, it is far from the only one.
More of a theme than anything, but lost, missing and new scions of Amber returning to the fold is another major story. This covers people few knew before was an Amberite, like Bhangbadea or Jayson, people like Krysta, who have left long ago and only now came back, and others. This is much more the personal stories of these characters, as they interact with Amber, and vice versa.
And that is to say nothing of the stories of Chaosians and Chaos, and the effects of the personal stories that characters have had on the game at large. SB would definitely be a long novel or a "fat fantasy series" if it was all written out that way.
It was mentioned on that infamous GM review that I am character oriented, sometimes to a fault. I *want* characters to tell their stories, to learn and grow, and interact with a complex universe.
As far as my own characters, they have stories to tell, too. Marcus' story seems to revolve around his growth and change in Amber now that he and the rest of his kin have returned after the War. While, of course, Bridgette's metaplot plays out as a foil. Cadmus is searching for who he is...from where he really came from, as a guide as to where to go, what to see.
And then there are my most recent creations, Iolaus and Delwin from A Grand Affair. Yes, its a game by design focused on, um, prurient interests, but my character design is primary, and such considerations are secondary. I told Ginger flat out that Iolaus doesn't seem well designed to be "picked up" so to speak. And that's all right, if Iolaus is the only celibate character for the duration of the Affair, that's fine as long as he feels he is making progress on his own goals and plans.
Now, Delwin is a slightly different fish, but he and Sand have their own plans and goals which I am not going to reveal here. But like Iolaus, he has his own personal story thread to play out against the background, and in the warp and weft of TGA.
So, in summary I do like to provide stories and space for stories on the part of my players, and my characters usually have a personal story of their own that I am exploring through, in contrast to, and in harmony with the game and milieu in which they find themselves.
Yesterday was the first day that I haven't put a blog entry up for over a month, and with good reason.
First things first, Scott and I went over to what is going to soon be my new apartment. A tiny matchbox sized studio over in Circle Pines will shortly become home sweet home, since the whole baby thing is coming closer and closer. The downstairs bedroom (where I am now) will become the office (which it once was), and the office will turn into a nursery. So even with a temp job (although a fairly stable one) its time for me to risk a place of my own, and it was high time I left from being underfoot at the Olsons anyway.
Scott and I also mapped out and drove the route to a place that I have a job interview for on Monday. Yes, a real life job interview, finally. The job market has been tighter than, well, something better mentioned in A Grand Affair. So I realize that I have a fair amount of competition, so I am neither overconfident, nor am I "counting" on getting this job. It would be a fair commute, too, about 30 miles each way in a car.
But for a real, full time job, is it worth it? As they say here in Minnesota...you betcha. I got some badly needed driving practice on Interstates, even if I don't get the job.
On the way back, we stopped in the high-end grocery store Byerly's, which looked a lot like Zabar's back in NYC. Unable to find them elsewhere, it was here that I finally found good old Nathan's hot dogs, and I bought a package, naturally.
Scott and I also went to Big Bowl, even if save for the appetizer we didn't stray from our favorites. Scott went for a Thai inspired dish, I went for the equally spicy "Blazing flat noodles". As an appetizer, since I had not had them in quite some time, we had lettuce wraps (ground beef, scallions, rice noodles to which you add sauce and put in bibb lettuce, fold and eat).
And today, well, on Oct 5, 1971 at 1:35 PM EST, I was born.
No major plans for today...maybe buy stuff for the apartment, a few other minor chores and things. Last year I spent hours on a bus, bus, train, bus trip from my apartment in Anaheim all the way to the Getty Center and back. It was a long and exhausting trip but a lot of fun.
Well, if I were to be so lucky as to get this job, I probably will "celebrate"...otherwise I will be relatively frugal about the matter.
Slate has an interesting article detailing how a flux in temp jobs can be a bellweather for the economy, both in good and bad times.
Naturally this is an issue near and dear to me, considering my own situation.
Arref has created an animated gif button for A Grand Affair.
I will cheerfully admit to having provided some tips to Arref when he was getting started on HTML and CSS...but graphics, now, he has always been far far better than I, and it shows.
I need to grab this when I get home.
In the movie Demolition Man, Sylvester Stallone's character of John Spartan is aghast to discover the future city of San Angeles is home to the "Schwarzenegger Presidential Library", since the actor became President thanks to the "37th amendment to the Constitution."
And remember the entry where I linked off of Ginger's approval of changing the Constitution in this way?
Apparently proposals for such an amendment ARE working through the House and Senate even now. The likelihood of these becoming law in time for Arnold to possibly run for President are pretty low. Americans are generally resistant to a change in the actual text of the Constitution, even as it gets interpreted and reinterpreted over the ages. But I still think Ginger and I are right, and it *should* change.
I got into a conversation with Scott today over the sizes of the five boroughs. The Daily quiz in the Strib had a map of the five boroughs with a list of their names, and you had to associate each borough with the name. Child's play for me.
It was the size of the map though which irritated me. I've always thought of Staten Island as the third largest (in area) borough behind Brooklyn and Queens, but this map, apparently to scale, seemed to suggest Brooklyn was smaller than Staten Island.
I decided to look online for the answer, and came across the page above...which has multiple entries and sizes listed for the boroughs. Further looking online doesn't seem to give a single set of numbers, even if all of them are fairly within the same ballpark
Maddening.
Ten technologies that deserve to die
Bruce Sterling, SF writer, offers a list of ten technologies that he thinks humanity would be better off if they were discarded...
Some of these are no brainers. I mean I can see the military usefulness of Nuclear Weapons and Land Mines, but they are repugnant in the extreme to me.
But Manned Spaceflight?! Sure, its dangerous...but is it, qualitatively, more dangerous than the brave souls during the European Age of Exploration? Or to be multicultural, what about the pioneers who braved the Bering Strait land bridge. They had no clue what they were going to find down in the Americas.
His dislike of DVDs brings up an argument I had not heard made before--increase of digital piracy. The commercials, though, I can definitely live without. Still, I think DVDs are better than videotape, and probably a stepping stone to completely downloaded content, or more compact forms. The former is not ready for prime time yet, and the latter aren't either. I wouldn't want to stick with videotapes until then. As Deb as mentioned, the clarity of DVDs and cable/satellite television is hard to give up, once you get used to them.
Here is a Meme that I am hoping people will pick up, since its one of those things that interest me about myself, and other people, and its relatively fun and easy. And if it doesn't, well you will learn a little more about me anyhow.
I call it, for lack of a better title, Cardinal Directions
UPDATE: Cleared up a couple of things on the meme.
Slight update for clarification: I generally am curious about the boundaries as far as land goes. It's harder and not quite as fair to use things like the height an airplane reaches above the ground, nor the path of an airplane on a great circle route.
As far as East/West goes, I do realize the Greenwich Meridian and the International Date line complicates matters. The way I mentally think of East and West are as relative directions from your hometown, as measured by the shortest distance. This is to say, from NYC, Greenwich England is the furthest East I've been, even if it is technically also the furthest West. Of course people who have circumnavigated the globe can't really answer the East/West question.
What is the furthest North you have ever been?
The north suburbs of London, England, visiting the RAF museum there.
The furthest South?
St. Petersburg, Florida.
The furthest West?
San Simeon, Hearst Castle, on the California coast
The furthest East?
Greenwich Meridian, London, England (in the Western Hemisphere: Black Rock, Connecticut)
The highest elevation?
A little more than a mile above sea level, at Idyllwild, California.
And now we reach the threshold of October. A month of many things to many people. Fall starts to come into its own, although this morning it feels more like a Minnesota November, with morning temperatures below freezing.
Still, there is much to commend to October... Leaves change, Halloween sits perched at the end of the month, on the brink of November. My birthday. Columbus Day. The winter constellations begin to wheel into view. Apples become ripe and ready for picking. (Recall that a couple of years ago, my former Boss took me apple picking in upstate New York--yum!).
It's my favorite month of the year.