| Yuletide Sign-Off |
[Dec. 18th, 2009|09:20 am] |
Well, it’s that time of the year again, when the stockings are all hung from the chimney with care, and web page hit counts fall like ill-placed ornaments dropping from the Christmas tree.
I hate year-end reviews, so I won’t subject you to one. And as for the decade, on a geopolitical and economic level, I’m glad to see the back of it. Let’s hope for a less wrenching one to come. At the very least, it will be one we can agree on a name for. Points for trying, United Kingdom, but “noughties” never made it across the Atlantic. To North American ears, it sounded not enough like a decade and too much like a pornographic breakfast cereal.
Anyhow, it’s time to sign off for my annual holiday blog break. I’ll be back with more fresh content, and some announcements of exciting projects, in the new year. I’ll be teasing Skulduggery some more, exploring the basic building blocks of narrative, and of course continuing to bring you the deadpan utterances of pistol-packing avians. Projects on the drawing board for next year include forays into fiction, the as yet unnamed GUMSHOE space game, and a book for Gameplaywright that I’m deeply psyched about. You can be sure I’ll be talking about those as they progress. And that’s not all: 2010 will also herald the arrival of a new Birds anthology.
In the meantime, thanks for coming and hanging out at the blog over the past year. Please consider yourself to have been wished the best for the holiday of your choice. And be careful—as much as we might try to dress it up with ribbons and garlands and ceremonies of renewal, the winter solstice really does mean to kill us. So drive save, space out the cookies with the occasional spate of vegetable consumption, and don’t drink any curdled egg nog.
Catch you in the teens, amigos. |
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| The Birds |
[Dec. 17th, 2009|09:20 am] |
View series to date here. Updated archive soon.
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| Blood and Guts In Carthage |
[Dec. 16th, 2009|09:20 am] |
Can you ID, without the aid of Google, the author behind the following passage of heroic bad-assery?
Matho had at first refrained from fighting, the better to command the Barbarians all at once. By degrees he had drawn near; the smell of blood, the sight of carnage, and the tumult of clarions had at last made his heart leap. Then he had gone back into his tent, and throwing off his cuirass had taken his lion's skin as being more convenient for battle. The snout fitted upon his head, bordering his face with a circle of fangs; the two fore-paws were crossed upon his breast, and the claws of the hinder ones fell beneath his knees.
He had kept on his strong waist-belt, wherein gleamed a two-edged axe, and with his great sword in both hands he had dashed impetuously through the breach. Like a pruner cutting willow-branches and trying to strike off as much as possible so as to make the more money, he marched along mowing down the Carthaginians around him. Those who tried to seize him in flank he knocked down with blows of the pommel; when they attacked him in front he ran them through; if they fled he clove them. Two men leaped together upon his back; he bounded backwards against a gate and crushed them. His sword fell and rose. It shivered on the angle of a wall. Then he took his heavy axe, and front and rear he ripped up the Carthaginians like a flock of sheep. Is it Robert E. Howard? Fritz Leiber?
Those of you with the smug smiles on your faces already know the answer — it’s Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary. This is from Salammbo, his 1862 follow-up novel, a thrilling exercise in blood and thunder set during the mercenary revolt against Carthage in the third century BC.
I was not hip to this until recently, when I came across a reference to it in the midst of some research into the surrealist movement of the 20s and 30s. According to the Wikipedia, it’s not well known in English. (It’s perhaps better known as the source of several abortive operas by Mussorgsky and Rachmaninoff.) Its failure to earn a reputation in the English-language world isn’t surprising. Its unflinchingly gruesome violence is still shocking today, and it’s hard to imagine it earning an appreciative audience in Victorian literary salons. I was reminded in some ways of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Here, however, we get less of a sense of apocalyptic moral degradation as an immersion in an alien era that predates our sense of morality.
Flaubert exhaustively researched his subject matter, and any history or fantasy buff should check it out for the evocative density of its descriptions. Any GM worth her D20s will find it packed with eminently stealable images and situations. Take the battle that swings against the Carthaginians in the following manner:
They were re-forming their lines enraged at having been conquered without a fight, when they discovered a vat of petroleum which had no doubt been abandoned by the Carthaginians. Then Spendius had some pigs carried off from the farms, smeared them with bitumen, set them on fire, and drove them towards Utica.
The elephants were terrified by the flames and fled. The ground sloped upwards, javelins were thrown at them, and they turned back;—and with great blows of ivory and trampling feet they ripped up the Carthaginians, stifled them, flattened them. The Barbarians descended the hill behind them; the Punic camp, which was without entrenchments was sacked at the first rush, and the Carthaginians were crushed against the gates. It’s on Gutenberg, but the effect may be stronger on those around you if you grab a print copy. While you’re home with the family this holiday season, impress them with your literary prowess by busting out some Flaubert on them. They don’t have to know how pulpily thrilling it all is. |
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| Setting Up Character Turns |
[Dec. 15th, 2009|09:20 am] |
Clifford Irving’s attempt to sell a faked Howard Hughes autobiography while the man was still alive was the kind of improbably nutso move you couldn’t credibly pull off in a work of fiction. In the movie account of the incident, even with the real-life angle to justify it, the script spends its entire first act setting up the decision. It carefully lays out the series of pressures that lead Irving to attempt his colossally risky scheme. This follows a basic storytelling principle—the more an action strains credibility, the harder you have to work to make it seem likely and relatable.
Roleplaying characters tend more than their counterparts in other narrative media to make choices that seem abrupt, arbitrary, or just plain crazy. Part of this can be chalked up to the fun of playing unhinged or impulsive characters. They shake things up, make things happen, and in general appeal to the player type referred to in the 4E DMG as the instigator.
That said, the extreme actions of otherwise sane or justified characters often come off as jarring in a roleplaying context due to a lack of adequate groundwork. GMs find it easier to lay pipe for coming events than players do. It’s hard for players to find opportunities to execute the slowly escalating stages of a dramatic character turn.
A GM might encourage this by allowing players to incorporate character transformations into the game. The player tells the GM how the character might slowly evolve over the course of many sessions, laying out the chain of motivating events required to get her there. Depending on where the dials are set on the game’s balance of narrative power between players and GMs, the GM might facilitate this as written, or attempt to surprise the player by getting her character where she wants to go in an unexpected way.
It might help when creating a character to first imagine her as she’ll seem after the turn. Then work backwards to introduce her in a previous state. A PC envisioned as a hardened killer might begin play as an idealistic pacifist. The next three to five sessions might each include a scene intended to slowly nudge her into her final state. Thus the arc that might normally be consigned to a backstory description (“Chandra stopped being a pacifist the day the Lupine Order razed her village”) is realized onstage, during play. |
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| Still Lame |
[Dec. 14th, 2009|09:20 am] |
As profound students of medieval history, I’m sure you all know that today is Roonemas. Since at least the fourteenth century, the eleventh day before Christmas has been celebrated as a time to make Andy Rooney-esque complaints. So while I wouldn’t do this any other day of the year, the spirit of the holidays compels me to share this observation saved from my recent trip to London.
Okay, so since when did standing still in a weird costume become a busking monoculture? Down by the Southbank Centre there had to be a dozen different street performers trying to cadge coins from sightseers, and pretty much every single one of them counted being stationary as his main talent. Granted, the two guys in the anole costumes riding bikes were more mobile than the others. But with the competition on display consisting of immobile Shakespeare, immobile French dude, immobile silver statue, etc., you'd think a juggler or classical guitarist would move in to easily conquer their malnourished entertainment ecosystem. I can't decide who was worse, lumpy immobile Superman or disturbingly off-brand immobile Mickey Mouse. Or is this all part of some art project to discourage tourists from clogging London, by ensuring that its street diversions remain consistently cheesy?
Happy Roonemas, everyone! |
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| Delightful Deep Ones? There's An App For That |
[Dec. 11th, 2009|02:49 pm] |
Thanks to Derek "Monsieur Le SuperCool" Pearcy, you can now get a Where the Deep Ones Are as an iPhone or iPod Touch app.
I honestly have no idea what clicking that link will lead to on your end; on mine, it opened the iTunes Store to the app's sales page, which is probably right. But I'm sure a minimum of faffing around on iTunes will uncover it, too. |
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| The Birds |
[Dec. 11th, 2009|09:20 am] |
View series to date here. Updated archive soon.
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 10th, 2009|05:58 pm] |
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So, should you happen to read the Fortean Times, the current number (257?) contains my brief review of Simon Young's The Celtic Revolution. Executive summary: OK, but not great. |
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