Author: Scott

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Books

Ariel by Steven R. Boyett

A surprising first novel about a boy and his unicorn… it’s an interesting and meaningful look at a fascinating world. The world has undergone “The Change”; five years ago many forms of technology just stopped working. The social order collapsed; non-functional cars line freeways everywhere, and the remaining people are fewer and much more inured to violence. Along with the technology crash, magic and supernatural beasts returned to the world. Many kinds of critters returned– manticores, gryphons, and unicorns.

Our hero, Pete, has a bond with a unicorn. They are good friends, talk with each other and are perfect companions for the road. Their relationship is strong and well described throughout– Ariel is never a horse with a horn, but is never traditionally human in thought or deed either. Their bond feels real and is strongly forged; they’ve gone through a lot together, and go through a lot more in this book.

I’m looking forward to reading the same-world sequel, Elegy Beach, soon.

Categories
Books

Yes Means Yes!

The full title is: Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power & A World Without Rape, Edited by Jaclyn Friedman & Jessica Valenti.

This was a very interesting book, with a wide variety of authors and essays. The loose theme was describing a world running right, with a wide variety of interpretations and depths. Some describe small tweaks required to get us to an acceptable tomorrow, some leap forward and describe the end result, and many walk the line between the two and describe both– or the path from here, to better, to best.

Several essays were solid but didn’t grab me beyond the intellectual level; most of these were expanding the idea of good sex in various directions and breaking down preconceptions. There was a lot of intersectional analysis in these essays, where the social constraints of being female are amplified by being fat, black, disabled, transitioning, and so on. These were good at keeping me grounded and reminding me that there are a lot of moving parts within feminism and desire. I particularly appreciated how many articles emphasized the internalization of norms, where very smart people intellectually knew that they deserved love, but advertising and culture kept knocking them down, telling them that any form of happy ending wasn’t destined for these splinters.

Several articles had me deeply interested; I was very tempted to write a post detailing my own experiences after reading a couple of essays (particularly about nice versus “nice” guys), the vision of “what do we imagine as a good first experience” and detailing the ways the stereotypical “good” was still short. The most persuasive, most useful, and deeply necessary discussion throughout revolved around the concept of enthusiastic consent. Getting that one thing right would help knock down the low standards of “no means no” and seeking a mere absence of resistance, and encourage sex to be an almost uniformly positive thing. It’s easy to get right once you begin with that as the expectation– so we have a job ahead of us, redefining what sex, pressure, and relationships should look like. An article on a very similar topic diagnoses much of the problem as our predator/prey descriptions and expectations for sex– sounds like a good place to start.

Categories
Misc Roleplaying

A bit of everything

Comics: Too Fat to be a Rockstar (Weekly), Guilded Age (MWF), Math Comics

Chris Chinn’s Blood and Ink gathered– http://bankuei.wordpress.com/2009/10/03/blood-ink-play-guides/
Quick: Character webs– http://www.rpggm.com/blog/2009/09/25/building-better-npcs-iii-character-webs/
Picking the price of success– http://buriedwithoutceremony.com/2009/10/20/the-little-things-in-life/

Mouse Guard AP#3– http://rpg.brouhaha.us/?p=1884
AP #4– http://rpg.brouhaha.us/?p=1920

Cool D&D Stuff: Bendy Dungeon Walls– http://www.dark-platypus.com/bendy_dungeon_walls.htm

Looking out for the story leads to constipation at the table. Story does not need to be preserved or looked out for. It is not a just hatched chick that needs everyone to be careful lest it is trampled. Just play the damned game, make choices that are brave. Look at your character sheet, let your character surprise you and story will just happen. — Judd, http://githyankidiaspora.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/the-myth-of-story-preservation/

Hardening WordPress– http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/oct/23/wordpress-exploit-scanner-hardening-hacker

Men/Women– http://www.rpggm.com/blog/2009/10/19/unintentional-sexism-in-rpgs-even-women-do-it/
http://www.dungeonmastering.com/tools-resources/character-sheet-cross-dressing

Categories
Books

Sorcery and Cecelia

Sorcery and Cecelia, The Enchanted Tea Pot, by Patricia C Wrede and Caroline Steevermer.

I really enjoyed this lighthearted correspondence. It’s a great world, with intriguing main characters and an interesting cross between nineteenth century manners and fascinating magic. I really enjoyed the whole concept, and could feel the fun the authors had in building their world together.

Categories
Food

This week in Food

Tonight I’m cooking up some (slightly tired) mei qing choi, to make Mei Qing Choi with Soy Ginger Sauce.

Yesterday I made homemade pizza crust, using the Bittman recipe. It was tasty and crunched nicely! [Note the perfectly round pizza crust. 😉 ] [1. Additional pizza night with the other half of the crust was added to the slideshow later.]

Prior to that, I made up one of my favorite dishes, Chicken and Rice. It always hits the spot.

Categories
Books

Other Lands: Acacia Book Two by David Anthony Durham

A pretty good sequel to The War with the Mein, with less connected storylines. Time hops forward nine years, which makes for a number of changes to the setting.

Daniel’s tale is the strangest; the Other Lands are much more fantastic than Acacia and the Known World. In many ways it didn’t work for me as well; it felt like everything was painted in super bright colors. There were some Asian influences that felt muddled– the culture’s differences were too great for the ink brushing and other subtle “eastern” flavorings to stand out– they were lost in the riot of body modification, soul transfer, and endless life. As you read along it works well and holds together, and the choice of Daniel to guide our viewpoint encourages us to understand how different the culture is.

Corinn continues largely the same, but with a twist– she’s a doting mother too. Her story is much like the last; intrigue and deciding what the necessary things are consumes her. She’s a conscientious queen with decisions that don’t appeal. The twist to sorcery (the risks explained by the Santoth) seem excessive, but I’ll wait to see what he does with it before I decide.

Mena is busy but not effective; her story is smaller than the other two– more personal. Other stories (like Aliver’s daughter) seem necessary, but didn’t really draw me in.

The ending was solid and really reemphasized who the characters are. I wonder how much of my reduced enthusiasm for this book is a result of the “mid-trilogy” drag, where the gains of the first book are shown to be only a fraction of what will be required in the end. The final book could be great– or this could become a series where I strongly recommend the first book.

Categories
FATE Games

FATE one-shot advice

(From the FATE mailing list: this post)

I posted most of this earlier to this list, so look through the archives for that thread, as there were other good hints. But here are my tips for one shot/con games.

Characters –
I would shy away from full chargen at the table. My local group loves to spend a whole evening generating characters, but it’ll take too long in a convention slot.

Use partial to full pregen characters. Don’t choose stunts at the table, again it will take too long. Either you pick them before or go stuntless, by choosing good aspects(which is the path I prefer).

At a minimum choose the top skills (the +5, and the 2 +4s for each characters). Let them fill in the rest, but also allow them to put them in in play so you can get going.

Pregenerate several aspects for each character. Make sure you have a list of them and write down possible places in the adventure that you’ll be able to compel them. You won’t be able to track more than one or two aspects per player at a table of 6 for very long. Have some compels up your sleeve and any others are gravy.

Cut their fate points to 5, and compel early and often. Explain self compels, and try to get them to the work for you.

Use the faster damage rules on the wiki if you want to speed up combat.

The Adventure –
In a 4 hours slot with pregens and 5 players I usually get either 3 bigger or 4 smaller encounters. Not much more.
Be sure to design the adventure so that you can drop whatever is needed out to get to the Big Bad at the end. Players are more forgiving of plot problems than not getting to the triumph stage.

Start them in the middle of something. Ignore the “meet in the bar/clubhouse/ diner and plan” stage (players will overthink it, and spend too much of the precious game time looking for things that aren’t there.) Get them into the action as soon as possible.

Jeff

Categories
Books

Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon

A solid and consistently interesting non-fiction book of collected essays. I like his take on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, his Maps and Legends essay about growing up with a love of maps and exploring the neighborhood, and many more. Other essays were short and targeted elsewhere– his brief applause of Will Eisner didn’t fire me with a passion to find out more.

American Flagg looks interesting, and I really enjoyed the in depth review of Pullman’s His Dark Materials series. It sounds like a first book I’d enjoy, and a remainder that would be… blah, but OK.

Categories
Food

CSA Veggies: September and October

CSA 09/02: csa 09-02

Continue reading “CSA Veggies: September and October”
Categories
Games Roleplaying

EndGame Minicon

The minicon was interesting– in a good way, mostly. I played three new games over the course of the day. The store, EndGame, was awesome!

The first was a pre-release version of Mythender, which I’d never heard of before. It was run by its creator, Ryan Macklin, who is working on the Dresden RPG for Evil Hat. [Though I didn’t make that connection until lunch afterwards.] I played Roland, Charlemagne’s knight, beside two other characters– Merlin (King Arthur’s adviser) and a hero who had slain gods in Europe, hoping to end untimely death forever.

The mechanics were a little complicated, and the game was a little transparently preachy, but it made for a neat one-shot. I suspect a 3 session campaign is as long as it’d ever go, but it was interesting. Afterwards, I had sandwiches with the other players at a shop just down the street. (Ryan’s offhand comments about “Dresden” finally clued me in to who he was.)

The 3 pm game [Burning Wheel] that I had signed up for was canceled by the GM– I think I was the only player who had signed up. I got into a game of Scooby Doo with the Inspectres RPG engine. It was fun and very different– clearly, my memory of the cartoon was hazy in comparison to the other players, but we camped it up and had a lot of fun. The session was very fast– we completed an 8 Franchise die mission in the first two hours. Since the next slot wasn’t until 8, the GM came up with a second plot after a ten minute break and we played it through. It wasn’t as good, but it was still very enjoyable.

When we finished, we crossed the street to the English brew pub across the way. I had a couple of sausages and sauerkraut– it was tasty.

Then I wandered back and joined the 8 pm game of Wild Talents. It’s an ORE game, and the GM had an interesting twist: it was set on the Germanic frontier with Marcus Aurelius as Emperor. We got stuck on a [self created] riddle for a while, but enjoyed roleplaying roman citizens with unusual powers and investigating in the depths of Germania. It was the most traditional of the three games, and was quite fun for being straight forward. As we cleaned up, the GM told us about a very separate path we could have chosen. It would have been an interesting scenario too!