This weekend I’m a redshirt at PAX East in Boston, and I’ll be running Eclipse Phase. If you’re coming to the show, I’m doing a two hour demo Saturday at 10 am & a full 4 hour game Sunday at 10 am. Check @EclipsePhase on Twitter for location info (as I’m not sure yet where the table will be).
More info here.
I’ve been obsessed with labyrinths for a long time. Some of this can be blamed on Jorge Luis Borges, but even without his writing, they pull me in, both visually and philosophically. Thinking about what I wanted to play in the D&D game I was recently invited to join, I decided to look at minotaurs and see if there was anything I could work with there.
I liked the material on minotaurs from the old D&D Taladas setting (the obscure opposite hemisphere of the Dragonlance world), and I also like Blizzard’s take on minotaurs (sorry, “Tauren”) in World of Warcraft. But both of these settings downplay what is to me the most fascinating aspect of minotaurs: their connection with mazes and labyrinths. (You knew mazes and labyrinths were two different things, right? Yep, sure are!).
So I’ve come up with my own take on civilized minotaurs for use in our as-yet-unnamed D&D world. Here’s what I send our DM on the character I developed, Jholi Narrh…
The minotaurs of Professor Lostcarriage’s World fall into two distinct populations: the Keepers and the Wanderers (sometimes called “Savages” by the Keepers). Wanderers are your typical D&D world minotaurs: unpleasant, savage humanoids feared by civilized races. Keepers are civilized. They dwell in enclaves bordering or in some cases completely surrounded by the nations of other races.
Keeper enclaves are called mazes. Each is a settlement completely enclosed by a maze, ranging in size from small hamlets up to minor city-states. The mazes are almost always magically grown hedge mazes, although in major settlements, some of the mazework may be of stone (particularly if strong fortifications are needed). Far-flung mazes may be of other materials, though these are less common. In places where plants won’t grow, such as the arctic, the maze might be of ice; in the underworld, of cave walls and dense fungal growths; in a jungle or desert, of vines or cacti. In some regions, the minotaurs cultivate fields or maintain pastures outside the maze; in others, they fish, hunt, or trade for food.
Minotaur life revolves around maintaining and enlarging their mazes (and the structures found within them), contemplation of the Labyrinthine Mysteries (see below), artisanry, and trade with the outside world and other minotaur enclaves. The organization of a minotaur community is somewhat monastic, which is why such a large, fearsome-looking people can co-exist among other races: their attentions and aspirations are focused inward. However, young minotaurs are encouraged to travel the outside world to hone their skills, learn the ways of other races, and if the opportunity arises, to convert the heathen Wanderers.
Minotaurs have two equally important spiritual traditions, a bit like the Japanese adherence to both Shinto and Buddhism. On one hand, druids are very important in their communities as representatives of the natural world (and to grow labyrinth walls). On the other, the minotaurs worship a human god, Parn, god of labyrinths. Parn has almost no human worshipers; the few who do exist treat minotaur mazes as holy sites and may visit them as pilgrims. The minotaurs believe that their ancestors were human, but were cursed for some now-forgotten sin to be part beast. They do not believe that their condition can ever be reversed (nor would they wish this), but they do believe that moderation and contemplation of the Labyrinthine Mysteries, as taught in Parn’s scriptures, keeps their lives in balance.
Jholi Narrh is the lowest-ranking warden of the Maze of Xiphin (pron. “ky-fin”), a small (village-sized) minotaur enclave not far from Haven (the main city in our game world). His elders have sent him out to wander, explore, and learn. Jholi’s maze is known locally for producing honey, mead, ink, and cloth dyes. Xiphin is nicknamed the Flower Maze by other races; the hedges themselves bloom riotously throughout the warm months and are the source of many of the town’s products. Couples of all races may visit in Spring to receive blessings of fertility from the local druids. The town’s standard is a stylized beehive set within a maze of hexagons (like a honeycomb).
I had fun with this character in the first session I played him. There was some misunderstanding when he first joined the party; he naively translated “Warden” as “Beekeeper” because of his role back home in the maze. It was a good time playing a big, humanoid beastie with a contemplative side — without falling back on the now-too-familiar shamanism of WoW’s Taurens.
I want someone to do an infographic, proportional to population, of leading causes of death in the contemporary U.S. vs. Elizabethan England.
I’d like to see how auto accidents & heart disease stack up against sword fights, scurvy, and the Red Death.
Me: “Imagine if instead of being at the mercy of TV writers, you & your friends could control what happens in Lost.”
Her: “That’d be AWESOME.”
Update: Please note that I wrote this before I had any idea what was going on with Catalyst.
Why is it that so many people involved in the production of pen & paper RPGs are so damned cynical about the industry, the hobby, and the people in it? Putting aside those who front like they’re assholes as some type of weird performance designed to entertain the worthy and repulse the unwashed (because admittedly, that’s me sometimes), I still see the most vitriol about the hobby coming from two sources:
Seriously, why? I’m starting to think that it’s the most immersed who are the most bitter, and possibly the most likely to act like awful humans in the process.
Cheer up, emo gamer. It’s supposed to be fun.
The Eclipse Phase Gamemaster Screen is now available as a PDF release. I’m pretty excited about this, because the adventure included with it, Glory, is my first solo RPG publication. The scenario is designed as a solid intro to the Eclipse Phase world. The characters, as agents of Firewall, are sent looking for another Firewall agent who’s gone missing. The adventure combines intrigue and investigation with a high-tech dungeon crawl on a deep space station and some good ol’ blood & guts horror. One reviewer compared it favorably to legendary sci-fi/horror computer RPG System Shock 2.
You can…
from Amazon.com.As with the Core rulebook, the GM screen is released under a Creative Commons non-commercial attribution sharealike license.
Where’s my Permanent Undercaste of Developmentally Limited Slave Workers?
(And Other Failed Predictions from the Annals of Science Fiction)
Science fiction is littered with the failures of writers who should have known better to accurately predict the future… But it’s even more littered with the failure of reality to keep up with their warped ideas. Here I shall consider a few of my favorites.
Permanent Undercaste of Developmentally Limited Slave Workers
Brave New World
A knowledge work job for life, constant lusty adulation from lower caste members of the opposite sex, after work orgies, free drugs, and a workforce of fetal alcohol syndrome hobbit monkeys at one’s beck and call… Who wouldn’t want to live in Huxley’s world?
Moralizing neo-cons, that’s who!
As someone who’s devoted a lot of thought to transhumanism lately, I have to say that this book remains a challenging one. In some ways, Huxley’s argument in Brave New World looks like the sine qua non for people like Francis Fukuyama freaking out about the H+ movement. While we don’t have the technology to do some of the things described in this book yet, perhaps the intention is there? I do hope so, because it would be a vast improvement over the Epsilons-Shopping-at-Walmart stories people on the Eclipse Phase Facebook page came back with as soon as I took up this line of thought.
Pretty People Forced to Wear Hideous Masks to Make Them Average
Harrison Bergerand
Leaving the most recent Lady Gaga video aside, Vonnegut’s parable of an average American Übermensch forced to wear myopia-inducing goggles, a racoon coat made of metal racoons, and a grotesque mask hasn’t played out as advertised. As anyone in human resources will tell you, above average people are valuable. Your best approach is to put them in offices where all the C students don’t have to look at them, stack their workload so high that their brains don’t work much better than Harrison Bergerand’s Dad’s at the end of the day, and pay them enough to behave. After just a decade of this treatment, the combination of repetitive stress injuries, office chair-related back pain, and fat rolls sprouted from years of drinking and poor diet normally add up to the same handicaps forced upon Bergerand… no mask required!
Really, Kurt, you were over-thinking the problem.
Soviets on Jupiter (or Luna, or Mars, or Anyplace, Really)
2010: A Space Odyssey
Mr. Clarke, get real. The Soviets’ played-out, oppressive social regime and internal instability meant that they couldn’t get to the friggin’ Moon, let alone building a space ship capable of travel to the Jovian system. Oh, wait… Americans can’t, either.
How embarrassing.
Reduction to the Status of Chattel for Women (May Substitute White People, Academics, Gun Lovers, Mormons, or Whatever Freaked the Author Out Most)
The Handmaid’s Tale
Although I actually think LDS paranoia about being oppressed for wanting to have lots of babies a la Ender’s Game is more entertaining, I’m including Margaret Atwood here because she’s such an ivory tower Henny Penny about being described as a science fiction author. Get over it, Margaret; no one’s going to force you to show up at Worldcon. It’s almost as silly as Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry freaking out about being called a goth band. Also, Ken MacLeod wrote a novel about talking squids in space, and it was fucking awesome, so you shut up.
I was going to write something about alarmist, overwrought narratives posing as plausibly framed social commentary, but look, I just ended up going off on Margaret Atwood for a whole paragraph instead. Whatever, moving on…
Food Pills
The Jetsons
I tried to make these when I was a kid by taking white bread and squishing it into the densest little dough bullets I could. When you added peanut butter and jelly, it didn’t work so well, but I’m sure modern food technology could do better than an eight year old with a rolling pin and time on his hands. Never mind that compressing a full meal into a pill would result in a pill that weighed about half a pound. The demand is out there. “But the Jetsons was a cartoon,” you protest. Pish tosh! Serious sci-fi writers kicked this idea around, too. Of course, if they had kicked an actual food pill they would have probably stubbed their toes badly and discarded this idea right quick.
Absurdist Totalitarianism
Brazil
The failure to appear of a preposterously Kafkaesque state where interrogators wear weird baby masks and dissidents get hung in garment bags aboard mobile armored hall closets would mark Terry Gilliam as one of sci-fi’s dimmest lights in the art of prediction, if not for the abject lack of imagination it displays on the part of the oppressive regimes we already have. Really, if glue-huffing African child soldiers could work out that neon wigs and women’s clothing would freak the fuck out of their opponents, you’d think the meatheads at Abu-Gharaib could have come up with something better than scaring people with dogs and making them form naked human pyramids. They could have been using, I don’t know, creepy octopus masks or something. Were I an Iraqi detainee, I’d pretty much poo myself instantly if some crazy white man dressed like a cephalopod came at me with a list of questions.
Unreliable Experimental Medical Procedures That Make Mice and Retarded People Smarter
Flowers for Algernon
Sadly, this is not a widely explored trope, but that’s okay, because Keyes had it in the pocket. The key implication of his idea, though, has not inspired the type of vigorous exploration that, say, virtual reality did. Which is too bad, because if you could perform an operation to make mentally retarded people more functional, just think of how you could improve all of the people who are technically of average intelligence but do stupid, stupid things all of the damned time.
And think of all the incidental spin offs you’d glean from the massive amount of human experimentation along the critical path to reach this outcome! It’s clearly a winner.
So There You Have It
Quit snoozing, reality, and try to keep up.
Saturday I went to Maker Faire Rhode Island and liveblogged the event from my jeejah. Here’s a hashtag search that brings up most of my tweets. For some reason, search cuts off some of my tweets (and I forgot to hashtag the first few), so here they are:
This was a great start for a first Maker Faire, and with all the wonderfully innovative minds out here, it was high time the Northeast threw one. I haven’t been to Maker Faire Austin, but this was a very different affair from the San Francisco event. The most noticeable difference was the scale of the inventions on display. The San Francisco Faire is notable for the presence of a lot of big Burning Man art. Out here, far from Black Rock City, the gadgets on display were no less cool but tended to be smaller (and fewer seemed designed to amuse tripping burners — although the REM inducer on display by the soldering tables looked straight off the Playa).
Whoever figured out how to coordinate the Faire with one of Providence’s Waterfire weekends was a genius. Unlike the San Francisco event, which is ensconced off in the San Mateo fairgrounds, the Rhode Island Faire took over an entire square and the streets radiating out from it in downtown Providence, meaning that thousands of casual passers by got to wander into the event, learn, and participate. The weather cooperated nicely, too. Of course, the SF Faire is big enough that it needs its own space and doesn’t need as much publicity, but the point is that it would have been very unfortunate if the first northeast Faire had been tucked away in a building out of the public eye.
All in all, this was a great time, and I even had a few minutes to stop for tacos at AS220 (an awesome & more permanent feature of Providence) before getting back on the train for Boston.
I did try to credit all of the Makers when photographing projects. If I shot your project and didn’t include your name, please let me know, and I’ll make sure to update this post to give credit.
Finally, I’ll pass on some information I picked up:
Photos (top to bottom): Yellow Submarine by Sean Bagge, DIY 3D printer by Makerbot Industries, Huge Foam Skeletal Robot Costume by Big Nazo. (All taken by me).
This is very belated, as I just gave myself about a month off to regain some sanity, but here’s my roundup of this year’s Gen Con.
The big news from where I sit is obviously Eclipse Phase. It’s finally out, and it’s a beautiful baby. At 400 pages, it’s a big baby, too. Catalyst had only a limited number of copies to sell at the con, so the people doing retail in the exhibit hall booth were cracking open one box each morning and selling out as fast as they could run the cash registers. I’m pretty sure we could have beaten some records for units sold at Gen Con if we’d had more copies, but trans-Pacific shipping (from Thailand, specifically) cuts deep into your margins if you airlift in too many advance copies.
Despite the dearth of actual books to sell, we had full tables for every demo we ran over in the Catalyst room at the Hyatt, and I was running demos more or less nonstop in the exhibit hall. I’m thankful to everyone who spent some of their time trying the game out. After all, there’s a lot to see at Gen Con. I even got to play in a demo run by Sprite (or “Rob Boyle,” as they call him there in Gondor). It was great getting to just be a player after writing and GMing a playtest group for two years. But this gets to the heart of what I told one blogger who stopped by to talk: we made Eclipse Phase because it was the sci-fi game that we all wanted to play.
Games for Which I Want to Write
The Gen Con exhibit hall is a non-stop assault of amazing new stuff, much of which a true gamer wants to buy and take home. One unexpected (and lucky, maybe) side effect of having moved to Massachusetts is that I can’t bring back much stuff due to airline weight restrictions. If I bring ten pounds worth of chapbooks with me to the con and get rid of all of them, I’ve got ten pounds of swag and purchases, max. This year I took a an approach to shopping I’d never tried before. I took my mandatory swing through the Indie Revolution booth and picked up a board game there (Andre Monserrat’s intriguing House of Whack). I eyed a really neat-looking storytelling game set in Asian antiquity whose mechanics apparently call for serving tea and stabbing other players’ character sheets with a knife (whose name I forgot, damn it!).
I then spent most of my time in the hall looking for games on which I’d want to work as a writer. I love running games, so for me, the litmus test of whether I’m going to love a new RPG is whether it immediately gets the creative gears turning in my head. There were some clear standouts. Some of these won’t be news, but having spent the last two years completely absorbed in making our game (and barely having gotten to leave our booth last Gen Con), I’d missed a few things.
Desolation (Greymalkin Designs)
When I saw this game’s tagline, “post-apocalyptic fantasy,” I was immediately intrigued. Take your typical happy high fantasy world. You’ve got lots of self-satisfied elves, dragons soaring over mountaintops, happy halflings at work in their barley fields — in other words, a wellspring of boredom as old as the Silmarillion. Really, your only option is to destroy it and set your game in the ashes. Now the halflings are resorting to cannibalism and the elves are wearing cloaks of elvenkind that haven’t been washed in eighteen months. Suddenly things are interesting! I wasn’t able to bring this one home, but I’m definitely giving it a read when I can grab a copy.
Geist (White Wolf)
I’ll admit: I’ve been known to beat up on White Wolf a little when I discuss RPGs with my friends. I love Exalted, but there are times when I’ve talked about them as if they were the Quentin Tarantino of the RPG industry (“I’m not into Kill Bill, and other than that, what has he done for me lately?”). Maybe I was bored with the formula for World of Darkness game titles (parodied by White Wolf themselves in the card game Pimp: The Backhanding). Maybe it was petulance at their killing Wraith (was I the only person who ever loved this game?). And to be fair, they’ve put out some products that I just didn’t like (Hunter: The Reckoning comes to mind).
Geist is not one such product. The people at the White Wolf booth were very quick (defensively so, it seemed) to tell me that the game is not a reworking of Wraith. That said, it retains in some form what I think was one of the most powerful aspects of Wraith: the shadow. Instead of playing ghosts with an evil twin, though, this game tells the story of living humans, recently returned from near-death experiences, who’ve bonded to an entity called a Geist. The Geist is a former person whose death was so emotionally charged that it transforms them into a near-archetypal persona whose drives and desires thereafter pull constantly at the Sin Eater, the mortal to which it bonds. Less brutal in its disempowerment of the PC than Wraith, yet no less spooky, Geist looks like a nice addition to the WoD franchise.
Alpha Omega (Mindstorm Labs)
And here I confidently thought we were going to be the prettiest game at Gen Con. Damn. We’ll have to settle for prettiest new game, since this one’s been out since 2007. Mindstorm had their core book and a book of monsters on sale, both gorgeously produced at an appealingly unusual aspect ratio. Post-apocalyptic occult horror games aren’t exactly new ground in the industry, but this one boasts a solid combination of compelling writing, innovative mechanics, and totally eye-popping art. The added presence of angels and demons (with halfbreeds as playable characters) introduces some interesting storytelling possibilities to a world that’s already gone through some over the top transformations by fire, flood, and comet.
Song of Ice & Fire RPG (Green Ronin)
The history of RPGs is littered with failures, a surprising number of which are games licensed off of properties that probably seemed to their developers like a sure thing due to the built-in fan base. Some failed due to poor design (Aliens), others due to weird restrictions imposed by licensors who didn’t understand the RPG industry and developers who agreed to their terms when they should’ve just walked away (Indiana Jones, Star Trek). These failures have become no less common over the years; they’ve just gotten more expensive (witness Buffy, a property that no RPG company in its right mind will ever touch again). So after the rather spectacular failure of Guardians of Order’s Song of Ice & Fire RPG, it’s heartening to see a good company like Green Ronin taking a whack.
It looks like they’re off to a good start. Rather than producing a door stopper of a core book full of material that’s only marginally useful (did anyone really need stats for every single knight in Westeros?), Green Ronin’s core book comes in at a slimmer, saner page count while maintaining great production values. Need setting material? GRRM’s notoriously incomplete series has what you need. Need a game for it? It’s right here. The fact that Green Ronin’s web site is currently offering it on sale makes it even more tempting. Oh, and in case you still haven’t heard: George R. R. Martin is not your bitch.
Pathfinder (Paizo)
One of the big pieces of news this year was Paizo’s release of Pathfinder. The running joke on the con floor was that Pathfinder is what D&D 4th Edition should have been. Maybe this is a little unfair to WotC, who, let’s face it, weren’t going to make anyone happy by releasing a new edition of a game whose last edition only came out five years ago. D&D 4th Edition was clearly intended to bring new players into the hobby by producing a product that would be friendlier to massmorg players, and in this it will perhaps succeed. Whatever the case, I don’t need to be miffed that the game I’ve played for 26 years has suddenly gone from semi-realism to a much more video game-like experience, because Pathfinder is there to keep D&D 3.5 in print.
The execution is great, and the price is right. Lest you think from the last section that I don’t like big, beefy core rulebooks, think again. I just don’t like them when they’re full of useless NPC stats or other filler that any good GM could generate themself while in a vegetative coma… which this book is not. At 576 pages, Pathfinder may knock a few vertebrae out of alignment when carried in your messenger bag, but the MSRP (only $50) is right, especially when the book contains everything you need to play. Contrast with D&D 4th Edition, where just the two players’ books will set you back $70, and this is a steal (although WotC was offering a very nice deal on Player’s Handbook I at the con this year — which I took). The anime-inspired art is phenomenal, and the fact that the Pathfinder setting book won an ENnie last year doesn’t hurt in piquing my interest, either.
Cthulhutech (Catalyst Game Labs)
Last but not least, there’s Cthulhutech, not a new product this year but one I didn’t get my hands on until Matt Grau handed me a signed copy at this year’s Con. Despite sharing a booth with them last year, I hadn’t gotten a chance to check out their product. I’m now devouring the book and enjoying it immensely.
The first lesson I’ve learned from this game (in combination with working on Eclipse Phase) is that if you’re doing an RPG and want the art to be effin’ slick, hire Mike Vaillancourt as your art director. This is a damned pretty book, with a very consistent visual style throughout. Is there a little bit of fan servicing thrown in there with the giant robots and unspeakable horrors? Well, yeah, there is… but it’s largely pretty classy.
Second lesson: it’s possible to design a fun, playable vehicle combat system without resorting to everything-but-the-kitchen-fabricator Star Fleet Battles-esque rules. I was initially a little skeptical about this game because I didn’t see how the designers could cram workable mecha combat into such a slim core book along with everything else this game covers. But Cthulhutech’s mecha rules build elegantly off of the personal combat system without adding more than a handful of special rules for handling vehicles.
Final observation: the writing is bang on. This isn’t just some silly “Cthulhu versus Battle Mechs” genre mixing mess. The writers have successfully envisioned a world transformed by contact with cosmic horrors, and they’ve followed through on all of the implications. I haven’t yet gotten a look at Vade Mecum, the first major rules expansion for the game, but I’m now pretty psyched for it.