Lonesome Robot Press :: Science Fiction

Eclipse Phase is up for an ENnie Award in four categories this year (Best Cover Art, Best Writing, Best Production Values & Product of the Year). The ENnies are one of the two big awards in the RPG field each year, and unlike the Origins Award, they’re based on fan voting. Unfortunately, this puts a product like Eclipse Phase at something of a disadvantage. We don’t have nearly the number of copies in circulation as, oh, say, Pathfinder. That said, I think we put out a superior game that deserves some recognition. If you have a few seconds (and it only takes that long, because there’s no registration), please cast a ballot for Eclipse phase at the ENnies web site. Voting runs until midnight on July 25 (i.e., you have until 11:59 pm on the 24th).

My colleagues Rob Boyle and Adam Jury have also posted some thoughts on voting for the ENnies this year.

Thanks to everyone who supported Eclipse Phase over its first year out on the market. Whether we bring home an ENnie or not, it’s been an excellent ride.

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.

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:

1. RPG.netters
2. Industry people

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…

• Get the PDF version from DriveThru RPG/JDR Rapide.
• Get the PDF version with Hack Pack (designer’s original files for your mash-upping pleasure).
• Or, pre-order the print version from Amazon.com.

As with the Core rulebook, the GM screen is released under a Creative Commons non-commercial attribution sharealike license.

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.

I’ll be at Gen Con 2009 in Indianapolis, Indiana from August 12-16. Mostly, I’ll be at the Catalyst Gamelabs booth delivering my elevator pitch on Eclipse Phase to anyone who stands to close to me. I’ll also be running some demos of the game and will be on the panel for a Q&A seminar. I posted a full schedule of these events on the Eclipse Phase Facebook page if you’re interested in stopping by.

The scheduled demo games are ticketed events. I have no idea how sold out they are, but odds are usually good of getting a seat if you show up with a generic ticket, as we’ll frequently have two tables running simultaneously in the same room. I believe anyone can show up for the seminar. And we’ll be doing booth demos, for which you just need to show up at the Catalyst booth. They’ll have a schedule posted.

Finally, I’ll have handmade chapbooks of my stories Caribou and Chat Perdu available. They’re free if you play in a demo, buy a copy of Eclipse Phase, or just really want to have one. Donations are most welcome, though, as my chapbooks can best be described as a loss leader.

And now, back to packing and making aforementioned chapbooks. Hope to see some of you in Indy!

Lonesome Robot Press is pleased to announce Empyrean, a pen & paper science fiction role-playing game set in posthumanity’s distant future. Inspired by influences as diverse as Cowboy Bebop; the original Traveller RPG; and the writings of Vernor Vinge, Peter Hamilton, Bruce Sterling, and Alastair Reynolds, Empyrean uses a richly developed Milky Way galaxy as backdrop for the meeting and clash of humanity and numerous alien races. Players can choose to portray characters from one of humanity’s many cultures and subspecies, AGIs, or aliens designed to be culturally distinct yet playable.

Although the possibilities for an Empyrean campaign are nearly limitless, the default campaign casts the player characters as the crew of an FTL (faster-than-light) ship. The rules and setting material focus on the challenges and opportunities for such characters, whether they choose to seek hire as mercenaries, ply the galactic trade lanes as merchants, or pursue more obscure goals. An elegant system of rules for modeling the technology levels and available resources in various star systems helps to determine the challenges and potential rewards of the missions upon which characters embark.

Player character roles are designed to encourage a cohesive “adventuring party” style of play, with some or all of the following possibly present within a PC group:

• Starship command crew: commanders, navigators, and helms
• Groundside ops personnel: drop ship pilots, groundpounders, infiltrators, and even bounty hunters
• Spacing professions: salvage crew, fighter pilots, and fleet ops specialists
• Social & sciences professions: biologists, linguists, astrophysicists, infobrokers, and trade negotiators
• Sentient starships whose robotic avatars can accompany the rest of a PC group groundside

A range of races and human subtypes are available as playable characters:

• Humans from planetary cultures, including the Normans, Aztlánistas, and Vegans.
• Humans from spacefaring cultures, including the technology-trading Ming Lu and the awesome mercenary fleets of Kombine Mercantile Marine.
• Lynn’Ryn, a race of tradition-bound blue skinned humanoids whose ancient culture teaches the discipline of manipulating physical reality at the quantum level.
• Al-Mogur, entrepreneurs and merchants who grow their ships from organic matter and whose science appears weirdly mystical to outsiders.
• Sovizen, humanoids descended from arboreal amphibians. Their aptitude for macro-scale building is unparalleled, extending to the planetary scale.
• Bagduarh, a race descended from flightless avian carrion eaters. They are new to the stars, having rapidly assimilated new technology gained from other races.
• Dholi Ghat, the children of the Mold, a race of rudimentary humanoids connected by slime mold implants in their bodies to the Bloom, a self-aware information network that is the only known method of faster-than-light communication.

In addition to unique PC races and a variety of interesting antagonists, Empyrean will eventually include spaceship combat rules at two scales: micro, for GMs wanting to include small craft and fighter combat in their games, and macro, for star system-spanning battles between capital ships. This and other features of the game setting and rules allow GMs to decide on what balance of hard sci-fi versus space opera elements they wish to include in their game.

Empyrean was co-authored by Jack Graham and Derek Swirsky between 2003 and 2009. The core Empyrean book will be released in two sections: a setting book detailing the game universe, and a separate rules book. The rules book uses the Eclipse Phase game mechanics published by Catalyst Gamelabs and developed by Rob Boyle and Brian Cross of Posthuman Studios. In accordance with the Eclipse Phase Creative Commons license, the Empyrean rules book will also be distributed under a CC license. Wherever possible, rules for Empyrean material will be made backwards-compatible with Eclipse Phase, allowing EP gamemasters to borrow from Empyrean.

Empyrean material will be released online starting in Autumn of 2009.

Eclipse Phase has officially gone to press. Although I’ve done minor writing and editing work in RPGs before, this will be the first time I’m credited as a writer. Although my word should not be taken as official, I imagine the core rules should be showing up in stores by August.

Go, little game!