Robin D. Laws's Blog, page 110

Pre-Prandial Link Review: Mass Ashen, Podcast Chemistry, Art Erasure

Michael Wolf on using Ashen Stars to run the Mass Effect setting.

Team format podcasts live or die on the chemistry between their hosts. When they work, it's because the participants enjoy talking one another, and allow us to listen in on their ongoing exchange rather than addressing us directly. The new gaming podcast 2 GMs, 1 Mic has that chemistry and enthusiasm for the subject matter.

In local headlines, city graffiti abatement paints over city-funded mural. Screw-up, political suppression, or both?

See P. XX

As Pelgrane ramps up production, installments of See P. XX fall thick and fast. The latest edition features another double shot from your humble correspondent.

My eponymous column tackles the non-issue of point hoarding in GUMSHOE, while making a wider point about not letting your concerns about how a game works stop you from playing it and finding out how it really works.

Also, the Ashen Stars previews continue with the basic rundown on the seven peoples of the Bleed. Appended is a poll asking you which species you'd most like to play. I confess to a certain amount of vindication, in that the eerily beautiful balla, who got a lot of stick during playtest, are now ahead in the voting. Go skew the results now.

And while you're doing that, check out the cornucopia of other gaming delights:

Gunslingers & Gadgeteers by Clinton R. Nixon, detailing the classes in Owl Hoot Trail.
Name that Orc, a competition for Owl Hoot Trail with fantastic prizes.
Using Stealing Cthulhu in Trail Scenarios, by Graham Walmsley, all you need to know to make your Trail adventures truly terrifying.

As always, View From the Pelgrane's Nest comprises a running progress report on products in all stages in development. Included is an incremental spilling of the beans re: Hillfolk, the game I'm testing now, and the DramaSystem rules that underpin it.

Pre-Prandial Link Review: Coolstop, Musegripe, Slurliment

If we're judging on visual grounds, my favorite Toronto subway stop has to be Museum. This piece names it one of the world's fourteen coolest.

Painter and author Leonora Carrington, the last surviving member of the original surrealist movement, has passed away at the age of 94. Although this is a good obit overall, I hereby register my irk at the headline's reference to her as a "muse", a term no one would use for a male artist of her accomplishments.

Alex Bledsoe shares what it's like growing up in a place where "tender-hearted" is a slur.

The Birds

The updated archive is here!

Korad: Doniri Revealed, Pitching Threniri

So what did the poll tell us about Doniri?

In Doniri, rivers drive thousands of prayer wheels praising water spirits. Deafness is a blessing, and only the deaf may be priests. Jewelry has its own language, signalling status, gender preference, and politics. Highly skilled musicians playing excellent instruments can actually cast spells. It is taboo to lie in sign language, the mother "tongue" of Cataracts, where crashing waterfalls drown out the sound of speech.

Now it's time to pitch ideas for Doniri's southern neighbor, Threniri. Humans live here, but the symbiotic runes known as the Aesigil predominate. This is where we work out who the Aesigil are, what their culture and norms are, and to what extent Threniri can be referred to as a nation.

Its cities are:

Steamveil
This town is designed so that the light of the rising sun illuminates different sigils all year long. Its name derives from its underground hotsprings, spas and brothels. Steamveil provides the setting for a famous epic poem of a doomed warrior and his lost love.

The Wyrdward
Proximity to the supernatural beings of the southern peninsula defines this remote and haunted settlement. Its citizens keep its demons from breaking through, while also controlling access to its realm of fey folk. Haunted mountains mean that it can only be accessed by sea.

As always: keep your idea brief, so I can fit it into next week's poll—12 words or less. And that's an actual 12, folks, not a notional 12. One idea per commenter. Pitch standalone ideas rather than building on someone else's proposal. Get them in before early Monday evening (eastern time.)

The Worldwound Gambit Sample Chapter

Zip on over to the Paizo web fiction blog for a sample chapter from The Worldwound Gambit , my brand new Pathfinder Tales novel. Or grab it as a PDF download. Chapter Four, The Lockbreaker and the Distance Man, is from the assembling the team sequence crucial to any heist tale, fantasy or otherwise.

An added benefit of having a sample chapter up on the site is that the novel gets an extra illustration it wouldn't otherwise have. Artist J. P. Targete makes the mad flame wizard Hendregan even more bad-ass than I imagined him. He's the eponymous Distance Man of the chapter title, which in heister parlance means "guy who can throw fireballs."

Against Creative Paralysis (Advanced Edition)

Yesterday I dispensed, along with a good size chunk of salt, my advice for the aspirational creator dealing with fear of failure as a barrier to getting started.

Of course creative anxiety doesn't go away when your work finds an audience. Here are some thoughts on making self-doubt motivate you in a positive way, as an experienced or working creator.

The morsel of advice that most helped me on this point comes from director Atom Egoyan; I've quoted it here before: "Don't get depressed about not being where you want to be. This nagging feeling of anxiety is actually called ambition. Ambition is your friend." Likewise, the fear of failure can be your friend if you use it to spur you to create, and to improve what you create before you send it out into the world.

To this end, one must discipline oneself to keep the voice of self-doubt on a tight leash. Let it out of its cage when you need it to revise and improve the work. Then put it back again, especially during the first phases of creation. That voice has nothing to say about you as a person, even when the most recent thing you've created does not match your full ambitions.

Revise, but not to the point of flagellation. At some point, not stopping work becomes paralysis in disguise. It will never be perfect. Anna Karenina isn't perfect (although it is a masterpiece.) Flaws make a work human.

Avoid working on stuff you wouldn't enjoy yourself (or wouldn't have when you were its target age.) That's a sure way to lose your creative compass. If you're working on a piece aimed at an audience whose taste you don't share, you can't know when it's good.

Truly nasty creative paralysis usually proves to be a manifestation of some other personal crisis. This is a tough place to be, a mental state of self-administered punishment. The work becomes a black dog, a symbolic enemy and source of shame. A creator in this position could easily be making quite good stuff without being able to see it through a veil of depression or anxiety.

When enmeshed in a garden variety confidence deficit, showing it to a supportive and trusted collaborator will help you find the perspective you've temporarily lost. Stop fussing with it and borrow a pair of reliable fresh eyes. (Handing it to someone whose own creative despond leads them to dish out aggressive criticism constitutes further self-sabotage.) Everybody goes through this at one point or another. Whatever problems your unfinished piece exhibits are more likely readily-fixed technical issues that say nothing of your self-worth.

However, if creative paralysis starts to feel like real-deal, chronic depression, anxiety or the like, forget the Dr. Phils and the Dr. Robins and seek treatment, pronto. We need you, and we need your work.

Against Creative Paralysis (Starter Edition)

kalevtait asked me to talk about fear of creative failure and how to harness its dread powers for good. (I'm paraphrasing.)

This is a subject I'd be disinclined to tackle unbidden. It's too easy to talk about creative anxiety in a way that generates more of it in readers, which is the very hallmark of bad writing advice. I've never allowed myself the luxury of creative inaction, so my telling others to avoid it smacks of the lifelong abstainer telling you how to kick that crack habit. If I thought it possible to transform folks' attitudes for them by exhortation and homily, I'd be chasing me some of that sweet Dr. Phil money.

Grain of salt thus dispensed, my take is that the only guaranteed route to creative failure is failing to deliver. If you make nothing, you've failed for sure. If you make something and it's not so great, well, you've learned something about how to make the next thing. That's not failure, but a down payment on future success. Maybe you don't release everything you make, if you don't think the end result works. No one becomes good without taking creative action, or without making a great lot of stuff that is formative at best. That's true whether you're talking Rad Bradbury's ten thousand pages of lousy writing which you then throw away, or Malcolm Gladwell's ten thousand hours of effort to achieve mastery of a field.

Thinking you might want to create some day doesn't count. Only by getting your ass in the chair, or in front of the canvas, or onto the stage, can you possibly succeed.

To conceive of the next thing you do as the make or break, the item that will either establish your reputation or seal the lid on your obscurity, is to commit an act of self-sabotage. Creative people generate ideas. If this one doesn't gel, you'll go onto the next. You can't force a breakthrough. You can only keep yourself open, pursue the task with discipline and all the time it requires, and tackle revisions with taste and detachment.

If you're worried about criticism, pick a creator you deeply respect. Then go and find a comment page or forum thread where yahoos bray their ridiculous disdain for the object of your admiration. Trash talk is a constant, untethered from the quality of one's work. With the advent of the net it's always a mouse click away. Conceive of it as background noise. It's no more a telling judgment than when you step on gum while out for a walk.

There's only reason to let fear of failure stop you from getting started creating: you're more enchanted by the idea of yourself as a creator than you are with the act of creation itself. By never doing anything, you can savor the fantasy that you someday might. There's nothing wrong with harmless daydreams, so long as you don't let them turn on you and become a source of self-blame. But if you're a creator at heart, you make stuff for its own sake first of all. Everybody enjoys positive reinforcement but ultimately it's about the work, not the approval. And the disapproval of others will never be as withering as the voice in your own head telling you not to try. So tell that voice to go screw itself, stop thinking about making something, and make something.

More tomorrow...

Pre-Prandial Link Review: Flat Pirates Preferred, HQ Horror

North American audiences who saw the latest Pirates of the Caribbean installment over the weekend split for 2D over 3D. Dare we hope that is is a leading indicator of the trend's demise?

Moon Design announces a HeroQuest horror book from Ben Monroe and Bruce Baugh.

The Birds

The updated archive is here!