Robin D. Laws's Blog, page 116

Korad: Defining Barle

This week's poll adds definition to the province of Barle, the empire's first conquest and the other half of its fertile breadbasket region. The top half or results in this check box poll become the area's defining truths. Poll closes Monday evening, Eastern time.

View Poll: Defining Barle

This Survey of Myself Has a Margin of Error

Polls show that the American public approves of the current western military intervention in Libya by only a 50% margin. I can relate. Only 50% of me thinks it's the right choice.

The case for or against the action is to an unusual degree entirely prudential. On a moral or emotional level, it's hard to root for any outcome other than the ouster of the Gadaffi family. Even alien reptoids would be preferable to those guys. So the question then turns on whether the campaign will achieve its ends, and at how great a cost in lives and resources. That's beyond expert agreement, much less the discernment of the casual observer.

Accordingly, I am prepared to issue the following statement:

I will have approved of the present military campaign all along, once it becomes clear that it has worked essentially as planned.

Whew, that's my bases covered.

This action earns the distinction of managing to split both American political parties. Establishment Democrats are mostly for it. Anti-war progressives are against it. The Republican side divides between neocon and pro-military tendencies on one hand, with the anti-Obama partisans shoring up the usually thin crowd of isolationists on the other. Showing impressive flexibility, some pols have courageously and simultaneously embraced both points of view.

It's in tough calls like this that personalities of officials tip the final balance. A double Clinton lobbying effort made this happen. Bill Clinton wishes he'd acted in Rwanda. He regularly frames his Kosovo intervention as the result of that lesson. It informed this process too.

A key selling point of Obama as the anti-Bush was his fondness for Lincoln and his proverbial cabinet of rivals. Drawing a contrast with his predecessor, he portrayed himself as someone who would surround himself with strong, independent advisers. He would make up his mind only after letting them go at it.

Where the course is unclear, the most passionate advocate generally wins. Here that was Hillary Clinton.

In the end, then, these airstrikes can be chalked up as Abe Lincoln's response to Rwanda.

Here's hoping that the ambivalence concludes with justice and a minimal loss of life.

Jumps and Causal Transitions

One way to tell a dramatic narrative from a procedural is to look at how its scenes are strung together.

In a procedural story, in which characters primarily pursue a tangible, external goal, connections between scenes are mostly causal. A plot event in Scene A leads the characters on to Scene B. A development in B takes them to C, and so on.

A: The characters meet a guy in a bar who gives them a job
B: They go to the job only to be jumped by thugs
C: They chase the thugs into a factory
D: They enter the factory and fight the thugs

Dramatic stories, in which characters pursue inner, emotional goals, sometimes present one scene as the obvious outgrowth of the previous one:

A: Aaron learns from Biff that Carla has been unfaithful
B: Aaron confronts Carla over her infidelity
C: Carla confronts Biff over his big mouth

They are however less tied to this model than the procedural. Scenes can stand as independent units, connected by the personalities of the characters and the theme of the story.

A: Aaron learns from Biff that Carla has been unfaithful
B: Aaron suffers a humiliation at the hands of his boss, Darla
C: Carla tries to break it off with her lover, Ernest

We might think of this latter type of transitions as a jump, as B does not flow directly out of A, or C from B. They could be rearranged and still make sense.

This is not to say that cause and effect does not enter into dramatic narrative at all. Just that its scene ordering is not necessarily determined by it. Eventually a scene will flow out of Biff's revelation about Carla. It just might not happen right away. It might be scene D, E, or F. In an extended serial TV drama, it might not happen till the next episode. Each installment will likely mix jumps with causal transitions.

Roleplaying games, with their emphasis on procedural plot lines and linear narrative, tend naturally toward the causal transition. A railroaded scenario might allow only one set of predetermined causal links between scenes. A more open-ended game finds the causal links as it goes along.

I'm currently working on a design that will encourage players (and the GM) to instigate jumps as well as causal transitions.

The Birds

The updated archive is here!

What is a Revivification Folio?

In Jack Vance's stories of the Dying Earth, the sun, and thus life itself, is universally thought to be mere moments from a sad, smoldering demise. Yet inexplicably it continues to shine, allowing the world's hyper-verbal denizens to go on swindling and pettifogging one another.

Likewise, the Dying Earth Roleplaying Game lowly smolders but refuses to burn out. A license-ending sell-off sold so many games that Pelgrane Press' simonjrogers elected to revive the line. Just the other week , DERPG reared its head into the RGPNOW top ten.

To assist it in its heroic refusal to lay down its elaborately-hatted head, I'm now in outside playtest on The Dying Earth Revival Folio. Unlike an innkeeper of the Dying Earth, Pelgrane is not out to swindle you. So this book is not a replacement for the DERPG core book you may have recently ponied up a ten-spot for. Nay, it is an invaluable adjunct, giving you what you need to play the game in the streamlined new Skulduggery way.

We are sometimes told that DERPG is a buyer's favorite game he can't get his players to try. The Revivification Folio solves that problem for you by adopting the super-fast, card-based character generation system first presented in Skulduggery. Players can jump right in without undergoing the more traditionally detailed character creation process mooted in the original book. Within minutes they are decisively ensnared.

The quick and deadly combat system is now quicker and just as unforgiving.

Magic is simplified so that the spells you wield appear on cards. In true Vancian fashion, you play the card and have used up the spell. Enchanted items can be used multiple times but are likewise presented in easy-to-use card format.

The book comes with cards to generate your first six PCs, and with notes on replacing them when they succumb to the cruelties of a decadent world.

Also included are your first three scenarios: one in which our picaresque heroes find themselves unwillingly indentured to a hotelier-slash-arch-magician, another in which they serve as guardians to a tomb-raiding expedition, and another in which they finally secure sinecures as officials in a bucolic rural village. Nothing could possibly go wrong!

Release date TBA.

Bookhounds For Bookhounds

Bookhounds of London, the supplement Kenneth Hite was born to write for the game Kenneth Hite was born to write, takes as its locus of horror the greasy, all-consuming need to possess rare books. What could be more fitting, then, to produce an edition that itself will become the rarest of printed RPG treasures? Head over to Pelgrane Press for the exquisite mock-leather low-down on the bilbiomane's ultimate lust object.

Korad: Barle, the Other Breadbasket

We've spent a good chunk of time working out the pre-collapse culture of the imperial Koradi. Now it's time to more expeditiously detail the various peoples and cultures they've enfolded in their knowledge-loving, ornament-disdaining matrician bosoms.

First off is Barle, the province to the north of Korad. It's not only their neighbor, but occupies the other half of the empire's productive breadbasket region. Their contact with the Koradi are likely longstanding. Were they longtime allies and close cultural cognates, easily absorbed into the imperial structure. (Austria to their Germany?) Perhaps they've spent much of their history as natural rivals, as per England and France.

I'm stipulating that they have their own language, as much as the ruling class must now also speak Koradi, and some at least latent sense of mutual identity.

We do know that their cities, located primarily on the coast, have in general seen better days. Lush, once-prosperous Winecoast recovers from a catastrophic fire and is harried by bears. Stiltport is flood-prone and run by a litigious mayor. Oldtown, in the interior, is the land's oldest city, now mostly a ruin. (Does this suggest that civilization started here and has been co-opted by the more muscular Koradi, as per ancient Greece and Rome?) The Barleans can still brag of Silver Oar's wealth; this port controls the barge traffic ferrying wheat to the populous southeast.

In the comments below, tell me something important about Barlean history, or its customs, values, and present-day situation. Keep your idea brief, so I can fit it into next week's poll—let's say 12 words or less. One idea per commenter. Get them in before early Monday evening (eastern time.) Then we'll vote, and the most popular ideas will go into the Barle entry in the Korad setting bible.

B. J. and the Bear Were More Into Nabokov

Kobobooks, the ebook arm of the Chapters/Indigo book chain, makes its products available through a reader device and a variety of apps, including one for the iPhone/iPad. They recently updated it to include new features. They're running a wee lag in the reader app functionality race. Surely, for example, they're working on a version that immediately loads the page you were reading when you last switched apps, rather than giving you a wait spiral. However, the new feature they got to before that is social networking. If you define "social networking" as "getting a bunch of weird pre-generated messages, just like you do on Facebook."

So now when you highlight a passage for the first time since updating the app, you get a notification informing you that you've received a game-style achievement. Like a lot of game achievements, its practical purpose cloaks itself in mystery.

Of the messages, I got while reading Natsuo Kirino's Highsmithian character study Grotesque, however, the champion had to be a message purportedly from KITT, of Knight Rider fame. Apparently I'd opened the app after midnight, because the talking car was pleased to hear that I was a Night Reader. Get it? Knight Rider: Night Reader!

This is a funny problem, not a problem problem. But it's one of those times you can't help mentally recreating the pitch meeting. I am picturing in particular the exquisite interplay of chagrin and smirk on the expression of the one Internet-savvy participant at meeting, as the idea is excitedly approved over her carefully phrased misgivings.

Here's my pitch: they should get Presto the Magician from the old D&D cartoon to grant an achievement the first time you turn on the scrolling function.

The Birds

The updated archive is here!

Ripped From the Headlines: Fungal Zombies

News of an Esoterror bioscience expedition sends the investigators on a jaunt to the Brazilian rain forest, where they encounter the usual horrors of nature at its most fecund and ferocious.

[Cue Werner Herzog]:



After a red-herring encounter with corporate forces intent on leveling the rainforest for beef production, they catch up with their quarry and find them studying fungal infections that turn ants into zombies. They discover a fungal formulation, manipulated by an Outer Dark Entity able to change organisms on the DNA, that will launch a human zombie plague. It can't induce a global extinction event, but it can certainly spawn enough panic to thin the membrane between realities worldwide.