Robin D. Laws's Blog, page 81
May 3, 2012
May 2, 2012
The Treasure of Far Thallai
The Wormwood Mutiny, part one of Pathfinder’s latest adventure path series, “Skull and Shackles,” has now dropped piratical anchor. With it comes the first installment of my new serialized novella, “The Treasure of Far Thallai.”
Challys Argent was once a cloistered scholar, pledged by family tradition to the pursuit of knowledge. But when her order’s seaside eyrie was razed and looted by pirates, her fellow pedants put to the sword, she swore to avenge her brethren and recover the precious artifacts the ravagers stole.
May 1, 2012
See P. XX
In my promotional flurry for The Birds: There Goes My Dream Job I have been remiss in directing you to the April edition of Pelgrane Press’ webzine, See P. XX.
My eponymous column previews The Gaean Reach design process, explaining how a game I thought was going to be Skulduggery with a dash of GUMSHOE asserted itself the other way around.
But that’s just for starters! Also included:
an inquiry into the love life of the doomed Augustus Darcy, from Book of the Smoke an introduction to the gorgeous artwork of new Pelgrane illustrator Phil Reeves tradecraft and character dossiers for Night’s Black Agents playtesting opportunities, including The Gaean Reach tantalizing first looks for the 13th Age, Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet’s upcoming love letter to dungeon-crawling fantasy adventure and as always, Simon’s update on what’s new and in the works at Pelgrane
April 30, 2012
Playtest Hillfolk With Me On Google Hangout
Do you have a webcam, a free evening this Thursday, and a hankering to try out Hillfolk, my upcoming game using the new DramaSystem rules set?
The playtest will take place on Google Hangout from 7-10 PM Eastern this Thursday, May 3rd.
To indicate your interest in taking part, leave me a private message on Google+, setting yourself up on G+ if you haven’t already.
In Hillfolk, you play tribal raiders at the dawn of the iron age, torn by conflicting desires in a time of hungry empires.
In your message, tell me who you want to play, providing:
your role in your small, hardscrabble tribe
your character’s name. Names in Hillfolk are metonyms—understandable words that reveal something fundamental about you. Examples: Skull, Thickneck, Farhawk, Rolls-the-Bones, Twig, Redaxe.
The rest will be revealed during play.
Feel free to list alternate choices for your role in the tribe, in case of duplication.
If I get more than six takers, I will choose between them by means inscrutable.
I’m going to try recording the proceedings, possibly using snippets of sound and video in the crowdfunding video. It might also wind up as an Actual Play resource. Respond only if that’s okay with you.
April 27, 2012
John Kovalic's The Birds: Vengeance
It’s The Birds Week!
To celebrate the release of the second volume of The Birds, There Goes My Dream Job, friend of the blog John Kovalic has pitched in with a week of guest strips—which also appear in the book.
Click here for the complete strip archive.
Stuck in mobile mode? Click here for image file.
The Birds: There Goes My Dream Job is now available from the Pelgrane Press store, and is winging its deadpan, gun-toting way to wherever you purchased The Birds Volume One.
April 26, 2012
John Kovalic's The Birds: Realistically
It’s The Birds Week!
To celebrate the release of the second volume of The Birds, There Goes My Dream Job, friend of the blog John Kovalic has pitched in with a week of guest strips—which also appear in the book.
Click here for the complete strip archive.
Stuck in mobile mode? Click here for image file.
The Birds: There Goes My Dream Job is now available from the Pelgrane Press store, and is winging its deadpan, gun-toting way to wherever you purchased The Birds Volume One.
April 25, 2012
John Kovalic's The Birds: Cuter
It’s The Birds Week!
To celebrate the release of the second volume of The Birds, There Goes My Dream Job, friend of the blog John Kovalic has pitched in with a week of guest strips—which also appear in the book.
Click here for the complete strip archive.
Stuck in mobile mode? Click here for image file.
The Birds: There Goes My Dream Job will be available within mere hours from the Pelgrane Press store, and is winging its deadpan, gun-toting way to wherever you purchased The Birds Volume One.
April 24, 2012
John Kovalic’s The Birds: Lively
It’s The Birds Week!
To celebrate the release of the second volume of The Birds, There Goes My Dream Job, friend of the blog John Kovalic has pitched in with a week of guest strips—which also appear in the book.
Click here for the complete strip archive.
Stuck in mobile mode? Click here for image file.
The Birds: There Goes My Dream Job will be available within mere hours from the Pelgrane Press store, and is winging its deadpan, gun-toting way to wherever you purchased The Birds Volume One.
April 23, 2012
Jonathan Tweet Forewords The Birds
I couldn’t be more pleased that the second anthology of Birds strips, There Goes My Dream Job, includes a foreword by seminal game designer, and my frequent collaborator over the years, Jonathan Tweet. Jonathan, who these days makes Google+ his social media HQ, wanted to post it to the world at large. So here it is.
If you’re reading this book, you’re one of the lucky people who have discovered Robin D. Laws. In The Birds, he distills his insights into the human predicament down to a hilarious comic strip. It’s all about sex, death, family, lies, and popular culture—doled out in carefully measured doses. It’s rewarding to be one of Robin’s fans, whether you’re playing his games, following him online, or reading his comics. He’s a game designer by trade, but his curiosity and expertise slosh out in all directions. Robin usually has something right (and possibly funny) to say about politics, culture, media, or literature. You can count yourself lucky for knowing Robin’s work, but I’m even luckier. I’ve been a fan of Robin’s work for over twenty years, and he’s contributed to several of my own game designs. My collection of roleplaying games includes many of his innovative and original works. In one of his early games, the supreme god of evil is a twisted version of everybody’s favorite Disney-owned stuffed bear. Robin never bothers to do things the way somebody else has already done it. In another game, one that only Robin could have written, players extemporaneously invent a story that tests their knowledge of cinema genre conventions. Some of his roleplaying games sit on the very small shelf where I keep only those few RPGs that I actually play for fun. In addition to his games, my collection includes his fiction, the Iron Man and Hulk comics he wrote, and the first collection of his comic strip: The Birds.
The Birds reminds me of another cartoon strip written by someone who isn’t a cartoonist, David Lynch’s The Angriest Dog in the World. In Angriest Dog, each strip had the same art and only the words changed. Given how unsatisfying Angriest Dog is, I consider it not so much a comic strip as a work of time-distributed visual art in the structural form of a comic strip. Like Lynch, Robin gives us repetitive, static scenes, but Robin’s strips have the distinct advantage of being funny. The Birds is not just a comic; it’s actually comic.
While the birds in Robin’s strip are often the same from one panel to the next, each character has two distinct expressions. A cartoonist would probably base the two expressions on emotions, such as “happy” and “sad,” or “happy” and “angry.” But Robin isn’t a cartoonist, he’s a Canadian. The two expressions he gives his birds are “gun” and “no-gun.” In practice, the “no gun” expression actually means something more like “no gun (just yet).” With all this gunplay, plus the lies and the spare staging, Robin’s strip reminds me of Quentin Tarantino’s debut film. Maybe it should be called Reservoir Birds.
Cartoonists take pains to show that their cartoon subjects are in motion. They use dynamic poses, motion lines, and spelled-out sound effects to get across the idea that, for example, a little boy and a stuffed tiger are on a runaway wagon careening down a steep hillside. But Robin is not a cartoonist, and that’s what makes his cartoons so outstanding. The poses of his characters suggest not motion but stasis. In the typical scene, each bird is standing still, probably with hands in pockets, possibly leveling a handgun at the other bird.
The instantaneous switch from the “gun” state to the “no-gun” state might be Robin’s way to avoid drawing motion lines. Based on my estimation of Robin, however, I suspect that it’s actually his homage to quantum physics, in which electrons jump from one state to the other with no intermediate step. Reading the latest installment of The Birds is like opening the box to see whether Schroedinger’s cat is alive or dead. “Who drew on whom this time?” we want to know. Like a radioactive isotope, the “no-gun” state inevitably “decays” to the “gun” state. Presumably, the “no-gun” state has a measurable half-life, telling us how many panels it takes, on average, for the gun to appear.
With all the motion happening either off-stage or between panels, the characters are static. These static images are reused from one strip to the next. At risk of overthinking a humorous enterprise, let me suggest that Robin’s subtle humor goes along so well with these motionless, repetitive images because his comic strip is about people being “stuck.” Figuratively, they’re stuck in bad marriages, stuck in bad affairs, stuck in bad friendships, stuck in a bad families—crazy people stuck in a world with other crazy people. The visuals reinforce this theme: the characters are stuck in place. The repetition of the same bird in the same pose pulling the same gun reminds us that these characters have been stuck where they are since the strip began. Application of this insight to the one’s own life is left as an exercise for the reader.
While Robin displays many varied sources of inspiration, in the last analysis, his strip demonstrates his debt to French existentialism. The moral of his comic strip is that, as Sartre succinctly put it, Hell is other birds.
The Birds: There Goes My Dream Job will be available within mere hours from the Pelgrane Press store, and is winging its deadpan, gun-toting way to wherever you purchased The Birds Volume One.
John Kovalic’s The Birds: Existential Genie
It’s The Birds Week!
To celebrate the release of the second volume of The Birds, There Goes My Dream Job, friend of the blog John Kovalic has pitched in with a week of guest strips—which also appear in the book.
Click here for the complete strip archive.
Stuck in mobile mode? Click here for image file.
The Birds: There Goes My Dream Job will be available within mere hours from the Pelgrane Press store, and is winging its deadpan, gun-toting way to wherever you purchased The Birds Volume One.
