Robin D. Laws's Blog, page 87
February 8, 2012
Latest Update of the Yellow Sign
For these past few months a mantle of quiet has settled on New Tales of the Yellow Sign, the collection of weird tales that will serve as my trial venture into ebook self-publishing. If the search terms section on my traffic stats is to believed, you, the Internet, have been anxiously looking for an update on this project for a while now. So here it is.
On Monday morning I found a delightful surprise in my inbox: the foreword to the book, written by master of mythos erudition Kenneth Hite. Entitled "I Pray God May Curse The Writer: Robert W. Chambers and Robin D. Laws" it is at once a lovely piece of writing, an incisive exploration of the stories and their horror pedigrees, and a source of great chuffedness around these parts. As Ken says:
All of these New Tales of the Yellow Sign orbit lost Carcosa, black star points poked through the white scrim of consensus reality by the force of Chambers' book. But each swings past on its own trajectory, a mix of styles and concerns in counterpoint to Chambers' unified "Gallic studio atmosphere" of the Yellow Decade. Each story launches itself in fugue from one (or more) of Chambers' originals, passages that Laws plays adagio or largo on different instruments, plays for modern dancers and not Victorian wallflowers.
With this chip off Ken's busy schedule gratefully in hand, I'm now ready to move forward. Next steps: a solid, professional proofreading, and finalizing the cover. Jerome Huguenin, the illustrator and graphic designer responsible for the distinct visual presentations of The Esoterrorists, Trail of Cthulhu, and Ashen Stars, has created a beautifully creepy modern take on the pallid mask image central to Robert Chambers' King in Yellow mythology. Now we're hashing out title treatment, with an eye to the punishingly small 88 x 135 size book images display on the Amazon website. It's much like designing a postage stamp. If you zip over to Amazon or any similar book site, you'll quickly note the covers that work in that format and those that resolve into a blur.
I look forward to sharing our process with you as we shoot for the former and shrink from the latter.
February 7, 2012
Ashen Stars Combat Options
The Jan/Feb See P. XX includes, among previously mentioned goodies, additional combat options for Ashen Stars. Start with this consideration of suppression fire as it applies to non-lethal beam weapons. Then move onto a collection of optional butt-kicking rules adapted to Ashen Stars from the Esoterror Fact Book. Add extra space opera flavor to them with a series of viroware enhancements.
Or start with the zine page for a cornucopia of columns, updates, announcements, and at least one cannibal conspiracy.
February 6, 2012
February 3, 2012
Five Keys To Punchier Prose
Although I'm not a line developer or editor for the GUMSHOE line, the Head Pelgrane occasionally asks me to comment on manuscripts in progress. Over time I've been able to see certain issues crop up in the work of multiple authors. This process has improved not only those books, but my own work. It's easier to see problematic material in someone else's draft than in your own. Manuscript review has also crystallized my thoughts on how GUMSHOE, and particularly its scenarios, might be refined and better presented.
Continue reading at See P. XX…
Or jump to the See P. XX Jan/Feb zine page for a cornucopia of columns, updates, announcements, and at least one cannibal conspiracy.
February 2, 2012
Hillfolk Now Open For Playtesting
After months of teasing here on the blog and in sundry precincts of the gamersphere, Pelgrane Press and I are now soliciting outside playtest reports for Hillfolk, the first DramaSystem game. Hillfolk features the saga of iron age raiders struggling to protect and enrich their clan at a time of clashing empires. DramaSystem fosters a dynamic between players and GM allowing them to collectively create a compelling, serial story of emotional need and personal conflict.
Its features:
Long term story play. DramaSystem arises from the story games school of roleplaying game design, which privileges the exploration of narrative over other design goals, such as strategic decision-making, tactical butt-kicking, or the simulation of imaginary environments. Story games typically focus on delivering a fun and challenging one-time story that wraps up in a single sitting. DramaSystem shines in long-term play, in which a group unfolds an improvised narrative over an extended period, during which they come to relate to the characters as they would to the protagonists of their favorite ongoing television drama.
Easier to GM: Unlike some justly acclaimed story games, DramaSystem retains the role of Game Moderator, a participant apart from the rest who guides action and pacing and provides necessary rules interpretations. In this it is more like a mainstream or traditional roleplaying game. However, its events are entirely created in the moment, sparing the GM the usual lengthy prep work required by those games.
Harder to GM: Where GMs in traditional games have nearly unlimited power to shape the narrative by determining the obstacles PCs face, DramaSystem doles out their interventions in measured quantities. That makes the effort of pushing the story in the direction you want more of a challenge, with game-like tactical elements. Working within the limitations becomes part of the fun. You can never predict the outcome of any episode, giving you a sense of surprise and suspense you don't get in games granting you near omnipotence.
Click the tag for previous Hillfolk / DramaSystem posts. Here's an early actual play report.
My main goal for this playtest is to learn how much of the game is already on the page, and how much additional guidance and exegesis the text requires.
To participate, please contact Beth Lewis at Pelgrane.
We'll be launching a crowd-funded campaign to fund the project next month.
February 1, 2012
Haywire
Those of you who like their formalist art films punctuated by bouts of vicious hand-to-hand combat are advised to hie themselves to Steven Soderbergh's Haywire. MMA fighter Gina Carano stars as a private contractor at the cross-section of crime and espionage who embarks on a mission of vengeance after her employer and ex-lover (Ewan McGregor) sets her up for a hit. Like many of Soderbergh's genre pieces, its classical narrative acts as a framework for giddy stylistic exploration.
The dusty, desaturated color palette and score by David Holmes recall a 70s that never was. A sonically muted firefight on the streets of Barcelona presents a fresh take on the gun battle. Like any action director of note, he goes wide for the fight sequences, allowing us to see the choreography. It draws on the MMA style in an opened-up way that isn't just grapples, balancing realism with bone-crunching impact.
For an obvious source of inspiration, see Jon Boorman's classic revenge drama Point Blank, with Lee Marvin. Soderbergh appears on the commentary track in conversation, raising it above the default back-patting to a master class in atmospheric crime drama.
Today, rather than trying to teach fighters how to act, we tend to see actors trained to fight. Roles that might once have gone to Steven Seagal now go to Liam Neeson. In that light Carano represents a bit of a throwback. She's not super-expressive as an actress, even after extensive post-production manipulation of her vocal track. But she does have presence, and unmistakable plausibility as a bad-ass, even in the non-combat sequences. In that she's a throwback to Bronson and van Damme.
See it for its own hyper-cool virtues, and for the atmospheric inspiration it might lend your Night's Black Agents series.
January 31, 2012
January 30, 2012
Reboot Lab
In an October Legends and Lore column that in retrospect veritably drips with hints, Monte Cook contemplates the legacy of the D&D property through its four editions worth of monsters. Should nostalgia for iterations past require updates of old beasties, or are certain creatures too lame to preserve?
Here one might take a page from the world of comics. The reboot that makes a previously lame character cool and creepy has already gone from an innovative move pioneered by the likes of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman to a decadent cliché attempted by just about everyone.
As we've yet to run this idea into the ground in gaming, it might be fun to reconfigure the silly monsters of yore into dread beings no party wants to meet in a dark dungeon corridor.
To dip into the 4E continuity while it's still current... when the mind flayer empire of Nihilath dominated the world, its rulers made a terrible example out of rebels. Their champions were borne to experimental laboratories, where illithid wizards created horrible new forms of life. They removed prisoner's brain tissue, using it as the basis for vat-grown guardian organisms. The resulting creatures can still be found, aeons later, floating through the Underdark. Appallingly, they retain fragments of their original identities. Their eternal torment manifests as a psychic aura that assaults the minds of any hapless explorers who come upon them. The vat survivors never truly die, but if defeated in combat fall over onto their jelly-like backs. During their torpor it is possible to gain flashes of insight into their ancient lives, which sometimes prove useful while exploring the ruins of Nihilath. Or sometimes drive the experiencer to madness. Folios of monstrous lore refer to these entities as soulscreamers, or by their name in the gnomish tongue—flumph.
January 27, 2012
The Forest Game
A Ripped From the Headlines Plot Premise For The Esoterrorists
When viral videos appear on the Internet documenting a mystery sound heard in farflung locations throughout the world, skeptics declare them obvious fakes. It doesn't take a sound engineer to tell that they're electronically generated, possibly from a sample of the Godzilla scream.
But the Ordo Veritatis knows that a hoax, no matter how transparent, can touch off supernatural events, if it opens vulnerable minds to the possibilities of the supernatural. As its governmental contacts take the videos down, the PC investigation team heads to the Alberta first nations reserve where some joker has been broadcasting weird noises in the forest. But as they attempt to triangulate his location, they realize that a portal to the dreaded Outer Dark has already opened—and they've just walked through it. In a borderland mixing qualities of Earth with that of the terrible beyond, hunted by predatory entities, they must find and neutralize the hoaxer's speaker setup—and hope they wind up on the right side of the gateway when it closes.
January 26, 2012
Style Notes for Anthropomorphic Prose
[Posted without context, but also, by popular request.]
Fable convention has it that we meet one member of each animal type, and his species name is treated as his given name:
Frog and Badger went down to the lake where they saw that Duck had polluted it with his motorboat.
Treat the species names of such characters as proper names, capitalized accordingly, without the indefinite article. References to groups of creatures would not be capitalized, and would use the definite article:
"I am happy to be a bald eagle," Bald Eagle said.
That is all.
