Dan Wells's Blog, page 14

The PARTIALS Launch is Tomorrow!

I am so excited, you guys. So excited. It feels like I've been waiting forever to share this book with all of you, and now I finally can. PARTIALS is a big book for me in a lot of ways–my first SF, my first real YA, my largest book, my biggest launch, and so on and so on–plus it's just a plain old good story. I had a ton of fun writing it, and I hope you have fun reading it. I hope it makes you happy, I hope it makes you angry, I hope it makes you think, and I hope it makes you talk about all the things that made you happy and angry and thoughtful and sad and excited and every other reaction. If you want to talk to me personally, or even just get signature, here are all the events I have scheduled.

Note: last year I started going out to dinner after each signing, extending an open invitation to anyone who wanted to come along; this proved to be a big hit, and I met a lot of great people, so I'm continuing the tradition with PARTIALS. The rules are simple: suggest your favorite local place, no big chains allowed, and everybody pays for themselves (me included–I'm not in this to schmooze for free food). We'll hang out and talk about reading and writing and whatever else you want to talk about, and it's awesome.

February 28: Book Launch at Weller's Book Works in Salt Lake City, UT

7:00pm

Weller's Book Works is the new location for Sam Weller's, now in Trolley Square. There's great parking, a wonderful new store, and the same awesome people that make it one of my favorite bookstores. The signing starts at 7, and whenever we finish up (probably around 8 or 8:30) I'm going to head down the hall to Rodizio's Grill for a "stuff yourself with food" party; this is the only signing at which I've already picked the restaurant, because it's awesome and it's right there.

February 29: Barnes & Noble in Orem, UT

6:00pm

This is my local store, just a few miles from my house; I even write there sometimes. I've had some of my biggest signings there, and the staff is always great. This is likely to end around 8, followed by dinner…somewhere. I'm open to suggestions.

March 9: Books & Books in Coral Gables, FL

6:30 PM

I have never been to this store, and in fact have never been to Florida. This event is the first stop of the March DARK DAYS tour, a really cool book tour with fellow dark YA authors Lauren Oliver and Claudia Gray. Their work is really great, so come and pick up some books. I'm complete stranger in Florida, like I said, so I'll be relying on some really solid restaurant recommendations from you guys. I can't guarantee that Lauren and Claudia will join us, but I will do my best to cajole them.

March 10: Barnes & Noble in Alpharetta, GA

2:00pm

I love Alpharetta; Georgia is consistently one of the most beautiful places I visit on tour, and I'm excited to be going back. This is the second stop of the DARK DAYS tour, so Lauren and Claudia will be here as well. Mid-afternoon is an odd time to go out to eat, but screw convention–I'm doing it anyway. At some point in the evening I'll be stopping off to sign shelf stock at Peerless Books, and (if I can make it) Eagle Eye Books in Decatur.

March 11: Vroman's in Pasadena, CA

4:00pm

Vroman's is one of the biggest indie bookstores I've ever seen, and has a great staff that's always reading and recommending new stuff. This is the last stop of the DARK DAYS tour, so again, Lauren and Claudia and I will all be there together, and it will be rad. It's also relatively near one of my favorite barbecue places, so we might be going there after, but as always I am open to suggestions. Later that evening I'll be signing shelf stock at Dark Delicacies in Burbank.

March 16-18: LunaCon in Rye Brook, NY

Times TBA

I'm spending this weekend in NY to meet my editor and do some research for the PARTIALS sequel, and since that's the same weekend as LunaCon I'm going to stop by whenever I can to hang out with their artist Guest of Honor, Dr. Howard Tayler. I don't yet know when and where you'll be able to catch me, but I'll post it on my calendar here (left sidebar) as soon as I do.

March 23: Signing in Ogden, UT

Times TBA

We're still locking down the details on this one, and we'll update this post and the calendar when we know more.

March 24: SLC Nerd in Salt Lake City, UT

From 2:00pm 'til the party stops

SLC Nerd is kind of like an SF convention with all the convention stuff stripped away; it's a party full of gaming and geekery and local bands. This is the first year, and I think it's going to be a lot of fun. I don't have a reading or a signing or anything, but I will be there playing a public exhibition session of my L5R RPG campaign, featuring local luminaries Larry Correia, Paul Genesse, the guys from Elitist Book Reviews, and more. Come say hello, and maybe get roped in as a minor character.

March 29-April 1: World Horror Convention in Salt Lake City, UT

Times TBA

The World Horror Convention is back in Utah again, and I'm especially excited this year because Mike Mignola will be there. Two years ago I kind of shy-stalked him at DragonCon, meaning I followed him around and went to his panels and was too shy to say anything. I talked to his editor, though, so that's something. Anyway, come to the con see him, and then maybe say hi to me while waiting in line or something. I'll have at least a signing, probably a reading, and a couple of panels as well.

April 6: Signing in Logan, UT

Times TBA

We're still locking down the details on this one, and we'll update this post and the calendar when we know more.

April 18: Books and Co. in Dayton, OH

7:00pm

I have another DARK DAYS tour in April! This time around I'll be touring with Kimberly Derting and Jill Hathaway, who are both awesome writers. I've been through Dayton once before, but don't really know anything about it, so I look forward to meeting you and hanging out at some awesome local place.

April 19: Anderson's Bookshop in Naperville, IL

7:00pm

The second stop of the DARK DAYS tour with Kimberly and Jill. Again, I'm a total stranger in Illinois, so I'm excited to get to know everyone. As always, food will be eaten afterward.

April 20: Barnes & Noble in Burlington, MA

7:00pm

The final stop of the April DARK DAYS tour with Kimberly and Jill. I've never been to Massachusetts, though I've always wanted to visit. If you're in the area, please come say hi, pick up a book, and hang out.

That's the full schedule for now. You'll note that some of my traditional tour stops (the Northwest and most of California) are not on this list, but never fear: when THE HOLLOW CITY comes out in July I'll be hitting all of these places, culminating in a couple of events at San Diego Comic-Con. That tour will also see a return to Alpharetta, Houston, and anywhere else I can reasonably make it. If your area isn't on any of these lists, by all means tell me which city and bookstore you'd like me to visit, and I'll do my best.

PARTIALS Launch: Dan Wells, in Musical Form

We are now less than two weeks away from the launch of PARTIALS! I'm having two big signings to kick everything off:

February 28, 6pm

Sam Weller's in SLC

February 29, 6pm

Barnes & Noble in Orem

The characters in PARTIALS live in the ruins of the world you and I leave behind, eleven years after a devastating plague wipes out 99.9% of the human race. They scavenge through the old, empty stores and houses to find things they need, like clothes and canned food, and one of the characters, a girl named Xochi, collects music players—iPods, Zunes, and so on. This is one of my favorite little quirks of the novel, because a music player is so much more than a song or an album: it's a record of who you are, reflected through your music. It's a little piece of your personality that survives the plague and reaches out to future generations.

So this got me thinking: if somebody found my music player in the wreckage of the old world, what would it say about me? I'd love to just plop my entire iPod up here for you to listen to, but it's several gigs and way too big. What I can do, though, is create a little mini musical portrait of myself—a representative playlist to show you who I am and what I'm about. I've painfully narrowed it down to 15 songs, and here they are.

Everlong, by the Foo Fighters

We might a well start at the top: "Everlong" is my very favorite song. I've included both the standard version and the acoustic; the acoustic video includes clips of an anime called FLCL, and I watched it every day while writing I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER.

The video

The acoustic version, with FLCL

Tu, by Shakira

Before she came to the US and got all big and flashy, Shakira was a simple Columbian singer writing beautiful, personal, confessional songs about life and love. I discovered her back when I lived in Mexico, and over the years her second album, "Donde Estan Los Ladrones?" has become my favorite album of my collection. "Tu" is sweet and sad, a love song with an almost Country-like sound. I love it.

The video

A Day in the Life, by The Beatles

Now you know my favorite song and my favorite album, so how about my favorite group? It's The Beatles, hands down, and this is one of their best songs—though not, I admit, their most accessible song. "A Day in the Life" is about living in a world that's too fast, and too disconnected, and too artificial. I respond to it very strongly.

The song predates music videos, but here's the music

Common Reactor, by Silversun Pickups

My other favorite group (hey, I'm allowed to have two) is the Silversun Pickups, and holy crap was it hard to pick just one of their songs to put on this list. I eventually went with "Common Reactor" because it's the most-played song in my iPod, and it's a great choice. Nobody does a delayed resolution like these guys.

They never made a video, but here's the music

Gimme Shelter, by The Rolling Stones

I write apocalyptic, dystopian fiction, so there's got to be at least one raging protest song on here, right? My pick goes right back to the source, the seething anthem of social unrest: "Gimme Shelter" by the Rolling Stones. Bonus PARTIALS connection: the woman singing backup sang so hard she miscarried the next day.

There's plenty of live versions on youtube, but the studio version has the best sound quality

Over the Confluence of Giants, by DJ Earworm

I'm a huge fan of musical mashups—taking two or more songs and splicing them together to make a new one. A lot of mashups are just "the music from one song and the words from another," and I love those too, but "Over the Confluence of Giants" is the song that convinced me the art form could go so much further. DJ Earworm took five or six different songs and created something entirely new and amazing.

There's no iTunes link because it's free. Here's a direct link to the file on DJ Earworm's website

Sabotage, by the Beastie Boys

I'm kind of a metalhead, and this is my pick to represent that vast portion of my music collection. Whenever I needed to write a big action scene for PARTIALS (and there are several), I always listened to "Sabotage" to get me in the mood.

One of the best music videos ever made

At Seventeen, by Janis Ian

One of the things I love about art is the ability to make your audience feel two different emotions at once: love and fear, or joy and sadness. The dissonance in those contradictions is a powerful experience. "At Seventeen" is a gorgeous 70s pop song about a girl who thinks she's ugly and nobody likes her. It's beautiful and heart-wrenching, and that combination is one of my favorite things in the world.

No video, but here's the music

Me and Bobby McGee, by Janis Joplin

While we're in the 70s, let's listen to the opposite end of the spectrum, a woman so raw and powerful she helped define an entire era. When I set out to write Kira Walker, the main character of PARTIALS, I used a lot of Janis Joplin for inspiration: the strength, the refusal to compromise, and just a touch of the apocalyptic abandon in the chorus of "Me and Bobby McGee": "Freedom's just another word for 'nothing left to lose.'"

None of the youtube versions have very good sound quality, but this is the best

The Finale of Swan Lake. Piotr Ilych Tchaikovsky

I love classical music, and more specifically the Romantic era with it's intense, emotional waves of sound. Swan Lake is, yes, a ballet about swans, which makes it sound like the non-manliest thing ever created, but listen to the finale. There's a beauty and a power in here that moves me every time.

A clip from the American Ballet Theater

You Can Call Me Al, by Paul Simon

Being a writer, I like to pay special attention to the lyrics of a song—good music is good music, but if it also has amazing words I will love it forever. Paul Simon is one of the best songwriters in the business, and Graceland is one of my favorite albums: simple yet experimental, light yet clever, and lyrically brilliant. "You Can Call Me Al" never fails to make me smile.

The official music video was improvised with Chevy Chase on the set of SNL

Seria Feliz (Nortec Remix), by Julietta Venegas and Bostich

This is the weirdest song on my list, and not coincidentally the one that probably represents me the most directly. It's techno, but it samples mariachi instead of traditional electronica; it's a mashup; it's in Spanish. I believe that art can come from anywhere, regardless of genre or convention or medium, and "Seria Feliz," remixed by Bostich, demonstrates that more clearly than anything in my collection.

Make sure you're ready for a face full of awesome

Houston, by Visqueen

This song is here to represent two giant chunks of my iPod: the chick rock section and the kind of hipstery "you've probably never heard of them" indie rock section. Visqueen's biggest song was "Blue," and that's the one that got me to check them out, but "Houston" is my favorite. Why? Because sometimes you don't need a reason to love something.

No video, just music

Helena, by My Chemical Romance

Another representative selection, this time showcasing my goth rock tendencies. My Chemical Romance does incredible videos, especially for "Helena" and "I'm Not OK." "Helena" in particular is not only goth but a screaming mix of punk and emo. So many people hate goth, and emo even more so, but you know what? Be who you are.

If I ever go goth, this video will be why

And why not, here's "I'm Not OK," because linking to stuff is easy

Fake Plastic Trees, by Radiohead

And Radiohead brings us home, returning to the sentiments of The Beatles "A Day in the Life": we live in a world that's artificial and disconnected, where we try so hard to fit in, to look different, to be something we're not, that we lose ourselves completely. Do you say things because they're true, or because other people expect to hear them? Are you real, or are you a fake plastic version of yourself? "Fake Plastic Trees" is epic and tragic and a perfect cap to my playlist.

The official video

So there you go: If you found those songs in the rubble of some lost, forgotten house, I think you'd get a pretty good idea of who I am, and what I value, and what makes me tick. How about you? What does your music say about who you are? Which songs will reflect your personality to the rest of the world?

Why I Like What I Like, Part 2

As I promised in Part 1, I'm back to talk about two of my favorite TV shows, not just currently but of all time: Breaking Bad and Parks and Recreation. These shows seem on the surface like they couldn't possibly be more different from each other, and indeed there are some significant differences, but the reasons I like both shows are almost identical. They both have incredible, well-written characters that I absolutely love.

Loving the characters of Parks and Recreation is easy, because they are all good people. Every single one of them, with the arguable exceptions of Ron's ex-wives, are good, nice, loving people who go out of their way to help each other. I hadn't realized how rare that was in a TV show until this one made me look back and try to remember another one like it. When the show debuted I assumed it was an Office clone, and in some ways it was; it has the same documentary shtick, it has the same veneer of workplace humor, and so on. Since I never liked The Office I didn't bother with Parks and Rec, but when I finally gave it another shot I saw that the two shows have very different feels. The humor in The Office is about how none of them get along, and they fight all the time, and hey look at how uncomfortable we made THIS situation. The humor in Parks and Rec is about the ridiculous lengths people will go to to do what they think is right, which slides it into farce territory: the tragic pursuit of a humorous goal.

(Sidenote: Are you familiar with that classification system? A drama is the serious pursuit of a serious goal, a comedy is the humorous pursuit of a humorous goal; a tragedy is the tragic pursuit of a serious goal, and a farce is the tragic pursuit of a humorous goal. I honestly don't know if that system provides any meaningful benefit, but I learned it in high school and I've always remembered it.)

The government angle of Parks and Rec is a big part of what makes it work: it contributes to the farcical nature, and it gives the characters something to fight against without requiring a specific villain. Perhaps more than that, though–and this goes back to the whole Care Bear "I love shows about nice people" thing I was talking about before–it is endlessly delightful and sometimes even inspiring to watch the main character, Leslie Knope, never give up hope in the American government. Our country is seriously messed up right now, and I've already wasted too much of your time whining about all the things I see going wrong with it, and yet Leslie always sees a bright side. Even while the show makes fun of bureaucracy and town meetings and everything else, it does it with a loving smile. Leslie believes in something, she works for it tirelessly, and the people around her recognize that and do what they can to support her. As the formula for a snarky modern sitcom this seems too antiquated to even exist, let alone work, and yet it does. That's practically a miracle.

Which is not to say that all the characters are bubbly and happy like Leslie. One of the best characters on the show is April, who begins as a jaded teenager and slowly grows into a jaded adult; she aggressively refuses to care about anything, because that's the personality she's chosen for herself (you've probably met plenty of teenagers just like her), and yet inside you can tell that she does care, very much, about a lot of things. As the seasons progress she falls in love, and her pursuit of that man is one of the sweetest, most wonderful things I have ever seen on TV–not because it's sweet, but because it earns its sweetness. The show spends so much time driving home the points that "April doesn't care about anything," and "April doesn't smile," so that when you finally see her care about something, or on those rare occasions when she actually smiles, it means something. You haven't just witnessed a character on a sitcom do something nice for someone else, you've witnessed a foundational shift in the way a character interacts with the world. Which is a long and winding way for me to get back to the reason I love this show: the characters are so well-drawn, so real and human and flawed and lovable, that you feel like you know them. Perhaps more importantly, you feel like you want to know them.

The characters in Breaking Bad, on the other hand, are not characters you'd ever like to hang out with or even meet–but they're still incredibly "good" characters that I am endlessly drawn to. I am using the word "good" here to mean "well-written," because no one in the show is really "good." They are, on the other hand, incredibly sympathetic. you never agree with any of Walt's decisions, but you can understand why he makes every single one of them.

The stated purpose of Breaking Bad is to show a protagonist become an antagonist. It's about a chemistry teacher in the throes of a midlife crisis (lame job, second lamer job, unexpected baby, and of course cancer) who starts making meth. He starts mostly on a whim, then continues because he wants the money, and by season three is doing it because it gives him a power and control over his life that he's never felt any other way. Step by step, choice by choice, you watch Walt make a series of decisions and actions that feel entirely justified in context, yet are completely unconscionable when you step back to see the whole picture. My friend Steve calls it "the ultimate supervillain origin story," and that's not far off. In simpler terms it is classic tragedy, the fall of a good man trying to keep up with the consequences of his actions, as compelling as Oedipus or King Lear and every bit as brilliant. The fact that you don't like the main character is beside the point–you don't like Othello either, as a person, and you're not supposed to. Tragedy is about knowing someone's going to fall, watching it happen, and feeling the catharsis on the other side.

In contrast to some of these other shows I've been talking about, Breaking Bad is deeply serialized. It's a show about change, and that kind of show can't survive with a stable status quo. People come and go, people live and die, people keep and tell secrets, and every single one of those events has consequences the characters will have to deal with. One of the most devastating things that happens to Walt comes at the end of the very first episode, when his reckless experiment cooking meth DOESN'T end in a shoot-out with the cops. He gets away with it, but he was kind of hoping to go out with a bang–"suicide by police." He thought he could do something stupid, die, and not have to worry about it anymore, but that's not the way life works. Tomorrow the sun comes up, and you're still here, and you have to live with everything you did yesterday.

Plot and character aside, I would watch Breaking Bad just for the writing. One of my favorite episodes involves an old man in a wheelchair who can barely move, but he can ding a little bell, and the writers wring Hitchcock levels of tension out of that sound effect. Another great scene had two heroin junkies desperately happy about a windfall of money, babbling on and on about all they things they were going to do and how they were going to flush their heroin down the toilet and never touch it again; the word choice and the pace of the dialogue make it obvious that they really, really, want to do this, but at the same time it's painfully obvious that they won't. And when the character of Saul shows up, the Platonic ideal of a greasy lawyer, holy crap: every word out of that man's mouth is pure gold. Even the visual structure of the show, a huge part of writing for screen, is brilliant. One scene cuts from a man laying out clothes for his daughter's funeral, a blue blouse on a pink bed, straight to another man's newborn baby girl in exactly the same pose and background. The writers care about this show, and they pay attention to everything from the tiny details to the apocalyptic climaxes. I do not exaggerate (nor am I alone) when I call it one of the best TV shows of all time.

Because I'm on the subject, I'll close with a quick list of my "favorite TV shows ever." Presented in no particular order:

Breaking Bad

Arrested Development

Dead Like Me

Cowboy Bebop

I didn't plan for those to be the first four letters of the alphabet, that's funny. Sorry I can't think of a fifth–there's a lot of shows I love, but nothing I really feel like putting in this company.

PARTIALS Launch: An Intro and a U2 concert

It's finally February! I've been waiting for February 2012 for a long time because, you see, I have a book launch on the 28th. And not just any book launch, but a brand new series in a brand new genre. After a string of supernatural thrillers (and one goofball comedy available only in audio), this month will see the release of PARTIALS, my new YA, SF, post-apocalypse novel, the first in a trilogy. It's the biggest, most ambitious, most complex book I've ever written, and I'm super excited for everyone to read it. It's going to be awesome.

I've already talked a bit about the book, and as the months progresses you're going to see a lot more, both from me and from various other reviewers and bloggers and so on. Right now I want to talk about something else–not the book itself but an experience I had while writing the book that changed the way I thought about it. This experience happened at a U2 concert.

I have never been a huge U2 fan, a fact that has been shocking to many of my friends and most of my girlfriends. My wife, in particular, was astonished to learn that I didn't really care for her favorite band of all time–I didn't dislike them, I just didn't really get into them. Fortunately for all involved, she married me anyway, and then last year as a present to her I bought two tickets to the U2 360 Tour; a friend of mine had extras to sell, and I knew my wife would go nuts, so why not? The 360 Tour is massive, record, breaking in all sorts of categories, and when we got there (a bit too early) we got to see exactly how record-breaking it was: an enormous stage with a gargantuan screen, more speakers than I ever knew existed, and so on. In a nice nod to the people who come early, the screen was covered with scrolling statistics, most of them based on various issues of world hunger and violence and so on: how many people have died from smoking so far this year, and so on. U2 is very politically active, and I used to work for a charitable foundation, so this kind of stuff interests me as well, and it sitting there watching it got me into a reflective state of mind.

Sprinkled in among the socially conscious statistics were random bits of trivia, many of them related to the concert itself: how many stops are on it, how many people work behind the scenes, and so on. Being in the middle of writing PARTIALS, two of these stats stood out to me. The first was voltage: how much electricity it took to power a single show on the tour. The number, of course, was immense, and I realized that it was more voltage in a single evening than the characters in my book are likely to see in a year. It's a post-apocalypse story, and aside from a couple of solar generators the characters simply don't have access to electricity at all. This really struck me, probably because of all the "save the world" statistics I'd been watching–the stark contrast between the book's desperation and our society's decadence. My (admittedly fictional) characters were struggling just to power their hospital, and yet today we have so much electricity we can "waste" it on something completely frivolous, like a rock concert.

The second statistic that struck me hit a lot harder: the numbers of people in the stadium. This was Rice-Eccles stadium in Salt Lake City, the same huge stadium that hosted the 2002 Olympic ceremonies, and it was completely sold out. I don't remember the exact number, but it was right around 46,000 people, and I thought "there are more people in this stadium right now than the entire human population of Earth in PARTIALS." The apocalypse that strikes our world in PARTIALS is a plague that wipes us right off the map, killing some 99.999% of the people on Earth. The North American survivors gather together in one place, count themselves, and find just 40,000 left alive; they're unable to contact anyone else, even before the satellite network goes down, and as far as they know they're the only people left on the entire planet. That kind of blew my mind, not just the visual depiction of "this is what 46,000 people looks like," but the fact that it was a rock concert specifically–that after the plague, there's not even enough human beings left to get together and throw a party in a stadium.

Yes, it's kind of weird that I was struck so powerfully by the imaginary plight of some fake people I made up for a story, but such is the mind of a reader. You know how it is. It really hit home to me how dire I had made the situation for the characters in my book, and I left with a resolution to depict that hopelessness, and the determination to survive in spite of it, much more directly than I had been. And that resolution set the stage for my experience during the show, which was much more profound.

U2 being, as I said, very politically/socially active, they had a segment about halfway through the show in which they started talking about all the problems in the world, and hunger and poverty and so on, and and how we all needed to go out and do something about it, and the whole time I kept thinking: "I saw the statistics on your screen, guys; you're spending more electricity and time and money on this show than most of these starving African kids can even comprehend." It made me angry–not just angry, it made me furious, it made me nauseous, it made me want to get up and walk out. I felt like these rich a-holes were using a facade of social consciousness to promote themselves, literally using starving children for their own gain. But U2 is smarter than that, and they knew what they were doing, and about 30 seconds before I told my wife we were leaving, they moved on from "look at all these problems" to "look at all these solutions." They talked about the ONE organization, advertised and almost fully funded by U2 and their fans, and started listing success story after success story, including video testimonials of people who've been helped and are now turning around to help others. U2 wasn't just telling people to help each other, they were doing it themselves; more importantly, especially for me as an artist, they were using their visibility as a platform to spread their message and their help to more people than they could ever reach otherwise. The exorbitant cost of the tour was worth it, because how else are you going to get 46,000 people to sit through a 30-minute commercial for a charity? This crowd didn't even sit through, they stood and they cheered and they donated and they signed up for the ONE mailing list.

This was important for me to see. I didn't realize it beforehand, but I needed this assurance that I wasn't wasting my time as an artist–that art could be fun and entertaining and also be an engine of change. I left that concert with a renewed determination to make my books matter, to make people think, to make even one of my readers a better person when they're done. I also left as a U2 fan, because those guys can put on a show. I was never all that into them, like I said in the beginning, but seriously: if you haven't seen them live, you haven't seen them at all. They're one of my favorite bands now.

I'm not saying that PARTIALS is brilliant, or that it's going to change the world. But I am saying that I put a lot into it–that I tried to tell more than just a post-apocalyptic adventure story. I grew up reading SF because the best SF makes you think about who you are, and about what the world is like, and about what it could be like as we create our own future. The characters in PARTIALS are dealing with some pretty hefty problems, including the very real threat of human extinction. They come up with a lot of answers, and not all of them are right, but if they can make us think about our own answers and our own choices, then I'm a happy man.

I loved writing this book, and I hope you love reading it.

Game Review: Black Crusade

I love roleplaying games–I've played them ever since Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in junior high, and today I'm involved in three different roleplaying campaigns (though one is on temporary hiatus). I'm getting my kids into it now that they're older, and I have gone on record many times to say that if more parents understood what roleplaying games were really about, they'd actually push their kids into them. A cooperative storytelling activity that encourages imagination, social skills, communal problem solving, and reading? Sign me up!

Of course, the game I'm going to talk about today isn't one I'll be playing with my kids anytime soon, and is not going to win anyone over from the "RPGs are evil" side of the argument. It's called Black Crusade, and it's about playing the villains instead of the heroes.

Black Crusade is part of the Warhammer 40k RPG line from Fantasy Flight, a series of gorgeously over-produced hardback books steeped in one of the richest and most enormous settings you'll ever see. "40k" is shorthand for "40,000," ie, 38,000 years in the future when mankind has already gained and lost contact with more worlds than most other SF settings ever have in the first place. Half science and half dark fantasy, it's a setting where FTL travel is made possible by magic portals that allow a ship to travel in and out of the Warp, which is basically hell. The setting's been around forever, notably through the tabletop miniatures game and recent video games such as Dawn of War. In RPG form, the new line began in late 2007 with Dark Heresy, which focused on the Inquisitors who roam the intergalactic empire making sure nobody gets too friendly with the daemons in the Warp. It was a great game with a simple system and some very evocative options, and was followed by Rogue Trader (space pirates) and Deathwatch (space marines). That was intended to be the full trilogy, covering the three main archetypes of play in the setting, but last year they published a fourth book that turns the entire setting on its head: what if you want to play as the daemons in the Warp, seeking to corrupt and conquer the "real" world? Black Crusade won't be for everybody, but those who like it are going to absolutely love it.

Villain campaigns are a tricky thing to handle, and many a game group has tried and failed to make them work. Usually they fall apart because one or more of the players interpret "I'm a bad guy" to mean "I can screw over the rest of the team if I want to." Black Crusade addresses this directly by giving the players a common goal and different, often complimentary ways of achieving it. They have to work together if they want to get anything done.

The goal is simple: you are an acolyte of the Chaos Powers, and you want to gain in favor and strength to eventually become a Chaos Daemon. See what I said about being kind of dark? You track your progress towrd this goal with two tally charts: Infamy and Corruption. Everything you accomplish gives you Infamy, and everything you experience gives you Corruption. Choices you make, and situations you get yourself into, will raise your Corruption, and the more corrupted you get the more powers you'll be granted by the Chaos Gods. Once you hit 100 Corruption your transformation will be complete, but what you transform into depends on your Infamy: with at least 100 Infamy you'll become a Daemon Prince, but with anything less you'll become a mindless Daemon Spawn. Your character arc is essentially a life-or-death balancing act, gaining enough Corruption to become hugely powerful without tipping over the edge and losing yourself completely. By working with other characters you have access to more abilities, more strings you can pull, and so on, so you can gain Infamy at a much faster rate. Screw the other players and you stand to lose a lot more than you gain.

Infamy is gained primarily through Compacts, which is an interesting adventure system that puts the players in a much more active role than normal–fitting, I think, for a game about villains. This is one of my favorite parts of the whole game. A Compact is a plan, more or less, where the players come together and say "We want to gain some infamy. What should we do?" This primary objective can be something small (assassinate an important leader, steal an artifact, etc.) or huge (conquer a planet, etc.) or anything in between; your goals are likely to be modest at first until you gain a little more leverage. Let's say your group decides to raise an army–you can't just do that out of the gate, so you need some secondary objectives to help get you there. Say there's a penal colony in your sector of space, with an army of criminals just waiting to be freed and armed; your secondary objectives could involve killing the warden in charge, poisoning the guards, buying or stealing a bunch of weapons, and so on. The group defines the objectives based on the skills of its members: if one character is a traitorous Imperium official, he could position himself to replace the current warden through political machinations; if another character has connections to Nurgle, the Chaos God of disease and decay, he could put a mutagen into the water supply and corrupt the planet from within. Everyone has something to contribute, and step by step you conquer the galaxy. As your objectives are completed you gain Infamy, including a special boost for completing the Compact, and then it's time to use your new resources (say, a shiny new army of mutated prisoners) to hatch a new plan and start a new Compact.

One of my favorite things about the Compact system are the personal objectives, an underhanded nod toward the "I'm evil so I can do whatever I want" mentality. You know some of the players are going to do it anyway, so why not make it part of the game? Personal objectives allow a player to do something selfish and unexpected without resorting to the obnoxious "steal all the loot" pattern that so many villain games fall into. Remember: the idea here is to be a villain for the helpless NPCs, not for the friends you hang out with to play the game. Let's use our penal colony example: you've defined your main objective (raise an army of prisoners) and your secondary objectives (replace the current warden, mutate the prisoners and guards, and steal a shipment of weapons intended for a distant war). Each player now has the option of adding their own secret objective, in private discussion with the GM, which can gain them a bunch of infamy at the risk of complicating the job for everyone else. Let's say your character is a follower of Khorne, the Chaos God of battle. You want to win his favor with a big fight, but your plan doesn't really call for one. It does, on the other hand, call for a shipment of weapons to be delivered to a planet full of criminals. Your personal objective might be to deliver the weapons early, and distribute them before the guards have been incapacitated, thus resulting in a massive prison riot. The end results will be more or less the same–you'll get your army, and the guards will be dealt with–but the path to get there will be a whole lot bloodier. Personal objectives get really interesting once you realize that everyone in the party probably has one, and many of them might conflict. It takes a very good GM to keep this house of cards intact, but the Compact system and the shared goals help keep the party together and each character (and player) personally invested in the group's communal success. Like the Infamy/Corruption system, it's a balancing act, but one with some very unique rewards you won't find anywhere else.

The Corruption system, while we're on the subject, has some cool features I want to be sure to mention, which go to the heart of character creation. The previous 40k RPGs have each had their own system for character class and progression, with varying degrees of success. The low-water mark for this might be Rogue Trader, which stratified the availability of certain skills and talents so tightly that many character types felt ridiculously constrictive; if you wanted to wield two guns at once, for instance, but you didn't choose one of the few classes that had access to this ability, you were hosed no matter how strong your character concept might have been. Some strictures are important, naturally, but when they feel painful and arbitrary it gets to be too much. Black Crusade solves this problem beautifully, in a move that makes it, in my opinion, the hands-down best of the 40k RPGs: they did away with character class progression altogether, and base your progress instead on your actions in-game and your loyalty to the Chaos Powers. You start with an archetype, such as Apostate (a charismatic talker), Heretek (a corrupted cyber-mechanic), or the Sorcerer (a Chaos Space Marine with magic powers). As you play, you keep track of your actions and advances, which help determine your alignment, and your alignment will help determine how much you have to pay for new advances–anyone can get any skill or talent in the game, but your connection to a certain Chaos God (and, in conjunction with that, a certain playstyle) will determine how easy or hard it is to get. The Forbidden Lore skill, for example, belongs to Tzeentch, the Chaos God of sorcery and change, so taking it brings you closer in alignment to Tzeentch. Take enough Tzeentch-based advances and you become allied to Tzeentch, making similar advances cheaper and opposed advancements (anything aligned with Khorne or Nurgle) more expensive. Thus anyone can have Assassin Strike, for example, but followers of Slaanesh, the Chaos God of trickery and deception, can get it more easily.

Now: the Corruption thing I was talking about. You see, Corruption is not just a score in the corner of your character sheet, it's an actual change, both physical and mental, that comes over your character. That change is marked with mutations and powers, some visible and some not, which add cool new options as your character grows. Just like skills and talents, the Corruption powers you have access to will change depending on which Chaos God you choose to follow. An unaligned character will still gain a mutation, but a character dedicated to, say, Nurgle will have a chance to gain a mutation specific to Nurgle, more powerful and thematic than the standard list (including such savory delights as Nurgle Rot and Corpulent Immensity). Closely aligned characters can also gain bonus Corruption points for doing things their patron approves of: killing a powerful foe is one thing, but if you want to please Nurgle you'll do it with poison. Thus your actions throughout the game, and the rewards you reap for them, will be dripping with story (or in Nurgle's case, oozing).

The game is not perfect, by any means. The options to include both humans and (ten-foot super-powered) Space Marines in the same party is problematic, not so much for balance (they've done a pretty good job) as for the difficulty of giving everyone equal opportunity to shine. I was also taken a bit aback by the lack of setting information inside the Warp–there's some, to be fair about as much as the previous books had, but the Warp is such a weird place that I really felt like I needed more. I couldn't assume that I knew what it was like, the way I did with the 40k games that take place in the "real" world of the Imperium. Another concern is the game's focus on player-driven Compacts–I don't consider this a failing of the game by any means, as I love the Compacts, but it is a bit of a barrier to entry for people expecting a more traditional campaign experience.

Perhaps most of all, villain campaigns are not for everyone. Maybe your group isn't ready to work together as closely as a villain game (ironically) calls for, or maybe your players don't want to be dastardly monsters who strive for daemonhood. If you don't, that's fine–play Dark Heresy, where you can root out corruption instead of sowing it. If, on the other hand, you're looking for a new perspective and an all-new playstyle, Black Crusade can be absolutely stellar. It's the most unique and polished game set in one of the richest worlds in the industry, and I think you could have a lot of fun with it.

Visual Migraines

I've had migraines since I was in high school, and while they're bad, they're never super bad–both of my siblings, for example, get far worse migraines than I do. (Both of my siblings are in far worse health than I am, in general, and both of my siblings make fun of me for eating wacky health food and using alternative medicine. I make no explicit connections between those two facts, I'm just mentioning them. No reason.) A migraine, for those blessed readers who don't know, is a seriously horrible headache, going far beyond "my head is killing me" to reach such levels as "my head is hanging me upside down in a basement and mailing my toes one at a time to my loved ones." Whereas most headaches are caused by pressure (blood or sinus), migraines are neurological, so the odds are that you either get them repeatedly or you don't get them at all.

"Repeatedly, for me, is usually about twice a year, and I can always tell one's coming because it is preceded by an aura: a visual effect, basically a local, temporary degeneration. This takes different forms for different people, and for some it doesn't happen at all; for me it manifests as a Scintillating Scotoma, which is an awesome way of saying that I see bright jagged lines interrupting my field of perception:



That's not a perfect representation of mine; rather than a cross-hatch of color I see actual jagged lines, usually neon-bright, like a flickering explosion effect from an old video game. I used that image to show you how disruptive it is to my actual vision, getting in the way of things and blotting out words, objects, and faces. In terms of shape and color, they're a lot more like this:



They don't last long, maybe 40 or 50 minutes, about half that if I can drink some caffeine as soon as they appear. Drinking caffeine early will also usually scuttle the pain, but only if I can get to some in time. Since I don't always drink a lot of Coke, this is sometimes harder than others.

Last night, and the reason for writing this post, I had the scariest migraine experience I've ever had, for two reasons. First, I was driving, which meant I didn't have any caffeine near at hand–and since my kids were home alone under their older sister's rapidly degrading supervision, I couldn't really take the time to stop and get any. In hindsight, I should have, because what happened next was freaky as all hell: the scintillating scotoma stayed, but then I also started to get negative scotoma on top of it. Whereas a scintillating scotoma is just a patch of wacky colors, negative scotoma is a patch of nothing at all:



Again, this is not a perfect recreation of what I saw (or didn't see). It's kind of like there were patches of blurry vision, but it's really more like there were patches of nothing. I wasn't see black spots or anything, just places scattered here and there where my brain simply didn't process anything. I could look at a fast food sign, for example, and while I was peripherally aware of the entire sign being there, I had to look at each part of it in turn to actually see the whole thing. The creepiest one was a car in front of me, where part of the roof was gone–it wasn't actually missing, and it's not like I perceived a giant hole in it or a deformed shape, I just couldn't see part of it. It wasn't there.

Yes, I should have gotten off the road, but I wasn't thinking clearly. I knew I needed to get home to help my kids, and I knew that if I didn't get home quickly and take some medicine the pain part of the equation would kick in and I might end up completely useless on the side of the road, waiting for my wife to finish her meeting and come pick me up, which wouldn't happen for another hour. I should have done it anyway, because it's stupid to drive under those conditions, but I didn't. Looking back, I suspect that my judgment may have been fuzzed by the same effect, but I don't know. It was just really freaky and weird, and you can tell it affected me because it's a whole day later and I'm writing a blog about it, despite just having blogged yesterday. Two blog posts back to back? That's crazytown.

I write a lot about mental disorders, and with THE HOLLOW CITY (coming out in July) I delved even deeper into the subject of neurological disorders, and the many, many, many ways your brain can just screw you up, sometimes for no reason at all. My little migraines and my little scotomas are a teeny tiny part of that, a bare taste of what people with schizophrenia or anxiety disorder or depression deal with on a daily basis. It opened my eyes a little bit to a subject I thought I already had a pretty good grip on; I understood the causes and the symptoms and the direct effects pretty well, but that drive made me realize the kind of helpless feeling that comes as a secondary effect, knowing that you're essentially a prisoner to an perceptive and cognitive organ that nobody really understands. It shook me up, and at the end of the experience I'm kind of glad that it did.

Why I Like What I Like, Part 1

I don't watch a ton of live TV, if any, but I watch a lot of shows on Netflix and DVD, usually at night when I'm painting miniatures (or, alternately, when I'm too lazy to do anything else). This gives me the chance to try out a lot different shows and characters and actors and writers, and because I am who I am I can't help comparing them; I don't just like or dislike something, I try to think long and hard about why I like or dislike it, and why other people might disagree with me.

One of the shows that I'm very lukewarm on–and I know this is going to get me pilloried in the geek community–is Doctor Who. What, you say? A sci-fi/fantasy geek who doesn't like Doctor Who? Sort of. It's not that I don't like it, I just don't love it. I can watch an episode and feel no compelling need to watch another. The ideas are invariably brilliant, some of them so much so that I'm still thinking about them weeks later: the episode "The Empty Child," for example, was an alternate history horror story zombie apocalypse wonder, more original and clever than any similar story I've seen in ages. But something about it, like I said, just doesn't drive me to come back. When I'm in the mood for an SF puzzle I'll watch an episode, but the shows I really like are the ones that keep me up until early in the morning, watching one more episode and then one more episode until I have to force myself to stop. Why doesn't Doctor Who do that to me?

My first guess was the lack of ongoing story. People tell me that Doctor Who eventually gets one, but I'm only 7 or 8 episodes in and haven't seen it. I like ongoing stories because of the depth they can create, and television is uniquely equipped to provide that in a way that no other visual medium can. We're in a golden age of TV right now, due in large part to creators' willingness to serialize a long, detailed story, and I'm loving it. But the thing is, some of my very favorite shows aren't serialized; the sitcom Community is one of the best things on TV, even being hiatus, and while that has some long-form emotional through-lines it doesn't have a true long-form plot. Put more simply, it's not a show you watch for the plot, you watch for the humor and the characters and the amazing writing. It's less "I need to see what happens next," and more "I wonder what they'll think of next," if that makes any sense. I watch serials to have my expectations fulfilled, and I watch Community to have my expectations subverted. Since this is essentially the same reason I watch Doctor Who–to see where they'll go next and what new idea they'll have to grapple with–I don't think I can say that the lack of an ongoing story is the problem.

Comparing Doctor Who and Community points out a more striking difference that I think hits closer to the mark: the characters. The characters in Doctor Who are, to me, essentially blank slates; their job is to encounter a weird new thing, react to it, "solve" it, and move on. The weird new thing is the part that takes center stage, and the characters are defined only by their relationship to it. I understand that this changes later on, particularly with Amy Pond, who's gotten more press than every previous companion combined–she and her husband are apparently very strong, interesting, complex characters. Please keep in mind here that while I haven't watched a lot of the new Doctor Who, I watched the old one religiously, and they suffered from the same problem: the Doctor always has a distinct personality, but not a lot of depth. The characters in Community, on the other hand, are incredibly round, fully-realized people. They can do entire scenes that are screamingly funny and/or touching, not just for what the characters say, but for what we know about them. Their personalities and desires and flaws help not only to make them rich and interesting, but to make the subtle nuances more important.

Put more simply, Doctor Who is about what the characters do, and Community is about who the characters are. Neither is inherently better or worse than the other, I just happen to like the latter more.

I had intended to also talk about two other shows–they were, in fact, supposed to be the entire post, but my introduction got out of hand and, well, here we are. So next week I'll come back and compare two more TV shows, probably my favorite two shows currently running, which have deep, interesting, wonderful characters and yet could not possibly be more different from each other if they tried: Breaking Bad and Parks & Recreation.

Game Review: Star Trek: Fleet Captains

I am a huge Star Trek nerd, as my love letter to DS9 last year can attest. I keep my pens in a Worf's-head mug, I own seven Star Trek roleplaying books, I own a TNG script ("The Offspring," which made me cry), and I have engaged in countless hours, if not years, of various forms of fan-wankery. I'm not the biggest Trekkie out there, but I'm a big one.

When I learned last year that WizKids had procured the gaming license for Star Trek I was pretty excited, though unsure what to expect. WizKids is one of my favorite gaming companies, thanks to the strength of HeroClix, but the Clix engine is pretty much the only thing they had going for them–their non-clix games were strained and short-lived, and even most of their clix games died. The best use of the engine was Mechwarrior, though the random distribution model totally didn't work for it, and my favorite clix game was HorrorClix, which never took off at all thanks in large part to the lack of a recognizable license. Game after game, they proved that they had awesome ideas they couldn't follow through on, and for an eager Star Trek fan that prospect was equal parts exciting and terrifying. And of course the main question through the whole process was the Clix engine itself: it's primarily a combat system, and while Star Trek does have combat it's nothing you'd call a major part of the IP. Could they branch out and do something new? Could they actually make it work? The answer is a resounding "kind of."

Their first Star Trek game, called Expeditions, was pure Euro, and a fairly number-crunchy one at that. The components look Star Trek, but by all accounts the gameplay never actually feels like Star Trek, so I never bothered picking it up. If I'm wrong, please let me know. Their third game, due to release in the next month or so, is a straight Clix game of ship-to-ship combat, so similar to Heroclix it's actually compatible with it (by which I mean compatible mechanically–thematically it's a raging disaster for everyone who hasn't dreamed about Spider-man punching the Enterprise in the face). The middle game, however, gets so much right. It's called Fleet Captains, and it manages to include just about everything you could ever want a Star Trek game to include: you have ships, you can put crew on them, they fly around exploring strange new worlds and seeking out new life, they can fight and talk and cloak and reroute power to the deflector shields and whatever else you can imagine. It's a brilliant design with a great Star Trek feel, but it's marred by some pretty serious flaws.

First there's the production values, which wouldn't be so problematic if you weren't paying so much for them. For $100 you get a box full of flimsy cards, packed so poorly that they have an improbably high frequency of breaking loose during shipping and sliding all over the box, in the mildest cases looking messy and in the most serious cases actually breaking the plastic ships. The ships themselves are a mixed blessing: there's a ton of them, and they look great, but they're fragile, often poorly glued, not to scale with each other, and unpainted–which, again, wouldn't be a problem except that you just paid $100 dollars for them. This from a company with almost 15 years' experience producing cheap, prepainted minis. It is very hard to look at this game's components and not feel like they were rushed to hit a street date, with little or no concern for quality assurance. Whatever portion of the $100 price tag was intended to pay for painting was used to pay for accelerated printing instead.

The game's second big problem is thematic, and I haven't actually convinced myself it's really a problem a yet. Rather than focus on a specific series, or even a specific timeline, the game throws literally everything into the same pot: Kirk and Picard and Janeway can all be on the same crew, despite the fact that their stories took place in wildly different times and places. For the non-Trek nerds out there, imagine a historical wargame that allowed you to have George Washington, General Patton, and Napoleon all on the same team fighting ninjas. That makes for some good fan fiction, but it's an inherently goofy idea that shows (dare I say it) a lack of respect for the IP. Now, there's a lot to be said for the malleability of the Star Trek universe–there are enough temporal and spatial anomalies to explain pretty much anything you want, and I usually teach people the game by saying "just imagine Q did it." But the crazy mixed-up timeline should be a scenario, not the baseline, and Trek fans shouldn't have to house-rule their game just to play what most people would consider the default setting.

But then again…the game is just so good. Once you sort out your messed-up components and glue your ships back together and concoct an appropriate explanation for the narrative, all your concerns slip away and you're playing the Star Trek game you've always wanted, boldly going where no one has gone before, matching wits with your Klingon opponents or scanning a sentient nebula or negotiating a peace treat between two alien species. And the possibilities for expansion are amazing: the game has Federation and Klingons, but nothing from DS9, the Borg, Romulans, Cardassians, or the Dominion. The rules are already set up to handle extra players, different modes (free-for-all, co-op, etc.), and more, all you need is the stuff (which is, admittedly, the hard part).

Do I recommend this game? Yes and no. It's not worth $100, so I'll tell you to buy it cheap somewhere, except then WizKids won't make enough money to justify an expansion, so I'll tell you to buy it full price. If we're lucky, WizKids will fix some of the production problems and do a re-issue, but I don't see that happening. How about this: find a copy you can rent/borrow/test, and give it a try. That will give you a really good idea of how much you like it and how much you'd be willing to pay for it. With games like this you have to remember the Boat Rule: if you want to go sailing you don't need a boat, you need a friend with a boat. Find a Trekkie with more money than sense and start dropping hints.

How Far Are You Willing to Go?

As I prepare for the launch of PARTIALS next month (my new book, coming on February 28), I've been doing a lot of interviews and writing a lot of blog posts and, in general, looking back at my career as a writer; it's not an especially long career, but it comprises 5 published novels, soon to be 6, and that's not too shabby. What stood out to me recently was the running theme in all 6 of them, a theme I didn't even realize was there until I saw it in my outline for FAILSAFE and started looking backward. I talk about a lot of things in my books, but one thread ties them all together:

How far are you willing to go to do what you think is right?

In the case of my ebook, A NIGHT OF BLACKER DARKNESS, it's less about "doing what you think is right" than about "getting what you want." The main character, Frederick Whithers, is trying to steal money and save his own life, and is forced into a series of ever-mounting dangers and relationships and compromises in the single-minded pursuit of that goal. It's a classic farce structure, and the book is a comedy, but his need to say and do and become things who would never have considered before make it a very dark comedy. Every new obstacle that arises forces him to choose, however subtly: do I take the next step and push this even further, or do I walk away? That's a choice that all of my characters, in all of my books, face again and again.

John Cleaver is a great example. In all three of his books (only three so far, at least) he finds himself facing terrible enemies that only he can stop–or at least he thinks he's the only one who can stop them. There may be some self-delusion there. The first book makes this choice plain: a killer is dismembering my friends and neighbors; I can stop him, but doing so will make me a killer in the process. Is that worth it? Most of us, in a moment of extreme danger, would lash out at an attacker, and maybe even kill to protect our children and family, but what about other people? Would you kill a man to protect your neighbor? To protect a stranger? What if it's not a moment of danger: you know that someone WILL kill someone else, and the law is not an option, and now in the dark and quiet is your only chance to stop him. If you kill him, you're a killer; if you let him live, someone else dies. Would you be partly responsible for that death? Would you FEEL responsible, even if you weren't? I don't have a great answer to these question–I wrote three books about a character struggling with the issue, in part because I struggle with it myself. Maybe it's easy for you; I suspect that the decision itself may be much easier than living with it afterward, no matter what you choose. John Cleaver faces permutations of this same problem over and over, sometimes going one way and sometimes another. "How far is he willing to go" is the question that drives the series.

My fifth book, THE HOLLOW CITY, isn't even out yet in English–the US gets it in July–but it's been on shelves in Germany since October, and it deals with the same issue plus an extra complication: how do you know you can trust yourself? The main character is Michael Shipman, and he is deeply schizophrenic, seeing monsters and manipulators behind every shadow. As the book progresses, however, he starts to realize that some of the monsters are real, and they have a very real connection to a series of grisly murders. No one believes him, so like John Cleaver he's on his own, but can he even believe himself? If this threat is real, it must be stopped, but with his own mind broken he runs the serious risk of harming innocent people along the way. Should he back away? Should he take the risks? Can he live with himself if he's wrong? The added uncertainty make Michael's conflict different from John's, but the core theme is still there: how far are you willing to go to do what you think is right?

All of this leads us to PARTIALS, an SF novel about the survivors of a world-killing plague as they try to rebuild human civilization. There are approximately forty thousand human beings left alive on the planet, and there are still many, many dangers that could reduce that number further. The stakes here are not just a murder or string of murders, but the utter extinction of the human race. How far would you be willing to go to save your own species? What would you do, what crimes would you commit, what morals would you compromise? There is a point at which NOT doing something "evil" could itself be considered wrong, if the evil act is the only way to preserve humanity. The sheer scale of the problem, in other words, warps the morality involved. The world of PARTIALS, and the outline of FAILSAFE, are filled with people who make difficult, questionable, often terrible decisions with nothing but the best of intentions. In some ways the books have no villains at all, just earnest people who define "good" in very different ways. Playing with the multitude of strategies people come up with to save the humans race is part of what makes the series so fascinating to write–and, I hope, to read.

In part, all of this is on my mind this morning because of our own world situation: this week marked the 10th anniversary of the Guantanamo Detention Facility, an off-shore prison where suspected terrorists are held without trial, tortured for confessions, and denied any semblance of human rights. My personal opinions on this are very strong, but I recognize that it's a thorny issue with weight on each side. I've added a poll to the left sidebar here on my website, and I'd love to get your opinions. Given the complexity of the issue, I've made it so you can choose multiple answers. I'd also love to hear your responses in the comments, but remember: keep it polite.

Game Review: Ikusa

Back in the day, when I was in…maybe junior high, but probably elementary school, I got into wargaming. Not the classic "hex and counter" games that hardcore historical wargamers consider to be the only games worthy of the category, but the big, over-the-top, "Risk to the extreme" kind of games, with big, colorful boards and handfuls of dice and piles and piles of little pieces. I wrote about this genre quite a bit in my review of Conquest of Nerath.

One of the pioneers of that gaming genre (today alternately referred to as 'thematic games' or just 'Ameritrash') was the Gamemaster series, which included Axis & Allies, Fortress America, and Shogun. Shogun was almost immediately renamed as Samurai Swords, but after a few years both it and Fortress America disappeared. It should come as no surprise that both games, now that the boardgame industry is bigger (and the kids who grew up on them are adults with greater purchasing power), are being reprinted. Fortress America will return this year under the same name, and Samurai Swords returned a few months ago with a new name–Ikusa–and a gorgeous new graphic design. I was very excited to try it out.

Ikusa is similar to Risk and other games like it in that it's basically a big map full of territories, and you fight over them; you start the game by dealing out all the territory cards, putting a dude on each one, and then adding a few extra units where you want to concentrate your force. There are different units with different strengths, though none of them really have any special abilities aside from "melee" and "ranged." Each territory has its own little garrison, usually peasant spearmen, but most of your forces are grouped into three giant armies that move and attack as single units. This is what really defines the game and makes it unique. Each army has a daimyo to lead it, and a special battle board showing exactly which kinds of samurai and other units are following him. The army's position on the board is marked by a standard bearer to save you the trouble of moving twelve guys around in a pile on the board. What's more, daimyos can actually "level up" as they win battles, gaining the ability to move and attack multiple times per turn. A high level daimyo can be devastating, marching across the board with a huge pile of samurai leaving only destruction in its wake, but this is balanced by the ninja, which you can hire to assassinate enemy daimyos and reduce the army back to level 1. It's a slick system and a lot of fun.

The economic aspect of the game is more robust than you might expect. Each player gets a certain amount of money (called koku) each turn, based on how many territories they control, and then you allocate them to a series of slots in a tray; this is done in secret, as some of your purchases are blind bids against the other players. When everyone's done you turn your trays around and reveal what you've bought–buying units, building castles, and hiring ronin are simple purchases, but jockeying for turn order and hiring the ninja are auction-based, and anything you spend there (whether or not you win) is lost.

The ronin are one of my favorite parts of the game. Instead of placing them like normal units, you place them on facedown territory cards so that no one else knows where you've hidden them. When someone attacks you, or when you decide to mount an attack, you simply flip over the card and place the ronin on the board (or on an army board under a daimyo; your choice). Ronin only stay with you for a turn, but they allow you to concentrate your force much more powerfully, so it's a deep strategic tradeoff: do I want more power, and the element of surprise, right now, or do I want a unit that will stick around and give me less power over several turns? It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer, and tough decisions like that are what makes gaming fun.

So yes, the game is great. It's not my favorite wargame, but it's a good one; if it didn't involve direct player elimination I'd like it more, but that's the breaks in an old-school game like this. I also really love the Japanese theme, and the art in the new edition is, like I said, very cool. You may essentially consider the review done at this point, because what follows is completely extraneous. You see, I'm an incurable tinkerer, and there was one aspect of the game that I really wanted to mess with–not for mechanical reasons, but for flavor. I've mentioned it a bit in the past, but I'm about a year and a half into an epic RPG campaign for Legend of the Five Rings, which stands for the moment as my favorite RPG setting. It's basically a sword-and-sorcery fantasy world drawing on Asian history and mythology instead of European, and is hands down one of the richest and most interesting game worlds I've ever encountered. As cool as Ikusa was for me, I really felt like, if I was going to play a Japanese-themed wargame, I wanted it to be L5R. So I did a big mod and rethemed it.

The main kingdom of L5R is called Rokugan, and is split into several clans: the Lion Clan, the Scorpion Clan, and so on. Each clan has a unique personality and a bunch of cool characters that I wanted to represent in Ikusa, which seemed like a perfect fit for the daimyos–and since the daimyos can level up, it was a perfect match to a sort of pseudo-RPG feel. I made up ten or so character cards per clan and gave them each two powers: one you get right off the bat, and another that you unlock when you reach level 2. Every time you start a new Daimyo (either at the start of the game or when another daimyo is killed and replaced), you simply draw a card and place it next to your army board. The powers are interesting without really being overwhelming, because I made them weak on purpose–the goal wasn't to change the game balance, just to add some personality to the daimyos and some L5R flavor to the game overall. I have a lot of printing contacts, so once the cards were written and designed I had a bunch of sets printed off and passed them out to my friends. They've become very popular. On the downside, I used actual L5R art for the cards, which means I can't (for copyright reasons) distribute them or even display them–it's just a goofy mod I made for my friends, using mostly our characters and NPCs from our RPG. So in some ways this paragraph has all been a big tease, but I prefer to think of it as an example of how you can (and often should) modify your games to fit your own group. House rules are like fan fiction, in a sense: we take what we love and we tell our own stories with it.