Michael Coorlim's Blog, page 44
October 28, 2014
Top 100 Books Related Blogs infographic
Check out #77.
An infographic by the team at Rebates zone
Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.
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October 25, 2014
Ghosts of Shaolin marketing blurb
Here’s the marketing blurb for the upcoming Galvanic Century novel, Ghosts of Shaolin.
James Wainwright always considered himself a working-class engineer playing at detective, never taking the vocation for more than an idle hobby and opportunity to test some of his steampunk inventions. His investigations have always been more of a means of humoring his business partner, idle toff Alton Bartleby.
That was before his adopted daughter Xin Yan was taken.
Never comfortable in social situations, James finds himself tracking his daughter’s kidnappers from London’s Limehouse to the gritty streets of Hong Kong, down paths where his mechanical know-how won’t serve him. Searching a foreign land, he’ll find that his greatest challenges aren’t those who have taken from him what is most dear, but letting go of his most treasured preconceptions about the world.
If this piques your interest, Ghosts of Shaolin will be released this coming winter. Sign up for my mailing list and you’ll get an alert when it’s out.
Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.
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October 21, 2014
Best RPG introductory system for new players
When I was growing up and tabletop role-playing games were a super-niche hobby, the question of what roleplaying game to use to introduce new players was easily answered. Dungeons and Dragons. Oh sure, there were other games out there, but DnD was the one that everybody played.
The Ubiquitous Dungeons and Dragons
It’s still the most common game, and for many people Dungeons and Dragons is synonymous with role playing, either in its native incarnation or in the Paizo’s Pathfinder spin-off. It’s accessible, and its marketing is the most pervasive.
Just by virtue of popularity, if someone taught you how to play, they were probably teaching you how to play Dungeons and Dragons.
Unfortunately, no matter how much many people love the system, it’s not the ideal way to introduce new players. In any of its incarnations D&D is a heavy system with many specialized rules that will slip past the head of new gamers, loaded with decades of traditions and conventions that only really make sense given the proper historical concept.
What makes a good introduction?
The biggest leap to make for new players isn’t the mechanics. Chances are they’re familiar with the concept of hit points and statistics from video games. And they’re not strangers to the idea of rolling dice.
What new players need to get a grip on is the back-and-forth nature of the conversation between players and the game-master. They need to understand the basics of roleplaying, of what they actually sit there and do at the character, of having a character. The playing. The pretending.
What do new players need?
The rest of a game’s rules are detail that they can pick up as they go along, but to play the game and participate, you need to be comfortable speaking up and interacting with the group. It’s easiest to learn that if you’re not trying to focus on long lists of abstract numbers and trying to remember what dice to roll in what situation.
What this adds up to is that an ideal system for new players is one where the roleplaying takes the stage and the mechanics of the system hide in the background. A rules-light game – and, preferably, one that will institute the right attitudes you want them to carry on for the rest of their gaming career.
Now what those attitudes are up to you, but you have this great opportunity to teach players with a system that shapes them into the people you want to play with.
Systems that make good teaching tools
Here are the systems I would recommend for initiating new gamers into the fold.
Fate
Apocalypse World – or really, any of its hacks. I believe Dungeon World might be least suited to this task as it’s intended to reproduce fairly specific tropes and artifacts of DnD style gaming.
PDQ. Really, you don’t get much more rules-light.
Gumshoe
Beyond the System
There are a lot of things you can do to make learning a new game easy on new players beyond the choice of system. Try and create a situation or scenario that isn’t too alien to them, so they have a frame of reference. Games set in the real world or in one of their favorite genres will go a long way to getting them past that initial awkwardness.
Have you introduced new players into role-playing games? Have any additional system recommendations or tips?
Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.
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October 18, 2014
2014 Readathon – The Crawl
Just finished reading Alyson Grauer’s Isle of Sound and Wonder. It was an excellent use of seven hours, minus the time taken to clean the apartment in anticipation of tomorrow’s kickstarter video shoot.
I’ll give the book a full review on Book Nouveau sometime next week. For now it will suffice to say that the review will be a positive one.
Next up: The Crawl, by Nikki M. Pill.
Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.
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An Average Workday
Ever wonder what it’s like to live the swingin’ life of a full-time author? Here’s how my typical workday goes.
9ish
I get up around nine, whenever the cat wants to be fed. He’s peristant, and will stalk around me on the bed, yowling, chewing on my hair, whatever he thinks is going to work. I have to sleep with a shoe in the doorway because he’s learned that slamming it is effective, but I refuse to give him the satisfaction of getting up earlier.
After I acknowledge defeat and the return to consciousness, I put on a pot of coffee, eat breakfast, take care of whatever else needs to be done.
Around 10:00 probably
I start writing.
I write in two-hour blocks. Anything less and I find it hard to get into a proper authorial groove. I time myself, and manage around a thousand words an hour. My first drafts are written sparse; I like to get the bones of the story down before I layer on the meat.
Revisions take more or less time depending on what I’m emphasizing in a given story.
1:00 maybe
I break for lunch.
5:00 I guess
I stop writing after six hours. My first and last 2-hour block have been working on my primary project – currently Ghosts of Shaolin – and my middle block is writing something else. A short story, Hero Historia chapter, blog posts for the week, whatever else I’ve got going on.
I’m a morning person. Or, at least, not a night person. The later it gets, the less cohesively I write. After I’ve got my writing done, I see to the other business of writing. Social media, responding to reader emails, administrative miscellania. This goes on as long as it needs to.
Midnight if I’m lucky
The cat doesn’t have a snooze button, so I try to wrap everything up and get to bed early enough to get the sleep I need. Sometimes I succeed. Sometimes I have insomnia.
A regular schedule
And that’s it. Five days a week, every week. Not always the same five days; I’ve got other obligations. The normal day to day living stuff – shopping, cleaning, assorted errands – and tasks related to the film production company I co-own.
Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.
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Readathon 2014 – Opening Meme
Took me about an hour to get myself set up, make coffee, feed the cats, etc, so I made a video while I was at it, covering the questions asked in the Readathon’s Opening Meme.
Now back to reading!
Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.
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Readathon 2014 – Intro
I woke up early today, and was browsing Ello when I ran across this Readathon thing that’s apparently starting right now. Basically: Read all day.
Since my reading list is embarrassingly long I’ll go ahead and get in on that. First book I have is an ARC of Aly Grauer’s “On the Isle of Sound and Wonder” that I keep meaning to dig into.
Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.
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October 16, 2014
Literary Influences
Last month I posted some movies that had influenced me as a filmmaker. Here’s a list of books that had a powerful impact on me as a reader, and that helped sculpt me into the writer I am today. Some of these are book-books, a few are comic books, but whatever. They’re stories. Read them.
The following links take you to Amazon purchase pages via affiliate links. If you feel motivated to support me, I get a cut when you buy through them. In most cases I enjoy the entire oevure of an authors’ work, but I’m just listing here my favorites.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
The Invisibles by Grant Morrison
Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis
Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett.
Principia Discordia by Gregory Hill
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Salems Lot by Stephen King
Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko
The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe
Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander
The Dying Earth by Jack Vance
Rendezvouz with Rama by Arthur C Clarke
Ghost Story by Peter Straub
Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson
There are more. So many more. So many old memories. But these are the first few dozen that come to mind.
Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.
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October 15, 2014
Kickstarter: Elegy for a Dead World
Elegy for a Dead World is a game about fiction and writing prompts. You’re an explorer, last survivor of a doomed mission, writing about the relics of dead worlds and sharing your work with others. It looks cool, has 9 days to go, and is at the 70% funded mark.
Check it out, and it it does it for you, go ahead and donate a couple bucks to it.
Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.
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October 14, 2014
Feeling low
One of the hardest things about being a professional creative with a public profile is that I don’t feel like I can safely express my opinions.
My career isn’t stable enough to withstand a storm of fake 1-star reviews from outraged manchildren, so instead of showing support for the people targeted by hate-fueled culture war, I bite my tongue and try not to feel like a coward.
Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.
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