Michael Coorlim's Blog, page 45

Playing the Backstory

In a role-playing game, a character’s emotional connection to the world is often limited to an academic understanding of their backstory. A more natural, more immersive result can be reached by playing through the characters’ upbringing.

Benefits to playing out the backstory

Characters are the result of their past, rather than having a past selected to result in the character
Experiencing playing through a setting and with backstory NPCs results in greater investment; when the village, kingdom, or world are threatened, this matters
Players grow and develop in response to individual choices, leading them to developing characters beyond their standard choices
Player Characters have stronger and more complicated emotional webs, leading to more interesting interactions.

How it works

In short, you begin the game long before the players’ adventuring careers begin. Depending on the story you’re going to tell, you might begin with childhood, college, or sometime after. Whatever it takes to frame the process of the characters becoming who they are.

Collectively you play out the process of becoming those characters, whatever the starting point for your game is. Allow this to determine what their starting traits are, based on the choices they make, and how they react to what life throws at them.

Implementation tips

You want to play this on a high-speed setting, years passing in little play time. What works for me is a series of played-out vignettes followed by months or years of time summarized by a few questions. The choices they make should matter, and have definite effects upon their development. Skip the boring stuff, zoom in on the life altering definitive events.

You might play this out at the table as a first session, or do it via email before the game as an extended form of character creation.

I find that a set-up that brings the party together works best. It’s far more entertaining to allow the players to react to one-anothers’ events in character, and it forges real true bonds between them.

Either let the players determine their starting situations, or roll for them randomly. Likewise, the events you play out can be determined randomly at first, and in response to their earlier choices.

Examples of use

Characters from the same small medieval village learn about the setting and each other as they grow from children to adulthood and leave to find their destiny as adventurers. (Fantasy)

College Freshmen deal with the stress of a new environment while trying to build a future and getting to know each other, dealing with the dramas of young adulthood, until they all get superpowers. (Superhero)

Friends grow up on the same culvert from junior high to adulthood, blissfully unaware of what lurks in the shadows around them, engaging in mundane conflicts and drama, until the vampire moves in next door. (Modern Horror)

A family of five are lucky enough to have a fallout shelter when the bombs drop, and must cope with learning to survive in the aftermath. This lasts until their parents die, and they must step out into the world and look for other survivors. (Post apocalyptic)

Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.

The post Playing the Backstory appeared first on Michael Coorlim.

Windy City Obscura: Exploring Chicago

There are a number of reasons why I’ve taken it upon myself to wander the streets of Chicago. Writing’s a sedentary job, and health is a big part of it. Every day I see studies and articles about how sitting all day is basically worse than chain-smoking bags of crack flavored razor-blades, and there are a lot of things I want to write before my slow and inevitable death. I could use the exercise.

Also, I’ve lived in this city for two years, grew up in the suburbs, and I’ve only explored a small fraction of what’s out there. There’s a lot of weird cool stuff hidden around, and I feel like I’m wasting it if I don’t go check it out.

This is how it’s going to work

My only real regret is that I didn’t start on this sooner, while the weather was still nice. Maybe the snow will make for more dramatic photos. Still, I’m going to try to get out for at least an hour every day, longer if I run across something super-cool.

I’m not really sure how it’ll pan out long-term, but the plan so far is to live-tweet my excursions throughout the week, and post summaries on the blog here every Sunday. I might go alone or with other people. Depends.

I’m already breaking my own rules

I know I said that these would be weekly summaries, but I’m eager to get started, and blog entries without photos are boring. I’m going to wander around my neighborhood and take some pictures to spruce it up and sort of get a feel for things.

Update: 4:00 pm

Back. It was a nice walk, if a bit chilly. I live down the street from a huge cemetery, but I’ll save that for next week. Today I just walked up and down some residential streets, including past what used to be Essany Studios, where they used to film the Chaplin movies. Today it’s part of St. Augustine College, and I’ve heard they’re doing some kind of restoration thing, though I don’t know the details.

I saw few people out and about, which makes sense because it’s a work-day, but it seems like there were fewer than I expected. Maybe it’s the weather. I don’t know, I really haven’t just gone out and walked. With the grayness of the skies, everything had a very isolating deserted mood to it. I won’t lie… I like the relative privacy.

Next week I think I’m going to try and stick to early afternoon during the week, when there are fewer people around. I feel a little self-conscious taking pictures while being watched. Something I should probably just get over.

Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.

The post Windy City Obscura: Exploring Chicago appeared first on Michael Coorlim.

The Full Moon Jam

The Chicago Fire Tribe’s Full Moon Jam happens, as the name implies, every full moon between Spring and Fall at Chicago’s Foster Beach. It’s been going on for a decade now, growing in size, spectacle, and popularity. I’ve been going for the last two years, and its growth even in a short period has been astounding.

The October 2014 Jam occurred under perfect weather conditions, balmy with clear skies and an unobstructed full moon. There’s drumming at the Jam to accompany the performers, but it didn’t come across so well in the video so I added a sound track.

Writing keeps me cooped up most of the time, so I don’t get out much, but I always try to make time to make it to the Jam.

They’re talking about doing one more jam in November, weather permitting.

Here’s a video I shot while at the last Jam. The hardest part was cutting it down from 30 minutes to six.

Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.

The post The Full Moon Jam appeared first on Michael Coorlim.

Windy City Obscura: An Epistolary Experiment

I’ve got in my head this concept for an epistolary story experiment that makes use of social media, such as twitter and facebook, to tell a story. Maybe this is what everybody does with social media, and I can’t just do that because I’m so wrapped up in the head-space of authorial intellectual bullshit, so I need to hem and haw and justify perfectly normal human behavior.

Whatever.

The true genesis here is that I have a lot of irons in a lot of fires: fiction, filmmaking, web serials, and book review blogs. I’m trying to work up the logistics of a kickstarter for a trans-media web series, all the while maintaining the basic human living stuff like maintaining my health, relationships, housekeeping and shopping.

Does that sound overwhelming? Because it is. And it’s anxiety-inducing. Fortunately, I think I have a solution.

Another Fucking Project

No, wait, seriously.

My problem isn’t so much that my life is full of awesome creative endeavors, but that it’s out of balance. I create all this art with my ass in the chair in front of the computer, only leaving my apartment when I absolutely have to.

That’s not a good thing. It’s killing me.

So, to motivate myself to get out and enjoy this amazing majestic city I have the good fortune of living in, I’m starting the Chicago Stories project.

The Windy City Obscura Project

What’s the Windy City Obscura Project, I hear you asking? I’m not entirely sure. It involves me getting off my butt and into the city, exploring it, taking pictures, then coming home and writing about my experiences. I’m a weird guy and this can be a weird city, so anticipate things veering into the esoteric more-so than the prosaic.

Is This for Real?

Sort of. Mostly. Yeah, I guess. Maybe fictionalized. I’m a novelist, man. But I really will be going out, I really will be taking pictures, and while I may embellish, there’s a core of autobiographical truth.

And fuck, man, it’s not my job to dictate what’s your reality and what’s your fictive dream.

Anyway, you want to follow along, I’ll be chronicling this as an epistolary journey via facebook and twitter. I don’t know if I’ll be dragging the other social media networks into it. Maybe I’ll set up a Pinterest board. But, yeah, subscribe to my feeds and you’re good to go. I think I’ll set up a page here on the blog to track it as well,  but I’m not sure how that’ll look yet. This is a seat-of-my-pants sort of endeavor, but given Facebook’s unreliability as a content delivery platform of late, I’m inclined to avoid relying on it overmuch.

Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.

The post Windy City Obscura: An Epistolary Experiment appeared first on Michael Coorlim.

Eat Like You Give a Fuck

I ordered the Thug Kitchen cookbook months ago, and I’m unreasonably excited about its release.

Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.

The post Eat Like You Give a Fuck appeared first on Michael Coorlim.

Book Nouveau is transitioning

Some of you might remember my book blog, Book Nouveau. I started it back in December 2012 to encourage myself to read more often by enforcing a sort of accountability upon myself. Well, the domain is expiring, and I’ve decided that instead of renewing it I’m going to shift everything to YouTube and start making video book reviews instead.

Forcing myself to read

Oh, don’t say it like that. I love to read. When I was younger I was a voracious reader. These days, though, all my time is taken up writing, and creating new worlds and stories scratches the same itch for emotional escapism used to when I was younger.

That doesn’t mean that authors shouldn’t read. We should. It’s a professional necessity. But where does one find the time?

We make the time. And Book Nouveau keeps me on track.

Anyway, there’s not much there yet, just the intro video. But take a look.

Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.

The post Book Nouveau is transitioning appeared first on Michael Coorlim.

Book Nouveau

I'm transitioning my book blog into a book vlog.

Not much up yet, just a cheesy intro video, but subscribe if you want to watch me ramble on about the books I read.

The Feng Shui 2 Kickstarter is tearing it up

Atlas Games’s Robin D Laws designed classic cinematic action tabletop RPG Feng Shui 2nd edition kickstarter went live an hour or so ago, and in twenty minutes they’d blown past their $8,000 goal. Their stretch-goals fell like mooks in its wake, one after the other, and only a few hours later they’ve broken $35,000.

Now that’s Kickstarting in style.

If you liked the original, or even if high flying, guns-blazing, neck-snapping action appeals to you, I strongly urge you to kick a few bucks and check out this awesome game.

Such Fond Memories

Back in the day when I gamed on a regular basis, Feng Shui was one of my standard go-to games. We didn’t always play in the supplied Secret War setting – I remember Legend of the 5 Rings L5R being a total blast – but the simplicity of the rules and flavors of the mechanics appealed to us.

Now if Atlas would just run an Unknown Armies Kickstarter…

Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.

The post The Feng Shui 2 Kickstarter is tearing it up appeared first on Michael Coorlim.

New Release: Bartleby and James

Bartleby and James is the second edition of The Collected Bartleby and James Adventures, the first Galvanic Century Edwardian steampunk novel. In addition to some minor edits, there are new opening and ending chapters that tie the detectives’ first cases together a bit more cohesively. As of this posting, it’s available as a free ebook from Amazon, Kobo, and the Apple iBookstore, and will soon be available free through Barnes & Noble.

A Galvanic Century in flux

The new edition isn’t the first of the Galvanic Century updates. There’ve been a few others.

When I first wrote And They Called Her Spider, the novelette that became Bartleby and James‘s first part, I had been planning on a series of four novelettes under the Bartleby and James Adventures series, and that the next three novelettes would comprise the Chronicles of a Gentlewoman series.

After the publication of March of the Cogsmen brought the storylines together, I fused the series together into the singular Galvanic Century. I was also branching off into other genres, so needed a single umbrella to place all the stories set in the same general story universe.

At this point there were the seven novelettes, their two collections, and the two novels March of the Cogsmen and Dreams of the Damned, along with the Steampunk Omnibus collecting all of it, available as ebooks, in print, and gradually, as audiobooks.

The eleven titles were a bit confusing for new readers and made my author pages look cluttered, so I unpublished the individual novelettes (no one was buying them anyway) and reworked their collections into tightly-woven novels.

So now, it’s Bartleby and James, A Gentlewoman’s Chronicles, March of the Cogsmen, and Dreams of the Damned. Much more manageable, particularly with Ghosts of Shaolin set to publish by the end of the year.

What comes next

I’ve got years worth of Galvanic Century  stories planned, and as long as people keep buying them, I’ll keep releasing them. Bartleby and James makes a good introduction, and it’s free, so if you like historical steampunk mysteries, feel free to pick it up.

Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.

The post New Release: Bartleby and James appeared first on Michael Coorlim.

The Trouble with Descent Macabre

Descent Macabre is a dark occult drama written by one of my long-time beta-readers and the narrator of the audio book version of Grief: Five Stories of Apocalyptic Loss, Chicago-area actor Kat O’Connor. She published Descent Macabre in May of 2013, and while it gets good reviews and is generally considered well written, it hasn’t moved very many copies.

Why Doesn’t It Sell?

The simplest reasons Descent Macabre doesn’t sell is discoverability and marketing. It’s a dark story of manipulation, abusive relationships, and death, a twisted tale of obsession and resistance, but the cover doesn’t really reflect any of these aspects. Any description of the plot alone would lead one to believe that it’s an entirely different sort of book due to market conditions, a paranormal romance, when really it’s the genre’s inverse.

The protagonist meets the domineering stranger with paranormal aspects who tries to pull her into an abusive relationship, using classical brainwashing and conditioning techniques. She does not give in to him, she does not fall in love, he is not a poor misunderstood alpha male looking for the right girl to settle down with.

The protagonist is strong. The antagonist is weak, vile,  a user, and the book doesn’t glorify that relationship.

There is no happy ending.

So yeah, it’s a tough sell.

Why? I think that it’s simply a matter of not being able to find its audience.

What Would Help

The only advice I can give Kat is to write more books to better establish her brand presence within publishing. The more books you write, the more of each title you’ll sell. This isn’t feasible, however – while Descent Macabre is well-written, Kat isn’t an author, she’s an actor, which is a full time creative job on its own, and she’s busy trying to get her own production company, Burning Brigid, off the ground.

It’s not impossible to write just one book and have it sell, but it’s unlikely. Winning the lottery while getting struck by lightning unlikely. So, in the absence of writing more books, I would council Kat to just accept that she’s not going to sell a lot of copies of the book. Which is too bad – it’s good, and more people should read it.

Questions? You are invited to either leave a comment below, or ask directly through the comment form.

The post The Trouble with Descent Macabre appeared first on Michael Coorlim.