Matt Forbeck's Blog, page 53
June 21, 2011
Star Wars vs. Star Trek Quiz and Twitter Contest
Over at the Adams Media humor blog, I wrote up a 12-question quiz to help you figure out if you're a bigger supporter of Team Star Wars or Team Star Trek. It's called "12 Ways to Tell if You're a Star Wars or Star Trek Fan." For example:
2. You regularly tell your kids, "Don't make me destroy you."
To celebrate this silly event, the Adams Media folks are giving away six copies of Star Wars vs. Star Trek. To enter, all you have to do is follow @adamsmedia on Twitter, then tweet your team + WHY with either #teamstarwars OR #teamstartrek. On June 23, they'll pick 6 random Tweeters, 3 from each team, to receive a free copy of the book.
June 17, 2011
Free RPG Day on Saturday
For you gamers out there — or those interested in learning more — be sure to check out Free RPG Day at your local game store tomorrow, June 18. I just posted about it over at Wired.com's Geek Dad blog.
Update: I also posted about it over at Tor.com.
June 15, 2011
2011 Diana Jones Award Shortlist Announced
I just got my hands on the press release of the shortlist for the Diana Jones Award for this year. Congratulations to all the creators who brought these wonderful games to life.
13th June 2011 For immediate release
SHORTLIST FOR 2011 DIANA JONES AWARD ANNOUNCED
Three RPGs and two board-games vie
for hobby-gaming's most exclusive trophy
The committee of the Diana Jones Award has announced the shortlist for its 2011 award. Boiled down from a longlist of 22 nominees, this year the list contains five candidates that in the opinion of the committee exemplify the very best that hobby-gaming has produced in the last twelve months. In alphabetical order, they are:
Catacombs , a board game from Sands of Time Games, by Ryan Amos, Marc Kelsy, and Aron West
The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game from Evil Hat Productions, by Leonard Balsera, Jim Butcher, Genevieve Cogman, Rob Donaghue, Fred Hicks, Kenneth Hite, Ryan Macklin, Chad Underkoffler, and Clark Valentine
Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space , a board game from Santa Ragione and Cranio Creations, by Mario Porpora, Pietro Righi Riva, Luca Francesco Rossi, and Nicolò Tedeschi
Fiasco , a roleplaying game from Bully Pulpit Games, by Jason Morningstar
Freemarket , a roleplaying game from Sorencrane MCRZ, by Luke Crane and Jared Sorensen
The winner of the 2011 Award will be announced on Wednesday 3rd August, at the annual Diana Jones Award and Freelancer Party in Indianapolis, the unofficial start of the Gen Con Indy convention.
ABOUT THE AWARD
The Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming was founded and first awarded in 2001. It is presented annually to the person, product, company, event or any other thing that has, in the opinion of its mostly anonymous committee of games industry luminaries, best demonstrated the quality of 'excellence' in the world of hobby-gaming in the previous year. The winner of the Award receives the Diana Jones trophy.
The short-list and eventual winner are chosen by the Diana Jones Committee, a mostly anonymous group of games-industry alumni and illuminati, known to include designers, publishers, cartoonists, and those content to rest on their laurels.
Past winners include industry figures such as Peter Adkison and Jordan Weisman, the role-playing games Nobilis, Sorcerer, and My Life with Master, the board-games Dominion and Ticket to Ride, and the website BoardGameGeek.com. This is the eleventh year of the Award.
More information is available at www.dianajonesaward.org or at the Award's Wikipedia page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Jones_Award.
CONTACT
For more information you can contact a representative of the DJA committee directly: committee@dianajonesaward.org
Doomtown Prints on eBay
My son Marty's putting up more of my old stuff on eBay now that school's out. He just stumbled across a pair of art prints I'd forgotten I had. Paul (Prof) Herbert created this artwork for the Doomtown CCG back when I was still the president of Pinnacle. The first one features Eureka the dog holding a zombie arm with a pistol still in it. The second shows a zombie Eureka.
Much as I love the artwork, I never hung these in my house, as they're a bit too dark for my younger kids. They're part of a limited run of 500 prints, signed and numbered by Prof himself, and they each come with a certificate of authenticity. Marty thought these pieces were something special, so he asked me to post about them.
New Reviews
A pair of great reviews showed up recently. The first is for Star Wars vs. Star Trek, and Earl Davis wrote it for the Empyrean. He gives the book 4 out of 5 stars and writes:
It took one of our own, Matt Forbeck to shine an honest light on the subject and force us to laugh at ourselves… Forbeck pulls no punches, laying out lightsaber swipes and Vulcan Nerve Pinches with equal aplomb.
Over at Amazon.com, Darrin Drader tackles Amortals. He awards it a perfect 5 out of 5 stars. Among other kind things, he writes:
The story has the kind of action that you would expect from a Hollywood movie, but there's a very touching human element to the book that you simply don't find in a lot of action movies.
Thanks, guys!
June 14, 2011
Bid and Vote on ENnies Dream Dates
Once again, the ENnies (the biggest tabletop RPG awards around) will have a cocktail hour and award ceremony at Gen Con this August. As part of that, they've asked a number of industry folks to help raise money by auctioning off an arrangement to hang out with them during the big ballyhoo. The list this year includes Paizo, White Wolf, the 2011 ENnies Judges, Ed Healy/Rone Barton (Atomic Array), Erik Bauer (Gaming Paper), Evil Hat Productions, Hero Games, Monte Cook, Owen K.C. Stephens, Sean Fannon (DTRPG), Stan!, and me—even though I'm only able to commit to the cocktail hour due to conflicting plans later in the evening.
The auctions for Paizo and White Wolf are already up on eBay. For the rest of us, the ENnies are running a poll to see whose time should be put up for bid next. Go check it out and vote for me or whoever else you'd like to see on the block next. We'll all get there sooner or later, have some fun, and raise some money to help keep the ENnies running.
[Edited to add:] I don't recall if I ever publicly thanked Ben McFarland for his winning bid last year. We had a great chat at the ENnies about his burgeoning work as an RPG writer (check out Streets of Zobeck, for instance), but that was just part of a series of talks throughout the weekend, starting at the Diana Jones Award ceremony. Thanks, Ben!
June 13, 2011
eBay Burst
With school out, my son Marty is listed a bunch more things from the games collection in my attic on eBay. We also have a few things left from the collection of Liz Danforth up there now. If you're looking for old, good games cheap, be sure to check out our listings. He'll be adding to them regularly over the next few weeks.
You'll also help keep Marty too busy to play ding-dong-ditch on me while I'm trying to write, so that's a double bonus.
Hot & Steamy Review and Interview
Over at Steamed, Suzanne Lazear asked me to write a quick post about my story for Hot & Steamy: Tales of Steampunk Romance. In the post, I explain how the invitation to write such a story surprised me, but that turned out to be a good thing. Anything that forces you to stretch your creative muscles outside of your standard strolls seems wise to me.
Also, at the Main Edge, Allen Adams gives Hot & Steamy a solid review. This includes a shout-out to my story, "In the Belly of the Behemoth," which he describes as "a Civil War-era tale about a crazed Confederate inventor and the slaves he may push too far."
June 7, 2011
Hot & Steamy Out Today
Hot & Steamy: Tales of Steampunk Romance, the new anthology from Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg, hits digital and analog bookshelves today. It features stories from Donald J. Bingle, Maurice Broaddus, Tobias S. Buckell, Mary Louise Eklund, C.J. Henderson, Vicki Johnson-Steger, Dean Leggett, Jody Lynn Nye, Mickey Zucker Reichert, Michael A. Stackpole, Stephen D. Sullivan, Marc Tassin, Robert E. Vardeman, Elizabeth A. Vaughan, and C.A. Verstraete, plus one from me.
Despite the basic theme running through the anthology, the tales vary in particulars as much as their authors. My tale "In the Belly of the Behemoth," pits the slaves on a Georgia plantation in the midst of the American Civil War against their mad-scientist master and his steampunk battle machine. Here's a short sample:
Dusky charged toward the house, but before she got a hundred feet from Obadiah, she heard a shot ring out. She froze in her tracks and turned toward the barn. What she saw there made her scream.
Dr. Tucker stood there on his one good leg and his prosthetic one, dressed in his grime-streaked work clothes, which he'd had shortened on one side to prevent the fabric from catching in his fake limb. He had pushed his tinted goggles—the ones he always wore when welding his contraptions together—back on his head, toward his mane of graying hair, and he blinked out at the world with ice-cold eyes unused to being so exposed to the evening sun. He held a smoking gun in his hand, and it pointed toward Obadiah. He ignored Dusky, not sparing her a first glance much less a second.
"Put that filthy Yankee down, boy." Dr. Tucker strode toward Obadiah, who had not moved a single one of his bulging muscles. As he walked, the servomotors in the brassy replacement Dr. Tucker had built for his left leg whirred and clicked in sequence.
Whirr-click. Whirr-click. Whirr-click.
"I said, put him down." Dr. Tucker never raised his voice. He let his gun do all his shouting for him.
Be sure to track it down and pick it up.
June 6, 2011
Happy Birthday, Quads!
I had a wonderful, jam-packed weekend, most of which was spent celebrating the ninth birthday of my quadruplet kids: Pat, Nick, Ken, and Helen. It started off Friday right after school with a sleepover party with four of their friends and their big brother Marty, who was nursing a side pain that landed us in the ER on Thursday. (He's fine now, thanks.) This involved pizza, playing outside in the record-breaking heat (94F), making s'mores over an open fire, and camping out in the backyard.
The kids and their guests had a wonderful, wild time, staying up past midnight and then getting up at the crack of dawn. We dined on donuts and started playing again until the guests' parents came to collect them, except for one boy who plays on the quads' soccer team. I coached the quads' last soccer game at 11:30 AM, and we all came home to collapse for a couple hours before heading out to a friend's pool party, at which there was another cake with the quads' names on it too.
Yesterday—the quads' actual birthday—we spent relaxing and then visiting the kids' big present: our new dog. His name's Simon, a one-year-old Lakeland terrier who had been destined to be a service dog but will wind up with us soon instead.
It struck me hard that at nine years old my little ones are now halfway through their journey to adulthood and eventually leaving our home. Marty may only be here for another six years himself. It's been such a wild and crazy near-decade with the quads that I can barely imagine what the next nine years have in store for us, but I know that they'll go by in the same kind of flash: a mad scramble while you're in it that seems to have passed by in a blink when it's done.
One of the best parts of being a freelancer is that I get to set my own schedule and spend so much time with my kids, to be there for them and with them not only when they need me but even when they'd just like me around. Sometimes that might mean getting a bit less work done at the moment, but when they're grown and gone, how much would I be willing to pay to have that time with them back? Far more than I might be losing out on now, I'm sure.
I'm determined to savor every last one of these moments with them that I can. In that way, this weekend, as brutally fun as it may have been, was a huge success.
