Lowell doesn't dress up to run games anymore, unfortunately.I’ve started tabletop playing again, although it’s via Google Hangouts rather than in person. My brother (whose excellent gaming and storytelling blog, Age of Ravens, you should check out) running a Changeling: The Lost campaign and it’s a great way to spend a little time with both him and my sister-in-law, along with meeting some new fellow players. I really love what he’s doing, which is using a system called Microscope in order to collaboratively generate the setting for the game, and it’s making me wonder about the possibilities of it for generating a shared world setting.
We went around the “table” first generating some high level concepts, such as vampires being very rare in this world, the existence of neon elementals, and some rule-specific stuff that kinda flew past my head, but which I’m understanding more as I keep going through the rules. The game’s set in Las Vegas, but successive rounds helped define the specifics of the world and some of the NPCs, like Wayne Newton: Werewolf Hunter or the Count, a bitter, twisted man who runs The Society for the Preservation of Vampires. Lowell’s blogged with more complete details here.
I really love this sort of session, because it’s so much fun to take someone else’s addition and riff on it. After the first round, the person starting each one had to come up with what’s called in Microscope terms a “lens,” something that each addition that round must reference. Ours were: guides, corruption, and alien abduction, and if you look at Lowell’s write-up, you may be able to trace where some of those items came from.
Interesting. I recently went looking for a new set of RPG rules to replace C&S rules I used to run. Never heard of Microscope, and it looks intriguing, though I’ve never heard of a set of rules that doesn’t use a GM (sounds more like a wargame than an RPG, though I spent a couple of years running/playing in a shared Champions setting which amounted to pretty much the same thing).
Rule set I’ve picked up is something called “The Burning Wheel.” Generic system (not for a specific setting except is is fantasy, though another book is out which adapts the system to scifi) and I’m trying to adapt it to use my old fantasy setting, though I may have to “crash” it and build upon the ruins (I’m speaking literally, not figuratively). Character generation is kind of complex (it’s the one weak point I’ve seen brought up in reviews) but the system seems clean and simple. Still reading it, but I’ve already picked up the other three books the Griffon had for it.
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Seven Tips To Make Your Workshop Submission Better
It’s the time of year when people are contemplating submissions to workshops like Clarion, Clarion West, Odyssey, Taos Toolbox, and a myriad of others. Here’s seven tips to help with yours.
Don’t put it off till the last minute. I used to do this sort of thing too, in school, because it was always so satisfactory to manage to pull a good grade out of your butt. But one thing I’ve learned is that time spent planning pays off, even if it’s just taking the time to get a little bit done or outlined each day.
Read it aloud before you send it off. I can’t begin to say how helpful this is when catching typos and other glitches that make your submission seem less than professional.
Color between the lines this time. Follow the directions and don’t send a piece that’s longer than the guidelines say.
Get someone else to read it. If only for your own piece of mind. Have them read the copy you’re sending – that way if you’re sending hard copy, they’ll catch that missing page that somehow didn’t get collated.
Pick something interesting. A piece that shows you at your most adventurous and best, a piece that shows you’re willing to take risks.
Play to your strengths. If you do killer dialogue, choose a piece that shows that.
Pay attention to the statement of purpose and say who YOU are, not what you think the readers want to hear.
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In the last year or so, I found a genre that hadn’t previously been on my radar, but which I really enjoy: furry fiction. Kyell Gold had put up his novel Black Angel on the SFWA member forums, where members post their fiction so other members have access to it when reading for awards, and I enjoyed it tremendously. The novel, which is part of a trilogy about three friends, each haunted in their own way, showed me the emotional depth furry fiction is capable of and got me hooked. Accordingly, when I started reviewing for Green Man Review, I put out a Twitter call and have been working my way through the offerings from several presses.
Notable among the piles are the multiplicity by T. Kingfisher, aka Ursula Vernon, and two appear in this armload. Clockwork Boys, Clocktaur War Book One (Argyll Productions, 2017) is the promising start to a fantasy trilogy featuring a lovely understated romance between a female forger and a paladin, while Summer in Orcus (Sofawolf Press, cover and interior art by Lauren Henderson) is aimed at younger readers and will undoubtedly become one of those magical books many kids will return to again and again, until Vernon is worshipped by generations and prepared to conquer the world. Honestly, I will read anything Kingfisher/Vernon writes, and highly recommend following her on Twitter, where she is @UrsulaV.
Huntress by Renee Carter Hall (Furplanet), which originally appeared in 2015, and whose title novella was nominated in the 2014 Ursa Major Awards and Cóyotl Awards, is a collection of novella plus several shorter stories. I’d love more in this fascinating and thought-provoking world, particularly following the novella’s heroine, the young lioness Leya, and the sisterhood of the huntresses, the karanja.
Always Gray in Winter by Mark J. Engels (Thurston Howell Publications, October, 2017) demonstrates one of the difficulties with furry fiction, which is the reader’s uncertainty where to site the fact of furry characters, primarily whether to take them as a given or have some underlying science to it, such as bio-modified creatures. Here Pawly is a were-cat, but the unfamiliar reader is forced to spend so much time figuring out whether this is something people take for normal or not that the story sometimes gets confusing, and with multiple POV shifts, the reader keeps having to re-orient themself. It’s tight, sparse military SF that readers familiar with the conventions of the genre will find compelling, entertaining, and quickly paced; newer readers may find themselves floundering a bit.
The Furry Future, edited by Fred Patten (Furplanet, 2015) is a solid and entertaining anthology that showcases how widely ranging the stories that use the rationale behind the existence of anthropomorphic beings as part of the narrative can be. Authors in the collection include Michael H. Payne, Watts Martin, J. F. R. Coates, Nathanael Gass, Samuel C. Conway, Bryan Feir, Yannarra Cheena, MikasiWolf, Tony Greyfox, Alice “Huskyteer” Dryden, NightEyes DaySpring, Ocean Tigrox, Mary E. Lowd, Dwale, M. C. A. Hogarth, T. S. McNally, Ronald W. Klemp, Fred Patten, and David Hopkins with illustrations by Roz Gibson and cover art by Teagan Gavet. This book is one that scholars writing about furry fiction will want to be including on their reading lists for reasons including its focus, its authors, the snapshot of the current furry fiction scene that it provides, and the variety of approaches to anthropomorphic body modification.
Along with the furry fiction, I wanted to point to an indie humorous horror collection that is one of the most specifically themed I have yet encountered, Ill Met by Moonlight by Gretchen Rix (Rix Cafe Texican, 2016), which features evil macadamia nut trees, including “Macadamias on the Move,” “Ill Met by Moonlight,” and “The Santa Tree” in a lovely sample of how idiosyncratic a sub-sub-niche can get. The production values of this slim little book show what a nice job an indie can do with a book and include a black and white illustration for each story.
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Interesting. I recently went looking for a new set of RPG rules to replace C&S rules I used to run. Never heard of Microscope, and it looks intriguing, though I’ve never heard of a set of rules that doesn’t use a GM (sounds more like a wargame than an RPG, though I spent a couple of years running/playing in a shared Champions setting which amounted to pretty much the same thing).
Rule set I’ve picked up is something called “The Burning Wheel.” Generic system (not for a specific setting except is is fantasy, though another book is out which adapts the system to scifi) and I’m trying to adapt it to use my old fantasy setting, though I may have to “crash” it and build upon the ruins (I’m speaking literally, not figuratively). Character generation is kind of complex (it’s the one weak point I’ve seen brought up in reviews) but the system seems clean and simple. Still reading it, but I’ve already picked up the other three books the Griffon had for it.