The Last Days of New Paris (tiny review)

I enjoyed The Last Days of New Paris by China Mieville last week. It's a short novel, showing a brief period in a long Second World War: New Paris, 1950, where Surrealist manifestations stalk the streets, literal demons from hell stalk the manifestations, artist-freedom fighter Thibaut fights the Nazis and the Nazis do the kinds of things you can probably imagine the Nazis doing if they really were tapping into demonic and occult powers.
I know nothing about Surrealism, but the book certainly painted a picture with the descriptions of the city and the manifestations within. There's a fast-paced story with some neat mysteries behind the beautiful, almost-apocalyptic world that's presented. I think fantasy (and sci-fi)  novels work well when a lot of the work of understanding what things are is left to the reader. So when China Mieville starts by talking about "manifs" you instantly get that they are something weird, strange, maybe dangerous, and as time goes on you pick up their true nature. This drew me in, and has reminded me just how good a writer Mieville is. I've picked up Perdido Street Station to re-read on my Kindle some time in the coming months (it's a loooong time since I first read it).

If you're interested in art generally or Surrealism particularly then I imagine that there will be interesting things in The Last Days of New Paris. But you don't have to know anything: the book carries you along through the explorations of Thibaut and Sam. I was not expecting the book to go where it went, but was very glad by the end that it had.

There are tons of neat ideas for games here too. Literally drawing on the power of art, a Tarot deck that can be spent card by card for special abilities, invoking the concept of a branch of art, and the almost-golem-like exquisite corpse creature that Thibaut shepherds around - there's a lot to take away from this book!

Lamentations Of The Dogs In The Vineyard

G+ is on life support, so a few weeks back I trawled through every post I'd made in my 6+ years using it to see if there was anything that I wanted to archive.

I found about a dozen posts that were effectively blog posts I'd misplaced. One was an idea I'd loved but done nothing with. I think over the coming weeks/months/however-long-I-maintain-a-regular-writing-habit I'll expand on this concept and flesh it out as much as I can.

From a November 6th 2014 G+ post:

Prequel to Dogs in the Vineyard; early 1800s sandbox campaign in a largely unsettled counter-Utah; party are not-quite-Dogs; sent off by the church to convert isolated communities, make contact with the Mountain Folk and look into those odd reports of weird caves in the Border Hills.
BUT play with LotFP as base system (plus guns). Clerics are true believers, magic-users are the church's investigators into other stuff who are now a bit tainted, fighters and specialists are the useful novices.
And the weird caves are filled with things out of Lovecraft.

I'm a fan of the setting for Dogs In The Vineyard, and in the G+ circles that I used to read and the blogs I currently read I see barely a mention of it. I LOVE what the game is about, I love the idea of the Watchdogs and I think that Dogs is possibly Vincent Baker's best game - at least out of everything of his I've read. The game-setting-making process he leads the reader/GM through is magical. Going from simple prompts it steers your creativity without being prohibitive.

But while I like the basic stats and skills setup for Dogs, I found it really bothersome to keep on top of the dice pools. The rolls and re-rolls, the escalation. It could be tense sometimes, but at others it was just eight or nine dice on each side clattering and trying to find an exception as no-one backs down.

So why not mix a little Old School goodness in to the blend to simplify some of the mechanics? Why not use D&Dish stats? And since LOTFP has a system that uses equipment and assumptions about a similar background period of history, why not "simply" perform an RPG transplant operation?

Why not write about this in bits and pieces over the coming however-long-I-maintain-this-blog-yadda-yadda-yadda?

Why not.

Catz

I like The Black Hack, and I think The Cthulhu Hack is a good read for combining a simple ruleset with a bit of focused setting and tone. Of all of the *Hack products I've seen so far, The Cat Hack has hit me the most as a game that I want to run. In 16 pages you've got rules, a theme, some neat innovations around equipment, magic and more. The classes are really clever, and not just feline versions of fighters, rogues and so on. The Cat Hack stands out to me as something to be explored - you could read it once quickly and miss a lot. If you get it, take your time when you read it, there is a lot of really neat stuff in there.

I'm going to run it sooner or later; I have a particular setting in mind for a game of it though. I like The Walking Dead and real-world zombie fiction, and there's something neat in my mind of mashing that with The Cat Hack. The dead rise, the humans in a neighbourhood are scared and wondering what to do when Mr Jones starts snarling and chasing after his wife with blood running down his face - and a group of cats work to try and help their owners escape and survive. I've no idea where it would go in play, although I would lean on it as being serious rather than a comedy game (even though the PCs would be semi-mystical cats).

I want to find out how well it might work for a setting. I have a three week gap in my "working away" schedule coming up, so if I can find a good day there, I might try to run it on G+/Hangouts. Stay tuned, drop me an email or comment if you're interested.

And check out The Cat Hack: it's small and perfectly formed, interesting and innovative and it's $1.95 on DTRPG! Total bargain!

An Odd Idea: Mechsuit O.D.D.

On top of working on A Random Encounter I have an on-again/off-again relationship with a hack of Into The Odd set in a semi-hard sci-fi setting at the edge of the solar system. Into The Oort, if it ever gets finished, will have spaceships, zero-gravity derring-do, exploration of ancient human megastructures and centaurs. (really)

Despite having only so many hours in the day and enough creative pursuits already, my brain keeps saying, "Nathan! Hey Nathan, think about this..." I blame Chris McDowall: he wrote a game with a very easily hacked set of mechanics. This post is the latest "odd idea" that I've had... It has some blanks and some spaces which are currently boxed out with [] square brackets because I haven't got that far yet. But I think I will, sooner or later...

Mech suit by flyingdebris

d100 Ship Names for the Oort Cloud

Out in the Oort Cloud people use spaceships. Sure, you could have a lot of fun playing a game about asteroid mining, or what happens on the last human outpost, but for my money you can have more fun flying between different places and causing trouble looking for interesting things along the way. That means spaceships.

I've posted a work in progress idea before about what ships are going to be like in the game, both game-mechanically and setting-wise, but one thing I've not mentioned is names. I am a massive fan of the late Iain M. Banks. The names of the Culture Ships in his novels are astounding; I love the thought, the humour, the outlandishness and sometimes the way a name can make you go "Huh? Why that?" While the spaceships in Into The Oort are going to be much, much lower down the technology ladder than a Culture GSV, two aspects of their names are things that I want to follow: the ship classes and their names.

I'll follow up in another post about ship classes, but for today I want to share a starting point, d100 spaceship names. If you're playing Into The Oort you're free to do what you want, make some up, come up with a cool setting idea and have them be derived from that. Or you can use some of my names, from the list below the cut. And if you do check them out, scroll down to the end for another thing to expect from Into The Oort.

Setting Idea: Yippee-ki-yay!

On Sunday I saw Olympus Has Fallen, which was good in a pulpy, ridiculous sort of way. Good actors making the most of an overblown plot. It has been described as "Die Hard in the White House" which is a description that totally fits.

Last night I was watching an episode of Lost (don't worry, if you've never seen it I won't spoil anything) and there came a point where a character was crawling through a ventilation shaft. Something connected back with Olympus Has Fallen and the "Die Hard in the..." summary. Which in turn lead me to write "Game/Setting Idea: Die Hard in an abandoned castle/wizard's tower" over on G+.

So...