In the House, or hanging out in the shed for now...

Not content with one sporadic gig here, I have a first post up over at the House, probably the start of a weekly series looking at what the member blogs have been up to, and going off on tangents.

This one covers basing miniatures and how it can be seen as an element of roleplaying, plus a potentially hobby-shaking development in the understanding of what miniatures might be, then representing low gravity in games. There's some interesting discussion in the comments as usual.

It's also worth saying that if you're a blogger and not a House member, but you want a bit more traffic, have a think about joining up. The info's all here. There's no widget to add and the essay is just a joke, but you can play along if you feel like it. You don't even need to link back to the House or put up the network logo, but it might be neighbourly.

This could be especially relevant to your interests if you're primarily a roleplayer and the blog is listed with the RPGBA, which looks like ceasing operation in a couple of months.

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Choose-your-own-annihilation and cheese with peas

Pegboard left an interesting comment at Faeit 212 yesterday. Here's the essential part:

Tzeentch book has a table on every page. You start by rolling a d6 per page number and comparing it to the table. Your army then takes that many hits. Your opponent gets that many models back. If you roll an even number, you go back a page, odd, forward a page, roll more dice and then your opponent gets the special rules haywire and feel no pain.

It's a joke of course, presumably aimed at GW and a certain thinking on randomness and fun, but there's a radically conservative idea in there. Wargaming and roleplaying have long used tables for resolution, but they've fallen out of favour in the mainstream even if a business model based on large books of rules hasn't. Games like DCC still get good mileage, and there are the funky system-neutral tables at the The Dungeon Dozen.

Imagine this: a choose-your-own-adventure-style book of tables for use at the table, for gaming without randomisers like dice, but with more potential effects and less linearity, at least as many outcomes as table entries. Choose your action, check for contexts and apply the results, maybe jump. But not Student's-t-like distributions: there could be nested tables, option trees and 2D or 3D charts, even close-the-eyes-and-point pictures.

Wired-up Fighting Fantasy Necromunda in Itra's City

Of all the games you've known or loved, what fine fusions would you make if you could?

I wouldn't mind exploring the early version of Necromunda from GW's Confrontation, but in the form of a networked Fighting Fantasy gamebook that's still a paperback, borrowed from a local library - with dust, stains and the pencil marks of past players - using the resolution system from the Norwegian RPG Itras By, and all on a rainy British afternoon.

Here's some of the rich setting material, although Itras By would encourage reworking it.

Hive clusters are connected together by roads across the [ash] wastes and transportation tubes supported on pylons and suspended from cables. ... the landscape resembles a petrified forest entangled in the web of some enormous spider. ...

...

... The ash occurs in many different, often vivid hues such as sulphur yellow, citric green, cobalt blue, pink, mauve, as well as various shades of grey, and it varies in texture from fine dust to crystalline clinker. The creatures and nomads that live there are equally colourful ...

... A moderate ash storm will strip an unprotected man to the bone in seconds, and then reduce his bones to a handful of dust. ... Imperial scholars who have studied dust ecologies believe that there may be currents and tides within the ash surface.

...

In hotter weather, when Necromunda’s sun breaks through the planet’s cloud cover, noxious vapors rise up and form poisonous mists and fogs. Mists are invariably followed by toxic rain storms, laden with particles of deadly ash dust and other contaminants.

White Dwarf No. 130 (October 1990)

The aspects are all there, in the intricate lived-in tone and weirdness. I'm actually looking for a gaming equivalent to this video, a soulful blend of individually outstanding material...

The major sources used, or a close and relevant match otherwise, are this ("Silent All These Years"), this ("Down by the Water"), this ("Cover Me") and this ("Dissolved Girl").

If you're wondering how the metaphor shifted, it probably passed at least partly through the prism of Tadeusz Różewicz's "Draft for a Modern Love Poem", especially the lines:

...

a spring-clear
transparent description
of water
is a description of thirst
ashes
desert
it produces a mirage
clouds and trees move into
the mirror

Lack hunger
absence
of flesh
is a description of love
is a modern love poem

Gaming can also be seen as a kind of ensemble musicmaking, even lovemaking, with a good metre, a few riffs and plenty of flights of fancy, all kept developing with gentle cues.

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Peake and British gaming

A couple of interesting articles on Mervyn Peake, probably best known as the author of the influential Gormenghast series. One has reflections from four writers, among them Michael Moorcock and China Miéville, the other an interview with Peake's children.

Tied in with this are two posts on British gaming and its major influences. The first is by Chris at Vaults of Nagoh and focuses on the dungeon concept; some Gormenghast too. The second, by Coopdevil at Fighting Fantasist, has more emphasis on WD and GW, 

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Blog your own adventure?

Has anyone ever heard of a blog being used as a Choose Your Own Adventure-style gamebook? Something along the lines of TSR's Endless Quest series. A 'gameblog'.

It could be done of course, with the choices leading to different posts instead of pages. It might be best built up as a closed blog and made public when finished, in that it wouldn't be much fun as a reader to have to wait for the right post for days or even weeks. That said, because editing past posts is possible, a short adventure could be put up and developed with parallel routes or extra locations over time.

Adding in the combat elements of Fighting Fantasy would be simple too, and could even be done with gadgets. The linked narratives of the Lone Wolf series could be recreated by linking blogs. In fact, a project like this could span many blogs, with characters able to leave one narrative and join another when the opening comes.

Interesting idea, right?

Update: It's well underway now and the starting point is here.
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Sleigh bells and whistles

I've held off for long enough.

If you have an interest in the physics of Santa Claus - not just that physique - then Science In My Fiction has an article for you.

Wondering how he'd look to an Inquisitor in the 41st millennium? Possibly the definitive answer is set out at Warhammer 39,999 in a humorous text of mysterious origin.

Also for fans of 40K - and anyone with a hand in worldbuilding - the trusty Just_Me at Bell of Lost Souls has an interesting article up, on holidays in the Imperium.

And as if that were not enough, the long-awaited Killzone update has finally arrived at Galaxy in Flames - forget the presents under the tree!

There are also more Christmas gifts waiting for you at various generous blogs.

Field of dreams

I saw something a day or so ago in moving from blog to friendly blog even more haunting than usual. Here it is, at Fire Broadside! in the fuller spectrum, a very fine gaming blog.

How do you feel about that picture? It's not there by accident - games designers are smart people, whatever we might sometimes imagine. Games Workshop are UK-based, a land with an identity still rooted very much in the rural and a liberal approach to land access. If you've ever hiked over farmland, you might feel a field is a funny place, especially when blood sugar level is low, muscles ache and higher functions yield to lower. Do we sense in such moments echoes of the wonder and fear of the savannah?

Humans have cultivated the land for 10,000 years or more. That kind of acquaintance gets under the skin. We've had a lot of adventures in among the crops or bound up with them, from rolling in the hay to struggling with 'pests', 'outsiders' and 'landowners', all of which terms are wide of the mark. Remember this Fighting Fantasy gamebook? Is that a scarecrow? Scarecrows are uncanny, and a fantastical setting doesn't help. Or maybe not so fantastical after all - national identity is often bound up with an understanding of land, and the landscape in that last clip does look familiar. Then again, national feeling can be just as powerful even when freed of the land, as George Orwell shows us here.

Sting presents a sunnier side, or does he? Here's a better version in my view - Sting liked it plenty - by Eva Cassidy. The shadows are definitely there if the sun is shining...

It gets into wargaming too of course. A while back the guys at Tales from the Maelstrom ran a battle at an agricultural facility in the 41st millennium. That's over 50,000 years.

Snow blows in

Snow has fallen here too. Forget wintry mix - it's almost a blizzard. The freeze begins.

The dramatic and changeable climate was one of the features of Port Blacksand I loved most. (For more on the city and my feelings about it see yesterday's post.) Being a seaport, it was explained in Blacksand!, meant blazing sunshine could easily give way to a pea soup fog or heavy snow with little in the way of warning. Its weather anchored the city geographically, gifted it character and made Blacksand more of a living space.

The same was true for the setting of Games Workshop's Necromunda, the polluted, half-abandoned domes sunk deep in the base of the towering megacity Hive Primus.

The Outlanders supplement to the original boxed game contained rules for weather conditions and related events. Hazy memory tells me it had gales to topple gangers from walkways, true acid rain, electrical discharges, toxic sludge and the hivequake. The same book also featured a superb bestiary section, describing the Underhive's bizarre flora and fauna. My favourites were the ash clams waiting to snare the careless. As much as the evocative texts, all of this potential served to make the landscapes real.

If the game sounds interesting - it is - the latest version of the rulebook is available online or printed and bound, the current miniatures are here and the Eastern Fringe is a good place to find out more. Some older material may have gone, but it's not forgotten.

With winter setting in and our landscapes changing around us, the senses are caught unawares, memories grow vivid and imagination wakes. It seems the right time to ask: how do the games you play have you breathing the air of the setting?

Mapmaking merry (1)

Wandering the labyrinthine byways of the internet of late, I seem to have taken a lot of very right turns. Even without a map to guide myself by I've come across reams of maps. The one that set off this post was one that inspired me long ago. It was a city map...

Blacksand!

That's right, Port Blacksand of Allansia, star of the Fighting Fantasy solo gamebooks and Advanced Fighting Fantasy system. Do you shudder with pleasure, or fear?

I relived the memories at Brighton Roleplayers, specifically at their post on urban settings in fantasy. While you're there, check out Sigil too. Right up my alley. They have the map from Blacksand!, and if you want a list of streets, there's one here. (I've added this useful wiki to memory banks in the right-hand column.) We met the city first in City of Thieves, the solo gamebook, helpfully reviewed here at Fighting Dantasy.

But this only set me off. I think we all love urban maps, whether campaign maps, adventure maps or criss-crossed tabletops, for roleplaying or wargaming. So Porky went snuffling for new or lesser-known options, and presents a subjective selection below.

Mainly fantasy 2D

• Lots of map roundups at Carto Cacography, the latest with some real gems
• Plenty of dungeons and tunnels at Aeons & Augauries
• A couple of post-apocalypic at the Forumopolis

Mainly sci-fi 2D / 3D

• S6 Engineering have some modular road, canal and city block terrain
• Jawaballs is hawking copies of the latest Space Hulk with its superb boards
• Litko have space corridors of their own and industrial towers with walkways

Many genre / fantasy 3D

• WorldWorksGames offer a vast terrain range for printing onto card or pre-cut
• Painted or unpainted fantasy buildings from Custom Kingdoms, shown off here by Blue Table Painting
• Impressive new fantasy towers from Games Workshop, one ruined, one dividing out into floors

No dead ends there - a host of atmospheric destinations - but stay in the lamplight!

So what have I missed? What grand thoroughfares, cramped streets and dank alleyways do you frequent? More to the point, which would you like to?
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