• John Scalzi, blogger extraordinaire and sci-fi author talks about how long it takes to get established in genre fiction. It’s an interesting read and remands me that if I haven’t started yet, I probably never will!
• There’s a new, George R. R. Martin edited, Jack Vance homage collection out entitles Songs of the Dying Earth and it’s prompted the New York Times of all places to print a lengthy homage of their own. I’ve never clicked with Vance, despite my love of the Vancian-style magic in D&D, and this article helped me realise why.

Intricate plotting is not Vance’s forte, but he artfully recombines recurring elements: the rhythms of travel; the pleasures of music, strong drink and vengeance; touchy encounters with pedants, mountebanks, violently opinionated aesthetes and zealots, louts, bigots of all stripes and boyishly slim young women with an enigmatic habit of looking back over their shoulders. His stories sustain an anecdotal forward drive that balances his digressive pleasure in imagining a world and the hypnotic effect of his distinctive tone, which has been variously described as barbed, velvety, arch and mandarin.

I’m afraid I’m all about the plots I’m afraid and writers for whom writing is primarily about the form of language have never appealed to me. The article’s a very good read though.

• Another thing I’ve never really got is steampunk, although I finished (and really enjoyed) Michael Swanwick’s The Dragons of Babel today and that has some steampunk elements. The Onion A.V. Club has a primer on steampunk which gives some pointers if you’re been interested but not known how to get into it.
• On the other hand I enjoyed the first two books of Scott Lynch’s as-yet-unfinished ‘Gentlemen Bastards’ trilogy as much as I’ve enjoyed any fantasy work in the last few years – they’re the sort of rollicking high adventure that makes me laugh and keep turning the pages. If you’re the sort of person who likes to wait till a trilogy is all finished before starting, you’ve got a bit more waiting to do. I’m hoping the wait is so the book is right not because Lynch has over extended…
• Finally the Guardian had some musing on fantasy fans recently as a result of the inaugural Gemmel Awards. To whit:

even SF fans have it easy compared to followers of fantasy. These are the people Red Dwarf fans sneer at for being nerdy. They are the zit-ridden little brothers of the SF geeks, whose even-less-healthy obsessions include trolls, giving Anglo-Saxon names to phallic weapons, and maidens with magical powers.

And to think this is an attempt to be complimentary. Sigh.

I will try to be better at getting these all up in a more timely fashion in the future. Promise.

Thanks for everything Dave – we’ve all had a great time with the games you helped invent.

Ace Comics & Games

This is the main gaming shop in Brisbane from what my thread on RPG.net told me. It’s up some stairs and not hugely well sign posted (the signs run out after the first floor). It’s probably 2/3rds comics with lots of trade paperbacks of all sorts.  There’s a little bit of minis gaming, some anime DVDs, a few cards and a couple of shelves worth of RPGs and all the major systems are covered. Basically it covers most of the things that people would want without having much in the way of really interesting or odd stuff. An interesting looking second hand shelf turned out to e almost entirely made up of reject d20 glut products although there was some old Dragon mags and even a copy of Pyramid from when it was print. I didn’t see any RPG stuff that I couldn’t get elsewhere pretty easily but did pick up a copy of DMZ vol. 5 which seemed really cheap. The staff were nice and obviously gamers – the whole time I was there, the guy behind the counter was talking about his D&D campaign. Overall, if I lived in Brisbane it would be were I went, but it’s nothing exceptional games wise if you have a decent shop at home.

Pulp Fiction

This is a sci-fi/fantasy/crime bookshop and it’s a goodie. I found it by accident on my one previous trip to Brisbane and got some helpful and friendly advice which lead me to read the wonderful Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold. So I was excited to get back there and it was as good as I rememebred. Basically it’s a small shop in an arcade stuffed to the gunnels with good genre books. I finally found a copy of Felix Gilman’s Thunderer which has been on my to-read list for a few months and saw lots of other stuff I’d like to buy. one of the things I like about Pulp Fiction is that it’s well-ordered, light, open and inviting. It looks like a professionally run place and there’s no stereotypical geekiness about it. I like that and I suspect Pulp Fiction will be a regular stop for me when I make it up here.

I trekked out to Kyle’s place on the other side of the city to play in his second one shot first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Gary Gygax memorial game. There was six players (including me) and all bar Phil rolled up characters on the spot.

Kyle has strong opinions about, well, pretty much everything. But his strong opinions about old school gaming are that you should do it properly. And properly in the case of character creation means roll 3d6, six times. In order. So no swapping around stats in order to make a good character, no rolling 4d6 and dropping the lowest. No rerolling unless A) your character is unplayable by the rules or B) your character is dead.

My first character was stillborn. With wisdom of 4 he was too silly to be anything other than a thief. Unfortunately, with a dexterity of 5, that wasn’t an option either. Back to the dice I went.

The second go was a bit better. In fact so much better, one of the other players accused me of bribing Kyle with the zucchini I’d brought him out of our garden. And so was born Wilgo, crazy hobbit thief (if I’m going to impinge on copyright, why not go all the way?).

We ended up with

• Mo – human cleric of the God of Goats, played by Ben
• Bo – dwarven fighter, played by Elizabeth
• Kagg – a human fighter with 1 hit point, played by Colin
• Erwulf – a decrepit human cleric of the god of the High Hills, played by Jon
• Li’lip – a second level elven magic user who had survived the previous Gygax Memorial Game, played by Phil
• and the aforementioned Wilgo

The idea of this was to have fun and not take any of it to seriously. Kyle facilitated this by setting us down in a village named Bob. As a result, I decided that Wilgo was an ‘emo’ halfling, complete with dyed black hair and bangs. His tagline was “you’ve heard of the Shire? I come from the Hood” and he named himself the Blingseeker.

Unfortunately, Wilgo didn’t lie long enough to get much bling. After a solo fight with a lone kobold, and a more difficult fight with a larger group of the same, Wilgo stepped on a caltrop and died, presumably of some horrible, fast acting infection. One of Kyle’s other rules was that a number of faceless adventurers were waiting outside the dungeon, ready to step in as needed and thus Zilgo was born. Zilgo was nearly identical to Wilgo in everyway, except with less money, worst stats and more hit points.

Subsequently Bo and Erwulf also met messy ends at the hands of the kobolds, to be replaced by characters whose names I forgot to write down! We made our way into the lower caverns, killed a basilisk and retired rich.

It was a good fun afternoon with a good group of people. I’m not sure I’d be looking to play like that very week, but I would definitely make the time to remember Gary again in suitable fashion. Looking over the above, I think that the game was more abotu the process than the story, such as it was. There were still some cool bits – a lake of breathable water with a damp cavern below stood out particularly. But it’s hard to recreate the humour and fun of the afternoon. So thanks to everyone for a good time!

In those early days I made up a lot of characters and read a lot of books. But that was the limit of my ‘old school’ gaming. So it was with some interest that I cam across the Quick Primer for Old School Gaming today. It’s a free, thirteen page download by Matthew Finch who wrote the Original D&D ‘retro-clone’ Swords & Wizardry and it goes into the differences between ‘modern’ gaming and ‘old school’ gaming.

I’d normally find this sort of thing slightly patronising and annoying, and indeed the Swords & Wizardry site has pretty strong elements of that, to whit:

To reawaken the hobbyist-gamer and put to rest the consumer-gamer, to break out of the miasma of RPG consumer-think, and to re-ignite the original wide-horizon view of fantasy roleplaying and its potential.

Blah.

But the PDF itself is actually a fairly fun and compelling read. It lays out different examples of play and how a modern game would run them and how an ‘old-school’ game would run them, with a modern game focusing on the skills and stats of the character sheet and the old school game focusing on the player’s imagination. One example searching a room – in the modern game the room is searched by a dice roll against the search skill and in the old-school game, it’s searched via role-play. As much as I hate to admit it, that’s been the way my modern games have gone sometimes and the Primer provided a quick way to reflect on that.

There are clearly some limitations to this – as Sophie would be quick to point out, a lot of the modern games she plays encourage exactly this sort of free-form roleplaying – yesterday’s 3:16 actual play is a case in point (it would be interesting to here how The Forge/Story Games crowd would react to being told that their games were really a return to the glory days of original Dungeons & Dragons!). But it’s clear what Finch is talking about here – old D&D versus new D&D – and so it’s silly to get too hung up on the limitations of his definitions.

I’m going to be playing in a first edition AD&D game on Australia Day for the first time in a long time and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m going to use the primer to get in the mood and frame of mind and hopefully it works!