GMing
Yet another THURSDAY LINK DAY!!!
- More DMing advice from Penny Arcade
- The movie Gattaca is being made into a sci-fi, police procedural TV show. Sound pretty cool!
- How we’ll cope (or not) with the Dollhouse cancellation – the 5 Stages of Grief. But, maybe we’ll get more Buffy?
- Setting up your Mac to play PC games.
- Michael Chabon on breaking out of genre and the role of fan-fiction in popular culture.
- What Stormtroopers do on their day off.
- Some guy at the Guardian reads George R. R. Martin for the first time.
- Robin D. Laws does a great real world RPG inspiration. Maybe we should change the way we do ours?
- i09′s take on what SFF books you might like if you liked some recent movies. It’s a cool idea, done well and the recommend some great books!
- Finally, The Onion A.V. Club gives us more geek fun with their New Cult Canon write up on Army of Darkness, a movie I have never seen but now really want to!
Race, genre fiction and roleplaying
Larry, at OF Blog of the Fallen, has written a really interesting post entitled ‘Whitewashing Diversity‘. It’s all about the lack of diversity in science fiction and fantasy writing and about the way that this is never interrogated, let alone noticed.
Too often in the SF that I have read (perhaps a couple hundred of books over the years, so it is very possible that I might not have read the right sorts of SF), way too often are the issues surrounding diversity/Otherness presented from the dominant culture’s point of view. While many SF authors over the years have taken great pains to avoid the “White Man’s Burden” point of view dominating their stories of First Contact, all too often the notion of “discovery” that creeps into these tales is that these Others (perhaps analogues for Africans, Asians, Latinos, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, etc. in US society today?) is that these “discovered” peoples (aliens) are ciphers, are often dangerous or at least potentially threatening, and that too often there isn’t a concerted effort even to “understand” these alien groups.
Run a Game at KapCon!!
KapCon is New Zealand’s biggest RPG convention and happens here in Wellington every January. It is two packed days of games and if you’re in the area, and interested it is well worth coming to. However there seems to be a bit of reluctance for people to GM games. So I’m going to do my bit to help pimp the idea.
I’m running three games. Derby of the Damned, Project Breather and A.C.O.R.N.. All of these are written up over at the site. Also to get more back ground nip over the The NZRag boards.