Jason Morningstar’s Fiasco is a hell of a game. I could write a few thousand words here about how and why it’s wonderful but you’ve already read other great recommendations of it online. The best, most persuasive argument for the game is simply to play it with clever, thoughtful players, so go do that if you haven’t.

Since playing it for the first time, earlier this summer, I’ve written or co-written a few playsets for the game. Some of them are scheduled to see the light of day in the future. One, though, is so crazy that I think it requires playtesting and advice to be gathered from the Fiasco community at large, to make sure the damn thing even works.

All The Damn Time

This is that playset: “All The Damn Time”

(It’s a PDF file.)

Here’s the gist of it: Sam Howard is a man unstuck in time. Some kind of quantum-level shenanigans have him traveling to and from key moments in his life. But if one Sam Howard managed to mess things up the first time, who’s to say that even more meddling Sam Howards can make things any better? Will Sam improve his life by futzing with his own history or will he turn a life of perfectly ordinary mistakes into a paradoxical catastrophe?

Who plays Sam Howard, by the way? You all do. You play Sams from different points in time. Good luck with that.

To be clear, this is a terrible starter playset for the game. If you have never played Fiasco, do not start here. Pick almost any of the great Playsets of the Month from the Bully Pulpit Games website, or play one of the sets that come packaged in the game book. If you’ve played the game a few times already, though, and you’re willing to tax your skills a bit, I’d love to hear how (or if) this playset works for you.

(Now for some advice, right up front. The Relationships are specifically designed to work across multiple Sams, young and old, but the first group is especially suited for the youngest two Sams and the sixth group is specially designed to “wrap around” from the oldest to the youngest Sams. You can tinker and meddle with the possibilities, of course, especially if you want a smaller story with Sams separated by shorter lengths of time. It should work either way. Just remember that the Relationships are open to interpretation.)

I’d like to especially thank Jason Morningstar and Logan Bonner for looking over this set once already. If it sucks, though, it’s my fault.

Tomorrow night I run the last session of the current playtest campaign I’ve had going for Razed. The game is still in active development, but I’m moving cities and sadly leaving this play group behind, so I’m trying to wrap things up in a way that is halfway satisfying.

Read more »

So John Scalzi is hosting a fan-fiction contest, which you can read about over on his well-known and book-spawning blog, called Whatever. The gist of it is this: Write a bit of fanfic to go with a painting that Scalzi commissioned from artist Jeff Zugale. Let me be more clear: Write a bit of fanfic to go with a totally eye-blastingly awesome painting Scalzi commissioned depicting Scalzi as an orc and my friend Wil Wheaton, wearing his clown sweater, astride a kitten/hippogriff/unicorn thing against a backdrop of exploding volcanoes, all painted by artist Jeff Zugale.

The winning entry becomes part of a chapbook from Subterranean Press, which goes on sale as a benefit for the Lupus Foundation of America.

I don’t expect that this will be in the actual running, on account of I probably won’t submit it, but I gave myself 45 minutes or so to riff on the painting, and this is what I came up with. (And since I’ve been working in screenplay format a lot these past few months, it’s where my head’s at.) If nothing else, I hope this amuses you.

From Hyperbole and A Half, which I had never heard of before this comic, which landed right adjacent to my heart.

The Alot is an imaginary creature that I made up to help me deal with my compulsive need to correct other people’s grammar.  It kind of looks like a cross between a bear, a yak and a pug, and it has provided hours of entertainment for me in a situation where I’d normally be left feeling angry and disillusioned with the world.

For example, when I read the sentence “I care about this alot,” this is what I imagine:

Click for more

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that my old Vampire: The Requiem chronicle’s blog still up and hosted at a popular Internet blogging platform. I thought I might dig through it for some nostalgic fodder, as I’m pausing briefly to look back before I unveil some big news about moving forward, but the only thing I found in there of real substance was this list of 25 Vampire: The Requiem story ideas. I remember, I sat down and jotted down every two-word blood-related phrase or cliche I could think of in twenty minutes, and then went back and wrote a short synopsis for a Vampire story inspired by that phrase. Some of them still seem dramatically sound, for whatever that’s worth.

Curious? All 25 short synopses are after the jump.

Read more »

Look at this list of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories from Wikipedia. It makes me feel hardly qualified to have my own vision for a post-apocalyptic world, for Razed, looking at how many of these stories I haven’t read or watched. Granted, it’s one hell of a list, and I’m not sure that I need to see Transmorphers before I’m qualified to use my own imagination, but still. Staggering.

How many post-apocalyptic stories do I need to consume before I’m ready to conjure my own and, more importantly, inspire others to conjure theirs? It’s obviously a ridiculous question. The goal of Razed isn’t to allude to the maximum number of apocalypses. The true answer, I think, depends on how real can I make the apocalypse seem during play, and how viscerally scary — and freeing! — can that apocalypse be made to feel in the text.

So that’s my goal right now: to be visceral.

This episode felt like a lot of positioning, moving the pieces around so they’d be in place for the final stretch. It felt like a lot of middle to me. In both timelines, things inch forward, but the episode didn’t quite feel like it had a beginning, middle, and end in either timeline. Maybe that’s just me.

As always, I recommend checking out the Lostpedia entry for the episode, too. Tap the power of the wiki. And you’ve seen the articles in the new Wired, right?

And, as always, rethink reading ahead if you haven’t seen the episode.

Spoilers are with you now.

Read more »

As usual, if you want a genuine recap, you probably won’t do better than Lostpedia’s coverage of this week’s episode. I found this one light enough on subtext that I didn’t expect to have much to say. Then I wrote 1,300 words about it. Shows what I know.

Spoilers are the smoke thing.

Read more »

Took a half hour today to revise some of the category and tag management on this old blog, and moved comments around so that maybe they’re within easier striking distance near the end of posts. I’ve been told by prolific web users and knowledgeable designers that expecting people to scroll back up to the top of a post to comment is unrealistic, and I’m finally putting that lesson to use. (I’ve dabbled with these changes before, but have only now come up with a look and placement that I can live with.)

While writing this, Pandora has given me Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice.” You can go with this or you can go with that, indeed.

Something I won’t be doing: going back and adding tags to the 998 (as of this writing) existing posts here on the site. Some of them were tagged in previous lifetimes on Blogger and WordPress.com, but there’s no time and little benefit to re-tagging those posts, so I’m not doing it.

As it is, I’m pretty sure I only added tags so I could make the kind of tag jokes that John Hodgman makes on his imitation blog-like device — the same sort that are common on Twitter. Totally worth it.