Recently I returned to Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) after quite a bit of time away. It was the release of the Mac client for the game that brought me back—I’ve been hoping LOTRO would come to the Mac for a long time. Now that it’s here, I’m finding it fun and easy to dip back into the game now and again. (I’m not even high-enough level for the new Rohan content, yet, but I’m getting there.)

Back when I was last diligently playing LOTRO, or perhaps the time before that, I founded a kinship (like a guild) as a means of getting a private chat channel for me and my friends. I stewed and fretted over what to call the damn thing, though. I went back through quite a bit of Tolkien’s lore for Middle-earth, the expanded lore of the game, and thought about all the joke names for kinships that I’d seen come and go on my server. I ultimately decided that I wanted to be able to play with the lore a bit while also paying playful homage to LOTRO’s writing and quest design. I chose to call us the Boars of Evendim. (If you get the reference, please don’t spoil it here.)

I founded the Boars kinship years ago and many of its members have since scattered to the four winds of gaming. Even I tend to return to LOTRO in bursts, playing for weeks or months at a time, devouring content new and old, and then drifting away for a time. LOTRO doesn’t feel like homework or a time sink to me — I play it when I want to, taking to it like I might binge on a television series. Works for me.

When friends of mine came to the game, at least for a while now that the Mac client exists, I immediately invited them to join the Boars of Evendim. I wanted us to have a common chat channel. I also wanted a chance to experiment with more in-game roleplaying and try putting my backstory for the kinship into words. A few of these friends of mine are role-players with experience from both tabletop play and WoW. I wanted to get a better sense of how RP worked in the MMORPG environment… and I wanted to write a bit about Middle-earth. Instead of telling some of my friends the out-of-character reason for the Boars name, I promised to tell them the in-character reason for the name.

Then I promised again. And again. Then it felt like I’d need to actually tell a tale to live up to the promises I had made in-character in Middle-earth.

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Artist Steven Sanders has a remarkable talent for inventing things — imaginary, impossible things. His illustrations and designs allude to whole worlds.

When I worked at Atlas Games, and Steven was drawing things for our books as a freelancer, he once turned in an illustration that so captivated me that I wrote a complete comic-book script inspired by his vision of hieroglyphic holography. In the years since, I’ve always kept an eye out for projects where I could get a chance to work with Steven again. Thankfully, my in-final-development RPG project, Always/Never/Now, was one of those projects. Steven Sanders was the artist I trusted with the beloved characters of my best friends — and Steven brought them to life with his own brilliant combination of character design and technological understanding.

Now Steven Sanders aims to inspire everyone — the whole planet — with a new world of his own devising. The project’s called Symbiosis and the Kickstarter campaign is alive and well. (He’s providing art and updates to the world-building project via his Tumblr page, too.) With our help, Steven Sanders can make Symbiosis into a beautiful artifact of a rare book, a handsome e-book, and a Creative Commons world ready for us to play in through our stories, our games, and more — wherever we are.

Curious about the scope and style of Symbiosis, I wrote Steven with a few questions about the project from a writer’s and gamer’s perspective…

Will Hindmarch: The themes of Symbiosis serve as commentary on our real-world relationships with technology, but the world of Symbiosis looks as alien as it is tangible. Is Symbiosis‘ world ours in some other time or is this a wholly new place—a new universe—you’re creating?

Steven Sanders: Ultimately, this is something I’d like to leave up to the reader, but for me, it’s on a different planet or maybe the far far future. One of those “after our civilization has been destroyed and rebuilt” sort of things. Perhaps a different Earth in a different universe. A key component of the technology of Symbiosis is the “bio-ether.” The bio-ether shares a lot in common with the ether used in obsolete physics for models of mechanical gravitation. This bio-ether is generated by two layers of bacteria. One in the deep crust, and another in the stratosphere, near the ozone layer. The two belts create a sort of “pressurized” zone of bio-ether between them. This sort of thing isn’t on the Earth as we know it, so some adjustments are necessary to time or place.

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When I write, I put on music. When I play RPGs, I put on music. I don’t know anything about music, really, but here’s something I’m listening to.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory soundtrack

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is one of my favorite games. It’s cinematics haven’t aged great, but everything else about that game — from the writing to the level design to the line readings — sticks in my imagination with great affection. (I wrote about Chaos Theory at The Escapist back in 2006.) It’s a confluence of great designs. I relive that game, as I write and as I play, through Amon Tobin’s wonderful, gritty tangle of a soundtrack.

Noisy, often busy, and seemingly in a constant struggle with itself, I find Tobin’s Chaos Theory a fascinating thing. Sometimes it’s almost all atmospheric textures, like in the track called “Hokkaido.” Sometimes it’s a crazy clash of beats and sounds, like in “Kokubo Sosho Battle.” My favorite track is definitely the opener, “The Lighthouse,” with its killer bass action and creepy high-end strings working together to build a beautifully uneasy espionage vibe. The whole album plays with the game’s modern-ninja theme, too, weaving in motifs that put modern sounds at direct odds with some traditional music styles to generate terrific tension.

Some time after the Chaos Theory soundtrack came out, I stumbled on a remix album that I guess Tobin produced and assembled while my back was turned. This one emphasizes the mixed soundscape of the first album without quite stretching into exaggeration, thanks to new mixes by Kid Koala, The Qemists, Daedalus, and more. It’s an electronic collision of machinelike tones and fluttering electronica that sometimes sounds like beat-backed vocals coming through tinny mass-transit speakers. A rare sound.

Chaos Theory Remixes

In addition to the remixes — all of them energetic without sacrificing atmosphere — this album sports a couple of new tracks. One is Tobin’s game-menu music from Splinter Cell: Conviction. Another, called “Breaking Protocol,” does this thing where a plucked bass line picks up little electronic notes and then turns into a rough, ragged sound that calls to my mind a slew of dirty, low-rent spies walking in slo-mo. It’s playfully dark and dramatic.

These are great tracks for the likes of Spycraft and Night’s Black Agents, for sure. (I also play these a lot when playtesting the futuristic setting for my stealth-action RPG, codenamed Project: Dark.) These are mood-builders, great for establishing tension and menace. Pair them with John Powell’s Bourne scores when you need chases and fights or couple them with some big, driving Bond cues for a blend of grit and savoir faire, if you like.

I got Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory at the iTunes store. I got Chaos Theory Remixed at Amazon.

“Whenever the true objects of action appear, they are to be heartily sought. Enthusiasm is the height of man; it is the passing from the human to the divine.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson in “The Superlative” in The Century (February 1882) (via)

This is a follow-up to an earlier post here, “To Do What, Do What?” In that post, I looked at some of what made Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World (AW) a difficult text for me. I’d intended to write this post, looking at some of what makes Baker’s game exciting and attractive to me, much sooner, to share it as a counterpart to dispel some smoke and, toward fairness, draw some circles around some of what makes AW compelling and shiny to me.

Doing that briefly proved difficult.

The only reason this isn’t at Gameplaywright is that the first part was posted here, ’cause it was about me as much as it was about AW. So it goes.

I’ve taken the tack, here, of singling out just a couple of things I enjoy, for the sake of time, both yours and mine. By now I presume you, dear reader, care about AW to the extent necessary to read this stuff. If not, get thee to Google or wait for the next post. It’s coming along shortly.

So. What is it that I dig about AW so much that its mad elegance drives me crazy with envy? What is it that I wish I’d developed for games that I’m working on? I’ll pick just two examples: moves and principles.

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So, that happened.

As you can see in the sidebar (at the time of this writing), I launched the Kickstarter campaign for Always/Never/Now. It went live yesterday at 4:50 (Central time) in the afternoon in what I intended to be a soft launch. The actual “grand opening” would wait until today. I thought. It turns out, people didn’t want to wait.

Thus, I conclude, you’re wonderful.

Additional funding makes it possible for me to grow the size of the product, add on new features, and offer better compensation to the artists and designers who helped me make the Kickstarter video (thanks to Quantazelle for “Unlawful Furniture,” the track under most of the video!) or are working with me on graphical elements for the finished project. I’ll be posting updates on the Kickstarter page telling you about them. It also means I can devote more time to writing and laying out the finished product.

I’m also devising additional rewards and preparing the additional milestones I already had in mind. The response to the Kickstarter campaign has been stunning already—I didn’t expect I’d have to move this fast to keep up with interest. I’m flattered. I’m floored. I’m excited as hell.

So, please do give the campaign a look—and stay tuned for updates and news in the days ahead. We’re just getting started.

Music: Deus Ex: Human Revolution, soundtrack by Michael McCann