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.

Over on my Tumblr thing, Josh of Blue Ink Alchemy asked this question:

What makes the best supernatural fiction? How do you keep the paranormal fresh and interesting?

Here’s my rough-shod answer:

Oh, man, you put that word in there: best. That’s like a pile of C4 with wires running out all over the place. I’m afraid to tamper with it, afraid to even look right it. Fortunately you’ve provided me a second question I can use as an escape chute.

What makes the paranormal fresh and interesting is, to my mind, the same thing that makes interpersonal drama fresh and interesting after 5,000 years of telling stories: character and detail. The trick to making any story interesting is to get the audience to connect with it—that’s what interest is, I think—and characterization is how that’s done. I could say, instead, that conflict is how you get people interested, and that’s true, but I think to have conflict you need to characterize two or more sides of the conflict. In other words, Person Vs Nature isn’t an interesting story, but an angry cyberpunk lost in the last jungle on Earth is, because the two main forces have been characterized a bit.

Characters are like the sockets we can use to connect with the story; they need to be deep enough for our plugs to fit into. That, or it’s the characters’ hands that we hold on to as we climb aboard the moving train of the story. Pick your metaphor.

I used to think that situation was key, and it is for sure important, but I think characters are a vital part of situation. So often, when I’m cooking up situations, I realize that the characters are implicit parts of the situation—as vital as organs. For my story about a vampire stranded in an English country manor, trapped by curious and foolhardy Edwardians, I thought the situation was key: vampire trapped. (The same goes for my vampire-on-a-submarine story.) The reason you’ve never seen these stories, though, is because they suck a little bit, because I put too much emphasis on the situation and didn’t play up the extent to which characters are essential to situation. The situation was good, but my characters weren’t sturdy enough to hold on to. I think too much supernatural fiction expects the situation to do all the heavy lifting. I could be wrong.

As to freshness, I firmly believe the trick to that is in details. A vampire drinking blood is rote, but having him drink something else isn’t the only way to freshen the material. Details, in the moment, make things tangible and immediate in a way that always has potential for freshness.

Consider the vampire who uses a blade, maybe a carrot-peeler, to draw back a curl of flesh from his drugged victim’s throat. He laps at the running blood, probing the wound with his forked tongue, meddling with it like it was a gash on his own gums. When he’s done, he peels off a spot of soft electrical tape and adheres the curl of flesh back into its sticky groove. “Maybe someone will think it’s a wannabe vampire,” he tells his bloodsucking cohorts, “but at least they’re unlikely to think it’s a fucking vampire.”

A bit of detail—uncomfortable or cozy, familiar or strange—is the difference between repetitive, same-old storytelling and freshness. A story without detail is a stiff, dried-out thing, while new detail restores even old stories to supple life. Whether it’s a grainy old raisin with a stem like a tiny brown bone or a juicy grape that bursts when bitten, at least it’ll have that telling detail.

You can ask me questions via my Tumblr or in the comments here, to help me decide what to blog about next. Please?

Did you read this thing I posted on my tumblelog? I may be wholly foolish to even write this out loud, this call for perspective on the subject of mediocre stories, but it just sort of fell out of my head onto the page this way, and I’m not afraid to be wrong for a little while if it’ll help me be right in the future.

I missed the wedding of my friends Marty and Shannon this past weekend, because I couldn’t make it across the country in time. A damn shame, truly. I wrote this little toast to be read aloud in my absence. I’m sharing it here despite the risk that it might not work unless you’re on the inside of it. So it goes.

So I’ve been looking forward to this day for a long time, and I’m not about to miss it just because of something stupid like not actually being there. Thus I figured I’d write something and see if anyone would dare to read it at the reception.

Then I had to come up with something to write. Which is hard. It got so bad that I looked up “marriage” on Wikipedia.

Then I opened up a Word file and typed in the phrase “pause for laughter” three times. I figured I was halfway to a good speech by then.

Pause for laughter.

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After mentioning this all over Twitter and Tumblr yesterday, I forgot to tell you, dear blog readers, that my newest bit of writing is up at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. But now I have done that, so as you were.

This experiment, blogging a few times per day with little updates, didn’t go like I expected. I anticipated doing something a little more like what Warren Ellis does, obviously, but I never blogged the little doses of links and news that he does, for a couple of reasons. Some of them are better than others, but off the top of my head, here they are:

I assume you already know.

You’re connected. You read the Internet. What am I going to do, hit you with a dollop of entertainment news I got from CHUD or something I was alerted to via Google news? (I have a Google alert set up for the words “Tracy Jordan +ridiculous +disaster,” as you know.) You read all that stuff already, if you want to. I simply don’t think of myself on being on the cutting edge of Internet news, so I’m slow to share with you things that I find online because, more often than not, I figure if I’ve seen it, you have, too. I’ll post it when I have something more to comment on about it. Which is maybe less likely than it used to be, because…

I’m trying to be politically neutral.

It’s tricky to do lately, but I’m trying not to add muck to the Internet political landscape. I don’t see how me mouthing off about politics is going to do anything but cut away at my number of readers, so I politely keep my mouth shut. It’s not like I’m so informed, anyway. I’d rather not contribute to that background noise and I’m not sure my message constitutes a signal. For what it’s worth, my politics are in flux, anyway — I’m constantly reforming my opinions based on the newest tomfoolery.

I try not to post images without attribution.

A lot of the funny gags and things I get sent to me in emails and junk aren’t attributed, so I don’t post them here. (Warren Ellis has things sent directly to him by a friendly orbiting host of creative types, so his pictures tend to come with attributions already.) On Tumblr, where the de facto truth is that images will circulate, I sometimes bend this rule, but I prefer to aim credit where it’s due.

(By the way, I may try this broadcasting experiment over on Tumblr in a future week. You check that thing now and again, right?)

My work is often not my own.

A lot of my time and headspace is dedicated to projects that do not belong to me, leaving me unable to talk much about the work I’m doing. Warren Ellis works often (mostly?) on creator-owned projects, so he can share teasers and allude to what he’s working on or even share the things that are currently inspiring him. I often can’t do that because it might hint at this or that NDA’d project that doesn’t belong to me. So a lot of things I would blog about, I don’t. So it goes.

I save up posts for elsewhere.

Since I’m trying to write for a living (and I have an update on that, maybe, in the future), I have to consider every piece of writing that I give away. If I think I might be able to get a magazine article or paying essay out of a post, I shelve it. If I think it might fit better at Gameplaywright, where I post my general and specific gaming material, that’s where it ends up. It’s not that what I post here is worth gold, but it is true that the time I spend posting here is time I’m not spending working on something else. I’d like to post more of substance here, but when I’m writing without a chance of pay, I feel guilty — like I should be working. When I finish my novel and am trying to promote myself more as a writer, then I’ll have good reason to post more here, and write more like Chuck Wendig does, with daily updates.

It doesn’t seem that effective.

I didn’t net many extra hits or readers this week, near as I can tell. (Some metrics aren’t in yet.) Worse, I don’t think the extra posting volume did much to entertain anyone, which means it was probably time wasted. Live and learn. Perhaps I’ll try a few more broadcast weeks in the future, to see if there’s a change over time, but for the next few weeks I’ll just be too busy to keep this up.

I imagine it’s easier for Mr. Ellis to blog throughout the day because he has a steady feed of compelling, surprising, alarming material coming into his inbox — I also imagine it’s hard for him to get anything done with that steady feed of distractions coming into his inbox. I certainly don’t want to make it sound like he’s got it easy. I can only imagine how taxing it must be for him to juggle so many projects and maintain momentum. I have, as counted last night, eight live projects — including the likes of The Bones, Razed and Eternal Lies — right now and they are, collectively, a handful. Cheers to Mr. Ellis for juggling and blogging at the same time.

So. There that is. Be seeing you.

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.

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Here is some musing I did on the role and quantity of research necessary to write, as posted in this Story Games thread:

What’s the going rate for research-to-writing. How much do you have to read before you’re allowed to write about a place, and how much are you allowed to write per page read? How valid is a public, international notion of a place, compared to a place as locals view it? How fictional is fictional — if your characters aren’t real people, then they presumably come with fictional apartments and houses and fictional relatives and fictional histories? Once you start telling a story set anywhere, you start lying a little bit, and you start getting things technically wrong. How much verisimilitude is necessary to offset what’s fictional? Where do you find the truth that makes for realism, and how much of that is truth as opposed to accuracy?

I pose these as troublesome, vaguely snide questions, rather than answers, because I think fiction answers these questions, each in different ways, by having the gall to come into existence, for better or worse.

Or, alternately, sometimes a city is just a city — sometimes a city is not a character but just a collection of tree flavors and weather selected to be the painted backdrop to a tale. Sometimes a city is just an adjective.

Am I crazy?

Superstition proliferates among the powerless. When we have no control over our writing, over the machinery that enables us to sit down and produce work that we can like and be proud of, we voluntarily turn power over to muses and furies. We characterize the random surges of inspiration and assign made-up systems to the unknowable mechanisms with power over lives — because clearly something has power over our lives and it is not us.

To take command of your own writing, you have to demystify it. A certain level of mysticism may always surround the work, but you have to at least illuminate the switch that turns on the writing machine. You have to know how to begin. You need access to those controls.