Meanwhile, Web Urbanist offers up another slew and a half of apocalyptic visions, with lots of great (and horrific) imagery to back it up. I’ve had this tab open for more than a week. I just keep going back to it as I make notes for Razed.

Some of you might be thinking about getting me something, though I suspect a large percentage of you potential gift-givers are my parents, to whom this post almost certainly does not apply. Just in case you wanted to express your birthday wishes through generous materialism or filthy lucre, though, I am happy to oblige you with easy venues.

First, take note of this, my Amazon wishlist, and its atomic components: Max Headroom DVDs and a William Gibson novel. Don’t pay too much attention to the order of the contents, though. Lower items just mean, in some cases, that I’ve wanted the thing for longer.

Of course, I welcome unasked-for books and DVDs and games, as you no doubt have exceptional taste and, hey, who am I to pass up free stuff?

Or, in light of my upcoming and unexpected trip to PAX Prime in Seattle, you can just donate cash to keep me fed and drunk, or, rather, watered. Or rather drunk. I’m on a shoestring budget for this show, with big plans to donate blood (to get the cookies) and to rent myself out as an experienced Fiasco player. That these are terrible ideas, doomed to financial failure, should tell you just how ill-equipped I am for Seatown. So, equip me. Slip me ten bucks and I’ll drink coffee in your honor.

Here’s that donate button:

If you get me something, be it a nice comment here on the blog or a few dollars to eat in the Emerald City or some kind of spinning media disc, thank you for taking the time and effort to do that. Really. I make fun of my materialism (and my birthday, and my pauperism), but I appreciate you coming by the blog and reading what’s here, truly. That’s already some kind of gift to me, so thank you for that. Happy birthday, me!

But, seriously, I’m also out of cigars. I’m not saying, I’m just saying.

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.

It isn’t like peeling an orange. It isn’t like popping a walnut. Skulls are harder than I’d imagined.

How long do I have, now? I’m still here, enough to know this is wrong, but I love my wife and I love my kids and I want to hold onto those memories and for that I need a brain.

Someone is coming closer, hesitating, slack-jawed. I scream at him, meaning to send him words like, “Fuck off! This is mine! I caught this one!” but I think all I holler is noise. I’m not really there. I’m in my fingertips, scouting over the surface of this slick and bloody head.

I get the jaw in one hand, the head in another, brace the whole thing against my chest, and pull. Something gives. But no go. His mandible waggles like a broken toy.

With his head in my hands, hair sticking to my bloody fingers, I drag him to the curb. I stomp. Something is cracked, beneath the skin. I nip at skin like it’s a cellophane wrap. I get fingernails into the crack. I pull. Fingernail breaks. This brain, and maybe I’ll remember my wife’s name.

This is tricky because we had just reached the beginning of a new storyline when I found out I was moving, so I must turn what was meant as a beginning into an ending. My hope is that I can reincorporate some earlier material, calling back to dramatic questions and motifs from earlier in the campaign to give a bit of coherence to a campaign that has been, up until now, more about exploring oddball ideas and rules wrinkles, and less about strict narrative cohesion. I’ve tried to keep the story compelling and surprising (I’ve used a lot of tricks like flashbacks and dream sequences to keep the players guessing), but I’ve also been focusing mostly on scenes over stories. My interest has been in watching the players utilize the Gumshoe game system in actual play, above all, and in testing new mechanisms second. The story has involved a few shallow mysteries and a few big hints at the game’s core mystery (about which I will write more soon).

While we’ve also been playtesting the setting, I haven’t yet been incorporating the changes to the setting that I’ve been making in response to play. For example, I’m changing the motives and methods of two major alien factions for the next playtest campaign, but have left them unchanged in the Atlanta campaign for the sake of whatever coherence I can maintain here. The setting, so far, has gone through the biggest changes, and tomorrow it undergoes a major test.

Tomorrow, I reveal the cause of the apocalypse.

Up until now, that’s been an underlying mystery of the campaign, and tomorrow night I weave together some elements from the earliest playtest session of this campaign with some of the answers that at least one of my players has been looking for.

(I can’t tell you those answers yet, because they’d be potential spoilers for the setting. I’ll let you know why, and why not, in a forthcoming Razed diary.)

The challenge, though, as I sit here sketching out the hook and the spine of this final chapter in the campaign, is folding the story back so that it points not at the grand conflict of the game, but at the characters’ more personal conflicts. We have three interesting, very human characters in this campaign, and I’d like the story to have been about them… not about game mechanics. To that end, I’ve devised two intertwining spines—not the exploratory spine-map that Razed scenarios will more often use—each of which ends at an important and defining question for the characters. One question puts the players back in a familiar spot, the other addresses their future goals. Both involve dramatic choices that will imply the fate of the characters, if those fates do not occur “on stage” during play.

In actual play, it’s likely that I’ll tap both questions to ratchet up the drama and give the finale as much weight as possible. The two spines are specifically designed to react as fluidly as possible to player choices made early in the scenario, where things are more linear.

Along the way, I’ll also try to introduce one or two of the alien factions that I didn’t make much use of earlier in the campaign. This is like a cameo appearance for these monsters, which I somehow think will appear more real once I see a players’ real-life reaction to them.

It’s a shame to see this campaign end, but I’m sort of glad it’s drawing to a close, too, as it gives me this chance to tie up loose ends and provide a dramatic finale to things. It makes the scatter-shot play we’ve been doing to date feel a little more coherent, just by giving it an ending. It makes this feel less like an experiment, and more like play.

Music: The Prodigy, “Invaders Must Die”

Anonymous asked:

How do you balance between exploring what you want to do and what your audience expects from you?

Great question. For me, lately, it’s not one I have to actively deal with—I don’t think I have an audience that expects things from me, per se. (For me, the balance is between the projects I want to do and the projects that pay the bills, and it always tips towards those that pay.) One of my goals for the back half of 2010 is building my rapport with an audience and expanding the definition of “what I do” for those who are paying attention.

When I was running Vampire, though, I dealt with this problem every day—what I wanted and what the audience expected were not the same, I think—and, honestly, I’m not all that happy with how I balanced it. Truth be told, the issue was balancing what we could do on our timeline with what the audience expected with what the audience needed with what I thought would meet with the approval of people in-house. On Vampire, I was concerned with getting nods of approval from other in-house developers and they just weren’t coming, for a variety of reasons. But my need for validation helped me to make some bad calls, and if I had it to do again, I’d just design the most aggressive mix of wish fulfillment and utility I could muster for the end user. I wouldn’t defy expectations in hopes of surprising people into admiring me, because the truth is that for most creatives, the work is what gets the attention, not the creator. Which is to say, I don’t think I would balance what I want and what the audience expects—I’d favor what the audience wants. Sometimes (often?), that’s to be surprised.

On Vampire, expectations often came from the previous (and more beloved) iteration of the game, and I was struggling to defy expectations while satisfying audience cravings, and some of those battles involved choosing one or the other.

The requirements of a line like Vampire are curious. The audience expected, for example, covenant books, and we delivered them. But that doesn’t mean the books (or the covenants as they were described) were what people wanted. And, in that position, what I wanted had to come after what the audience wanted and what my bosses at White Wolf wanted, so I’m not sure that era really addresses your question either.

Someone like a novelist has to deal with this question more, and I’m dealing with it on my current novel, where “my audience” is a slew of potential agents and editors I hope to court. My goal, in this case, is to tell the story I want to tell while defying expectations about genre and first novels. My hope is that what the reading audience at large expects from me (the first-time novelist) is a good yarn; my hope is also to surpass expectations.

But expectations are dangerous beasts. How is an author supposed to measure them? On Vampire, we got different feedback from different venues—RPGnet, direct emails, our own forums, retailers—and we couldn’t please them all. And all that feedback still only amounted to slices of the audience. Estimating expectations is tricky.

Sometimes you just have to write what you want as well as you can and trust that there’s an audience out there for it. Then it’s up to the marketing to refine the audience’s expectations such that the work meets or exceeds them. If you’re cooking a steak, make them hungry for steak.

If the audience is the client who hired me, though, what I want to do once again takes a back seat (or sometimes opens the car door and rolls right out into traffic) to the audience expectation. As a working writer, what I want to write is sometimes not part of the equation.

So it isn’t always about balance. Maybe it almost never is.

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?

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.