David Gemmell Award for Fantasy Shortlist Announced

I was late in discovering the fantasy works of David Gemmell. Even though Gary Gygax's company New Infinities published the first American edition of Gemmell's debut novel Legend (they published it under the title Against the Horde), it wasn't until 2001 that I'd even heard of the author. A friend of mine (Tom Wisniewski), a player in my regular D&D group, mentioned that his favorite author was David Gemmell and that Legend was one of the best fantasy stories ever written. Based on this high praise, I bought a copy of the Del Rey edition and was so enraptured that I read the book in a single sitting. It has been that way with every other Gemmell book I have read. They aren't uniform in their literary quality, but they are uniform in their ability to get you to turn the pages.

Gemmell isn't my favorite fantasy author, but he was a fine example of what a author in the school of Sword and Sorcery themed fantasy can be. Robert E. Howard was the founder of this particular sub-genre of fantasy which merges supernatural horror with some traditional fantasy elements. It is a sub-genre that has seen its literary qualities undervalued due to the frivolous hack work of some of its supporters/promoters. The key criminals in this regard are L. Sprague DeCamp and Lin Carter. DeCamp was a skilled fantasist outside of his Conan and Howard related work and without Carter's editorial hand modern fantasy would be lackluster today. Both of these men were deeply influential figures in the fantasy genre, yet when either of these men got their hands on a Sword and Sorcery tale of the Conan school all they could produce was hackneyed drivel. Comparing Carter's Thongor, or his Conan "collaborations," to the Conan tales of Howard is like comparing a research paper I wrote in 5th grade to one I wrote in Graduate school. DeCamp and Carter did yeoman's work in promoting the Sword and Sorcery genre, but both did great damage to the literary respect the average person believes the genre merits.

David Gemmell was a writer in the Sword and Sorcery school, in the best sense of the term. He was the most "Howardian" writer of his era, something he accomplished without writing Conan pastiches. Gemmell's tales featured the deeply individualist protagonists and supernatural horrors that the genre demands, but he added other narrative layers as well. Like Howard, and unlike many other Sword and Sorcery authors, Gemmell incorporated historical events into his fiction. Gemmell's Drenai saga contains many tales pulled straight from Herodotus, including the Battle of Thermopylae which forms the structural basis for Legend. Gemmell also incorporated a sub-narrative discussion of Christian morality and "just war theory," something I cannot attribute to any other Sword and Sorcery author. Yes, other fantasy authors incorporate such discussions, but they don't tend to be in the Sword and Sorcery genre with its anti-hero protagonists and often nihilistic worldview.

This isn't to say that Gemmell's fiction was a kind of Christian apologetics or that they were works of evangelism. His discussion of religion, war, and heroism is what one would expect from a man who could be described in the following way:

Expelled from school at sixteen for gambling, Gemmell entered the world of work with little in the way of vocational skills and drifted through a number of casual jobs. These included labourer, lorry driver's mate and nightclub bouncer, a profession well suited to his robust six foot, four inch frame.

He isn't writing books to convert anyone or to preach. The religion in his books puts a context onto the violent actions of his villains and protagonists. The faith of the Gemmell books lacks simple Manichean dualism. It is a world where even though miracles happen, there is still suffering and heroes wonder why such suffering exists. Gemmell provides no answers. It is as if he is writing through is own musings on the topic, he is discovering rather than dictating. It makes for interesting reading.

That said, Gemmell's works aren't books that are meant to be read as religious tracts, they are adventure tales where heroes battle powerful foes to protect the things they value. Sometimes the heroes are redeemed villains, sometimes they are citizen soldiers, and sometimes they are murderous avengers who may never be redeemed for their actions. Most of them are compelling, and the vast majority of them partake in exciting adventures.

Gemmell's fiction is the perfect combination of Robert E Howard and Michael Moorcock. His writing contains the rugged individualists of Howard, but it also has some of the irony of Moorcock. He is very much an author worthy of having his name attached to an award.

The David Gemmell Fantasy Awards, now three awards, have released the list of this year's nominees. It is a list full of very good fantasy by talented authors. You can see the full list below as well as in the embedded video.

Of all the nominees, I think that Graham McNeill's Empire (Time of Legends: Sigmar Trilogy) (an excellent media tie in novel set in the Warhammer universe) and Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold are the two that fall most within the Sword and Sorcery tradition, but I am a fan of Brandon Sanderson's fantasy and am glad to see that he received two nominations.

Please read this year's nominees, but if you haven't read any Gemmell do give Legend a try.

The 2010 Origins Awards Examined Part 2 -- Children's, Family, or Party Game

Tuesday, I gave a list of all the nominees for this year's Origin Awards -- the Hobby Gaming Oscars -- and included some closer examination of two of the categories. I was impressed with all the Card Game and Board Game nominees, but it was probably pretty clear that a couple of them held particularly special places in my heart. As I mentioned in the previous post, the Origin Awards (Awarded in June at GAMA's Origins gaming convention) are the gaming hobby equivalent of the Academy Award. Technically, the Origins award is the official award of the "Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design." The Academy is made up of both professional and hobbyists, and the nominee selection process has participation at the hobbyist, professional designer, and retail distribution levels.

This has been true for quite some time, and the public/industry nature of the award is one of its great strengths. Looking back at a February 1982 issue of The Space Gamer (one of the leading gaming hobby magazines of the 1980s) one finds a nomination ballot soliciting nominations from fandom at large -- a process that is not longer followed for a variety of reasons. In that ballot, the selection committee is described as follows, "An international Awards Committee of 25 hobbyists (some professionals, but primarily independents) directs and administers the awards system." I'll write more about the process in my post regarding the failure of some publishers to properly promote their work by submitting to the Juries this year in a future post. Suffice to say that the Academy is, and has always been, an organization of professionals and amateurs working together to ensure that the best in the hobby get proper consideration.

Today I'd like to take a look at another category. I'll be providing information about the Children's, Family, or Party Game nominees.

Children’s, Family, or Party Game

Are You The Traitor? – Looney Labs

As the Dice Tower review makes clear this game is a faster and more chaotic version of the traditional game Werewolf, a version that is significantly removed from the traditional game that inspired it. This is a game that has great potential for fun, or great potential for boredom depending on the group it is played with. One can imagine dynamic games where long conversation periods precede the accusation process, but one can also picture games where the accusations come so swiftly as to undermine the game play value. Typical of Looney Labs creations this game is very loose in structure and you need to consider the playing group that you are with before considering playing this game. One advantage this game has over traditional Werewolf games is that no players are ever eliminated from play. The winners of a round receive points and play moves on to the next round. This prevents any players from feeling left out as the game continues and is one of the great innovations in this adaptation.

Duck! Duck! SAFARI! – APE Games

Duck! Duck! SAFARI! is the latest in Ape Games duck! duck! series of games featuring a broad array of rubber ducky themed toys. SAFARI contains the rules and pieces for five different games, the rules for a sixth game have been added on the website, for players ages 6 and up. I am a fan of games like this, and Stonehenge, that offer gamers a decent bang for their gaming dollar. The package includes traditional race games and memory based games with excellent components. Besides, who isn't a sucker for things this cute?

Pack and Stack – Mayfair Games

Do you want all the panic and chaos of moving day, including wondering just how you are going to fit your giant library of games into the moving truck, without any of the back ache? Then Pack and Stack is the game for you. Mayfair Games has made a business of importing entertaining family games from Germany to the United States and this is yet another feather in their cap.

Ren Faire – Atlas Games

A few years back, Atlas Games released a wonderful little card game by the title Gloom which featured two wonderful game play innovations -- a requirement that to win you had to make the life of your opponent better than your own, and the use of translucent cards that layered effects on your base playing card. With Ren Faire designers Michelle Nephew and Wendy Wyman have found another way to create competitive play that doesn't feel competitive. Ren Faire is a game of Ren Faire noobs who are desperate to garb themselves in appropriate attire in order to fit in with the rest of the crowd. The game uses transparent cards to represent the clothing that will go upon your avatar, but to get those clothes you must play performance cards to earn the money to buy the clothes. This is where Nephew and Wyman's innovation comes in. Players must actually perform the actions described on the performance cards. This can lead to mayhem and amusement. Mechanically, this game is a perfect fit in Atlas Games line of non-rpgs. I have long considered their Once Upon a Time to be among the best games with regard to combining card games with performance, and now they have added another game to the list.

Word on the Street – Out of the Box Publishing

Ever since Out of the Box Games release their excellent Apples to Apples game, the company has been a leader in the independent Children's and Family game market. With Cineplexity, they demonstrated that they could make a movie trivia game with extraordinarily high replayability. Last year's release of Word on the Street once again demonstrates the company's ability to create trivia games with tremendous replay value. The goal of the game is to bring all of the letter tiles onto your side of the board by selecting a word based upon a category card, think Fact in Five, and pulling over every letter tile that the word contains one lane closer to your side. One twist, you have a time limit and when time is up you can no longer move tiles. You and your team must choose words that move the most tiles, but you must do so quickly and as the other team tries to distract you -- possibly by claiming that your word doesn't fit the category. Spend to much time defending the "legality" of your word and you might no move any tiles. The game combines elements of Scrabble, Boggle, and Apples to Apples to create an entertaining experience.

The Shattered Glass Project -- Jess Hartley's Fiction Foray into the Open Design Wilderness

A couple of years back Wolfgang Baur began a project that leveraged the hobby gamers' desire to support game designers they enjoy to create a revenue generating project taking advantage of the distribution possibilities the internet offers. With his "Open Design Project," Baur asked fans to become Patrons of role playing game adventures that he would design in collaboration with some patrons and distribute back to all the individuals who patronized his project. There were various levels of patronage that allowed for a greater, or lesser, role of creative input by the Patrons and also allowed for more individualized product offerings at the termination of a given project. For example, a high ranking patron would not only be allowed to have input on the content of the adventure, but would receive a signed copy of a printed version of the product as well.

Early in the process, the Patrons and Baur discussed whether finished products should be available for sale to the community at large upon completion -- perhaps after a given timeframe of Patron exclusivity. The answer was often some variation of, "No! We supported the work, we want to keep it special." Supporting a project often entailed a much higher price tag than is associated with buying a typical adventure at a hobby store, so the sentiment is easy to understand. This isn't to say that there haven't been projects "made public." Baur has done patroned work that was intended for public sales upon completion, and the vast number of Open Design bit torrents available has demonstrated the willingness of some patrons to completely ignore Baur's copyright -- and the rights of exclusivity shared by other patrons -- in order to make the "information free yo!"

In fact, it was upon seeing a group at my local gaming store playing an early Patron project that the GM announced proudly he had downloaded from a torrent that I cooled off on my patronage of Baur projects. I am still a patron of all of his projects, as of today, but the broad availability of torrents and my lack of time to participate actively has led to me reducing the level of my Patron status. I tend to be a mere "patron" rather than a glorious "Patron of the Arts," as I was in the past. Baur's project is inventive, and he is one of the better designers out there. He deserves your support, and not your scouring of the internet for a "freebie."



Speaking of deserving your support, on March 20th of this year Jess Hartley -- of White Wolf and other RPG design fame -- announced that she was beginning a patron supported project of her own. She calls the project The Shattered Glass Project and describes it as follows:

What is Shattered Glass?

Shattered Glass is a modern fairy (urban fae) short story, penned by Jess Hartley, which will be made available for a limited time, exclusively to patrons of The Shattered Glass Project.

What is The Shattered Glass Project?

The Shattered Glass Project is many things. It's an experiment. It's a work of fiction. It's a solution. It's a piece of art. And it's your chance to be directly involved in my work.

Why "Shattered Glass?"

Shattered Glass is the splintering of reality that happens when a person realizes that the world is not quite as they believed it to be. It is destruction, from which both damage and opportunity may arise. It speaks of magic mirrors and ice queens, of vandalized store windows and shattered windshields. It's the fragile nature of everything precious, and the value both of protecting that which we hold dear and knowing when to move on to something else when what we love is no longer good for us.

If you enjoy the thematic writing within the White Wolf gaming line, Jess Hartley is one of the writers who makes the flavor text of their games so engrossing. And let's be fair, it is the flavor text of the White Wolf games that helped them start a minor revolution that re-invigorated the role playing game hobby. For readers of White Wolf's flavor text, books and films like Twilight and Vampire Diaries are merely part of an existing obsession rather than new takes on older narrative tropes. As a contributor to White Wolf her work has been primarily within the re-imagined World of Darkness of the 21st century (if she contributed to the works in the 90s I apologize for limiting my credit giving to the more recent work), a re-imagining that broadened the scope of the line of narrative horror games. She has contributed to works within all aspects of the World of Darkness, but her largest area of contribution has been in the Changeling game line. In its 1990s incarnation, the Changeling game setting seemed mildly out of place. The game, with its focus on Faeries and the Fairy Court, seemed slightly out of place with the urban horror focus of the rest of the World of Darkness. With the re-invention of the line, and Hartley's contribution, in the 21st century version there is no longer room for doubt that Faeries can be as horrifying as Vampires, Werewolves, and "constructs."

With The Shattered Glass Project, Hartley is bringing her personal take on urban fae storytelling and I am looking forward to seeing the results. I have signed up as an "Artisan Patron." If I am going to participate in a Patronage project, I like to have something physical to which I can lay claim. I just don't trust that some other patron won't violate Hartley's copyright and make the digital version available beyond the "limited time." Which is a shame as all the revenue patrons contribute goes straight to the artist, which negates any "corporate overlords cheating artists" argument in support of piracy, and the virtual patronages are a very reasonable $5.

If you can't spend $5 to support an artist you admire instead of taking the product of their hard work for free, then you don't really admire the artist. Actions speak louder than words.

So if you are in mood for a -- possibly pretty dark -- modern fairy tale, give Jess Hartley's project a little support. I can't wait to see the results.

And Now for the Real AVATAR

From the looks of the second preview, the only problem with this adaptation of the excellent animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender is the casting.

Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of the best animated shows I have seen in quite some time, though Phineas and Ferb is on the list, and you can view some clips and a limited number of full episodes at the links below.

• Avatar Episodes
• Avatar
• Games

A-Team -- Second Trailer: Speaking of Things That Make My Inner 12 Year-old Happy

Tron as Advertised by Saul Bass

Readers of this blog know that I am pretty excited about the release of Tron: Legacy in 3-D this Christmas. I imagine it will be one of the first movies that my daughters and I watch together in the theater and sharing a small piece of my cherished childhood with my own children is something to which I am very much looking forward.

One of the things that I am interested in seeing is how modern visual techniques are going to transform the concepts that were presented in the original film. The original film was a visual tour de force. Its ability to translate computer concepts into beautiful visual metaphors was remarkable and the imagery in the film comparing the circuit like structure of the "internet" with the nighttime illuminated landscape of a modern city is one of my favorite transitions in all of film.

That said, after stumbling upon Hexagonall's Tron credits, and advertising, done in the style of Saul Bass, I have begun to wonder what a retro-remake of Tron done in the style of a Stanley Donen, Alfred Hitchcock, or John Frankenheimer would be like. Try and imagine the film that would follow these opening credits:

This is a movie that I'd like to see. In particular, I'd like to see how modern animators would face the challenge of doing a retro-remake that uses modern technology to achieve classic animation techniques. What animation style would be used to simulate the life within the computer? What would a retro-remake "innerverse" look like? What would the opening video game sequence look like? I don't know, but I would love to see it.

Wizards Announces Rollplaying for Roleplaying

As a part of their annual April Fool's "spoof product" tradition, Wizards of the Coast has announced the release of two "much needed" new products for any roleplaying gamer's collection with Roll-playing for Roleplaying and Dice-n-Wipes.

Of the two, Dice-n-Wipes is the more farcical as it pokes fun at the overly common superstitions of many gamers. The "karma cleaning" joke is one that has been done to the point where it has become almost dull, but the ad for the wipes is amusing in a way that adds a little freshness to the joke. I did find myself saying, "well, I could use these to wipe down my gaming mat." The fact that I found a real use for a joke ad was sufficient to make me laugh.

The ad that really amused me, though it pales in comparison to the brilliant My Little Pony role playing game ad from a few years back, is Roll-playing for Roleplayers. This product is also known by a couple of other names, The Amber Diceless System, Over the Edge, Vampire: The Masquerade "old school edition pre-diablerie roll-playing power creep," Bullwinkle and Rocky Roleplaying Party Game (an under-appreciated work by David "Zeb" Cook), and Wizard's own 4th edition Dungeon Master's Guide and Dungeon Master's Guide 2, as well as quite a few other products.

The point is, while it is an amusing joke to infer that a product is needed specifically to incorporate more "roleplaying" in a group that focuses on "roll-playing," the real irony comes from the fact that several products have been created specifically to produce this effect. Aaron Allston's classic Champions campaign product Strike Force is one of the best examples of a product of this type. Champions, like 4th edition and D&D in general, can easily fall into the "roll-playing" trap where everything is decided by die rolls and the "improvisational persona performing" that makes "roleplaying" so unique -- and is the aspect that Greg Stafford argues make "roleplaying" an artform more than a game -- can be abandoned for pure mechanics. The riff that D&D is "roll-playing" and not "roleplaying" is a riff as old as the hobby, and it is good to see Wizards have a little fun with the stereotype. The ad also takes a couple more self-deprecating jabs at Wizards; look carefully at the bottom of the book.



It just hit me that the joke of the book may be the fact that it is a book filled with rules that will better allow players to substitute "roll-playing" for "roleplaying" more fluidly, rather than the inverse -- which was my initial assumption. If this is the case, the joke is even better and more self-deprecating. What company in their right mind would release a product that intentionally provided rules designed to removed the "improvisational narrative" aspects of the game experience? Other than FATAL, Rolemaster, and Hero System 6th Edition I mean?