Play Like A Pirate -- Or if You're Going to Talk Like a Pirate, Go Big!

In 2008, I began advocating that people should celebrate "Play Like a Pirate Day" rather than participate in "Talk Like a Pirate Day." My contention was that one of the most irritating things you can hear your co-workers say is, "Aaaargh, Avast, Ye Mateys" a couple times an hour in some half-hearted participation in a day of international live action role playing. Even worse are the inconsistent uses of "Yar!"

What makes it most irritating is the fact that these small offering of participation are lackadaisical at best.

I would rather my co-worker show up dressed in full "Age of Sail" apparel, blunderbuss and cutlass in hand, and charge into the office while staying in character as much as is possible for the day.  A wholehearted celebration of Talk Like a Pirate Day, I can get behind.  It would be fun, in the "employees showing up to work in costumes on Halloween" kind of way. You know... like when a person comes to work in their full blown Optimus Prime costume -- one where they can actually "transform" from robot to big rig.  Things like that create moments where you are truly impressed with your co-workers commitment. On the other hand, when your other co-worker shows up with only a pair of "cat ears" on and a mild scowl on their face, it's annoying. 

Most participation in International Talk Like a Pirate Day is of the cat ear type, and not the Optimus Prime type. That's why I still believe that it is time for the phenomenon to die. That doesn't mean that we should no longer have a day "celebrating" piracy and the outlaw attitude, or as the founder of Talk Like A Pirate Day called it "Piratitude." Pirates are still awesome (though not as awesome as Transforming Psionic Robot Pirate Ninja Dinosaur Mutant Demon Hunting Vampires), it's just that talking like a pirate that is lame. I think gamers, and geeks of all kinds, should lay claim the holiday and re-cast it as "International Play Like A Pirate Day." That way the costume role players can  cosplay pirate and other people can play pirate themed games, read pirate themed novels, or watch pirate themed films.

As I wrote a couple of yeas ago, "from now on September 19th will be a day when families and friends get together and enjoy some form of Piratical Recreation. Such recreation can include celebrating by talking like pirates, certainly role play (in the traditional sense) is play. Our celebration is inclusive, not exclusive. But families and friends will no longer be limited to listening to the 'yars' and 'aaarghs' of everyone around them. Some might choose more formal ludographic participation -- that's game play."

Here is a list of recommended activities for this year's festivities -- thankfully the Day doesn't fall on a Weekday this year:

1) Play a pirate themed roleplaying game. In particular, we recommend Pinnacle Entertainment Group's excellent PIRATES OF THE SPANISH MAIN. This is highly recommended for those who want to talk like a pirate. It encourages such behavior in an appropriate venue. Besides, by role playing (in the game sense) participants can act far more Piratical than is allowed under modern mores and laws.

If you want a more heroic bent with mystical aspects, you can always play Pinnacle's 50 Fathoms instead.

2) If you own a copy -- and not many do -- play an exciting session of the classic Broadsides and Boarding Parties

If you don't own a copy of Broadsides, try one of these two excellent pirate games from GMT Games.

3) Blackbeard: The Golden Age of Piracy. The game is a redesign of Avalon Hill's classic game of the same name. The new version is suitable for 1 to 5 players and has less "down time" for players who aren't in their current turn.

4) Winds of Plunder is a quick and fun game that is more in the style of the "Eurogame" than Blackbeard or Broadsides.

5) You can play the previously reviewed Sword and Skull.

6) Lastly, we recommend watching one of your favorite pirate films.  Personally, I'm going to watch CAPTAIN BLOOD with Errol Flynn today, and maybe a PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN film.

Or you can sing "For I am a Pirate King!"

Star Wars Anime? Sure. Why Not?

The Star Wars community has long been a creative force on the internet, and for the most part Lucas and Co have been very open to the use of the IP in fan created work.

I recently caught wind of a Star Wars anime project being tinkered around with on 4chan.  The project is far from finished, but this video gives a glimpse at the state of the animation -- the video I'm posting has sound that the /m/ animations lacked.

In all, I think that the animation looks good.  One thing struck me about this brief piece though, and that is how much it humanizes the Imperial Pilots.  The Star Wars films have always presented the Storm Troopers and Pilots as faceless and ominous archetypes -- and eventually as weak willed clones with subconscious "Orders" planted within their minds.  This artist, Otaking 77077, has given us a glimpse into the helmets of the pilots, and it changes the point of view in interesting ways.  I found myself rooting for the Imperials in this video.  It was an interesting sentiment to experience, as I'm used to the Empire as antagonists and not protagonists.

A part of me wonders if my point of view would have been different if the Imperials were represented with Zentradi skin tones or blue skin like the residents of Gamilon.

[Book Review] GIANT THIEF -- Where's the Likeable Rogue?

Easie Demasco is a character with whom I am conflicted. On the one hand, he is a witty character who has a well developed sense of humor. One the other hand, he's a jerk -- one who never really becomes more than a jerk. He's also the strongest and most compelling feature of David Tallerman's novel GIANT THIEF (published by Angry Robot Books).

GIANT THIEF is a fairly straight forward tale of:

1) Thief acquires MacGuffin not understanding it's value.
2) Thief meets people who understand value of MacGuffin and seek to use thief in battle against evil.
3) Well...you kind of know the rest.

Often these tales include a heroic journey or follow a bildungsroman format in which our Thief undergoes some major transformation or grows in some way -- usually evolving morally. Not so with GIANT THIEF.   Easie begins the story as a selfish and greedy rogue, and he ends the story as a selfish and greedy rogue with more grandiose plans than before.

Technically,  that does count as some kind of character development, but it lacks the moral evolution that often occurs in these tales.  Easie goes from a petty thief to an individual who seeks to become a master thief. He goes from pick pocket to one who wants to become a Thomas Crown-esque figure, but he lacks the sophisticated charm of a Thomas Crown and has instead a clownish sense of humor.  If one were to cast Easie for a film, one would look more to comedic talent than to cool sexuality.  He's more Daffy Duck than Han Solo.

There are quite a few clumsy moments in the book and the chapters establish and follow a  predictable rhythm. One is tempted to say that the book is one that isn't to be recommended based on these flaws, as they are often fatal to good storytelling. And yet...

I keep finding myself wanting to throttle Easie Damasco, or watch him get caned, or at least have a long talk with him to wake him up and set him on a more moral path. I keep finding myself imagining conversations with him.

All of which means that Tallerman has achieved something that is often rare within a novel, he's created a realistic character who lingers in ones mind weeks after a book has been read. That is a good thing indeed. If only Easie were more likeable. He's a rogue and a scoundrel...and that's it. He's not loveable. He's not nice. He doesn't harbor a hidden heroic heart. But he is interesting and I want to know more about him

[Gaming Notes -- Contains a minor Spoiler]

The book's MacGuffin and interpretation of Giants are perfectly suited for adaptation to the gaming table.  The MacGuffin is a non-magical stone sacred to the Giants that signifies who is the Giant's chief.  In Giant society the orders of the chief must be followed without question, even if they violate the morality of the tribe members.  The Giants in this case are gentle pacifist vegetarians, but they are asked to do some terrible things.  All of which could make for a compelling and morally complex D&D adventure.

You can play with PC preconceptions regarding Giants and slowly introduce them to the moral complexity of the situation.  How many Giants will the players defeat, or even kill, before they discover the secret of the stone?  How will they feel about their actions later.

These are good questions, that can make for a rewarding adventure as well.

[Gaming Library] Aaron Allston's STRIKE FORCE: A Must Own GM Resource

At the Origins convention in 1981 Hero Games released what would become one of the best selling super hero role playing games of all time, a game that is still around and which has served as the IP behind a  computer MMORPG.  That game is CHAMPIONSand it is one of the great games that the hobby has produced. 

CHAMPIONS has a large and active fan base, though it does seem to have dwindled a little between the 5th and 6th edition of the rules.  That dwindling may soon find itself reversed with the recent release of CHAMPIONS: LIVE ACTION and upcoming release of CHAMPIONS COMPLETE.  I've been of the opinion the past couple of editions of CHAMPIONS and the HERO rules have become a little bloated, and it seems that the designers behind CHAMPIONS COMPLETE agree as their upcoming rulebook is only 240 pages in total.  While much can be, and has been, written about the CHAMPIONS game, there is one supplement for the game that transcends the game itself and is one of the best "how to run a campaign" supplements ever produced...for any game system.

When CHAMPIONS was released in 1981, Aaron Allston worked for The Space Gamer magazine which was then a publication of Steve Jackson Games.  Steve Jackson returned from the Origins convention with news of the game and asked Aaron to review the game for the magazine.  Aaron did so and his positive review appears in issue 43 of The Space Gamer.  This article was quickly followed by a "proto-Strike Force" article entitled "Look Up in the sky..." in issue 48. 

In the article in issue 48, Allston describes how he came to be a CHAMPIONS player and game master -- he would later become one of its premiere contributors.

The superhero campaign of CHAMPIONS which I run, which is successful enough that it's been thrown out of TSG playtest sessions (it was crowding out all the other games), began as an irritation. Steve Jackson came back from Origins with the news that some new company in California had nabbed the name CHAMPIONS; I'd hoped to use CHAMPIONS on a personal game project.  I could review the Hero Games offering if I wished.  Wonderful.

 Looking over the rulebook, though, I was impressed.  The game appeared clear and coherent after a single read-through and seemed to faithfully simulated the four-color stuff of comic books.  Extensive solo playtesting ensured almost immediately, with the heroic Lightbearers waging a running war with the criminal mastermind Overlord.

In the end, Overlord's munitions-running scheme was wrecked; the Lightbearers disbanded, with one member dead and two others unwillingly allied with the villain; and I had chosen to run CHAMPIONS on a regular basis.

 There is a good deal more to the article in which Allston shares with potential players and game masters some guidelines and some pratfalls that might happen as one plays a super hero campaign.  How does one exactly acquire a super hero secret headquarters anyway?  One can see the foundations for the book STRIKE FORCE in the article, and Allston provides a nice glimpse into what can contribute to the running of a successful game.  As good as the article is, it pales in comparison to the CHAMPIONS sourcebook that Allston wrote based upon that early -- initially merely a playtest -- campaign.

Aaron Allston's STRIKE FORCE is one of the better campaign sourcebooks ever written.  It has a very simple arrangement.  It begins with a section on campaign use.  This section is not a how to plot an adventure section, as by 3rd edition CHAMPIONS had a pretty good chapter on that, rather it was advice for dealing with very specific problems.  This chapter covers the following:

• The "Character Story" -- discusses how to help players develop the character stories that they dreamed up when they initially created the character.
• Simulating the Comics -- discussed how to keep the players behaving in a four-color fashion.
• The New Player
• Aging the Hunteds -- How to make "Hunted" behave like real world constant interactions rather than as a mere random roll done each week.
• Listening to Your Players
• Ground Rules
• Translation Follies
• Types of CHAMPIONS Players -- The Builder, The Buddy, The Combat Monster, The Genre Fiend, The Copier, The Mad Slasher, The Mad Thinker, The Plumber, The Pro from Dover, The Romantic, The Rules Rapist, The Showoff, and The Tragedian.
• Character Conception Checklist
• How to Ruin Your Campaign

If Allston had written no other sections than the "types of players" and "how to ruin your campaign" sections of the sourcebook, this would be an invaluable resource.  Allston's breakdown of player types builds upon some of the discussions which had been going on in Different Worlds magazine and other places in the game-verse, but his clear description of the varied motivations of players is spot on and extremely useful.  Between STRIKE FORCE and Robin Law's book on Game Mastering Rules, you have almost everything you need to run any game successfully...if you follow the advice that is.

In addition to the overview on Campaign advice -- generic campaign advice -- Allston then continues providing an invaluable tool by giving us a look into his own campaign in the subsequent chapters of the book.  We are given an "Abbreviated History" of the STRIKE FORCE campaign, which can be used as an example or as an outline for one's own campaign.  He provides the full roll call of the STRIKE FORCE and SHADOW WARRIORS teams as well as Independent heroes and a number of Villains from the campaign.  This is followed by a detailed history of the campaign -- both his real world work and the in game history.  In the history, Allston shares some of the storytelling challenges he faced and how he overcame them in play.

If you can find a copy of the book, I highly recommend it.

Being a Parent Can Be Heartbreaking

Last night I spent a wonderful evening with my lovely 4 year old daughters History and Mystery.  They had spent part of the day coloring with Jody and had shifted from one creative activity to another, namely dancing.  Both of the girls had turned on their electric keyboards to play pre-recorded songs, neither in sync with the other, and had begun dancing with the free and unselfconscious joy that only young children can truly manage.

It was a beautiful scene to watch, and was one of those glowing moments when as a parent you feel on top of the world.  That natural high was about to take a severe drop...as you might have guessed from the title of the post.

As happens every night, and too quickly every night, the clock ticked past seven and thus initiated parenting subroutine 8.(e).D.7.1.(m).3.  That's right, it was bedtime.  It was time to take a quick bath, brush teeth, read stories, and sing a bed time song.  None of this was out of the ordinary.  There was also what appeared to be the typical groaning about how either History or Mystery had yet to finish some entertaining task, which usually amounts to "but Dad...Ironman needs to go defend the castle" or some similar activity.  This evening though, History was upset that she hadn't been able to finish coloring the pictures she had been working on earlier in the day.  Jody and I assured her that there would be plenty of time to color them tomorrow, maybe even when mom was working on some drawings of her own.

That's when it happened.  Mystery looked right at Jody and then at me and asked, "Why am I not an artist like mom?  I want to be an artist like mom."  I immediately felt as if, Mola Ram had reached into my chest, pulled out my heart, and left it burning in his hands laughing maniacally.  I was stunned for a moment as I tried to find a way to tell a 4 year old that:

1) Yes you can be an artist like mom.  You can be anything you want to be.
2) That some things take time to learn, and show her how she was more comfortable drawing and coloring now than she was a year ago.
        a) I'm not one to tell History or Mystery that they are now "better" at a task like drawing and       
            coloring at an age when they should be experimenting and feeling free. 

The books on parenting provide wonderful advice, but they don't do anything for the sinking feeling one feels in ones chest when a child expresses disillusionment at a perceived limitation.

Ugh.

Cubicle 7's Yggdrasill -- Gaming in the Norse Epics

As a fantasy fan and a gaming fan, I am always on the lookout for fresh ideas in both areas.  It never ceases to amaze me how often the freshest ideas come from looking back and returning to "primary sources" instead of using only the most recent works for inspiration.  For example, I have found reading the "The Bonestealer's Mirror" by John C. Hocking in a recent issue of Black Gate Magazine to be far more entertaining Sword and Sorcery fare than the staid stacks of post-Conan "Thud and Blunder."  This kind of looking back is why I find the stories of C.L. Moore or Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions (even with its total cop out of an ending) so refreshing while I find a good deal of modern fantasy to be played out.

This isn't to say that "older is always better," far from it.  It is only to say that when writing in a tradition, it is often useful to go back to a font closer to the origin as the water of ideas there is often cleaner and has more room for the writer to invent new ideas.  It is easier to adapt Beowulf into a Western than it is to do the same to The 13th Warrior for example -- due to the added commentary that 13th Warrior is making regarding the time in which the story takes place.

It is often said that the fantasy role playing of role playing games is Tolkienesque, that all fantasy rpg campaigns are to some degree adaptations of The Lord of the Rings.  There is some truth to the statement, though plenty of exceptions, as most fantasy rpgs have their elves, dwarves, and halflings.  They have their Rangers and their Thieves.  They have their dragons and magical rings.  At least enough of them do that the argument isn't entirely an insane one to make.  It also means that many games that could otherwise be great -- due to interesting mechanics -- fail to succeed and become Fantasy Heartbreakers.  Fantasy Heartbreaker is too often a term used with derision, and it oughtn't be.  Fantasy Heartbreakers are "heartbreaking" after all, they are the underdogs that we root for that ultimately failed in their goals.  Too often those goals were to incrementally improve on the existing state of gaming, too often they are just making a "better version of game x that came out last year."  They have too often forgotten the truism that I began this post with, "often the freshest ideas come from looking back and returning to "primary sources" instead of using only the most recent works for inspiration."

Cubicle 7's Yggdrasill does what these other works often fail to do, it reaches back into the annals, into the very things that inspired Tolkien himself, to create a rich milieu for fantasy role playing.  To say that Yggdrasill is a beautiful product is an understatement.  Like Cubicle 7's excellent Tolkien licensed rpg The One Ring, the graphic components of the game are top notch.  So too is the writing, the translation, and the structure of the book.  The game knows where to begin.  If you want to create a game about the world of the Sagas, then you had better set the tone quickly, and this game certainly does that.  It begins with an original piece of fiction, and follows with numerous quotations from the Völuspa.  The game captures the feel of its setting very well.  By looking to back to the Eddas, the game has created a rich milieu for storytelling and game play. 

As for the rules themselves, they are simple to explain and easy to understand.  They are also informed by a couple of different eras of gaming -- they seem to have a touch of Greg Gorden-esque (Deadlands, DC Heroes, James Bond 007, and others) elegance to them.  How much?  I cannot say yet, I want to see these rules in action.  One can review the physical and narrative quality of a game merely by reading it, but one can only truly review the rules after extensive play.  I will say this for Yggdrasill, it makes me want to play it and the information on the world is enough that even if the rules fail the book itself is still an asset.

History, Mystery, Orcus, and Cthulhu Greeting Cards

Today has been a crazy day, but from the moment it began I knew that it was the day that I would have to launch my new Kickstarter project even though I haven't finished editing the pitch video.  Don't worry, I will finish that soon and I'll be adding a couple of rewards.

I knew I had to launch the project when my daughter Mystery who was cheerfully playing with one of my Balor D&D pre-painted miniatures ran over to the shelf where my limited edition D&D mini Orcus was lying and brought him to the breakfast table to "play with his friend."  I don't know exactly what kind of games that Orcus and his pal "little Balor" play together, but I do know they include Aurora from Sleeping Beauty and Silvermist from the Tinkerbell series among their closest friends an playmates.

Who knew that Aurora and Silvermist went for the "bad boy" type. Watch out Prince Phillip.

It was the perfect combination of cute and terrifying and I took that as the sign that the time was right.

You see, I've been planning to release a Cthulhu Claus Holiday Card project for some time now as one of the offerings of the business my friends Wes and Joel formed with me last year.  Our goal is to create a number of gaming and gaming related products with an overarching aim of building community and expanding the scope of the hobby.  I think that the Cthulhu Claus Holiday Card project fits that mold perfectly.

I hope that its mix of Lovecraftian imagery adapted by the humorous hand of my wife Jody Lindke -- the first woman to win the prestigious Charles Schulz Cartooning Award -- with the spirit of the Holiday Season will make a great gift for gamers and for non-gamer pulp fans alike.  Ever since I first saw "All I want for Solstice is my Sanity" video and read through Tor's December belongs to Lovecraft blog entries, I've wanted to do a Lovecraft themed Christmas product.  The only thing I lacked was the funds to launch such a project, and now with Kickstarter I have that opportunity.

Of course, that also means that the success or failure of this project is up to you.  If you want this product, please back my project.  I promise that there will be more rewards coming -- original artwork anyone? -- and that we will have stretch goals.  Help me make this happen.