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Posts Tagged ‘gaming’

a question for the gamer types

As you probably don’t know, Bob, kniedzw and I are running a Dragon Age game right now, using the Pathfinder system. A couple of our players have decided to go into business — they basically staged a hostile takeover of the trading contracts belonging to a certain noble house, since they knew in advance that said house was about to go down in political flames.

So now we’re trying to work out how to handle the business in a way that will make it rewarding and worth the investment of skill ranks/character effort/etc, without flooding the game with so much money as to completely unbalance things. I have some ideas for how we might do this, but I also know this is something other people may have dealt with in their games, so I thought I might as well toss the scenario out here and see if anybody has suggestions.

For context, these are level 5 PCs, so average character wealth is roughly 10K-11K gp. There are two PCs involved in the business. They took out a loan to foot the bill for buying out the contracts; we haven’t specified how much money that was, since the whole economy of D&D is borked in the first place and putting numbers on things would only highlight that fact. What I’m aiming for is a) some way to measure the scale of their enterprise, b) some way for them to draw off limited amounts of cash as profit, based on that scale, and c) some way to link the maintenance and growth of the business to their skills. (One PC has Profession: Merchant, and the other has a wacky good Diplomacy score.) As I said, I’ve got a potential framework in mind, but I’m interested in other ways of handling it. Thoughts?

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/591454.html. Comment here or there.

Books read, March 2013

I almost posted this yesterday, because really, as such posts go, this one is a joke. I did many things in March, but reading books? Not really one of them.

Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett. Returning to my leisurely saunter through swan_tower Finally Reads Discworld. I have now been properly introduced to Sam Vimes, previously encountered as a minor character in Monstrous Regiment (before I started reading things in order). I like him, though not as passionately as some people seem to — possibly I will grow more attached in time? I liked Sybil quite a lot, and the reflections on how her brand of confidence is both personal and class-based. I was mostly meh about the bad guy’s scheme, but on the whole, much fun.

~~the memoir that is still untitled~~ Re-reading the second book of the series preparatory to revising it (which is what I’m in the middle of doing now). It still needs a title. I will have to fix this soon.

Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne, David Gaider. Read for research, as kniedzw and I have begun running a Dragon Age game. Not really worth your time, unless you are a rabid completist for that franchise. It offered little in the way of worldbuilding information I didn’t already know, and, well. This is David Gaider’s first novel, and boy howdy does it show. Hopefully he improves with the later ones, since I need to read those, too.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/581287.html. Comment here or there.

update on the Togashi Dynasty

I just sent in a draft of my L5R chapter, after beating my head bloody against it for the last week or so. Note to self: when estimating the amount of work involved in writing a chapter for a game book, word count on its own is not an adequate metric. This is not, repeat, not like writing fiction. It’s more like writing your undergraduate thesis.

I even have a bibliography. 4th edition books consulted in the writing of this chapter: core, Emerald Empire, Enemies of the Empire, Great Clans, Imperial Histories, Book of Air. Books consulted from previous editions: Way of the Dragon, Creatures of Rokugan, Legend of the Burning Sands. Also the L5R wiki. 4th edition books not consulted: Strongholds of the Empire. (And Second City, but that’s because my gaming store doesn’t have it in yet. Otherwise you bet your ass I’d have been eagerly looking up just what an Isawa Archaeologist does.)

Now I think I need to go feed myself and maybe drool at the TV for a little bit while I wait for my brain to regrow. I need it for some of these other projects whose deadlines are breathing down my neck . . . .

fun with wuxia

I’m in the brainstorming stage of ideas for my L5R chapter, and so I put it to you, o internets:

What are your favorite wuxia plot tropes?

I’m thinking specifically of the more mystical end of things — more The Bride with White Hair than Hero, but really, anything in that general direction. I need to invent some history for this chapter, and I need some fuel to get my brain rolling in the right genre. (Feel free to recommend movies I might enjoy, while you’re at it.)

my first gaming credit

It’s no secret that I’m a gamer. RPGS, both tabletop and LARP, are one of my main hobbies; they’re also what I studied in graduate school. I’ve written academic papers on the subject, and grew a novel series out of one of the games I’ve run. From time to time I come up with system hacks for running games in particular settings; when I was playing Changeling, I wrote an entire splatbook’s worth of material for Mesoamerican fae.

Some of you may recall that a while ago, I started messing around with an alternate history for the game Legend of the Five Rings. I stopped posting about that because shortly after I began, the guys at AEG announced that they would be taking submissions for Imperial Histories 2 — that is, proposals for chapters on various eras of Rokugan’s past.

Including alternate histories.

Last night, I got an e-mail telling me that my proposal for “The Togashi Dynasty” has been accepted, and will be included in the volume.

This pleases me greatly not only because, hey, sale, but because I love the chance to broaden my horizons and publish something in a new field. And L5R is a great game, with a rich setting and a devoted player base — as evidenced by the dozens of submissions they got for IH2. I think writing this chapter is going to be a lot of fun, and I look forward to seeing what’s in the rest of the book.

The Wheel of Time Roleplaying Game

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome.]

To fill the time between now and the final spate of WOT analysis (which is currently scheduled to begin in September, but that’s assuming the January pub date for A Memory of Light stays put), I bring you: the Wheel of Time Roleplaying Game!

(Core book only. I did not pick up Prophecies of the Dragon, the sole expansion published before they dropped the line, though I have read a summary of it. The material in it is considered non-canonical anyway.)

Ground info first: this is a d20 game, published in 2001 (between Winter’s Heart and Crossroads of Twilight) meaning it dates back to the brief heyday of third edition D&D — third edition, not 3.5. Since WOTRPG has its own world-specific set of classes, the revisions made to the class system between editions don’t much matter, but the skill system is the old mess, lacking not only the simplifications introduced by Pathfinder, but even the improvements of 3.5. (“Intuit Direction” is a skill!)

Before I dig into the grotty details of the system, though, I should talk about the presentation of the book itself. As is usually the case with merchandising of this sort, it doesn’t appear to be entirely certain whether it’s trying to market itself to fans of the books — who already know the world, and are itching to imagine themselves as the Dragon Reborn or whatever — or to lure in outsiders who might then become enamored of the world and go pick up the series. Frankly, I’m always dubious of the latter approach: did anybody really say “oh look, another generic-looking d20 epic fantasy supplement!” and rush to play it? Everybody I know who bought or played it (which isn’t very many people) was already a fan — the sort of people for whom the “fast-track character creation” makes sense, because they already know what an “Aes Sedai Accepted” or “Runaway from the Stedding” is, or for whom it’s interesting to see Rand et al. get statted. And yet, there are little one-page potted descriptions of the Aiel and so on, and a worldbuilding section that explains all the countries of Randland, rehashing information fans already know.

Those are the same people for whom the art is going to be infuriating. Instead of the familiar map, we get a less sophisticated redraw — I guess they weren’t able to license the rights to the old one? — featuring place names like “Tamen Head.” Um, yeah. And the character images . . . well, let me just show you the Wise One apprentice:

Don’t you love her dark skirt, white blouse, and dark shawl? Or how about the Cairhienin noblewoman, with her striped skirt?

I know this is probably stock art purchased on a budget, but sheesh.

Actually, the art is a good lead-in to my main point, which is that d20 is an abysmal system for running a WOT game. It is, in fact, the stock art of the gaming world: cheap and easy to get, but bearing at best a vague resemblance to what it’s supposed to describe.

First: general mechanics neepery.

The Togashi Dynasty, Part Two: Before the Clan War

Okay, so you have the alternate history for the founding of Rokugan that I laid out in my previous post. Where do you go from there?

Another sidebar in Imperial Histories mentions that Hantei didn’t have to step down and let his son Genji become the Emperor. What if he’d gone on ruling forever, as an immortal kami? Well, that’s more or less what happened with Togashi in canon: every Dragon Clan Champion until the Second Day of Thunder was in fact the founding kami, under a series of aliases. So you could easily have the same thing here, not even bothering with the cover story. Emperor Togashi just goes on ruling.

Since a) he’s canonically very reclusive, because of the way his gift of foresight works, and b) we’re aiming for mystic weirdness here, I figure he withdraws more and more from Rokugani society as the years go by. People almost never see him; ise zumi or other members of the two Imperial families (the Mirumoto and the Agasha) carry out his orders, or relay them to everybody else.

Until the dawn of what is, in canon, the Gozoku era: the late fourth century.

(I’ll take a moment here to acknowledge that really, if you go changing something as major as the Emperor of Rokugan — and therefore the entire shape of Rokugani society — you should logically end up with a highly divergent AU, not the same historical events reworked. But that would mean really re-inventing the L5R wheel, and besides, I think it’s fun to keep filtering canon through this lens.)

So how do you get the Gozoku conspiracy when the Emperor is an immortal kami with foresight?

Short answer: because Togashi foresaw it, and let it happen. Man, it’s hard to deal with a powerfully precognitive character, and not have them come across as a total dick.

The Togashi Dynasty, Part One: Founding

I’ve said before that the setting for Legend of the Five Rings is really well-developed, such that you can have all sorts of fun messing with it. The most recent book for the fourth edition supports this in interesting ways; in addition to giving all kinds of historical info, it has sidebars scattered throughout, suggesting AU scenarios that might have resulted if events had gone differently.

One of those concerns the founding of the Empire. Canonically — for those who don’t know — nine kami, the children of Lady Sun and Lord Moon, fell to earth (and one of them fell through the earth into Hell, where he became corrupted). The remaining eight gathered mortal followers and held a tournament amongst themselves to decide who would rule this realm. Hantei won, and the other seven founded the Great Clans, and that was how Rokugan got started.

The sidebar in Imperial Histories asks, what if a different kami had won?

It gives a few sentences for each of the other kami, reminding you of their personalities, and outlining the general flavor that would have resulted if Doji or Hida or whoever had set the tone for all of Rokugan. The one that caught my eye the most was this:

If Togashi had been destined to defeat Hantei, he would have built an Empire far different from anything imagined by his siblings — a place of mystery and enigma, where religious contemplation and individual enlightenment were the highest goods. A GM who wishes to make Rokugan closer to the sort of mystical martial arts setting depicted in many Asian films might find a Togashi Dynasty suitable to the task.

Granted, I am playing a Dragon PC (a member of the Clan that kami founded in canonical history), and a Togashi monk to boot. But I think those lines would look shiny to me even if I weren’t, because I’m a fan of movies like The Bride With White Hair (which is the first example that leapt to mind). And so my brain immediately started playing with this notion. How could you redesign L5R for a timeline in which Togashi won?

I’m splitting this into at least two parts because the more I think about it, the more interesting notions come to mind. Everyone, and L5R geeks in particular, are invited to hop in with comments and suggestions. For this first part, I’ll start with the founding of the Empire and the Great Clans.

Trying to minimize the amount of stuff you have to design from scratch, with mixed success.

A folktale for Legend of the Five Rings

We had another session of our L5R game on Sunday, which astute readers will recall was April Fool’s Day.

The Togashi monks — of which my character is one — are renowed for doing kind of weird and/or inexplicable things. Clearly I needed to play a few April Fool’s jokes in character, right? Unfortunately, I’m not much of a prankster, and by the time I thought up this idea, I was already at FOGcon (meaning my brain was well on its way toward being fried). The only trick I managed to come up with in the end was to give the Ikoma libraries a text they did not have, namely the Book of the Cricket: the world’s tiniest scroll, detailing the many calamities that should have killed my lucky cricket but haven’t. (And I do mean tiny. I had to use a magic tattoo to be able to see well enough to write it, and the Ikoma had to use a pair of spells to copy the scroll and then enlarge the copy before they could read the damn thing.)

But because my brain can apparently do folklore in its sleep, I did come up with a story for why there is a tradition in Dragon lands of playing tricks on the last day of the month of the Dragon. For any interested parties, I give you the tale of Chibuta and the passing of winter.

In the earliest days of the Empire . . . .

Proud to be a Dragon

Warning: the following post will not make the blindest bit of sense unless you’re familiar with Legend of the Five Rings. If you aren’t, please continue on to the next blog post. Thank you for your time.

***

So in our session tonight, one of the PCs — a Shosuro trained in the Bayushi courtier school — goes with our NPC companion to hunt down this Yogo who’s wanted for a crime. In the course of questioning the peasant innkeeper, she realizes he’s lying. And, being a Shosuro, she opts to subtly intimidate him into telling the truth, rather than backhanding him across the face for lying to a samurai.

A Crane in the common room of the inn overhears this. He’s a Doji trained in the Kakita dueling academy, and is trying to make a name for himself as a duelist, so he comes over and starts blustering to the Shosuro about the way she’s treating this innkeeper — basically ginning things up into an offense so that he can challenge her to a duel. She (very rightly) calls him out for eavesdropping on somebody else’s conversation and butting into business that isn’t his, and so thoroughly upsets him that he tries to slap her. Whereupon the NPC companion — a Mirumoto bushi from the Iron Mountain school — steps up and rams the butt of his katana into the Doji’s ribs.

Stuff and things, we run and get a magistrate to okay the duel (to first blood only), the two guys face off. This could go badly, because the Mirumoto is a great skirmisher, but is much less experienced at dueling. The Shosuro, however, has told him that his opponent has the Brash disadvantage, so the PCs and their NPC companion are doing all kinds of little things to needle the Doji and put him off his game. Which we succeed at well enough that a) he basically false-starts, gets bashed in the ribs again, and has to be ordered back into position by the magistrate, and then b) he continues with his strike even though the Mirumoto went first, and the duel is therefore supposed to be over. But he misses — not because he meant to, but because of the damage he took from a certain now-broken rib and the first cut — and so it’s an all-round disgrace for the Doji.

And this is where things start to get fun.

homebrew system for Dragon Age

Tossing this out there for the gaming geeks to play with: I think you could run a Dragon Age tabletop using the Pathfinder system.

(I know there’s a DA-specific system out there. I haven’t heard very good things about it, and particularly object to the way each book only covers five levels, requiring you to buy four books to have a “complete” game. True, Scion did something similar — but they also did a remarkably good job of putting other worthwhile content in all of their books. Very few companies pull that off.)

I figure that, at its core, you make warriors into fighters, rogues into . . . uh, rogues, and mages into sorcerers. A spells-per-day system is rather different from the mana-based system of the video game, but on the other hand, the video game is wall-to-wall combat, which a tabletop game wouldn’t be. (And this opens up the potential for mages to have spells useful for any purpose other than nuking people. Seriously, one of the great flaws in DA worldbuilding is that as near as I can tell, mages are only good at killing and destruction — there’s no peacetime use for their magic, with the lone exception of healing, that would allow them to be anything other than a threat to society. And how often do you see them out in public, healing people?)

The nice thing about Pathfinder is its (relative) adaptability: if somebody wants to play a Dalish hunter, say, they could play a skirmisher — a ranger without the spellcasting abilities. You can customize the differences between a Dalish Keeper and a Circle mage by using the sorcerer mechanics, but letting them pick from different spell lists (like druid and cleric), and also by picking different bloodlines. You can toss in some Traits to vary things a bit more, too. And then specializations you model with prestige classes: borrow the barbarian rage mechanic for berserkers, maybe some paladin mechanics for templars, cook up something for blood mages, and so on.

You’d have to tack on a few additional rules, like something to handle demonic possession or action in the Fade. But I think this would strike a decent balance between accuracy and simplicity: it comes vaguely close to the feel of the actual game (with level-based advancement, feats as talent equivalents, etc), while not requiring vast amounts of untested modding to make work. (I originally thought of modding it a lot further — replace Charisma, Intelligence, and Wisdom with Magic, Cunning, and Willpower; make d20-style mechanics for the talents in the game — but that rapidly became a nightmare of effort.)

I haven’t played Pathfinder very much yet, though, so I don’t know if there are improvements or problems I ought to think about. Any thoughts from the peanut gallery?

con updates

First of all: I regret to say that I will not, after all, be going to ICFA this year. It’s the week before FOGcon, and doing both back-to-back last year was really draining. Add in the fact that I’m already heavily booked for cons and other appearances this year — not to mention that it costs a lot more time and money both to get out to Florida, now that I’m on the West Coast — and I’m just going to have to pass this year.

I’m delighted with my schedule for FOGcon, though. They haven’t posted the panel descriptions yet, so all I have to share with you are titles, times, and panelists, but these look pretty good:

Judging a Book by the Girl on Its Cover – Friday, 3:00 p.m. (Jaym Gates, Marie Brennan, Jean Marie Stine, Elsa Hermens)
Equal Time for Non-Vampires – Friday, 4:30 p.m. (Mickey Phoenix, Anaea Lay, Marie Brennan, Jaym Gates)
Roll 1d6 on the Plot Hooks Table – Saturday, 8:00 p.m. (Marie Brennan, Steven Schwartz, Gary Kloster, Alec Austin, Alyc Helms)
Mutations/X-Men – Sunday, 1:00 p.m. (Ian Hagemann, Katie Sparrow, Marie Brennan, Naamen Tilahun)
Reading – Sunday, 1:30 p.m. (Marie Brennan, David Levine, Phoebe Wray)

Plus the writers’ workshop, which I’m doing with David Levine and Cassie Alexander.

I’m particularly looking forward to the “Plot Hooks” panel, which is about the relationship between gaming and fiction: Alec and Alyc are both in my writers’ group, Alyc is running a Pathfinder game Alec and I are playing in, and the gaming history between me and Alyc . . . it goes back twelve years, if you count the jerry-built Changeling game she ran during Castell Henllys field school, which led to me playing in the Bloomington Changeling LARP, which led to me running Memento, which led to the Onyx Court series. To name just one example.

Think we’ll find anything to talk about? 🙂

for those with an interest in LARPs

My friend mikevonkorff has been doing a series of posts about live-action roleplaying games — their design and execution, what players look for in a game and how they pursue it, etc. Chewy stuff, especially since a lot of his commentators are part of a circle that has played a bunch of games together, but I’m coming from a totally different gaming community. Makes for some very enlightening comparisons.

I’m taking a particular interest in this because kniedzw and I are likely to be running a one-shot LARP based on Changeling: The Dreaming in a few months. (If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, will be around Memorial Day weekend, and think you might like to play, drop me a line.) I haven’t done a lot of LARP-running, so it helps to watch other people talk about the stuff you need to consider, and the different ways those topics can be approached. Especially when those people do things very differently than I do.

Anyway, if you have any interest in the topic, check his posts out. And feel free to jump in, even on the older posts; the more perspectives, the merrier.

I’ve been sitting on this for a month

I’ve worked with Ekaterina Sedia (squirrel_monkey) twice before, on “Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics As Employed Against Lycanthropes” (in Running with the Pack) and “Coyotaje” (in Bewere the Night). Now that I have the go-ahead, I’m delighted to say that I have sold her a third story, this one without any shapeshifters in it whatsoever: “False Colours,” a novelette in her upcoming anthology of YA Victorian romance, Wilful Impropriety: 13 Tales of Society and Scandal.

You can read more about the anthology here. The table of contents looks pretty awesome:

THE DANCING MASTER by Genevieve Valentine
THE UNLADYLIKE EDUCATION OF AGATHA TREMAIN by Stephanie Burgis
AT WILL by Leanna Renee Hieber
STEEPED IN DEBT TO THE CHIMNEY POTS by Steve Berman
OUTSIDE THE ABSOLUTE by Seth Cadin
RESURRECTION by Tiffany Trent
MRS BEETON’S BOOK OF MAGICKAL MANAGEMENT by Karen Healey
THE GARDEN OF ENGLAND by Sandra McDonald
FALSE COLOURS by Marie Brennan
NUSSBAUM’S GOLDEN FORTUNE by M. K. Hobson
THE COLONEL’S DAUGHTER by Barbara Roden
MERCURY RETROGRADE by Mary Robinette Kowal
THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS by Caroline Stevermer

As for “False Colours”? Well, a select few among you may recall a certain character named Lt. Ravenswood . . . yeah, this is that story. The rest of you will have to wait and read it for yourself — I wouldn’t want to spoil anything!

I’ll post a release date when I have one.

Thanksgiving Advent, Day Four: Role-playing Games

Almost forgot today’s post! Well, I’ll take my inspiration from the thing I’m about to run off and do, and say I’m thankful for role-playing games.

Yeah, you heard me; I’m about to go spend my Friday night being a gamer. (This is not at all a surprise to some of you.) RPGs are awesome, man! The way I approach them, they’re collaborative storytelling, and let me tell you — it is freaking amazing when stuff comes together, totally unplanned, into the perfect bit of story. Emergent narrative, to don my academic hat againt for a moment. I loves me a well-written novel, too, but when that stuff happens half by accident, it’s extra cool.

And playing gives me a chance to explore different kinds of characters, in ways I can then bring back to my writing. So aside from the benefit to me, there’s a benefit to you.

Now if you’ll pardon me, I have go to pretend to be someone else. 🙂

one more

I forgot to put Unhallowed Metropolis on the list! (I never owned the book, which is why I overlooked it.)

Man, that was a fun game; I’m sorry that moving out to California cut my involvement short. Our GM told us our characters should be from the East End. I don’t think he expected us to make the most illiterate, amoral, disease-ridden group of PCs known to gaming history — but wow, did it produce a fun dynamic.

games I’ve played

Because I was trying to list them in the car on the way home tonight.

(An asterisk means I probably played less than five sessions.)

Vampire
*Werewolf
*Mage
Changeling
Mummy

Mage

Aberrant
*Exalted (2nd ed)
Scion

Dungeons & Dragons (3.5 ed)
*Redline
*Mutants & Masterminds
Star Wars (revised ed)

Buffy
Angel
*All Flesh Must Be Eaten

Dungeons & Dragons (2nd ed)
GURPs
*Ars Magica (not sure what edition)
Serenity
Shadowrun (not sure what edition)

. . . and it looks like I’ll be starting in a Legend of the Five Rings game soon. (RPG, not card.) LARP-wise, it’s all been Mind’s Eye Theatre, hacks thereof, or the Buffy/Angel tabletop system applied to a live-action game. (You know those little plastic bubbles you get from vending machines, that have toys in them? We scattered a bunch of those around the site, with a d10 in each.)

My experience really isn’t that diverse. The problem is, I rarely run games myself, so I’m dependent on what other people are minded to run. And most of my gaming was done in a very White Wolf-leaning town.

Answers, Round Final

The last set from the question post. Thanks to everybody who participated!

***

stevie_carroll asked, Do you have an unlikely favourite place in London (out of your top whatever places in London as opposed to your very favourite place)?

I guess the question is, what makes a place unlikely? I love the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral — not for any reason having to do with it being a big famous landmark, but because of the way the cathedral’s position fits into the City in my head, and the way you can sit on its steps and watch the sun set over the West End and eat your yakisoba from Wasabi or pasta salad from Tesco’s for dinner. It’s my mental “home” in London. But that might class it as “very favorite,” I guess.

I also love the fragment of the old London Wall I found on my first trip and revisited every subsequent time. It’s tucked away from the busy roads, and has a lovely bit of garden around it.

I don’t know if any of those count as “unlikely,” though.

***

dmstraylight asked, If a PnP RPG based on the Onyx Court series was produced, what system would you want it to use and why? How about for Doppelganger? Driftwood?

The obvious answer for the Onyx Court is Changeling: The Dreaming, since that’s where it came from. But you’d have to do a lot of system hacking at this point to make it work, since Banality doesn’t figure into the Onyx Court, and it’s kind of a central idea for Changeling; rip that out and the whole thing falls apart.

If not Changeling, then maybe Deliria, which I haven’t actually played, but is in my head as a reasonably flexible system for doing faerie-related stuff.

The doppelganger books, I don’t have a ready answer for. I have L5R on the brain at the moment, so that’s the first thing that leaps to mind (especially with the Void and all), but from what I’ve seen of shugenja spells, they don’t lend themselves to the mixed-Element approach of the witches in my novels. Come to think of it, I have a hard time thinking of any magic system that treats conjunctional effects of that sort as a common thing, rather than an occasional exception, though I’m sure such things exist. Any suggestions from the peanut gallery?

Driftwood, of course, is easy. 1) Grab every gaming core book off your shelf. 2) Drop them on the floor to make a map of Driftwood. 3) Have fun. ^_^

***

Aaaaaand that’s it for this round of “ask me anything.” Tune in at some indeterminate future point for more!

Answers, Round Three

More answers from the ask me anything thread.

***

starlady38 asked, If you were to write anything in the Onyx Court world post-series ending, what would it be about and when would it be about?

Chronologically post-ending, or just written post-ending?

Chronologically, as others have said, the most likely continuation of the series would be into the Blitz, and then to the modern day. (Whether or not that will happen depends on multiple factors, one of which is sales figures for the rest of the series, so if you want a Blitz book: go tell your friends to buy the rest of ’em!) I have to admit I sort of like the notion of a historical series that spans enough time to stop being historical, though there would be some interesting challenges associated with doing so.

At least, that’s the novel side of things. I’ve written a few Onyx Court short stories, and intend to write at least a few more; one of those would be a Jack the Ripper story, taking place not long after the end of With Fate Conspire. Aside from that, the top spot on the short fiction list is probably the “Ada Lovelace builds herself wings” story.

***

yhlee asked, Favorite weapon?

Rapier.

What? I watched The Princess Bride at a very impressionable age. ^_^ And then took fencing classes at my local rec center, where our teacher couldn’t keep us linear and make us leave our off-hands out of it for love or money, until he said “screw it” and taught us rapier-and-dagger styles instead of foil or epee. The left-handed weapon of my matched pair of rapiers was a gift from him.

The style suits me, I think, and I want to get back to doing it. I am definitely built for speed and accuracy above strength, and it’s a great weapon for Renaissance-ish settings, which I do admit I have a soft spot for.

***

alecaustin asked, Did you ever get a chance to do the research you wanted to do for the Mt. Hiei story?

I’m working on it, yeah. (Actually, I need to steal the car from my husband so I can make a trip down to the Stanford library, after which work will proceed at a much more useful pace.)

Also, under which edition of D&D (if any) are you level 31? (4e would break in half, but you’re okay under 3e’s Epic level rules, and still within parameters for Classic D&D…)

Who says it’s D&D? I’m tempted to claim I’m a Dragon Age DW rogue, and just picked up Unending Flurry. (Man, pair that with Twin Strikes and Low Blow, and your opponent bleeds out like you cut their femoral artery.) But even with the Awakening expansion, DA classes cap out at level 35, and I want to live long past that point. WoW would be a good choice, since they keep raising the level cap — but I don’t play that game and have no interest in doing so. In which case, okay, fine, I’m a D&D 3.5 character, playing for a GM who (hopefully) doesn’t mind coming up with the stupidly over-the-top plots that become necessary when playing epic-level PCs. ‘Cause I intend to become very epic.

this one’s for all the gamer geeks

Tonight’s Random Game Concept that sprang up in my head:

(Old) World of Darkness game, cross-genre. Let the players make any kind of PCs they like — Kindred, mages, changelings, mummies, whatever, and you play a short prologue.

Then the barriers get torn down. All of them. The walls between this world and the Umbra, Shadowlands, Dreaming, Yin and Yang Worlds, all the rest of it.

And you run the rest of the chronicle as a post-apocalyptic Exalted game.

It’s a new Mythic Age, not the one from the Exalted books. You’re throwing out all the setting information, so you don’t have to worry about why your ex-mummy Solar Exalted is cooperating with an ex-mage Sidereal, etc. You get all the fun of apocalyptic world destruction, with GIANT MAGIC POWERS, a legitimate reason why the PCs might be able to really reshape all of reality. It would be EPIC BEYOND WORDS.

. . . I think I want to run this.

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