The Middle of Amber

I was going to write a blog post suggesting that people support the Lords of Gossamer & Shadow Kickstarter that is taking up where the Amber rpg by Eric Wujcik left off. The Kickstarter has about 19 hours to go, the game should carry on for years. And maybe I am still writing that blog. But I'm shifting the focus off the new game that I-am-looking-forward-to-and-think-you-should-support .... back towards the Roger Zelazny stories that created the path for the game.

By high school, Zelazny was my favorite author. The extent to which I loved his work has clouded my memory of how I first encountered him. It wasn't through Jack of Shadows or Lord of Light or Nine Princes in Amber. It was through The Guns of Avalon, bought second-hand in a musty used paperback store built into a weird indoor-outdoor mall that would soon go out of business when I was in 7th grade and my family had just moved out of the Army and into Oregon.

If you're familiar with Zelazny's work, you know that The Guns of Avalon is the second book in the Amber series. I missed that. I liked the cover illustration of two warriors battling chaotic hordes. Well, they looked like orcs. Inside it didn't go quite the way I'd expected. By that time I'd read the Lord of the Rings and Watership Down and Starship Troopers, but it's possible that The Guns of Avalon was the first troublesomely adult novel I'd read. The demon knocks on the window and he goes ahead and invites it in? The girl he fenced with and then slept with may be another demon who killed off the kindly family? He's walking through realities and getting stronger all the time? And now we're using guns in fantasy worlds? What?

I wasn't ready to deal with a story this loaded.

Skip forward a year, maybe less. I'm in Gandalf's Den and there's a big display of Zelazny books, a series of books in a new black cover design I like a lot. I'm looking at the books and I see something called The Guns of Avalon. Wait. This is the book I have with that other cover. Wait. It's the second book in the series? Ohhhhhhhh.

I bought Nine Princes in Amber. Loved it. Read The Guns of Avalon again, in the old weird cover that used the words 'another swashbuckling fantasy voyage to the kingdom of Amber' instead of coming right out and saying it was a sequel. I felt dumb. But happy.

So my introduction to Zelazny was as a magical force that blew in from nowhere, didn't quite synch up to my very-sheltered youth, and gradually became a beloved companion.

May the lords of gossamer and shadow continue the work.

Five 13th Age Progressions

1. The cover above is our first rough draft. Aaron and Lee still have lots of work they plan to do on it. That's a wind-and-lightning powered druid fighting a dragon who has yet to be revealed. It gives us game designers something to strive towards.

2. Lee calls the piece Over Drakkenhall. I love the name, partly because it reminds me of the WWI airplane battles that were my entry into gaming playing Fight in the Skies/Dawn Patrol. I guess I can confess that my slang for the cover-dragon is 'the Bloody Red Golden,'but don't worry, the story behind this has everything to do with Lee's/Aaron's art mixed with the sorcery of the Blue and nothing further to do with WWI ace jokes.

3. On other 13 True Ways work, Lee and Aaron continue to roll through the art, Robin Laws has turned over great work on devils, Drakkenhall, and Axis, and Jonathan is carving his own twisty multi-icon passages through the ruins of Drakkenhall.

4. While Jonathan, Aaron, and Lee press forward on 13 True Ways, I'm using my designer-head for a few weeks to help with the 13th Age Bestiary that Ken Hite has organized for Pelgrane. It's mainly designed by people including ASH Law, Ken, Kevin Kulp, Rob Wieland, Ryven Cedrylle, and Steven Townshend, with editing by Cal Moore. There are innumerable dangerous and quirky touches that deserve to be touched on in later posts. For now I'm developing monsters, improving mechanics and suggesting ways that the monsters' stories can dare more in individual campaigns.

5. And in regard to the book you've all been waiting for.... Once upon a time my page count estimates suggested we wouldn't have room to print the last chapter of 13th Age, the mini-adventure called Blood & Lightning. We said we would put the adventure on line since we couldn't fit it into the book. Well the good news is that I was wrong and the adventure does fit into the book. Last week, with the 304 page layout finished except for page xx's, Simon and I decided to add the revised Blood & Lightning adventure back into the mix. We've got a 320 page book now with no need for an adventure download and it looks like the decision is only going to cost us three days. So we'll have more good news soon, I think.

Murder pixies

David Kaehler was one of the winners of the Monster Art +13 contest for the 13 True Ways Kickstarter.

David asked for a somewhat straightforward illustration of pixies in a mushroom circle firing sleep arrows at surprised adventurers.

I decided that Aaron McConnell's amazing talents meant I didn't have to settle for a somewhat standard image. I rolled the picture forward a few minutes. What happens to adventurers brought low in a pixie circle? Aaron's first draft is below.

It's dark, it's a ritual, and that's one pumped-up pixie.

Haven't done the mechanics yet, but they're going to be fun.

The final illustration will bring out what's going on at the bottom of the illustration with a bit more clarity while still maintaining the frayed boundaries of good taste.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, murder pixies.

Museum Fantasy

Sometimes working at what you love pays off in ways you would never have predicted. I've always loved the Science Fiction Museum at the EMP, even in the early days when it felt like not much more than the seriously-impressive handwritten manuscript of Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon alongside a whole mess of robots.

The Museum has been upgrading the past few years with nifty new permanent exhibits on horror and yes, science fiction. Opening next Friday, Fantasy: Worlds of Myth and Magic completes the triumvirate.

I helped with the brainstorming and planning stages of the fantasy exhibit and worked with the museum's Erin Wheeler to choose the characters for the Archetypes display. Erin piloted the display and brought in characters from media I'm more-or-less-illiterate in (anime, cinema). We handled the writing together with some help from a few other folks.

One of the best aspects of working on the Archetypes display was bringing in characters from writers whose works I love and who might otherwise not have been recognized. Fafhrd as a Barbarian and the Gray Mouser as a Rogue? That might or might not have happened without me. But getting N. K. Jemisin's Nahadoth the Night Lord into the display as an example of the The Earth-Shaker, and using Sethra Lavode from Steven Brust's Dragaera as an example of The Iron Woman? A sweet way to repay a bit of the pleasure I've had reading these books.

Ditto for the painting above, by friends who are two of my favorite artists, Catska and Cory Ench. This painting of Suldrun originally appeared as the cover of Lyonesse on my friend Bob Kruger's electricstory.com site. Now Cory and Catska allowed it be used as Suldrun's illustration in the Damsels section of the Archetypes display. I love it when friends' work comes together.

The exhibit opens on Saturday the 27th, but on Friday the 26th there's an opening gala involving archery, scavenger quests, sword-fighting demonstrations, photos sitting on the Iron Throne from Game of Thrones, and games run by Card Kingdom and WotC. Come sit by the river a spell, wander the gardens, or cast a spell.  

Fawning candy blink dogs

A couple months ago Ken Hite was putting together the monster list for the upcoming 13th Age Bestiary from Pelgrane Press. I'd been helping with suggestions and sample monster write-ups. Then I mentioned the monsters I wasn't sure we should cover.

Dogs.

Any time D&D did a book of monsters in 3e and 3.5, you could count on a substantial portion of the contributions amounting to dogs. Go ahead, start paging through with the core Monster Manual, you'll hit the hound archon, barghest (wolflike is doglike, man), blink dog, dire wolf, gnolls (because hyenas count), and so on, up through the warg, winter wolf, and yeth hound. The monsters just get barkier in the Fiend Folio and in the old Monster Manual II, sometimes when you don't really expect it. Caniloth? That's a dog-like not-demon/not-devil. Senmurv? That's some kind of coyote humanoid with rainbow wings. As soon as you do a race sourcebook, that race has gotta have a dog. Or three. The parade of dog-like monsters keeps spooling out like a WTF multiversal dog show.

I became aware of our canine design tendency when I was choosing minis for the D&D Miniatures game. Like other powerful unconscious tendencies, dog-ness often took us by surprise. A gravehound, a werewolf, a Nessian warhound, a gnoll priestess, an iron defender and a goblin warg rider feel like different monsters. But if you squint, they're all from Canine Kennels.

The ubiquity of dog monsters isn't a surprise. We think with what's familiar. Twisting the familiar into a monster creates scary and resonant monsters. And other creators have had weird dog-fixations. Shakespeare tended to link 'fawning' in the same sentence as candy (sweetmeats, candied jellies) along with a dog or hound or mastiff, there are upwards of seven plays that feature this precise association, something like a text analysis fingerprint. Us 'd20-rolling designers? We've got an even more obvious thread: new monster concept = obvious (or just maybe stealthy) dog.

So Ken made the call to exclude dogs from the upcoming 13th Age Bestiary. It was a good call. 13th Age is aimed at imaginative GMs and players who are being encouraged to add their own cool ideas to each campaign and session. It's clear that most of us gamers can design actually-interesting dog-monsters ourselves and we've covered a few of the obvious wolves and hellhounds in the core book. We're trying to supply ideas and inspiration you might not have had immediately on your own, so throwing more dogs onto the pile just isn't necessary.

And by the hoary breath of the winter wolf, my previous work cycle created enough pre-painted plastic dog-style miniatures that you should have no problem finding minis to suit your new creations.

Manos: the Hands of the Internet

Bruce Baugh introduced me to the Internet. We were both living in Portland in the late 80s and very early 90s. I remember Bruce showing me that his computer was dialing up a system that let it link to other computers all around the world. I’d sort of vaguely known that something like this was possible but had left it to others. Bruce was one of those others. For reasons that might have had something to do with what was working at the moment, Bruce demonstrated his computer’s worldwide connectivity by finding out what the weather was like in South Africa. At that second. Well, actually it took a minute or two and Bruce commented on the computers his query was routing through. I was impressed. I didn't know what to make of it, not really, but I was impressed. And within a few months I had an AoL account and was participating in the gaming forums, which in combination with contacts made through pre-internet Alarums & Excursions surely led me to work professionally in gaming.

I didn't have a television back then (or since . . .). So Bruce was also the man to introduce my girlfriend Lisa and me to Mystery Science Theater 3000. The first episode Lisa watched with us was the epically brain-damaging episode bludgeoning through the movie Manos: the Hands of Fate. If you aren't familiar with this film I’m not going to be the one guilty of linking to it.

When people joke about the early days of the Internet—it’s a series of tubes—I flick past the subject’s personal association with a murderous dwarf, a high priest’s orange robes that flare out into giant hands, and slap-wrestling semi-nude female cultists.

About half-right, in other words. 

Bruce. Thanks for everything. 

Three Strikes Lightning

Cleaning my desk I uncovered an envelope with two stories scrawled on its back, stories I heard in two of the rare moments I wasn't carrying a notebook.

The top of the envelope is a list of curious but ultimately non-remarkable attributes pertaining to a friend's cousins. They add up to a compelling clan in a Hillfolk game set on the 7 hills of Seattle.

But the bottom of the envelope is where things get interesting. We were hiking a ridge trail near Hurricane Ridge with ominous clouds in the distance. The conversation turned to lightning strikes and the woman passing us on the trail entered the conversation.

     "My grandfather got hit by lightning three times."
     "What? Three times?" I said. "Um, clearly he survived at least..."
     
Yes, he had survived all three lightning strikes. I believe she told me that he was still alive but not up to hiking any more, so they'd come up the Ridge without him.

Of course I wanted the details so the full story came out in about ninety seconds while she waited for the rest of her family to catch up.

Strike #1 was when her grandfather was in school. He was sitting at a desk just looking out the window and lightning came through the window and blasted him out of his chair. Didn't hurt him much though.

Strike #2 was worse. He was in the Air Force during WWII and he and two friends wanted to get back to the barracks quickly from the mess hall. Reconstructing my notes, the situation was complicated by the fact that the grandfather had suffered some sort of leg injury, he was on crutches. His two friends decided to rig up some carrying arrangement and then instead of going the long way around they cut through a drainage culvert. And that's where the lightning hit them and both his friends who were carrying him died.

Strike #3 came when his B-17 was hit. I didn't write down whether he was a pilot or a bombardier or a navigator or a gunner, but I did write down that the hit when he was in the B-17 left him blind for 6 months. But he recovered and ended up flying 25 missions for the USAF and 27 more for the RAF maybe not in that order.

     "Wow. OK. Thank you so much for that story."

     There was no sign of thunder in the clouds but if I was him I'd avoid hiking Hurricane Ridge even if my knees could handle it.