College Life

M has a new job as financial honcho at a venerable nonprofit org in Philly. She makes a lot more money, and is happier in her new job. Yay new job!

Last night, they had a big to-do with cocktail attire and a celebrity appearance by C. Everett Koop who, before he was all Mr. Surgeon General, was saving children from death with his bare hands at CHOP and probably has awesome stories by the bushel. So that's very interesting.

I feared that we would stand in our fancy duds, surrounded by a mob with at least 40 years on us, engaging in drab, repetitive conversations which would be all the more excruciating for me, since my entire job was to smile and not say dumb things.

Instead, the evening was a sedate blast. The mob of septuagenarians -- spot on. But a room full of doctors is not dull. If I twittered, this is how I would have described the evening:

• Discussed 19th c. gothic literature with a medical ethicist. Heavy.
• Crazy stories from the frontiers of museum conservation.
• Pitched myself for a potential job!
• The CEO keeps manhandling Koop to get him to talk into the mic.
• Koop's friends call him "Chick." No, for real.
• Free Jack Daniels?! But I'm driving!
• My wife almost flashed the chairman of the board. Smoooth.

Furthermore, THIS JUST IN: Rich people eat pretty damn well. The food was "heavy hors d'oeuvres" which to middlebrow yokels like me means: "The kind of things you eat anyway, only out of a paper bag, while sitting in your car."

I wanted to bury my face in the cheese table. Attended by an enthusiastic cheese sommelier (or something), he pointed me to this awesome sheep cheese, and a five layer cheddar thing that was so good, I left the table so I wouldn't embarrass myself by scooping wheels of it into my mouth. Duck and turkey dim sum was my second favorite, but it's not like I failed to eat the steak and potatoes wedges. Only after the food was all gone did I discover there had been lamb in a room I never even got to.

Music came later, which we didn't get to hear because we were touring the museum and talking to the director. Then on our way out, we got free miniature trowels! Oh boy! They're probably meant to be letter openers, but we brainstormed other uses that I can't remember now.

Overall, a success. Next month, I am arm candy at some formal dinner, where I will need a tux. It will probably be a boringer event, but I'll find someone talkative and ask a bunch of pointed questions and see what I can open up. Everybody in that room has a lifetime of stories. Some of them have to be great.

Sprung*

I work pretty doggedly at restraint. Things seem to go badly for me when I'm not paying close attention to what leaves my head. But I guess I've had the filter on too tight lately.

Last week, I was told that my open-ended contract was closing at this job I like. Too bad, but that's contract work. Sometimes it ends before you're ready.

However, with 3 weeks to go, I cannot seem to muster the giveadamn to do the job anymore. Which is bad.

Except it's turning out to be kind of good. When I had to work on something boringly difficult this afternoon, I snapped and started writing goofy shit.

Which turned out to be not so terrible once I looked at it again. I realized I'd been clamped down, too closed, too careful. It was contributing to making the job boring and difficult, and getting in the way of being able to write better stuff.

My copywriting replacement and I kid about nobody ever saying anything negative at an ad agency -- firings are termed as a freedom to pursue other things. But, you know, it might be.



*"Lockdown" and "lockup" are sort of like flammable and inflammable -- they seem like they should be antonyms, but they ain't.

Press Play

Press releases are meant to go to press outlets, which this is not.

However, for my ones of readers, here's a press release about a new .pdf game book available for Call of Cthulhu. It's special because Call of Cthulhu is a venerated RPG with a reputation for quality, and a snail's pace of production.

Super Genius likely heralds an end to that snail pace part. The people behind SG are friends, so of course we wish them well. Furthermore, I am a contributor to the book! So for you completists, this is officially part of my professional corpus.

Behold:

Super Genius Games Answers the Call of Cthulhu!

Escondido, CA (April 16, 2008) – Super Genius Games (SGG), and Chaosium, Inc. proudly announce the completion of a deal allowing SGG to begin publishing a new line of official CALL OF CTHULHU™ roleplaying game supplements.

“This is like a Mythos-inspired dream come true,” said Hyrum Savage, co-founder of Super Genius Games. “We’ve been big Call of Cthulhu fans for years, and the chance to actually produce official product for the game is an incredible opportunity.”

"We're delighted to have the Super-Geniuses publishing Call of Cthulhu supplements" says Chaosium propagandist Dustin Wright. "This agreement will result in more gaming opportunities for our players, which is a very good thing."

Super Genius Games will be taking a new approach to Call of Cthulhu publications with an aggressive schedule of low-priced products. Although no release dates have yet been announced, the first product is slated to be on store shelves and available for paid PDF download before the end of Q3 2008, with a price point under $15 (US).

“We believe there are lots of people out there who want to play Call of Cthulhu more often,” said Stan!, Creative Director for Super Genius Games. “But there isn’t the depth of material available that there is for other games. In particular, there aren’t enough easily accessible adventures designed to be played in just a night or two. Being a Keeper for this game is challenging. You can’t just rely on standard tropes of heroic tales or fall back on random encounters—you need to come to the table with something prepared.”

All of Super Genius Games projected releases for Call of Cthulhu will be stand-alone products that you can buy in the afternoon and use at the gaming table that night. But they won’t be just fire-and-forget scenarios.

“If you get more than one of our products, you’ll see connections forming between them,” said Stan!. “There will be metaphorical breadcrumbs leading from one to another and organizations that turn up regularly, getting a bit more detailed each time. But at the same time, each product will stand fully on its own. To get full use out of our products you won’t have to own anything else … except the Call of Cthulhu game.”

Please visit supergeniusgames.com for more information.

About Super Genius Games
Super Genius Games is an imprint of OtherWorld Creations. Founded in fall 2007, SGG is dedicated to publishing quality print and PDF products for a wide range of games and game systems.

Co-founders Hyrum Savage and Stan! between them have more than 22 years experience working professionally in the hobby games industry. They have done projects with and created products for Wizards of the Coast, Upper Deck Entertainment, TSR Inc., Paizo Publishing, Malhavoc Press, West End Games, Steve Jackson Games, The Game Mechanics, Guardians of Order, and many other industry-leading companies. Their work has been nominated for 10 major game industry awards.

About Chaosium, Inc.
Chaosium, (Kay-Oss-Eum) is known for publishing high quality books & games, and for having a well-developed sense of fun.

In 1975 the company was founded as The Chaosium by Greg Stafford. It was later incorporated as Chaosium Inc. Chaosium thrives in the mild climate, gorgeous surroundings, and gentle earthquakes of the San Francisco Bay area.

Most of Chaosium's product lines are based upon literary sources. H.P. Lovecraft's 1920's horror fiction provides the basis of the classic Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game line which has won so many awards that the we have lost count, though we do know that there are more than 70 of them. Mr. Lovecraft also provides the inspiration for our many Call of Cthulhu fiction collections.

In 2005, Chaosium celebrated our 30th anniversary. In 2006, Call of Cthulhu celebrated its 25th anniversary

MEDIA CONTACTS:
Steven Brown, Super Genius Games 760-261-6132
steven@stannex.com

Dustin Wright, Chaosium, Inc.
dustin@chaosium.com

New Dog

So what we went and did over the weekend was we went and got a new dog.

The old dog is distressed, but man, whatever. He's an old dog. Make way for Dog Progress!

New dog's from the shelter (which I guess is different from "the pound") and predictably undisciplined, but a sweetie nonetheless.

She seems to be some greyhound and some other thing. My own scientific analysis is: dalmatian or beagle or something. She's got a build I like to call "rangy."

We don't have a name for her yet. The shelter called her "Cricket" but M had a dog named Cricket when she was a kid, and you can't double up on these things. Also, why name your animal after another animal? Does anyone name their dog "Dromedary" or "Panda"?*

Here is a partial list of potential names, most of which we have rejected. Feel free to use any of these for your unnamed pets or office supply products:

• Bathsheba
• Ranger
• Gilraen
• Fletcher
• Tirade
• Buechner
• Zelby
• Knothead
• Fortunata
• Zonks
• Fake Steve Jobs
• Coconut
• Merit

The last two are the current front-runners, but there's plenty of time for something to come out of nowhere and take the lead. Post your suggestions in the comments! If we use the name you suggested, then won't that be great?

*Come to think of it, they probably do.

Springtime is redemptive in Philadelphia.

I'm not a big Philadelphia booster. The city has potential, but it's unlovely in many places. The people here, while rarely hostile, are not generally welcoming. And winter gets old, especially when it drags as it did this year.

But walking around this weekend, driving with the windows down, seeing the newly enlarged skyline through the newly-engreened trees, looking at the throngs stroll by the river, seeing young women in short skirts again... Philly can clean up all right come April.

Death Happens

This week in D&D, a fight ran a little long, and most of the players were acting bored and twitchy by the end. It didn't help that I killed one of the PCs and several others had near-death experiences.

No matter how good a sport the player is about it (and he was a good sport), there's always an awkwardness when a PC dies. I've noticed it across game systems. The energy level of the whole table drops when one player is involuntarily put out of the game.

You can stop some of the loss by immediately assigning the player to run one of the party flunkies--an NPC or animal companion. But I didn't think to do that before the player, with an hour drive ahead of him, decided to call it a night.

There's a lot of D&D talk about how character death is too easy and meaningless because of access to raise dead effects. I haven't experienced that. I played for four years in a campaign at WotC, where my character got killed 6 or 7 times, sometimes in spectacular, horrible ways.* I gained 15th level three times. Eventually it wasn't a show stopper, but I never ceased to care. It never got boring.

I want to make returning from the dead even easier. It's punishment enough for a player to have to sit out of a major fight. Why should I make it harder for you--for all of us--to keep playing? All good games are designed to keep players viable to the end. I think only atavistic devotion to simulation makes role-playing games different.

4th edition D&D seems to take the Champions-esque smoke-and-mirrors road, which is: Make it so freaking hard to die that it basically won't ever happen, but let's nobody admit that so the illusion of death remains.

Although I never read it (apologies to Monte and Sean who will probably see this at some point), the Ghostwalk setting book had a great solution: When you die, you become a resident of the land of the dead. A ghost. You can return to the land of the living, or you can just stay a ghost for a while. I like the idea of death being an altered state rather than a terminal state.

Riffing off that last thought, I might try introducing another way to do death when our current adventure is done.


*Once, my elf barbarian, Sevet, was killed by massive damage--not the damage itself mind you. I rolled a 1 on my massive damage saving throw. How embarrassing. Then the evil cleric we were fighting cast create undead on his corpse, he sprang up as a vampire, and promptly started tearing into his former friends. The sudden appearance of mid-level barbarian vampire is hella scary to your own party.

Cupidity

Stan! emails news today about the remake of Cupid, a 10-year-dead TV show by Rob Thomas that you don't remember, which we have an entirely unrelated in-joke about.

Since I think Jeremy Piven is hi-freaking-larious, I am biased against believing that anyone will follow him well. However, my enjoyment of Jeremy Piven is nosed out by my don't-give-a-crap about the whole thing.

EXCEPT that it provides an opportunity to mock entertainment executives. Excerpts from the email I sent back to Stan!:

Here's my docudrama on how that went down:

TV Executive 1: Hey Veronica Mars guy, what else you got? Can you make... I dunno... Veronica Saturn or sumpin?

Rob Thomas: How about we try this Cupid idea again... nobody watched it the first time, so it'll SEEM like new!

TV Executive 2: Thomas, you're a genius! You've done it again!

Stan!'s response:

That is much TOO plausible for my comfort level.

Book Larnin'

For the last three weeks, Bob Cringely, a tech industry insider who knows how to think a couple of steps ahead and will explain it to you, has been futzing with the ideas of the education system to come. Read the first one, and click on through, especially to Amish Paradise.*

Our current American education system is still woefully modeled on industrial revolution strategy, which has benefits, but some notable drawbacks.

The benefits are in efficiency. Sticking all the kids in one place and drilling them all with the same bore of info (pun intended) is not ideal, but you'll get more children educated more consistently--together, under a professional's guidance--that way than you will leaving every child's education up to every set of parents.

However, portable, inexpensive, wireless information delivery obviates nearly everything about the current educational model. And as Cringely points out, in this model, school will not ever end. Nor should it.

"School" as a discrete concept might end, though. If you had a perfect little infofaucet with you all the time, would you stop using it, and learning from it? I might turn it off occasionally, but I wouldn't take it off.

I think Cringely's skies look unnaturally blue. We will still need human mediators, and it is good and right to have them. However, technology is changing our relationship with information, and all the principals in all the world, confiscating all the cell phones they find, will not change it.

The only thing that could seriously dent this future is large-scale disaster: economic collapse, environmental catastrophe, war on native soil. If one of those happens, we'll be glad to have a low-tech backup. But we can't bank on that. We need to plan for good, and expect it. And a plan to overhaul the education system is an excellent part of that program, already in progress.


*I'm not interested in giving up many of my "English" ways, but the Amish do a number of things very, very right. I would trade off some of my modern conveniences in exchange for the discipline, humility, and craftsmanship of the Amish. In fact, there might not be an option.

Bacta: Within Reach

2-1B! Get on this!

In a few years, they think they'll be able to fix your spine with nanogoo.

Northwestern University researchers have shown that a nano-engineered gel inhibits the formation of scar tissue at the injury site and enables the severed spinal cord fibers to regenerate and grow. The gel is injected as a liquid into the spinal cord and self-assembles into a scaffold that supports the new nerve fibers as they grow up and down the spinal cord, penetrating the site of the injury.

When the gel was injected into mice with a spinal cord injury, after six weeks the animals had a greatly enhanced ability to use their hind legs and walk.

I wish all the cool medicine wasn't going to happen in 10-20 years. I'm led to believe that some people are in pain now.

Audience Participation

Monday at lunch I ran a beginner D&D session for some co-workers who hadn't played since they were children. One dude is pretty big into D&D Online, which, compared to tabletop, is like having a driver's license from a different country. You know how to drive, but you don't know about driving HERE.

Before I continue, a digression: I sometimes forget that I'm smart. I hang around intelligent people, and I like reading and learning and various smart-guy pastimes. I'm used to, literally, being the dumbest guy in a room full of brilliant people, which colors my self-perception. So occasionally, when I've busted out some four-syllable word to a circle of blank faces, I realize that I'm not always in that room. Sometimes, I'm the smart one.

Hang onto that idea.

For the assignment I just finished, I got to make up adventure sites. I didn't have to detail them, I just wrote romance copy--a paragraph intro and hook. It's fun, but it's hard to invent something new in one paragraph.

For instance, I made up a site that consists of three wizards whose towers are physically miles apart, but interconnected with teleports. Once you enter from the ground and start throwing open doors, you never know exactly whose tower you're in any more.

That's an okay idea. You can do some fun things with that. But I wanted it to be better; I wanted to make up something that was so shockingly new and interesting that my editor would write and say, "Jeff, this paragraph is so compelling, I want to commission you to write this entire adventure up in detail for publication." Somehow, I wanted it to be super-extra-lightning creative, something that would perk up jaded professional ears.

Contrast this with my lunchtime D&D experience, where four adults go on the following quest: The town elders want you to explore a dungeon. Inside the front door, two goblins attack you. Later, in a different room, two more goblins and an orc attack you. There are chests containing treasure.

That's it. Ta-da.

They loved it. Had a great time. One guy emailed me later asking questions about it. They want to play again ASAP.

At Wizards, we would always tell ourselves that we weren't the audience, but I don't think we believed it deep down. We were connoisseurs of games, and we had increasingly nuanced, stratified tastes. Most of the time, we believed in those more than we believed in playing to our audience.

But the people who play the game are not that discriminating. They are project managers and electricians and suchlike. They don't walk around thinking about this stuff. For them, opening doors and killing goblins is plenty fun. Super-extra-lightning creative might be fun too, but it also might be unnecessary, or worse, overkill. They don't need, or even necessarily want, four-syllable words.

Don't hear me stumping for mediocrity, right? I'm just saying that I'm as close to the audience as I've been since I left Alabama to work for TSR, and it's good to get to know them again. It's good to be them again.

Our Paper Year

Today is Meredith's and my first anniversary, and it's been a great year.

When we met, I knew early that she would be an excellent lover and partner. I'm so glad she feels the same way about me.

There's no part of my life that's not improved with her in it, and year 2 looks to be even better.

Language Barrier

In my career DMing 3rd edition D&D, I have seen a bizarrely disproportionate number of new players take the Sylvan language, because it seems cool and logical. When you play a new game, you don't know how to optimize under the set of rules, and so you make interesting, but ultimately unsound choices for reasons you had no idea about. Sometimes those are subtle.

What I find interesting about such a complex game as D&D is that some unsound choices are not subtle at all. After all, you're a ranger. You spend time in the forest. Why wouldn't you learn the language of forest dwellers?

Mainly because no one speaks it. I haven't looked through the Monster Manual, but the number of creatures who speak Sylvan is probably one of those one-hand counting deals.

I was talking to my friend, Monte, once about why a multiplicity of languages in D&D is cool, but in Star Wars is a pain the ass. We more noted the discrepancy than attempted to explain or rectify the problem. But here's what I think:

D&D has a relatively small, closed set of languages. There are 20 in the SRD, representing more languages than your character will care to learn (especially considering low-level language comprehension spells). But the three or four that you know still represent a significant percentage of all available languages. There's a not-terrible chance you can understand any given language.

When the DM says that someone is speaking in a strange language, you lunge for your character sheet--is it Gnome? Infernal? Sylvan? It's possibly the dumbest, simplest kind of mini-game nestled in D&D: Did I make a successful blind choice? It's a crappy game; it's nickel slots--low stakes, low payout, all luck. But it's still compelling occasionally, in a reptilian-brain way.

In Star Wars, with a kajillion languages, the odds make it more like a lottery. "Trandoshans? Yes! I speak Dosh!" That might happen once in an entire campaign, if that often. After a couple of those moments without winning, you don't want to play anymore.

So there's that. But the unsound crux in D&D is that these multiple-but-not-overwhelming language options are unevenly distributed. Lots of monsters speak Undercommon, Goblin, Giant, Draconic, or Abyssal. But way fewer monsters speak Celestial or Sylvan. Statistically, you just shouldn't bet on Sylvan.

This disparity is compounded because someone who speaks a "good" language like Celestial or Sylvan is likely to be an ally. A DM needs that person to deliver info, not withhold it.

Different languages exist in fantasy games for two reasons: flavor, and to hide information. Flavor is great, and it informs design. But it is forest when you are looking at one particular tree. Important, but not pertinent.

Hiding info, on the other hand, is very pertinent, and doing it linguistically is an underused aspect of D&D adventure design. I've got half a mind to tweak the language rules in my campaign to offer more opportunity for interestingness here. But I've only really got half a mind for it, so it probably won't get done soon.

Until then, an easy fix is to create and employ more monsters who speak Sylvan or Gnoll or Ignan or whatever just to jump-start this underused mini-game. Because I like it when players make unsound choices for fun reasons, and I'd rather reward them for that than let the rules tacitly punish them.