Writing, Game Design, World Domination

The Future

2010-06-05T16:02:00.000-07:00

The attitude about the future has really changed from the time I was a child. I'm currently thirty-seven years old, and when I was a child, society was looking to the stars. We believed that one day, we would be able to leave this solar system, make contact with aliens, and see all the wonders possessed by the heavens. We believed that incredible technology was on the way that would revolutionize our lives, and perhaps most importantly, we believed that the future would be positive. Somewhere along the way, that changed.

Sure, we have technology today that realizes much of the dreams we had about the future through the twentieth century. In fact, the internet surpasses the expectations that many had. At one time, we thought that out phones would have video screens so we could talk to people and have the voice accompanied by the live image. Now, we have that, but to make it better, the service doesn't cost us a dime. In the late '80s, Arthur C. Clark write 2061: Odyssey Three, in which an aging Heywood Floyd reflected that computer technology would be unable to match up a few lines of text to the poem it belonged to without a lot of programming and a lot of time. Today, we type what we remember into Google and it finds it for us in seconds.

Today we're retiring the shuttle fleet, but we have satellites providing us with everything from television to cell phones and GPS, and we have a permanent foothold in space (for as long as the government decides to continue funding it). We have private companies pushing into space, even while the government decides whether to actually make the next generation rocket.

The point I'm making is that by all standards, so many of the things that were science fiction when I was a kid have become real today. If the futurists of today were to set some optimistic goals, maybe we wouldn't be so obsessed with this dystopic future that so many people today fear.

But the fact is that people have a reason to fear. This technology and level of society has come at a great cost. The massive oil spill in the gulf of Mexico is a reminder of the largest, possibly insurmountable hurdle that we have to contend with: peak oil. Most people reading this already know what peak oil is, but for those who don't, peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline. In other words, cheap energy, the cheap energy that makes our current lifestyles possible, is not infinite and sooner or later we will be forced to deal with the consequences of an ever expanding human population in a world where the energy production cannot keep up with its needs. When will this occur? According to the predictions made in the 1950s, peak oil should have happened twenty five years ago. Thanks to more fuel efficient cars, we managed to forestall the inevitable, but many experts are guessing that we hit peak oil hit sometime in 2008 and that we are currently at the plateau.

This is a huge issue, with implications to humans that will most likely outstrip the effects of global warming. Without an abundant supply of energy, we're looking at a decline in food production, the end of easy transportation, and diminishing abilities to use all this wonderful technology we've developed in my lifetime. But forget the tech for a moment, what's going to happen to our cities once the trucks stop showing up with food and medicine? The answer is simple: unless people have already found a way to become self sufficient, a lot of people are going to starve to death. The cities will be hit the hardest, because they lack the land necessary to produce the food needed to support their populations. I suspect that small towns will fare better because of the abundance of open land. Regardless, when this happens, people will leave the cities and flock to the small towns, which will undoubtedly be doing everything they can to make the most of their limited resources. These newcomers will not likely be welcome, which will simply perpetuate the inevitable strife.

So this is it, Armageddon, right? Not necessarily. I believe that this is something we can survive, but only if we start seriously looking ahead now rather than fighting to preserve the limited model of our past.

Right now government, under the premise of heading off global warming and our reliance upon foreign oil, are pumping millions into "green energy." Again, I'm sure the readers of my blog are educated enough to know that green energy is energy is more environmentally friendly and does not rely on fossil fuels and does not contribute to global warming. The fact is that if we were to run out of oil today, we wouldn't have the technology in place to continue functioning. Solar, wind, and other technologies must become much, much more efficient for us to be able to rely on them. However, the technologies of tomorrow already exist. What if every house were equipped with solar panels. What if every community had wind generators interspersed with farmland to provide energy for the local community? I recently heard about one area where they're experimenting with high powered solar energy, where they have a field of mirrors that catch the sun at all time of day, then direct all of that energy towards a tower that is filled with water. The energy it produces is caused by steam! Wouldn't this be perfect for all of the communities in the US that we have in the desert states? We already know that we can run cars on electricity, so the more electricity we can generate, the more likely we are to meet out energy needs.

Of course the progress we need will be fought by the oil companies, which have a great deal of influence over government, and see no reason to make such drastic changes as long as we're still dependent upon their product. Even better, when peak oil really sets in, they're estimating that a gallon of gas will rise to $16 a gallon or higher. Oil companies really want to hold on to their dominance over our economy and our entire society because when it hits, they're going to make the kind of money that they currently only dream about (as if they billions they already make isn't enough!).

But the issue of our vision for the future extends beyond peak oil. As I said, it is an obstacle, but it is possible that it's something we can avert, if we act. Maybe part of the reason we've become pessimistic about the future is because we're in the worst economic slump since the Great Depression. People are out of work, expenses are still going up, and just managing to pay the bills is becoming more and more difficult. Politics have become toxic (in part because it is so obvious that so many of our elected officials serve their corporate masters rather than the people who vote for them), and the media outlets just egg on these divisions so that they can score ratings.

Is it any wonder that science fiction isn't selling these days? People are being told that the future is here now, and it sucks.

I think that we need to keep our eyes on the future, especially now. Back in the 1930s, the world was far worse off than it is now. In the midst of the Great Depression, people embraced futurism. It affected everything from entertainment to architecture. While I'm not an expert in the field of the futurism of the period (it is an area of interest though - more on that some other time), the one thing I know it did was create an optimistic future that the people of the time could embrace and look forward to. I believe that it was needed back then, and the result of the optimism of the time is the incredible technology we have today that we take for granted.

While I'm a fan of Mad Max, the Fallout games, and other versions of a dystopic future, I think that those are potential futures that don't have to come to pass. I think that what we lack right now is not the ability to do things we need to survive, but the vision. What we need is a new fresh wave of futurism. We know what we have achieved, and we know the problems that we face, so now what? What are the next advances we can make to move forward as a society?

If we were all optimists, what will our daily lives look like in 2035? Or 2100? Or 3000? Why don't we don't we redefine the world we want to live in and then make it happen?

Book Publishing in the 21st Century

2009-12-30T14:01:00.000-08:00

Let me get this out of the way first before I go on: I am not saying that traditional book publishing is dying. You heard me right, your ability to go to the store of your choice, pick our a paperback or hardback book, take it home and read it will probably not go away... at least not entirely.

Two days ago an interesting thing happened. As described here, on Christmas day more books electronic books were sold through Amazon.com for the Kindle than traditional paperback books. Even before this happened, Amazon's sales of E-books were about on-par with traditional books. In fact, Amazon.com has said that their top selling item in the entire company is the Kindle. I don't think that it is possible to deny that people are switching to electronic reading.

This begs some larger questions though. What of traditional book publishers, like Random House, ACE, TOR, Del Rey, and others? How will they be able to survive in the new marketplace? I'm sure that some people are already rolling their eyes and thinking that this is another article about how new technology is supposedly going to revolutionize life as we know it, change paradigms, and otherwise open up access for the entire world (Cue the old Coke commercial from the '70s and '80s where they just want to buy the world a Coke...). I'll repeat, I don't think paper books are going to go away, and I think that traditional book publishers are going to survive in one form or another for as long as there is demand.

On the other hand, I am talking about technology and electronic readers are presently changing the way that people read books. In a recent interview Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, said three things that I find interesting. First, he said that he was surprised by the success of the Kindle. Second, he said that that he believes that we will see the end to paper publishing, in favor of electronic publishing, at some point in the future. Third, he said that he doesn't read novels in paper form anymore if he can help it. These are bold statements from a man who was one of the first to pioneer E-business. Today, language, text, and technology are all inter-related in new and exciting ways. We haven't seen an innovation to the traditional book of this magnitude since the invention of the printing press. Note that I'm not talking about E-readers specifically, but rather the internet and the wide variety of tech-options for reading information, whether it be short form, like online article or long form, like novels. Paradigms really are shifting right in front of us, and many of the people like me, born in the '70s and before, are either struggling to keep up, or see the modern age as the fulfillment of the promise that was made by science fiction authors.

As we all know, the current model of publishing is where the author creates a brilliant work and then sells it to a publishing house. This often involves an agent, who performs the vital service of selling the author's work to the publisher. The publisher then provides the services of editing the work, providing cover art, marketing, and printing. All three of those items are expensive. Just getting one paperback title onto store shelves costs thousands of dollars. While it's not impossible for an individual to do this themselves, it is not easy.

Whether the traditional publishing houses like it or not, E-publishing changes everything, beginning with printing. Usually, the most expensive part of publishing a book to paper is printing. Thanks to E-readers, you don't need paper anymore. One quarter of the services provided by a traditional publisher has just been eliminated. Now, at this point, the mercenary in many writers thinks, "Hey, I can do this myself now!" In fact, yes, the writer is now free to forego the traditional publishing house and do it all themself. It's called self publishing, and it has actually been around slightly longer than the E-reader due to a number of high quality print on demand outfits. If you recall, however, there are four things that a publisher does for an author, not just one. The other three are still important.

So let me ask you, dear reader, why do you not go to the Lulu.com storefront, peruse the various self-published books, and buy them just as often as the ones from major publishers? Generally, there are three complaints about self-published books: lack of editing, lack of quality cover art, and frankly, you don't exactly know what to buy.

So we're back to traditional publishing, just in a new medium. Right?

Not exactly. I'll preface my remarks by saying that a lot of what I'm about to say is based on information I've received from writers in the field. I personally, am an RPG writer who has not yet published my first novel (more on this later). First of all, traditional book stores are hurting. The ability to buy online as well as the fact that you can only buy books for electronic devices online means that a lot of people are saving themselves the trip to the store. Book publishing companies are also tightening their belts and requiring that a lot of authors do a lot of their own promotion. So that means that the things that traditional book publishers are really doing in the digital age is offer a paper option for customers, offer quality cover art, and offer editing. They are quite good at these things.

Note, however, that these publishers are now trying to claim perpetual E-publishing rights for the books they publish even while established authors are deciding to go it alone and publish their works themselves. After all, if you're an established writer with an established fan base that recommends your books to friends, then you simply don't need publishers to get your work out there. Put them out there yourself and make more money!

So what happens if you aren't an established author? You should be able to get cover art for your book for a few hundred dollars if you know where to look. But even if you have the expertise to edit your own work (which is actually usually a really bad idea), you still need to find some way to promote your books. While traditional publishers are asking authors to do a lot of self promotion, they still list their books with stores, which gets them on the shelf in your local store, which in-turn results in a certain number of sales. No, that doesn't mean that this will land you on the New York Times bestseller list, but it does mean that if they publish your book, you can probably count on a certain amount of money from the deal. The amount of money depends greatly upon things like the popularity of the genre you are writing for, the quality of the cover art they give you, as well as the terms of the contract you sign.

So book publishing in the 21st century looks a lot like book publishing in the 20th century, except with more gadgets? Essentially, that is what I'm arguing. Until you can afford to market your book, you still need the traditional publisher.

But there is another possibility that we might start to see more of: the publishing company that dispenses with the paper and the local book store, and sells directly to people over the internet. After all, with all these Kindles out there that just require data to give you a book, you don't need to invest in print runs. Also, by utilizing services like Lulu.com and Amazon's Booksurge, you can still get your books into print for those customers who still have to have paper. This company would still be responsible for editing, promoting the author's work, and they would be responsible for providing the book with good cover art.

So what's the advantage to this model? Put simply, accessibility. The bar for entry into this field is lowered significantly. In fact, the bar for entry into this market is lower than it is with roleplaying games, the field I'm in, because you don't have to bother with interior art, nor do you have to worry about game mechanics when you're editing. All you have to do is put together a good book and find an audience. This is something that small RPG companies have been doing for years by doing the work they can do themselves, bringing in freelancers to do what they can't, and then finding their audience online.

My argument is that if small RPG companies can do it, so can small electronic novel publishing companies. This also means that aspiring writers will probably start finding it easier to get their first book published, but the flip side of this is that there probably won't be as much money in it, unless you go through the large traditional publishing houses, at least not until that publishing house has built up a reputation for quality, or the author has managed to find an audience.

So in summary, book publishing in the 21st century will see the traditional book publishing Goliaths shrink but not disappear. We will see a rise in small presses that publish directly to electronic formats. We will see more people who are making some money from their writing, but we will probably see fewer authors who will be able to do it full time as their primary means of support.

And this is both good news and bad news to aspiring authors.

Why the Ancient Greeks and Fantasy Were Made For Each Other

2009-12-16T22:41:00.000-08:00

The general assumption behind almost the entirety of the fantasy genre is that it is set in a pseudo-medieval period. Maybe this is so that the characters can wear pants, or maybe this is because it's how Tolkien did it, but I really started to question whether it was the right way to go some time ago. While I still enjoy fantasy books and gaming, I feel that the way to make it more interesting is to go Greek. (hint: thesis statement here-->) The reasons I think the Greek civilization is a better model for the fantasy genre is because it was polytheistic, it consisted mainly of independent city states, and because the monsters of its mythology are so commonly associated with the fantasy genre.

Starting with polytheism versus monotheism, many people are willing to ignore this in favor of capturing the overall feel of medieval Europe, but it really is kind of a big deal. In the middle ages, the Christian church dominated everything. For a thousand years, they were the dominant power. It really wasn't until Charlemagne came along that a secular leader managed to recapture real power from the church, and it definitely wasn't until the black death that people realized that the church didn't have all the answers. It wasn't until the crusades, the cultural exchange between the Muslims and the Christians, and the rediscovery of Aristotle that people in Europe realized that they could apply reason rather than faith as the primary means of making decisions. This is huge. It was so huge that the Thomas Aquinas spent a great deal of time and effort trying to merge the reason of Aristotle in with the dogma of religion.

Most fantasy genres, on the other hand, are very polytheistic. Having a multitude of gods that are constantly struggling against one another just makes for more interesting stories. It's more fun creating stories that involve mortals landing in the middle of struggles that are so much larger than they are. Polytheism gives characters an ultimate frontier to strive towards, and it also provides them with a reason to quest on behalf of their deities. In Star Trek V, Kirk asks "God" what he needs with a starship. It's a valid question in a universe where gods are all-powerful, all seeing, and all knowing. In a fantasy universe, the gods are a bit more limited in their abilities, and a Greek god would have a pat answer for Kirk: "Because Zeus got pissed, dumped me off here, and your starship is the only way to leave this dead planet!"

Religious matters aside, fantasy also usually assumes a degree of political intrigue. I'm not going to attempt to make the argument that the middle ages lacked politics - far from it - but I am going to say that a setting where city states were independent and controlled a great deal less territory makes for a more interesting story or game because the politics can change drastically as the heroes travel from one locale to the next. In a kingdom that spans hundreds of miles, if you make an enemy of the wrong person in one town, you will be wanted for most of the other towns within reach. In ancient Greece, if you piss off a king of one city, you make haste out of town, or hop a ship, and when you arrive at the next city, odds are that you get to start clean (or at least with whatever baggage you have from the last time you visited). It's easier to build an episodic story while maintaining the same basic culture throughout.

If you know your history, you could point out that Greece wasn't entirely without large government. There was the Delian League and the Peloponnesian League, which were comprised of a number of city states and were aligned against one another. This is true, and it's also true that Crete was a dominating city state during the bonze age. Despite this, the political influence of Athens, Sparta, and Crete was not as all-encompassing as it would be in a kingdom. The political institutions were completely unstable, which is why looking up the Delian League in Wikipedia turns up a huge list of city states that belonged to it at one point or another, but either dropped out on their own or were conquered by someone larger, forcing them out of the league. Many of the cities of Ionia, for instance, in Modern day Turkey, were part of the league until the Persian Empire came in and conquered them. Persia, in itself, makes for an excellent "evil empire" for characters to struggle against.

Finally, a good percentage of the monsters that form the backbone of fantasy fiction and gaming are either directly taken from Greek mythology, or they are based on these creatures. Off the top of my head, Greek mythology directly contributed the following monsters to D&D: minotaurs, cyclops, lamia, medusa, hydra, dragons, gorgons, centaurs, giants, hags, harpies, demons, ghosts, and more. Or, to put it another way, a good number of the monsters that characters run into in fantasy literature are directly derived from Greek mythology.

Finally, Greek mythology is more loaded with traditional fantasy heroes than medieval literature is. Sure, medieval literature has Beowulf, King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and Robin Hood, but the Greeks give us Haracles, Perseus, Theseus, Jason, Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus, etc. etc. etc. There's simply more there. And keeps... there were castles in Greece, just like there were castles in the Middle Ages. In fact, King Minos's castle in Greece was both a castle as well as a dungeon.

Now maybe you'll argue that it wasn't until the middle ages that plate armor was invented, that metal craft wasn't perfected until then, or that there are a few more monsters that were picked up through the vikings, or the Americans, or the Arabs, but realistically, the cultural influences from those sources is not felt as greatly as the Greek culture is in most fantasy literature (granted, there are exceptions, but I'm making a general statement here). In fact, in terms of cultural influences, I would further argue that no culture in the history of the world was more influential on our own culture than ancient Greece. It is for all of these reasons that I believe that ancient Greece itself is a long-overlooked source of fantasy fiction. Unsurprisingly, this is an avenue that I am currently exploring, and you'll see the fruits of my experimentation in the coming months.

2009-12-14T11:59:00.000-08:00

So another year is almost over and this is the part where we reflect on where things are at as well as where things are headed.

First of all, the big news from me this year at year end is that I have finished all coursework for my undergraduate degree. This is a pretty big deal for me, considering that I opted not to finish at the university my first time through, and I actually did pretty well for myself in the workforce for about a decade after making that decision. That said, I did hit a bit of a glass ceiling due to the lack of a degree, so I finished up only to find that I really enjoy school. In fact, I enjoy it so much that I'm applying for grad school. So much for the glass ceiling, if this happens, it will be a complete change of direction into something that will allow me to do more meaningful work.

The next big news for me is that the grim reaper almost paid me a visit. I'm sure everyone reading this has heard of the swine flu, or the H1N1 virus. Yeah, I had that and it led to pneumonia. The problem was that I didn't know that I had pneumonia and the two times I went into the clinic, they gave me some weak antibiotics and sent me on my way. After this had gone on for a couple weeks and I was still feeling like crap, I went to the emergency room and found out that I had a pretty severe case of pneumonia. My second night there didn't go so well, as my blood O2 levels crashed. Luckily I was in a hospital and they were prepared for that, but had I continued to stay home, it could have been bad. All told, I spent a week in the hospital, another week at home after that recovering, and then there were the two weeks before that, so I missed a grand total of a month worth of school. Most people were suggesting that I take a medical withdrawal and then try again next semester, but I really didn't want to postpone graduation and there were classes I was taking that wouldn't be offered next semester, so I picked myself up by my bootstraps and got myself back to class. The fact that I succeeded says as much about how cool my professors are as it does about my drive to catcht up. It wasn't the easiest thing in the world, and some of my other projects suffered as a result.

Speaking of other projects, I'm currently in the middle of writing the eighth Oathbound book, which will be called Eclipse. What's cool about this project is that Oathbound is really one of those key projects I was involved with very early in my RPG design career, and I really didn't expect that I would get the chance to return to it. When Bastion Press went down, the Oathbound property went to one of its original creators, Greg Dent, and given the state of the RPG industry at that time, it didn't look like it was worth continuing. Things are looking up in the industry this year, however, and he decided to move forward with it again, and with as many of the original crew as possible. As it turns out, the returning crew includes all of three of us: Todd Morasche, myself, and of course Greg Dent, plus we've brought on a newcomer to the field, Clinton J. Boomer, who is a fellow Werecabbage and a hell of a great writer/designer. I should be finished with my part of this project fairly soon, which means that I'll be on to the next thing....

So, on to the next thing! You know those nifty devices that have been coming out for the last few years? Amazon makes one called the Kindle, Sony makes one simply called an E-reader, and there are a few more out there? It struck me that the existence of these devices really blows the doors open for those of us who know we can write novels well, have a desire to do so, but can't seem to get out of the slush pile. Incidentally, it's a fairly common occurrence for RPG authors to have difficulties breaking into novels. In my case, there have been a few near misses, such as the Babylon 5 novel I was to write for Mongoose Publishing, right before their license fell through.... So, tired of near successes, I've decided to take things into my own hands, in typical Darrin Drader fashion, and start up a novel publishing company.

I know what you're thinking: how is this any different than any other self publishing scheme? The answer is that I'm not just going to be publishing myself, but I'll also be publishing other writers. If someone comes to me with an outstanding manuscript, I'll publish their book, but what I'm specifically looking for are game designers and even game studios who want their novels to see the light of day and their game world translated into fiction. I'll be doing the copyediting and layout, providing covers and advertising, and I'll also be making these novels available in multiple formats, so you'll be able to buy them and read them on whatever gadget you prefer, including the PC. Plus, if you're the type who just has to have a dead tree format book, I'll make our books available through one of the print on demand outfits as well.

Right now I'd love to give specifics about what this new venture is going to entail, but I can't do that just yet. What I can say is that I will in fact be publishing a novel of my own, which I'll start writing as soon as I'm done writing this Oathbound book. I can also say that there will be two new shared world settings that I'll be handling, which other authors can get in on. I've picked out a name for the company, which I can't share just yet due to the fact that it remains unregistered as a business, although the web domain has been reserved. I'll make an announcement when we start accepting submissions as soon as things come together.

One little tidbit I can share about my own personal novel project is that it's in one of the shared worlds I mentioned and it takes on traditional fantasy, but frames it differently than I've seen done before and I'm pretty excited about the creative direction it's taking.

So that's it for now. I'll try to blog more often now that I'm finished with school... for now anyway.

The CRAP Principles and You

2009-10-27T19:17:00.000-07:00

Question: Why do you think the CRAP Principles are important in design?

Answer: I've studied the CRAP principles in several classes now and I think that the reason that they are important in design is because, very simply, they present a method of design that is easy for the the average user to access. Provided that the user is not color blind, or is simply unable to see the content of your page, the CRAP principles seem to resonate with the naturally occurring brain patterns in people.

People can see your material best when there is some sort of contrast between the various elements on the page. Without contrast, you end up with text or images that blend into their surroundings, requiring the viewer to strain their eyes to try to obtain the meaning from them.

When you repeat elements, it helps provide continuity for the viewer. For example, if you repeat the same font and size of text when you create a new section head, the viewer will quickly recognize the section heads for what they are. Similarly, regular text is easily spotted when compared with the rest of the page and indented text might be quotations. As long as the same format is used for every occurrence of a specific element, the viewer will not become confused.

Alignment is good because it keeps your material from looking scattered. Unless you want a scattered presentation for some reason, using alignment only makes sense is another tool that helps you organize the various elements you are using.

2009-10-06T01:22:00.000-07:00

Q: After reading the two McCloud pieces, how do you think McCloud views comics as visually rhetorical?

A: I think McCloud presents a good case for why comics can be just as rhetorical (or perhaps moreso) than ordinary text. In the first piece, he talks about how adding a level of visual abstraction allows the author to more purposefully convey a rhetorical message. He also talks about how the reader can impose himself into the cartoon or comic through abstraction. Showing how a person goes from a realistic photo to a smiley face that we still recognize as a human face demonstrates how we tend to impose our own identity on everything. This allows us to subconsciously identify with the drawn image.

The second piece talks about how the nature of images and text have changed over time, grown away from one another, and then grown back together in the form of comics. In this piece, it is clear that the author is biased towards the comic medium, and is making an argument to back up the claim that comics are a valid form of rhetorical communication. My feeling is that he is correct that images and words can be combined to effectively communicate a rhetorical message, but I also feel that there's the obvious question of how seriously we should take this medium in today's society. In common usage, the comic is used primarily for comic books as well as political cartoons. Comics books, while popular, (in my opinion) tend to be vacuous jaunts into unrealistic superhuman escapist fantasies, and have very little value outside of pure mindless entertainment (though I will admit to some exceptions that intentionally try to make the reader think, or at least challenge conventions. Works such as Persepolis, The Watchmen, or Maus fit my definition of quality despite the medium). Political comics, on the other hand, are typically intended to be funny, amusing, and make people think about the author's message. I find them to be somewhat more relevant, though they still shy away from seriously addressing issues and instead poke fun at the political events of the day.

So to say that I'm not a huge fan of the comic medium would be an accurate assessment, though I do feel that it can be quite effective on the rare instances when it is intentionally used for maximum relevancy and impact.

2009-10-01T02:23:00.000-07:00

Q: Can visuals make arguments? How do visuals make arguments? Give an example.

A: Visuals can make arguments, but as is argued in the two articles for today, they do so in much the same way that written or verbal arguments do. In other words, in order for a visual argument to be successful, it must convey a question, and then it must attempt to answer this question in a way that attempts to convince the viewer of the author's point of view. To accomplish this, the visual must reference things that are accepted and understood within a societal and cultural context. This context often changes over time, which is why many visual arguments from decades ago that would have been effective then would not be effective in today's society. One example is how smoking was once a symbol for intellect, cultural refinement enjoying the finer things in life, relaxation, and (believe it or not) health. Today, an argument that attempted to use cigarettes in this manner would either be laughed at or simply not understood.

Likewise, visuals can make effective arguments if they are able to successfully tap into society's collective consciousness. We see this a great deal in two areas: advertisements and political cartoons. As someone who eschews advertisements, I'll bring up a relatively benign cartoon that surfaced on 9/30/2009

In this comic, we see Obama skipping from one troubled area within America to the next with an almost acrobatic ease. Of course most people would agree that the majority of these problems would not be problems if not for the incompetence of the previous administration. Despite this, Obama is the man who currently has the job to fix this mess and this comic makes the argument that he is taking it all on. I think that the argument that it makes is that applying his time and resources to convincing the Olympics Committee to pick Chicago might be a waste, given everything else that he must contend with. Regardless, the Olympics committee is impressed by his abilities, even if Chicago isn't going to win. So, to break this down to its two main arguments: 1. Obama is wasting his time with the Olympics since their importance is not equal to the other issues he must contend with, and 2. Obama is practically running a decathalon by trying to solve all of these problems facing the nation.

Target's Logo

2009-09-22T01:15:00.000-07:00

Q: Choose a company logo and write about its qualities as a picture, symbol, and a sign.

As a picture, the Target logo does not invoke a literal association with an actual target. The circles are too perfect and the lack of a background immediately inform the viewer that this is not something that you are going to encounter in the real world, unless you happen to see a picture of it somewhere, say perhaps in or near a shopping mall. As a symbol, when looked at without the text that says "Target", it is clear that this represents a target. The layered red and white rings of varying sizes are unlikely to represent anything else. Someone might interpret this as an indication that they are on the right track, or that the correct path is ahead of them. As a sign, obviously the successful chain of retail stores has saturated culture with their sign through advertising and prominent placement outside of or near malls, that it effectively lets people know that a flyer with the image on it belongs to them, or that if they follow the sign, they will arrive at one of these shopping centers. Because they clearly thought their logo through strategically, there is no question about what it should be associated with. Had they picked a cube, or a pyramid, the association may not come as quickly, which might have negatively impacted the brand they created.

Blog Post 9/7/2009

2009-09-07T23:04:00.000-07:00

Q: How are visuals and multimedia rhetorical? Explain.

According to Foss, Foss, and Trapp, rhetoric can be defined very simply as communication. Although they offer a lengthy description about how communication is broken down as symbols and signs that our brains interpret in certain ways, ultimately what they are saying is that rhetoric is the ability to communicate an idea from one person to another. Visuals and multimedia are an important type of communication in today's world because when we see certain images, our brain gives them certain meanings which are based in cultural context. For example, if we see a big octagonal red sign, we interpret that as stop. When we're driving, it means that we need to stop our car and look for traffic moving through an intersection. When we see a the same sign on a website, or in a book, it usually means that we need to take some extra time to consider something, or to not do something. For instance, a software manual might include a stop sign if there are additional steps that must be completed before moving on. Sometimes the portraits of people can carry special meanings as well. For example, Martin Luther King Jr. symbolizes equality and racial co-existence while a picture of Charles Manson, when used in conjunction with discussion of a certain policy might mean that it is dangerous, promoted inequality, or is might kill a person. The multimedia used to convey a message is as limitless as the human imagination, and the effectiveness is determines almost entirely by the author's ability to interpret social consciousness.

Looking Through the Sansa

2009-09-02T21:30:00.000-07:00

Aside from my computer, the most used electronic device in the house is not the television, a radio, or a video game machine, but my MP3 player. I suppose that the MP3 player is the modern day high-tech, non-brand-name version of a walkman. Of course it's a walkman that can hold half of the albums I've ever bought on it at one time, which makes it a bit more useful when I go on one of my regular evening walks that lasts about an hour and covers about three miles. Rather than have bulky tapes stuffed in plastic cases that always seem to be falling apart, I instead can finish an album, or a song, and continue along my way, new tunes playing, an no worries about where to stash the tape I had been listening to.

And yes, I do realize that comparing an MP3 player to a Walkman dates me, but hey, at least I've been a computer geek all my life, as opposed to so many others my age who never actually considered using one until they were forced to for work.

So when I look at my Sansa (not Apple... thankfully not Apple), looking AT the thing is the simple act of figuring out how to make it function. Connect interface cord to the device and the other end to USB socket... copy songs to the device... go to settings and choose my memory card, reboot, and load up a bunch more songs... reboot again... wait for the database to refresh... wait some more for the database to refresh... place headset over ears... select music... select artist... look for album... What? Where's the album I want to listen to? I check the computer and realize that none of the MP3 files have the album name, so it's getting shuffled under unsorted. Fix the original files... plug in... load songs... reboot... wait. And this time there it is! The AT is taking the necessary steps to get it to play music. Now I can get past the AT and get to the THROUGH.

For an MP3 player, the THROUGH is simple. Once I hit play, I can listen to whatever I have loaded it with. I find that quite often this ends up being Collective Soul because just about everything album they've made in the last ten years is upbeat enough that it's beat and rhythm keep me moving. When it's not them, sometimes it's the Killers, or U2. It doesn't matter really, because once I get past the steps needed to make it work, it's a matter of enjoyment.

How The University Sees DTC

2009-08-26T21:38:00.000-07:00

Question: In regards to these two articles, how do you think the university views multimedia authoring?

Response: Unfortunately I cannot comment on the two articles just yet as I am still waiting for my books to arrive. Rather than continuing to feed the overpriced college book store's voracious hunger for my money, I am instead choosing to buy my books online where they are more reasonably priced.

That said, Jim Haendiges' opening lecture on Tuesday 8/25/2009 suggested that the university humors DTC and that many professors come from such a traditional background that they aren't sure how to grade assignments done in electronic media. I have to say that this is in all likelihood true, but it does not reflect my experience with it.

In my limited experience with the university, the person who represents the greatest "authority" is Bob Eddy, who, I suspect, is someone who would be horrified at the prospect of being constructed as a representative who speaks for the university as a whole. That said, he is my advisor, one of my former professors, and a person who I greatly trust and admire. The reason I bring him into the discussion is because ever since I first met him, he has suggested that I take DTC classes. Last semester Bob advised me to get into Paul Mulhauser's English 355 class and was unable to because it had already been filled. I had actually already elected to do my minor on CES as a prelude to grad school. Unfortunately my wife, who had worked for the university for two years, was let go because of the budget crunch, and as a result I decided not to pursue grad school and instead go for something more immediately useful. When I spoke with Bob about this, he recommended doing a minor in DTC.

The point that I'm arriving at is that in every way that it counts, I have been encouraged to pursue DTC. It therefore came as a surprise that the university doesn't offer strong support DTC.

And Now for Something Completely Different... Again

2009-08-26T21:29:00.000-07:00

Yes, for those three and a quarter people who actually follow my blog, I must report that it is being co-opted once again by coursework.

(Image courtesy of http://www.michaelbrochstein.com/photo/images/people/tmsq0312.htm)

Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook Sells Out

2009-08-04T17:53:00.001-07:00

If you're a gamer, but now you've heard the news, so I'll skip all the exposition.

This is a win for gaming, and this is significant. For the past decade I've been concerned that the "only game in town" existed under an extremely large and uncaring corporate entity (even if I for a time worked for said entity). After rounds of nonsensical layoffs and corporate decisions that were misguided and just plain mean spirited, I was losing hope that this industry was ever going to re-balance itself and find some of what it enjoyed under TSR at its height. It was my desire to see the game shift to a company that was run by people who actually played RPGs and worried about the state of the game rather than treating it like it was just another one of many expendable brands. That is not to imply that RPGs are not a business and that the people who work in it do so out of pure altruism, but there is spot where good business decisions meet with good products, as well as the proper respect for the game, the people who originally brought it to life, and those who have worked on it ever since.

Last year everything changed when Paizo committed to a course of action that some decried as misguided, foolish, and destined to fail. "Who still wants to play third edition?" They asked. Paizo asked for the community involvement to tell them what we were looking for in our game, and for a year, we told them. Today we are beginning to see the results of this gambit and they are good. We at last have a strong, viable RPG company that is committed to including the players and the fans. After watching them and their products, and after working with them on several Pathfinder AP pieces now, I can say that Paizo is exactly the company I've been hoping would come along and provide some much needed leadership.

Congrats Paizo! You've come a long way from the jettisoned "Periodicals Department" and I look forward to seeing what's next.

Remembering Exalted Deeds

2009-07-16T01:28:00.000-07:00

Now that I've been at the whole game design thing for a few years (I think I'm up to nine years of doing this professionally), one of the things I'm allowed to do is look back at past projects and post my thoughts. And what better project to talk about than the Book of Exalted Deeds? I mean let's face it, aside from the core rules, this is one of the 3.5 books that could be considered a hit. Actually, I have no idea how it did in sales; I never asked, but the one thing I do know is that any time I meet D&D players and mention that I have cover credit on the book, there is always familiarity and there are always stories.

It could be said that getting credit on this book was my second lucky break. What was my first? Accidentally not getting credit for some design work I did that ended up in Dragon magazine (it was purely accidental and led to my first paid gig as a designer). So prior to landing this job, I had been working as a temp at WotC, and I had finally worked up the courage to shoot an email to the R&D department about doing a bit of work for them. I was referred to T'Ed Stark, who I sat down and had a good long conversation with about writing and D&D in general. Prior to this I had met Christopher Perkins a couple times, and that was it for the people I knew.

So after I mentioned that I had done some design work on my own and I pointed out the articles with my name on them (and the one that didn't), T'Ed decided to give me a shot on what he pitched as the sequel to the Book of Vile Darkness. Of course, being a huge fanboy at the time, I knew everything about the BoVD. I knew it was a bold new step in a direction that TSR had been afraid to go, and I knew that it had been written by Monte Cook, a guy I still have never met in person, but who had been an inspiration for years, and I knew that it was going to be a tough act to follow. But hey, I was up to the task.

While the Book of Exalted Deeds may have helped put me on the map, the fact is that my co-authors did most of the work. This was really James Wyatt's book. He was the lead designer and he's the guy who came up with the truly original ideas that appeared, such as the Vow of Poverty, the whole of at least the first couple of chapters, and quite a bit of the mechanical stuff that was found throughout. Christopher Perkins had worked on the 2nd edition book called Warriors of Heaven, so his inclusion on this book was a bit of a no-brainer.

So there I was, first real writing job and I got to work with two of the most talented writers/designers in the industry (and I believe that this remains true today) following up the most well known designer in all of gaming, working on the the sequel to one of the most controversial but ultimately well received books in the edition thus far. Oh yeah, no pressure there. None at all!

In all honesty, the work wasn't as long or as hard as I thought it would be. I brainstormed the rules I wanted to work on, I met with T'Ed and Chris a few times, and I figured out how to make things go from ideas to rules. Along the way (and with the permission from the guys), I snagged a few spells from Warriors of Heaven and updated them to work with the current edition. This project went comparatively quickly and then after I made my turnover, Chris and I met to talk about some ideas that worked and some that didn't. I ended up rewriting a few things, but overall it went pretty well.

So what parts of the book did I actually work on? It's been a while and I may not even remember every little thing, but some of the highlights include the owl archon (incidentally, Chris asked me where this came from and I said I made it up. In fact the idea had come to me while I had been in a drunken stupor one night - I used to drink back then. I rarely do anymore, but I didn't go into that), the leskylor (which I think may have been adapted from somewhere else, I don't recall anymore), the sanctified creature, the sanctify the wicked spell, the anointed knight, the beloved of Valarian the sentinel of Bharrai (I think), the skylord, the vassal of Bahamut, and numerous spells.

As I said before, this was really James' book and he did an outstanding job on it. I'm just lucky that they decided to take me along for the ride. Of all the books I've worked on for WotC, there are really two that people remember: the Book of Exalted Deeds and D20 Apocalypse.

After the release of the book, it slowly became apparent to me that this one was popular. First there was the controversy about the Adult Content sticker on the front, which didn't seem to apply to this one as much as it did the BoVD, then there was the constant internet discussions about the Vow of Poverty, and then there was the WotC online convention, in which Chris and I fielded questions about the book. It was a good time and that book opened a lot of doors for me as a freelancer that probably would not have opened had I not been at the right place and at the right time to get assigned the right project.

Obviously these days I'm not with WotC anymore. I'm working on my own RPG brand - Reign of Discordia, and I've been doing some work for the awesomely cool and nice people at Paizo. Everyone who knows me is aware that I'm not down with 4E, but I do owe and want to acknowledge a serious debt of gratitude to T'Ed, Chris, and James. From the bottom of my heart, and I mean this literally, thank you for my career. Cheers and best of luck!

Thank You Mr. Obama For Giving Us Something To Work Towards

2009-07-08T15:29:00.000-07:00

Why were the late '90s so awesome? Technology! For a period of about three years I was on the technology bandwagon back in the '90s. I jumped aboard the great technology innovation train about midway in '96, and I rode it for a while. Granted, I wasn't a programmer or developer. Actually I was in sales, but I could also build, repair, and upgrade them. Regardless of my vantage point, nobody is arguing that the speed at which the PC is evolving has slowed way down in the past decade. Well, maybe the last 2/3 of the decade. At any rate, tech isn't what it used to be.

What was cool about the computer revolution was that it was moving fast and it allowed us to do all kinds of things we had never done before. Do you know how many scanners I sold to people because I happened to mention that they could start digitizing the family album? Or photo printers that I sold because I pointed out that once they had digitized the family album, they could then reproduce those treasured old photos themselves? I also sold a crapload of PCs just based on the fact that they could play the latest games. These days the former example is a given since computers are capable of doing everything, and the games have moved to consoles.

I always refer to this decade as the zeroes. I mean aside from quaking in our boots that we were going to get hit by terrorists again, what have we been working towards? Sure, a lot of people jumped aboard the housing bubble before it popped. A lot of people jumped aboard the finance bubble before it popped, but none of that was blazing new ground. OK, we built houses. People bought houses. People loaned money, took a cut, insured the houses and the loans, etc. But were we actually focusing society towards building anything new? I would argue that we haven't and as a result of this and some of the most lousy leadership this country has seen in a long, long time, we were really just drifting forward on the momentum built up over the previous decade. Obviously we have run out of momentum so it's time to start building something new.

MSNBC.com has an article about how companies are turning their sights towards green technology. In addition to that, they're in the process of passing a new energy bill that will make traditional energy consumption more expensive for the average American. Translation: become more efficient or pay through the nose.

So what will this mean in terms of finding something new for us to set our collective sights on? You guessed it. The next wave of cars will be hybrids, or possibly fully electric. Our next washers and dryers will be designed to use power more efficiently. The same is true for all of our appliances. And what about other things we can do to get each household further self-sufficient? If they keep making solar panels more efficient, people will start installing those instead of traditional roofing. This in-turn, will eventually drive the prices of solar panels into the traditional roofing price range. I don't know about everyone else, but I'd personally love it if I could start producing my own energy instead of continuing to pay the local electric monopoly their monthly extortion.

I also predict that in addition to this being a cost-cutting measure, it will eventually become a matter of prestige. Just like it was once cool to get the upper end Pentium machines so that you could play the latest video games, it will become cool to make the household as energy efficient as possible. Imagine getting together with the neighbors and having bragging rights because you only had to fork over fifty dollars to the power company!

This desire to make things more environmental has been around for decades, but the difference is that now, thanks to a presidential mandate and a new law that's going to sucker punch everyone in the wallet, there's an actual reason to develop this technology. Of course this will create a whole host of new jobs all the way from research and development all the way down to sales. I think this has the potential to turn a recession into a boom, and it might just be the type of boom that becomes so essential that it's the next great American industry.

I'm not exactly known for my optimism, but this is something that I'm actually looking forward to. Save money, make money, and do so in a way that's good for the planet! When was the last time the three of these things aligned in that manner?

Moving Stuff Over

2009-06-27T01:06:00.000-07:00

Just got done moving a bunch of stuff from my Facebook notes to my public blog.

Happiness is.... Pullman in the Rearview Mirror

2009-06-27T01:04:00.000-07:00

A while back I saw a bumper sticker that said "Happiness is... Pullman in the rearview mirror" and it reminded me that even though nearly twenty years have gone by since I reached the end of my non-optional community arrest in this town, and the world has changed in a number of ways, some things really don't change at all. Back in 1996 I had finally had enough of this town, so I escaped to the West side. My reasons for leaving were numerous: not enough good jobs in this area, hadn't really ever spent any time in a place other than Pullman, all my friends from highschool had gone, all my friends from college were gone. In short, I wanted to go out and experience life, make a name for myself, and move beyond the limitations of this place.

It took several years for homesickness to set in. I'm not talking about the mild kind of homesickness that you get over time as you realize that familiar elements are missing from your life; you know, the kind that you can cure by taking a week to go back, surround yourself with those familiar elements, and then leave, happy that you have the freedom to get away. I'm talking about the kind of homesickness where you realize that even though you have a lot of nice things, a decent life, a career, a new car, a house, children and pets of your own, there are also certain things that just weren't the same - and not in a good way. It takes an hour to get anywhere because the traffic is so congested, it's always raining, except for when it's hot, and when it's hot the humidity makes it sweltering, and then there's the small matter that you have to drive quite a ways to escape urban sprawl.

Someone, and I don't remember who, once described Pullman as a forest in the middle of a wheat field, and I happily agree with them. It isn't exactly a full-on desert, but the summers are hot and dry, the winters require a certain amount of masochism to survive, and you can't help but be aware of the rebirth during the annual greening of the Palouse and then its inverse, when everything changes to shades of yellow and brown and the bite of cold creeps back into the air. During those last few years in Seattle, I really missed the Pullman summers, when the dirt was so dry that it became powder and you could smell the asphalt baking in the streets, and the distinct earthy smell of the rare rainstorm after weeks of being blasted by the heat. The sky was often cloudless and blue during the day and you could actually look up in the night sky and see stars rather than the dull light of the urban sprawl reflected in the ever-present clouds.

Then there's the culture. Many people claimed that Pullman is a cultural wasteland. In fact, Young Jean Lee, who graduated from Pullman in the 1990s (was she in our class?) is now a playwright and was featured in the New Yorker, where they discussed her play entitled "Pullman, WA" One passage reads:

I was surrounded by mermaids. I was lying on soft green grass and they
were standing on their flippers in a circle around me. I looked up and saw
a bright blue sky crisscrossed with rainbows that arched from one puffy
white cloud to another. As I sat up, the mermaids started hopping away
and I could see that the landscape around me was composed almost entirely
of chopped-up mermaid parts.

In interviews, she has said that her father brought the family over from Korea (she was only two at the time) and became an evangelistic preacher—right here in Pullman. She rebelled, became a playwright. “Pullman, WA” isn’t very reader-friendly, but it’s probably fun to perform. One reviewer calls it a performance piece. By willfully NOT being about Pullman, it’s really all about Pullman. It’s about a wasteland, teenage and otherwise.

Despite the perception of Pullman as a cultural wasteland, maybe there's something that people overlook. The community is largely educated, thanks to the presence of the university. Pullman has athletes, and writers, and music, and food, and beer, and nature. A fifteen minute walk from any place in town is all it takes to move beyond the boundary of the city and out into the countryside. Pullman has diversity, and tolerance. Pullman's highschool is not only rated one of the best in the nation, but it's also a place where people are given the tools they need to find their calling in life, and the wisdom that they will probably need to leave Pullman in order to be those things.

So here I am, two and a half years back in Pullman, finishing my degree, that one big project I should have finished more than a decade ago, and I'm looking at this place not in terms of its limitations and shortfalls, but in wonderment at how any of us could have possibly taken this place for granted. While I'm beginning to look once more towards the future, despite the worst economy I've ever seen in my life, I'm beginning to remember Seattle fondly, not quite homesick yet, but remembering the things that are there that are not here like friends, excellent radio to keep me company while I'm stuck in traffic, companies with high paying positions that don't involve teaching college, and the ability to go shopping for something and actually being able to find it. I don't know if Seattle is in my future; there are editing positions with both local universities here, and Pullman is a better place to raise my kids, but I'm not convinced Pullman is the place for me anymore either. For everything that it is, it's also small, and no matter their strengths, small places are limiting places.

Regardless of whether I stay or leave again, the one thing I'm doing differently this time is not allowing myself to take it for granted. The bumper sticker lies. Happiness isn't coming to or leaving a place; it's wanting to be at whatever place you are.

Atheism and You, or What is Christ to an Atheist?

2009-06-27T01:02:00.001-07:00

Clearly the fact that I'm an atheist and that I'm writing this means that if you happen to be a member of any Christian denomination, chances are that we have a major fundamental disagreement about the nature of Jesus Christ. I think that there is a common mistake in thinking among Christians and atheists that this disagreement has to be a defining one between us, however. I don't believe that this has to be true. In fact, I would argue that while atheists do not believe that there was anything divine about Christ, he was one of the first widely popular humanists in world history.

When analyzing antiquity, it's very hard to come up with solid facts about very many things. In those times, even though people were just as resourceful then as they are today, they didn't have the same compulsion to record things that we do today. Most people were illiterate and the people who could read and write weren't considered the intellectual elite. The literate were considered more along the lines of secretaries today, who transcribed the thoughts of the truly great thinkers. Now obviously this is a blanket statement, and there are some notable exceptions, like the Arab scholars who preserved many of the works of Greek knowledge recorded astronomical observations, but for the most part, speech was considered far more of an important medium than the written word. Now here we are, thousand of years later and we're left with a lot of incomplete and inaccurate records regarding the things that occurred in antiquity. That said, the modern day is very much derived from antiquity, so we cannot simply walk away from it and reject it as "not modern" or "not enlightened."

When we turn our attention to Jesus Christ, the first thing many of us look at is the fact that nothing was written down in a timely manner. The testaments within the bible were written decades after the death of Jesus. There are Roman documents from the time that discuss Jesus, so we can safely assume that Jesus actually did exist. Christians believe that the holy spirit worked through the various writers to convey to people the exact words of Jesus, thereby sidestepping the question of the accuracy of teachings that were decades old by the time they even started being recorded.

What we know is that the New Testament was compiled based on interviews with eye witnesses, and therein lies a problem. As has been scientifically concluded in recent years, memory is a fragile thing. Memories are easily altered and distorted based on perceptions, suggestions, and beliefs. That's why there have been numerous documented cases of crime victims identifying the wrong suspect after a crime. So, thirty years after the death of Christ, we can only believe that the words and deeds of Jesus were distorted a great deal, particularly by the people who followed him and believed in his message. For example, how would we know Martin Luther King Jr. in the modern day if there were no written or video accounts of the speeches he gave? I would argue that very few of his exact words would be preserved, although the essence of his message would be very much preserved.

I would also argue that in antiquity, people had a very real tendency of mixing the mundane with the supernatural. For example, in ancient Greece, people believed that the sun moved across the sky because it was pulled by the chariot of the god Helios. A prominent sect of Buddhists decided that Buddha was a god rather than a man despite the fact that this is a contradiction of one of the main tenets of the religion. Greek and Roman mythologies were full of stories of various figures being gods or the sons of gods and performing great deeds that would be outside of the realm of normal human beings. In fact, a religion without these elements would have a difficult time finding traction among ancient people. The fact is that there is really nothing new or exceptional about the Jesus story within the context of the ancient world.

So that's a summary of why it is both reasonable and logical to doubt the validity of the full mythology of Jesus that is embraced by the Christian religion. That said, even a non-believer like myself should objectively look at the message of Jesus and evaluate it on its own merits rather than simply discarding it. As I said earlier, even if the exact words of Martin Luther King Jr. were not recorded, the fundamental message would have been remembered and his teachings would probably still have a transformative effect upon society, even if it would take longer for it to spread by word of mouth. So who was Jesus?

Jesus was a religious reformer! His message was that the God of the Old Testament was too harsh to be accurate and that if there was a benign creator, what he really wanted was for people to live peacefully together and be faithful to God. The first part of his message is one of the core underpinnings of Western society while the second part is hardly unexpected given the fact that he was a religious figure. Again, comparing his to Martin Luther King Jr., we would not expect him to preach a message of racial equality and reform and not ground it in his Christian background. Jesus was the same. Once you discard the religious elements of Jesus' teachings, his core tenets were: the golden rule, loving your enemies, repentance and forgiveness, not judging others. In other words, Jesus wanted peace and coexistence. While I think that much of Jesus' actual words were lost, the core tenants were recorded intact, and that they were consistent with enlightened thought.

While atheism is the rejection of supernatural forces upon our lives, one of the things we need to do is come to some sort of realization of the synergies between our lack of belief and the belief systems of those who do believe. It would be wonderful if we could all just be human beings dealing with each other, and most of us believe that the ideal way of achieving this would be through the rejection of ancient outdated dogma upon modern society. Sine that isn't going to happen, we need to figure out a way of dealing with everyone else that doesn't necessarily categorize them as "the enemy" or "the other." It is true that Western civilization is largely based on the Renaissance, which was when people rejected the church's control over every facet of society while embracing the emphasis of reason of the Greeks, but there is a very humanistic moral underpinning that also exists within our civilization. We can come up with non-religious reasons for morality and there are certainly disagreements among many of us regarding what is and is not moral, but the bottom line is that as a culture, we tend to try to do what we consider good.

In my opinion, it would therefore be more productive for Atheists and Christians to work towards understanding and common goals based upon similarities in our ideologies rather than working towards hostility based on our differences. If what we want is consistent with the teachings of Jesus regarding human behavior towards one another then it would not be inappropriate to adopt Jesus Christ within our own context, which is that of an early humanist philosopher. It could even be appropriate for an atheist who identifies with the teachings of Jesus to consider himself a Christian atheist. It should likewise be possible and even useful to take the humanist, rational elements of other religions. Just as science places an emphasis on ancient scientists, many of whom were wrong but "onto something", one does not need to accept superstitious dogmatic beliefs in order to find the value of certain beliefs that emerged from antiquity.

Michael Jackson and Other Sacrifices to the Cult of Celebrity

2009-06-27T01:01:00.001-07:00

I'm not going to sit here and claim to be a fan of Michael Jackson, unlike so many other people who have come out of the wookwork since yesterday to express their grief. I'll be honest with myself, and with you. I didn't like him. I admit that I liked Thriller when I was in Middle School, before I started to cultivate a more mature taste in music, but at some point I came to the realization that pop music was a lot like eating empty colories: pleasant for a short time, but ultimately not good for me. But I'm not interested in talking about my dislike for the man's music. Instead, I want to talk about my dislike for the American cult of celebrity.

If you were to talk to these people who are now flooding the stores to buy up all of Jackson's music, or sitting around on sidewalks in small groups singing 'Billie Jean,' how many of these people would have actually been excited about the man if you had talked to them a week ago? Over the last ten years or so, I've heard a lot more people use the terms 'has-been', 'pedophile', or 'wacko-Jacko' to describe him. In fact, what was the last single he released? I certainly don't know because I can only barely remember the last time I heard about him when the media wasn't busy ripping him to shreds.

Not that he didn't bring some of it upon himself. I honestly don't know if he was actually a pedophile or just a strange man who was using children to capture his own lost youth, but just about anyone will agree that inviting young boys to come sleep in your bed isn't a wise thing for an adult to do. Then there's the fact that he kept a zoo at his house, slept in a glass cage, chose odd names for his kids, and hid them behind veils. To say he was eccentric would be an understatement.

Regardless of his weirdness, who are all these people mourning him right now? Why didn't we ever hear people defending him or expressing appreciation during the last fifteen years of his life? And why are all of these television personalities exulting his greatness when a few days ago they were looking for any dirt they could find on him so that they could take it to the public? I'm not going to say that he'd still be alive if the media had just left him alone, but I will say that he had to have felt like he was under a lot of pressure and under appreciated towards the end. Another question - if all these people who are rushing out now to buy his back catalog had done so earlier, would he have been buried in debt?

The truth of the matter is that a good, happy, well adjusted celebrity is boring to the public, and the media leeches don't have a story unless they can tear someone down. So that's what they do. They tear people down, hold them up for public ridicule, harass them as they get out of cars and walk down the streets, and otherwise make it seem as though they're living in a fishbowl. I don't know about the rest of you, but I wouldn't want people following me around and catching every moment I spend away from my house on video to be played back for a bunch of celebrity obsessed morons.

And that brings me to the real culprit. Shows like TMZ wouldn't operate in such an exploitative manner if there wasn't a large audience for such things. People are obsessed with the lives of famous people for some reason. If the people weren't buying, the tabloids wouldn't be selling. Maybe without the constant media pressure there would be fewer celebrities doing themselves in with prescription pain killers. Or maybe some people are just naturally self destructive and they still would. The bottom line though, is that these are human beings, just like the rest of us. They act, or they sing, or they dance, or they just have all the money in the world. That's it. They're also prone to the same vices, weaknesses, and bad behavior as the rest of us. Is it fair to put someone on a pedestal and then intentionally knock it out from under them for all the world to watch?

Like I said, I'm not a fan of Michael Jackson. I didn't buy his records, I avoided watching coverage of him on TV, and I tried to keep my mind occupied with things that actually matter, like the war in Iraq or the unethical corporate decisions that led to the economic meltdown. Nevertheless, even I, someone who actively avoided Michale Jackson, couldn't escape knowledge about him because coverage of him was so utterly pervasive. I couldn't help but absorb everything about him every time I went to the grocery store or turned on the news.

The cult of celebrity allows us to make gods out of men by promoting them to the status of "cultural icon'. We hold them to impossible standards, and then we have to make a big deal out of it when they prove unable to hold with those standards. Once we've finished sacrificing their virtue, honor, and goodness in the eyes of the public, they themselves all too often offer themselves up as bloody sacrifices for the public, which then celebrates them as martyrs. One of the sad truths of our culture is that we rarely allow ourselves to truly appreciate any artist until they're dead.

We're are a society of mean spirited salacious idol worshiping hypocrites. The pressure that we exert continually drives our best and brightest to their early graves. Why do we bother crying over the deaths of people like Michael Jackson, Anna Nicole Smith, Heath Ledger, and so many others when it was our prying interest in their personal lives that compounded their existing problems? Shouldn't we be happy that they finally reached the final conclusion that we steered them towards? Hey America, don't you think that maybe it's time to turn off the TV and stop buying those rags by the checkout counter? Aren't we supposed to be the country that sets the ethical standards for the rest of the world?

A Humbling Look Back

2009-01-17T17:52:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it's good to look at my early stuff just to see that there has been improvement. In my case (at least in my own humble opinion), the improvement is noticeable and monumental. Before I really got started writing for D&D, I was like a lot of other people in that writing was something I had wanted to do for a very long time, but I didn't keep in practice and I didn't take advantage of the opportunities that were available to submit material to various publications. Even though I wanted to be a writer, I wasn't persistent in my pursuit of success, and I'm really not even sure I was particularly good at it.

Back around August of 2000, when 3rd edition D&D was brand new, I submitted the following proposal for a Dungeon magazine adventure. At the time Chris Perkins was the editor in Chief, and he had shot down every adventure proposal I had sent him prior to this. As luck would have it, this one was not accepted, but he did give me the opportunity to resubmit after making some changes. In looking back on it now, the writing style was awkward and the adventure needed a little more something to make it more interesting. That said, it wasn't a total waste. I could probably rework it now, remove the items that are strictly Wizards IP, get rid of the elements that contribute nothing to the adventure, fix the writing and actually have an adventure that might be kind of cool.

Once I started getting some professional writing gigs, things never really slowed down, and this proposal was lost in the pile. So, for your amusement and mine, here's the unedited proposal for a Dungeon adventure that I never wrote. Don't feel bad if you find it gagworthy, I do too.

The working title of this adventure would be “Conflagration in spring.” It is for 4-6 characters levels 7-9 or 48 total levels. It will be helpful but not necessary for one of the party members to be a ranger. At the center of this adventure is a unique monster, magically created, called a flamespawn. Though similar in appearance to a deepspawn, except made of magma, it has a completely different host of abilities. The creature’s primary ability is to enchant other creatures. Creatures enchanted are converted to evil while under the influence (5 miles) of the flamespawn and given a low-grade breath weapon of fire (1d10 points of damage at will unlimited times per day). These creatures are not under the direct control of the flamespawn, but wander around as agents of chaos. The only creature the flamespawn is able to produce (like the deepspawn) are Burning man golems (from Monstrous Compendium Annual Vol. 2) at a rate of 1 every week. Instead of mouths and eyes attached to the creature it has tentacles of fire. Instead of being a genius its intelligence is merely 8.

The flamespawn was originally contained in a pit in the first layer of Baator (this part can be easily modified if it doesn’t fit with 3rd edition). The creature that created this was a devil of greater power who intended to use this as a weapon of chaos against cold-based demons in the Blood Wars. The author is aware of the fact that Baatezu are lawful, yet this is a weapon designed more to randomly hit less fortified areas of Baator. It was released into the forest here on the prime material plane through a series of events: A party was adventuring through Baator on an unrelated quest. They killed the fiend that kept this monster, but did not encounter the flamespawn itself. They did pick up a scroll, which they had yet to identify. The scroll was designed to be used by lesser Baatezu on missions in the Blood War, and therefore was not difficult to read. The party returned to the prime material plane and was on their way to the next major city to learn more about it when they were unknowingly pick pocketed by a killmoulis (Brownie). The killmoulis was curious and not nearly cautious enough when he read the scroll releasing the flamespawn.

The adventure begins in early spring (or late winter depending on when it would be the easiest for the DM to place it into their campaign) in a forest when the party comes across a group of druids who have just finished fighting off a fire. There is a ½ acre area of burned trees with a stag lying dead at the center of it. The area is still smoking and the druids look extremely weary. The party will undoubtedly stop to ask them what happened here, and the druids will explain to them that they have been fighting more and more unseasonable small fires in this forest for the past month. Worse yet, many of the animals have seemed to be possessed. They’ve been breathing fire at the druids and starting blazes like the one they just finished putting out. So far they’ve been able to contain the blazes but they’ve been increasing in frequency. They have no idea what is causing this, and they will ask for the party’s help in this matter. The only clue they will have in this matter is the location of a killmoulis burrow not far away. Normally they don’t think much of the killmoulis, but recently it seems to have been abandoned.

The killmoulis burrows have in fact been abandoned, as the party will discover upon investigating it. Unfortunately there will also be 2 burning man golems protecting this area. Also present will be 2 possessed cave bears. Since this was the emerging point of the flamespawn, it returns here often. The party will have to defend themselves against the golems and the bears. After clearing the area the party will find a used scroll. A faint trace of ash leaves faint marks where the letters once were (the scroll used to summon the flamespawn). On the outskirts of the area they will find a killmoulis that has been hiding since its village was rampaged by the flamespawn. It will tell them the story of how a big round thing made of fire appeared in their midst and started attacking them. Most were able to escape, but not all.

There will be a very faint trail of ash left by the flamespawn that has been undetectable to the druids. The party can use to track it back to its current lair provided that they either have a ranger present or have other similar tracking skills. There will be several other encounters planned with possessed animals, and a couple possessed monsters along the way. They will also encounter a newly set fire close to the path. The druids have not yet shown up to battle the blaze, so it will be up to the party to stop this one. They can put it out any number of ways – this would be expanded upon in the body of the text.

Upon nearing the lair of the flamespawn they will have a chance of seeing a killmoulis that has been possessed. If it is not stopped it will run into the lair alerting the flamespawn that there are people coming. The lair itself is a small series of caves that belongs to a tribe of orcs. In their present state they should be treated as red neo-orogs (Monstrous compendium annual 3) with the additional breath weapon mentioned above. There will be 23 of these in the lair along with 2 more of the Burning man Golems. The party will have to fight their way through these to get to the flamespawn.

Once the party reaches the chamber with the flamespawn, it will be protected by 1 Burning man Golem, and 5 neo-orogs. The flamespawn will try to possess the members of the party. This should be a pretty tough battle for characters of this level. This will need to be play tested to fine-tune the exact number of monsters in this area prior to publication. Upon the death of the flamespawn, the enchanted creatures and any affected orcs will be released from their enchantment. Life in the forest will return to normal, and the PC’s will have the gratitude of the druids, who will thankfully be able to get back to tending the forest. The party will be rewarded with an offering by the druids of 5000 gp.

Truth is an Onion

2009-01-15T23:32:00.000-08:00

The truth that we are fed is nothing but the surface. The explanations we are offered are little more than simplifications, as a father would offer a young child so that he can get them to stop asking so many questions. Truth is layers: history that dates back years, centuries, and millennia. Truth is complexity; unintended slights, shameful acts, misdeeds, noble sacrifices. The problem with truth is that the more you want to understand it, the more layers you must peel back to find it, and the more you find, the more issues you uncover, which themselves must be peeled back until you reach a point where there is no longer any information to find, or the truth challenges the version of the truth that you have come to accept.

Here are a few inconvenient truths that have become clear to me:

* The reformation, which was built on Greek ideals, would not have been possible if Islamic scholars had not saved Greek texts by translating them while Europe was in the dark ages. In a very real sense, the foundation of our current "enlightened" culture owes an enormous debt of gratitude to the very people we war against on the other side of the world.

* The term "Islamofacsists," which the Bush administration coined to refer to Al Qaida, Hamas, and the Taliban really doesn't mean a thing since those groups have very little in common. Rather than refer to Al Qaida as fascists, they should call them what they reall are: anarchists.

* A war of ancient grudges, and by-gone political decisions made by people who were never affected by the results of their actions mean very little to the innocent boys and girls who are being inhumanly murdered by the hundreds by bombs and missiles.

* What happens over there affects us over here. Despite our differences, we all share a common thread of humanity. Attempts to dehumanize the "other" so that we can kill them, occupy their lands, exploit their resources, and seek to replace their culture with our own ultimately serve to dehumanize ourselves.

Truth is an onion, and unfortunately the more layers you peel back, the more it stinks. Next Tuesday a potentially great man will be taking office in this country. It is my belief that he understands the complexity surrounding the issues that have led to such suffering and he will take the necessary actions to restore a sense of humanity to our dealings with other people in far off places. We must restore our moral compass and act in accordance with our conscience instead of blatant self interest.

Reactions to 4E

2009-01-11T16:36:00.001-08:00

About a month ago, Ryan asked me the following question:
How do you feel the dumbing down of D&D? I know you blogged on this earlier but thats what it seems like to me. In comparing 3.5 and 4.0 what I've seen is a change towards "user friendliness" that in reality seems to change alot of what appealed to core fans inorder to appeal to a broader base. I found this frustrating but do you think theres a connection between the alienation of the base and the indifference of other markets that are being sought after?

I felt that this is something that deserves its own blog entry because it's kind of a complicated question.

The first issue is whether 4E is a "dumbing down" of D&D. To that I would agree that character customization is certainly different than 3rd edition. Your combat abilities now have more to do with rigid class powers than they have to do with your choice of feats and other decisions you make as you level. I don't consider that so much dumbed down as drastically changed. If that happens to be easier, then whatever gain there is in terms of ease of use is complicated by all of the combat conditions that are placed on characters.Marking opponents, causing them to fall, get pushed, and other conditions end up adding a lot of complication that you used to have to select by performing certain combat actions, or casting certain spells. I'm not going to blow smoke by saying that I like 4E, but I don't think that calling it dumbed down is exactly accurate. I also think that the new approach makes combat more repetetive than what we saw before, and that's not something I particularly like.

The second part of the question - "do you think theres a connection between the alienation of the base and the indifference of other markets that are being sought after?" is more in line with my own criticisms. The things the old guard aren't happy with include the way that powers have become the all important character decisions where combat is concerned, the jettisoning of simulationist mechanics that dealt with things other than combat, the loss of the Vancian magic system, and the shortcomings of the three core books. Is it true that there are poeple who didn't like Vancian magic? Sure. I'm not one of them, but they're out there. Are there people who would rather play a tactical miniatures game? Definitely, and those people seem to be pretty happy with 4E. Are there people who like the ease of use of powers, as opposed to having to use feats and special combat actions? Absolutely. However, some of these systems dated back to the original Dungeons and Dragons game, and for those that didn't they were definitely parts of third edition that people enjoyed.

That begs the question, why would you make such drastic changes? My opinion is that it was done to appeal to a younger audience that might be more familiar with video games than D&D. I believe that 4th edition serves its purpose as a player acquisition product. The main problem that I see with it is that those who have been playing the game for upwards of 30 years see this new version as something other than D&D. I'm in that crowd myself. I feel that what we were handed wasn't so much a new version of D&D as it is a brand new game that happens to bear some resemblance to the D&D we all know and love.

And I agree with Ryan that there is an indifference in the other markets among players that are being sought after. World of Warcraft is huge, so they decided to make many of the mechanics operate more like what you would expect to find in an MMO in an attempt to entice those players to play D&D. The problem is that the vast majority of those players are perfectly satisfied rolelpaying on their computer monitors with people who probably don't live nearby. If this is what they know and enjoy, what is there to motivate them to play a game on a tabletop that simulates the experience that they get, quite vividly, on the computer? They're different games, different experiences, and I think it foolish to try to suck players from one to the other by making one more like the other.

So what of the players who have been with the game for decades? 4E is such a departure from the previous edition that it's a tough sell. Some will embrace it, but a lot won't. That only serves to fracture the existing customer base. If polls at places like ENWorld are to be believed, only about 25% of the existing player base is actually playing 4E. The more telling statistic in this poll is that roughly 31% of the total number of respondents have tried 4E and stuck with 3E. Add that to the 27% that refuse to try it anf it send a clear message: if the D&D brand is a train, people seem to be getting off in record numbers. What this poll doesn't address is whether or not 4E is working as an acquisition product. ENWorld is known as a site composed primarily of older gamers and professionals in the field. Are there newer gamers that we just don't know about? WotC had better hope so.

So for those of us who don't want to play the new game they've given us, we have a few options. We can stick with 3.5; many people are doing exactly that. The problem of course is that they aren't making anything new for it. Sure, there's enough stuff between WotC and other 3rd party publishers to keep people busy gaming for the rest of their lives, but a lot of people like to collect this stuff andaccumulate more. I'm guilty of that. So if you don't like the new game, and if you feel that 3.5 could use some improvement, primarily in the areas of high level play, certain combat actions, and other subsystems, then there's Pathfinder and a few other D20 based systems out there.

I'm personally pretty firmly in the Pathfinder camp. Sure, the beta has yet to address the difficulty of high level play, but I think that the final version will since they've listed that as one of the game's design goals.

Second, what I have played works rather well. The core classes are balanced with 3rd edition prestige classes as well as some of the later core classes. What this does is make it so that you can run a good character without having to take multiple prestige classes or multi-class into a bunch of other core classes. You can also incorporate WotC's prestige classes and core classes from later books without worrying about unbalancing the party. I'm cool with that.

Third, the guys over there at Paizo are some of the friendliest, coolest people in the industry. I have nothing but respect for Jason Bulhman, Erik Mona, James Jacobs, Wesley Schneider, and Sean K. Reynolds.

Fourth, the involvement of Monte Cook and other people who could be considered "Old school TSR," such as Jeff Grubb, Sean K. Reynolds, JD Wiker, and authors like Elaine Cunningham. Monte Cook was one of the three brains behind 3rd edition, and he's acting in the capacity of advisor to Jason Bulhman, the guy who's actually designing the Pathfinder RPG. Who better to help guide you along the way than one of the guys who was responsible for making 3rd edition the smashing success that it was? Who better to contribute to the line than experienced designers who were there at the launch of third edition? Someone put it best when they said that Pathfinder is the spiritual successor to D&D, and I completely agree with that statement.

Finally, I'm biased because they're letting me in on some of the fun. Pathfinder #16 had my first contribution to the Pathfinder line, an article that I wrote about the Drow of Golarion. Also, I wrote a full length adventure that will appear in Pathfinder #23, and I have a pretty good feeling about my prospects of continuing to work with them in the future.

In the final analysis, I doubt that Pathfinder will be able to capture all of the people who are deserting D&D, but I do think that it will capture enough of them to do well for itself. For those of us who want the next version of D&D to be look and feel like the D&D we've always known, Pathfinder is the real deal and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who will listen.

You can download the Pathfinder beta-test rules for free from Paizo's website at www.paizo.com

Comic Life Blog - Becoming A Parent

2008-12-04T23:46:00.000-08:00

I was going to post my revised Rogerian paper until Paul mentioned in class that we can do this blog on Comic Life during class, so I decided to go that route instead. The reason, frankly, is that I feel that the Comic Life assignment needs more thought put into it than I have thus far, and I can get the paper revised at any time between now and the day we turn in the portfolio.

The point behind Comic Life is to have fun while demonstrating the learning of a literacy, and I can't think of any literacy I've had to learn that is more demanding and with less room for error than parenthood. So I believe that this needs to be five comic book pages long, and I'll be using South Park characters due to the fact that there's a nice, easy to use generator. So here's what I have in mind for my Comic Life:

Page 1: Becoming a parent.
Parenthood became real to me in the operating room where my wife was having her first C-section. She was on the table while I had a hospital gown, mask, and cap on. I was fine as the surgery started, but I knew when they started cutting. I was doing fine until they suctioned out a bunch of amniotic fluid mixed with a healthy amount of blood, and of course I looked over at the container as it collected the fluids. I rapidly turned green, felt the need to vomit, and had to be led out of the room. Had I not, my wife would have either ended up wearing the contents of my stomach on her face, or I would have fainted. I'm not sure which.

Page 2: Sleep Deprivation and Poop
I took the night shift manning phones while my wife worked retail during the day. This means that for the first six months of my child's life, I was literally existing on three hours of sleep per day. I'd get off work at 5:00 AM, arrive home around 6:00 AM, and then watch my little girl until about 7:00 PM when my wife arrived home. During that time I was responsible for feeding the child, keeping her occupied, and changing diapers. Oh yeah, all the while I was also writing gaming material for a variety of publishers. When I look back on it now, I often wonder how I managed to survive the sleep deprivation. Then there was the never ending chore of changing foul smelling diapers. Now that I've had a few kids, I swear I've had to personally deal with a medium sized mountain worth of poop. Sadly, I'm still not done with it, as my youngest is two and a half years old.

Page 3: Eating Out
My wife and I used to have more money than we do today. In fact, eating at the Outback Steakhouse was a weekly ritual for us. So was eating at Red Robin, and then we'd usually eat at Denny's. the Olive Garden, or one of the other mid-tier fast food joints on the west side.... At least until the first child came along. As a baby, every time we tried to go somewhere to eat, she would start crying and would become inconsolable. Even when we came prepared with a bottle, a change of diapers, and used a rocking car seat, she simply refused to allow us to eat in peace. Eventually we were forced to give up eating because we were afraid that the other patrons would murder us.

Page 4: Children's Programming
One of the things nobody bothered to explain to me before I became a parent was that once you have a kid, your TV is no longer your own. Prior to parenthood, my TV spent a lot of time being tuned to some ctuff I really enjoyed, like Babylon 5, the X-Files, Star Trek, Penn and Teller, etc. After parenthood, my TV was absolutely dominated by The Wiggles, Dora the Explorer, and other shows that I'm currently doing my best to force out of my head. To this day, I really have no tolerance for those shows even though its all my kids want to watch. And of course on those occasions when I simply overrule them and watch something I want to watch, they're loud and obnoxious, refusing to allow me to concentrate.

Page 5: Being a Parent is Being a Teacher
Before my oldest went into kindergarden, I wanted to make sure that she would be one of the smart ones. With that in mind, when she was about four and a half years old, I grabbed a bunch of coins and sat her down to learn basic math. Sure, it was really basic math, but I showed her that if you count one group of coins and added them to another group of counted coins, you would end up with a larger group of coins. I think it took about a week of trying to get her to understand, but before too long I could ask her simple questions, like "What is four plus three" and I would get the ever accurate answer of seven. I also taught her how to subtract while I was at it, and as a result, she has always been way ahead of her class in math. She won't be starting multiplication in school until next year, but she already understands how and why it works, and she's working on memorizing her multiplication tables. Not only is she well ahead in that area, but she's also above average in reading and all other areas. Being a boog teacher at home means that she is a good student at school, which ultimately leads to a happier more socially adjusted child, and seeing that makes pages one through four worthwhile.

Regarding the WotC Layoffs

2008-12-03T11:01:00.001-08:00

Rather than express my own anger towards a company that would summarily dismiss established vital talent like Julia Martin, Jonathan Tweet, and Dave Noonan, among others, I'm going to quote Monte Cook's ENWorld post today instead (in response to a post by Kevin Culp):

While I appreciate the good intent, I'm not sure how one might credit layoffs with the creation of Malhavoc Press. Neither Sue nor I were laid off, nor was our first major freelancer (Bruce Cordell). I suppose later on we used the talents of Sean Reynolds and Skip Williams, but we'd been around for a while at that point. I suppose you could say that some of the layoffs were indicative of the kinds of large changes that occurred at WotC which convinced me it was no longer a place I wanted to work at.

Not that I have any illusions about what would have happened had I stayed. I've no doubt that I would have been laid off. From a larger perspective than just yesterday, it's become clear that WotC's become a company that not only doesn't value experience, it avoids it. (And looks at least somewhat disdainfully, rather than fondly, upon its own past.) You have to stretch your definition of "old guard" to even apply to anyone there anymore. (This is likely a bottom line issue, since the longer you stay, the more you get paid.) When I was there, I worked among people like Skip Williams and Jeff Grubb--with that kind of perspective at hand, I was always the new guy. Which was fine by me. I had much to learn and always appreciated the perspective they could provide. Now, most of the people working on D&D weren't even there when I was there. That's how much turnover and change there's been. There's a real danger of losing continuity with these kinds of layoffs. Dangers involving making old mistakes and not remembering what was learned in old lessons.

It's a foolish and shortsighted management that lets people like Jonathan, Julia, and Dave go. Foolish. And a cold-hearted one that does it at Christmas. But this is not new outrage, it's old, tired outrage. This is the company that laid off Skip, and Jeff, and Sean, and other people of extraordinary talent and experience. It's par for the recent course.

Before I end this bitter ramble, let me just add that it's hard not to laugh at the shocking and perhaps pitiable ineptitude of a company that makes role playing games that would lay off Jonathan Tweet, very likely the best rpg designer, well, period.

I wish all of them the best, and have not a shred of doubt that they'll all go on to do bigger and better things.

Since my thoughts are less diplomatic, I'll just hold on to them. If we meet at a con, buy me a drink and you might be able to coax a rant out of me.

Where I See Tabletop Gaming Headed

2008-12-01T19:48:00.000-08:00

The tabletop roleplaying game industry is dying.

Or so I've heard....

I started hearing this in the summer of 2003 when Wizards of the Coast released D&D edition 3.5. Immediately the sales of all of the companies publishing under the OGL dropped down to unforeseen low levels. In truth, I had been in the industry for a full three years at that time and though I was insulated from the bloodshed because I worked for Wizards of the Coast at the time, I could see the bloodbath as it was occurring. Prior to 2003, the companies that were doing rather well publishing under the OGL included Bastion Press, Mystic Eye Games, Atlas Games, Fantasy Flight Games, and Alderac Entertainment Group, among others. What do all of those companies have in common? They all either no longer exist or they are no longer publishing material that is compatible with D&D.

Coincidentally, at the same time 3.5 was launching, there was another little game that was also in its infancy: World of Warcraft. Maybe you've heard of it. I know, you're thinking that I'm going to blame the decline of D&D on MMOs, as is the typical interpretation of things these days. I mean WoW is making gazillions of dollars, so surely they're stealing all the D&D customers away, right?

Not so fast. By the time WoW was released, the MMO had existed for the better part of a decade. There was Ultima Online, and Everquest, and Asheron's Call, among others. Everquest had even been particularly successful. Yes, World of Warcraft is certainly an unprecedented success, but when I put my head down in the trenches to actually talk to people at the conventions and the local game stores, and the messageboards, what I heard wasn't that online gaming was stealing them away from tabletop gaming. Instead, what I heard was that 3.5 came out way too soon on the heels of 3.0. Many people were still playing 3.0 and refused to give WotC the money for the upgrade. Now personally, I'm in the camp that really likes 3.5 and did consider it a better value than 3.0, but as long as people were able to kill make believe monsters and take their make believe treasure, they didn't particularly need an upgraded set of the very same rules.

So the last five years have been pretty lean. We've seen a bunch of companies go out of business, we've seen fewer products released, we've seen fewer gaming companies start to replace the ones that go down, and we've seen a new edition of D&D released, and from the reports I've heard, fail to impress a good percentage of the audience. The D&D brand is certainly weaker now than it has been since probably the late '90s, but I'm not actually interested in talking about the past; I'm more interested in speculating about the future.

I used to bemoan the fact that when you went up to people and talked about an RPG other than D&D, people would either give you a blank stare and ask what the hell you were talking about, or people would make the same face they make after taking something foul into their mouth, like sour milk, and automatically associate it with a lack of quality. And the truth is that when the D20 products first started hitting the helves, there was a bit of hit and miss. Some products were absolutely stellar, while others were marred by bad editing, bad layout, and bad game mechanics. There is one adventure module on my shelf that I keep as a monument to bird turds because they managed to do everything wrong on the list. But again, I'm allowing myself to be dragged into the past when the point is that what I feel we're really seeing is a widening of the RPG base. In other words, there have been enough excellent third party products over the last several years that people have finally gained confidence in it.

Now the fact of the matter is that most products bearing the d20 logo did die a death. However, when publishers stopped making d20 compatible material, they started making new games that were based on the d20 system and published under the Open Gaming License. The Babylon 5 RPG, Arcana Evolved, Iron Heroes, Castles and Crusades... Oh crap, I'm talking about the past again. Well screw it, you can't get to the future without first covering where you've been. So when WotC decided that it was time to release a new version of the game, there were a lot of players who were still playing a version of 3rd edition and weren't ready for it to go yet. Then there were those who were sick of this "evolved" version of D&D and just wanted to play the game like it was originally published, and then there were those who wanted some uniquely customized version of the game to fit their idea of a cool setting, or a specific feel. For instance, some people wanted a game that was dark and gritty instead of high fantasy, others wanted magic to be handled differently. The beauty of the OGL was that they could get what they wanted, it would still be D&D because it was based on the same original mechanics.

What's more is that a lot of these games have extremely high production values. Some, like Green Ronin, mainly produce black and white books, but those black and white books are done extremely well. Then you have others that are publishing their games in full color, again, with production values that rival or surpass WotCs'. An example of that is Paizo Publishing, which was originally created to continue producing Dragon and Dungeon magazines after WotC decided to give them the axe, but has since positioned themselves as the AMD to WotCs Intel. Their Pathfinder products are full color, their production values, writing, art, and cartography are as good or better than WotCs' in every area, and they're continuing forward with the Pathfinder RPG, which is the next evolution of the D&D 3.5 system. And there are other games that are also taking the D20 system and running with it, such as Modern20 and True20. Spycraft 2.o is another full color book that is essentially based on Modern, but makes signifficant changes to the game. Then there are the retro-clones, which are picking up steam, and new or revived systems that are gaining gaining ground, such as Savage Worlds, Cortex, Traveler, Runequest. Heck, even Star Frontiers is seeing an online revival and currently has "digitally remastered" versions of the original core books posted online as well as a new online periodical called the Frontiersman.

The wonderful thing is that people all over the place are actually playing these games!

In my mind, this isn't a rejection of D&D 4th edition as much as it is the fact that people have finally realized that they have options! Lots of them!

On top of that, the expansion of the PDF market and the rise of printing on demand through companies like Lulu.com means that there are a lot more companies in the business, a lot more games being made, and getting your stuff out to your customers isn't nearly as hard as it once was. In other words, the new configuration of the print industry is adding to the choices people have.

Personally, I've always been comfortable with the basic D&D and Advanced D&D schism. While WotC is offering 4th edition, which tries unsuccessfully to be all things to all people, I'm finding that Castles and Crusades functions well as the new "Basic" and Pathfinder functions as the new "Advanced." I can play Pathfinder with my 35 year-old gaming buddies who have come to like this level of complexity in their RPGs while I can bust out the C&C and play with my wife and daughter.

So what I'm getting at is that while D&D maintains a player base that many companies would die for (even while it is undoubtedly disappointing the bean counters at Hasbro), the rest of the players are going to the other publishers who have long struggled in the shadow of D&D. Many people say that the golden age of gaming was back in the '80s, others say that it was just after the advent of the OGL, when suddenly everyone could make a game compatible with the best known roleplaying game in the world. I say the golden age of gaming is right here, right now.

I say this because your choices as a gamer are nearly unlimited. People like me, who used to dream of being a published game designer, can make that dream comne true, assuming that you happen to be competent at writing and game design and have some good ideas. You can do it by either hitching your cart to an existing publisher or, if you have the technical know-how and the connections to get the art done - do it yourself.

The future of tabletop gaming is no longer in the hands of those who have had it in the past, but rather, it's now in the hands of the community that supports it, both through choice and through small time publishers. This is an industry where the little guy is getting noticed and after a while, isn't so little anymore.

This is the golden age of roleplaying. Game on!

Blog #8 part 2

2008-11-10T19:33:00.000-08:00

Reflection on paper 2

I think that this paper is superior to earlier drafts because, unlike assignment #1, it was completely overhauls from the original paper. Initially this paper took up the argument from the article that we need to continue funding for the space program where it should have stuck more closely to the assignment, which was to analyze the argument being made in the article.

So to that end, I cut about 80% of the content from the first couple drafts and essentially started over. The paper is now focused on what the original article says while drawing in related support material from other sources. It was a lot more work, but it's worth it since I strayed so far from the original assignment with the first one.

A nice side-effect here is that since the rough draft of assignment #2 relates directly to the long paper I get to write, it provides me with another source, besides the Rogerian argument, that I can mine for that paper.

2008-11-07T18:13:00.000-08:00

Toulman Analysis “Saving Hubble”

"I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I'm an optimist. We will reach out to the stars." – Professor Stephen Hawking

The September 2008 issue of Discover magazine discusses the next planned flight of the space shuttle; their mission, to fix the Hubble space telescope for the last time. At the time the article was printed, this launch was scheduled to take place in October; however, due to additional electronic failures with the Hubble telescope, the mission has been postponed until sometime early next year (Dunn). The focus of the Discover article discusses NASA’s plans to replace the aging shuttle fleet with a new space vehicle, but it makes a semi-successful claim that NASA’s future is dependent upon the success of failure of this next mission due to potential budget cuts and the tragedies of the past.

The article’s columnist, Corey S. Powell, appears to support professor Hawking’s belief that humanity must venture into the stars if we want to survive as a species. Although he does not state this directly in the article, he does make a pathetic appeal when he addresses the warrant many people have that space travel is important.

The article efficiently covers the range of issues currently facing the space agency in the first half of the article, including the fact that this will be the last mission to fix the Hubble, and that the shuttle program is set to be retired in 2010. In the last half of the argument, he says the following:

NASA’s future depends heavily on this month’s Atlantis mission. If the shuttle flight goes awry, Hubble is doomed, and the already-precarious support for Ares and Orion [the new rocket and space module] might evaporate. (Last fall, Sen. Barack Obama suggested delaying NASA’s next human space adventure to focus funds on more practical problems). (Powell)

Powell’s argument is immediately backed with Obama’s statement, set aside from the text within parentheses, but he fails to elaborate on this position. He could have strengthened his argument by stating that Obama has already proposed delaying the new space vehicle by five years, which would leave the US without a space vehicle for a total of nine years (Dunn). The article does report that the current plans are to rely on Russia to transport our astronauts to the International Space Station once the shuttle is retired, but given the recently strained relations between our countries, there is a chance that this arrangement may end prematurely, which would be an undesirable situation.

Currently our relations with Russia are strained. While there is no indication that the United States will be entering into a war, or even renewing the Cold War, there is an uncertainty about our joint cooperation and diplomatic relations. In August of this year, Condoleezza Rice stated, “Moscow it is playing a dangerous game with the United States and its allies, who will stand by Georgia and ensure its recovery from a weeklong Russian invasion.” She also said, “The alliance would act to punish Russia for its actions and deny its strategic objectives by ensuring that Georgia’s insfrastructure and economy are rebuilt and that its government is fully supported by the West.” (Associated Press). This is the sort of terse rhetoric that makes clear the disapproval of the United States towards Russia’s actions, and it clearly puts in jeopardy any arrangements we have with them at this time.

Powell’s appeal to logos is flawed when he states that the Hubble is doomed if the mission fails because he does not take two issues into account: First,the Hubble is already doomed. Even though the mission will be to repair the space telescope, this will be the last time this happens. It is only a matter of time before it fails again and is abandoned. Second, he also doesn’t take into account the fact that the previous shuttle tragedies occurred at different stages during the mission. The Challenger was destroyed as it was launching into space, while the Columbia was destroyed upon re-entry. This means that it is entirely possible for the Atlantis to successfully launch into space, repair the Hubble, but be destroyed upon re-entry. If this happens then the Hubble will not be doomed’ at least not until it fails again, but the mission itself will still be a failure.

Powell also fails to make any sort of connection between a failed shuttle mission and a loss of funding for NASA. He does not present any evidence suggesting that either of the candidates or policy makers would withdraw their support of NASA if the next shuttle mission fails and leads to the deaths of more astronauts. He does point out the fact that the shuttle program has met with fatal accidents on 1.6 percent of its flights (Powell), which skirts a commonly held warrant that the space program is too dangerous and costly, both in terms of dollars and human lives. However, given the fact that the shuttle has already been deemed too dangerous and the current plan is to go back to a safer capsule design, it could be argued that the powers in control of the nation’s purse strings would simply write off a final mission disaster as a sad side-effect of a flawed design, and then move forward with a more tried and proven design. There is also a question of whether NASA could be in danger by raising the unstated question of whether the American public would be willing to continue a program that has met with the relatively high rate of failure under the shuttle program.

The article highlights the current state of NASA and discusses the very real possibility that the space agency might face serious funding cuts in the near future. Although it references a statement made by the Democratic Presidential candidate, it could have been more clear about what exactly was said. The article does successfully articulate that NASA is in a crucial transitional state, and with it the future or manned space exploration might be in jeopardy.

Powell, Corey. "Saving Hubble." Discover September 2008: 26 - 33.

Dunn, Marcia. "NASA delays Hubble mission until next year." MSNBC.com 29, Sep, 2008 25 Oct 2008 .

"Rice says Russia playing dangerous game." Associated Press 18, Aug, 2008 7 Nov 2008 .

Blog #9

2008-11-04T23:29:00.000-08:00

Blog #9
1. What is contrastive rhetoric? (150 words)

Contrastive rhetoric is a new way of looking at bi-lingual education that takes into account the fact that people for whom English is a second language may have means of communicating that don't translate perfectly to the way the English language is constructed. The idea behind it is to facilitate reading and writing in English. In addition to bi-lingual students, it also applies to people who don't participate in dominant U.S. culture, and opens the doors of composition for them as well. Five questions are key to anyone attempting to discuss a given topic:

1. What may be discussed?
2. Who has the authority to speak/write; OR Who has the authority to write to whom under what circumstances?
3. What form(s) may the writing take?
4. What is evidence?
5. What arrangement of evidence is likely to appeal (be convincing to) readers?

While these are all questions that are easy for a native language speaker who is part of the dominant culture, they are not as self-evident to the non-native speaker/newcomer to the culture.

2. Why is the Alexie article an example of contrastive rhetoric? (150 words)

I think that the Alexie article was an example of contrastive rhetoric because it provides and answer for the five questions above, and ultimately, the people making the decisions were not the people who belonged to the Native American ethnic group. To answer the questions quickly:

1. Culture said that what may be discussed is that nature of what it means to be a Native American. In their idealized form, as defined by Hollywood, they were noble savages - warriors who used monosyllabic speech, or people close to nature who climbed mountains or waded into streams.

2. Those with the authority to speak were the people defining the idealized Native American - Hollywood actors and producers, who were normally working from stereotypes rather than any real understanding of the culture.

3. The writing might take the form of a movie script, or a TV show, or a trashy romance novel. The Native American was there for entertainment, not for the education of cultural understanding.

4. Evidence is the depiction of Native Americans, such as Tonto, who Sherman Alexi hates.

5. The arrangement of the evidence is that they are ideally suited to the role of sidekick.

Of course that's a load of BS, but it makes me wonder how far we've come really. One of my favorite movies is Brotherhood of the Wolf, which features a Native American character. Even through the character dies a heroic and meaningful death, he is still portrayed as the noble savage warrior who essentially fills the role of the sidekick. On the other hand, there's a European character who also fills the role of sidekick, and the relationship between the protagonist and the Native American seems to be one of genuine friendship as opposed to "helper." I think the portrayal in that movie is a little more complicated than Tonto, and I would love to know what Alexi would say about it. My guess is that his analysis wouldn't be entirely positive or entirely negative.

Election Day Redux

2008-11-04T22:13:00.001-08:00

Yes We Can!

Election Day

2008-11-03T20:19:00.000-08:00

Get out and vote.

Dungeons and Dragons: Attack of the Retro-Clones

2008-10-28T14:06:00.001-07:00

Yes, I'm actually posting something game related today. Hopefully those who have gotten used to all of the rhetoric will be pleasantly surprised by the change of pace.

First of all, I'd like to acknowledge where the gaming industry is at, and where I'm at in relation to it. Last August Wizards of the Coast released Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition. This new game was completely overhauled from 3rd edition, placing an emphasis on player character powers, ease of DMing, and streamlined play. While many people loved the new edition, I would argue that an equally sized group did not find it to their liking. I am one of the latter. Without going into a lengthy diatribe, I'll say that it fails for several reason: the new emphasis on powers, forced movement, and the slaughtering of numerous sacred cows that had been with the game since it was originally released in 1974. D&D has strayed far from how it was originally conceived: as an emulation of fantasy novels, such as Lord of the Rings, Conan, and others, which allowed players to enter into an imaginary world as fictional characters. This was an outgrowth from tactical strategy games. Because the 4th edition game philosophy places a greater emphasis on gamism rather than roleplaying, in my mind at least, it is much closer to a fantasy miniatures game than it is a roleplaying game, and as such, is a fairly giant leap backwards in its evolution.

As I said earlier, I'm not the only one feeling this way. Paizo Publishing chose to continue using the Open Game License (OGL) to produce a new and improved version of 3.5, called Pathfinder. I'm placing the majority of my support and design skills behind that effort, as well as the True20 game, which I feel does a superior job of handling modern and future type roleplaying games.

So that should be the end of the conversation, right? We have two fairly major commercial games from large game publishers, and as a result, I still find my talents as a game designer in demand. So what else is there to talk about? Old school revivial; specifically, the rise of the old school clones.

The first game, published under the OGL, which attempted to take a step backwards in terms of the rules and overall feel of the game was called Castles and Crusades, by Troll Lord Games. They started with the core rules of 3rd edition, which were released as open content by Wizards of the Coast, and they stripped out many of the innovations made with 3rd edition. The standard experience point advancement was tossed in favor of a class-based system, as we had with previous editions, skill checks were replaced with ability checks (a system called the SIEGE system), weapons and armor were once again dictated by class as opposed to being open, and the big game changer, feats, were eliminated entirely.

Castles and Crusades is an excellent game. Let me just get that out of the way now. I bought the PDFs a while back and I've been looking them over, and I really like how it all comes together. It retains some of the things I like about 3rd edition, such as flipping Armor Class over so it's expressed as a positive number, while at the same time embracing the simplicity and ease of play that was found in the previous editions. The easiest way to sum it up is that it's as though they took the best parts of 1E, 2E, and 3E, stripped out all of the extra stuff that doesn't make for a streamlined, easy to play game, and put it out there for the people who want a game that feels similar to original. It should also be noted that before his death earlier this year, Gary Gygax had embraced Castles and Crusades as the spiritual successor to D&D, and he finally got around to releasing his dungeon crawl masterpiece Castle Zagyg (originally Castle Greyhawk) for this system.

Perhapse that would have been the end of the conversation, but there were still those who weren't crazy about Castles and Crusades. While you could literally run any old D&D or AD&D module under Castles and Crusades with very little modification, some people didn't just want a compatible system, but wanted the actual rules from the original game.

This is where the retro-clones come in. Copyright law is a funny thing. If I write a book, it is automatically copyrighted under me, and aside from the fair use laws, which allow others to use a small portion of that book for a variety of limited purposes, someone can't come along and snag the my book's text and republish it. This can even extend out into the realm of ideas, at which point things get tricky, but one thing copyright law does not protect are game rules. In other words, the rules of a given game can be lifted entirely, as long as you use your own explanatory text, trade dress, and give it a different name. The OGL allows publishers to use most of the intellectual property from the core rules of WotC's 3rd edition D&D game. Better, the OGL cannot be revoked, and there are no provisions within the OGL preventing a person or publisher from combining the IP released by WotC with the rules lifted from other editions. This combination is what has given rise to the retro-clones, which is where individuals and (extremely) small companies are recreating the original AD&D and/or Basic D&D game.

The two retro-clones that are specifically worth mentioning are OSRIC (Old School Reference & Index Compilation) and Labyrinth Lord. OSRIC started out as a simple open source reference guide for people who wanted to develop products that were compatible with AD&D 1st edition. It originally had approximately 150 pages, and it was basic, but nice. The 2nd edition of OSRIC, which Stuart Mashall has kindly given me a preview of, is a much more ambitious project. It includes an updated set of character creation rules, but it also includes the full (as near as I can tell) list of monsters, as well as all of the material you would need as a GM to run the thing. There's more art and more material, and one thing that remains the same is the stripped down, easy to use layout, which is reminiscent of the 1st edition game.

Along with OSRIC is Labyrinth Lord. This game, which is also available as a free download, is different because it attempts to recreate the old Moldvay/Cook version of Basic D&D. As similar as it is to AD&D, it has its share of subtle differences, which lead to a slightly different game experience. It also features a layout that looks slightly more professional than OSRIC and contains a great deal more art. It is visually impressive, particularly if you happen to remember those twenty year old games on which is is based.

Labyrinth Lord as created by a small company called Goblinoid Games, and LL isn't the only retro style game they produce. They also have a d100 based system called GORE (which is beyond the scope of this blog entry) and Mutant Future. What I like about Mutant Future is that rather than try to recreate one of the editions of classic Gamma World, they instead used the basic OSRIC based sytem to create a post-apocalyptic game that was otherwise very similar to Gamma World. The result is impressive, and still extremely reminiscent of the old classic.

As I said before, my support remains fully behind Pathfinder and True20, but I have to admit that there is an appeal to these retro-clones that goes beyond nostalgia. The fact is that unlike software, old tabletop games do not become unplayable as time goes by. What was a good rules system twenty years ago remains a good rules system today. In the case of the retro-clones, they still contain all of the old sacred cows, such as percentage based thieves skills and upside-down armor class, but they are still a joy to play. It seems that the further the official game called D&D wants to denounce its roots, the more interest there is in simply playing the originals. I for one have been inspired to get a second game going, probably using the Castles and Crusades game system (though I'm also contemplating OSRIC as well) and possibly even write some material for one of them. Sure, the pay would be nonexistent, but frankly, I got into game design to have a creative outlet, not for the money, and there's something very, very cool about the classic game I grew up with. The fact that going back to that system would allow me to make use of a whole bunch of old gaming products, including somewhere around 100 issues of Dungeon, is very appealing.

Oh, and here are the links to these games:

OSRIC
Labyrinth Lord
Mutant Future
Castles and Crusades

Blog #7

2008-10-23T23:54:00.000-07:00

Blog #7
Write a reflection on the third draft of Assignment #1. Use at least two terms
we have learned in class.

Your reflection should answer this question:
1. What do you think is better about this draft when compared to the others?
Why? (300 words)

I think my third draft of assignment #1 is considerably better than the second, mainly because I implemented Paul Muhlhauser's suggestions for improvement. In my experience, taking the feedback given to you by any given class's professor and using the changes they suggest leads to a higher grade. Not only does it acknowledge their situated ethos, but it also shows a willingness to follow their vision for the assignment, thereby striving for improvement.

Of course this answer a total non-sequitur because it doesn't address the qualitative changes that have been made to the paper. So a more on-topic response would be that I changed the thesis to a statement that I had originally made in the final paragraph of the paper. I've found that when writing my conclusions, I tend to write more concise thesis statements than I do when starting my papers. This might be because by that point I've already worked through everything I want to say and I can provide a more concise summary.

The other thing I did was combine a paragraph listing the various TRACE elements with the paragraph relating to the key. While it had originally been my intention to quickly address those elements to satisfy the requirements of the paper, I found that they made my 'key' argument stronger (Besides, Paul Muhlhauser recommended that I do this ;-) What that effectively did was answer the question, so what? to the relevance of that paragraph.

So in short, I feel that the third draft is really an improvement because of minor adjustments to the organization of the paper. I didn't perform a massive overhaul to the original, nor do I feel that it was broken to the point where it needed that sprt pf treatment. I do feel that the paper is stronger now than it was originally, and I mainly have Paul Muhlhauser's rhetorical expertise to thank for that.

The Rhetoric of Babylon 5

2008-10-16T14:58:00.000-07:00

As anyone who has watched Babylon 5 knows, as the plot moves along, the heroes encounter two overriding philosophies, which are truly only ever explained by the fundamental questions of their respective civilizations. The Vorlons, which represented order, asked the question, "Who are you?" The Shadows asked, "What do you want?" The third voice, which was represented only by the first One - the only being who remained behind and served as the God figure for the others asked, "Do you have anything worth living for?"

Up until near the end of the Shadow War, the Vorlons were believed to be the force of good in the conflict. "Who are you" Was a rhetorical question that they intended to use as a means to get people to examine the trappings of identity and see themselves as the true beings they are. According to the show creator, Joe Michael Straczynski, the intention is not to solicit a "correct" answer, but to "tear down the artifices we construct around ourselves until we're left facing ourselves, not our roles." Identity creates division, so casting it aside exposes the core of what lies beneath. This seems to be at least partially influenced by several eastern religions, such as Taoism, Jainism, and Buddhism, which emphasize non-attachment to material things, non-action, and acceptance. Indeed, in the real world, most dominant Eastern religions are considered peaceful even while they often tend to exist alongside totalitarian regimes that oppress their own people. As it turns out, the Vorlons were not the good guys, but were instead the predominant authoritarians.

The Shadows, by contrast, practiced an ideology of chaos. Their question, "What do you want?" illustrates that they use personal desire to shape identity. This was presented as disharmonious, destructive, and ultimately less than ideal, which is why the younger races were forced to struggle against them time and time again. The comparison that JMS seems to be making, but he never comes out and says, is that the philosophy of the Shadows is analogous to capitalism in the United States. In the US, lives are shaped by greed. Those with wealth desire more wealth, those with some wealth also desire more wealth, and coincidentally, the poor struggle for more wealth. Even while those who have live lives of comfort and privilege that most can only dream of, those with wealth and power desire the acquisition of wealth to the point where they are willing to circumvent common sense for personal gain. It is for this reason that the world is now faced with a deep recession or possibly even a depression. Greed is the great evil of the United States, causing it to cannibalize itself until there's nothing left. In an ironic twist, one of the most conservative presidents of the past hundred years is now forced to implement some of the most socialist measures to keep the entire economy from collapsing.

The final questions come from Lorien, who describes himself as the first one. "Do you have anything worth living for?" This was actually the question asked of Sheridan as he stood on the threshold between life and death following his attempted self sacrifice, and his question was eventually refined to two questions, "Why are you here," and "Where are you going?" For now, we'll only examine the original. "What do you have to live for?" is a far more powerful question than "Do you have anything worth dying for?" People die in wars, and for causes, and for loved ones. They do it all the time, all around the world in conflicts that are often horrible and quickly forgotten. Alternatively, asking what you have to live for asks what work to you have left undone? When asked this question, Sheridan ultimately answered Delenn, who was the Minbari ambassador to Babylon 5. This answer initially created puzzlement. The romantic relationship between Sheridan and Delenn had only been hinted at up to that point, but what they were doing was spearheading the war. It wasn't just the love they had for each other that was important, but the work that they were doing together. When stripped of all of the possible considerations, his answer was love, not just for Delenn, not just for humans, or Minbaris, but for all interstellar races - universal love.

While the Shadow War was happening, President Clark was busy transforming Earth into a totalitarian state. By advancing the politics of division and fear, he was able to assert absolute control over the society he led. At the time, the best historical figure to compare him to was Hitler, though just a couple years after the end of Babylon 5, President Bush rose to power and advanced a very divisive agenda that othered Democrats, Arabs, and even our allies in the United Nations. Bush is a far better example of the problems JMS warned about than Hitler, not because he used ideology, lies, and the media to secure his own power as a demagogue, but because ultimately it was the conscience of his own people that overthrew him. It was the love of others rather than the fear of them that ultimately led to the popular demise of their divisive ideologies.

Finally, the ascension of G'Kar as a prominent religious leader demonstrates the ultimate example of a transformation of love. G'Kar was a Narn, a member of a warlike race that had only recently won its independence from Centauri occupation. When we first see him, he is bitter, nationalistic, hateful towards the Centauri, and distrustful towards the other races. Throughout the series, he undergoes a trial at the hands of his enemies. His homeworld is once again conquered, with the help of the Shadows. He leads those of his people who escaped re-enslavement from Babylon 5 for a time, but is ultimately captured, tortured, made to amuse the Centauri emperor, at whose hands he is mocked and disfigured when they removed one of his eyes. When G'Kar emerges from his trial, he is no longer a figure who stands for nationalism, but instead universal love. He is a warrior philosopher who counts among his friends those who he once hated. In a final display of enlightenment, rather than allow his own people to turn him into a demagogue, he leaves for the outer rim, which is a metaphor for the frontier, often associated with death.

The message JMS promotes with Babylon 5 is, knowingly or not, an interpretation of Kenneth Burke's "A Rhetoric of Motives," and he suggests that the solution to the problems of the world is love of everyone. According to Robert Eddie, Director of Composition at Washington State University, love is a form of mysticism - which is itself an overwhelming feeling of connectedness with all people, and things.

When seeking the true underlying message of the multilayered plot JMS has constructed with Babylon 5, and to quote John Lennon, "Love is the answer." The welfare of the community is more important than the welfare of the individual.

Blog #6

2008-10-09T19:40:00.000-07:00

Intelligence Officer, Navy Reserve

The Intelligence Officer ad that appears in the September issue of Discover magazine is relatively simple and straight forward. It features a piece of paper, apparently sitting on a desk with a series of simple instructions that one would give someone watching their house, and a pair of keys. The home owner left instructions to water the plants, bring in the mail, contact them at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. in the case of an emergency, and to shred the note immediately. There is a break towards the bottom of the page under which a short blurb is written on a metallic looking background, which reads, “Intelligence Officer. As an Intelligence Officer in the Navy Reserve, you’ll manage valuable intelligence and help to defend this nation as few others can. All on a part time basis….” This text sets up a particularly effective pathetic appeal because it suggests that the reader can add excitement to her life if he joins the Navy, picks the job he wants (in this case, Intelligence Officer), and then works part time. If the reader takes the suggested route, he can serve his country, thereby being part of something larger than himself, live a life of intrigue where he keeps valuable national secrets, all while earning what is presumably a good part time income, without having to leave his regular daily life and responsibilities to do it.

The text contains two main components, the first of which is what is written on the note. Items one and two are pretty ordinary and could be a note left for anyone who is taking care of someone else’s house for a few days. There is nothing particularly interesting, exciting, or notable about taking care of plants and bringing in the mail. In fact, those two items would likely be assumed for someone taking on these duties, making these instructions rather pointless. The following two lines, “….Contact me at the Pentagon….” And “Shred this note immediately!” are designed make an emotional appeal to a person’s sense of adventure. There is something dangerous about their line of work, so the caretaker is to ensure that nobody knows where they’re at while they’re away! The second of the text’s components is located at the bottom of the page simply lists the fact that a person can apply to be an Intelligence Officer if they join the Navy, and they can do it part time. This tells the reader that they can leave their ordinary life behind and do something meaningful and exciting for their country.

The constraints of this ad are that not everybody is open to the possibility of joining the armed forces. For many, risking their life for this country, particularly under the current administration, is simply not worth it. It is also not going to apply to people who can’t obtain security clearance, criminals, or the developmentally disabled. Further constraints are that the Navy is looking for people in the following professions: engineers, educators, IT professionals, CPAs, and consultants. According to their website, the actual Finally, the exigence of this ad is that the Navy needs recruits.

“Essentials of Argument” states, “Visual Argument establishes common ground and invites viewer identification. (240)” This is certainly true for this ad. The person making the ad wants the reader to think that the ad applies to them. Ordinary people, presumably like the person viewing the ad, leaves similar notes for people all the time. They typically include a list of things to do, how to contact them in case of an emergency, and any special instructions.

The keys are an interesting component of this visual argument as well. Normally keys would be a sign for gaining access to something, but not in this case. Despite their break with conventional symbolism, they still have meaning. In “Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric,” Foss, Foss, and Trapp say, “That signs and symbols often intertwine is typical of human communication. For instance, a tree standing in a forest is not a symbol; it does not stand for something else.” And, “The tree also becomes a symbol – an instance of rhetoric – when it is cut, for example, to use as a Christmas tree. (3)” The keys on this add seem straightforward – the person taking care of the house will use them to get into the house so that they can take care of the plants and drop off the mail. However, on a metaphorical level, they represent the reader’s mundane life. If the reader takes this job, they can drop their mundane life off with the most convenient person while they can leave home for a while (almost like a vacation) and assume the role of a spy. For a few days at a time, as part of their job with the Navy, they can become James Bond, or Jack Ryan. That implies danger, excitement, sex, and responsibility.

In addition to this, the remaining TRACE principles complete the argument. The reader is assumed to be an ordinary person. Since they’re appealing to a sense of excitement with this ad, the assumption is that the reader lives an ordinary life in the United States, working an ordinary job; a slave to the grind. They might be someone who needs to pick up a part time job to supplement their income. The ad’s author, the Navy, gives the impression that someone seeing this might be interested in joining the Navy so that they can live this exciting life. They know that this would appeal to possible recruits because it wouldn’t necessarily involve leaving home for months or years at a time and risking their lives in combat situations.

Although this ad looks almost mundane at first glance, its elegant simplicity stands out from the magazine in which it is situated and demands attention; it skillfully employs pathos to make an argument for recruitment into one of the branches of the armed forces. The appeal to excitement and service is a powerful tool for recruitment, and the Navy is likely to find success with this ad.

Citations
US Navy, "Intelligence Officer, Navy Reserve." Discover Sept 2008: 5.
1. Wood, Nancy. Essentials of Argument. 2nd. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc, 2009.
Foss, Karen, Sonya Foss, and Robert Trapp. "An Introduction to Rhetoric."Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric. 3rd ed. London: Waveland Press, 2003. 1-18. 28 Aug 2008 http://www.aml.wsu.edu/facultysites/Muhlhauser/FossFossTrappsm.pdf
U.S. Navy, Navy Reserve, Enlisted Opportunities, Intelligence and Communications. U.S. Navy. 18 Sep 2008 .

Blog #5

2008-09-30T21:10:00.000-07:00

Select one of the rhetorical terms we have use in class and describe how McCain
and Obama use this effectively or ineffectively in their websites.

On John McCain's website, he makes the following statement:

Wherever there is a hungry child, a great cause exists to serve.
Where there is an illiterate adult, a great cause exists to serve.
Wherever there are people who are denied the basic rights of Man, a great cause exists to serve.
Wherever there is suffering, a great cause exists to serve.

McCain uses anaphora to make a pathetic argument about public service. Anaphora is the repetition of the same word at the beginning of a series of successive clauses or verses. In this case, it is the word wherever, which is then matched with one of society's shortcomings, and is then finished with "a great cause exists to serve."

I feel that this is an effective use of anaphora because it helps McCain's ongoing argument that he has dedicated his life to public service. He continues to plant the suggestion that his career as a politician is about the people he serves, rather than having to do with his own ego and ambitions. It's an effective argument because in these uncertain times, with the massive economic meltdown we've seen in the past couple weeks, the war in Iraq, and the current president who has proven that he is almost completely without morals, the people are looking for someone who puts their interests first. Joh McCain is trying to convince people that he is that person.

John, McCain. "Why John McCain." JohnMccain.com. Republican Party. 30 Sep 2008 .

2008-09-24T01:51:00.000-07:00

1. Define warrant in your own terms. Why does argument work better when
warrants are shared by the arguer and the audience?

Warrants are often unstated beliefs, values, and principles that are part of arguments. Argument works better when warrants are shared because the disagreements of warrants can lead to different interpretations and therefore different outcomes of the argument.

2. Provide an example to support your claim.

People who know me are well aware that I have done a great deal of work in the roleplaying game industry. There are those who are only passingly familiar with this as "Dungeons and Dragons," or that weird game with books, paper and pencil, and miniature heroes and monsters. Someone who is not overly familiar with roleplaying might make the claim that this hobby is not mainstream. One of the supports they might use is that its players are not "normal" people. This taps into the warrants that the game it is commonly played by nerds, geeks and other social outcasts.

The support that these "not normal" people uses the warrant that players are mostly geeks, nerds, and outcasts. That is further broken down into the notion that nerds are socially maladjusted but incredibly intelligent people. A geek is a "peculiar or otherwise odd person, especially one who is perceived to be overly intellectual". Outcasts can be a catchall that covers everyone else who doesn't act or dress in ways that are consistent with popular culture.

This argument is flawed, however, by the demographics of gamers. While the stereotypical gamer falls into the category of geeks and nerds, the truth of the matter is that most people who play the game are average people. This is backed up by surveys that have been conducted by people within the roleplaying game industry. These studies have shown that the average gamer is likely in college or has a college degree, they are just as likely to be married as the rest of the population, and they hold down ordinary and wide-ranging jobs. The only commonalities between most gamers are a high level of intelligence and a certain enjoyment for works of fantasy and schience fiction. Anecdotally, I am a game designer and a gamer myself, and the people I game with on a regular basis include someone with a degree in communications, a researcher at the vet clinic, and a guy who is very athletic as well as a doctor of genetics. I would further argue that of the four of us, only oneof us fits the classic definition of a geek.

The fact that the warrants are unspoken and not necessarily agreed upon leads to different conclusions among different audiences. The average, non-gaming audience might agree with the stereotype, and therefore agree that the hobby isn't mainstream. Those, like myself, who have inside (and not public) knowledge on sales figures, demographics, and a background of meeting actual gamers at conventions, know that the warrants are simply incorrect. Their characterization of gamers as being outside the norm isn't consistent with the facts because it isn't just nerds, geeks and outsiders playing these games.

Blog #3

2008-09-09T21:15:00.000-07:00

1. What is the most important feature of visual argument you learned from EOA? Why? (140-50 words).

According to Essentials of Argument, "Visual argument is immediate and tangible and pulls you into the picture. (237)" This seems like the most important point because to me, it does the best job summarizing the difference between a visual and written argument. A written argument relies on abstract symbols to convey a message, and while images are also symbols, they're not as abstract and they have the potential to draw a person into the message with a simple glance.

Just for fun, I've constructed my own visual argument that features certain people and events from this country's history. Anyone reading this blog, this is your chance to judge whether or not I've managed to convey my point. What is this argument about? Is it successful or not?

2. What is the most important feature of visual image you learned from McCloud? Why? (140-50 words).

The most important thing I learned from McCloud is the relationship between the reader/watcher when they see a cartoon face as opposed to when they see a real face. When the person has a face-to-face conversation with another person, they have an image in their mind of the person they are speaking with which is accurate based on their perception. However, at the same time, they have a perception of their own face which is not as vivid, and contains more of a general "sense of shape..... A sense of general placement. (207)" Because a person doesn't see themselves in a photo-realistic sense, when they see a cartoon image of a face, it is easy for them to view the cartoon as a representation of themselves.

1. Wood, Nancy. Essentials of Argument. 2nd. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc, 2009.

McCloud, Scott. "The Vocabulary of Comics." Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World 195 - 208. 10 Sep 2008 .

Blog #2

2008-08-30T00:26:00.000-07:00

1. What did you think of when you encountered the word argument as you began reading this chapter? What do you think now? (150-200 words)

The first thing that normally comes to mind when I think of argument is "To make a case for." This is my own personal definition, and it really comes from that fact that as a writer, a father, and someone who likes to go online and engage in unmoderated messageboard debate (meaning that sources are rarely cited, unless I'm trying to move in for the kill on a particular topic), I am frequently called on to justify my point of view on a given topic. For example, when I tell my oldest child that she cannot go over to her friend's house to play for the day, in order to seem like a fair parent, I need to make the arguments that we might be leaving the house soon, her friend's parents said that they would be busy for the day, and that she's still grounded for cutting the cat's hair with the scissors. Of course this is a very easy argument to win because I am the final authority in this case.

According to Nancy V. Wood, in Essentials of Argument, "Argument classes are taught in college because they improve the students' ability to read and think critically and write or speak about signifficant problems and issues that have social consequences. (5)" In my experience in the real world, a number of people end up in careers that have nothing to do with the field in which they earned their degree in college. The fact that they have a college degree is often enough to earn them the opportunity to fill various positions based solely upon the fact that they are able to think problems through critically and then act upon them competently.

When properly used, argument informs us of critical things, such as the best candidate to vote for in an election based upon their stance on the issues rather than whether or not we simply like them as individuals. Critical thinking helps us watch a movie and then evaluate it based on the artistry of the film making as well as the message it is trying to convey. For instance, is a war movie trying to expose the horrors of war by showing the plight of a soldier, as in Saving Private Ryan? Is it a propaganda film that is meant to influence the audience to support U.S. interests abroad, as I would argue that the third Rambo movie does? Critical thinking allows us to determine which products are the best to buy based on its features, benefits, and consumer reviews as opposed to relying on the hype of salespeople.

When faced with a complex problem, how do we deal with it? We must be able to come to decisions and then present arguments to explain why we took the actions that we took. We must also be able to analyze the arguments made by others to decide whether we agree or disagree with what they are saying, and sometimes offer up counter-arguments in an attempt to change a proposed course of action.

Honestly, my opinion about argument isn't any different now than it was before the reading. Argument is everywhere in our society, and it makes us better and more useful individuals if we recognize it when we see it and analyze it to determine the best way to process it.

2. Why did you choose your magazine? (75-100 words)

I chose Discover because of all of the magazines that were listed, it was the one that appealed to me the most. It is the one magazine from the list we were given that is most likely to have articles that I'd be interested in reading. I enjoy science articles, yet not coming from a background in hard science, I fit perfectly with this magazine's target audience. Discover is a science magazine for lay-people. In other words I like to read about all of the neat new developments in science and technology, but I'm not particularly interested in trying to make sense of the complexity of the actual science since I lack the background.

1. Wood, Nancy. Essentials of Argument. 2nd. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc, 2009.

Blog #1

2008-08-28T01:33:00.000-07:00

How does Foss define rhetoric? Describe in your own words what this means to you and offer a few examples from your experience.

I read the twenty page introduction to Rhetoric by Karen Foss with a specific eye for a definition of rhetoric, and while the subject matter tended to meander from theoretical to the historical, the key statement seemed to be "For us, rhetoric is the human use of symbols to communicate" (1). Symbols are the expression of our reality through language.

Foss talks about two key ideas relating to symbols, the first being that "Humans construct the world in which they live through their symbolic choices" (2). While symbols could just as easily translate to a number of different modes of communication, including art or music, the most appropriate type of symbol is language and words. The idea is that words, or symbols, that we choose may contain positive or negative connotations. For example, if I am describing a new version of an intellectual work with the pejorative term "dumbed down," I am using that specific term to voice disapproval. Likewise, if I were trying to cast it in a neutral or positive light, I might choose the term "streamlined" or "simplified."

Symbols can also be a representation of physical objects. Foss uses the example of a tree. "For instance, a tree standing in the forest is not a symbol; it does not stand for something else. It is simply a tree, although the word chosen to represent the thing standing in the forest is a symbol" (3).

A rhetorician who is conscious and intentional with their use of symbols is able to craft an argument that is intended to accomplish a goal. The nature of that goal might be to convince people to adopt your way of thinking, come to a consensus on a difficult matter, or settle a dispute. Rhetoric may include writing, oration, physical, multi-media.... Being new to the world of rhetoric, I would simply interpret it as communication.

Google defines rhetoric as:
* using language effectively to please or persuade
* grandiosity: high-flown style; excessive use of verbal ornamentation; "the grandiosity of his prose"; "an excessive ornateness of language"
* palaver: loud and confused and empty talk; "mere rhetoric"
* study of the technique and rules for using language effectively (especially in public speaking)

What this means to me is that rhetoric is a way to convey meaning and expression, persuade others, raise awareness, and otherwise communicate through the use of symbols.

In the past, having never actually studied rhetoric, I have used it for a variety of purposes, including debating political issues, particularly around election time; incorporating it into my roleplaying game writings; and I have used it for the purpose of marketing the roleplaying games I have been involved with.

Currently, for those who haven't notices, the country I live in is in the final months of a presidential campaign. I have engaged in conversation with others on various messageboards where I have sought to gain information and opinions about the candidates. I have mainly been in information gathering mode up to this point, and I have only recently made a decision about which candidate best represents me and my interests. The goal of these debates has not been to inform other people's views, but rather, to try to come to a consensus among other similar-minded individuals of what the issues, strengths, and weaknesses are surrounding each candidate. Now that I have picked one, my rhetoric in these place will likely change to a stance where I will try to persuade others to vote with me.

The rhetoric in the professional writing I have done is a little harder to spot. Roleplaying game material tends to be escapist, so people don't appreciate it when it becomes too preachy. Nevertheless, there are a few jabs at modern political figures and organizations, though a person would have to read the material carefully to find the parallels, as well as the commentary I'm making. There is much to be said about understated allegory.

Finally, I have used rhetoric on this very blog to promote the book I released in June called Reign of Discordia. Unlike most of my other writings, this one was released through a much smaller publisher, so I tried to help that publisher as much as possible by promoting the book myself through my blog and messageboards. My goal was to be informative and make it sound appealing without being so assertive about it in high traffic areas as to make myself annoying in the eyes of the other people who visit these sites. Obviously, continuously bumping the same thread over and over on a messageboard and talking about it in every unrelated conversation would become irritating, while it is far more appropriate to pimp the book to a much higher degree in my own online space.

I feel that professional writers should possess an understanding of rhetoric because such knowledge helps them more effectively convey meaning and promote their message through their various works.

Foss, Karen, Sonya Foss, and Robert Trapp. "An Introduction to Rhetoric."Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric. 3rd ed. London: Waveland Press, 2003. 1-18.

28 Aug 2008 <http://www.aml.wsu.edu/facultysites/Muhlhauser/FossFossTrappsm.pdf>

And Now For Something Completely Different

2008-08-27T18:10:00.000-07:00

If you happen to be one of the 2.5 people who have been following my blog for the past few months, you might be in for a surprise as the content starts to include some things that are very not gaming related.

You see, I have this dirty little secret I've been hiding for a number of years now. I attended college back in the early nineties, but I never finished. I may have gone on to manage a retail store, work at WotC, and write some gaming books, but the fact is that in the real world, employers generally tend to treat you like an uneducated schmuck if you don't have a degree. This was somewhat true a decade ago, but it seems to be more true as time goes by because nearly every kid who manages to graduate highschool is now going on to complete their college degree.

While that begs the question of how a degree gets a person ahead in life if everyone has one, that doesn't really address the question of what happens to the people who don't have one. My experience is that it leaves them looking at the options of perpetual retail or fast food hell. You know, I've done my time in those trenches and I'd rather be standing on the corner hustling random strangers for their spare change than go back to it.

What's sad is that when I decided that I wasn't going to go back and finish, oh something like thirteen years ago, I was only three semesters from graduation. That's one and a half years. Back then that seemed like such a long time, and I was so burned out, and I assumed that by demonstrating competence, I could be successful without that expensive piece of paper. Frankly, I have been successful in many areas, but not as successful as I should have been. What's the reason I didn't land any upper management jobs, or get the editor positions I applied for, or even be interviewed for some jobs that randomly applied for and still feel are beneath me? My work references were good.... Its that lack of a degree.

So I'm going back to school to finish my degree, and I'm not giving up until I'm successful. I might even try to go on to grad school if I can figure out how to fund it.

One of the classes I'm taking is an introduction to rhetoric. Based on the classroom discussions and the reading I've done so far, I really think I'm going to learn a lot in this class (and I'm not just saying that to suck up to the professor, who will be reading this blog). Part of my grade for the class will be to keep a blog that addresses some of the subject matter we will be studying. I've decided to just merge it in with my regular blog to keep things easy for me.

So if you happen to be one of my very few regular readers, prepare to learn something that has nothing to do with games. If it seems a little esoteric, don't give up, there will also be gaming related ramblings posted here whenever I feel the need to post about it. In fact, I'm not turning my back on the gaming industry. I have some small projects currently in the works that will be manageable with my class schedule, and then I have some hopes for where I might end up after I have my degree. I'm not done with gaming. In fact, after my eight years in the industry, I'm just getting started.

Making a Con Appearance

2008-07-30T10:32:00.000-07:00

There are some really outgoing game designers who thrive on making public appearances. That's never been me. Sure, I ran some demos at Gen Con 2003, but I usually shy away from them because I'm not crazy about the public speaking. This changes this weekend.

I've been invited at the last minute as a guest for SpoCon 2008 where I will be sitting on a panel and running some games on Saturday. The panel will be on, of all things, 4th edition. They were very interested in having me on it for a couple reasons. First, I'm published, second, I told them that I'm more interested in what Pathfinder has to offer than 4th edition. So I'll be at that event talking up Pathfinder while trying not to dwell on the aspects of 4th edition that I'm not so crazy about.

I will also be running a few games. First will be a session of True20 with the Reign of Discordia campaign setting in the morning, then a couple blocks of the Pathfinder RPG using the Alpha 3 rules in the afternoon and evening. Revenge of the Kobold King should be just the right length to fill the block of time.

If anyone lives in or near Spokane, come check out the Con. The website is located here: http://www.spocon.us/programming and no, you won't see my name on the web site's guest list because my appearance just came about over the last couple of days, but I'll be there fully immersed in gaming goodness.

Reign of Discordia Design Diary 3 - Setting Elements

2008-06-20T15:21:00.000-07:00

Before I get going too far into my latest design blog entry, I'd just like to say that the setting book has had a really, really good first 24 hours. One of the most important stats is that it is #1 on the True20 category top seller list at RPGNow! I'm told that no Non-Green Ronin product has ever been #1 in that category before. For those who rushed out to buy it, I want to offer you a heartfelt thanks. It seems a bit ridiculous when you think about how long I've been in this industry, but RoD is my first solo book-length project, and it makes me happy to see it doing this well. I hope it continues, because I'd like to still be working on this setting years from now.

So today I'm going to address focus. Many settings have, in my opinion, too tight of a focus. I've said before on various messageboards that Reign of Discordia is an everything and the kitchen sink type setting. What I meant by that is that I wanted narrators and players to be able to use this setting for every sub-genre of space opera that you can think of. I wanted it to cover everything from Star Wars style swashbuckling to the grittiness of Firefly, and everything in between, but I wanted it to have elements that were familiar to the scifi fan.

I'd like to present Star Wars as an example of a wonderful setting with too tight of a focus for an RPG (no offense to anyone who enjoys it or has worked on it). The main problem I see with it is that the official story by George Lucas focuses excluslively on the life and times of Anakin Skywalker. Episodes 1 - 3 focus on his young life while episodes 4 - 6 focus on his later adult life. Lucas has said that as far as he's concerned, once Anakin is dead, the story is over. Sure the background setting exists, and it is fantastic, but the flaws that I see with using it for an RPG is that no matter the contribution your characters make, they will never be central to the story, they will never be the ones to ultimately help the rebellion win, and they will never have the same talent with the force as the Skywalker clan. That means that when playing this game, you are essentially agreeing to make youself into a supporting character at best. I know a guy who was running a Star Wars game set between episodes 3 and 4, and he says that for some inexplicable reason, the enthusiasm to continue the game dropped to zero as soon as they hit the point in time where a couple of droids showed up on some backwater moisture farm.

It's easy to define the focus for Reign of Discordia. The largest background factor is that the central government for over a thousand worlds fell five years ago and nobody has stepped up to fill their shoes. The infrastructure that was built during the rule of the Imperium has rapidly broken down and people are suffering as a result. There's a lot you can do with that alone, but there are a couple of other major storylines going on as well. First, you have the R'Tillek, the lizardlike former enemies of the Imperium, which, for reasons that have yet to be explained, are intent on destroying the former Imperium member worlds. The second is that the Humans and the blue skinned Human-like Lamogos, once close allies, have fallen out of favor with one-another, which has sparked a nasty cold war.

So already we have three major things you can do with your campaign, all of which can function independant of the others: work towards restoring some sort of order in the galaxy, work against the R'Tillek, and take a side in the Earth - Lamog cold war. Of course a good narrator will be able to work all three into a campaign..

As far as emulating other sub-genres, I included the Frontier Worlds. These were worlds that were wild and untamed when the Imperium still existed. They were the next generation of colony worlds, but they never became self sufficient. Due to the fall of the Stellar Imperium, they've become cut off from supplies, and they would probably be in even worse shape if it weren't for independant cargo haulers. A group that enjoys Firefly could easily create a campaign set in this area of space alone. Characters in this sort of campaign will also likely engage in salvage operations. Since the cost of buying new spacecrafts is so high, the easiest way to upgrade a ship is to salvage a wrecked one.

Emulating Star Wars is another easy one. The Imperium may be dead but the Lamogos Star Navy still exists. These guys don't own the galaxy anymore, but they still like to act like they do. When one of their fleet commodores decides that he has an interest in something in a planetary system, they tend to pop into space along with a bunch of capitol ships and utterly disrupt everything in their attempt to achieve their objectives. The fact that their world has little to do with their matters little. They're so much more powerful than most other worlds that they can still ride roughshod over the local systems and their militaries. Sometimes they're after a person, sometimes technology, sometimes they're trying to force a trade agreement. The list goes on and on about what their motivwes might be on any given day, but the heroes will find themselves working against them more often than not. (As a quick aside, not all Lamogos are like this. You can easily have a Lamogos hero, and there is no shortage of good aligned Lamogos throughout the known worlds).

For those who enjoy a more Babylon 5 type feel, I provided the Rover's Beacon space station. This isn't exactly the last best hope for peace. Actually, since Imperium funding dried up, they've had to scrape by in any way they could, which in this case, means allowing raiders to use the place freely. It isn't quite a sanctioned base of operations, but raiders are allowed to dock at the station, keep quarters, and conduct business there, so long as they don't disrupt the usual station operations. It's also a big center for commerce in general, so they get a large number of Humans and aliens from throughout the known worlds passing through regularly. So far my campaign has been based around the space station because it provides an excellent home base for the heroes.

If you're a Battlestar Galactica fam , RoD doesn't have Cylons, skinjob infiltrators, or a ragtag fugitive fleet in search of Earth. What it does have is the R'Tillek, which attack planets, seemingly at random, and kill everyone on the surface with a mix or orbital bombardment and a deadly viral biological agent that so far has been 100% effective in killing all intelligent alien species that have come into contact with it. The entire former Imperium stands on the brink of annihilation from these guys, and diplomacy doesn't work on them at all.

These are just a few campaign models you can follow that are based off of the major space opera shows and movies out there. There are over 50 worlds and roughly 20 major organizations included in the core book alone (with more on the way), all of which have their own problems and specific needs for adventurers. Each can make a great focus for an entire campaign without ever touching the core conflicts of the setting.

Many science fiction games out there rely on licensed properties that have a micro focus (the characters in the novels, movies, or TV shows), always keeping the heroes in the game out of the spotlight. Reign of Discordia was designed as a role playing setting first and foremost, thus making the heroes the focus of the setting.

The Reign of Discordia core book is on sale through RPGNow

Reign of Discordia Is Now On Sale

2008-06-18T22:41:00.001-07:00

Science Fiction the way you love it!

Reign of Discordia is the core setting book in line of the same name by the celebrated game designer Darrin Drader and Reality Deviant Publications. RoD gives you what you need to know about the galactic civilization following the fall of the Stellar Imperium. Future sourcebooks and adventures will further add to the dynamic space opera setting presented in this core setting book.

Within the pages of Reign of Discordia, you can fight against the R'Tillek and their crusade of extermination against the known species, fight to protect the independence of dozens of worlds, participate in the cold war between Earth and Lamog, haul cargo to the Frontier Systems, involve yourself in the various crime syndicates, work for one of the interplanetary conglomerates and engage in corporate sabotage, play a role in the advancement of one of the interplanetary organizations, salvage starships, and engage in a number of other activities that will bring danger and adventure.

* Character rules for a space opera setting
* Six new core races for the setting (Gaieti, Lamogos, Tallinites, Sangor, Relerrans, and the R'Tillek).
* Seven character roles (soldier, naval officer, infiltrator, mentalist, pilot, bounty hunter, and low-life).
* Descriptions of over 50 planets, which comprise the setting's core locations
* Descriptions of numerous interplanetary organizations
* Starship rules for True20
* A range of starships
* A detailed description of the space station Rover's Beacon, which is one of the key locations within the setting.

Welcome to the threatened and turbulent galaxy of 2690. Can you make a difference in these difficult times?

http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=56479

Reign Of Discordia Design Diary 2 - Starship Combat

2008-06-15T00:33:00.000-07:00

Reign of Discordia is a True20 setting, and though it really does function as a unique set of rules, it has its roots firmly planted in the D20 SRD (system reference document, for those not in the know). There have been some attempts to get away from that with some products, but to me, the farther one gets from D20's various subsystems, the stranger and less integrated with the rest of the game the mechanics feel. It was therefore my intention to use as much of the starship combat rules from the Future SRD as I could get away with.

This is a sensible plan; after all, why reinvent the wheel? There's just one problem: I don't particularly like the Future starship combat rules. Like much of D20 Modern (to me, at least), the system just came up a bit short. I played some starship combat under the D20 Future rules shortly after it came out, and I specifically felt that the damage rules and the movement rules were deficient.

Starting with the damage rules, what I didn't like was the fact that they went to such great efforts to make everything scale perfectly with standard D20 Modern that it just caused annoyance. Since a point of damage on the character scale was a point of damage on the ship scale, you ended up having to roll a crapload of dice any time you hit with any weapon. Who carries 8 8-sided dice with them to a gaming session? Unless you had the guy at the table who carried a pouch containing every dice he's ever owned, chances are that he's going to sit there and individually roll that eight sided dice 8 times (and even if you do have that guy, what are the chances that he's going to let other players jinx them by sharing with others?). Of course he tallies the die rolls in his head as he goes, and then towards the end, "Oh crap, was that 54 or 56 points?" or "Hey, was that five or six die rolls I just made?" And the one guy who does bring his bag of dice still manages to roll between one and three off the table, prompting rerolls, causing dice collisions between the re-thrown dice and the ones that are sitting on the table, thus changing their values. In other words, it's a royal pain.

One of the nice things about True20 is that you have a completely different mechanic for dealing with damage. You don't roll a handful of dice under any circumstances. This is a good start, but it led me down a line of thought that brought up some larger questions.

Should a guy with a blaster standing on the hull of a ship be able to damage it in any way? True20 has no hardness rules. Toughness becomes part of the measure of hardness, but that still means that a guy could potentially get suited up in a space suit, grab a blaster, float himself over to the hull of a quarter mile-long battlecruiser, and take a shot at the thing. If the battle-cruiser botched its roll, it could take some actual damage from the shot. This doesn't make sense to me. If you take a pistol and shoot at a real life naval warship's hull, is it going to do any damage at all? No way! With the armor that thing has, the bullet is totally bouncing off! The same should be true for starships; after all, they're armored well enough to withstand collisions with small sized space junk.

To solve this issue, I changed the scale. Starship weaponry starts with a damage of 1 and goes up from there. Damage 1 = damage 10 on the personal scale. A guy with a blaster now cannot do damage to the hull of a ship, though a guy with a plasma cannon, or a nuke, can. This also keeps the die rolls nice and low - they're actually the same scale as character combat, which makes the math easy. I was a little unsure about the mechanic after I came up with it, so we playtested it, and it worked extremely well. Starship combat still felt like starship combat, but the level of complexity was minimized.

Next up is movement. What I absolutely loathe about the D20 Future method of movement is that it is exactly like character movement. Starships can start and stop on a dime and size does not affect maneuverability. In my experience, this makes for starships that aren't affected by inertia, and combat becomes very, very boring. So, with that in mind, I fixed the problem.

But wait a minute. All stop. Back the horse up. Isn't one of the design goals of True20 to streamline things and make the game easier to play? Why yes, yes it is. But isn't what I'm talking about actually going to complicate gmae play? Why yes, yes it is. So how can I justify doing this with good conscience? OPTIONAL RULES! You see, the D20 Future starship rules are already about as streamlined as they can get (if you don't take the above mentioned damage dice into account, anyway). There would be no reason to go any further in the direction of streamlining and simplification, but if you're a simulationshit, like myself, there is reason to add complication. So these rules are purely optional, and in my opinion, they make a barely acceptable system both playable and enjoyable.

Optional Rule 1: Acceleration and Deceleration. In the standard rules, ships have a tactical speed. Under the D20 Future rules, they can go from 0 to as many squares as they wish in a single round. As I said, I find this unrealistic in space. To remedy this, the tactical speed remains unchanged, but you now have to accelerate or decelerate to change your speed. Each engine type has a base number of squares it can accelerate or decelerate in a round (minimum 1). This number is reduced by 1 per size above the ultralight starship size. For instance, if an Ultralight starship with a particle impulse engine has an acceleration/deceleration of 6 squares, a Superheavy starship with the same type of engine has an Acceleration/Deceleration of 2 squares.

Optional Rule 2: Maneuverability. It should go without saying that not all ships should be able to thumb their noses at inertia. Ships are assumed to be moving forward as they move around on the battlemat due to their main enginges being located in the back of the ship. A ship that is a quarter of a mile long simply should not be able to make a sudden 90 degree turn, and move a couple squares, and then make another 90 degree turn and go a few more. The new rules are as follows: Super-heavy starships may rotate 45 degrees once per round. Every class below superheavy may rotate an additional 45 degrees per round. Ultra-light starships may rotate 5 times during their move, Light starships may rotate 4 times during their move, Medium starships may rotate 3 times during their move, and Heavy starships may rotate twice during their move. Ships that may rotate more than once during a turn may do so at any point during their move, however, they must move forward one square after each doing so before rotating again.

Again, this is a relatively simple rule, but it adds a degree of tactical complexity to starship movement that is otherwise lacking.

Now frankly, the Reign of Discordia setting is actually relatively rules light. I was interested in creating an interesting setting that people would want to participate in rather than putting a rulebook out there dressed up as a setting (don't even get me started on all the 200 page D20 setting books out there that really only had 30 pages worth of actual setting material, while the other 170 pages were add-on rules that I was usually only marginally interested in). Remember the design concepts behind True20 are that simple and streamlined = good. I've already covered the major rules changes with the first two design diaries. Yes, there are more rules present than the ones I've talked about, but most of those simply involve adapting the Future SRD to True20, and in most cases the changes were relatively minor. In the next design diaries I'm going to talk about the setting itself and how I set out to create something that contained some familiar elements, but did it in a way that made for an interesting and versatile setting.

Reign Of Discordia Design Diary 1 - Healing and True20

2008-06-09T23:15:00.000-07:00

Let's admit it, healing in True20 is a bitch. There really isn't any way around it. If you're unlucky enough to be rolling badly on a given night, you could very quickly run out of Conviction points and be sidelined very early in any given game session. It's easy enough to break the rules in a fantasy setting; just give your guy a healing potion and he's back up and ready for more. Modern and scifi games that omit the majority of the supernatural and fantastic elements have a real problem to contend with: the ease of character death.

I've said many times that Reign of Discordia is intended to be a bit like retro-70s scifi. But what exactly do I mean by that? Here are a couple examples off the top of my head. The original Battlestar Galactica was really a pretty dark setting, yet things still looked bright and shiny, and the heroes rarely took a hit. Within a few episodes after this great interplanetary apocalypse, there were discos and upscale restaurants in this "rag-tag fugitive fleet." Wow, talk about seizing the day! How about where everyone suffered under the oppression of the Galactic Empire in Star Wars, yet the characters were irrepressible and naively heroic? Battles were big, blasters were the great peacekeepers, and no matter how dark things got, there was always room for heroics!

Reign of Discordia is not Star Wars, nor is it the original Battlestar Galactica, and there are certainly no disco joints after 99% of the human species has been wiped out. In fact, in this setting Humanity is far from wiped out, though it does face some very serious threats. Despite the political chaos that has shaped the setting and brought poverty, oppression, chaos, and pain to the people, there is room for the irrepressible characters - the heroes, the scoundrels, and the loyal sidekicks. There is room in this setting for swinging across a chasm that drops hundreds of feet into the depths of some industrial beast while people are shooting at you from all directions. Of course, where there is room for heroics, there is also room for unforgiving miserable failure. Suppose Luke Skywalker had swung Leia to the other side of the chasm, only to catch a blaster bolt to the chest, and was reduced to Disabled status. Would that be the end of Luke? In the Star Wars verse, it would be a flesh wound and he'd continue on, even while the guys in full armor take lesser hits and fall down dead.

True20, by default, is a little more deadly than that. The trick was to create a mechanic where there would be less punnishment for doing what you're supposed to be best at: being a hero. Now, I reiterate, if this were a fantasy setting, a simple healing potion would do the trick. The problem is that Reign of Discordia tries to stick mostly with things that can be explained by science. Adepts are present within the setting, but they're pretty rare and they have a limited selection of powers. With no cleric and no healing potions, how exactly is a character supposed to achieve these great heroic feats, even in the face of a good shot by an NPC?

The answer is through feats. According to the core rules, you can make a healing check once per day. If you spend a conviction point, you can make an immediate recovery check, or do one of a number of other actions. Obviously conviction points are important, they're very helpful, and they're versatile, but they are not plentiful. To address this, there's the Bounceback feat in Reign of Discordia.

So what's up with Bounceback? In Die Hard, Bruce Willis walks across a floor covered in broken glass with his bare feat, cuts himself pretty badly, bleeds all over the place, but still manages to go on fighting. In Rambo III, John Rambo takes a bullet to the abdomen, but yet he manages to go on and kick some commie butt. In Raiders of the Lost Arc, Indiana Jones takes a bullet to the shoulder, but yet he still manages to wrap his whip around the bottom of a vehicle and ride along down the road behind it. Sure these wounds might hurt like hell, but they were able to somehow recover from them enough to keep on fighting through sheer stubbornness and force of will. What Bounceback allows you to do is recover two damage conditions once per day. Say you just took a blaster bolt and you're now Disabled - use your Bounceback feat and you're simply Hurt. There's also an improved version of Bounceback, which allows you to do the same thing as Bounceback, except that you can do it a number of times a day equal to your Constitution score.

Finally, when Bounceback and Conviction fail, you have one more tool at your disposal: Biocort. This is one of the items that was ported from the Modern SRD to Reign of Discordia. However, unlike the way that Biocort works in the original rules, rather than speeding healing, it actually can take away some of the damage immediately. Use one dose of Biocort and you get to make an immediate recovery check. Of course this does not guarantee that you'll succeed at your recovery check, and it also doesn't necessarily make normal healing any faster, but it might just offer enough relief for the character to keep on going. However, unlike healing potions in fantasy games, Biocort has its limits. You can use it up to three times per day, but no more or it loses its effectiveness.

The main idea behind these items is to make the setting more fun. It gives the characters what they need to survive long enough to rescue the princess that the R'Tillek have taken captive, or take out the Lamogos soldiers who guard the shield generator.

In the next design diary, I'm going to talk about the ever fun and exciting topic of starship combat, and how the Reign of Discordia rules give you the option to bring a bit more realism to the game than the standard D20 Future rules do.

Reinvigorating theHobby

2008-04-25T09:54:00.000-07:00

One of the stated goals of 4th edition D&D is that it will reinvigorate the hobby. I think this is a fine goal because what is good for Wizards is ultimately good for the industry on the whole.

Currently we're living in an age where the roleplaying game market is getting sucker punched. Online sales are killing the locally owned gaming shops by undercutting prices and offering titles that the local shops simply cannot afford to stock. On top of that, the whole tabletop gaming category is hurting because of the massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs). It has gotten bad to the point where the guy who got me into roleplaying in the first place referred to the RPG industry as dying.

But is it dying? The fact is that there are fewer large gaming publishers around now than there were when the last edition of the game came out eight years ago. That alone should be pretty telling. You have a lot more books selling in PDF format rather than print, and those who are printing their products are running some pretty short print runs. Books are now selling in the hundreds of copies where they used to sell in the thousands.

Advertising is down. With the death of the printed versions of Dragon and Dungeon magazine, where are is a small to medium sized publisher supposed to advertise so that they can reach a large number of their target audience? They pretty much have to go online and appeal to the gamer elite to buy their products. The problem with this is that there are so many different products competing for the dollars of the gamer elite that it's very easy for quality products to get overlooked. Then you have the gamer elite, which in itself is composed of a few thousand, and as much as they love to play these games and buy the good stuff, they see small companies marketing to them so often that they've become very jaded about it. And who can blame them? As one of them, I've definitely limited my spending money to the stuff that really catches my interest.

So along comes D&D 4th edition, which will be making some pretty major changes to the game we've all known for such a long time. For a lot of people, it's hard to get past the fact that the game will be changing to this extent, but I understand why they're doing it and I support their efforts because ultimately this hobby either needs a boost, or it is going to quietly fade into the night. I'm basing my career on the health of the industry, so I really feel strongly that their efforts need to succeed. Sure, there's been a lot of talk about what the new gaming license will do to 3rd party publishers, and I think people have some valid concerns, but ultimately we need to focus a little more on what's best for the hobby and the industry built up around it. What's good for WotC is good for the industry.

If WotC can draw back the lapsed gamers as well as show all of these people who have gotten hooked on World of Warcraft that this is a fun worthwhile thing to do - and its social so they can do it with their friends rather than doing it at their computer - then there will be more people in the local game shops and more products being sold into the mass market. Right now it's crucial that the industry either finds a way to stop the bleeding out of gamers and actually manage to draw some new people in, or simply resign itself to the status of a fad that has finally had its last hurrah. I was raised in gaming and it will forever be a part of me. I can't imagine a time where it doesn't exist in one form or another, but frankly, I don't want to see MMOs be it's only future.

So do I support 4th edition D&D? The answer to that is an unequivocal YES! I want 4th edition to be a smashing success because it will mean more work for me, more people interested in gaming, and more products out there to choose from. Likewise, I hope that the smaller niche games can continue into the future. I want to see Pathfinder, Modern20, and True20 (among others) to continue to be successful. I love these niche games because I like to have some variety in genres and game styles after playing D&D for over 20 years. What's good for WotC is good for the industry, so we wall wait to see if this is the fresh start the hobby needs right now. I have faith that it will be, and things will be much more upbeat in the industry by this time next year.

No Empire Tonight

2008-04-21T02:11:00.000-07:00

I've been a busy little monkey the last couple weeks. Not only have I finished up writing Reign of Discordia (and been pimping it like a madman anywhere that will listen to me about it), but I also just finished writing the final installment of ENPublishing's War of the Burning Sky, a little adventure called The Beating of the Aquiline Heart. I was planning to reward myself by watching Star Wars (No, please do not ask me to refer to it as A New Hope. And Han shot first damnit!) and Empire Strikes Back tonight.

So I sat down and made it through Star Wars, but the whole time I was sitting there I was thinking about how I wasn't entirely thrilled with our first Reign of Discordia adventure the other night. It was really just a great deal of improvisation following the basic story I was planning to make into the first published adventure for the setting, but at the end I felt that the heroes weren't really challenged enough. Then inspiration struck in a big way on how I could restructure the whole scenario to make it much more action packed..... More like what I would be likely to find in one of those late '70s/early '80s era space operas, which are helping inform the direction of this product. So rather than watching Empire, I instead sat down and hammered out over a thousand words worth of adventure proposal and shot it off to Dave at RDP. I suspect that he'll like it and I'll be able to get to work writing it just as soon as I make a few minor changes to The Beating of the Aquiline Heart (What do you mean the beholder isn't in the SRD!!!!? Oops, I seem to have forgotten about that.)

Remembering Oathbound

2008-04-12T15:26:00.000-07:00

Its really easy for a person to get so focused on what their current projects are that they don't bother looking back at some of the things they've done in the past. Specifically, in my case, I'm 110% into campaigning for the success of the Reign of Discordia line. I'm doing this because I know its a good setting, it's consistent with my design philosophies, and the art direction of the thing is going to get away from the CGI look space opera has developed in recent and get back to its roots from the late 1970s.

But this blog entry isn't about Reign of Discordia and how wonderfully brilliant it is. This blog entry is about the Oathbound campaign setting.

I first became involved with Oathbound right at the tail end of the writing for the core setting book. In fact, other than offering up a little tidbit that was added to the adventure in the book, I really didn't do much at all for that book and I was lucky to have gotten into the credits at all. I did do the adventure that appeared for free on the website. I did get to play a major role in Plains of Penance, which was the first expansion book for the setting. I was asked to write an adventure that would appear in it, and I was told to make use of a creature called the Ulatra. I did it, excited to be getting my first real freelance gig, and happily turned it in. Later, Todd Morasch, the lead artist and the guy who had thought up the Ulatra in the first place back back when he was in highschool, sent me an email thanking me for bringing his monster to life. He was thrilled that I could write an adventure around this creature and do so in a way that was faithful to his imagination. This would be the first of many such successes with Oathbound.

My second major Oathbound project was Wrack and Ruin, which was about the portions of the city of Penance that either lie in ruin or lie beneath the city. To be honest, I still can't keep straight which was which, but the point was that it was the first book (other than some stuff I did for my own short lived company) where I was given the position of lead designer. We're talking cover credit and about 50,000 words of the book! Man, that puppy really was the first book that could be called a Darrin Drader vehicle, and again, not only did Bastion seem happy with it, but it was also a critical success.

The next book I played a role in was Oathbound: Arena, where we finally broke into the second major domain of the Forge. It was a harsh desert where people went in to do battle over the massive amounts of gold that lie beneath the red sands. I forget the actual number of words I contributed to this book. It wasn't enough to earn cover credit, but it was somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 words, so again, it was a good chunk. I also have to admit that I prefer the Arena portion of the setting to Penance. In fact, I think it was probably the best domain we developed. There were a lot of writers working on it which brought about real diversity, ultimately leading to a widely varied but very compelling setting. I can also lay claim to the mass combat system in that book as well as a prestige class that still catches my fancy called the Ravager, which would spin stones around it to absorb damage it would have otherwise suffered. Again, this book met with critical success.

I wasn't part of Mysteries of Arena, since I was too busy writing Serpent Kingdoms for WotC at that time, but once I was done with that project, I helped Thomas Knauss out on Wildwood. While he did the majority of the writing for this book, I still managed to kick in 50,000 words and added a significant amount of the defining characteristics to the final book, including one of the strangest D&D type adventures I've ever seen. Again on this one, it was met with critical acclaim. Unfortunately it came at a time when the D20 market glut was in full swing, and Bastion Press wasn't doing so great financially. As a result, it literally took years for it to find its way out of development and into the hands of the gamers who wanted it. I was impressed that one of the people who was the most vocal about his desire to own the book was the ENWorld critic Alan "Psion" Kohler.

One more book was written for the Oathbound line, the Player's Guide to Oathbound, which was designed to make Oathbound 3.5 compatible. Thomas Knauss ran solo with that project, and I was definitely too busy working on WotC projects at that time to get too involved with it. Actually, other than looking over some stats for some races I had originally created, I had nothing to do with it. Because of the sorry shape Bastion was in, it never saw any form of official release and it was recently leaked as a word file for free through Steve Creech, the new owner of Bastion. He couldn't officially release it since the ownership of the Oathbound line reverted back to Greg Dent, the guy who thought up the setting in the first place, but it was still an entire book sitting on his hard drive that was of interest to the people who still liked the setting.

Some people look at the failure of Bastion to mean that the Oathbound setting itself failed to sell. That's pretty far from the truth, considering that in terms of actual sales, the entire Oathbound line was one of the highest selling non-WotC D20 settings. Unfortunately, as sheer number of D20 books hit critical mass, the actual number of books any company was able to sell hit rock bottom. Sales into the hobby game market for most companies went from being in the thousands to the hundreds. For Bastion, this was simply not enough to sustain the livelihood of the owner of the company and (like many others at the time) the business sank.

Despite the ultimate demise of Bastion Press and the Oathbound line, I can say that it was a setting that did get a lot of circulation among gamers and it literally launched my game design career. I can hang my hat on it and say that it was as good as of a setting as we could create. Yes, I am a bit proud of my involvement with it, and it really brings a smile to my face these days when I see people talking well about it. I've been seeing a lot of that lately.

Reign of Discordia Press Release

2008-04-03T10:41:00.000-07:00

Reality Deviant Publications and Darrin Drader have teemed up to produce a new science fiction space opera campaign setting called “Reign of Discordia” exclusively for the True20 game system.

The core book, due out in May, describes a galaxy in turmoil following the collapse of a major star-spanning government called the Stellar Imperium. The core Imperium worlds have been destroyed and most of the former member worlds have decided to fend for themselves. While they try to reestablish their own sovereignty, a brutal power lurks, slowly exacting their vengeance upon a defeated people.

“This is something that has really been on the backburner for a few years,” Said author Darrin Drader. “I’ve been a huge space opera fan since I was a young child. I caught the original Star Wars in the theater when it was first released in 1977, I was a huge fan of Star Trek, the original Battlestar Galactica, and all the other major space shows that have been around since then. I really wanted to do a space opera, but I wanted to do something that captured the excitement and a little bit of the style that you saw with science fiction back in that era. I think there were some ideas about the future and future technology back then that you just don’t see very much of anymore, so I wanted to dust those off and incorporate them into the setting. I also wanted to make the play style support a number of different sub-genres within the larger space opera genre, and I think I’ve managed to accomplish those goals. I feel that the best system for this sort of game is Green Ronin’s True20 game, so I’m quite pleased that we decided to use it for this setting.”

Reign of Discordia will become one of Reality Deviant Publication’s core settings, which will receive several accessories and adventures in the near future. Reality Deviant’s other core settings include Cthulhu, Land of the Crane, Interface Zero and Blood Throne.

About Reality Deviant Publications
Reality Deviant Publications is a small press publishing company whose focus is on producing a variety of RPG games and supplements for various game systems including True20 and the Ogl/D20 system. More information about Reality Deviant Publications is at www.realitydeviants.net

About Darrin Drader
Darrin Drader is an eight year veteran of the role playing game industry and has worked on several well known products, including the Book of Exalted Deeds, D20 Apocalypse, Forgotten Realms: Serpent Kingdoms, and Forgotten Realms: Mysteries of the Moonsea, all by Wizards of the Coast. He was also an integral part of the Oathbound campaign setting, with a sizable amount of material in Plains of Penance, Wrack and Ruin, Arena, and Wildwood. He has also written a number of gaming related articles for a variety of other publishers. A full list of credits is posted at http://www.werecabbages.com/members.php?id=54

Go Get Blight Elves

2008-03-31T02:57:00.000-07:00

I have very little to report at the moment, other than the fact that the book I'm writing got extended by a chapter and I'm currently in the process of finishing that up.

So since I have very little to talk about, let's talk about something else. The Blood Throne setting was one of the settings included in the True20 Worlds of Adventure book by Green Ronin. It is, in my ever so humble opinion, the best default fantasy setting available for True20, and it stands up extremely well as a grim fantasy setting in general. It is also published by Reality Deviant Publications, the same company that will soon bring you my space opera setting Reign of Discordia.

If you don't have it already, I highly recommend picking up Blight Elves, which is available from RPGNow here. If you like sadistic elves with one heck of a twist, this is the book for you. Inexpensive and of professional quality, even if you aren't using True20 as your game system of choice, it's full of great ideas if you're looking for a way to make your evil variety of elves nastier in general. ALso remember that converting from D20 to True20 and back is extraordinarily easy.

I highly recommend it.

Reign of Discordia

2008-03-25T17:19:00.001-07:00

The publisher has announced that True20 setting I wrote, so I can now talk about it somewhat. The name of the project is Reign of Discordia, and its a space opera setting. As far as space settings go, its something I was pretty hyped about as I was working on it because it took a lot of elements that I've always loved about the genre and lumped them in one place while, in my opinion, managing to be original.

More on this later.

2008-03-23T02:32:00.000-07:00

That True20 project - I just crossed the finish line. Hooray for me! Now all I have left to do is an art order and then its in the hands of the editors.

Pathfinder RPG

2008-03-22T12:32:00.000-07:00

The big news in the RPG industry this week was the announcement by Paizo Publishing (formerly the publishers of Dragon and Dungeon magazines) that they will not be switching to D&D 4th edition and will instead be developing the Pathfinder RPG, which will be based on the D&D 3.5 rules. I have to admit that I was in a state of shock when that announcement hit. I think that WotC, and most everyone else watching the industry, assumed that the 3rd party publishers were going to adopt the 4th edition rules under WotC's new Game System License (GSL) and run with it. There are a couple of problems with that assumption, however. First of all, WotC has yet to produce the GSL, and second, all indications are that its going to be much more restrictive than the OGL was. For starters, Green Ronin probably wouldn't have been able to do True20 under the GSL. There's also the possibility that companies may not even be able to translate their old material released under the OGL to 4th edition compatible versions.

Paizo has the additional problem in that they are producing a hybrid product. Their Pathfinder series is a series of linked adventures presented in book format, however, they ship on a monthly schedule. So the physical form might be that of a book, but in almost every other way, they're magazines. Since Pathfinder is all about series' of linked adventures, they can't afford to sit around and wait for WotC to give them the license they need to keep producing their monthly book. They're currently shipping the second adventure path and they're probably finalizing the third or even the fourth of these right now. If they want to be 4E compliant by the end of the year, they need the GSL and they need the rules prior to now.

Be that as it may, other than the publishers that this affects, who are the winners and who are the losers of this decision? The customers! Those customers who decide not to switch to the 4th edition rules (and from what I've been reading, there may be a fairly large number of them this time around) will have a ready source of 3rd edition (kind of) material. According to Paizo, they won't need to buy the new Pathfinder RPG to keep playing the Pathfinder adventures. Better yet, if they do decide to buy into the Pathfinder RPG, they'll be able to play old adventures and use old 3.5 accessories with the new books. So other than the rules upgrades, which will serve to streamline things a bit and solve some of those problems people complain about with the new edition, thjis is really just a way of keeping the 3.5 rules in print.

So those are the winners. Who are the losers? Those who switch to 4th edition will be the ones who lose out on this deal. A lot of people like having printed magazine like things to keep their games going. WotC will still have Dungeon magazine and Dragon magazines, but they'll only be online, and they'll require the use of a printer and a subscription that will cost $10 to $15 a month. Actually, people like me will appreciate this because it means that material wil only be printed out as needed and it won't require a lot of bookshelf space. I don't really see the downside, but for many, this will be a big deal.

So what's my final analysis? I fully intend to do design work for 4th edition, and I intend to play the game and hopefully like it. From all accounts, it sounds like it will be a much easier game to design for. However, from what I've heard, it will also not appeal as much to the power gamers as 3rd edition did. In a sense, it's going to be like the old days when we had Basic D&D which ran alongside Advanced D&D. The difference here being that these games will be supported by different companies. While I fully intend to be onboard for 4th edition, I have to admit that I am a fan of the complexity and internal consistency of 3rd edition. I don't want to even think about liquidating my 3rd edition books, nor can I imagine never playing that game again. In other words, I'm thrilled that Paizo is doing this. I'm extremely happy that people are keeping the 3rd edition game system alive.

A final thought is that WotC may have shot themselves in the foot when they released 3rd edition by creating the OGL. Sure, up until this point, 3rd party publishers haven't been able to take much more than a small chunk out of WotC's loyal fan base, but who knows how long that will hold true? The OGL used the open source movement as an inspiration, touting that it would lead to advancements in game design, and in truth, I believe it has. There's also a lot of talk comparing 4th edition to New Coke, but I have another comparison that, should it come to pass, should be scaring anyone at WotC who is committed to the D&D game: IBM.

In 1981 IBM released the personal PC along with its open architecture, which made industry standardization possible. When Compaq came along and started using this to build IBM Clones, IBM fired off a bunch of cease and desist letters, along with several lawsuits. I don't think they intended for other manufacturers to use the open architecture to create their own PCs. Unfortunately for IBM, Compaq understood the implications of what they had done better than the parent company that had done it, and we all know how things turned out. Of anyone who might be reading this, are any of you reading this using a computer manufactured by IBM? Didn't think so. While IBM managed to hang in there through the mid-90s, often marketing their machines as "premium" or "original," the truth was that they became just another competitor in a crowded market.

Now, in looking at WotC and their wonderful "Open Game" upon which so many standalone games have been created, one has to ask whether or not its really in anyone's best interest to switch? 4th edition is really just an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle, then throw that bottle into the ocean and hope that nobody finds it. Good luck with that. Instead what is happening is that Paizo is out there in scuba gear, retrieving the bottle, shining it up quite a bit, and strapping it to the hood of their Pathfinder SUV and driving it a lot farther down the road that WotC expected them to. And you know what? Good for Paizo! I hope that the 3rd edition game is around in one form or another for decades to come, regardless of what ends up happening to D&D.

Overcoming Writer's Block - Or The Importance of Getting Enough Mental Fiber

2008-03-21T09:05:00.000-07:00

I have to admit that I've been a little bit blocked recently. This project I'm working on is almost done. In fact, out of a 70,000 word manuscript, yesterday I was facing down 6,000 words remaining, which in writing terms is just a short jaunt, and having a hard time coming up with anything to say. And I hate it when that happens. One little detail comes along, confounds me, and leaves me lost for words sometimes for days. Given the fact that I'm doing this for a living now and I have four projects lined up after this, I really don't have time for it.

So to find a solution, I resorted to some fairly extreme measures. First, I took the kids to the park. Sure, it was very cold yesterday, but they've been bugging me about this for a while and they were all bundled up, so it was fine. While there, I noticed too late that someone had lined up two of those table/bench combo things and put them right at the entrance of the gazebo, so of course the kids had to go running up into the gazebo by way of the table/bench things. It's a wonder nobody has broken their neck on that. We got back and it took a while for my ears to warm back up, but that did nothing for my writers block.

Next I turned to more distraction, namely playing on our new Wii. I bowled a near perfect game in Wii sports, which was pretty cool. I also watched my oldest daughter bowl a pretty good game using my Mii, and then I solidly trounced my wife when we played against one another. Still blocked up.

Finally, when faced with a day completely devoid of production, I resorted to my secret weapon. I grabbed my MP3 player and listened to Def Leppard's Hysteria album. Now their tour back in 1986 supporting this album was the first concert I went to, and many of the songs on that album are fun, but I would hardly call them a masterful group unless your idea of masterful are the glam rock bands of the '70s and '80s, but they are fun. Check your brain at the door, don't expect anything too challenging musically, just sit back and enjoy the ride. I mean who could forget such memorable songs as Don't Shoot Shotgun, Pour Some Sugar On Me, and Excitable? On the other hand, for me it serves as pure mental fiber and usually gets my mental juices flowing. Sure, it may be killing off a quarter of my brain cells in one shot, but it works! However, like so many other big guns, I try to keep it in reserve. Using it too much could result in an unwanted addiction and it could stop working altogether. At any rate, I managed to get 2,000 words onto the page for the day, which is what I was hoping for.

Four thousand words left until the finish line. Almost there! I should hit the mark and get everything turned in tomorrow.

Almost Done

2008-03-15T02:44:00.000-07:00

I'm almost done with that True20 product, so it will soon be going off to editing and I'll just get to sit back and wait for it to be published. I've already hit my target word count and I have one chapter left, so I could really quit now if I was so inclined. Regardless, it's good to be almost done and on schedule. I do have a little more monkeying left to do with the rules mechanics, but those are so close to being done now.

Tomorrow night (actually, I guess it would be tonight, given the late hour) we'll be playtesting a bunch of stuff. I'm definitely looking forward to it and hoping that the playtest won't prompt a total rewrite. ;)

Back to the Grind

2008-03-10T02:28:00.000-07:00

After working for two weeks straight on my True20 project I took a much needed break this weekend. All I really did was mull around on the internet a bit, watch some TV, and then take the family for a drive on Sunday. In other words, took it easy. Now its time to get back to work and get the last third of this project written. I think I can probably have it by the 20th. I'll check back on the 20th and report my progress.

Filling the Pipeline

2008-03-07T02:09:00.000-08:00

Working as a writer is all about filling the pipeline.

It's very rare that I take on more than one project at a time. I'm not saying that its impossible to work on more than one thing at once, but it definitely helps to do a good job if there's only one thing occupying your attention at one time. That means that the best way to do things is to continually look for more work, and then block out time to spend on those projects. Freelancers frequently face one of two problems. The first problem is that you don't have enough work to fill all the holes in your schedule. The second problem is that you have enough projects but you underestimate the amount of time it will take on another project, and that throws your whole schedule into chaos.

I've faced both problems in the past. In one case real life kept throwing me a bunch of curve balls, and on top of that I had projects do. It wasn't my finest hour as a writer, but what can you do? You can't make yourself less burned out, nor can you create time where there is none. All you can really do is hope that the guy you're writing for is a patient and forgiving person.

The other problem is the one facing me right now. I had cleared my schedule entirely, and I had intended to keep it that way for a good long time. I had intended to get a nice normal job and simply enjoy gaming again. No deadline stress, no getting burned out on the subject matter, just enjoying the hobby again. That all changed when I lost my last job due to some stupid political BS that had nothing to do with me. So I've finally decided to play to my strengths and go full time with my writing, and most people who know me think that's a good thing.

The problem I'm currently running into is keeping busy. I'm currently working on a 60,000 word project, and I'm about 2/3 of the way done with it. I'm hoping to be done with it by the end of the month, but I'm taking it on faith that there will be more projects lined up after that. Right now there's nothing definite. Most of the major publishers are in a holding pattern due to the release of 4th edition D&D. Many are unsure whether they'll pay the $5K to get an early start on compatible material, some aren't sure whether they'll make the switch at all, and I think that a lot of them are just waiting to see what the others will do. The end result of this is that there aren't very many freelance gigs to go around at the moment. This is not the best time to be trying to fill the pipeline. I'd get something going with WotC, but they aren't showing the 4th edition rules to anyone who doesn't already have them, which means that it will be June before I can start on anything new for them.

So one thing I have going at the moment is that the company that is publishing the True20 product I'm currently working on thinks they can keep me going for a while. They think I do good work, they enjoy working with me, and the nice thing about True20 is that it won't be going through an edition change anytime soon. So that's one thing I can sort of count on. I'm not going to lie and say that they pay as well as WotC, but they're good people and I enjoy working for them.

Another thing I might have going is a novel, but this is a big maybe. Back in November of last year I started a novel because it was National Novel Writing Month. I didn't make it to the 50,000 word goal, but I did get over 20,000 words. More importantly, I think its a good story and I also think its publishable. I recently contacted a novel publisher about publishing with them, and the vibe I got from their email was that they were interested, so send the manuscript for what I have. That has now been sent, so now I just wait to see whether they like it or not and want to see the rest. This is my first real attempt to get a novel published, so I'm hoping for the best but preparing for the worst. The one thing I have going for me that should keep me out of the slush pile is that I have done a lot of writing for WotC.

So right now I'm faced with the daunting task of re-breaking into the writing profession. I suppose this is a pretty minor complaint when you stop to consider that I didn't get paid for any of my work for the first two years I was doing game design. Breaking in to the industry isn't the easiest thing in the world to do, but as my friend Eric Cagle said, once you're in, you're in.... unless you really do something to f*** it up.

More on Gygax's Passing

2008-03-05T00:59:00.000-08:00

I have to admit that I found myself tearing up several times today, especially when reading through the tributes to him on various messageboards. It was hard to stay seated at my desk and continue pounding out the product I'm currently working on, knowing that the man who made this possible is no more. Tonight I took a walk as I typically do a couple times a week. I like to go through the neighborhoods where I grew up, circle around the highschool and all the sports fields surrounding it, and then go back to my house. Tonight was a clear windless night with crisp cold air and bright stars above. As I went, it occurred to me how lucky I was to be alive to savor this walk. A human life is the blink of an eye to the universe, but if you add up all of the time from all of the lives Gary Gygax positively affected, it is no mere blink of an eye, but millions of years. The length of time it took for life to crawl up out of the oceans and transform into human beings. Maybe longer....

As I saw the familiar sites of my childhood, I was reminded how large a role D&D played in my young life and how that was all possible because of this one man who contributed so much and was always there for his fans, all the way until the end. On the way back around the highschool I saw something unusual. Deer! Two of them -- one of which was not fifty feet away. That had never happened before. I returned home, sat down, neared my daily wordcount goal, read some more memorials, and quietly thanked Gary for this wonderful living he made possible. And then I reminded myself again how lucky I am to be alive and wished that this great man could be the same.

Thank you Gary, for everything. Thank you. With luck we'll meet one day, but hopefully not for many, many years to come.

Gary Gygax Has Passed

2008-03-04T10:08:00.000-08:00

It saddens me to report that the father of the roleplaying game industry, Gary Gygax, has passed away. His contributions have changed millions of lives including mine, and he will be sorely missed.

News From Me

2008-03-04T09:27:00.000-08:00

Hey all,

It's been a few months since I came out strongly in favor of True20 as the premier source for Modern and Future games. I've obviously done design work for Wizards of the Coast, I'm a former employee of theirs, and by all rights I should come out strongly in favor of the D20 Modern game. Modern isn't a bad game, I've written a book for it, however, I find the simple act of creating a character for the system tedious at best. I also think that when we start talking about things like firearms and energy weapons, hit points aren't really the best measurement of how your character is doing. In these games, it isn't like D&D where you're some guy encased in steel, letting your armor take the brunt of the blows that connect with you. I think Hit Points are reasonably believable in a fantasy setting, but when we're talking about a firearm aimed at your skull, frankly, a real person's chance of survival will have more to do with their luck and a measure of their toughness. True20 supports this style of play, and better yet, character creation is not overly complicated.

So to get to the point, I've been out of game design for about a year and a half now. The reason is simply that real life demands were severely cutting into the amount of time I had for game design. That is no longer the case, I've decided to make the transition to full time writer, and my time as a writer is going to be about evenly split between fiction and game design.

More to the point, as I said before, I've written books for D&D, I've written a book and some web enhancements for D20 Modern, but the one thing that I've never had the opportunity to do is work on a project of my own. I've always been more or less a hired gun. There's nothing wrong with that since that's how freelancers make their money in this business. At the end of the day though, it left me wondering if I've ever really contributed anything substantial to the hobby I love.

I am pleased to say that I have made arrangements with a publisher that's willing to take a risk on True20, and I'm working on something that I'm actually pretty excited about. I can't go into any real details right now, other than to say that its going to be a new setting book, it incorporates a lot of the elements of what I've always enjoyed or thought was cool about the genre for about as long as I can remember, and it is very likely the start of a new product line that will be exclusively for the True20 rules. Be watching for an announcement soon. I'm pretty excited about this because not only is this an opportunity to bring my vision to this hobby, but its also giving me a chance to work with some great people whose work I have admired for a while now.

So to sum it up, I'm back in the gaming industry, I'm in all the way this time, and at least for the time being I'm hitching my wagon to the True20 rules.