Category: Writing
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Random Encounters: Steampunk Paris
I'm starting a new feature of the 'blog this week: your Weekly Random Encounters. Each week I'm going to post a new random encounter table for a particular setting. Use these for roleplaying games, story prompts, or as a kind of I Ching to predict your week. I'm also appending the Situation generator to each…
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We Have A Situation Here
Most roleplaying games display a curious paradox. The player-characters, the ones controlled by the players, are literally the only people in the game setting with free will, yet they tend to show a crippling lack of agency. Player-characters are forever getting hired by bossy patrons, handed orders by their commanders, or being assigned quests by…
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The Climax of That Movie
What is the climactic moment of the movie Star Wars? Is it the point where the Death Star explodes just as it's about to vaporize the Rebel base? Is it a couple of minutes earlier, when Han Solo swoops in to knock Darth Vader into deep space so that Luke can fire the torpedoes which…
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Book Review: Gravity’s Rainbow
For years people have been recommending Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow. So, when I saw a copy on sale at the bookstore a few months ago, I decided to pick it up and see what all the fuss is about. I was prepared to like this book a lot. It's about a bunch of…
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Battle on the Tabletop!
Combat in roleplaying games has a lot of variation, but most game systems break it up into two main components: how hard it is to hit someone, and how much damage that person can withstand. So in Dungeons & Dragons, everything has an Armor Class, which determines what one must roll in order to score…
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Book Review: Revenger
It's sometimes very difficult to tell the difference between a genius and a crackpot. Both can be geeky, eccentric, abrasive, or just plain annoying. There is, however, one foolproof "tell" for the crackpot: they don't share ideas. If someone comes up to me at a convention or a book signing and starts going on about…
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Convention Report: Albacon 2017
(". . . Featuring ME!") I drove west through sleet, rain, and fog — but no snow, which was a huge relief as I was in a car without snow tires — to Albany, which looks as if someone decided to drop the 1960s capital city of a large post-colonial nation into the middle of…
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Albacon 2017, Featuring ME!
On Friday and Saturday, March 31-April 1 I'll be a guest at Albacon 2017, the long-running convention in New York's capital city. There's a really impressive lineup of people attending: Charles E. Gannon, Stephen Hickman, Lawrence M. Schoen, Ken Altabef, Ken Burnside, Debra Doyle, Jim MacDonald, Chuck Rothman, Ryk E. Spoor, Ian Randall Strock, and…
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Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 8 (whew!)
Having finished the story several chapters earlier, Mr. Baum piles anticlimax on anticlimax by cutting away from the adventurers in the Nome Kingdom to the magical fairyland of Oz, where Ozma has been watching the whole thing on her Magic Picture. I have to say Ozma is a little uncomfortably voyeuristic here. It's one thing…
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Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 3
Chapter Seven begins with a nice bit of Baum's own particular fairy mythology. The Rain King gets too much water in his basin and it spills over, causing rain on Earth. Then the Rainbow arrives, and the Rainbow's Daughters dance on the bow, daring each other to touch the ground. And — as happens so…
The Cambias Digression 