Nerd Level Up

After a good many years of reading one chapter at a time, here and there between other books, and really taking the time to saver them, earlier this year I have finished all twelve volumes of the History of Middle Earth series. This is a collection of most of J.R.R. Tolkien’s previously unpublished manuscripts which relate to Middle Earth, each with detailed notes from his son, literary executor, and fellow Anglo-Saxon professor; Christopher Tolkien. The books were, for me at least, almost always enjoyable to read. Not only do they contain more, or alternate versions of, stories about Hobbits, Elves, “Atlantis” and even tweed-wearing professors, they are full of the younger Tolkien’s personal reflections. He remembers when and where the family moved to align the dates of scraps of material written on the backs of envelopes. He recounts his trials puzzling out his father’s handwriting in decades-old notebooks. He even admits to mistakes he made in assembling The Silmarillion for publication in the 1970s. This is all value added. I get the sense, though he never admits it in the text, this was an important project for Christopher Tolkien precisely because, in a way, he got to go back and live with his father again in such a personal way.

I’d like to say everything was amazing, but it wasn’t. How could it be? A bunch of the material is incomplete or rejected or deemed to not fit into what had already gone before. Even so, there’s a lot I liked. Here are the bottom five of my top ten materials from all twelve volumes.

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VIII: The War of the Ring, Part Three: Minas Tirith, XII: The Last Debate

Volumes VI, VII, VIII and part of IX contain the draft versions of The Lord of the Rings. I do like reading the early versions of the tale where Bilbo’s cousin Bingo meets Trotter, a very well-travelled hobbit, in Bree. Mostly, the draft texts are a curiosity, but some contain interesting details which ended up getting cut. At one stage of writing, there was a scene after the Battle of Pelennore Fields where Gimli, Legolas, Merry and Pippin catch each other up on what happened on their different roads. The story about the Paths of Dead was later moved to its final place in the chapter The Passing of the Grey Company and was shaved down in the process. In the draft version of the chapter, Gimli tells, very briefly, about how they found the body of Baldor son of Brego, one of the early kings of Rohan along the way. He died beside a door he couldn’t open. There isn’t much more said, but Gimli calls it a sight he cannot forget. I feel the same way. For some reason, there’s a deep tragedy in the idea of this person lost in the dark and unable to open a door. Where does the door even lead? Who else was with him? Why did he want to enter the Paths in the first place? So many questions spiral out from these few lines and no answers are given. We are left to fill in the details. It’s classic spooky storytelling. Let the reader think of something, it’ll be worse than whatever the writer could says. There are a lot of moments like this in Tolkien generally, but even more so in the unfinished and draft versions. I think it is where Tolkien is at his best, giving us just enough to feel like there is a bigger world here. It’s the illusion of other vistas behind the vistas.

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X: Morgoth’s Ring, Part Four, Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth

Most of the material in volumes IX, X and XI is from after LotR was written when Tolkien returned to the stories of the First Age. There is an early period before LotR was actually published when he still hoped to have the First Age tales published with The Lord of Rings. There is also a later period after publication when he was still trying to bring all the tales of the First Age into a publishable form and also to make the world consistent with what was now canon in the published text. For example, he tried to re-write the creation myth to account for modern astronomy which, he felt, demanded a round earth from the beginning of the story, rather then a flat world later made round. He also wrote an essay trying to describe, for himself at least, how the Elves actually died and if Glorfindel of Rivendell really could be Glorfindel of Gondolin.

From this same later period comes Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, which translates to The Debate of Finrod and Andreth. This work is set up as a discussion between the Noldo King Finrod Felagund and Andreth, a Wise-woman of the human House of Bëor. She was the great aunt of Beren One-hand. They discuss the different ways they, as the two kinds of Children of Illuvatar, live and die. Athrabeth is, first of all, a very different view of what happened in the First Age – the other tales are mostly heroic tales of battles, magic and daring do. It’s refreshing, in a holistic, medieval way, to think the same guy who died frighting a werewolf in a pit for dude bro honor also had this reasoned discussion with another mature scholar. The Noldor are always supposed to be the “wise” elves as well as the heroic ones, so it’s nice to have a dialogue of that sharing of wisdom.

Aside from being a cool thing to add to the canon, I find Athrabeth fascinating because it puts ideas Tolkien had written about elvish life cycles in other places into the mouth of an elf. Finrod tells Andreth about hröar and fëa, which roughly mean Body and Spirit. These terms, and the concepts Finrod talks about, don’t really show up elsewhere. Similarly, Andreth tells him lore which shows up nowhere else. In ancient times humans met and fell under the power of a horrible being she has come to understand was Morgoth (Sauron’s boss and the original Dark Lord, for those who don’t know). This is, to me, more of Tolkien putting his Catholic faith into his fiction.

What I found so interesting about it, however, is Andreth presents this information as a great shame and something she can barely discuss. Since it shows up no where else, is it really such an important idea for Tolkien that his fantasy humans also had a -capital F- Fall? I get the feeling from reading the Athrabeth, as well as what Tolkien wrote to friends in his letters, that is was an important part of his thinking, at least in later years. His was retelling Christian theology and so a Fall, a period of tension between good and evil, a final battle, and the ultimate removal of humans from the created world are all there; just but recast in fantasy terms. It’s not always so clear when Samwise is reciting Bilbo’s silly song about trolls, but it’s very clear in some other these other works what Tolkien was doing.

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V: The Lost Road and Other Writings, Part One: The Fall of Númenor and The Lost Road, III: The Lost Road

Tolkien was haunted by a tale he could never rightly tell. He tired several times and in different ways to tell the story of the fall of Númenor. Aragorn is descended from the Númenorians and some of his family history is told in The Lord of the Rings. There is the annalistic list Tolkien prepared of the rulers of Númenor for inclusion in the Appendices to LotR. Then, there is The Lost Road. Legend says Tolkien and his writing buddy, C. S. Lewis, challenged each other to write a tale of travel. Lewis was to write of “travel in space” and he produced the novel Out of the Silent Planet, and went on to expand it into a trilogy. Tolkien was to write of “travel in time” and he began to write The Lost Road, which progressed no further than a first draft of sketches and some connected poetry. Like so many of his other abandoned stories, the parts of The Lost Road which exist hint at a powerful finished work about family legacy and human tragedy writ over thousands of years.

In brief, The Lost Road begins in the modern era with a son and father beside the ocean. The son feels a strange pull to go to sea, almost like it is a memory of the past. The father admits he felt it too as a young man. This scene repeats again and again, each time going deeper into history. According to the story, fathers and sons have always stood on the beaches of England, looked out over the Atlantic, and thought they really belonged “out there somewhere.” This leads all the way back in time to Tolkien’s Second Age of the Sun when humans really did live on a huge island, Númenor, in the middle of The Great Sea. Then the tale begins to tell of the beginning of the end of Númenor’s age of bliss and the political machinations and betrayals which led to its destruction by the gods.

I like most of the ideas The Lost Road plays around with. I actually like the sentimentality of using generations of father-son conversations to bring the reader into the story. Tolkien was someone who loved his children very much. Many of his stories emerged from ones he told his children and his letters to his son while his son was in uniform during the Second World War positively gush with affection and worry. There is not so much familial love on display in his major published works, but it was clearly part of who he was. I like seeing him write these intimate scenes for this story. I enjoy that the idea of “racial memory” or “generational longing” is how a fantasy writer and linguist would tell a story of “time travel.” He certainly wouldn’t write about a time machine, as any Tolkien fan should know. I have experienced false nostalgia from reading particularly moving descriptions of the past, but the longing to be someplace you have never been is not something I have felt spontaneously. It seems Tolkien himself did feel that way and he tried to work through those feelings, in part, with this story. He explored this in more depth in another abandoned story I will discuss later in this countdown.

Should I mention how the whole Númenor is remembered as Atlantis aspect of the story and the Númenorians being a “blessed” and “better sort” of people is problematic? Maybe I should.

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XI: The War of the Jewels, Part Three: The Wanderings of Húrin and Other Writings Not Forming Part of the Quenta Silmarillion, I: The Wanderings of Húrin

This is a prime example of an unnecessary text. I’m sure that’s why material from it was not incorporated into The Silmarillion. It’s a remarkably complete text, though, so that suggests it was important to Tolkien. Or it could be he just got a wild hare to write it and dashed it off all at once.

Húrin was a human warrior, one of the lords of the Edain, who allied with the Elves against Morgoth. He was also the father of Túrin and Niënor whom Morgoth cursed and whose downfall has a prominent place in The Silmarillion. The doom brought upon the brother and sister is technically Morgoth’s torment of Húrin whom he captured, chained to a seat on a fortress, and cursed with supernatural sight so he could watch the tragedy of his children’s lives unfold. Then, to rub salt in the wound, after his children were dead, Morgoth released Húrin and sent him to do what he willed. What he did, as told in The Wanderings of Húrin is go get revenge on the Folk of Brethil. Túrin had lived and fought for this forest-dwelling people for many years, but they would not assist him in his final battle with the dragon Glaurung. He essentially attempts to shame them for not being braver, but he doesn’t really want to inspire them, he wants to incite them to revolt against their hereditary lord. This he does and the fight effectively ruins Brethil and another stable land holding the line against Morgoth is ruined. It’s a tragedy in all respects. Húrin oversteps decency out of anger, the lord of Brethil oversteps decency in response out of fear, with the Folk of Brethil caught in the middle; genuinely remorseful they let Túrin be killed and genuinely torn about whom to follow.

This is a classic Tolkienesque conflict of ancient rights and personal motives. To me, the central scene is one in which Húrin speaks to a moot gathered at Doom-rock (it reminded me of the scene at a natural stone amphitheater early in Richard Adams’ Shardik, even though that was written later). This is where Húrin gives the speech which upsets the Brethil society. It is similar to Tolkien’s other “mental contest” scenes, such as Gandalf breaking Grima’s hold on Théoden or Aragorn talking to the Mouth. It also has something of Marc Antony speaking over Caesar’s body in Shakespeare. It’s very much about the power in words and working one’s will through words almost like magic.

It’s all well-developed, mature storytelling. Tolkien had it in him. He didn’t write many scenes like this, but he could write them. Wanderings is what’s good about Tolkien on display. Then again, it’s his weakness as a writer too, because this fully-realized story fragment doesn’t connect to much of anything. It’s way too detailed to be included in the annals of the First Age, but it’s not given a proper beginning or ending, so it can’t be called a proper short story. It’s a very striking couple chapters orphaned from an novel which was never written.

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II: The Book of Lost Tales Part 2, Part One: The Tale of Tinúviel

The first two volumes of the History of Middle Earth, unsurprisingly, contain the earliest versions of what eventually became The Silmarillion, begun while Tolkien was convalescing from a bout of flu during the First World War. In 1917 he first wrote the story which eventually developed into a touchstone for his life: The Tale of Lúthien and Beren.

What amazes me most about all the Lost Tales versions of the stories is how similar they are, in broad strokes, from the first to the tales as later written. At the same time, the details and the tone of the stories are so different, they are hardly the same stories at all. The Tale of Tinúviel is emblematic. In short, Beren wishes to win Tinúviel’s hand from her stern father Tinwë and so they go off together, make friends with a great hound named Huan, fight an evil prince, take on Melko himself to claim a Silmaril only to have Beren’s hand bitten off by a giant wolf named Karkaras, which Beren and Tinwë eventually slay to recover the jewel. These fundamentals of the story did not change over 60 years of development! It’s remarkable. These stories arose almost fully formed from some deep, very personal place, it seems, and just stuck around with Tolkien forever.

But the tone is so different. Firstly, the language is full of constructions to sound “old timey” like “surely, my thane” and “then did she lave her hand.” Then Tinúviel’s magic is totally fairy tale. She sings a song of all the longest and tallest things to make her hair grow long enough so she can weave it into a rope to escape from the tree top house where she was being kept. Lastly, while telling the story is part of the point, Tolkien can’t help but make it something of a just so story along the way. The tale contains the line, “Wherefore it is that there is hatred between the Elves and all cats even now.” Yes, that evil prince I mentioned is a large black cat called Tevildo Prince of Cats and he menaces first Beren (by making him hunt rat-sized mice) and then Tinúviel. That’s where Huan, the great hound, comes in and he chases Tevildo off. If this part of the story sounds familiar too, it’s because through various mutations, Tevildo eventually becomes Sauron who, in the form of a werewolf, fights with Huan and loses.

I love this version of the story. It’s so goofy and charming, which was clearly what Tolkien was originally going for. The valor, dignity, and complex relationships between fate and heroism he later explored with the same First Age stories just isn’t here. These are “simply” new fairy stories in the vein of the ones Tolkien had read as a child.

I’ve got five more to talk about next time!

Irons in the Fire

I am in the thick of putting the Never Going Home manuscript to rights. Almost all of the writing is in, but the wildly different styles of the authors have to be reconciled. This is a big job and I’m really not sure how I’m going to get it done by the date we’ve set for ourselves. I see I’ve got all this work to do, but I also see my inbox full of questions from other writers who are doing adventures for an adventure collection. There are all sort of skill levels represented in this group of 31 writers as well as different levels of experience with role playing games and with the First World War. I’ve found it hard to keep them all on track and explain the game mechanics over and over and still have the energy to sit down and work on my own word counts. It’s just another aspect of how NGH is bigger than we ever expected. My role as creative director is really stretching me when there are so many places my attention is being drawn. Learning. We are still learning how to do this.

Never Going Home is certainly the biggest iron in my fire pit, but I also have a few more in there. Since Wet Ink Games has created a new system for NGH, we feel we can use it to make more small to medium-sized games. We are developing a few at the same time, but the one off to the fastest start I will be called Project Equus. We have someone whom we have worked with before who had a really good handle on the +One system. We’ve basically given this person a free hand to create a game and they are off and running. My involvement should be slight, but it’s still something I have to keep an eye on.

We have also started to move forward on a large project I am going to call Project Nimbus. It will very likely be in development for several years and will take a lot of work – mostly in the world building and in hemming and hawing to get the tone absolutely right. Aiming from the start to make a “prestige” product is not something I have done before, but with the success of NGH and the working methods we are trying, I think we will be ready to make a great finished product by the time we have all the contents written.

Lots to do. Better get to it.

Strife Liberated!

You will know already if you were a backer of the project, but Wild Skies: Liberating Strife is done and set out to everybody. It’s available at fine retailers everywhere and has even been reviewed. It’s March and I feel like I have not come up for air since I started putting the Liberating Strife manuscript together in August of last year. Well, I am taking this moment to breathe. *three deep breaths*

When we chose to set the first Wild Skies book in Europe we always knew “The America Book” was going to be the next one we did. Being two “Yanks” ourselves, it only made sense. We took the same assumptions about the period and the technology level we want for the Wild Skies world and adjusted everything to an America context. What if everything Nikola Tesla said he could make actually got made? What if there was no “trust busting” and bigger and bigger companies unified into one mega-corporation? What if American politics of the period was stanch isolationism backed by the highest level of tech in the world – all leased to the army and air navy by said mega-corporation? Well, that’s the America we present in Liberating Strife.

That was what Brandon and I brought to the table. This was bigger than our previous project with two additional writers brought on. To over-simplify their contributions, John Kennedy was our “company and dissidents” specialist and Josh Sinsapaugh was our “culture and counter-culture” expert. The depth of research those two went to and the results they produced fill me with joy. Instead of just giving players a bunch of American tech and some American animals, this book paints an almost complete picture of the United States of American in this alternate reality diesel punk time line. Corporate structure of the United Dennington Trust; it’s there. Boardroom politics at the highest levels; covered. The popular and underground music scenes; explained. Traveling the roadways and airways; yes. All the countries of North America; have their own section. This is a 130 page book and it’s page 67 before you get to anything with game statistics; before that it’s all world information. Considering three of the four main writers grew up with Palladium’s Rifts* Wold Books, maybe it’s not a surprise.

The book also has a lot of great art in it. Showcasing art is another thing we get from the game books which are our roots. The cover by Chuck Walton and Eduardo Domínguez is another great one. Inside, in addition to another slate of great pieces from Mike Mumah of animal people doing all the things (shout out to my favorite, the Jazz Age party on page 87) and Aspen Aten doing another map for us and Brian Manning’s work on the weapons and vehicles, we have 30s-looking national parks posters from Steven Wu and action scenes by Steven Cummings. All together Wild Skies: Liberating Strife doesn’t just give you some stuff from America, it lets you play Wild Skies in America.

Case in point: In January I ran a game of Wild Skies using some adventure seeds we had sent to Kick Starter backers right after we funded and the pre-gen characters in the book. I was laying awake in bed the night before thinking about the game and trying to account for everything the players might want to do. I knew my game was full of people who had signed up specifically to play Wild Skies – I knew they would want to test the full potential of the game. As I lay there, I feel like I went through all the stages up to cosmic brain, because with all the material in the book flashing through my head and all the sessions I have run over the last few years I knew I could handle any situation which came up. If they wanted to go on a road trip, or try to take over a night club or ride the rails, or become air pirates, or stay in the work camp and investigate the original mystery, I could run that. When it came to it the next day, I could indeed run it and we had a great time. People like a game I helped create! It’s an amazing feeling.

Wild Skies: Liberating Strife is Wet Ink Games product number WIG-108, which means there are 9 Wild Skies products out there now. I haven’t talked about them all here so be sure to check them all out on DriveThruRPG.

The Books I Read in 2018

I tend to read between 40 to 50 books a year. I know this empirically, because since 2006 I have kept a record of every novel, comic book, role playing game rules book and non-fiction book I have read. I’ve reviewed some of them here, but I don’t think I’ve put my full list up before. It’s below. Before that, I want to say a brief word about my favorite five books of the year.

Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, 1941-1943
This is an art book with very little text. It is essentially the senior project of artists David Leventhal and Gerry Trudeau who were looking at how to make images do more narrative work than just illustrating a text. Leventhal has already reached his mature form with his soft focus photographs of toys which create images of the Eastern Front which seem real. Along with the text by Trudeau the book is, as it is titled, a graphic chronicle of that phase of the war. This was on my want-to-read list for a long time and I enjoyed the impression it created of seeing dramatic moments of history recreated. I have more thoughts about this one and some images in an earlier post.

Lacuna Part I. The Creation of the Mystery and the Girl from Blue City (Second Attempt)
I also previously talked about this role playing game by Jared A. Sorensen. I got to play this game for a second time at NerdLouvia earlier this month and two of my players were there specifically to play this odd dreamscape crime solving game. It remains unlike any other RPG I have ever read and I look forward to playing it again and getting better at bringing all the weirdness this game has to offer to the table.

Soldier of Sidon
This is the third book in what became a trilogy. I was wary of if because this book was written almost 20 years after the second book in the series. There is a little bit of disconnect in style, how could there not be after two decades? That said, it’s not much of a disconnect. I also may like this one the best of the three books. It’s more intimate and personal and I enjoyed that this year. I have long said Gene Wolfe is one of my favorite writers, largely because one of his early books immersed me in a way which has rarely happened to me. In this series, Latro is a Roman mercenary from when the Greeks were ascendant who, because of an injury, cannot make new long term memories – and also sees the gods. The text is Latro’s journal written day by day about whatever has just happened. It’s a great set-up for storytelling. This adventure follows Latro as he sails up the Nile. Since I wrote a NaNoWriMo about ancient Egypt a couple years back, I was fascinated to read all the fictional Egypt stuff. It also felt a bit like a self-indulgent closure for the character, but since I like Latro, and had just read two other books about him, I was happy to get this closer examination of this character. I recommend all three books in Wolfe’s Soldier series.

Pictures of the Pain
I’ve read a few books about the JFK assassination this year. This one is my favorite so far. It’s an attempt by Richard Trask, a professional archivist, to put every photograph and film strip into print. That in itself is fascinating, especially for the many photographs by the journalists who were in the presidential motorcade. Not only are their photographs objectively better than the famous amateur photos because their greater training and better equipment, they were also able to capture all the moments of the immediate aftermath of the assassination because they were right there with their cameras ready. More interesting than the photos for me, however, was Trask’s collection of the biographies of the photographers, details about their cameras and the state of the news industry at the time. Why was Zapruter filming that day? What kind of camera was Nix using? How does an image wire service work when it’s still the age of wet chemical film? Trask answers all these questions.

Rock Candy Mountain #1-8
I don’t read a ton of comics, but this series written and drawn by Kyle Starks with color by Chris Schweizer and design by Dylan Todd is the best one I have read this year. It is the story of a hobo who is searching for the fabled rock candy mountain, which is essentially hobo heaven. There’s a lot of fist fighting and a significant about of magic weirdness. It’s so engaging and thoroughly interesting – at least to me – I am nothing but pleased I read it. It’s just good comics.

For honorable mentions, I read several things I’ve been meaning to read for a long time; Frankenstein, Jim Henson's Tale of Sand, My Friend Dahmer, and old comics like Samurai Penguin, Cutey Bunny and Magnus Robot Fighter. I also completed all the Conan and Sherlock Holmes stories, which feels like something of an accomplishment. I also read a collection of Jon Ronson’s journalism called Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries which I enjoyed.

Books I Finished in 2018
-The Voice Out of the Whirlwind: The Book of Job - Ralph E Hone, ed.
-Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronical, 1941-1943 - David Leventhal & Gerry Trudeau
-Civilization and Its Discontents - Sigmund Freud
-Soldier of Arete - Gene Wolfe
-Stories of Soldiers and Civilians - Ambrose Bierce
-The Gospel of Wealth - Andrew Carnegie
-The Coldest City - Antony Johnston & Sam Hart
-House Made of Dawn - N Scott Momaday
-The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen - James Wallis [RPG]
-The Wood Beyond the World - William Morris [LibriVox]
-They Killed Our President: 63 Reasons to Believe There Was a Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK - Jessie Ventura [JFK]
-Unfamiliar Fishes - Sarah Vowell
-Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries - Jon Ronson
-Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth - Reza Aslan
-Dead Lands: Reloaded Player's Guide: Explorer's Edition - Shane Lacy Hensley & BD Flory [RPG]
-Lacuna Part I. The Creation of the Mystery and the Girl from Blue City (Second Attempt) - Jared A Sorensen [RPG]
-The Bible
-Wonder Woman: The Golden Age Omnibus Volume 1 - William Moulton Marston, HG Peter, et. al.
-Dead Lands: Reloaded Marshal's Handbook: Explorer's Edition - Shane Lacy Hensley [RPG]
-Samurai Penguin #1-7 - Dan Vado, et. al.
-This Side of Paradise - F Scott Fitzgerald
-Imperial Earth - Arthur C Clarke
-Russ Manning's Magnus, Robot Fighter, Volume 3 - Russ Manning, et. al.
-Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot - Bill O'Reilly & Martin Dugard [JFK]
-The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle -Army Surplus Komikz Featuring Cutey Bunny #1-2 - Joshua Quagmire
-Jim Henson's Tale of Sand - Jim Henson & Jerry Juhl as realized by Ramón Pérez
-Dance Night - Dawn Powell
-Soldier of Sidon - Gene Wolfe
-The Secret History of Wonder Woman - Jill Lepore
-The Book of Mormon
-Prometheus: Fire and Stone - Omega - Kelly Sue DeConnick & Agustin Alessio
-Twelve Ordinary Men - John MacArthur
-American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond - E Howard Hunt [JFK]
-The Postman Always Rings Twice - James M Cain
-They Shoot Horses, Don't They? - Horace McCoy
-The Bloody Crown of Conan - Robert E Howard
-The Satanic Bible - Anton LaVey
-Thieves Like Us - Edward Anderson
-11/22/63 - Stephen King [JFK]
-Native Drums #1-6 - Chuck Paschall & Vince Riley
-Revolutionaries: Join, or Die [RPG]
-Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
-"The Shadow of the Vulture" - Robert E Howard
-My Friend Dahmer - Derf Backderf
-The Last Battle - CS Lewis
-The American Revolution: First-Person Accounts by the Men Who Shaped Our Nation - TJ Stiles, ed.
-Pictures of the Pain - Richard Trask [JFK]
-The Letters of JRR Tolkien - Humphery Carpenter, ed.
-The Evolution of Physics - Albert Einstein & Leopold Infeld
-The Island of Doctor Moreau - HG Wells
-Drawings from the Gulag - Danzig Baldaev
-The Screwtape Letters - CS Lewis
-Copernicus Jones: Robot Detective #1-8 - Matt D Wilson, Kevin Warren, et. al.
-Dracula the Unconquered #1-4 - Chris Simms, Steve Downer & Josh Krach
-Yo Mate a Kennedy - Manuel Vázquez Montalbán [JFK]
-Rock Candy Mountain #1-8 – Kyle Starks, Chris Schweizer & Dylan Todd

Never Going Home Gets Going

It has been a very busy month here in “the museum”. The campaign for Never Going Home concluded on 3 December after a very successful run. This is by far the largest Kickstarter we have ever run and the results are actually a little scary. When we had under 200 backers for Liberating Strife back in April, I felt gently encouraged. With NGH getting over 800 backers I feel like we’ve suddenly catapulted to a new level of notoriety. I feel pressure to do everything right like I’ve never felt it before. Before it was just self-imposed perfectionism. Now, I have to impress a lot of strangers, many of whom have more experience with games and with Kickstarter than I do. This project isn’t on “easy mode” anymore. Not that I’m complaining. Everything I’m talking about is a good problem to have. I spent the next week after getting everything ready to actually run Never Going Home at a local nerd-centric event called Nerdlouvia. It’s put on my Nerd Louisville and this was probably the biggest of the three years I’ve been going. The photo below captures me down in the lower right corner waiting for my game to start.

When it did start, Never Going Home works as expected! Since it was was the first time all the pieces of the game were tested at once, there were a few hiccoughs, but for the most part it’s a working game. There are some improvements to make, which became obvious as soon as I had players asking questions and wanting to do things. Those ideas will have to be worked in and some other things tried. I’ll have to test it all out before too long. This book is slated to be done – at least with the writing – by the end of February. Wet Ink is in the middle of getting contracts with all our writers and planning who is writing what and what art we need. It’s going to be a big job. Our biggest yet. When will it feel like we’ve “arrived” as a company? I have no idea.

Armistice Day

Today marks 100 years since the end of fighting in the First World War. It is Armistice Day. For the last few years as each centenary of the events of the war has come, I have seeped myself in the history. It’s no surprise to me my creative life has in the last few years been dominated by echos of the Great War. While writing the Sovietski for Palladium Books I studied the October Revolution and the early days of the Soviet Union to get capture some cultural notes from that period. I was even more drawn into the Great War by working on Wild Skies, my first original game, which is set in an alternate timeline where the war didn’t come to the same relatively tidy end we know from history. Last year I summarized the events of the whole Russian Revolution and its place in the war as near-daily updates on FaceBook. My newest project, called Never Going Home is horror role playing set directly in the trenches. With so many of my creative output focused on this war and its aftermath, I have to acknowledge this day.

Especially this year, today is, for me, a solemn day for remembering the dead. I am staggered nearly to silence by the loss the war inflicted. The rough figure is 16 million people killed by the fighting; soldiers and civilians. With another 20 million soldiers wounded. That’s the war itself, not counting the Spanish Flu, the Russian Revolution, or the conflicts which simmered in the former Ottoman Empire into the 1920s. The numbers have a danger of becoming simply statistics. I find it more arresting to look at pictures of the graveyards which cover the former battlefields. Solemnly look with me.

What was the meaning of so much death? Famously, the war was supposed to “end all wars”, and that certainly hasn’t proven true in the last 100 years. How much more death have we seen then? Too much. Today, I am remembering all the dead. It’s very hard not to be cynical, but I want to celebrate the idea of peace the armistice of 1918 represents. We can stop fighting wars. We can move things to the negotiation table. We can agree not to kill anyone today. Peace is an idea worth working toward.

To be clear, I am not talking about shaking hands with people in my own country with different politics. That’s too easy. I am not saying there are not things like racial justice and clean water which are worth fighting for. There are! Voices must be raised, demonstrations staged, change demanded. I am talking today about questioning the need for weapons technology and political assumptions which lead to bombing villages from airplanes and building missiles capable of crossing oceans. I am affirming today, on Armistice Day, I want to live in a world without armed conflicts, proxy wars and national posturing in the form of military spending.

I know words matter. A call to memorialize all those killed by war is very different from a call to honor the sacrifice of soldiers. I will let others celebrate today as Veteran’s Day. Today I look beyond the need for military might to appreciate the possibilities of peace.

Overview: CAPERS by Craig Campbell

Another project I was involved with has reached print. CAPERS is “a super-powered game of gangsters in the Roaring Twenties.” The game first came to my attention almost a year ago when the creator released a preview version to IGDN members. I don’t tend to get too excited about super heroes, but with my head deeply enmeshed in the 1920s and the whole interwar period because of Wild Skies, I decided to see what someone else had done with that time period. All the Jazz Age stuff seemed pretty accurate. Good. Like AMP: Year One before it, I found CAPERS isn’t about super heroes in the comic book sense at all, but about super-powered people. I can get onboard with that. Then reading through the rules, I was fully convinced by the mechanisms. The game uses playing cards for resolution. I ran the sample adventure for my game group. I backed the project on Kickstarter. I met the creator at a convention; turns out he’s a great guy. To cement my involvement with the game, I ended up writing a small amount of content for the game. I even wrote my own adventure and ran it for a local open gaming event. CAPERS is a game that has convinced me to play along at every step. Now that the book is out, I want to talk about it.

The CAPERS book is 163 full-color pages packed with theme. Craig, (I’ll just go ahead and call the designer Craig because we’ve become friendly since we met in person) has done a great job to hit all the notes right to immerse players in that past age. The use of cards for resolution, the appearance of poker chips on the character sheets, Art Deco stylings throughout the book, and choice of a few key game terms like Moxie (a currency players expend to push situations in their favor), to a glossary of ‘20s slang all conspire to put players in the world of the setting. Put on some jazz music, play on a felt topped table and you are there. The book itself is well-printed and there are a ton of extras – don’t have any in hand myself yet, but CAPERS themed playing cards, Moxie cards, maps, GM screen, and adventures are all available. Lots of stuff for you if you like physical bits at your table.

I want to talk about the art quickly. It is all by Beth Varni. She has done a good job with the period look. Full color means all the art is digitally painted so it all pops on the page. Something I also appreciate is the choice to display counterfactual diversity. Not that there weren’t women and African Americans in the U.S. in the 1920s, just that they don’t show up in most of the images of the time. Varni’s art shows people of all sorts doing all sorts of things. Black casino owners, women with tommy guns, female Federal agents, Hispanic and Asian names and faces… It’s great to see this kind of inclusion. It isn’t just the art, either. Gender and ethnic diversity is built into all the NPCs. Well done, NerdBurger.

At the center of gameplay is a straightforward card-based mechanism. The Game Master sets a Target Score for whatever Checks players attempt (average is 8). The player then draws from their personal deck of standard playing cards trying to draw a card which meets or exceeds the TS. Jack-Ace serve as 11-14. Players may draw a number of cards equal to the applicable Trait. For example, if a character with 3 Agility wants to do a backflip (TS 10), they have three chances (called Card Count) to draw a card which is ten or higher, with the ability to stay at any time. A lot of nuance comes into the system around this core card draw system. Skills and spending Moxie add to Card Count, the suit of the card the player stays on can add a Boon or Complication, jokers are either very good or very bad, plus a few other things. In practice I have found a lot of tension comes in when a player is looking at a success with a Complication and wondering if they should draw again knowing they could just a likely draw a success with a Boon or end up with a total failure. It is a great system, which is both easy to learn and fast-playing at the table. I believe Craig even put the rule set out under a creative commons license as CAPERS CORE, so it’s out there for anyone to use.

The other things in the game are a primer on 1920s culture and bootlegging gangs, a section of powers (which work the same as other Checks) with 25 minor and 15 major powers which includes Cold Beam, Flight, Goo Generation, Probability Manipulation, Super Strength and Weather Manipulation, extensive setting information for gangster hot spots like Atlantic City, Chicago and New York City; with ten other cities profiled as well (my contribution was to write four of these cities, including my current hometown of Louisville, KY), some ideas for playing in alternate worlds like Capek’s Earth, the Flipside and Omega Earth, plus extensive indexes so you can find just about whatever you are looking for. It’s a great book, very well-produced, and it’s a great game. I recommend it to anyone who likes either the 1920s or super-powers and to anyone looking for a lighter to middle-weight game (similar to Savage Worlds in complexity) which offers a pleasing alternative to dice-based systems.

If CAPERS doesn’t seem like your thing, NerdBurger is raising funds now for a GM-less horror-comedy game called Die Laughing in which players create a very bad and very deadly horror movie. Check that out too.