Monthly Archives: December 2009

Three Weird Selections

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Dice for various games, especially for rolepla...

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I have a lot of strange things on my hard drive. In the process of moving things over from my modestly-large drive on my big laptop to my surprisingly-larger hard drive on my netbook, I’ve been going through some of the more unusual selections (with a healthy dose of "where the hell did I get this from?"). I decided to start another irregular feature on here called "Shit On My Hard Drive" so I can start sharing them with you. (In this case, "shit" means "hobby game of some sort," but it might be anything else I find weird on my computer — songs, video games, software, whatever.)

Here are three RPG selections on my hard drive right now that are… a bit odd.

Joe in Ten Persons: I found this via the Free RPG Blog. It’s a game about a guy named Joe who meets a man named Keeton who allows him to interact with a variety of alternate versions of himself who are all obsessed with affecting the decision of one particular Joe, Joe Prime. SImple, right? It’s a one-shot shared-narration competitive RPG with a clear winner and a weird kind of board game vibe featuring stick figures.

Yeah, there’s no easy way to describe it. But it’s worth at least a glance. And it’s free.

Download it.

Read a review.

The Agency: Take the height of 60s super-spies. Stir in a healthy portion of monster stomping, and you get The Agency. It has a lot of the fun of a game like Bureau 13, but with a system that focuses on high action and camp (with some interesting incentives to fail entertainingly). It was originally designed for the No Press Anthology, but it’s now released by the author for free.

Download it.

Read a review of an earlier version.

Super Console: Tired of playing fantasy RPGs? Now you can play a video game RPG… as a tabletop RPG… which is primarily focused on fantasy. Well, you know what I mean. This straddles the line between "faithful reproduction" and "shameless parody," but more than once it’s inspired me to run a game where mages and ninjas level up multiple times a session and buy equipment from identical-looking stores while fighting in two opposing rows. There’s nothing to handle situations outside of combat, but given the kinds of games this is emulating, that’s not surprising. It’s a buck on DriveThruRPG, but you can find free (legal) copies on the net if you dig around a bit.

Buy it.

Read a review.

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Holiday Swag

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A quick note to detail the cool presents I got for my birthday/Christmas this year.

Birthday


Christmas

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Sherlock Holmes (2009)

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Sidney Paget: Sherlock Holmes

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Note: As people comment here and in other places, I plan to update this with footnotes providing citations for various points (for and against). Because I love playing with Sherlockian research, even if I’m not that awesome at it.

To preface this, I have been a Sherlock Holmes fan for twenty-five years, since my father gave me a water-stained and dog-eared copy of the "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," containing the first twelve stories of the canon. I have read everything by Doyle, probably read an additional two dozen pastiches, listened to close to a hundred audiobook and radio versions, and watched a variety of television and movie renditions of the master detective. While I by no means consider myself a Sherlockian scholar, Holmes is certainly my first and most persistent fandom.

It has been with equal parts excitement and trepidation that I’ve been awaiting the Guy Ritchie vision of Sherlock Holmes. I planned to see it at a midnight showing on my birthday (because that would have just been awesome), but it turns out that the nearest theater to where we were in Tennessee was well over an hour away. So I waited until Sunday, when we got back. I had a terrible cold, and didn’t want to go out — until David asked if I wanted to go see the Sherlock Holmes movie.

Because that’s different, you see.

Interestingly (and to a great extent, flatteringly), a number of my friends have been waiting on my opinion of the film before going to see it themselves. They know of my obsession fanaticism interest in all versions of Holmes, and since I gave my brief review on Twitter, a number of people have contacted me asking for a more detailed review.

If, however, you just want the short version, here it is: I thought it was a very fun and enjoyable update to Sherlock Holmes that keeps to the core of the canon, although casual audiences might not realize that.

More detailed thoughts (minor spoilers)

Don’t just murder your darlings — cut them in half

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Eddie Murphy in Hollywood Walk of Fame

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Before I start my latest installment of “Head to Keyboard,” I want to tell you a quick story.

A Quick Story

A while back, I made some comments on Facebook and Twitter agreeing with a writer who doesn’t want people to give him their manuscripts to critique. I got some pushback from a couple of my peers saying that they would rather give advice to struggling writers, as a way of paying it forward. I was resistant to this, and I hid behind the old chestnut that there really isn’t anything new to say on the subject of writing advice, especially since just about any “rule” I could lay down can be broken to great success.[1]

After a lot of reflection, the real reason is that I didn’t really consider myself all that advanced of a writer that I could dole out advice with any authority. It wasn’t that I thought I wasn’t good, but rather that I wasn’t good enough to have my advice be actually useful. In reading Chuck Wendig‘s “Advice You Should Probably Ignore“ posts, I realized that sharing my own experiences as a writer could be beneficial in its own way, in much the same way as the early episodes of Mur Lafferty’s “I Should Be Writing.” I’ve been doing a lot of that through my episode post-mortems on Whitechapel, but I’ll try to do more generalized revelations here.

For the children, you understand.

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Crazy Busy

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I didn’t realize how crazy busy I have been and will be, but I just looked at my calendar and noticed it was full of stars activities.

Thursday night was the office D&D game. Friday through Sunday was a special LARP event I had been organizing for several months. Tonight I have some time to do some writing. Tomorrow is our In A Wicked Age game. Wednesday is recording for Whitechapel. Thursday is D&D (last game before the holidays). Friday is the office holiday party. Saturday is another holiday party, followed by a Christmas concert featuring a friend of mine. Sunday is a baby shower. Monday is free again, before jury duty on Tuesday. Then things open up a bit before the Christmas break, where things are mostly dead. I may have to shuffle a few things around to get it all in.

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5 Ways To Get Your Pitch Read

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It’s another edition of "Head To Keyboard," my irregular column of writing advice. This time, Chuck Wendig has called me out. Specifically, he said this:

Eddy, I know you have thoughts on what makes a good pitch. C’mon. Share with the class?

He speaks, and I obey.

After two years of manning the White Wolf slush pile, I’ve gained a couple of ideas of what makes a good pitch over a bad pitch. Here are five of them.

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