Back and Forth on Creation is Burning.

Good heavens! November already – how the time flies. I beg you to forgive the unusual gap in my performance, and to please believe that the following has lingered in draft form for many a week. And thus, I begin:

Permit me to take this opportunity to winge about Exalted. This is not without purpose! I winge, dear reader, for Great Justice, and because it is a lead-in to today's commentary/rant.

I may have said (and if I have, I do beg your forgiveness) that Exalted was (and is) one of the best games out there. The sprawling, go-anywhere setting, the East-meets-West fusion, the juicy Campbellian archetypes of the titanomachia, of empires gone wrong...

But the system, frankly, sucks. And with the recent second edition, hard as it may be to believe, the system sucks worse. I know – I too thought new editions were made for the purposes of de-sucking an established work. The corebook is clean, I'll grant you that: but the surfeit of oddness (ranging from cut/paste errors in Charm structure) to what, to an outsider, resembles peenar-waving "LOLZ mah Xalts beter than urs" style power-creep makes the many sourcebooks a) bad investments and b) physically painful to read. The exception is the second edition Lunars book: you may take your old Lunars book and line birdcages with it, and it will probably be of slightly greater use.

So what to do about all this system-suckery? My hypothesis is this: if you take a great system (with a tightly-written yet somewhat run-of-the-mill setting) and inoculate it with a superb setting (where the system is, for my purposes, irretrievably broken) awesomeness will precipitate out on to the gaming table. Thus, "Creation is Burning," which will either imminentize the Eschaton or cause said awesomeness to crystallize out of solution, drifting down like manna to obscure our character sheets.

To that end, permit me to introduce Dr. Odie, to whom all credit is due for his command of Burning Wheel and Exalted: and whose laser-sharp focus and insights of crystalline precision drive the few and blurry thoughts I have about this system-conversion experiment. A draft of Creation is Burning made its way to him, and he responded with a thoughtful critique some several hundred words longer than the original document.

Rather than pour innumerable hours into an attempt to fix each Charm and balance it against the others through a thorough conversion -- an attempt which I suspect would be doomed to futility before it began -- my answer is to devise a system whereby one can reproduce the awesome might of the Exalted without bogging the (already very complex) Burning Wheel rules down with a 400-page book for each Exalt type. Obviously, creating such an approximation involves a certain degree of subjectivity; just as two games of Exalted from two different groups will almost certainly vary wildly on their scope and power level (Essence-5 Solars vs. Dragon Kings in Rathess), asking two different gaming groups "what makes Exalted, Exalted?" will yield vastly different responses. I disagree with the groups who use Wushu or similarly light rules for their Exalted conversions, leaving most if not all variations of Charm and technique to flavor text or simple narration; I desire my games to have more mechanical weight than mere ephemera. Yet it also seems that a Charm-to-Charm, 1:1 conversion of every mechanic in Exalted misses the point as well. If that were our intent, why not simply revise the Exalted rule and Charm set to a more balanced and pleasing version, and perhaps port over the BITs from Burning Wheel -- in effect, a conversion not of Exalted to Burning Wheel, but vice versa? While you're free to undertake such a Herculean task yourself, my interest lies in finding the middle ground between those two extremes.

An incredibly salient point: I admit to the geeky adrenaline-rush instinctive "convert every Exalted charm to Burning Wheel" initial effort, but the good Dr. Odie's near-Socratic dialogue put the brakes on that.

With Burning Wheel's strong focus on Beliefs and Instincts as player priorities, I really don't know that Exalted's Virtues are required. One Belief and Instinct devoted to each would surely be enough; if you want a Compassionate character, a Belief (that, as a bonus, ties into the story at hand!) and an Instinct like "Always help the helpless" would be more than enough to get you in trouble. Limit Break, though. Not sure how we'd want to do that. Not sure at all, actually. An obvious one is that every time you don't follow an Instinct (or maybe a Belief, as well), you rack up points toward Limit, but what does a Limit Break entail? This bears further pondering.

My response:

I recognize that BW offers up a buffet of emotional meatiness with BITs. And perhaps a set of Virtue traits is gilding the lily, but it seemed appropriate, given the emphasis on Virtues, and craziness, and the Great Curse... I was strongly influenced by Blossom's Honor/Shame mechanics, though I would certainly not suggest seppuku if a character's Valor exceeded his Temperance. But that balancing act was the root of how I initially envisioned the Great Curse: if you go into Virtue imbalance, you start to suffer the Curse -- when your Compassion is at 6 and everything else is a 3, you get a bit wonky, and start giving away all your gear to the poor -- or you decide to euthanize a nation to end its suffering peacefully and without pain. How this interacts with Limit, eh. I'm not sure. In my foggy initial concept Limit was less important than virtue imbalance...

Maybe just having Virtues reflected in BITs is a better idea after all. Or, just picking up Virtue die traits! They could give you a little bennie, like channeling virtues in E(X)E -- and if your fellow players thought you weren't displaying the appropriate level of Compassion, Valor, etc. then Bam! Off it goes. If you're displaying more, then Bam! You get another one. Maybe suggest characters pick two Virtue traits from, I dunno, 3 or 4 example traits per Virtue. Like: Bravado (Valor) Dt Being outnumbered is nothing -- when the deck is stacked against you, that's when you shine. +1D to all Steel and combat rolls when clearly outnumbered. Advocate (Compassion) Dt You speak for those whom society has silenced. +2S to your Body of Argument in any Duel of Wits when defending or promoting the interests of a disadvantaged social group (slaves, the poor, etc.). So it's kind of like you're automatically channeling the virtue, whenever appropriate.

The jury is still out on that. I must say, though, that after having read the Magic Burner I am sold on using Practical Magic as the basis for Excellencies in CiB, per Dr. Odie's suggestion:

Having had the time to go over the Magic Burner, I note that there's a magic system called "Practical Magic" wherein magic is common and low-key; rather than mighty wizards knowing the spells to end all life, everybody knows a little bit. All doctors know charms to knit bones together and encourage flesh to mend, lawyers and magistrates know minor geas spells, et cetera. The result is that the Sorcery skill becomes highly available, with the caveat that you must purchase (or learn in-game) the ability to use it separately for each skill category. Swap "Sorcery" for "Charms" and you have exactly how I proposed we divide Charm use up (that is, along the broader skill categories). Therefore, I'm inclined to run with that as our base for Charms. First Martial Excellency, Third Social Excellency, Second Crafting Excellency, and so on.

An emphasis of the Exalted game as published is that the character's Virtues (to wit: Valor, Compassion, Conviction, and Temperance) carry an ancient curse, laid down at the close of the titanomachia, when the gods and their Exalted comrades sealed the surviving Primordials in a prison of their own flesh and oaths. The thrust of the curse was that these virtues would incur wicked, foolish, arrogant behavior – that they would carry the Exalts to ill ends through a sort of reductio ad absurdum process. An incredibly Valorous Exalt would be driven to greater and greater deeds of might, challenging mythic beasts, fellow Exalts, and perhaps even the gods in a quest for a worthy opponent. A supernally Compassionate Exalt might choose to euthanize an entire nation to ease their pain, or be driven to destroy death. Yes, Exalted thinks big. The next (or a next, anyway) task is to see where these Virtues fit into CiB. The good Dr. Odie says:

Certainly what will most strongly determine the preferred route for Virtues is what we want to happen for (or in lieu of) Limit Break. If you want to pursue the idea of Virtue imbalance causing trouble, then it makes sense to track each Virtue as its own attribute. If you are more concerned with Limit as originally conceived -- a track that builds up and builds up and then blows up, taking your character's sanity with it -- it makes more sense to focus on tracking Limit, and increment the counter whenever players betray character Beliefs or suppress Instincts. I'm not sure where I think the best course lies. I do know that Burning Wheel very rarely takes character control away from the player totally, and so I'm hesitant to ascribe any compulsions in either form (via Limit Break or through Virtue imbalance). I really like your Virtue die trait idea, though.

With allies such as this in my quest for gaming greatness, how can I fail?

Dr. Madu

SERENITY NOW! or Don't Say I Never Gave You Nuthin'.

Another short post, dear reader, for which I apologize. Indeed, I must make further expiatory remarks to the effect that this brief missive will mostly consist of criticism. If you don't want to read that, then I suggest you choose a link from the list to the right – Ding or xkcd might be more your speed today. Otherwise...

...on with the blather!

As you may have guessed, I am a young man with warm feelings for SCIENCE (It works, bitches!) and am therefore partial to things science-tific. The flipside to this is that entertainments meant to be sciencelike, such as pretty much all science fiction, had better hew pretty fucking close to the grain if they want me to keep reading/watching/caring. Bad science = me walking away, though some efforts get a pass. The Fifth Element, for example, has terrible science. But it's a parody, so I can accept transluminal airline service and a series of closely-spaced beepy-beacons marking the edge of human interstellar territory as just part of the story. But take a serious SF flick (or one that tries to be serious) such as... oh, The Day After Tomorrow. Now I don't know much – I'm just an unfrozen caveman lawyer, not a climatologist. But if you're going to posit an ice age that happens so fast it freezes fuel lines in helicopters in midflight you had better just skip the pseudoscience bullshit and call it magic.

This attitude is more or less suspended when it comes to roleplaying games, mostly because a) I am inured to the terrible science or b) if you try and fight it the story falls apart. Like in the old Palladium Robotech game, where Veritechs ran on what was essentially alien life-force, in space and atmosphere alike, without consideration of reaction mass or fuel. Take protoculture away, and you start having to justify tankage, and range, and operational loadout, and then you may as well be playing Mekton Zeta +.

All this is a roundabout way of saying I liked Firefly, a lot, and I even enjoyed Serenity. (Though Mal Reynolds is a lot more engaging when he's a wiseass, and not a very sympathetic character when he's being a dick. There were a couple occasions when I sincerely hoped Mal would end up as a Reaver hood ornament.) Both of these entertainments had terrible science, and Joss Whedon himself admits that the "science" portion of "science fiction" didn't interest him. In the show, and in the flick, the bad science is more-or-less forgivable – mainly because they don't try to explain it. People can walk around normal-like in a spaceship under weigh, with nary a mention of spin, gravity emulators, or giant magnet sandals. Unfortunately, in the context of a roleplaying game, you sort of have to talk about these things, because if you don't some bespectacled twit is going to work out the math and prove that the Ringworld is unstable – there goes your science cred. So better just to toss some technobabble in there, and hope most readers get glassy-eyed, and move on the swedgin' part.

I knew that the Serenity roleplaying game was not going to be Blue Planet, say, or even CP2020, when I bought it. Really, my biggest complaint is not the total lack of coherence even in the crap pseudoscience – it's the fact that the entire book is written in Firefly dialect. Which, if you've never experienced it (and if you haven't, how the hell did you get in here?) is folksy para-cowboy patter with the odd Mandarin expletive thrown in. This, to me, is akin to writing the entire D&D player's guide like this: "If thou then savest 'gainst the rod, O Fortunate one, thou takest but half damage." "When thou smitest the goblin with thine shortsword, thou inflictest 1d6 damage: but shouldst thou find thyself fighting a giant, lo! take thee care, for thou doth but 1d4, as yon giant is of Large stature." Dialect is great for the flavortext! But keep the rules crisp and clear and concise.

Here. I'll give you an example for free – my 3-page addendum to the ship creation rules. Never one to leave well enough alone, I offer up this PDF so you too can put it on your blog and excoriate my writing style, design ethic, and leitmotif. Needless to say, Serenity and its attendant intellectual properties are copyright of Universal Pictures (may their multiclass ninja/lawyer/accountants never sully my lab), and the Quirks ruleset is in no way intended to infringe upon that.

Ugh, legalese – it leaves such a bitter taste in my mouth. I believe I shall wash it out with a beer. Salut!

– Dr. Madu

PS Not that short after all. If I could only apply this ethic to Deathmagus....
PPS ARGH! A God-damned typo. I'll have to fix it some other day. Unless I rule that "condictive" ceramic fittings are some kind of nanotechnological thing. Or maybe they're made of smart matter. Smart ass matter.
PPS Aaaand somewhere along the line FileAve went kaput. I'll host the PDF somewhere else. After I correct some typos!

Exalted: City of Darkness fluff

If a place that's composed of equal parts Blade Runner and Crouching Tiger can have fluffy bits, that is. Calling it "E:CoD Chunks of Shattered Concrete and Rusted Iron, With Supernatural Kung Fu, Gods in VR, and Beamklaves" is a touch unwieldy (if accurate). Anyway –

Jina Liao knew she was in trouble when the Dragon somewhere in the wreckage behind her began to chuckle. The speaker of of his black-jade armored suit stripped all evidence of humanity from the noise – just a mechanical, grating ‘heh-heh-heh,’ amplified to a volume that shook dust from the leaning concrete pillars of the ancient garage.

Jina was the leader of a ratgang. That was the Dragons’ name for people who refused their offer of safety and security, the so-called “survivor civilization.” The Dragons made deals with spirits of electricity and information, and set themselves up as neofeudal lords in the City’s ruin. The Dragon chasing her now was Cathak Hrond – a sadistic enforcer-prince for the Cathak family.

He was hunting, a pastime for many bored and cruel Dragons. With their Essence-optics they’d pick out a likely ratganger, either kill his companions or drive them off, and then chase him through the underbelly of the City. Typically the pursuit was incredibly one-sided, the ratganger armed with a length of pipe, a shiv, her wits, and a zipgun; the Dragon armed with a Essence-fueled coilgun or flamethrower, and clad in powered jade-alloy armor, guided by spirit-AIs and navigation software.

But Jina was a quarry of a different kind. She ran a ratgang, which made her a force to be reckoned with. She knew the alleys and rooftops of Sector 81 like she knew her own breath and heartbeat. When the Cathak gave chase, lighting her path with blasts from a heavy beam cannon, she nearly lost him in the Railyard Jungle. She swam the length of the Scumpond underwater, hoping to confuse his Essence-sensors. She leapt from balcony to balcony at the Old Hotel, crossing three-meter gaps twenty stories up, to no avail. He hounded her relentlessly, dogging her steps, taunting her through the helmet speaker. “Run, girlie, run! It’s more fun that way!”

Sadistic bastard.

She was sure she had him caught at the Pillar Farm. Once there had been some kind of enormous skeletal concrete structure – a skytower, an airpark, maybe a powerbeam station. But at some point in the City’s past – after the Fall, presumably – the tower had overbalanced and come crashing down, leaving a tangled mass of twisted rebar, pillar-stumps, and pulverized concrete. It was a deathtrap, and ratgangs throughout 81 lost kids and scouts there, two or three a season. Jina figured if there was anywhere in Sector 81 that an armored Dragon could be crushed to a paste, the Pillar Farm was the place.

She was mistaken.

Her cable-tripwire was flawless, placed at the bottom of a looming snarl of snapped-off columns. It looked stable, but when the tripwire went ten tons of debris would roll down in a gathering avalanche. Hrond was following the heat-prints her bare feet left on the gritty pavement – and when he blundered into the cable, invisible at ambient temperature, the grinding roar of tumbling concrete sent Jina into a brief euphoria.

That changed when the first column rose from the pile, supported by a gleaming black jade arm. Hrond gave the shattered concrete pillar a contemptuous power-assisted shove and stood, the servos in his legs yowling as a load of debris spilled from the powersuit’s shoulder plates. “Nice try,” grated the speaker, and the beam cannon came up as Jina turned and ran. A blue-white flash of light accompanied a hisssCRACK as concrete exploded in white sparking tracers of burning lime – and Jina was off, sprinting for cover. Hrond thumbed the beam output toggle to “constant” and twisted the collimator-choke down to a pinhole as he tracked the fleeing ratganger by her heat signature. With a cold smile, the Cathak leveled the beamrifle and watched as the targeting AI settled the crosshairs on the girl’s back. Inhale… exhale… aim… squeeze— the beamrifle spat a searing thread of energy that should have sliced the girl into smoking slabs. But when the Cathak’s flash-compensating filter cleared his visor, all he saw was a red-hot worm-track scribbled across a teetering concrete wall, his missed target written large. No corpse, no girl. With an amplified growl, he kicked his way out of the tangled pillars and stomped up to where the girl had been. A pit yawned at his feet. “Suit, enhance to normal light,” ordered the Water-dragon, and the power armor’s spirit obliged by amplifying the dim and grey ambient to a level like that of a bright day. Colors were washed out into pale suggestions, and the image was grainy and restless – but clearly the girl had stepped on a weak spot and fallen through.

Hrond scowled at the thought of his hunt being cut short. “Suit! Audio enhance,” he commanded, and leaned down at the edge of the gap. As he listened, he gave the hole a brief visual inspection. A maintenance hatch, perhaps; the tags of rusted hinges jutted from the edge. One was beaded with fresh blood. Interesting. A tentative scuffle came through Hrond’s helmet speakers, analyzed and noise-filtered, and unmistakably a footfall. With a tiger’s grin the Cathak stepped back, adjusting the beam rifle’s output to “burst” and the collimator to “wide-angle:” then he lowered the business end of his weapon into the gap, leaned away, and pulled the trigger. WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM! The Essence-driven weapon loosed five blasts, each with the force of a grenade in the enclosed space, before a telltale winked in Hrond’s visor. The weapon was spent.

Jina hardly had time to recognize her good fortune as the rusted hatch gave way beneath her feet. She fell, fetching up against a jagged spur of metal with a stifled cry as the air burned above her. Despite the pain, instinct bent Jina’s knees to accept the shock of landing, and when her feet hit concrete after a surprisingly long fall, she rolled with it and ended up sprawled at the base of a wall. Her head rang with the impact, and the darkness was near-absolute. She wasted a few precious seconds trying to decide if she was dead, alive, injured, stunned – the dim grey square of light above her was suddenly occluded, and ratgang instinct threw her into silent, scuttling motion. Her hands were thrust out, one high and one low, to detect or deflect obstacles. She struck something cold, smooth and unyielding: a metal door set into the wall. Her fingers brushed a box bulging from the doorframe: at her touch it lit dimly with golden numerals. Some mad impulse seized her then, and as Hrond lowered his weapon into the darkness, barrel glowing with its priming charge, Jina tapped 5 random numbers into the pad. No one was more surprised than she when the door slid silently open. Not one to question great fortune, she dived though just as the chamber behind her exploded with Essence-fire.

OMGZORZ DOES SHE EXALT?

Yes, she does. When I have that bit o' fluff written it will probably go up here as well.

In the meantime, I offer the following sage advice to all dwellers in the City of Darkness:

Stay alert! Trust no one! And keep your laser daiklave handy!

– Dr. Madu

Within spitting distance of 44K.

Which is not that great of an accomplishment, considering I stood but a cable away from 42,000 words weeks ago, with all guns loaded, primed, and ready to fire a withering volley of langrage (language?). But between this quarter's final project and other impedimentia, I feel pretty good about having gotten that far.

I read about how other people write – what wannabe writer doesn't? Gordon R. Dickson recommended you sit down and just write. Write anything, even if it's crap, even if you're writing your name over and over again, and sooner or later you'll get tired of writing crap and either a) write something good or b) quit writing. Gene Wolfe, that son-of-a-bitch*, sits down in the morning and writes for two hours, knocking out a Hugo or three. And that's all he does. Steven Brust apparently maintains a normal lifestyle (involving blogging, email, and computer games) and somehow mystically written works appear. My guess is while he's asleep a demon possesses him, cooks up a big meal, eats it with gusto, and then writes like... well, like a demon. His advice boils down to "Write a cool sentence. Then write a cool sentence connected to that one." Lather, rinse, repeat.

The method that works for me, which works for me insofar as it works at all, is probably most similar to the Brustian model: I get a vignette in my head, a scene where Milesos dispatches his mortally wounded father-in-law after some snarky dialogue. I write it. Then I get another scene, where Milesos and company get ambushed by a pack of Dire-folk. I write it. In the meantime, there's this huge chrono-literary gulf between the two events, and that's where my scattershot method feels like it's breaking down. The capturing and the father-in-law-killing are critical points in the book, sure: but there are doubtless other critical points in between. I just haven't thought of them yet.

They also say you should read, and read widely (Who are 'they'? You know, 'them.' 'Those people.' 'Those people with their name on books on shelves in my library.' 'Writers.'). Most recently I have been hip-deep in Anathem, which is a Neal Stephenson book that snuck up on me in the dark and hit me over the head with a Burmese whack-bonk. I won't bore you with a review, but I will say this: it was written by a man in love with language. I probably only catch 15% of the verbo-linguistic cleverness that goes on in Anathem, but that's enough to keep me smirkingly thoroughly engrossed.

Neal also says "Just keep writing." So I shall go do just that.

After I read a few more pages of Anathem. It's research! No, really...

– Dr. Madu

*Said with the deepest respect and appreciation for Mr. Wolfe's craftsmanship.

Fiddling while empires burn.

Apologies for the brief nature of today's commentary: I've been out and about in the real world, trading my goggles for a sledgehammer and giving free rein to my destructive nature in the service of good (or at least not-evil). I just want to say this:

Burning Empires blows my mind.

And frankly, that's impressive, because I have a lot of mind – and it does not, dear reader, blow easily. By all means, go over to their lab and poke around. Thor Olavsrud's series of articles detailing the evolution of Burning Empires from over-dinner hobnobbery to glossy, bricklike printed product is a real insight to those of us who aspire to someday publish similar efforts of our own. Faith Conquers and Sheva's War are on their way to me as I type — and I must say, I look forward to those comics as I have not looked forward to a comic since the halcyon days when I had an Appleseed subscription.

Eagerly awaiting –

Dr. Madu

PS "Karsan League Tequila: This Time, The Worm Eats You."

You're ugly, and your monster dresses you funny.

Not everything that goes on in the lab is a product of in-house gamescience – oh no. There are many fine things brewed up in the myriad bubbling vats of game-dom. And recently among them I've found this – Monsters and Other Childish Things. This is a roleplaying game about children and monsters, and for a change the slimy, barbed, razor-fanged 11-dimensional thing under the bed is not your enemy: it is your best friend.

Monsters and Other Childish Things (Or, if I may be forgiven the abbreviation, M&OCT: at this very moment technicians are testing whether this is better pronounced 'emminocked' or 'emmin-oh-see-tee'. As soon as verifiable results are in I shall report them here.) is based upon the One-Roll Engine (as promulgated by the incomparable Greg Stolze) and was penned (Generated? Synthesized? Cloned? Surely there's a better term out there) by the illimitable Benjamin Baugh. Here the players take the roles of children afflicted with befriended by monsters. Don't go running for the airlock, now – you won't make it past the laser-sharks. Yes, you play a kid. Yes, you're puny and ineffectual. Yes, your monster is a superpower-by-proxy. No, this is not a hard-edged real-world-sim tactical game: if you're looking for that, look elsewhere. This is a game about exploration of the self* in the following context: what you would do, were you a wee child, with the perfect bodyguard-slash-troublemaker-slash-comrade-in-arms ready at your beck and call, to get you into and out of trouble? (Sorry about the hyphens.) Much as Aberrant asked, "What would you do with KEWL, W0RLD-SHAKIN' POWERZ™?" Emminoct asks, "What would you do, if, like, when that jerkface Eric McJerky trips you again on the way to math class , like, you could totally call up a cacodemonical, maddening, eldritch titan-spawn of the Elder Days to kick his ass?"

If the answer is "Do that, and then skip along to class cheerfully whistling 'Tekeli-li, tekeli-li'" then you're on the right road. The trouble arises when Eric McJerky's best buddy, an aeon-striding tentacular cthonic god (and psychic powerhouse!), takes umbrage at poor Eric's mistreatment.

Emminohseetee – I really dig the setting. I enjoyed reading the 'example characters and NPCs' section on its own merits, so much so I was driven to depict a monster named Bugnutz (above, dining upon a perfectly ripe sack of trash). I have a habit playing flawed characters, as anyone who ever faced (or was a friend of) Brendan Jermflux in the Bad Old Days of the Bad oWoD ("Overconfidence" + twin 9mm pistols + a 7-die pool divided into seven one-die triggerpulls – w00t!) knows. And the kids of Emma-knocked are the perfect mix of utterly dependent kid-ness and utterly unstoppable monsterish asskickery to satisfy the both masochist and the sadist within. I am not the Muad'dib of the ORE: at least in its incarnation as Immen-otsi-tí, it's a little more more coarse-grained than I care for. But I don't own (yet) any of the other fascinating ORE games – REIGN, GODLIKE, Wild Talents – so I freely admit to some observer bias. Further testing is clearly necessary!

I will not belabor the mechanics of Monsters &c. here, except to say that I find the idea of emotional damage equaling physical damage in effects to be intriguing, and I wish to subscribe to Benjamin Baugh's newsletter. If something similar shows up in Crows, you are all permitted to point at me and shout THIEF! Hey, it was shiny and I've got more Eyes than Beak. Whaddaya-whaddaya? Don't make me drop The Dozenz on you.

In other news, Deathmagus tops 42K with no end in sight. More on this development later.

In the meantime, science calls –

Dr. Madu

*Scientific tests here at the lab have proven it.

As if I don't have enough irons in the fire.

Or test-tubes over the Bunsen burner. Maybe that's a better metaphor.

In the works (running in parallel with Creation is Burning) is Exalted: City of Darkness, which is an alternate-universe take on Creation. Imagine the guy who says "In a world..." at the beginning of the movie trailer. Now, say it with me:

"In a world... where the Primordials failed to hold back the creeping tides of Chaos. Where Autochthon's last desperate act to save Creation was to merge his Primordial essence with Mount Meru, the very axis upon which all the world spins. Where there once was a Blessed Isle... there is now the City of Darkness."

(cue Matrix music)

This is a kitchen-sink setting for a game line that lives and dies by kitchen-sink settings. The idea being that the Primordials' ability to spin order out of chaos was overmatched by Chaos's ability to go beyond order (or something like that). As Creation withered away, the Most Mighty and Ancients retreated to the Blessed Isle, and there made their last stand. In an effort to fortify the place, Authocthon merged himself with the Earth pole – and amazingly, his gambit succeeded... but at a price. As the Builder's spirito-mechanical soul merged with the land, nearly all facets of the landscape became reflections of his technological nature. Cart paths became maglev tracks: trees became utility poles. In one swift "Oh shit, we've converted the planet to stable strangelets" moment all of Creation that remained had changed. Where once stood grandiloquent Manses were now harsh-edged arcologies of stone and steel. In Mount Meru's place stood Authocthon's immanent Core, a megalopolis of sky-piercing crystalline towers. On the shores of the Blessed Isle sprouted adamantine walls, grim and grey and glassine.

And then the normal Exalted history we know and love/hate/ignore takes over from there. At its cold, cybernetic heart, Exalted: City of Darkness is but an excuse to get all the Exalt types under one roof, in the same game, with moonsilver sniper rifles and orichalcum hovercycles.

Also, there's a detective story in the works, tentatively titled Monkey. I am sorry to report it has nothing to do at all with real monkeys.

Ook ook!

Dr. Madu

Edited to add: "That movie trailer guy" mentioned in the link above is the inimitable Don LaFontaine, who died Monday, 01 September 2008.  It's the passing of a voice without a face.  I will miss you, Don.

"In a world... where voiceovers are not what they once were."

The cyberpunk future I ordered looks nothing like the catalog photo.

Finally! Finally someone makes a reverse trike! Something that doesn't resemble a cross between a La-Z-Boy and a Bigwheel, something that a young buck such as myself can ride without feeling geriatric!

It's the Can-Am Spyder roadster, and almost all the photos you see of it look like this:

My god, is that sexy. Just look at the thing! It screams anime! Adventure! Excitement! All that shit that a Jedi most definitely does not crave!

When you look at if from the front, though, it just looks like someone shoved a Model T up a snowmobile's ass.

How bloody disappointing. That big boat nose out front... just bleah.

I guess I won't be reenacting Venus Wars any time soon.

I remain (still on four wheels) –

Dr. Madu

A novel in search of a good title.

Wordcount: 40,034

Deathmagus! Okay, I know that doesn't have much of a ring to it. But it's a working title, I assure you: and if there is a publishing house out there that can suggest a better one, I am all ears.

I won't lie to you: this is pretty transparently revenge fiction. Which is not necessarily a bad thing — Elron wrote a shitload of unflinchingly revengeful books, and they did well enough to found a religion. My ambitions are far lower, dear reader: to sell tell a good story. And now, the words all gamers love to say and hate to hear:

Let me tell you about my character.

So the plot, or premise, or genre, or setting, or all of them at once is this: a young man, third son of a minor noble, is given a choice — the priesthood, or a far-off and rather disreputable school of magic, a place called Kingsguild (which, in its heyday, was in fact the headquarters of a thaumaturgical guild chartered by the Horned King (more about him later)). Milesos (for that is our hero's name) picks Kingsguild in a totally uninformed decision, and in six weeks he's packed off through rolling, flinty hills to this rambling keep dozens of leagues from anywhere.

Kingsguild is no longer in its heyday. It's just this side of a ruin: and where once it may have been a place of light and learning, it's now home to a very motley collection of magi, who (sadly enough) represent the best of the best among extant (legitimately chartered) sorcerers. One's a rapist, another an alcoholic, a third mad as a sunbathing bat.

I mention here that everyone I've talked about the novel to, at this point, exclaims "Hogwarts!" or something to that effect. While I enjoyed the Potter books as much as any other fellow who cut his teeth on AD&D and Edgar Rice Burroughs, it pains me to think that the first image that comes to mind is the goofy-scary-but-essentially-harmless academy that M. Potter has the honor of attending. In fact, Kingsguild is not modeled on the British education system — it's more like college. It's a place where you can do whatever you like, basically. Drink all night? Skip classes? Summon demons? Who will stop you? No one, really, until you piss off the Archmage who runs the place and he turns you into a whirling column of fire, and the drunk, fat old Healer has to reconstitute you from ashes in a lengthy and excruciating process. Hogwarts will enchant you: Kingsguild might kill you.

No one wants a laundry list of what Milesos did on his first day at school, and his second, and on and on ad nauseam. I don't want to write it any more than you want to read it. So instead the story's told (from first-person — I can't help it, I ran too many roleplaying games and read too much Haldeman) as a memoir or narrative of current events, intercut with flashbacks or scenes from Kingsguild that remind Our Hero of something happening now.

That's the nutshell version. I'll talk more about the difficulties and the sticky points and the two or three sentences I like in a near-future post. I will also attach a sample chapter or two so (as Tom and Ray say) the three members of my audience can read them and laugh, weep, or sigh as appropriate.

For now, dear reader, I remain–

Dr. Madu

PS I prescribe a gin and tonic for myself, and one for you. Go watch a movie or something while you're at it.

Current and upcoming projects

Greetings! The Doctor here, with the obligatory intro post — mostly an excuse to list a few of the things I've done, am doing, or are contemplating doing (forgive the jumbled tenses, please). Each of the projects mentioned herein will certainly have their own time under the microscope for those that take an interest in them. To wit:

• Deathmagus (necromantic revenge-fiction/dark fantasy: currrent)
• Crows (system experimentation/role-playing game about crows: current)
• Creation is Burning (Exalted as seen through the lens of Burning Wheel: currently contemplating)
• The Illustrated Adventures of Herman von Shnout (work-in-progress young adult mad-science fiction: semi-current)
• Painting from Dreams (series of acrylics based on dream-images: semi-current)

In addition, one may expect to see occasional links posted from such sources as the Daily Illuminator, rpg.net, and other fine sources of information.

Until next time, dear reader, I remain–

Dr. Madu