New Qalidar Art

Click here for Alejandro Gutiérrez Franco's preliminary sketch (thumbnail at right) of the karcist, a class that uses the forms of ceremonial magic to extract and bargain with the hidden mind of things, which can involve animistic spirits, demons, and even computer viruses.

A limited run preview edition of Qalidar: Resistance RPG, with an adventure which won't appear anywhere else, will be available from Peryton Publishing at Gen Con in August, 2013.

Heroes and Ashes

When they first started talking about creating a successor for City of Heroes, I was sure some people would just flail around, talk big, then decide that it's an impossibly big job and disappear. Sure, that could still happen, but they've come farther than I expected. I'm particularly impressed with the way +Missing Worlds Media is going at this. It won't be City of Heroes, but maybe it'll be something.

Oh yeah, the link:
http://beefjack.com/features/rising-from-city-of-heroes-ashes/

BASHCon XXVIII: Free Hugs

BASHCon was fun. I got in on some great gaming with lots of familiar faces and enjoyed a relaxed atmosphere with nerf-gun soldiers and zombies wandering around. I needed a weekend like this.

...except for the part about forgetting my camera and having to fall back on my phone for the whole trip. That's why some of these pictures kinda suck.

Friday
A quick bit of packing and a fairly short road trip to Toledo, and we were unloading the car and crossing the creek by the UT Student Union before we knew it. Tom called up Ken (did I mention Ken? I'm sure somebody did but, long story short, Ken St. Andre was there as a special guest) and found out that we weren't going to have an exhibitors' table after all (again, long story, not very interesting). I was, I admit, relieved. I had never been convinced that selling here would be worth it, and this would leave a lot more time for enjoying the con.

Anyway, we found Ken and chatted a bit in the registration line. Tom ran off, muttering something about not wanting to lose any more fingers, and came back with fried mushrooms and cheese sticks. Somehow we got separated and I overheard BASHCon people frantically looking for Ken. I thought Ken would probably be with Tom, and I knew Tom would go where there was beer. Sure enough, I found them at Phoenicia. Turned out that the BASHCon folks thought Ken was running Tom's T&T game, Lair of the Snow Dragon. I'm guessing that's why we got the awesome private room with four tables. Tom took me, Jerry, Liam, Alex, Ken, and Paul through the hills and a newly-marshy valley (after an eternity spent talking Ken out of attempting to make some kind of marsh-snowshoes out of scrub brush) to a cave in a big rock formation where Alex charmed some fairies with his singing and Ken talked to the dragon.

After the game, several of us met up for a late night snack & nightcap, then went back to our respective hideouts to crash.

Saturday
Tom got a ride over with Alex. I slept in a bit and delivered Ken to the convention. Jerry's zombie game was still in progress, so Ken and I played Magic. I never think to to bring a deck. I imagine my poor old collection is pathetically outmoded by the super-science of modern munchkinry, anyway. Luckily, Ken had a spare, and it was a killer. The man knows his Magic cards.

Over lunch at Phoenicia, I found out that I had been eaten by zombies in Jerry's game. I played in the one last year, so I guess my character's absence needed to be accounted for. Ran into John from previous Peryton RPG and Gamma World adventures, and put together quite a large gathering, Good food, good conversation, blah, blah, blah, I know - you don't care.

So anyway, Ken did a couple of T&T seminars in the afternoon. His hat stuck around to pimp the merchandise when he stepped out. Tom, Jerry, and I wandered in and out of these and took some time to chill in the cozy student center. I'm not sure what happened to the others. I'm sure they had stuff to do. I took a few turns around the exhibit hall, toyed with buying an Eclipse Phase book, a 20-sider that lights up when you roll a 20, or a piece of steampunk jewelry, and ultimately decided that I would have just been buying stuff to buy stuff. I think we popped back over to Phoenicia a few times too.

Eventually, evening came around. Tom's massive three-GM Ragnarok event was really filling up. I had a Peryton RPG event at nine, so I had to wander off while they were still making characters. Checking in at the desk, I found that there were only two players signed up for my dungeon crawl, Shrine of the Mantis.

My game was a little off. Part of it was that my heart wasn't really in it, even though I was unusually well-prepared. Also, I only had two players, one of them in an argumentative mood. Normally, I'm pretty good about finding a way to let people do the cool, unexpected things they come up with in play. I'll even bend the rules if it doesn't seem unfair to the other players. It's a lot harder to be open-minded, though, when you have a player who will run over you if you show even a moment's hesitation. I think I even missed some opportunities to use cool options that were already in the rules, just because I was being worn down by anti-d20 propaganda and lectures on the psychology of giant metal insects, and couldn't think past "it's not your turn!" anymore. I don't want it to sound like it was all that way, or even most of it. There were some great scenes. Anyway, whatever excuses I might come up with, I felt bad about my performance, so I gave the other player a copy of the rule book.

Leaving the common-folk gaming hall around midnight, Ken and I wandered over to the Royal Suite and found that Ragnarok had just wrapped up as well. After a bit of post-game chatter, we headed out. The UT Student Union is a bit of a labyrinth, so we paused to consider the best route. Tom noticed the direction the hall was going and was convinced it would take us where we wanted to go. I remembered the path to the best of the known exits and wanted to go that way. Tom was not to be swayed and, though our trek took us through unlikely nooks and dusty storage stairwells, it ended in a door that opened at the best possible location for us to exit the building. It didn't even set off the fire alarm.

Damn it.

(This picture of the secret exit was obviously not taken that night, but I'm putting it here anyway.)

We said our farewells to Paul, who was on his way out, and then it was time for our traditional Saturday-at-BASHCon treat, late night tacos!

Sunday
Despite the early morning, I was looking forward to Jerry's AD&D game, and it was great. We invaded a slaver fortress, where the Diminutive Death-Dealers (a pair of halfling thieves, one of which was my character) snuck in and took out the wizard while the others fought his giant henchmen. Then the archer got to show off in a fight that ranged across a series of tree-houses connected by raised platforms in the woods, and the barbarian got smacked down. Perfect conclusion to the convention.

Don't Believe Their Lies
Tom's write-ups have become a pain to link to because he insists on posting them in a gazillion pieces, and it looks like Jerry might be succumbing to his perfidious influence. Here's the first installment of Tom's and here's what Jerry has posted so far (and the official one). You'll have to find the rest on your own. Paul has also written up his impressions.

New Games to Play - Gen Con 2013

For me, the most exciting thing about Gen Con this year is that Peryton Gamers will be running several brand new or in-development role-playing games.

Qalidar: Resistance
Naturally, I'm going to put mine first, right? To be fair, it is the only one that will be ready to sell by Gen Con... I think. After over a year of playtesting and tinkering and I can't even guess how much time in conceptual development, I'm really looking forward to showing this one off in all its glory. Peryton Publishing will be selling a special preview edition of this game with an adventure exclusive to this event. Find us in the Studio 2 Publishing block in the exhibit hall. I'm also planning to have a quick demo handy for anyone who wants to stop by our booth and try it out, but I recommend signing up for one of the sessions listed here if you can.

Qalidar: Resistance 
10am Friday, 10am Saturday, 9pm Saturday

Try out a brand new insurrection-themed RPG in this introductory scenario. Take the role of a Wayfinder, a traveler who whose explorations have taken you far enough outside the tapestry of the scheming trions that you can see the pattern for what it is. Step into the secret places where the oligarchs spin their webs, and try to seal the recklessly-exploited cosmic flaws through which the substance of Qalidar bubbles into the daylit world. I'm running the two morning sessions and a fiendish semi-human assistant is running the Saturday evening one.

Crawlspace
This set of horror RPG rules is evolving from a hybridization of Tom's previously released TAG Crawlspace rules and an unfinished monograph he's been tinkering with for years. It will use his new d10-based system which he's tentatively calling TROTT. I'm trying to convince him not to stick with that.

Bigger Than a Breadbox 
11pm Thursday
You were a college professor teaching Medieval folklore and Astrophysics at Dartmouth University when you went to sleep. Now you're a pizza delivery guy from Cincinnati.

Hopelessly Lost 
Midnight Saturday (which we tend to think of as Friday night)
The natives know that they are as likely to get lost as the tourists in the Lake Fohggihohxi swamps. Big Foot, aliens, or just plain evil?

Castle of the Moth 
Midnight Sunday (Saturday night, y'know?)
Welcome to Horsehead Crag, NY, the world's leading location for UFO sightings and the Moth Man.

Powerful Tales RPG
So, a long time ago, we announced a TAG variant called POW! which led to a fiction anthology called POW!erful Tales. The anthology did really well and got a lot of praise. The RPG kind of languished, and about 473 other people decided they liked the name and tossed up their own POW! RPGs. The Powerful Tales RPG is a completely different thing than the one we were working on before, though. This one's actually based on the Peryton System, and Mike (the editor of the anthology) has some wild ideas that I think will really make it stand out from other superhero RPGs.

Powerful Tales Playtest
11am Friday
I'm not sure what kind of scenario he has in mind yet. All we've got so far is, "Be among the first to try the new superhero RPG from Peryton Publishing."

Stay Alive! 
This is a set of zombie apocalypse variant rules Jerry is putting together for Tunnels & Trolls, but he's done so much work, clearing up ambiguities from the source material and coming up with creative adaptations for all the gory fun you expect from a good zombie flick, that I'm counting it as a new game here. He's been running a series of  adventures and even has a play-by-post game going, in which the zombie plague breaks out at the University of Toledo during BASHCon. I believe this adventure is connected to those.

Out of the Frying Pan
2pm Friday
The world has gone crazy as the dead have seemingly come back to attack and consume the living. You have escaped the campus and survived the night, but what about the day after?

Spacers
Like Crawlspace, Spacers is something Tom's been running for years using TAG, and is now in the process of updating to his new TROTT rules. It's classic sci-fi adventure: rayguns, rocket packs, and space helmets with fins.

Attack of the Androids 
5pm Friday
Throwing ice chunks at Mercury can be tricky. Especially when the androids don't like suicide missions.

No-Dice RPG
I haven't been privy as much of the inside scoop on this one as the others, but I was at one of the playtests, and Scott has a really interesting set of playing-card based rules for his No-Dice RPG.

Psychic Cats and Magic Dogs Detective Agency
9am Saturday
A reporter for the New Atlantis News and Information Service (NANI) has been found dead in the Leo District. Can the eclectic employees of the PC&MD Detective Agency set aside their differences long enough to unravel the clues, expose the conspiracy, and catch the murderer? Each player will run an animal-human-hybrid pre-made character in the setting of New Atlantis. There will be a short lunch break during this game.

Glow
Not to be confused with the Glow World adventure for New Khazan, this is another prototype TROTT game made for post-apocalyptic sci-fi.

Out of the Bubble
9pm Saturday
You've hit 30 years old. The leaders of Bubble-City have decided no one lives beyond 30. This adventure takes a familiar premise and moves on to explore a post-apocalyptic midwest.

Other Stuff
Of course, it's not all shiny and new. We've got my Aqua Teen Hunger Force variant of Bean!, Jerry's Game of Thrones campaign, and several events under the same old T&T system, too. For a complete listing, go to perytongamers.com/events.

The Next Blog Thing

...or, as it was presented to me, "The Next Big Thing Blog Hop Tour" in which writers answer some standard questions and then tag in some other writers to do the same. I was tagged by Michael K. Eidson, a speculative fiction author, blogger, and web programmer.

Although I've got a whole bunch next big things in the works right now, I've decided to apply these questions to my almost-finished novella, which should be available in couple of months, if not sooner.

1. What is the title of your book?  
The working title is As Always, which was also the title of the short story that started all this. I might still change it if I think of something I like better.

2. Where did the idea come from?
The main elements of the setting are all part of Qalidar, which evolved from a combination of dreams, travel, meditative trances, and role-playing sessions. Also, for reasons I'll go into under another question, this book owes a lot to a prompt from Eposic.

3. What genre does your book fall under?
It starts out as heroic fantasy, dives into time travel pretty quickly, and takes on more science fiction elements as it goes along, while still dipping back into the original heroic fantasy setting on a regular basis. Also, there's an Old West style gunslinger.

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

• Zira: Michelle Rodriguez - I hadn't initially pictured Zira looking like Rodriguez, but there's no reason she couldn't. Mostly, I picked her because her range of expression fits this character really well. The actor who plays Ceira needs to be able to display a believably tough, guarded mood as easily as wide-eyed curiosity. 
• Fentar: a digitally dwarfed Michael Madsen - And no, I would not want him to affect an accent, most especially not a Scottish one. 
• Veth Tarkas Rhel: Cillian Murphy - A winning smile, beautiful eyes, and good at being creepy. What more could you want?
• Wilkes: Ben Browder - I was originally thinking Nathan Fillion, and I'm sure he'd do a wonderful job as well, but, the more I thought about it, the more Browder seemed right, somehow.
• Aradoc: Anton Yelchin - He may be a little young, but he's got the right look and can certainly manage Aradoc's cocky, playfully dishonest style.
• Rathlind: Alec Newman - I'm finding it really easy to picture Rathlind's maniacal intensity on Newman's face. Plus, Alec Newman is awesome. He should be in every movie.

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Zira, a roguish explorer and treasure-hunter, is drawn into the multiverse-spanning machinations of a charming, amoral mystic, and must find a way to take control or always be a pawn.

6. What is the longer synopsis of your book?
In the course of, you know, that stuff from #5, our heroine has to deal with loss, ambiguous personal relationships, and destructive extra-dimensional corporations. She explores her own world as well as the between-space known as Qalidar. She discovers disturbing things about the forces that shaped her universe and the inhuman conglomerates that are trying to warp it even further. At this point, I need you to imagine you've just read a concluding sentence that brilliantly wraps up the scattered thoughts above and leaves you desperate to find out more. Ideally, it should also convince you that the characters are interesting. Maybe just go back and read #5 again.

7. Is your book self-published or represented by an agency?
It's not quite there yet, but I've already decided to publish this one myself.

8. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
The first draft of my manuscript? Just how long have these questions been circulating? You know it's not 1975 anymore, right? Here in the future, we have word processors. I have to admit, though, I do miss disco.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?
It started taking shape as a story when Eposic announced its second anthology and started soliciting stories with a particular set of time travel elements. Although the short story was accepted, Eposic later had to cancel the anthology, so I still had the unpublished piece to market elsewhere. After that, it was accepted by two other publishers, which also folded before my story could see print. Naturally, I had several rejections as well, frequently along the lines of "great story, but ________ (time travel or heroic fantasy or something else) doesn't fit my theme." One guy just didn't like Wilkes.

So anyway, I had this story, and several other bits written. My original plan had been to publish more Qalidar stories through other people. These would have been standalone tales, but would also star the same characters and would continue to develop the overarching plot. Then maybe I'd put them together in an anthology later. Because of the first story's tortuous journey to nowhere and other adventures in time-wasting, though, I scrapped that plan and decided to publish it all myself. And, since it's easier to sell something large than something small, I figured I might as well write the whole thing the way I originally imagined it, as a novella.

10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
It'll be really really cheap in Kindle format.

And that's it for the questions! Now to tag in some more writers and spread the virus. Only one of the people I contacted wanted to play, so allow me to introduce Andre Kruppa of Game Soapbox Productions, master of theatrical horror gaming. He'll be blogging about his next project soon - probably next week.

My Bookshelf

Awhile back, +James Maliszewski at Grognardia started a meme. I don't know if anybody else picked it up, but I've finally gotten around to adding my bit:

And here's a frequent denizen of the surface of that desk:

Requiem for Paragon City

Yeah, I know - it's just a game. And if you can't get past that reaction, please just stop reading here and go lecture someone else about starving children or whatever it is that makes you feel all grown up.

It was the Friday before Labor Day. I was looking forward to a long weekend, and stopped to check my email one more time before I got in the car. My brother Mike described it as finding out that fifty of his friends had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. City of Heroes was being shut down.

Apparently, this was done so that the parent corporation could... well, nobody's too sure what they were trying to accomplish. It was later verified that the game was still turning a profit, and all NCsoft offered by way of justification was some weaselly corporate newspeak. The suddenly unemployed members of Paragon Studios, the people who did all the work, didn't seem to know much more than the rest of us.

But that's not really the point, is it? Despite some valiant efforts to save them, Paragon City, the Rogue Isles, and all their associated alien worlds and pocket dimensions, are going to vanish on November 30th, 2012, probably forever. I'm writing this to work my way through it, to figure out how the cancellation of one online superhero game could hurt so much. Aaand, it's an excuse to talk about Mugged Santa again and put up some nostalgic pictures that (mostly) haven't left my screenshot folder before.

I was never much into MMORPGs, or any kind of video games for that matter. I enjoy them well enough when I sit down to play them, but somehow they never stick. So, naturally, when Mike started nagging me to try out this great new super-hero game that he and Billy and Lynn had been playing, I shrugged it off with an occasional, "eh, maybe later." Eventually, he just bought another copy of the game and mailed it to me. Well, okay, the least I can do is try it out, huh?

On March 7, 2005, I created a storm summoning/gravity manipulation Controller called Ki Rin and, after a brief training mission, joined Mike and Billy in Atlas Park. I can't remember who they were playing. Maybe their established characters, Neutronium and Carabiniere, but probably new characters so we'd all be the same level. We played a few missions and then I stuck around to explore a little on my own. Before the week was over, I had created several more characters, including Sunshrike, who was to remain one of the mainstays of my ever-growing horde. And I was already pestering other friends to sign up. Somehow, this game did what the others couldn't; I was hooked.

Tom watched me play it a few times and then wanted to try it himself, so he created several characters on my account. Getting more and more into playing Broccoli Mangod (or, in this incarnation, Brocholi Mangod), and The Acting Patriot, he finally decided to create an account of his own. That only accelerated things. One of us would see the other playing and jump right on. The Hunger Strike team, full of food-based heroes inspired by Broccoli Mangod and The Angry Beet, grew, along with MYTHOS, founded by Cthulhu Boy and Song of R'lyeh. Citrus Shocker and Capt. Scrappy split off to found The Scrap Pile, and will go on scrapping until The End.

We worked our way out of Atlas Park and Galaxy City, then moved on to explore Kings Row and the deadly, shattered ruins of The Hollows. Kings Row became the source of a lot of fond memories, I guess because it was fairly easy to reach the appropriate levels (we were always creating new characters) and it was a fun area to explore, especially during the Halloween event. Broccoli Mangod refused to attack The Lost there, because he felt strongly that they were only misunderstood unfortunates, exercising their right to free assembly. In Steel Canyon, we renamed one of the ponds, "Cowards' Lake" because we always ran there to lick our wounds after starting a fight we couldn't quite finish.

During the 2006 Winter Event, when Tom realized you could almost put together a Santa suit from the costume piece prizes, he created Mugged Santa, an old (but still ripped) man in tighty-whities whose mission was to win back his uniform from the treacherous gnomes who robbed him. Starbryte, one of my earliest characters, who had been neglected for a long time and was still only second or third level, joined him, along with people we met along the way and Mike's Frost-Brand. Absurd as it may sound, this improvised plot was the basis for my short story, "Mister Blue Sky" in the POW!erful Tales anthology.

And of course, there was also City of Villains, which, as you might have guessed from the name, was the expansion that made it possible to play the bad guys. It was my birthday present from Tom that year. That was also about when Tom's co-worker Emerson joined us, and when we started our fan blog. CoV opened up new vistas, new power sets, and new inspirations (not the game term, the regular word). The tutorial was a cool prison break scene, and the starting zone was an amazing burnt-out husk of an old-timey European style city with newer sci-fi elements built over it. Port Oakes kind of reminds me of Cleveland. I will always think of Key Tower as Arachnos HQ.

I joined in villainous enterprises with The Unbeholden (Tom's creation, founded by his Stalker, Beasty Boy,  who casually handed off the administrative duties to my Corruptor, Mistress Terror. Unbeholden is also one of my favorite group names, which will see new life in Qalidar), The Twice Born, and The Technocratic Dominion. One day during a Double XP Weekend, Zombie Lizard Moll (me), The Partying Animal (Tom), and Firetemple (Emerson) fought their way through an army of snake people and founded The Bad, The Ugly, and The Mutagenic, which, with the addition of Mike's Apocalizard and several others, would become our most active villain group.

After a while, the blog sort of faded. Kind of a pity, because we were still playing a lot, and there were several later adventures that I would enjoy revisiting. We all drifted away from the game for a while because of financial issues, and I was the only one who came back with any regularity. The games I played with strangers never engendered the same kind of spontaneous creativity as our friendly sessions, though, and the stories I came up with by myself, while fun to play out, never quite seemed worth the trouble of blogging. Here are some of the posts I really enjoy going back to. Probably nobody but me, and maybe the other people involved, will feel this way, but I'm putting it all out there anyway.

• Cleveland vs. Indianapolis: Rogue Isles vs. Paragon (Tom)
• Beet Gone Bad (Me)
• Unbeholden is Doing "Just Fine" (Tom)
• Santa gets mugged and joins the Scrap Pile (Tom)
• Irma Embraces Evil (Me)
• Samedi Sam Cleans Up Rough Image (Tom)
• Scrap Pile Going Rogue? (Me)
• Beasty Boy on Rampage (Tom)
• Junior Scrap Pilers Go Trick-or-Treating (Me)
• Unbeholden Forever (Me)

For the release of Going Rogue, they had a promotional event in which everyone who had ever had an account could play for the weekend. Mike, Tom, Lynn, and I signed on and played until our eyes bled and we collapsed over our keyboards. My character had the new demon summoning power set, naming her summoned creatures (which the character insisted were not demons, but quasi-sentient extra-temporal chaos manifestations) after my cats. There was the whole new world of Praetoria to rampage across which, sadly, I never explored much after that get-together. Also, I only have a couple of screenshots to show for the whole event. I guess I left the extra roll of film at home on that trip.

And that's what it really is - a trip. Not the drug kind, although, well, maybe sometimes, but the vacation kind. The adventure kind. Sure, the game was a way I could do things with physically distant friends and family, but it wasn't unique in that way. And it was a way to meet new people, but I do that all the time at conventions and, you know, life. Those are things I'll miss, along with the fun of just creating characters and playing the game, but what really makes it irreplaceable is that it was a unique place where we talked, explored, created, and overcame adversity together.

It's a place where I could revisit old ghosts at will. Walk around a virtual corner and, hey, do you remember when that gardvord knocked Scrappy off the bridge and he landed here, barely conscious, in the middle of a bunch of Lost? Remember when we first saw all those clockwork swarming around this ditch and had no idea what was going on? Isn't this where we were exiting from that sewer mission and that enormous muscle-man in pink underwear zipped by? Yeah, the exploration badge is up on this ledge; took me forever to find that one. And so on. It's ten or twenty of my favorite vacation spots, all full of old memories, all ready and able to embrace new memories, all crumbling into the abyss at the end of the week. That's what I'll really miss.

And flying. Flying is awesome.