Superhero Rejects

These are the guys our GM won't let us play:

The Boozer, who can control alcohol the way some heroes control water or fire, and creates an aura of drunkenness whenever he consumes alcohol. He can't get drunk himself. He finds this vexing.

Sanity Man, who psychoanalyzes people by punching them.

The Gecko, who has all the power's of a six-year-old's conception of a gecko. He can climb on walls, has a very long tongue, and an aura of fear.

There are more, but we couldn't come up with amusing enough names, so I've forgotten them.

(Washington) D.C. Superheroes

So I spent the weekend in New York, and came back with another patch of roleplaying ideas. Last time I went I had some ideas about generating cities using random tables, and I gave a bit more thought to that idea. (Mostly about pregenerating businesses to drop in as necessary.) And I thought some more about hacking together a system to run a cyberpunk campaign. (Perhaps using Basic Roleplaying as a base?) But mostly I got this strange idea about running a superhero game set in Washington D.C., in the early 70s.

Setting a game in the 70s was an idea I'd had while surfing Wikipedia. Specifically, those pages where it lists all the events of importance from a particular year. This struck me as a great way to generate background and color for a historical game, and such a time period would have a number of advantages along those lines, even if I was making some tweaks in the timeline. The 70s in particular appeal to me as a decade because it's outside my personal experience but not remotely distant, the culture is distinctive and recognizable, and the mood contrasts with the current era's in interesting ways.

But I wasn't really sure what kind of game I would really want to run in a the 70s, until I remembered my long-standing interest in running a superheroes game. I put it off for a while because my group didn't seem into it and I wasn't sure what system I'd use, but now I've got enough superhero-obsessed players that I could wrangle the rest into it, and I've done enough research to decide that Mutants & Masterminds would be worth taking for a spin. Washington D.C. is the obvious choice for a home base, seeing as it's close by and I know it fairly well, and particularly the early 70s were an interesting time to be in the city. It also has some persistent institutional dysfunctions that would make it very attractive to crusader-types; this would be right around the dawn of (limited) home rule, and a natural time and place for such personalities to get involved.

After talking with my brother for a while, we decided that brand new superheroes with a street-level focus would be the way to go, and that works very well with both the city and the time period. The players would be one of the first real supergroups to start working together, and they'd take on the various gangs in charge of different parts of the city, all the while dealing with other territorial supers, a suspicious but embattled federal government, and the city government itself. There'd be politics and international goings on happening in the background, but the majority of the action would be based on fighting over control of turf and maybe solving a few of the city's problems along the way.

Superior Scribbler

So Sirlarkins, author of the most excellent blog The RPG Corner, has gone and given me the Superior Scribbler Award, which is pretty neat. A bit mind-boggling, perhaps, but very nice of him. He writes:

To me, Odyssey is a living example of the "go play" attitude--seems she's always plotting or scheming about a new campaign to map out or a new system to take a creative monkey wrench to. I can definitely sympathize. Yet, here's the thing folks--she manages to run games too! Too many would-be GMs, I think, fall victim to what I like to call the "Stanley Kubrick syndrome," getting caught up in the perfectionistic quest to perfect every set, shot, part, and line of dialogue. Sometimes you just have to grab your camera and start shooting. Odyssey shows us you can have your cake and eat it too.

Which, to me at least, is illuminating. I don't give a whole lot of thought to what this blog is "about." It tends to be "about" whatever dang fool thing popped into my head most recently. So the suggestion that there is, in fact, something resembling topical coherence in there--well, it's interesting to me, at least.

But the point of the Superior Scribbler award is that those who receive it get to pass it on to five other blogs who they think deserve it. I happen (as others have noted) to think that there are a lot more than five blogs out there that count as "exceptional," since I read a lot more than five. On the other hand, a lot of those are gaming blogs, and considering the speed this thing is already sweeping through the game blog-o-sphere, most of the good ones should get picked up by someone. So I figured I'd pick out the five best blogs that aren't part of our little cross-linked universe that still ought to have some interest to gaming folks.

Fraggmented: John Seavey writes about a lot of things, most of them geeky. Of particular interest to me is his series on storytelling engines--their creation and maintenance, as well as the various things that can go wrong with them. He starts out mostly writing about comics, but has since expanded to just about everything; movies, TV shows, books, you name it. Even beyond the purely academic (or even writerly) interest I'd have in such a topic, there's a lot of points to consider when setting up a campaign, since those are often built on long term story-generating status quo's themselves.

Square Mans: Mathew Colville is another eclectic blogger -- but he does a fair amount about gaming, of both the tabletop and digital varieties. And he doesn't just write about them--he analyzes them, writing long, intellectual posts whose intensity just about makes up for their infrequence.

I Waste the Buddha With My Crossbow: Dr. Rotwang writes about GMing! And the eighties! He's the guy who got me in to Traveller, and he writes a lot about not taking this GMing stuff so dang seriously, which is a good antidote for the kind of compulsive perfectionism all those GMing advice websites, great as they are, can engender. I know I've kind of broken my "no blogs that other people I read will probably hit" rule, but dang it, this was one of the very first blogs I started reading back when I first started getting into this crazy sub-hobby, and it's great.

Zompist's E-Z rant page: Now, what's really amazing is Mark Rosenfelder's main website, where Virtual Verduria and The Language Construction Kit reside, but it's not a blog, and his rant page is pretty spiffy too. He's a conlanger and world-builder par excellence, so there's a fair amount of advice and information regarding those two topics. No comments allowed, sadly, but he does write about economics and politics so it's probably just as well.

A Villain's Life: Not in any way gaming related (unless you're running a superhero game, I guess) Doctor Cataclysm's personal weblog is just fun. Cataclysm makes for an entertaining narrator, and where else are you going to see catfish men trying to destroy the earth with crystal resonance and an android from the future with a baked goods subroutine gone awry.

And, finally, the rules:

• Each Superior Scribbler must in turn pass The Award on to 5 most-deserving Bloggy Friends.
  
• Each Superior Scribbler must link to the author & the name of the blog from whom he/she has received The Award.
  
• Each Superior Scribbler must display The Award on his/her blog, and link to This Post, which explains The Award.
  
• Each Blogger who wins The Superior Scribbler Award must visit this post and add his/her name to the Mr. Linky List. That way, we'll be able to keep up-to-date on everyone who receives This Prestigious Honor!
  
• Each Superior Scribbler must post these rules on his/her blog.
  

Why I Keep Geeking Out About A Villain's Life

Man, I already thought A Villain's Life was cool, and sort of sweet, but now I care. Doctor Cataclysm, please be okay!

Yeah, I'm still geeking out about it. It'll pass. In the mean time, a small insight:

Most media has a fairly clear division between real/non-real. Movies have a screen, books have their pages. Even if there's a framing device, in most cases it's still pretty easy to tell, just from the format, that it's fiction. Yes, that book may claim to be a journal, but its still professionally printed with the publishers name in the front.

This kind of fiction, this fictional blogging, has a little less of that. It's still obviously fictional--there are no superheroes, no superpowers, no weather machines. But that's only discernable from the content.

In form, this is just another blog. It's framing device is built into the media itself. I tend to dislike frames in books, just because they're not. You can tell, very easily, that the frame is also false, so it tends to interfere with my suspension of disbelief. Your mileage may vary.

But this is cool. I get information about Doctor Cataclysm in exactly the way I would if he was real. 'tis a trick, rather like a well done game story, that allows for stronger audience/character attachement.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Literary Pretensions: Iron Man

Iron Man is about technology. In the movie, he's also very specifically about the corporatization of technology, and the responsibility creators have over their creations. But he also represents a general conversation about the role and effects of technology.

In Iron Man, technology has a dark side. In the movie, Tony Stark creates the suit, but he also creates the villains he uses it to battle. And in the comics, Iron Man's suit has, on occasion, become a villain in its own right.

But Iron Man is a superhero. He's technology personified, and, for the most part, he's a force for good. The wrongs he has done, even inadvertently, he works to right. Technology is a powerful tool in that fight, and he has a unique control over it.

Which is at the heart of the Iron Man concept. How do we control technology? In what ways does it affect us? Tony Stark has a remarkable talent, but he simultaneously depends on technology to survive. His injury was inflicted by a man-made weapon, but another device keeps it from killing him. He uses technology to do good, but the evil he fights is often similarly empowered.

And, of course, it's not just shrapnel in his leg or his liver or something. It's his heart that has shrapnel and a magnet in it, magnifying its importance in both physical and metaphorical terms.

"Technology" isn't the only thing that Iron Man is about. And being "about" things isn't the most important thing about Iron Man--the most important thing is smashing bad guys with fancy gadgets.

But what he's about is important. Superheroes, and other culturally important stories, give us a window into our culture's collective unconscious.

Technology is very much on our minds.

Random Thoughts on Iron Man

I loved Iron Man. Awesome movie. Shame I didn't get a chance to write about it until now, but thems the breaks.

I wasn't expecting it to be so funny. It works. It would have been interesting if they'd put one of those testing videos Tony Stark took on YouTube, but it obviously wasn't necessary.

I love tech-y, shiny, robot type stuff. I knew the movie had the suit in it, but then it turns out to have even more robot awesome, and I am officially happy.

I was impressed by the psychology of the movie. I think this movie has the most coherent explanation for why its superhero became what he is, out of all of them that have come out so far.

And his relationship with Pepper Pots seemed more human than the sort of "no, I can't love you, it's too dangerous" business most superheroes satsify themselves with. I mean, it had that, but it had a lot more than that--we work together and depend on each other but I'm desperately afraid of commitment, etc. Standard pieces for relationship movies, but stretching the superhero box a bit.

And--this is a personal thing, not analysis--I liked Tony Stark. A lot more than I like, say, Peter Parker, or Bruce Wayne. I sympathize with Peter, and Spiderman, and I accept Bruce Wayne as necessary. But I don't even particularly like Batman, as a person, I just think he's cool.

I hadn't realized that, until I saw Iron Man. It made him a likable guy. A messed up guy, but in an understandable way. And, in the end, a mostly decent guy.

Doctor Cataclysm

I mentioned Doctor Cataclysm, and his blog A Villain's Life, in sort of an offhand way, but it really deserves a full, proper post. If you haven't read it, go read it now, so far it's very short. (I further recommend that you add it to your feed, and if you don't have a feed, to get one, but now we're shading into irrelevancy.)

I'm really quite taken with it. I have a mild obsession with non-standard storytelling, and I've been interested in the idea of fictional blogging for a while. And, of course, superheroes are cool. Supervillains even more so--especially mad scientists.

That's all certainly part of it. But Doctor Cataclysm himself is really quite charming. He's a super villain, but he's not psychotic. When he's not engaging in (excellent) supervillainy, he occasionally stops muggers, and worries about being "too much of a moocher." The villainy is entertaining, but it seems like a cross between a job and a hobby, (love your work, I guess) and less like destroy-the-world craziness.

Which is good. It's relatable. And, at times, very sweet. (Though I recommend running through the previous posts before hitting that last.)

My favorite thing about this is that it's not fiction in blog form. It is, in fact, a fictional blog. In addition to recounting his villainy, he blogs about movies, politics, and YouTube videos. The politics and the videos are fictional, which is probably necessary, (though the videos might make an interesting project) but the movies are real, which is excellent.

The only trouble is that there's not very much of it, yet. Which is great for me, and you, and everyone getting into it right now, because there's not much to get into before we're up to speed. But I sure hope it keeps up, at the same level of quality, because it sure is a lot of fun.

(I can think of one other nitpick--the most generic of the generic blog templates. But in some ways, that adds to its charm, and I can't fault a brand new blog for not having figured out it's look yet. I still haven't really figured out mine.)

Oh, and a thank you to Neitherworld Stories, for linking to A Villain's Life in the first place. From there I have also learned of Velvet Marauder, but haven't yet had quite the chunk of time I'd like to get through it.

Superheroes & Sorcerers

Someday, I need to run a campaign that actually uses these ideas. Or just get a copy of Mutants and Masterminds.

Though I think there is something to the "Dungeons and Dragons rules, superhero attitude" idea. This may be something to try with The Book of Nine Swords.

Or--actually--with Iron Heroes. Though I have a suspicion that the two systems may work fairly well together. Might take a bit of tweaking.

I wrote those notes during the two weeks I thought Exalted was "totally awesome." And the six months when I accosted people with Batman factoids on an hourly basis. Can you tell?

You Can Hear The Gears Screech

None of the regular crowd is going to get any of this, and even if I explained I doubt they'd care, but it's all been rattling around in my head for a while, so, here goes:

Isn't the song "Iron Man" just perfect for Iron Man? Particularly as of Civil War, but I hear tell he's still just as whacked out.

While we're on the topic: the new Ultron. I know the justification is "Frank Cho likes to draw hot women," and allegedly doesn't like to draw Iron Man, but I have to wonder how Bendis got from there to something so mind-boggling bizarre. On multiple levels. (Maybe it's not weird in the comic? Maybe it's just my interpretation of the comic, second-hand?)

It is yet another situation explained by yelling "NANITES!" This makes me happy.

Iron Man is cool. Have I mentioned that? (Never read any of his comics. Looking forward to the movie.) Not personally, but conceptually. (I wonder, is it bad that I think of him as "like Batman, but with SCIENCE!" And less ethics. Which is frightening. Really frightening.) The heart thing is . . . pondersome. Hrmm.

Campaign Planning

The campaign's wrapping up, so that means I need to start thinking about the next one.

I won't actually need to have a campaign ready for at least another couple of months, maybe more. I don't plan on doing another one this summer, and it may take some time after that to get a group together. There's always the possibility of an internet campaign, but that brings up its own set of considerations.

Like how I want to run a supers campaign, and no one in the current group is really into that. I, of course, think it's just because they're not giving it a chance; if they'd just try it, they'd see how awesome superheroes are. But if they're not interested, they're not interested, and it'd be a lot less hassle to find some people who are interested in supers and teach them roleplaying games. Preferably something freewheeling and snappy, like what I've heard Truth and Justice is like, because that's how superpowers are handled in the comics books. It's not a science, it's "wouldn't it be awesome if?" I could, I suppose, use Mutants and Masterminds, which might be easier to convince people to play as it's mostly d20, but it just isn't quite as intriguing.

I don't really want to run Arcana Evolved or Dungeons and Dragons again. Not for a while. I may feel different after the GURPS campaign, but for now I want to get away from the combat, the number crunching, and especially the magic. If I do end up running a d20 campaign, it'll be either Iron Heroes or d20 Modern. Both mean no magic to deal with, and both reduce the number crunching. (Iron Heroes has nifty villain classes; Modern has zillions of pre-made stat blocks.)

Of course, seeing as I mostly play D&D, and that's what I have books for, my planning tends to run along those lines. Superhero stuff is different, of course, but when I think fantasy I tend to think, "How would this work with D&D?" (Or Arcana Evolved, or Iron Heroes.) So I have a couple of potential campaigns that I've developed for D&D. I could go back, take the concepts, and rework them for another system, but that just seems like unnecessary work. One revolves around an arcane aristocracy and the infernal and celestial powers meddling with it, drawing mostly on Girl Genius and Dune. The other has less material for it, but it's mostly my latest version of this ancient kingdoms in the desert idea I've always liked, built around Iron Heroes. And that wacky-crazy megadungeon I want to do.

Then there's Eberron. Which I'd really rather play than DM. (There aren't many things that fall in this category, but they are there.) Elves in Eberron really rock, and, of course, there's the warforged. Unfortunately, I often get frustrated playing, because there's an element of "that's not how I would do that."

Probably when it comes time to actual run a game, I'll have some completely different idea of what I want to do, based on whatever weird obsession I've just developed.

That's Not How Money Works

Apparently, Fox thinks they're allowed to deface U.S. currency for profit.

I know a bit about currency. Part of my elementary education. Mostly what I remember is, "Money is fancy! Don't mess with it! The Secret Service will get you!"

I don't recall, "Unless you have a really good reason! Like money!"

Mostly, I like how they didn't intend to “suggest that there was any approval from the U.S. Mint or the U.S. Government.” That's what money means: the U.S. Government has approved this metal. They say it's worth something. Otherwise, it's not money. If something is on money, and it still functions as money, that literally means, "the government is cool with this."

Note that the Franklin Mint is a private company--that's not entirely clear in the article linked. New York Times has a better article (meaning: not cribbed from the AP) but you have to sign up for a free account.

Strangely Attractive

This is the geekiest, and the most frightening, thing I've seen all week. Batman. LEGO. LEGO Batman. Naturally, Nightwing has truly strange hair.



There are plans for a video game.

Webcomics You Should Read

Scary Go Round
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: This is a good comic. Very funny. Lots of weirdness. (Not as much mad science as it used to have, sadly.)

XKCD
You're probably already reading this, but if you aren't (and you like this blog) you probably should be. (If you hate this blog, I'm not going to be much help.) It has a lot of jokes that I don't understand, because they involve advanced math, but the jokes that I do understand are unbelievably funny.

Order of the Stick
Again, you're probably already reading this. If you aren't, you should start soon, or there is no hope for you or the human race. I'm serious. This is a really, really good comic. Lots of Dungeons and Dragons jokes but, hey, another reason for people to play D&D.

Narbonic
This one's actually over, but they're re-releasing it, with commentary, one strip a day, so it's going to be around for another six years. However, you should read the whole strip plain first, because otherwise, you're quickly going to learn a lot of major plot points. Plot points the comic builds up to over years of strips. Needless to say, this is a really awesome comic. Mad scientists are always awesome.

Looking For Group
Another one I've mentioned before. It's only gotten more awesome.

Special School
This one's maybe not quite as good as the others, but it's good and getting better. (And, seriously, "not as good as the Order of the Stick" almost doesn't count as information.) It's about superheroes. It references the evil overlord list. In a word, awesome.

Thoughts on Superheroes

I'm thinking about building a superhero universe. Not like I don't already have enough going on, but I'd mostly be working on it in art class. Which has been going weirdly well this year. It's nice to have one area of my life where I have just flat out, easily measured improvement. (Hey, that figure doesn't look nearly as wonky as those older ones.)

I like superheroes. Hate the format they're published in, but I like the concept.

I hate the format for a lot of reasons, but the basic reason is the bizarre time dilation that it produces. Time advances in some ways but not in others. Or it advances at a different speed. You end up with series of issues that cover maybe a couple of weeks of time, but take years to publish. Technology and current events advance faster than plot. Some characters age, some don't, and it causes weird things to happen to their relationships.

But I like superheroes. I like superpowers. They have interesting metaphorical implications; they have interesting "hit you in the face!" implications.

An Air of Desperation

I'm not sure what to say.

One wonders what Superboy looks like from other angles.

Superwoman looks awesome.