Archives for April 2014

Hey! Remember how last week we were discussing mixing together my love of games and my love of writing to create some side projects? Immediately after writing that post, I remembered “Hey, didn’t I buy a pen and paper RPG rulebook at PAX I could use for this…?”

Several days of hard work and 18,000 words later and we’ve got City of Angles: A Fate Core Campaign Setting.

Even if you don’t do RPGs, this document acts as a fun and interesting overview of the entire story series, with more details about the locales and mechanics and doings and goings-on. It has collapsable hidden spoiler sections, so if you haven’t caught up on the stories, you won’t ruin anything. It’s even got tables where you roll 1d20 to see what awful things you find in the Sideways!

I’m very curious to see if anybody will actually run a game with this. If you do, I’d LOVE details on how it goes. Remember, this is essentially fanfic; you can fiddle with the universe all you like, recast your players as the lucid protagonists, anything. Go nuts with it. I’m not gonna stop you from violating my precious, precious *snrk* canon.

This week you get the first half of the campaign book, next week you’ll get the rest… which includes notes on how to represent metadream connections with dice and stats. Neat stuff.

It does mean we’re delaying the next actual story chapter, //021, until May 10th (and possibly one week later) but since I have a spot of writer’s block AND I’m leaving for a week’s vacation soon, honestly, having something up else in the meanwhile is a good thing. Gives me breathing room. I appreciate your patience here and aim to keep you plenty entertained while I hack my way through the jungle of tangled plot threads.

So, whaddya think?

So this week, I’ve got the last scenes of //020 for you. Quite a few of them, sort of a week-and-a-half sized update.

The reason for the weird timing lately? As mentioned before I attended PAX East. My peeps, my culture. Which is admittedly a bit odd since I’m not actually very good at video games and I don’t PLAY a wide variety of them. (I OWN a wide variety of them, but that’s because I have Steam installed. Anybody else who has Steam installed is acutely aware of this issue and it needs no further explanation.)

Even if I’m terrible at actual games where I get easily overwhelmed with too much information too quickly… I love the IDEA of games. I grew up with them and they’ll always be there. I love gaming culture, with its the humor and dry wit. I love the gaming industry, and read news blogs routinely. I love the spark of creativity that’s coming out of the indie scene.

I saw some amazing stuff at PAX, which has been consumed whole by the indie scene thanks to the Indie Megabooth and a wide variety of panels on all sorts of subjects. For instance, I highly encourage you to check out Let’s Quip, an indie game about arguing on the internet for points. (Plz install Unity3D Web Player before proceeding. Although a Facebook-free iOS version is forthcoming, too.)

Often, I’ve pondered somehow worming my way into that mess and making games my path in life. (Although “writer” is the least desired role for a game developer, it seems, with far more need for artists and programmers and even sound guys in comparison.) But I’ve done the one-man-band developer schtick before, back in the Neverwinter Nights days, and after five years of that I burned out hard; it’s tough going. On top of that I lost about 75% of the audience that I’d built up from successes with Sailor Nothing and Unreal Estate by ignoring my writing for so long. Ouch.

So, for now, I’m content to focus on my novels and simply enjoy gaming as a side hobby rather than an active participant.

Although…

Although I’ve pondered doing a visual novel or a Minecraft map or some sort of tie-in that supports my writing. It’d be a hell of a time commitment, and I’d need resources like art that I do not in fact have, but it could be an interesting experiment. So, I turn this over to you. Would you be interested? Before you blurt out “YES” because it’s an easy affirmation to make, consider it might slow down the writing process, or require you to install software, or any number of tradeoffs. Is it worth the price? Would you go with me on that journey? Or are you content and happy with what you have? Let me know.

Regardless, for those of you reading these words now — as I’ve said in the past — you’ve gone down the rabbit hole deep enough to get to this level of fandom. And for that, I thank you, and am hopeful for your continuing support. Remember, take a gander at //020 too, and let me know what you think there.

Let’s talk about travel and timing. This year the way things shook out, I’ve got two vacation-type outings to deal with… PAX East which is coming next weekend, and a family trip to Disneyworld which is coming up mid-May. The Disney trip won’t interfere with updates too much due to the way the flights are timed; one update will go live in the evening instead of the morning, but that’s it.

But the PAX trip definitely monkeywrenches things. That, in combination with having weirdly spaced natural section breaks in this chapter, is like an infinite wrench of monkeys. So, here’s my plan.

• Today, you’re getting a slightly larger than usual update in the form of the first scenes of //020: Lost Girl.
• This THURSDAY, April 10th, I’ll have a small update with a few additional scenes for you.
• Nothing goes up Saturday April 12th except a bunch of Tweets from me about PAX, odds are.
• The story concludes on Saturday April 19th with another very large update.

And after that… I’m out of writing buffer. //021 is a huge story, the pivot around which the book rotates, because it marks the point where we fight back. So, we MIGHT need an empty week after this one’s done for my writing to catch up with my posting.

I’ve been very good about sticking to my schedule for some time now, so thanks for your patience as we wobble a bit. Hopefully I’ll come back from my vacations refreshed and ready to roll. Lord knows I need some refreshing. It’s been a strange bunch of weeks and I am ready for them to end.

So, read up, enjoy, and let me know what you think. If you’d like to track the many wondrous things I’m seeing at PAX, you can follow me on Twitter. I may do a wrapup blogpost after returning if I have something particularly insightful to add.