I recently did an interview with the folks at the Darker Days and Darkling podcasts; you can listen to it here.
Topics of discussion include D&D, World of Darkness, fiction writing (both past and future), and appliances.
My thanks to everyone involved for the invitation and opportunity. And to you guys for sitting through it. 😉
It may be the sleepiness talking, but I’m suddenly feeling the urge to run a Dark Sun campaign in which the PCs are templars and other servants of one of the Sorcerer Kings, tasked with keeping the peace and investigating crimes in their home city-state.
And for whom failure to close a case is potentially punishable by death, either in the arena or as sacrifice.
I shall put it in the stack with the other 24,917 campaigns I want to run "at some point."
I’ve been seeing a certain phrase used online a lot lately, and it bugs me.
People are saying "Oh, I read the audio version of [Book Title]."
No, you didn’t. You listened to it. You didn’t read it.
There’s nothing wrong with listening to an audio book; I’m not denigrating that at all. But use the proper verb. You didn’t "read" an audio book, any more than you "heard" a printed book, or "watched" a song on the radio.
Tonight, we made characters for, and played our first session of, a new Solomon Kane RPG campaign. (It’s a "Savage Worlds" game.)
This is my first experience with the Savage Worlds system. With the exception of a recent three-session playtest of a Trail of Cthulhu supplement, and a single session of Mummy: the Resurrection at GenCon, this is also the first time I’ve played an RPG that wasn’t D&D in about eight years.
After character creation, we only got about an hour of playing in, so I’m not prepared to comment on the system just yet. But I think it’s going to be a great campaign. Everyone seems to have a grasp of, and appreciation for, the source material. We’re focusing on genre and capturing the feel of Howard’s Kane stories (minus the overt racism) rather than historical accuracy.
My character? Rukma Kadam, an Indian mystic. He was once part of a cult who called upon Ravanna and had congress with rakshasa (Indian demons), setting them against their enemies. By the time everything went wrong (as of course it would), and the demons turned on their own community, it was too late for Rukma to do anything about them. The rakshasa and the bulk of the cult was eventually defeated by a "wandering Puritan swordsman" whose name Rukma never heard. (Cough, cough.) Since then, Rukma has wandered Europe and Asia, seeking out and destroying supernatural evil as a means of karmic atonement for his prior actions. He is currently traveling as the manservant/bodyguard of a woman named Isabella (my wife’s character), as this allows him free passage in parts of Europe where he would otherwise not be welcome.
It’ll be interesting to see how he interacts with the French musketeer and the Jesuit priest who are the other two PCs in the campaign. And for all that I’ve only played him for an hour so far, I’m loving this character. In point of fact, I think I may see his transformation from an RPG character to a short story protagonist somewhere in the future…
My only complaint is that we’re only meeting biweekly, so I have to wait fourteen days to play again. 😛
Today was apparently Phil Athans’ last day at Wizards of the Coast.
For those who don’t know, Phil has been part of their fiction department since the TSR days, and has been in charge of that department for several years now. I’ve had several opportunities to sit down and talk with him, and I’ve worked for him–albeit at several levels of remove–on a couple of different projects. Of biggest impact to me personally, however, was the fact that Phil was the guy who decided to offer me the opportunity to kick off the new Planeswalker line, and thus gave me the opportunity to write Agents of Artifice.
I had nothing currently lined up with WotC, in terms of fiction, but I was looking forward to working with him again at some point in the future. I’m disappointed to know that won’t be happening–unless he finds a job at another sci-fi/fantasy publisher, of course, and I certainly hope that he does–and also disappointed at whoever made the decision to let him go. The fiction department at WotC won’t ever be the same without him.
Thank you, Phil–for all the work you put into the books, and for the opportunities you gave me. I hope you find yourself something even better.
Got a new Suvudu column up, in which I ruminate about the nature of religion in your average fantasy novel.
