Again, With the Excellent Company!

I’m good enough!

Hey! Check it out! I’m in excellent company again!

At KublaCon out in California, they give awards for the best of several types of games. One of the categories is “RPG/LRPG: Best Game That Doesn’t Include Elves or Vampires” and I find Shock: just under Chad Underkoffler’s Zorcerer of Zo and Jason Morningstar’s The Shab-al-Hiri Roach. I can’t tell if I’m second runner up or if we’re tied, but I’m not contradicting that roach. Last time I did, it told me to do something frightfully shameful.

There’s nothing saying that there couldn’t be elves or vampires in Shock: of course. But I won’t tell if you won’t. And it looks like Jason’s pointed out the same thing.

In any event, I’m happy to be on the same page as these guys.

Shock: Strikes Again

Shock: Strikes Again

 Shock: Social Science Fiction has landed again at Indie Press Revolution. It looks like my printer woes are ended for the time being, Publisher’s Graphics having swooped in and done a good job for a good price.

The new matte laminate is very nice to touch and the illustrations look good. Let’s hope they don’t get bought by Alphagraphics.

(The image at the top of a post is modified from a picture by Kane Quinnel of lightning hitting his house out of a clear sky.)

Shock: Ubiquitous Surveillance. Issue: Democide

Bir Maza, a burned town in northern Darfur.

There’s a website called Eyes on Darfur . In it, you can see satellite photographs of villages that have literally been destroyed by fighting there.

Let’s think about that for a moment. The core defense of the Government of Sudan has been “Nuh-uh!” for years. They’ve kept away UN observers and peacekeepers on the grounds that nothing’s going on. But the satellites fly overhead every few minutes. They see the smoke, they see the fire, and they see anything 2 meters wide and bigger. Like, say a Land Cruiser with machine guns mounted in the back.

Now, let’s consider using Shock: for something like this. Let’s talk about using Satellite photos or Google Earth as a Shock. Or the Space Station. Or camera phones. This might be a really interesting way to play. It loses the level of abstraction that, say, “Furries” and “Interstellar travel” give you, but it might gain some meat from familiarity.

Anyone who wants to, come over. We’ll play like this and see how it goes.

Rollin’ Rollin’ Rollin’

Vincent and Joshua clean a chain

Vincent and I spent last Saturday building him a bike.

Originally, the bike was a $20 yard sale Mongoose, purchased on Martha’s Vineyard and mostly left outside since, that I’d taken apart to see all the parts that I was usually afraid to take apart. Then Vincent needed a bike. So back together it went!

Running cables on Vincent’s new bike.

He bought a new saddle (the old one was eaten by mice) and new cables (eaten by rust) and some paint for the front fork (which would eventually be eaten by rust) and we set about assembling the thing. We had a ball.

Vincent is so badass!

I also haven’t taken pics of my bike, so here are some pics of that, too. It’s a Trek 6500 with Bontrager Road Warrior road slicks, some cheapo aero bars and an adjustable stem. I’d like to put more of a front mudguard on it and figure out a way to tighten the front suspension up some more.

Joshua’s bike.

The handlebars are hard to understand. Here’s a detail:

Joshua’s handlebars.

The difference in speed with the aero bars is really interesting. Not only do I get to duck out of the wind, but it feels like I can push really hard on the pedals. Someday soon I’ll get a computer and see how much of that it imaginary.

(Thanks to Carrie, who took the pics with me in them!)

Playcollective: Collecting Play Since 2007

The Playcollective. Play, Together.

Emily Care Boss (Breaking the Ice), Tony Lower-Basch (Capes), Vincent Baker (Dogs in the Vineyard), Judd Karlman (Dictionary of Mu), Malcolm Craig (Cold City), and I (Underpants for Rude-Looking Vegetables) have joined together to form some sort of Voltron where we make a giant game designer who combines only at the last moment to defeat the space monster when we could have joined at the beginning and won more easily. Dig the Playcollective site! We’ll be updating frequently.

End

Believe it or not, it was a story with great emotional weight.

This last weekend, I went to Triangle, VA to go to Camp Nerdly, a gathering for self-deprecating awesome people. I played a bunch of games and all were good. But I’m looking for something when I go to Nerdly or a convention: I’m looking for a real experience, where I learn about myself and the people around me, where we make some really affecting fiction. This last weekend, that game was not either of the fun Shock: games I played, nor was it the game of Dogs in the Vineyard that I ran (the bloodiest one I’ve ever seen), but, unspurprisingly, a game of PTA.

It was called End and it was about trying to find meaning and human connection in a literally disposable world, where sex is used to control and maintain the status quo and never for love of any sort.

Remi Treuer Produced and I (Solin Trrur) played with Tony Lauer-Basch (Melody), Nick Novitski (Donnie), Krista Evanouskas (Kandra), and Travis Farber (Julien). Remi’s started an AP thread over here. It’s sexually explicit, but if you’re reading my blog regularly, you’re not put off by the F-word.

(The picture at the top of the post was cropped from one that came up in a Google search for “awkward sex”. I chose it for the detached expression on her face that I saw a lot during End.)