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WIP-it Wednesday: June 21st, 2017

21 Wednesday Jun 2017

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Time for a new weekly writer’s roundup of my works-in-progress and those ready to read!

It’s been a packed week.

Leading up to it, my old cat became very sick and then passed away. And prior and post to that sad event I had bookended weekends that required me to work on my house and it’s grounds. All of this prevented me from putting as much effort as I wanted into preparing the sixteen hours of roleplaying games that I’ll be running at this year’s PortCon, which starts Thursday.

It shoved the majority of what needed to be done all into the last weekend before the con. Most of my fellow writers out there should know that means it was deadline and crunch time. I tapped my reserves and chugged caffeine like Popeye downs spinach. And, by gum, even though that last weekend wasn’t enough to get it all finished… I pounded out and completed the last two games this Monday and Tuesday!

Aside from printing the color handouts Thursday morning, the games are ready with a day to spare.

However, this victory came at the expense of the time I usually devote to maintaining my social media thoughtfully, and other stuff… like sleeping. ;-) I apologize if my presence has been lacking, or my posting slapdash. Starting next week, I hope to not only return to working on my novel, but also to getting the blog back on track and regular again.

As I write this, I’m exhausted. This was a lot of effort compressed into a small amount of time while I was also working and commuting to a full-time day-job. But now I’ve met this part of my responsibilities, and once my work is done today, I even have an evening to rest-up with before my vacation and the convention starts.

So I hope you can forgive me if I cut this short, and bid you adieu. I’m going to have fun over the next four days, and you’ll hear all about it next week. :-)

Alright, time for me to stop blogging and get back to writing some more fiction! a good night’s rest! Take care!

WIP-it Wednesday: June 7th, 2017

07 Wednesday Jun 2017

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Time for a new weekly writer’s roundup of my works-in-progress and those ready to read!

As I mentioned in my last update, the month of June in general will find me shifting my focus away from Vivian’s Last Cigarette for the next few weeks. Instead, I’m working on and finishing the RPG sessions I’ll be running for PortCon, which takes place from June 22nd to the 25th.

It is creative work, not unlike assembling ideas for a story outlines. But thereafter, crafting role-playing sessions and scenarios is different than settling down and writing fiction. Role-play is collaborative storytelling. Unlike a you-and-your-story situation, you need to leave a lot open in the scenario to allow the other people playing to craft the unfolding tale with you.

You’ve got to make your players active participants, because if they are instead passive observers the game isn’t going to be very fun. If folks want a passive entertainment experience, a good book, movie or something similar will whip the pants off of me standing around and acting out a story from start to finish for several hours.

Most RPG players are looking for that active experience. The key thing about RPG game mastering is to give it to them, but that can be harder than you think.

As a writer, I personally LOVE telling stories. I start thinking about characters and have a blast working out their backgrounds and personalities. Then I start envisioning story scenarios –Who’s going to do this and when, and how antagonist X will react and how events are impacted from there– This is a great strength for me to have as a writer, but as Game Master it’s a serious flaw: It makes it easy for me to have tons of preconceived assumptions and desires about how a game will play out, and how its players will act using the characters I have worked hard to craft and embellish for them.

As you can imagine, having a mindset like that doesn’t set-up an experience that is likely to be a satisfying role-playing for the players. With everything pre-plotted in my brain, they feel railroaded and like their choices and input doesn’t matter to the ultimate outcome of the game’s story.

Three out of the four games I ran at last year’s PortCon featured characters I’d spent many tens of hours envisioning and writing. I wrote over 40,000 words of material for the con, most of that for player handouts with detailed character rundowns. However, that work was a wasted effort because it was vastly ignored.

The games were still fun all the same, because I designed them as open-ended and without preconceived conclusions. I did that as a safeguard, being conscious of my plotting tendencies, and I’m so glad that I did. Doing that salvaged those situations quite well combined with a positive mindset.

The one game where I let the players generate their own characters with a quick system turned out to be the best. All I did for my part was run the rest off a few pages of essential notes and lots of improvisation. I’d done it that way only because I was running low on time and couldn’t finish what I had planned initially… but it taught me a valuable lesson.

Players generating their own characters is defiantly the best way to get them invested in in a game. It also prevents me from making assumptions about how the characters will act or react to events… because I have no idea who the characters will be. ;-)

The downside is that this can eat-up valuable time when you only have four hours to play. Depending on the game, character creation can be lengthy and complicated. Fortunately, I’m using the Five by Five rules system for all my games this year. It’s a simple, versatile and understandable system that can be taught with 5 – 10 minutes. In it, characters only consist of five “traits” and one “trouble trait” that’s used as a roleplay aid. I have found 5×5 perfectly suited to the “pick-up” style of play found at PortCon, where players of all skill levels might be found at my table.

However, even simple and quick systems can get bogged down if the players don’t know what they want to play. In addition, players often don’t have a good grasp before the game starts of what character traits will be fun and useful in the scenario. This can result in characters that don’t get to do much, like a scuba expert in a desert based adventure. It can also create unbalanced parties with a massive excess of ability in one area (making some challenges too easy), and a great or total deficit in another (making other challenges nigh-impossible).

So this year what I’ve done in all my games is to let the players select their characters from a pool of partially completed ones:

Each character has an illustration to give a player an at-a-glance impression of what they could be like. In addition, in most of the games I have 1 to 3 of the five character traits pre-selected as well. These pre-selected traits are useful to the scenario I’m going to run, thus ensuring that some basics needed for the game will be in the group of players.

Unchosen trait slots get to be selected by the player as electives, off a chart of options that is unique to each game. This allows some player customization, enforces setting flavor, and ensures trait usefulness. Each individual trait is also removed from the available selection pool as they are chosen, ensuring each character has a unique set of abilities.

The one exception to this is my Godzilla: Invasion of Monsters game. In that scenario, ALL of the character’s traits are electives chosen by the players, allowing total customization… from a variety of useful traits.

No specific background or roleplaying guidelines are presented for any characters in the games. I leave those for the players to dream up in play, and they get a head start on that by selecting a role-play related “trouble trait” from a list much as their other elective traits were chosen.

As a game master, my job is to keep the story moving, judge rules, describe events, and portray every character that isn’t controlled by a player. And I’ve found that as my players are given more freedom to tell and influence the story, I am freed as well. Instead of making the game “just so”, I instead can focus on my antagonists acting appropriately for their goals and knowledge. I improvise and let them react to the world the players are influencing. I can focus on making every member of my supporting cast of non-player characters being memorable, and simply having as much fun as the players are.

I’m a reformed, formerly bad, game master now. It just took me realizing that if I wanted to make a game “just so”… I needed to write it as a story instead. ;-)

Alright, time for me to stop blogging and get back to writing some more fiction! RPGs! Take care!

WIP-it Wednesday: May 3rd, 2017

03 Wednesday May 2017

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Time for a new weekly writer’s roundup of my works-in-progress and those ready to read!

Not much movement on the novel to report this week. I edited the 1,700 words I wrote on Vivian’s last weekend, and then added about 500 more to get the fourth chapter to the point of introducing a new character.

This character will be the first (non-animal) changeling the reader encounters that isn’t an orc. Although Cricket is only present in chapters four and five, she’s being inserted into the book in revision, so I think it is well worth my effort to weave her in aiming to make her presence as seamless as possible. Exploring options on how to do that siphoned writing time, but it was worth it.

Beyond that, Lauren has started her annotation of the new chapter three. She hasn’t been able to finish it yet, but as I’m still buried under the need to write new chapters, I’m content to wait for her feedback while I dig myself out. :-)

And as far as the novel goes, that’s it. Why so little progress? My short answer is… Side Quests.

My creative focus over the weekend became divided between several other projects I’m involved in. However, unlike the situation a couple weeks ago, these are creative projects I’m involved with willingly. So devoting time to them isn’t unsatisfying, even if they do sap momentum away from getting my book done.

The biggest of these side quests involved the PortCon convention where I’m running 16 hours of tabletop role-playing games from June 22nd to the 25th. I’m authoring all of the sessions myself, using the Five by Five rules system. Unfortunately, the unexpected task of adding new chapters to the book has lead me to ignore my responsibility to finish getting them ready, even after beginning with a good start on them early in the year.

Things came to a head Saturday, when a plan to run a multi-game master mega game was abandoned. This created a scheduling gap, and necessitated that I create an additional RPG session to fill a 6 to 10pm slot.

From scratch.

And get it submitted in five hours’ time.

Fortunately, I had a prior idea that I’d thought-up as a contingency plan… the efforts to make the mega-game a reality were always lackluster, and I’d lost confidence that it would happen. So I fleshed out my notes, submitted my pitch, and low-and-behold The Great Dragon Escape is now on the convention docket! :-)

The rush to get that done illuminated my need to get these games ready. A big part of that is providing my wife with the info she needs to design the handout materials for the sessions, which we hadn’t done. It’s always fun to collaborate with Kim, and before I knew it most of my weekend was gone after we were done brainstorming.

However, a lot of my anxiety about being unprepared for the con was gone too, even though I’ll need to devote a good block of man-hours to be finally finished making the games.

And that’s the biggest reason why work on the novel was in a low gear this week. Barring any surprises, next weekend I hope to focus on writing the book exclusively and get back up to speed.

So what is the final lineup of games I’m running at PortCon this year, you may ask? Read on…

Toys Against Darkness

You were won. All of you were. Taken off the shelf behind the crooked carnival game where you have sat for so very, very long. But even as you are given to an overjoyed child, you can feel HIM watching. Held in the car by sleepy hands, you and your fellow teddy bears from the stall know that HE is coming to claim HIS prize tomorrow night. He always does: You’ve all witnessed it powerless and inanimate before. But now you have been given the duty to protect your children. You know what is at stake. And when HE comes tomorrow at midnight, you MUST find a way to STOP HIM FOREVER!

Chaos at Camp Changeling

August 11th, 1989, 9:30 pm: Almost three years after “The Change” began, a group of young teen “changelings” trek through the moonlit woods near Moosehead Lake, Maine. Variously labeled as elves, dwarves, orcs or goblins, they’re an oddball group. Having snuck away from the Camp Changeling summer event for “special” youth, they approach a supposedly haunted cabin they’ve been dared to spend the night at. Their plans for the evening include junk food and an all-night game of D&D… But before dawn, they’ll find out that not all monsters are imaginary.

NOTE: Chaos at Camp Changeling is set in the same universe as my novel Vivian’s Last Cigarette. ;-) None of the characters in the book are present in the adventure, but there is some crossover in terms of themes. My inspiration on this one are The Goonies, Stand by Me and a mélange of horror movies. ;-)

The Great Dragon Escape

Madam Maggda’s dragons are by far the greatest attractions of her traveling menagerie. Captured before they had even hatched fifteen years ago, the only life they’ve ever known has been spent in magical cages. But the dragon younglings are as intelligent as any human their age, and have been plotting an escape from their cruel mistress for years aided by the ghost of a cowardly knight only they can see. After befriending a pair of sympathetic young jesters and pickpockets, is tonight the night when the dragons will make their daring breakout and escape to freedom?

Godzilla: Invasion of Monsters

The members of recently defunded A.D.I.A. –the American DaiKaiju Intelligence Agency– are reactivated by emergency order after MOTHRA destroys Air Force One and kills the President mid-Tweet. As a handful of agents answer the call in Washington D.C., none other than GODZILLA himself wades ashore and attacks the Capital! With Congress and the White House leveled by nuclear fire, the government is thrown into chaos. But when a mysterious psychic child appears, the agents uncover signs of a sinister extraterrestrial conspiracy that threatens all of humanity. Unsure of whom they can trust, can a small team of heroes turn the tables and overcome titanic odds to save the Earth?

Alright, time for me to stop blogging and get back to writing some more fiction! Take care!

WIP-it Wednesday: February 8th, 2017

08 Wednesday Feb 2017

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And_making_this_face

Time for a new weekly writer’s roundup of my works-in-progress and those ready to read!

Edits! Kim completed a double read of chapters 4-8 of Vivian’s Last Cigarette, and presented me with her feedback on Sunday. Now that she’s finished the first act, I was pleased that its surprise at the very end affected her as a reader exactly as I hoped it would! Her excitement with the development gives me lots of confidence that the second act and climax is as good as I think it is.

Of course, there were rough spots and patches in need of improvement that she pointed out as well. I spent Sunday afternoon working on those, revising chapter five and half of six. There was certainly more in need of doing edit-wise this weekend than last. By the evening, chapter five definitely was reading better, and six is shaping up nicely. Finishing six and getting seven and eight to second drafts status will be an ongoing project for this week.

Meanwhile, the second drafts of chapters 1-4 are still with Jess. Her schedule’s been tight, but she did get in a preliminary read and hopes to annotate the drafts with feedback for me soon.

One thing that I’m hearing very consistently from both of my alphas is how they love the main characters of Viv and Gronk. I’d felt that these two were going to be a strong card in the story since pretty early on, but that independent validation is still good to hear. Engaging main characters are vital to any book, but this is primarily a love story, so their interaction and development is the rock it’s built on. So far, it seems like that foundation is very strong and solid.

Before I got the pages on Sunday, I started prep work for PortCon. The convention is coming up at the end of June, and I had a lot of fun creating and game-mastering RPGs there last year as a staffer. I’m hoping to make this year even better, but I realized last week that I won’t have a lot of free time going into May-June… Because that also coincides with my current target release window for Vivian’s. So I’ve decided to get started crafting those adventures now, between edits of the novel. I want to have them good to go long before last-minute shenanigans start looking like viable options! ;-)

I’m also using a different approach and strategy crafting the games this year.

Last PortCon, frankly, I overdid it on my preparation for the games. I wrote about 40,000 words of material for the events I was running in about a month’s time. Now, all my games went well and they ended with happy players that had a good time… But that is a crazy amount of work for me to invest into crafting four games that ran four hours each!

And it was unnecessary work at that. Most of it was spent detailing the backgrounds of playable characters and writing up adventure specifics as if I were to publish or have the game run by someone else. None of those things were happening with this material, so all that effort and polish was simply not needed.

The last game I made for PortCon 2016 was The Most Dangerous Game of Doctor Moreau. I actually ran out of preparation time to get it ready for the con, so instead I came up with a simple creation mechanic that allowed the group to quickly generate their own player characters and removed me from having to detail that process. Structuring the game’s plot very openly, I mapped an island, created the antagonists in notes only, envisioned a semi-firm idea of the players’ challenges… and winged the rest of it.

It turned out at least as successful as the other games I ran that I had put so much more polish and work into. It may have even been the best game I ran at the con.

These are four hour games. Players don’t have time to appreciate reading well formed and written character biographies; they want to play. The only person running these scenarios is myself; I don’t need polished writing and descriptions because it’s already in my head. I just need a few pages of important notes to manage things.

So I’ve got a whole new attitude going into crafting my four games to run in 2017. They’re going to be much leaner. Players will create their own characters with a quick system. I won’t be writing tens of thousands of words that go unread. Instead, I’ll be game mastering off of a skeleton outline and notes. Any gaps found in play, I’ll overcome with the improvisation I’m beginning to find is a strong point of mine.

As far as specific game ideas are concerned, I’ve already mentioned the G.I. Joe / Predator / Aliens crossover multi-game-master idea I’m working on with another GM back in November.

I’ve also worked out a session called Chaos at Camp Changeling that takes place in the universe of Vivian’s Last Cigarette! :-) In it, the players assume the roles of 12-14 year-old normal and changeling (orc, elf, goblin, etc.) kids at a summer camp. It’s a mix of humor and action with a little suspense that starts with them playing D&D in a supposedly haunted cabin (they’re spending the night in it on a dare). None of the characters in the book are in the adventure, but there are lots of indirect connections… and it’s also set in Maine during August, 1989, just like the novel.

I have also plotted Toys Against Darkness: A scenario wherein the players assume the roles of animate toys protecting their children from a horrific evil. The last scenario is Godzilla: Invasion of Monsters. I bet with a little imagination you can figure out what that will be about. ;-)

Alright, time for me to stop blogging and get back to writing editing some more fiction! Take care!

WIP-it Wednesday: November 9th, 2016

09 Wednesday Nov 2016

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09nov16

Time for a new weekly writer’s roundup of my works-in-progress and those ready to read!

It’s been a full and creative week this time around. Things started off on a bad foot, with my wife and I both getting stuffy and sore-throated the day after Halloween. The first cold of the season always comes with a sense of dread and I prepared for the worst, but the affliction never progressed beyond a sniffle and low-energy for me. My poor wife however, who’s asthmatic, got very sick indeed and missed several days of work because of it.

As I served Kim orange juice and picked-up her share of chores so she could rest at ease, I was contacted by Ben Van Dongen. Ben’s a frequent reader of my blogs and I of his, and he asked me if I would like to kick-off next year’s “Fifth Monday” chain-serial on the Adventure Worlds story blog. The idea is that one author starts a story with one written section, then hands it off to another to write the next. They in turn leave the responsibility of the part after theirs to yet another author, and so on until it’s done.

This is all accomplished with minimal or no communication between the contributors, so the ultimate result is unknown until the very end.

It sounded like a fun idea to me, so I agreed to get things started and float the boat out with a twenty five hundred words or less opener. I’ve already mulled over a few ideas I like that I think will create a nice springboard for others to build on! But I have no plans to write it until December when I should have the first draft of Vivian’s Last Cigarette done.

A few days later, I was contacted by a friend in regards to an idea he had for PortCon 2017 that will happen in June of next year. As some of you may recall, I had a lot of fun at this year’s PortCon creating and game-mastering a number of role-playing games. Chris is a veteran game master and regular at the event, and he wanted to explore the idea of running a “collaboration game”. The basic concept is that we each start a separate game with independent teams of players, then we merge the two games to run a huge, epic climax collaboratively.

I thought that would be an awesome event to run for the convention, and we started brainstorming immediately on Friday afternoon. Chris and I share a love for the franchises popular in our youth, and also see the value in running RPG-one shots that cater to fandom members likely to be attending a geek-culture celebration. With that in mind, by Saturday we had started to explore a crossover idea involving Alien, Predator and… G.I. Joe! ;-)

Alien/Predator crossovers are nothing new. But Chris’ idea to throw the 1980s toy juggernaut of G.I Joe into the mix really surprised me with how well the three properties coalesced into a solid scenario.

knowingBoth Aliens and Predator are films with strong military overtones, pitting comparatively modern human soldiers against other-worldly menaces. So G.I. Joe slid neatly into the themes of both. As a triad, the three together retained the strengths that made the franchises originally work, while at the same time adding new angles.

Sunday I found myself jotting down ideas excitedly, which turned into a thousand word treatment for the game. I think it could become a super fun event for the con next year. :-)

Finally, the weekend also found me starting chapter fifteen of Vivian’s Last Cigarette! Even with everything else I mentioned going on, I still made good progress. Saturday I began with a little re-writing of a minor supporting character, then I wrote about twelve-hundred new words. Sunday I swept through what I had crafted the day prior, revising and editing a fair amount before ending at close to sixteen hundred words into the new chapter for the weekend.

The novel is definitely into its falling action. However, I’m sure there will still be lots of questions left in the reader’s minds when they get there… And I’m having fun answering them bit by bit as I start to wrap things up. :-) I’m also happy with the way I’m still able to reveal new character developments and wrinkles in the final chapters of the book. I think that these last challenges, answers and surprises will keep the pace going right until the end.

Another thing that I’ve enjoyed in getting back to writing the novel proper is returning with some humor. Chapters ten to fourteen, the climactic chapters, have been quite serious. Even dire. There are a few bursts of humor to break tension here and there, and I think they were even stronger contrasted as they are against the serious tone. However, the comedy beat between Viv and Gronk that grew in the first nine chapters was absent. The explanation for that  is simple: The climax is about them getting separated and the uncertainty of if they will ever see each other again.

Now that the above question is answered, these two are right back at it! It’s good times. ;-)

And now it’s time for me to stop blogging and get back to writing some more fiction! Take care!

WIP-it Thursday: June 30th, 2016

30 Thursday Jun 2016

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30JUN16

Time for a new weekly writer’s roundup of my works-in-progress and those ready to read!

Yesterday I posted an overview of my experience game mastering and being a staff member at PortCon and how that ties into my life as writer. To surmise, I had a blast and it was a very fulfilling endeavor for me on multiple levels! I learned some things about myself. :-) It was also a huge undertaking, and I wrote about 40,000 words of material for the events I was running in about a month’s time.

I had so much to relay about this experience that I decided to break a big update into two posts… So welcome to a WIP-it Thursday and part two! Today I’ll try to give an idea of what the convention was like for me, and then go over where I’m at with my writing this week.

Convention_Time

Wednesday (Pre-Con)

The day before the start of the convention had me rushing about and getting a lot of household chores and yardwork done in preparation for the next four days with us mostly gone. My friend Ian, the RPG chairman for PortCon this year and the one that called on my aid to game master, also needed a place to crash on the night before the con as he needed to be down a day earlier than his hotel reservation. Ironically enough, our guest room is also our game room. ;-)

It was really no problem for my wife and I to play host to him, and we had a great time talking over dinner and catching up before we all got busy on convention stuff until midnight or later.

Thursday

The first day of PortCon opens to the public at 4pm and then runs until midnight… but as you can imagine there is a lot of staff activity beforehand. Ian left early in the morning, and Kim and I worked until about 11 am pulling things together at the house… like frantically finishing handouts for my games and whatnot. We got to the local copy center, and thanks to an attentive owner we were on our way with about $55 less in our pockets by noon after printing all of the game materials.

We had just enough of time to get to the main staff meeting at 1:30 pm, living about an hour’s drive away from the location of PortCon (The DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel in South Portland, Maine). We were feeling pretty good and organized… until halfway there we discovered that my wife had forgotten both her con ticket, and her phone that could have shown her digital proof of purchase as a backup…

godzilla

…So we turned around, got the tickets, and started over again. We got there just before two in the afternoon as the big meeting was winding-down. Rather than awkwardly slip into the tail-end of things, I instead snuck in smoothly to be one of the first staffers to get their convention badge. ;-) Oh yeah, (slips on sunglasses), totally planned it that way to skip the line!

Cosplay

My wife Kim got a spot in line to get her registration done, as she wasn’t staff this year and had to wait for regular registration to open. She didn’t mind this at all though, as there are always nice folks to talk to and cool cosplays to enjoy. :-) The weather was also exceptionally pleasant this year for the whole convention: Clear blue skies with temperatures in the 70s to low 80s (22 to 28 Celsius) and a nice breeze.

I left to partake in the RPG staff meeting scheduled to begin before the con opened to the public at 4 pm. A new thing this year was that the all of the games had been moved out of the hotel and relocated across the street to the Maine Mall in a long vacated space that was once an Extreme Fitness gym. The convention worked out a deal with the Mall rent out the space for the month.

PortCon2016_BadgePortCon is a tiny convention if you put it next to giants like DragonCon or Comic Con that can boast about attendances between 60,000 to almost 200,000 people. Our attendance this year was a bit under 3,500 for comparison. ;-) That said, PortCon is the largest annual convention in the state of Maine, and held at the largest venue available within its borders!

The DoubleTree Hotel is almost bursting at the seams handling the convention’s attendance, even with those “tiny” numbers. But there is no bigger option (if they build it, we will come), so renting the space at the Mall was an excellent move that freed-up much needed room at the hotel and cut back on crowd congestion. The room that became the “PortCon Games Arena” for a few days was rough around the edges: Bare concrete floors with carpet glue remnants and Spartan structural modifications. But I didn’t mind. As someone who has been to a lot of game shops (and few rock clubs) housed in less than ideal spaces, I suspect that I wasn’t the only one who felt that it had an “Oh yeah! Lets play some games in the basement!” feel. ;-)

game roomAnd the space was enormous! Plenty of room and sections for Role-playing, board, card, miniature and video gaming with hundreds of people congregated around! We were slightly concerned that we might have a drop in attendees as the arena was a five minute walk from the hotel, but those fears quickly faded and we had a great turnout. I really liked it, and all the room it freed-up at the Doubletree made the experience over there far more pleasant all-around. I hope the space is still available next year!

Thursday was my “free day”, with no scheduled games for me to run. Kim and I got some cheap Chinese food after helping to setup the arena space, and took in Ian’s workshop on “How to be a Better Role-Player” until 10 PM. We called it an early night and left for home after that as my first game was scheduled as soon as the Arena opened Friday morning.

Friday

Toon_PosterFriday was my “big day” with two, four hour game sessions scheduled: The Cartoon Olympics from 10 am to 2 pm and The Werewolf Wrestling Federation vs. the Vampire Women from 6 pm to the close of the game room at 10 pm.

I came to the con dressed in a stripped referee shirt and red bow-tie, emulating the fashion sensibilities of nearly blind Judge Mole overseeing The Cartoon Olympics. I also came bearing plastic medals to hand out to the winners of the Olympic events and twelve ridiculously oversized foam dice for everybody to roll:1c

The dice were a huge hit, and I ended-up using them for every game I did this year! :-D They were a really inexpensive and fun addition that I’ll be expanding on in the future… buying a pack for each game and giving them away to the players afterwards.

In addition to the medals and dice, I also brought a wisecracking beaver hand-puppet and a Nerf-gun…

BickfordWhy yes, this was a silly game! And it went very well with players immediately trying to help their weightlifting abilities by detonating TNT with classic cartoon recklessness. ;-) I was able to play on some running gags and be very “animated” while everybody had some goofy fun.

I had a four hour break between games that I used to grab a late lunch and check out the artists and vendors over at the hotel area. Then it was time for my second game, The Werewolf Wrestling Federation vs. the Vampire Women!

This session had a lot of interest beforehand, and I got a really good batch of players. The game went well, and the action flowed exceptionally so. When the antagonists appeared there was a lot of crazy confusion amongst the players, and things got a little off track. But I was able to work with them and get the game to a satisfying climax just as we ran out of time and had to end the session.

PosterEverybody left with a good smile having enjoyed the adventure, and several said the setting felt very deep… The kind of setting that would be really interesting to explore further. Their enthusiasm might have me expand on my notes and share it as a game supplement. :-)

The game area is large and loud, and my game mastering style is to stand and act-out the action while I use a lot of vocal work portraying characters. Because of the noise, I need to do this at a high volume the whole time so I can be heard. After eight hours of this… my voice was shot and my feet were sore.

Sounding like a horse, two-packs of cigarettes a day smoker, I took a vow of silence until morning to rest my voice and drank a soothing broth of honey-tea after the hour-long ride home. I slept very well.

Saturday

Still horse, I stopped and picked up a bag of mentholated cough drops to take the edge off of my ragged voice on the way to the convention. They helped a lot. My session of Ork Quest ran from 2 pm to 6 pm, so we didn’t have to arrive as early as we did on Friday. We did get to the con with enough time for a short game of Dungeon Crawl Classic before lunch.

Ok_PosterOrk Quest did very well, and I think the open nature of the adventure ran a bit smoother than the Werewolf game of the prior night. The players picked a good combination of characters, but immediately started getting sidetracked. As the game was designed in part to be humorous and a comedy of errors, this wasn’t so bad. Eventually they got on track and in fact the game ended with them successfully completing the adventure!

Although a great deal of the material I created for the game went undiscovered by the players… I had everything plotted out and mapped in the town they were adventuring in. There was nowhere they could go that I didn’t have an idea what they would find, and there was very little that I had to improvise on the fly. Knowing all the sub-plots within the town and how they related to one another really helped me run a good game with memorable characters.

My favorite moment was portraying a one-legged dwarven sea captain whose peg-leg had been stolen by the players. It was very funny to have him cursing a salty streak while I hopped around swinging a cutlass! Another good moment came in playing Morty the teen dishwasher, who was secretly a wererat. He immediately became smitten with the teenaged wererat girl amongst the players… a character that happened to be being played by my wife… so we hammed it up without any awkwardness! ;-)

Kim and I grabbed some Chinese takeout afterwards from the mall food court, then joined my friend Ian to play in his game of Unknown Armies. It was a very enjoyable game where we worked to thwart a magical ritual using the ninth game of the World Series as a symbol to rewrite American history!

Then it was back home again for more honey tea to nurse my now destroyed voice.

Sunday

Saturday is the “big” day of PortCon, and often a very late night for attendees because of after con activities. Sunday is the last day of the convention and tends to be a mellow day as things ramp down.  My last RPG session, The Most Dangerous Game of Doctor Moreau, was set to run at 10 am on Sunday morning when the game arena opened. However, attendance was quite light after the doors were unlocked. I suspect many folks were sleeping in.

MDGoDM_PosterA lot of the early games couldn’t start for a lack of players. That would have happened to my game as well, but one con-goer in particular started calling in favors on his cell-phone to bring in people because he really wanted this one to happen! And it worked! He filled the table!

Even with a late start, Moreau ended up being a really good game. The players took on the roles of amnesiac humanoid animals being relentlessly hunted on Moreau Island. I was able to keep the pace up and the players managed to be resourceful and stay one step ahead of the antagonists. The game ended with all of the players escaping… good job guys!

I came up with a simple creation mechanic for Moreau that allowed the group to quickly generate characters. I believe that immediately made them feel more attached to them and their ultimate fate. The structure of the game’s plot I left very open… I mapped the island, created the antagonists, and had a semi-firm idea of the players’ goal.

Eastern Gray Squirrel PCEverything else I did on the fly.

That was partially because I ran out of preparation time, but it was a good choice that allowed me to adapt the story to whatever the players came up with… Like the child-sized squirrel girl marksman who got a hold of an AK-47 and had the attitude of Rocket Raccoon, for example.

After Moreau ended as a success, my wife and I grabbed a bite to eat and started helping with the breakdown of the game arena a little after four in the afternoon. The convention ended at five, and the staff (with volunteer help from Kim… she’s so awesome) worked really well together to pack away everything and leave the space at the mall cleaner than when we came.

Everyone then went to IHOP, ate pancakes and pie, and celebrated a really great convention. And that, my friends, was my PortCon 2016 experience! :-)

I’ll be doing the con again next year, and the theme this time around will be “Carnival”. I’ve already jotted down some game ideas. Better still, I have a whole year, and not three-ish weeks, to get all of the work done! Kim is also going to join as staff next time, so in addition to getting a free ticket we’ll also be able to take advantage of the free hotel room offered as part of that deal… That will save us two hours of driving every day.

Oh, and cough drops! I’ve got to bring those next time to start! My voice still hasn’t recovered fully. I’m also considering making “Gollum Juice”: A concoction of honey, lemon and ginger steeped in hot water that actor Andy Serkis drank daily while playing Gollum and destroying his voice day after day in the Lord of the Rings films.

And now that I’ve relayed my convention report… I can get back to writing stories! :-)

While I was at the con, I received a fresh beta-read of The Unicorn Hunters, and it looks like I’ll need to expand the piece with a new chapter to serve as the story opener. I had hoped that I was done with it… but the story is just not there yet. The current opening isn’t working well, so I’m adding a new chapter to the current four that will serve as the new opener.

Doing that will turn the story into a full-fledged novelette (13-15,000 words) however, which is more in line with the other stories in my book. And if my new plotting and planning holds true as I rethread it, I think it’ll not only open the tale much stronger, but also strengthen the existing material as well.

This added work will, regrettably, delay The Unicorn Hunters release on Aethereal Engines even more though… So I’m looking at releasing Tears of the Joyous Mare first instead. I think Tears will need less polish and work to be ready, and it’s currently half the length of Hunters. Once I add another chapter, it’ll probably be only a third of its size.

Alright, time for me to stop blogging and get back to writing some more fiction! Take care!

 

WIP-it Wednesday: June 29th, 2016

29 Wednesday Jun 2016

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29JUN16

Time for a new weekly writer’s roundup of my works-in-progress and those ready to read!

I’m recovering from the convention, and it was an awesome four-day marathon! Everyone had a good time in the games I ran and created, and I didn’t have to cancel any of them for a lack of players. At one point on Sunday morning it looked like that might happen to The Most Dangerous Game of Doctor Moreau, but one con-goer in particular started calling in favors on his cell-phone to bring in people because he really wanted this one to happen! And it worked! He filled the table!

In attendance at the convention was one of only two people in the world who have ever finished the highly vaunted “Iron GM” competition with a perfect score. He was running his own games (a very popular table, he’s a fun guy), and after watching me in action several times he came over impressed and said that I “kicked major ass” game-mastering!

PortCon2016_BadgeAccentuating that moment, there was a con-goer who came up to me after one of my sessions and shook my hand. He said that he had game-mastered RPGs since he was a kid, and what I did with the art form was now what he would aspire to achieve.

All that was very humbling. I came to the con feeling a little nervous that I wouldn’t be very good… I hadn’t really done a ton of game-mastering, ever. And even when I tried my hand at it as a teen and young adult, I think that most of my friends would agree that I was far from, uh, spectacular. Yet instead of just getting-by, I blew a lot of people away… including some very experienced, hard-core pros that always run a full table.

Now they want to team-up with me next year to rock the convention. :-)

All of this urged me to ask the question: “Why and how am I doing so well at this? I was pretty lousy before, and it’s not even like I had a game-mastering training montage before the con.”

After thinking about it, I decided that what’s changed is that I have accepted myself as a writer.

The last time I did any RPG game-mastering, and certainly when I was a teen or so, I was a frustrated writer and storyteller. I wanted to tell stories, but I let my fears keep me from trying, except for a few little bursts. I was afraid of rejection, ridicule and failure… and those are very human and universal things to fear.

Eventually I realized that I had to let go of those fears, or at least charge ahead and keep picking myself up whenever they knocked me down. I did this because I wanted my stories to live, because a story that is never told will never live beyond its creator. I love my stories too much to see them consigned to that fate, and with that resolution I found the strength I needed to try.

Before that point, role-playing games were a safe and private obsession of mine. A place where I could craft complete stories that I would tell “someday”. And when I ran a game, I did so having a very set idea on how I wanted the story to unfold. Those of you reading this who have ever played an RPG before are probably already cringing at this admission… and for good reason! ;-) Because the most important aspect of a role-playing game, the most important ingredient for a good time, is that everyone is involved in cooperatively telling a story.

If you take away the freedom of the players to participate and contribute in a meaningful way to the stories you build around the table, well… You’ve pretty much just railroaded your friends into preforming a screenplay for free. Worse yet, they’ll have just enough improvisational freedom and resentment to make sure the game master’s intricate story won’t unfold, in any way, as they want it to.

Yes, this is a recipe for a RPG session where NOBODY, players or game master, ends up very happy. And that was how a lot of my games went… They were just awful. So I gave up on GMing and focused on being a player in the very infrequent times that I did play after my twenty-fifth birthday.

Four years ago, I went to my first PortCon and participated mostly in the role-playing aspect of the convention. I had matured a lot, and learned how to be a really good player at the table. In an RPG that means not only using your wits and creativity to tell a good part in the story with your own character, but also helping your game master and fellow players tell their stories.

I found that I was really good at this: The same creative spark and sense of drama that I access as a writer were obviously also put to use in achieving that success. But the rest was just a mater of being a good team player and acting on the opportunities to draw out the best in your companions.

When I started writing seriously and with abandon less than a year later, I stopped being a frustrated writer and storyteller too afraid to try. Instead, I started the process of becoming and being a writer and storyteller. I haven’t looked back yet. In doing so, I could see what I had done with my “safe and private” RPG obsession and the creative dungeon I had made for myself with it.

Now, when I have a story to tell, I write it… I don’t make an RPG of it. ;-)

PortCon2016_ShirtThis month and weekend, I learned that if I have a good idea for a role-playing game, I can create one of those, too. And do it well. I utilize the same creativity and drama I have as a writer to craft their structure, and then I put my humor and performance skills to work weaving a story for and with everyone around my table.

It’s simply a mater of not setting my mind on a specific outcome. I provide the structure. I provide a vague flow of plot and action, and judge questions and disputes… But it is the players and their characters that provide the story, not I.

It’s their story being told, after all. I’m just a part of it. :-)

I’m creating stories all the time, pretty much every day I’m thinking them up. It’s my thing, my talent, my superpower… and I realize that not everyone is like that. So it’s a great feeling for me to be a conduit for those who want to be a part of a flowing and growing story with an unknown ending, but don’t have my talent to do it with.

The look in their eyes around my table, their excitement as dice are cast and fate is tempted. Their taste of my world. That’s my reward.

And I’ll do it again next year. :-)

It’s been a busy couple of weeks, so check in tomorrow for part two my update… a WIP-IT Thursday!… Where I’ll finish my convention report and go over where I’m at with my writing this week!

Alright, time for me to stop blogging and get back to writing some more fiction part two! Take care!

Convention Time!

22 Wednesday Jun 2016

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Convention_Time

I’ve been writing like a MADMAN this past week trying to get everything ready to knock some socks off at PortCon 2016 with some awesome RPGs and game mastering!

logo16v2It all starts tomorrow, and I’ve still got things to finish! So no work-in-progress check-in this week… Because I’m too busy working on said works in progress!!! ;-) Expect a full report next Wednesday. :-)

If by some cosmic conjunction of fate you find yourself attending PortCon between Friday and Sunday, below is the schedule of the games I’ve created and will be running this year:

dice_2016_a

Alright, time for me to stop blogging and get back to finishing these games! Take care!

WIP-it Wednesday: June 15th, 2016

15 Wednesday Jun 2016

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Time for a new weekly writer’s roundup of my works-in-progress and those ready to read!

This week I received great beta-reader feedback on both The Unicorn Hunters and Tears of the Joyous Mare. Lauren and Amy both did fantastic jobs and pointed out a number of things to refine. :-) As The Unicorn Hunters was the longest and had by far the most feedback, I dove into revising it on Sunday and Monday. I’m really happy with the fourth draft that has resulted from that work.

Lauren’s feedback on Hunters was helpful in many ways. It brought into focus how I’ve been developing my style of dialogue structure, and that it’s consistently noted as a strong point. And that I’ve built a strong knack for describing action. These are good things to hear as I like writing action and my characters tend to talk quite a bit. ;-)

She also had some Point-of-View confusion in places that forced me to define more clearly the style of POV that I’ve been developing. Frankly, I’ve just been using it because it works for me naturally in my style of storytelling. I had been thinking of it as simply 3rd person limited narrative, but Lauren helped me to realize that my stories are actually in a variant of that.

In standard 3rd person limited, the narrative has one POV character that the reader will know the internal thoughts and feelings of. Everyone else is described only in what can be experienced externally (seen, heard, etc.).

What I do is, for lack of a better term, “3rd person limited-limited” POV. In it, the narrator doesn’t know the thoughts or feelings of any of the characters… Not even the main character even if the “camera” of the story follows them and has them in the scene. Therefore, none of the scenes in this style are intended to be from anyone’s POV other than this disembodied narrative voice/essence that can’t get into anyone’s head… Or does so very rarely.

It’s a tool that works for me to force showing and not telling. And I like how it emulates our perception of reality in a small way: Most of us aren’t telepaths that can read minds and experience what another is thinking or feeling. So I use my narrative voice to direct the reader to what is going on and highlight details like a cinematographer. I make some allowances for sensations to aid in description, but I try to break the POV as little as possible.

It’s a style that I’ve been growing into, and I’ve by no means mastered it. However, so far many seem to be enjoying it. :-)

Although I had hoped to start posting installments of The Unicorn Hunters next week on Aethereal Engines, sadly I had a beta-reader back out. The availably of my next reader on the list is combining with my own tight schedule to cause me frustration… But it can’t be helped. I’ve still got a ton of work to finish before the convention in two weeks. And my ailing old cat has not only been a source of worry, but has also needed my love and attention. It’ll just have to wait until early July.

Our young cat comforting his older brother who's having a rough time...

Our young cat comforting his older brother who’s having a rough time…

I still have to finish the Ork Quest game for PortCon, but I’ve made good progress on it and I hope to be done writing the adventure tonight. Then I’m going to piledrive right into writing The Werewolf Wrestling Federation vs. the Vampire Women!

flat550x550075f.u2My inner ten-year-old wresting and monster-movie fan is ecstatic. ;-)

I think it’s going to be an interesting game. Although it’s certainly going to have its share of over-the-top pro-wrestling action mixed with B-grade monster movie hijinks, there’s another layer on top of it. I’m working with the ideas of shapeshifting and the metaphorical “masks” we all wear. Werewolves are a prominent mythic archetype of having two very different faces that someone can show the world.

I prefer to use werewolves a symbolic bridges, showing how the different sides of our natures can blend into a synthesis and alliance of natures that at first glance might be seen as in opposition. My werewolves tend to be calm and at peace with who they are, and usually only as violent as a situation requires them to be. Left to their own devices, I imagine them as being just as social and fun-loving as they are cunning.

First Run by Christy Grandjean.

First Run by Christy Grandjean. Click here for more of the artist’s work!

Although they are not werewolves, the wolf-kin in my story “The Old Man of the Elder Trees” have these elements. My flash-fiction story “Rumble at the Red Rock Tavern” has actual werewolves that have these traits in a modern setting… and a great big brawl as well!

With the Werewolf Wrestling Federation, the players are indeed werewolf pro-wrestlers (or possibly other were-creatures) in a world where such supernatural people have recently “come out of the closet” and gone public. These are not cursed individuals that go on murderous rampages. Werewolves in this setting encompass a wide variety of humans, members of families that have the ability to shapeshift into wolves or whatever.

The goal of the Federation is to show weres as people that just so happen to have this power. That they can be just as good or as bad as other people, and that werewolves are cool. It’s a big shift in tactic from the hundreds of years they’ve spent hiding their natures out of fear of prosecution. But the idea of showing werewolves as heroes and not monsters or animals is key… because the weres don’t loose their human consciousness when they change.

Like real-life pro-wrestling, the players take on the roles of entertainers that preform the stunts and storylines of staged matches and more. However, they do so while mixing-in werewolf shapeshifting… which makes them quite a bit more entertaining than mundane pro-wrestling. ;-)

Yet, although the “werewolf” mask might be off, the “mask” of their wrestling personas, or “kayfabe”, is very much on them.

santo_vs_las_mujeres_vampiro-859535924-largeThey are all playing the roles of good and bad guys, faces and heels. But underneath that entertainment persona, the “faces” might not be all that good… and the “heel” whose job is to be booed by the crowd might actually be a really nice guy.

Then something goes off-script. A new storyline with an uncertain ending and very real consequences is introduced. Masks might need to be maintained, but the roles beneath them will need to be revised as an ancient evil rises from the grave seeking vengeance…

…And the only hope for us all are Werewolf Wrestlers. ;-)

Alright, time for me to stop blogging and get back to writing some more fiction! Take care!

WIP-it Wednesday: June 8th, 2016

08 Wednesday Jun 2016

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08JUN16

Time for a new weekly writer’s roundup of my works-in-progress and those ready to read!

I finally received the feedback from my second alpha-reader on The Unicorn Hunters and Tears of the Joyous Mare. She’s been going through a rough patch the past few weeks, so it’s entirely forgivable and things are looking up for my good friend now. We even got to get together and had a great chat about the pieces and writing in general over the weekend.

Nomps_08JUN16

With the help of my recovering cat, I combed through red-marked manuscripts and edits and was done by Sunday night. Both pieces have now been placed in the hands of their first beta readers and according to both Lauren and Amy, I should have their feedback by early next week. A lot of people are interested in helping me with beta reads of The Unicorn Hunters, but Lauren raised her hand first and got dibs. ;-)

I’d be willing to take on a couple more beta readers if folks speak-up with interest. I only send out one version of a draft at a time, however. That’s to avoid confusion and duplicated efforts. It can get really confusing working in edits based off of two reads of the same draft. Readers point out and comment on the same things, and changes suggested by one reader then pulls the threads out of suggestions made by another. So I’ve found that for myself the method that works for me is as follows:

Revis_Outline

…And so on until I’m happy with the degree of polish on a piece. Generally, I always get my two alpha reads and I like to get at least one beta read before I’m done with revision and edits. As you can probably guess, the alpha reads are far more error prone than the ones I send out to betas. That’s because the feedback I want on a beta read is more about if the story is working or not and if it’s enjoyable to a reader representing a good example of my target audience. Proofreading is a secondary concern.

I’m hopeful that either Tears of the Joyous Mare or The Unicorn Hunters will be ready to post on Aethereal Engines in a week or two. Joyous Mare will be a straight one-shot short story, but The Unicorn Hunters will be a four-part serial novelette. Hang in there guys, new fiction is coming! ;-)

With edits done for now, I’ve returned to work on the original RPG sessions I’m crafting for my local geek convention near the end of this month. This week my goal is to finish the Ork Quest game.

I’m packing Ork Quest with lots of humorous D&D and fantasy trope inversions, and it should make for a funny, straightforward session. Although I could try running this with a classic D&D ruleset or a descendent like Pathfinder, those systems are complicated and quirky. I love classic RPGs, but crafting proper adventures for those systems would take more time than I have. And they are also rulesets that aren’t very forgiving to the errors and mistakes the humor of Ork Quest hinges on.

Instead, I’m using the simple Five by Five rules system created by Jeff Moore. If you’re an RPG gamer, check out the link because he offers a free PDF of the rulebook. It’s a cool system! The rules can be taught and learned in minutes, and it has a strong storytelling focus and mechanic that favors my style of game mastering. Five by Five has just enough detail in outlining combat to resolve it without a lot of brouhaha, and move on with the story.

I’ve learned that in a convention setting, when you have a four hour block to run a game for five to eight strangers with at least a few lacking experience with the game… Simplicity is key. An hour spent explaining rules is not only boring, but also an hour that nobody is playing the game. And playing the game is what everyone really wants to do.

Because it’s simple, but with just enough rules to have some structure, Five by Five is a strong system in a convention and “pick-up game” environment.

The trick is to have simplicity without being so basic that it’s dull and pointless. With a role-playing plot, it’s a lot like writing a short story versus writing a novel. You don’t have time to illustrate a bunch of wonderful twists and sub-plots like you could if one was running multiple sessions or a regular game campaign. So instead I focus one or two twists and maybe an equal number of sub-plots.

Likewise, I provide pre-generated characters so as not to waste valuable time at the table crafting characters and waiting for players to make choices about what they want to play. In going the pre-generated route, however, I try really hard to offer a wide variety of fleshed-out characters. Usually twice the amount I expect as a maximum number of players for the session. That’s because, as with any RPG, it’s critical that players have lots of options in what and how they play… and not be railroaded into choices for the sake of your plot. Player engagement and freedom to craft the story is a top priority, always… ignore that and your game is in peril.

In Ork Quest, the players assume the roles of “bad guy” monstrous types of the Festering Swamp Tribe. These are characters like Shahnana the She-Ork Shieldmaiden, her grandfather Oldtooth, Phlink the Goblin Sniper, Krotch the Orkan Hunter and Ignatta the Wererat.

Having been exiled from the tribe, they must sneak into the human town of Fanbor in a quest to wrest a magical drinking horn of never-ending ork beer from its “dangerous” denizens in order to be forgiven and return home. Hilarity and misadventures should ensue. ;-)

The whole adventure is an inversion of the fantasy RPG cliché of a party of adventures equipping themselves in town before going off to slay monsters and recover a McGuffin from the local dungeon. In Ork Quest, a party of monsters leave the dungeon to recover a McGuffin from the local town while facing off against the challenges provided by its townsfolk.

MonsterQuestTo give credit where it is due, the idea for Ork Quest is inspired by a ten page, first edition AD&D adventure called Monsterquest that was written by Vince Garcia. It was published in TSRs DUNGEON Magazine in 1988 and I played the adventure at about the same time with friends when I was a kid in junior high. The slapstick shenanigans and good times it evoked are fond memories of mine… ones I haven’t forgotten yet!

So thank you, Vince… Your adventure gave me a cherished memory! And when I was brainstorming RPG session ideas, the concepts you presented in Monsterquest instantly came to mind as great game for the Con! I hope the adventure you inspired me to create will be as fun yours was for me. :-)

Alright, time for me to stop blogging and get back to writing some more fiction! Take care!