Entries tagged with “Cthulhu Rising” from Things You Don't Care About
Recently, I've been Netflixing the DVDs of the James Burke's Connections series. If you're not familiar with them, the premise of the show is to illustrate how seemingly unrelated historical events and technological innovations create some of the most important things that you find in the modern world. One episode, for instance, shows how a test for the purity of gold is related to the development of atomic weapons, and another shows how an Arab caliph's sickness in the 8th Century led to modern mass production, and yet another shows how the Little Ice Age led to the development of aircraft.
Aside from being fascinating to watch on their own, this series of documentaries is extremely interesting to me in that it mirrors my thoughts about world building -- that each element of a fictional world should be interconnected to as many other elements of the world as possible, and that those connections should be considered very carefully when you're going through and building that world. This is something that I tend to argue about a fair bit on the Chatsubo, with regard to Eve Online and its storyline; my latest trouble has been with the given population on Seyllin I, the focus of the latest big patch day downtime news barrage.
Why does this bug me so much? I don't know. A deep and complex world has been a big selling point for me on RPGs, books, movies, TV series...pretty much everything. I think it's largely just personal preference -- some people really like well-developed characters or witty dialogue, I like well-developed settings. And, ever since I started writing, that's been a focus for my writing, possibly to my detriment, since I tend to focus on that almost above everything else a lot of the time. I would like to think that there's more to it, though.
In a way, Connections is a world building exercise that works in the opposite way an author usually works; whereas I say "okay, if we have this in the world, how did it come out about and what does that mean for the rest of the world," Burke says "we had this and this and this, and how did all those things come together to create a world in how we have that?"
I really feel like this sort of analytic approach is key, especially for creating a game setting. In a novel or movie, your viewpoint is generally limited -- for instance, if we look at something like Alien, we don't need to know much really about the state of the world outside the Nostromo, except as it affects the main characters in that movie. We know there's a corporation, and it hires these spacers to go around and haul this ore, and they can travel faster than light, and so on and so forth -- but we don't need to know what sort of government there is, or how many people live on Earth, or how many colonies they have, or anything like that. We only need to illuminate as much of that other world as the characters in that story see; if you think of it like a film set, actually, we don't need to construct a full-scale replica of the Nostromo, we only need to build the parts the camera is going to see. We should make those as detailed and lifelike as possible, but if it's out of the camera shot it's not really going to show in the final product. Yes, you can do it -- the attention Syd Mead paid to a lot of the elements of Blade Runner is an example -- but it is far less necessary.
In contrast, in a game setting, especially an RPG, where you are going to have people using it in all sorts of different ways, and have characters from all sorts of different backgrounds, and have all sorts of different adventures, the "camera shot" of the universe becomes far wider. You can't simply ignore a lot of this stuff because at some point, it may very well come into play. Obviously, you can constrain this somewhat; you don't need a 300 page sourcebook on medical technology if the game is not Space Doctors: The Healening, but you should at least give some mention of the general things that medical science can do if the characters are likely to have to deal with it at some point. John Ossoway has done something like this for Cthulhu Rising, for instance, in the Rough Guide.
And this is where I think I run into my issues with some of the things in the Eve storyline, especially over the last year or so. Where is the Rough Guide to Eve Online? As far as I can tell, there isn't really one; certainly, there's nothing really out there available to the public, which is frustrating for at least some of the players (I know it can't just be me). One of the things I really liked about Mass Effect is that they actually took the time to think about a lot of that stuff, even though, as a single player game where your "camera shot" is going to be a lot smaller than in a pen-and-paper RPG or MMORPG, most of it is not really necessary. While you could say this was all just wasted effort, I suspect the primary benefactor of the Codex was not the audience but the writing staff of the game. By writing down and setting that stuff in stone, now the writers can all work from the same assumptions about the game world and play off each other's ideas without making the setting seem schizophrenic and disjoint -- you don't have one part of the game where you're told everyone has personal rocketships and another part where everyone is living in abject poverty eating gruel three times a day.
I think it's the fact that that's dismissed as a backburner issue by a lot of people in the discussions I have about the Eve storyline is what frustrates me so much.
Aside from being fascinating to watch on their own, this series of documentaries is extremely interesting to me in that it mirrors my thoughts about world building -- that each element of a fictional world should be interconnected to as many other elements of the world as possible, and that those connections should be considered very carefully when you're going through and building that world. This is something that I tend to argue about a fair bit on the Chatsubo, with regard to Eve Online and its storyline; my latest trouble has been with the given population on Seyllin I, the focus of the latest big patch day downtime news barrage.
Why does this bug me so much? I don't know. A deep and complex world has been a big selling point for me on RPGs, books, movies, TV series...pretty much everything. I think it's largely just personal preference -- some people really like well-developed characters or witty dialogue, I like well-developed settings. And, ever since I started writing, that's been a focus for my writing, possibly to my detriment, since I tend to focus on that almost above everything else a lot of the time. I would like to think that there's more to it, though.
In a way, Connections is a world building exercise that works in the opposite way an author usually works; whereas I say "okay, if we have this in the world, how did it come out about and what does that mean for the rest of the world," Burke says "we had this and this and this, and how did all those things come together to create a world in how we have that?"
I really feel like this sort of analytic approach is key, especially for creating a game setting. In a novel or movie, your viewpoint is generally limited -- for instance, if we look at something like Alien, we don't need to know much really about the state of the world outside the Nostromo, except as it affects the main characters in that movie. We know there's a corporation, and it hires these spacers to go around and haul this ore, and they can travel faster than light, and so on and so forth -- but we don't need to know what sort of government there is, or how many people live on Earth, or how many colonies they have, or anything like that. We only need to illuminate as much of that other world as the characters in that story see; if you think of it like a film set, actually, we don't need to construct a full-scale replica of the Nostromo, we only need to build the parts the camera is going to see. We should make those as detailed and lifelike as possible, but if it's out of the camera shot it's not really going to show in the final product. Yes, you can do it -- the attention Syd Mead paid to a lot of the elements of Blade Runner is an example -- but it is far less necessary.
In contrast, in a game setting, especially an RPG, where you are going to have people using it in all sorts of different ways, and have characters from all sorts of different backgrounds, and have all sorts of different adventures, the "camera shot" of the universe becomes far wider. You can't simply ignore a lot of this stuff because at some point, it may very well come into play. Obviously, you can constrain this somewhat; you don't need a 300 page sourcebook on medical technology if the game is not Space Doctors: The Healening, but you should at least give some mention of the general things that medical science can do if the characters are likely to have to deal with it at some point. John Ossoway has done something like this for Cthulhu Rising, for instance, in the Rough Guide.
And this is where I think I run into my issues with some of the things in the Eve storyline, especially over the last year or so. Where is the Rough Guide to Eve Online? As far as I can tell, there isn't really one; certainly, there's nothing really out there available to the public, which is frustrating for at least some of the players (I know it can't just be me). One of the things I really liked about Mass Effect is that they actually took the time to think about a lot of that stuff, even though, as a single player game where your "camera shot" is going to be a lot smaller than in a pen-and-paper RPG or MMORPG, most of it is not really necessary. While you could say this was all just wasted effort, I suspect the primary benefactor of the Codex was not the audience but the writing staff of the game. By writing down and setting that stuff in stone, now the writers can all work from the same assumptions about the game world and play off each other's ideas without making the setting seem schizophrenic and disjoint -- you don't have one part of the game where you're told everyone has personal rocketships and another part where everyone is living in abject poverty eating gruel three times a day.
I think it's the fact that that's dismissed as a backburner issue by a lot of people in the discussions I have about the Eve storyline is what frustrates me so much.
....now is the time to do it. I got mail from John Ossoway, the Cthulhu Rising head honcho, announcing the new version of the Cthulhu Rising monograph from Chaosium (which, incidentally, I have a credit in now -- woohoo!). In addition to everything that was in the last version, this new one has:
My apologies for this bit of shameless self-promotion, I will now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
- New cover art by Ben Thornley
- Updated timeline and background information
- Expanded information on colony worlds
- Expanded information on weapons and equipment
- Updated rules for psychic powers
- New character sheets
- New layout
My apologies for this bit of shameless self-promotion, I will now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
As you may have noticed, the blog has suffered in the last two weeks
since I broke the one-post-per-day rule, and that certainly is not
helping things at all. And a while back, I mentioned an idea I had for some Cthulhu Rising fiction using a character I first came up with in college. Well, both those things are sort of putting a fire under my butt to do something to fix both those problems. As a result, I'm going to go back and work on writing this story as a serial and posting it on my blog in chunks of a few thousand words each, maybe with a bit of analysis to see how it fits into the larger Cthulhu Rising world.
Part of the intent of the story is a fleshing out of Delta Green in the Cthulhu Rising setting, so if you have played or read Delta Green before you may recognize some of the elements of the game within it. At the moment, the exact status of Delta Green in Cthulhu Rising hasn't quite been fleshed out, so this may not be entirely canon, but since I'm taking part in the discussion of how to develop Delta Green in the setting, hopefully it will be close at least. With any luck, the first episode will be showing up on the blog in a week or two.
Part of the intent of the story is a fleshing out of Delta Green in the Cthulhu Rising setting, so if you have played or read Delta Green before you may recognize some of the elements of the game within it. At the moment, the exact status of Delta Green in Cthulhu Rising hasn't quite been fleshed out, so this may not be entirely canon, but since I'm taking part in the discussion of how to develop Delta Green in the setting, hopefully it will be close at least. With any luck, the first episode will be showing up on the blog in a week or two.
I've been a gamer -- a pen and paper, books and dice gamer -- since I played my first game of AD&D back when I was in grade school. I've played or run everything from the aforementioned variations of D&D to Shadowrun to Heavy Gear. I have an RPG collection that takes up the better part of half a bookshelf, I love writing setting material for the RPGs I have played, I've gone to GenCon 4 out of the last 5 years, and I'm an active member of RPGnet. Almost all my friends in high school and college played RPGs to some extent or another.
But here's the problem -- I haven't played an RPG in ages. The last game I played in was a PbP Twilight 2000 game, which was awesome, but it sort of died out due to players losing interest, although the fact that it lasted almost three years is no small feat either. I haven't played in a real, face-to-face game for almost three or four years now though. I have tons of ideas for something to run (even though I'd much rather play, since I always seem to run games), but I only really know one or two people locally who are interested in the same sorts of games I am. Sadly, gritty low-power games do not seem to be the flavor of the month.
To some extent I blame this on the fact that D&D and d20 have bottled up 90% of the RPG market, giving a lot of new gamers the idea that that's the only thing out there. It's not the late '80s, early '90s heyday of RPGs when you could go into a gaming store (a real, brick-and-mortar gaming store like the old Sword and Crown here in Champaign) and see dozens of different systems and settings represented on the shelves. Even those non-d20 companies out there like DP9 and Catalyst Game Labs (the new publishers of Shadowrun) seem to only be publishing a trickle of books every year (and even fewer I'm actually interested in). The demise of the FLGS, in particular the good FLGS, means there's really no place to meet other people interested in various games casually, and that sets you up for making posts on various boards and possibly ending up with one of these with no forewarning.
For someone who is trying to do semi-serious writing in the field, it makes it hard for me to playtest ideas I have as well. This is part of why my SilCore conversion of Shadowrun remains in a half-completed state; sadly, the game I tried to run on IRC with them just didn't work out. Dan and other people on #rpgnet are trying to convince me to give it another try, and I may end up doing that, but I don't have high hopes. I just want to bring back those days when I was in high school and college, when a bunch of friends would get around a table and have fun playing out a story and being far cooler than we actually were for a few hours every week. I miss being excited about the weekend because it meant I was going to get to see something I had worked on get enjoyed by someone else right there in front of me. I miss having discussions with people about what worked and what didn't and how I can make it better -- something I only really get to do once a year now at GenCon with NSDM folks.
*sigh* I know this comes dangerous close to violating the no-whining policy I set for myself, but I can't help but be filled with a bit of nostalgia these days when I pick up one of the books I have lying around, or when I read actual play threads on RPGnet or the Cthulhu Rising boards. One of these days, I am going to have a game group again, and I can use all the ideas bubbling around in my brain. Until then, I'll have to be satisfied with writing down what I want to do once I get one, and helping other people have material they can use with their own gaming groups.
But here's the problem -- I haven't played an RPG in ages. The last game I played in was a PbP Twilight 2000 game, which was awesome, but it sort of died out due to players losing interest, although the fact that it lasted almost three years is no small feat either. I haven't played in a real, face-to-face game for almost three or four years now though. I have tons of ideas for something to run (even though I'd much rather play, since I always seem to run games), but I only really know one or two people locally who are interested in the same sorts of games I am. Sadly, gritty low-power games do not seem to be the flavor of the month.
To some extent I blame this on the fact that D&D and d20 have bottled up 90% of the RPG market, giving a lot of new gamers the idea that that's the only thing out there. It's not the late '80s, early '90s heyday of RPGs when you could go into a gaming store (a real, brick-and-mortar gaming store like the old Sword and Crown here in Champaign) and see dozens of different systems and settings represented on the shelves. Even those non-d20 companies out there like DP9 and Catalyst Game Labs (the new publishers of Shadowrun) seem to only be publishing a trickle of books every year (and even fewer I'm actually interested in). The demise of the FLGS, in particular the good FLGS, means there's really no place to meet other people interested in various games casually, and that sets you up for making posts on various boards and possibly ending up with one of these with no forewarning.
For someone who is trying to do semi-serious writing in the field, it makes it hard for me to playtest ideas I have as well. This is part of why my SilCore conversion of Shadowrun remains in a half-completed state; sadly, the game I tried to run on IRC with them just didn't work out. Dan and other people on #rpgnet are trying to convince me to give it another try, and I may end up doing that, but I don't have high hopes. I just want to bring back those days when I was in high school and college, when a bunch of friends would get around a table and have fun playing out a story and being far cooler than we actually were for a few hours every week. I miss being excited about the weekend because it meant I was going to get to see something I had worked on get enjoyed by someone else right there in front of me. I miss having discussions with people about what worked and what didn't and how I can make it better -- something I only really get to do once a year now at GenCon with NSDM folks.
*sigh* I know this comes dangerous close to violating the no-whining policy I set for myself, but I can't help but be filled with a bit of nostalgia these days when I pick up one of the books I have lying around, or when I read actual play threads on RPGnet or the Cthulhu Rising boards. One of these days, I am going to have a game group again, and I can use all the ideas bubbling around in my brain. Until then, I'll have to be satisfied with writing down what I want to do once I get one, and helping other people have material they can use with their own gaming groups.
So the whole process that got me to finally put this up began the week after GenCon, when (as I said in my entry a couple days ago) I was feeling depressed and sorry for myself, and when I saw my therapist the Saturday afterwards, I'm pretty sure what he said could be distilled down to "stop whining and do something about it." That's probably me taking things a bit harder than I should, but frankly, that's been what my conscience has been screaming at me pretty much constantly for years now. Admittedly, in most cases, starting a blog doesn't seem like it would do much in the "stop whining" department, considering that LiveJournal has built a business on marketing to thousands of emo suburban teenagers looking for attention.
However, I think for me, this will hopefully give me an outlet for something I've been doing far too little of lately -- writing. For far too long now, I think I've felt a kind of paralysis about writing, feeling like I am never going to finish anything -- so why bother starting? It's time to break that block down and at least write about something every day, and hopefully making it visible to at least a small number of other people will give me some degree of accountability -- even if, as the title of the blog indicates, no one actually cares about what I'm writing. So, the challenge to myself now is to keep this up.
However, this isn't going to be the only thing I want to make sure I have consistent progress on. Some other things I want to keep up in addition to my daily posts here:
However, I think for me, this will hopefully give me an outlet for something I've been doing far too little of lately -- writing. For far too long now, I think I've felt a kind of paralysis about writing, feeling like I am never going to finish anything -- so why bother starting? It's time to break that block down and at least write about something every day, and hopefully making it visible to at least a small number of other people will give me some degree of accountability -- even if, as the title of the blog indicates, no one actually cares about what I'm writing. So, the challenge to myself now is to keep this up.
However, this isn't going to be the only thing I want to make sure I have consistent progress on. Some other things I want to keep up in addition to my daily posts here:
- One idea a week for the Game Design forum either on Scrapheap Challenge or on the Eve Online boards. For far too long I have wanted to get into game design, but I haven't done a goddamn thing about it other than read books and think about it. I realize that this is not really that big of a step up from that, but at least it's getting something written out, put out for criticism, and keeping me thinking about a game I'm involved with. Maybe it won't go anywhere, but it's a good exercise nevertheless. That's one idea per week too -- if I post something on SHC I'll probably repost it on the Eve Online forums after it's been put through the wringer, but that's still the same idea, so it doesn't count as a new one.
- One new article every two weeks for Cthulhu Rising. That's John Ossoway's awesome Aliens-meets-Call of Cthulhu setting, which I did some work for this spring but sort of let slide this summer. No more. This is going to either be a major revision of a previous article (like the one on Phobos and Deimos I need to rewrite) or something totally new. Time to get myself writing some background material or short fiction for this, if I am really that interested. Not sure this will work out, but it's probably my best chance for some good author credits, which would be something nice to put on the resume for the future.
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