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Here’s an item I’ve been meaning to mention for a while now: Worldwide Adventure Writing Month. This June, you’re encouraged to write a 32-page adventure module. It doesn’t need to be the Best Module Ever, and it can be for whatever game system you choose; the point is just to write something down and revel in the accomplishment.

I don’t think I’ve ever met a roleplaying gamer who has not, at some point or other, aspired to game writing. (In fact, I know very few gamers who have not dreamed of creating their own game from scratch–maybe that merits a post at some point.) The nice thing about WoAdWriMo is that you don’t need to craft an epic masterpiece; you just need to put together 32 pages of adventure. If you’re a GM, chances are you’ve already got far more than that already written up, in the form of campaign notes and homemade adventures. Why not gather up your notes, fire up the imagination, and see if you can’t crank out a short module this June?

I’m absolutely planning on trying this, and have been pondering for a week or two now what my epic adventure will be. I’m leaning towards putting together a nice, old-fashioned dungeon crawl; but a tiny part of me wants to write an espionage adventure, in loving memory of the late lamented Top Secret S.I. Would-be game writers of the world, join me this June!

(Also, check out the WoAdWriMo blog for some decent adventure-writing tips, even if you don’t plan to participate.)

I live!

Support the troops, send your games to Iraq

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Got a few good games sitting unplayed and gathering dust on your bookshelf? On June 9, the first official game convention in Iraq will take place–it’s called Ziggurat Con, and the organizers are looking for help in providing roleplaying games to be played and handed out to the troops as prizes. More details here:

The largest problem with running a Con in Iraq, of course, is that there are no local stores or game publishers, and few game books on the post. Even dice are in short supply, with many soldiers breaking the unwritten taboo held by many gamers and sharing dice. Thankfully, many game publishers have also lent their support. […] But Amberson indicated that the soldiers could definitely use more.

“This convention is currently in drastic need of prizes and giveaways for the troops,” he said. “Everything donated will go directly to the troops, or to MWR to use as loaner books for the soldiers.”

What a great way to lend some moral support to the troops. Consider gathering up a few games and shipping them out in time for the convention! The post linked above has a list of specific games they’re after, but it sounds like they’ll welcome most any sort of gaming material you can send. I’ve been looking to trim down my game collection anyway–this is the perfect opportunity to do so.

Sudden death and the Super Mario Bros.

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Here it is, the most frustrating Super Mario Bros. level ever. I can’t stop laughing–it’s sadistic level design at its best. Every time the player (who must have the patience of a saint) gets past one hurdle, he’s rewarded with sudden and unavoidable death from another angle.

It actually reminds me of one of the less enjoyable aspects of many early text and graphic adventure games. It wasn’t uncommon in some adventure games to be killed without warning by a trap or enemy that you had no way of anticipating or avoiding. The only way to avoid death was to reload the game (you did save your game, right?) after having been killed and steer clear of whatever room or activity resulted in instant death. While the threat of unannounced death did add a certain tension to the gaming experience, it wasn’t fun at all to be killed without receiving any advance warning that your character was in danger.

The manuals for these games were filled with exhortations to save your game often to minimize the rage you would feel upon having to replay giant chunks of the game after an unexpected death. As adventure games became more sophisticated, designers got better at providing advance warning (sometimes subtle, but any warning was better than none) that your character was in mortal danger. It was much easier to accept your character’s death if you at least felt that you had been given a fair shot at avoiding it.

These days, most games have some form of auto-save mechanic that saves your progress for you as you advance, reducing the need to continually save the game manually. But back in the old days, when we had to walk uphill to school both ways and there was only enough space for eight saved games on an Infocom disk and death could come at any time for any reason… well, I guess I’m glad we’ve moved beyond that particular aspect of the Good Old Days.

Leave me alone–I'm playing Nethack

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Angband This link is for my old pal pcg, who I believe loves Nethack and other roguelike games even more than I do: Roguelike Magazine, a magazine devoted to discussion of the roguelike genre. What a fun idea for a magazine–and the first issue is quite promising, especially the article about interface concepts.

If you’ve never played any of the roguelike family of games, you’re really missing out on one of the great gaming experiences; Nethack and its ilk are living proof that pure gameplay can make even the crudest graphics acceptable. My personal roguelike game of choice has always been Angband–I guess I like the (very, very loose) Tolkien connection–but they’re all good in my book.

At any rate, I hope the magazine does well, and that the roguelike community embraces it.

The superstitions of MMORPG players

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Do you keep a rabbit’s foot in your Warcraft character’s inventory in the hopes that it will bring you better loot? Do you believe that facing a certain cardinal direction while crafting an item in Final Fantasy will improve the quality of the object you’re creating? If so, you share in some of the many player superstitions common in massively-multiplayer online games. The Daedalus Project has done some research about superstitions held by players in online games.

Truly fascinating stuff–the superstitions range from the simple to the bizarre, and many persist even after game designers have specifically denied that they have any effect on gameplay.

Break time

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Things have been quiet here lately… too quiet, perhaps. After some reflection I’ve decided that a bit of change may do me some good–so I’ll be taking a little break from this blog for a while. I am confident I shall return before too long, but I’d like to take some time off to focus on some other writing projects for a bit. Granted, I haven’t really been posting here regularly for a while anyway; but by actually writing a post acknowledging this, I’ll feel a bit less guilty about concentrating my online energy elsewhere.

It’s been real, it’s been fun, it’s even been real fun. I’ll be back in a while. Hold down the fort while I’m gone.

Now we know where Stephen King really gets all his ideas

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It’s always exciting to learn about celebrities with RPG skeletons in their closets, and here’s a particularly fun one: the NYT is running an article about Joe Hill, an author recently outed as the son of Stephen King. It’s a nice piece about the challenge of carving out your own career in the shadow of a famous parent. But the really interesting item is way back at the top of page 3, where we learn that a certain roleplaying game factored into life in the King household.

What roleplaying game, you ask? Three guesses, and the first two don’t count:

The King boys grew up riffing on each other’s fantasies; in what they called the Writing Game, a literary version of tag, one brother would write for a few minutes and pass the story to the other. “We used to play Call of Cthulhu,” Owen told me, referring to the role-playing game based on the H. P. Lovecraft story. “Joe was always dungeon master. You had sanity points, and it was like, if you encountered Yog-Sothoth one too many times, you were crazy. You could only have so many adventures, and then you had to have a new character, and I thought that was brilliant.”

Truly, a finer summation of the Call of Cthulhu experience has never been uttered. It all makes perfect sense now. The Dark Tower series always struck me as awfully RPGish, in a very good way…

(Thanks to the M-Pire for the link.)

The Staging Point

a microscopic cog in the catastrophic plan

Put it in writing!

Bring on the Singularity

This June, write your own adventure