Blógünder Schlock

I skipped out on Penguicon this year (it’s my favorite out-of-state convention), and it’s probably a good thing. All of Tuesday night was spent making trips to the bathroom to shout at the porcelain, and while this sort of thing usually kills a day or two, I was still running a fever and losing precious sleep Friday night, and stumbling around all achey like a zombie on a no-brains diet on Saturday.

Penguiconners, I missed you this weekend, and for this you should be thankful. Whatever I’ve got, you don’t want.

I colored two pages of Bonus Story before falling ill, and then, in spite of the illin’ an’ chillin’, I actually managed to bang out a week of comics on Friday and Saturday. They’ll probably need touch-ups when Smart Howard checks back in for work Monday, but most of the heavy lifting is done.

I know, I know… the buffer is supposed to give me time off for sickness, but with book deadlines crushing me, and conventions coming in May (Hello, Leprecon!) I really don’t want to lose a week just because the new entrees from Panda Express thought so much of themselves they demanded I taste them twice.

When I called my friend Bob Defendi to let him know I couldn’t join his game Wednesday night, I told him I probably wouldn’t be eating at Panda for a looong time to come. “The taste of chinese food on the way back up is one of those memories that just won’t let go,” I said. Bob told me that would be a great first line for a book. It made me laugh, but laughing still hurt a lot.

Sorry for the huge quantities of “Too Much Information.” I’m sure you’ll agree (to complete the song lyric in the title of this post,) “these are the things we can do without.”

Sandra and I slept in just a bit, and began the day with a nice breakfast in the hotel. Then my schedule kicked in for what felt like two straight days. I had four hours of panels, one blog TV shoot, numerous conversations in the halls, and I think I was running my mouth (and my brain, fortunately) non-stop. By 5:00pm I was wiped out, but all I had time for was a power-nap.

Following said power-nap, we hit the Guest of Honor Dinner, which I think I kind of dozed through in spite of the fascinating conversation happening at our table. Liana K. and Christopher Golden managed to keep everyone entertained there while I managed to appear awake. You know I’m worn out when I’m too exhausted to talk.

While the day was full of memorable moments during the panels, the one I’d really like to share happened early in the day during the “Working As A Creative Professional” panel. A smart-looking, attractive young woman asked the question: “When do you know that it is time to quit the day-job and try to be a writer (or artist, or musician, or whatever) full-time?”

The question clearly stemmed from a measure fear and insecurity. This girl had a good job, and a comfortable lifestyle, and was afraid that if she chased the dream, she’d end up out on the street and homeless.

Here’s the advice I gave her, and it applies to most of you. If you’re smart enough to have a good job, and have enough energy left over to pursue something in the creative arts, you really don’t need to fear becoming unemployable. Don’t be afraid of falling down, because that will happen. You need to trust that if (when!) you fall down, you will be able to get back up. If the creative thing doesn’t work out, you’re still going to be employable. You may even land a better job than the one you left. You’re smart enough to figure out what needs to be done to make it work.

Knowing when to make the transition is tricky, and it’ll be different for everyone. I left Novell long before I felt financially ready, but if I hadn’t left when I did, I may never have made the switch. For Sandra and I it was a matter of prayer. That’s probably a good idea if you’re the sort of person for whom that works.

Okay, enough with the preachy motivational therapy… On to the LARP.

Following the banquet we were at loose ends. I rested a little more because I wanted to hit room parties and the like. I ended up joining the Shadowrun LARP.

LARP = Live Action Role Play. I threw on some dark clothing and a prop or two, and became “Gash,” the dwarven street mage. I adopted the thick, pseudo-scottish brogue I use in my IK role-playing on Thursdays, and wandered into the “tavern” where the rest of the players were.

I suppose one measure of how effectively you role-play is how often you knock the other players out of character. In this LARP, when you wanted to say something as the player, rather than the character, you put one hand on top of your head. Gash was so thickly rude and shockingly witty that hands would literally FLY to the tops of heads after he finished regaling the tavern with anecdotes of dwarven culture. Interestingly, for all his talk, Gash never fired off a single decent spell (though he tried, and just about killed himself doing it.) Another measure of effective role-play is when you’re having fun WITHOUT being buried in game mechanics.

We all had a great time, and I’m really, really glad nobody was taping me. If I had any hair to let down, it would have definitely been let all the way down between 11:00pm and 2:00am at Ad Astra. Gash’s performance won me a goody bag that included some cool roleplaying swag and a very cool Hellboy trade paperback.

Chimaeracon is a great little gaming convention, with around 300 attendees. When I attended in 2006 I got introduced to Frag, and Al Griego planted the seeds for getting me hooked on mini painting.

Returning in 2008 was huge fun. The hands-down flashiest bit was the Mechwarrior pods brought in by Mechcorps of Houston, where you actually climb inside a cockpit, shut out the world, and play Mechwarrior with two sticks, two pedals, six screens, and I don’t know how many buttons.

I got three free games, thanks to my GoH status, but had I been spending money it would have been worth every penny. Sadly, for most of my games I was playing against experts. I spent a lot of time getting blown up. I did, however, get a very cool t-shirt from them. Death from above, indeed…

I had some great conversations with the other Guests of Honor. John Picacio (recently nominated for a Best Artist Hugo) and I discussed book covers we like and don’t like. Marc Singer (The Beastmaster himself) and I talked about the “1000 True Fans” business model, and how microcelebrities like me (I’m eFamous) can actually make a solid living.

I played an awesome “Dungeon Crawl” using Reaper’s Warlord rules and figurines. Vince Hendricks ran a great game, and I actually managed to come back from behind and win. What did I win? Well… Reaper minis, which I’m now looking forward to painting.

I couldn’t possibly play a tenth of what was being played at Chimaeracon this year. If you like games of any kind, and you live within an hour or so of San Antonio, this event is well worth your time in 2009.

Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons passed away on Tuesday, March 4th. CNN has this listed under “cnn.com/technology” which perhaps illustrates the enormous impact this man had on the lives of the people currently on this planet’s cutting edge.

If you’re a computer programmer, or if you work in just about any other highly technical field, the odds are pretty good that you’ve played Dungeons & Dragons. It’s likely, in fact, that your brush with it was during your formative years, and that you (like me) count those experiences among the ones that most shaped your imagination.

CNN’s article was kind of dry. If you want a good tribute, check out Rich Burlew’s illustrated tribute over at Order of the Stick, and the gorgeous single-panel nod over at Penny Arcade.

As for me… I believe that Gary has gone to a place where his imagination can be writ large, and where mere dice and tables can’t describe the outcomes. That God who gave us all life, and who invites us to choose wisely as we write the stories of our lives must certainly smile when a universe-builder like Gary finally comes home. He’s probably got pencils and paper spread out already.

I’ll lead with a picture. Last night I finished painting up this guy, and I’m really pleased with how he turned out — especially his face.

Some of those chin-spots are part of the scuplt, but some were free-handed in place. That’s a practice I’ll be returning to for future trollkin, I’m sure. There are more angles available over at his Cool Mini or Not page*. As usual, you can rate him.

Next up: Yesterday’s “Minumus, the One Page RPG” article is now lying to you. Enough of you asked Ken Burnside for clarification that he had to DOUBLE the size of the game. Today it fits on a single sheet of paper, but you have to feed it through your printer twice. If this daily doubling persists, by the end of the month it will be 2 to the 27th power (134,217,728) pages long, or a little more than half the length of the collection of now-obsolete D&D 3.5 manuals you currently regret purchasing.

The good news is that now your $2.00 donation gets you twice as much PDF. Woo-hoo!

And finally… I took a vacation in December following the book release, and earlier this week I discovered that I had forgotten how to draw, and how to grind. I figured out how to draw again (you have to pick up the pencil first) but still don’t have my grind on. I inked a very measly 2 rows yesterday before my hand complained. So I took a pair of advil, and was rewarded with mild tummy cramps.

My buffer-fu New Year’s Resolutions are as follows:
1) Advil Is Not Candy
2) Draw A Little Each Day Rather Than A Lot All At Once, At Least Until Your Hand Gets Better You Moron.

(*Note: some Cool Mini or Not content is NSFW.)

Ken Burnside of Ad Astra Games emailed me yesterday to show me this creation of his. It is brilliant in its brevity. It is a table-top RPG whose rule set fits entirely on one page — and that includes a sample character sheet that will fit on an index card (pictured to the right - click to enlarge.)

Here’s a snippet, the first two paragraphs on creating your character:

Write down five things about the character you want to play. Pass the paper to the person on your left; that person takes your five things and makes 7 skills out of it.

Pass the character sheet one more place to the left. Everyone takes a look at the five things defined, the seven skills, and defines two positive special abilities, which are adjectives that end in exclamation points, like Tough!, Smart!, Fast!, Keen Eyed! or Detective!

One really cool thing I noticed with Minimus: there does not appear to be a way to min/max, nerf, power-game, or otherwise “break” the rules without the help of all the other players, including the GM.

I haven’t tried playing with this system yet, (but I’ve read the entire core rulebook three times) so I can’t attest to its actual playability, but I think that if your gaming group really gets into the role-playing, and if your GM is a decent storyteller, this system will reward that amply.

The PDF is freely available here from Ad Astra Games. They ask only that you donate $2.00 if you like it.

Ad Astra Games is the same group that brought us the Honor Harrington “Saganami Island Tactical Simulator” board game, whose rule set still rattles my simple mind. Seeing both Minimus and Saganami from the same game designers leads me to wonder whether, at some point in the recent past, Ken Burnside and his team ran out of disk space and were forced to make their next offering a masterpiece of concision.

If you play table-top RPGs, I think you owe it to yourself to read through these rules and ponder their implications.

I’ll lead this with a link: At long last, the CAR-PGa now has a public website, so if you find yourself needing to defend tabletop RPGs, you have a good starting point, and the knowledge that there is a group of people out there who want to help you.

And now, the full story: a while back I went looking for materials that promoted traditional pencil-and-paper Role-Playing Games. After quite a bit of digging I came up with only a small handful of sites. I publicized my quest, and received email from a few people in both camps — some insisting that Dungeons & Dragons and all games like it were evil, and others anxious to point out the benefits of those games, especially for kids in junior high and high school.

I also got email from M. Alan Thomas II, a regional director of the Committee for the Advancement of Role-Playing Games (CAR-PGa). This organization had been around since the ’80s, but though they’d discussed it for years, they did not yet have a public website.

Mr. Thomas credits me as the impetus for finally getting the site off the ground. And so today you can find version 1.0 of the CAR-PGa website at www.CAR-PGa.org (though you’ve certainly already figured that out, what with all the linkage thus far in this post.)

If you play table-top RPGs, and you have a website or blog, you, too, should link to the CAR-PGa.

Why? Because when concerned citizens, parents, teachers, and others go searching for information on table-top RPGs, they need to be able to find something besides Jack Chick tracts and articles on Rocket Propelled Grenades.

The best kind of link is something that not only names the organization, but also says something about what it does. Like this: CAR-PGa: In Defense of Role-Playing Games.

You’ll see that link go live on my archive pages here in the next couple of days. I’m putting my money where my (big) mouth is.

If you’re really interested in advancing the cause, you could join the CAR-PGa and contribute to the materials on their site. This is especially true if you don’t think their offering is complete. The best kind of constructive criticism is the kind that is actually accompanied by materials and tools for further construction.

For the record: I play table-top role-playing games at least weekly, and usually five or six times per month. I’ve played with my kids, and will certainly continue to do so. In fact, I’ve got plans to launch a new campaign with them during 2008, and many of the figures I’ve been painting recently are geared towards just that. Most of you know me (from my blog entries, at any rate) as a devoted family man with an active imagination, and table-top RPGs fit that perfectly.

This Saturday, September 8th, I’ll be at Dragons Keep in Provo signing books and doing sketches along with four other creators: Ryan Ottley, Tyler Kirkham, Andrew Dabb, and Dylan Johnson.

The store will have the first two Schlock books available for sale, and I’ll bring mockups of the cover for Schlock Mercenary: The Tub of Happiness. I’ll also have a portfolio full of original artwork for you to peruse. If you’ve been wanting to buy an original strip, email me now and I’ll bring it with me.

There will also be gaming and game demos, including HeroClix, Magic, Star Wars TCG, and Warmachine. If you’ve been wanting to see my Trollblood army up close, it’ll be there.

If you’re a comic book collector, I’m told there will be 40,000 comic books new to the floor, and that the back stock comic books will be available in 10-cent and 25-cent bins.

Dragons Keep is located at 260 N. University Ave in Provo, and there’s plenty of parking in the rear. The festivities run from 10:00am through about 4:00pm this Saturday. If you need more information, call 801-373-3482, or visit www.dragonskeep.com.

There’s been a lot in the news recently about the current economic crisis. Whether or not government intervention is justified, you can’t deny that we’re all in a tight spot.

I’m talking, of course, about Thursday’s announcement that Wizards of the Coast will be releasing D&D(R) version 4.

Millions of table-top role-players around the globe are bemoaning the fact that their libraries of D&D 3.5 books are now valueless, and that they’ll have to buy all new books. The burden this places upon the geek economy is crushing.

Me? I’m looking forward to it. When 3.0 and 3.5 released, I was skeptical. I treasured my old AD&D books. Then I got into the new game, and found that it really was much better than it had been. I loved the fact that skills had been fleshed out beyond a quirky, DM’s-discretion 1d6 mechanic, and that’s just the most obvious of the changes.

Granted, I only have a few books that will need to be replaced, but WoTC has a good enough track record (in my opinion) that I’m not afraid to start picking up the 4.0 editions when they release.

Speaking of “release,” I’ve put the official press release behind the cut. If you play table-top games, this is worth the read.

(more…)

Okay, the subject line really isn’t fair. But I’ll get to that.

The painting workshop went well, and was packed. I didn’t turn anybody into an instant Golden Demon winner, but several people made breakthroughs. My only regret is that we didn’t have enough space. There were 20 of us crowded into two small banquet tables and one dinette table… we would have spread out, but there were RPGs running on every other table in the store.

Next time we do this we’ll schedule it all by itself, and we’ll make sure that all the “master” painters (Drew, RJ, Ty, and maybe me) can sit and paint along with everyone else, so there are more demonstration cycles available.

After the workshop Boyd, one of the new Warmachine players, asked me to come downstairs, because there was a game going on the one available table, and they needed a rules lawyer. It turned out there was room on the table for TWO games, so Boyd broke out his Menites, and he and I played a 500 point  game, while I doubled as an expert for the game next-door.

Here’s where I’m torn… I want new players to have a good time, but I really can’t bring myself to throw a game. Besides, when you’re teaching the game it’s helpful to actually USE all the cool tricks, stacks, buffs, spells, and feats, so that other players can see how it works. Right?
But I feel bad. My Dire Troll Blitzer (the one with the cannon on his back) pot-shotted Boyd’s cavalry which invited a charge. When the charging cavalry failed to kill him, he ate half their horses… including the one that Boyd was painting during the workshop.

Then my Mauler pounded Boyd’s “flagship” warjack (the Avatar of Menoth) into scrap in one round. And from there it was just a matter of preventing his increasingly lonely warcaster from potshotting and killing my warlock — I’ve seen lots of games turn right at the end that way (I’ve dealt that sort of defeat out myself), and had no desire to fall victim to it.

(As an aside, this is the third time my trolls have devoured someone’s cavalry. Not having any cavalry of my own, I can’t say how they’re supposed to be used. I’m afraid, however, that I’m in for a rude awakening when somebody figures out how to NOT serve them up as iron-shod troll-chow.)

Boyd was a great sport, and we had a good post-game discussion about tactics, and “where things went south.” If his cavalry charge on my flank had been timed to arrive with his jacks on my front line, and if his caster had popped his feat on that round, I expect the trollkin would have been crushed. Conclusion… his forces were too staggered in their approach, and his feat came too late in the game. Also, he had some spells and abilities that would have made a big difference had he known to use them.

Boyd, thanks for the game. Your horses look wonderful (and taste even better!)