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Month: December 2018

Wheels & Walls

You have Walls and you have Wheels. It was ALWAYS that way and it will ALWAYS be that way!”

Donald Trump

Who am I to gainsay our President? And I’ve seen worse creative prompts. Thus, I present a one–page RPG: Wheels & Walls. The good mechanics and GMing advice in this game are lifted directly from Lasers & Feelings, a one-page tabletop RPG by John Harper. Everything else I wrote in a few hours before getting back to the business of celebrating the New Year.

This game wears its political opinion on its sleeve.

If you like it, you can find a long list of other Lasers & Feelings hacks here.

Weighty Gifts

As always S and I do a minimal Christmas. This year we were accidentally gravity themed — I got her a Gravity Blanket and she got me Gravity Dice. Since we consulted on these, we elected not to wait till Christmas Day to open them. Items from other people are still wrapped, since we’re not barbarians.

The blanket is really nice. It’s relatively small — smaller than a typical blanket, just 72 x 48 inches. This makes it a bit short for me but perfect for her. Both of us sleep easier when using it, so I will probably wind up with one of my own soon enough.

Gravity dice.

The dice are also awesome. They’re machined aluminum; solid but not too heavy. 3/8th of an inch on a side. The FAQ says they’re carefully balanced and I imagine they’re reasonably close.

I got these twelve as Feng Shui dice. I also have six I’m going to use for Blades in the Dark. I am super-pleased.

We are also grateful for the jams and jellies my lovely Aunt Kathy sent, the gift boxes from S’ family, and everything from my mother.

New Daniel Keys Moran

This is unexpected but pleasing. Fortuitously, I’ve been reading the four extant Continuing Time novels in reverse chronological order. And lo, now there’s a new short story collection including a lot of Continuing Time material! I guess I’m going to pause before The Long Run.

Daniel Keys Moran’s The Long Run was thrillingly exciting to me in the 90s. It fit roughly into the cyberpunk category, and the author was clearly technically savvy. The computer technology rang true. Even today: yep, of course it’s possible to figure out who wrote a chunk of computer code based on their stylistic quirks. DKM is a very good stylist, unapologetic about his quirks, versed in pop culture. I could have mainlined his stuff.

Then in his next book it turns out that this cool near future cyberpunk series is actually a huge future history. Mind-blowing. And he has the whole thing planned out, cool!

And then stuff happened and he went quiet. If you search my blog for his name, I was pretty cynical about it for a while. Sorry: I was younger. I just wanted it to be true so much. Thirty books, millennia of story, huge themes, a completely confident author. It was so exciting.

Now it’s fine. He should be first and foremost happy, except that the Lakers should not win NBA championships. But anything else is just fine, and any more words are gravy. The existing books are good by themselves.

And now there’s another one, so that’s awesome!

Some of the short story collection is previously published stories; “Realtime” and “Given the Game” were both magazine publications back in the day. The Continuing Time stories look to be new. There’s a teeny bit of time overlap — “The Shivering Bastard at Devnet” is dated 2676, which is also when Lord November: The Man-Spacething War was set. “The Shepherds” is set in 2049, which is the middle of the years in which the Castanaveras telepaths were born, but perhaps more interesting is the evocative line “Peter Janssen is shot from Jupiter orbit by a Zaradin Cathedral Starship” from the timeline.

Going back to the 1994 press release on the state of the Continuing Time, “The Shepherds” is listed as a short story set in 2049. “Platformer” is listed as a novel set between 2964 and 3031. The vision has stayed remarkably consistent.

Late edit: “‘Tales’ is more than half new material, btw — more than 175 pages out of the 365 or so. None of it’s ever been collected before.” So there you go.

It’s been a while since I played the reference-hunting game in the Continuing Time. If you want to play it yourself, the old Kithrup archive is still there.