“Elvis’ entire career was a big mystical ritual, you know. He knew what he wanted to do all the way back in Memphis, and he put his whole life together so that he could pull it off. All those years, all those songs, all those different costumes — why, he was gathering up orgone energy decade after decade after decade. All flavors, too. Fat person orgone energy. Skinny pelvis orgone energy. Wartime orgone energy. All of it flowing into Elvis. ...
My current favorite piece of gaming slang is “lasersharking.” “Hey, you know, that game concept would be better if the sharks had lasers on their head.” Lasersharking. Leave the poor concept alone; not all concepts need lasers to reach their full potential. Rifts is all lasersharking, all the way to the bottom turtle.
The Civil War did not end in 1865…. The Confederates went into hiding and in 1908 they used their boy Teddy Roosevelt to found the FBI - conFederate Bureau of Inquisition. You heard it here first. I collect kooks for the purposes of generating weird NPCs for games. Possibly I need a kook category.
For the curious, my GenCon schedule follows. Thursday Iron Ref (Judge/Player), 2 PM — 8 PM This is run by a couple I’ve sort of kind of known for a long time, and whom I had a great time gaming with last GenCon. The concept is also terribly cool. Quasi-fortunately, my other first choice for this slot filled up two hours after registration opened, so I didn’t have to make a choice. ...
For the record, I spent most of Saturday having a pleasant Mother’s Day celebration with my family. Sunday was the day I spent mesmerized by City of Heroes. And there is a screenshot album, which will keep getting updated as long as updating it amuses me. “Some villains do not wish to end their lives of crime. The Teleonaut uses his mystical shadow powers to reason with them.”
Any MMORPG in which I can create a big bruiser wearing a green suit and a sleek black shirt, with a wrestling mask to match? That’s an MMORPG which is perfectly OK by me. I had a refreshing evening of beating up thugs and muggers, during which I looked a lot like this (click the thumbnail for the big picture): Now, that’s what I call entertainment.
Mention Count: 2. In Angel, characters have Drama Points, which can be used for a number of quasi-narrative purposes. PCs get either 10 or 20 at the start of the game, depending on how powerful they are otherwise. (Think of the difference between Angel or Buffy on the one hand and Xander or Wesley on the other hand.) They have five uses, as follows: Heroic Feat, which gives you a +10 bonus on any one roll; I Think I’m OK, which instantly heals half the damage a character has taken to the point it’s used; Plot Twist, which creates a “lucky break” for the characters; Righteous Fury, which costs 2 Drama Points and gives a +5 bonus for all rolls for one fight; and Back From The Dead, which allows a character to come back from death. ...
A couple of quotes for Jere. First, about history: Well, it was simple enough, he thought now. Anna was often on his mind these days because of Assaf. And so in the desert this morning his memory had abruptly tumbled back through the years to Stern, all the way back to Egypt and the Monastery where it had actually begun for Anna and him, although neither of them had known then that it was a beginning, so long ago in Cairo. ...
[More character noodling. This is for Rob’s Starchild game.] “Is that Summer or Strummer?” “Eh, you know, whatever…” Kai Summer is immensely young, and the heavy overcoat he wears — down to his ankles, collar turned up to his ears — does nothing to hide this. It accentuates his slender frame, skinny like the loosely knotted tie he sometimes wears. His ragged boots swallow his feet whole. You could drop him into a Chicago winter and he’d vanish like he was just another bad poet with too much pride to work retail and not enough time to live. I’ve never seen him without the overcoat off stage. On stage, though, he’s someone else. He doesn’t get any bigger, but he uses his guitar to carve electric lines through the air in minor keys that owe more to madness than to music. If you squint just a little you can see a shimmering field of music around him like an aura of sound. I’ve noticed that people playing with him don’t get too close. I can’t blame them; I’d worry about getting sliced in two by a stray power chord. It is trivial to say that he is the best guitarist of his generation because at the ripe old age of 17, he is the first guitarist of his generation. Perhaps in the end, if Mother doesn’t have her way, he will be known merely as the man who found the possibilities. Perhaps someone else will be the man who developed them. But I wouldn’t bet on it. He is playing tonight at the Broken Metronome. He told me the other week that he hopes to jam with Mary Pagan someday. It’s the first personal confidence I’ve ever heard from him. Mary? Are you out there? Can you hear me? This critic thinks you should make Kai’s dream come true. From Lester Shots’ “Beating the Minutes” column in the ChicaGO alternative wheneverwecan.
Here’s the cliche: This week’s Wednesday Weird isn’t about just any old hedge Wizard, but the classic wize old wizard that is a staple of the fantasy genre. Although Merlin is a heck of a lot older than Gandalf, I’m not sure if he started wearing the pointy hat before Tolkein’s wizard. However, since D&D and most fantasy fiction has (for better or worse) been heavily derived from Tolkein’s work ever since, we’ve seen a lot of wizards in the Gandalf/Merlin mold. They’ve been dispensing sage advice and assisting heroes for ages. Sometimes they have the hat. Sometimes they don’t. ...