Nothin’ ain’t somethin’ till there’s mashup DLC.

I want to do a big thoughtful post on Dennis Lehane’s newest novel, The Given Day, because hey, Lehane. Mystic River remains one of my favorite books ever. But… I liked The Given Day a lot. It’s an easy read, it’s interesting history, and Lehane’s love for Boston shines through every page. I don’t, however, think it’s quite as significant a book as Lehane seems to think. It has to carry both the weight of Lehane’s discussion of race and class, which is great as always, and of historical information, which I think weighs the book down overly. ...

SSC: I’ve been waiting for Chinese Democracy to come out, because I wanted to hear it. First single (also titled “Chinese Democracy”) is here (original).

I mentioned last night that Oz was in the public domain, and that there was a thriving subculture of fans writing and publishing Oz books. I would not be me if I were unable to provide a link or two. Or three. I find this whole thing inexpressibly charming.

Unfortunately the local Living Forgotten Realm group’s plans to run bi-weekly Sunday games fell through, and I can’t make the regular weekday games. There’s a big weekend event coming up in a couple of weeks that’d get my puny level 1 cleric up a couple of levels, and thus perhaps enable him to play in the next tier of adventures – but I’d still have the same scheduling issue, so it’s not really worth it to burn a day on that. ...

If I’m going to draw maps, I want them to be old school maps. Black lines, graph paper, no shadows, no textures. You can pretend this is because I am unartistic if you like; you will be correct in large part. Still. Just about nothing does good old style maps. Dundjinni is really oriented towards neat battlemaps. RPG Map Maker is unpolished and is a paint program rather than a draw program. Map Tools is nice but is also more of a paint program, I think. So OmniGraffle. You can set up a nice old school graph grid and you can include that grid when printing or exporting images. Snap to grid is easy. If you do everything as lines, it’s not too hard to add a hole in a wall. I figured out how to do round rooms. Caverns and river lines may be hard, but I’ll cross that obstacle when I come to it.

The thing that really surprised me about running 4e was how amazingly simple it was in practice. Setup is perhaps a different story, which I can’t speak to yet, but assuming you have an adventure in hand and a bunch of players, it’s nearly frictionless to run. A well-presented adventure, as per WotC’s example, puts stat blocks for each monster with each encounter. These literally have 70% of what you need to run the encounter. You get each attack listed clearly, with the bonus to hit and the damage included, along with any other effects. Everything the monster might do is right there. ...

Spoilers. This is a difficult movie. I laughed pretty hard through a lot of it, except where I was wincing. Sympathetic wincing, not angry wincing. The Coens are not in the business of making movies that are easy to figure out, and they don’t do open access. This is like that. A lot of the criticism of this movie revolves around how unlikeable the characters are. Filmspotting talked about the Coen tendency to mock stupid characters. There’s no doubt that most of the protagonists are dumb and/or cold and/or malicious, but I don’t think I can write the movie off as an exercise in mockery. ...

(Not Fringeworthy, that’s different.) Use Nemesis, which is fairly simple and free. A couple of nomenclature changes – Madness Meters are Stability Meters, and most difficulties are fairly low. Things are weird but not alien weird. The Unnatural track is the Fringe track. Trump dice are likewise Fringe dice. There is no supernatural, but there is fringe science, obviously. Those versed in fringe science might go above 5d in a given stat. I wouldn’t be surprised if Nina turned out to have 6d in Body, and Dr. Bishop has 6d Mind. Perhaps more. ...

It is rather difficult to talk about Neal Stephenson’s newest without spoiling lots. In generic, cloudy, unsatisfying terms: it’s a Stephenson book, with lots of thought experiments and science and so forth. There are action scenes. The world changes dramatically during the course of the book, as a result of the actions of the protagonists. There is a romance of sorts, in which a practical female character falls for a slightly fuzzy-minded idealist. The alien world setting is nice. I found myself very engaged by the society and the worldbuilding. Which is good, because there’s a lot of it before the plot proper starts. OK, spoilers. Don’t get too excited, since it’s just gonna be a one-liner quip.