maandag 30 september 2013

Playing Cards and D&D

While playing Dungeons and Dragons, my friends and I have found several reasons to use card games. I used it to get a kick out of my players freaking out, we’ve had several instances of our characters consulting a Tarot deck, and we even played poker to earn money at one point (I wasn’t very successful at that…). At one point, I even had a plan to invoke a system of drawing cards to add a couple of random effects to the game at times it would need a little spicing up, or to punish my players.
When thinking about it, playing cards are actually an excellent way to randomise effects. Different numbers and houses can yield different effects, or have different meanings for the players. Quite frankly, there can be as many different options as the person who designs the system really needs.
That’s what pulled me to one of the Kickstarter campaigns I decided to support. It was a combination of the many different options that could come out of a deck of cards, combined with another of my weaknesses: creating Non-Player Characters that are somewhat believable and have a personality, especially on the fly. This Kickstarter campaign was of the Character Cards, cards that laid out a basic person with four primary points:

“Their heart’s desire”, which was symbolized by the house of hearts. It basically tells you about the main goal of the person in life.
“Their occupation”, symbolized by spades. It tells you what they do all day or night.
“Their physical appearance”, symbolized by diamonds. Exactly what it says on the tin, really.
“Their social connections”, symbolized by clubs. Who they know, and who matters.

Every card has a name, a ‘big’ description based on the suit of the card, and several smaller descriptions for the other suits. A King of Hearts would have a large text telling about what that person wants in life, while three smaller texts tell about their occupation, appearance and connections. A Queen of Clubs would have a large text telling about the connections the character has in life, while three smaller texts tell about their heart’s desire, occupation and appearance.
What makes the cards extra interesting, though, is the secret all characters have. It is assumed that nobody is completely honest, or knows absolutely everything about themselves. They give people a twist, or a dark side, or maybe even a light side if it’s possible.


They even thanked all of us!

As you might notice, I separated the stack in two different stacks before I took the picture. That’s because there’s a full Major Arcana set next to the 54 cards that fill up a normal deck of playing cards. There’s also four ‘knights’ that have been added to the court cards of the four suits of which I’m not exactly sure if they are part of the arcana set, or if they were just a nice addition, but with the 22 Major Arcana cards and the four knights, it’s a total of 80 character cards.
My main motivation when pledging for this Kickstarter was to get myself enough names, characters and motivations to help myself build characters for RPG’s, tales and books. Especially the last two have always caused me trouble. Names are hard to me, especially believable names, and making ‘generic character #14’ again to bore even me at some point, so there should actually be some interesting, original names and characters in my stories in the future…
Can’t wait!

vrijdag 20 september 2013

Reaper Bones

Quite a while ago, somewhere around July 2012, the one friend I always paint miniatures with pointed me out to the Reaper Bones Kickstarter, which was basically a ‘we sell existing miniatures dirt cheap so we can get funds to design new miniatures’ drive. Some other friends and the two of us decided that it was well worth the money and, if we all chipped in, the costs could probably be overseen. We put our heads together, made our decisions, and pledged for the Bones.
The Kickstarter turned out to be a huge success, gathering 3,4 million dollars worth of pledges, and it was pretty clear that everyone was going to get a huge load of awesome miniatures. The estimated delivery time would be somewhere around march 2013, but with all of the add-ons and stretch goals that were met, we were pretty sure they were never going to make it in time for that date.
March came and went. April, May and June also passed, and we started joking about the time we had to wait. July and August also passed…
And then I received the confirmation mail. Our order had been processed and sent by airmail to my house. On the third of September, the mailman rang our doorbell, demanded we paid him for import tax (damn you, tax system!) and then handed me a box that was actually a little smaller than I had expected it to be. Giddy with excitement, I set up a camera on a tripod and started to record my very first unboxing video.


 
 
It was pretty bad, considering the fact that the camera’s battery died about halfway through the unboxing and missed about all the important things, but it was fun, so I uploaded it anyway. After sorting everything out so my friends and I could get all the miniatures we had called dibbs on, I decided that it was a great idea to immediately start painting one of the mini’s the first chance I got.
I planned to wait with this blog post until I had finished that mini, so I could get a good comparison picture of what an unpainted miniature looks like, next to a (rather poorly, knowing me) painted miniature. The Bones material was specially designed for painting, after all. Unfortunately, the friend I paint with, and the friend whose paint I use, is currently moving and isn’t really able to paint with me. So I can’t paint. Life’s hard like that.
What I can say is that, quite frankly, the promotional pictures didn’t prepare me for the actual quality of the Bones miniatures. The first image of the material I had seen was this one:
 

As you might see, there are a couple of places where the detail appears to suffer because of the material. However, when you place it next to a miniature that was photographed slightly better (maybe without the use of flash photography…), you can see that the details are actually nicely preserved by the material:

 
It’s actually pretty fun to work with the material. As it’s got some limited ability to bend, it’s suddenly very possible to reach points on the miniature that would otherwise be covered by different parts. Though this same attribute means that some of the more spiky things, like spears and staves, can be stuck in a bent position thanks to the moulding process, it is more of a boon than a curse. The bent pieces can be fixed with some boiling water, and there will be no more axes breaking because the rigid resin decided it didn’t like the minimal pressure that was placed on it! (yes, there’s a story behind that one, too…)
With all of the Bones miniatures I’ve got lined up now, it’s quite probable that I’ll be set for quite some time. One of them is planned for my Declipse Savage Worlds game, if that ever gets started, and several others are planned characters or little surprises for my friends…

I really look forward to painting these things…

donderdag 19 september 2013

Coffee II

And yes, I did get a second one...

Coffee

I never really drank coffee, mostly because I couldn't see the appeal to the bitter drink that was supposed to keep me awake. I always figured that I could deal with that using energy drink, which indeed worked for me for a long time.
I managed to keep that up, until I went to Switzerland with scouting. It took one groggy morning for me to decide that, yes, it was time for me to learn drinking coffee. Coffee was readily available, energy drink wasn't.
After that, I started drinking a lot more coffee. I realized it was a great boon for both my home life and my college life. My university has quite a few options for getting my hands on a cup, so as I'm staring at the (by now empty) cup on my desk, I think I'll need to relocate soon to get a chance at some more...

zaterdag 14 september 2013

Games and Books

I recall that, a long time ago (around 2005, to be exact), we had a house computer that we all shared on the ground floor. It was the computer that everyone used and which was often a test machine for my father’s new acquisitions.
As such, both my brother and I spent most of the time on that computer, playing new games as they came along and enjoying them or telling my father to get rid of them. It was a good time, which brought me in contact with several video game franchises and learned me to enjoy them.
In 2005, I suddenly found a new Star Wars game on the computer. Star Wars: Republic Commando, to be exact. It was a game that was praised for its excellent AI, interesting storyline and fast gameplay, three things that I couldn’t agree more with. It basically followed a single commando squad, comprised of four different individuals, that was fighting its way through the well-known Clone Wars that made up the second and third movies of the prequel trilogy.
I recall highly enjoying the first of three large levels, which brought the player through several environments on Geonosis, where the player and his squad were constantly being harassed by the flying, insect-like Geonosian hunters and the droids that made up the meat of the separatist army. It had its ups, it had its downs, its busy moments and its calm moments, and it formed an excellent introduction to the game.
Then… came the second chapter, which took me a very long time to complete. Not because it was very hard, because it wasn’t. It was your typical ghost ship mission with a lot of dark corners, shadows and speedy enemies that tended to jump out of dark corners and approach you rapidly.
And, I was a wimp. That same chapter brought you the shotgun-like slug thrower, which was basically an instant kill button in that chapter (its use diminished in the third and last chapter, though…), and suddenly made all those scary enemies a laughing stock that was taken care of with the push of a button.

In the end, I replayed that chapter for fun, countless times, because it was an excellent chapter, but the story was a bit lacklustre. It was the third chapter, which ended on a bit of a cliff-hanger, that really piqued my interest in the game.
(obviously, spoilers coming up for the ending of an eight-year-old game that you should’ve played already)
The final challenge is an enemy battleship hanging above the location that your squad is currently residing in. You’re told that the best way to deal with this battleship is to take the four anti-air cannons that are set up in a circle directly underneath said battleship, so you go out and find said cannons. You leave the sniper at the first cannon, the demolitions expert at the second, fight your way through hordes of droids with your tech expert and leave him at the third cannon (really the hardest fight of that part, if I recall correctly…) and finally take a seat yourself in the fourth one. Your team takes care of the battleship, it explodes, and you get picked up in your gunship to deal with the next assignment.
However, as you go to pick up your sniper, you hear that he’s being overrun by enemies and his communication stops. You’re told to leave him behind by Yoda, the door of the gunship closes, and the game ends.

There are a lot of people who wanted to find out what had happened with Sev (the sniper), but unfortunately, the sequel, called ‘Imperial Commando’, never left the planning stage and the fans were left hanging.
That included me.
I figured that I would probably never find out and was actually quite happy with that, but I kept returning to my drifting Republic Cruiser and the monstrosities that inhabited it. It was a happy little memory that was sitting in the back of my mind and something I could return to if I wanted to have some fun.
Then, one day, as I was browsing the internet, I stumbled across a series of novels written by a women called Karen Traviss. They were based on the same universe as the fantastic game I had played, though it followed a different squad on obviously different adventures. How else could it be.
I bought the first book online, to see how it was, and I was impressed. The story was well written, detailed, and gave me insights in the actual culture of the commandos outside of combat. What they were like without their armour and while dealing with other commandos, soldiers and civilians.

After a little more research, I found out that Traviss had been involved in the production of Republic Commando and had had a say in writing the banter between the squad of the game and had actually built a complete language to write a song with. It was pretty impressive, so I decided to keep reading on.
I enjoyed the book series as relationships were built and characters were introduced. The characters of the game were actually introduced in the books, the books detailing the things that happened between the different missions in the game and, of course, by the time the mission on Kashyyyk had rolled around and Sev had been lost, the way they coped with the loss.

Unfortunately, the series ended abruptly after the series had received a name change. Originally, it had always been called ‘Republic Commando [subtitle]’, but as time went on and Order 66 had passed (Star Wars fans will know what that means), it started to be called ‘Imperial Commando’, of which only the book called ‘Order 66’ had been written.
After that, Lucasarts decided to make some… radical changes to the Mandalorean culture to make it more suitable for the Clone Wars animated series that was running at the time. The change could basically be explained as the nomadic warrior culture that had been the undertone of all of the books being turned into a treehugging hippy culture that would make it virtually impossible to write the next books without rebooting the whole story. Because of the contract with Lucasarts, considering the use of their IP, Traviss couldn’t keep writing on in her own continuity, and she logically decided to abandon the Republic Commando series, leaving the last book with cliff-hangers, characters lost and scattered all across the Star Wars universe.
Though she posted spoilers about the book that would have closed it all off, which she had planned in a rush as she got the idea her books wouldn’t fall in good grace anymore before being forced to cancel it all together, I never really felt like it was good enough. A list of spoilers and planned notes never has and never will beat reading the actual book, but I had managed to push the feelings of loss and lack of closure to the back of my mind for a while.
I found other books written by Traviss that I enjoyed. She wrote a couple of books in the Gears of War universe, bridging the gaps between the games, but unfortunately, they started to get tedious and I started seeing the critique that other readers had about her. Idolizing tribal cultures to the point of extremism, making sure they were told of as legendary warriors and that they came out like that in the books. Extremely detailed combat scenario’s that, quite frankly, coloured my own way of writing combat and went on for many pages at a time. Witty banter that probably wasn’t as funny to me as it was to her. The list doesn’t go on and on, but there’s multiple points that I couldn’t ignore as I read on.
I ultimately opted to stop reading her books, because they turned out to be long and tedious, with the excitement of the story gone. I didn’t like it, because I had a lot of fun moments with her stories, and I could almost compare it to ending a long and intimate relationship, but I couldn’t keep up with the irritations anymore.

Some days ago, I returned to Traviss’ website and took a look at the Republic Commando section. Maybe I was hoping things had changed and that the Imperial Commando story would keep going, or maybe I just wanted to remind myself what had happened and what belonged to the past. I don’t know, but I do know it inspired me to write this piece and that it reminded me of an excellent time. I actually downloaded the game again, though I’ll have to see if I get it running again. I really hope so…