Nuketown

Off the Bookshelf: Cole Protocol, Skies of Pern, Century Rain

Kenneth Newquist — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:30:00 +0000

After a fiendishly busy January and February, I've finally had a chance to take a deep breath and spend some time reading. First up on my early spring reading list is The Cole Protocol by Tobias Buckell, a Halo Universe novel involving the quest to prevent the alien Covenant from securing navigation data leading to Earth.

On deck is The Skies of Pern by Anne McCaffrey, one of her last in the classic science fiction setting which features telepathic dragons and their human riders battling the alien, sky-borne menace of Thread, followed by Century Rain, near-future apocalypse/time travel/alternate reality book by Alistair Reynolds.

The Cole Protocol by Tobias Buckell

I keep meaning to read the Halo universe books, particularly the original trilogy of books recounting the events of the first video game. It's a compelling universe that's only just barely been touched by the video games, and I'd love to delve deeper. When Amazon.com and Macmillan went to war over ebooks, and all of the Macmillan titles were dropped from Amazon, I decided to take up John Scalzi on his call to support the authors caught in between by buying Tobias Buckell's The Cole Protocol. The Halo universe book, published by Tor, takes place in the opening days of the Covenant/Human War. The United Nations Space Command has initiated the Cole Protocol, which is systematically wiping any and all navigation data that could lead to Earth from captured (or soon to fall) star systems.

That mission brings a UNSC stealth frigate and a team of Spartan super soldiers to The Rubble, a renegade human colony lurking in a gas giant's trailing Trojan moons that's some how established a truce with a faction of Covenant aliens.

It's a good read that scratches that itch to delve deeper into the Halo universe. It's got what you want from a Halo book: Spartans battling behind enemy lines, noble UNSC fleet officers and ODST warriors on a desperate mission, and a suitably "big science" structure in the form of the Rubble, and an AI that just might be on the brink of going insane.

Is it a great book? No. Buckell relies too much on our familiarity with the Halo universe, and doesn't spend nearly enough time describing the Spartan armor, energy blasts, or the look and cant of the alien species. Those who haven't played the series are likely to be lost reading this novel; there's some background provided, but these are mostly touchstones for fans.

Characterization is thin; I liked Lieutenant Keyes (who goes on to become Captain Keyes in Halo) but the Spartans and ODSTs are relegated to secondary characters. All of this serves a rapidly-moving plot that quickly skips between the human factions and those of the Covenant. It makes for a fast read, but I wish the book had another 50 pages to flesh out its characters and environment. That having been said, I loved the idea of the Rubble, and book's works in some nice hard SF touches (particularly in the destruction of a certain Covenant base). It would have been easy to let the science slide in a book like this, and it's a credit to Buckell that he didn't succumb to that temptation.

The Skies of Pern by Anne McCaffrey

One of the last novels in the Dragonriders of Pern series, The Skies of Pern takes place after the Dragonriderrs have unearthed the ancient starship that brought them to the planet in the first place, and have taken steps to deal with alien menace known as thread that rains from Red Star.

I first read the Pern series when I was in high school, and I loved the first three books -- Dragonflight, Dragonquest and The White Dragon -- but then what teenage geek wouldn't want his/her own telepathic, time-traveling dragon?

I don't know if it's a question of me getting older, or the books declining in quality (or a little bit of both) but I didn't find the later books to be nearly as good, the sole exception being Dragondawn, which recounted the settling of Pern and the first flight of the dragons.

The last book I read was All the Weyrs of Pern, which saw the dragons deal with the Red Star once and for all. It was a decent read, and a good conclusion to the series, but it begs the question ... what will the dragons do when there is no longer any Thread to sear from the skies? The Skies of Pern looks to answer that question, while simultaneously setting up a new skyward thread.

Century Rain by Alistair Reynolds

On deck is the hard SF novel Century Rain, which involves an alternate Earth whose environment has all but been destroyed by a runaway plague. A worm hole is discovered to the 20th century, before the plague was unleashed, but that wormhole could lead to the destruction of both time periods. I've enjoyed Reynolds' work, which features big ideas backed up by detailed prose, and I'm looking forward to this one.

GameCryer.com: Six-Shooters & Spaceships reviewed

Kenneth Newquist — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 23:37:33 +0000

The Six-Shooters & Spaceships sourcebook for the Serenity RPG provides plenty of what a body needs to stay alive in Joss Whedon’s space western universe: weapons, equipment and spaceships. My review of the book is up on GameCryer.com.

It's not an essential book, but it is a useful one as it introduces a variety of low and high tech items (livestock, new guns, cybernetics) as well as a ship floor plans and write-ups. There are also crew bios and statblocks for each ship, which are perfect as NPCs or heroes for a one-shot. While I run Serenity infrequently, I am planning on using the ship floor plans for my Star Wars: Shadows of the Force campaign.

Game Day: Return to the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth

Kenneth Newquist — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:13:47 +0000

After many months away from the game, my group is returning to Dungeons & Dragond 3rd Edition for an old school dungeon crawl through the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth using the D&D 3.5 version released in 2007.

I've got mixed feelings about this.

While I owned the Lost Caverns as a kid and read through it cover to cover several times, I never had a chance to run it. Moreover, with this module we're going to continue what we started with our White Plume Mountain run by travelling back into our D&D campaign's history to the founding of the Blackrazor Guild. In White Plume Mountain, guild leader Brant Bladescream recovered the infamous soul-devouring sword Blackrazor (but lost most of his adventuring companions in the process). In The Lost Caverns, he's taking a new band of heroes into the depths of an infamous dungeon in search of even more powerful magical relics.

The Blackrazor Guild is one of the cornerstones of my gaming group, but in truth they're more of late 1990s and early 2000s phenomenon. The guild's intrigues, chaos factor, and shear distructiveness was a lot of fun, but in time it gave way to other subcampaigns with less collateral damage.

That's the upside. The downside, well, it's dungeoncrawl. In the last year of Star Wars: Saga Edition, we haven't had a single dungeoncrawl with all its associatied traps and one-encounter-per-room setups. It can be fun, but it can also be grueling, and it's what killed our Maure Castle subcampaign.

There's also the D&D 3rd Edition rules themselves. D&D 3E is a good game but it's got it's warts, and after playing so much Saga Edition, those warts are even more apparent to me. Things like the myriad conditions that can affect a character (sickened, nauseated) which inevitably require rules lookups and slow down the game as well as tricky mechanics like incorporeal, which never seems to mean what people think it means. Plus, we'll be playing 10th level characters, which means iterative attacks and arcane/divine spells that can really pack a potent punch (or at the very least, throw off everyone's math with buff spells).

My goal with Friday's game is to keep things focused and moving, avoiding the problems of Maure Castle and focusing on what worked in White Plume Mountain. Here's how:

Skip the prologue: Lost Caverns has a lengthy wilderness component; we don't have time for that. I'm cutting to the chase, summing up the battles the PCs fought to get to the start of the dungeon, and highlighting any villages they can fall back to to rest and recover.
Give them a purpose: Why are our heroes there? They're looking for the fabled Daoud’s Wondrous Lanthorn, last seen in Lost Caverns. Why are they looking for it? Because the Blackrazor mages need it for an upcoming expedition to the outer planes. It's not an earth-shaking hook, but it's something.
Keep things moving: There are a lot of combat encounters in the Lost Caverns, but that doesn't mean that a) I have to run them all, b) that I have to fight every battle to the last hit point and c) I have to run them as written. If it looks like things are turning into a boring slugfest, the battlefield will change.
Reign in the rules: I want make sure the "save vs. do nothing" spells and abilities of many of the monsters are kept in check; no one's going to sit on their hands for an hour while they wait for their sanity to return.

Of course, I always work to keep combats moving, and keep the rules debates online and not at the table, but with D&D -- any flavor of D&D -- it's harder becuase it is so crunchy, and people do love digging into the rules so much.

But knowing about the trap is half of avoiding the trap, and apprehensions aside, I'm looking forward to it. It's old school D&D, served with a slice of pizza and Mountain Dew, set in one of the all-time classic Greyhawk dungeons. How could I not?

Post-Game Report

The game went well. Really well. We blew through 5 or 6 encounters -- I can't remember exactly how many -- and from what I could tell, everyone had a lot of fun with the dungeon. I'd been about the Lost Caverns encounter-per-room setup, but through a combination of good party tactics and the occasional down-sizing on my part (did we REALLY need half-golem darkmantles AND a dragon turtle attacking the party? I think not...) things moved quickly. In about 4 hours the party was able to make their way through the Lesser Caverns, defeated the gorgimera guardian at the entrance to the Greater Caverns, and now stand poised to delve deeper.

No one left frustrated (even though we played until about 1 a.m.) and I'd say everyone's looking forward to part 2 next week.

So why did it run so well? A couple things. First, I did scale back on one or two encounters that I felt were challenging enough as is. The party took a number of good lumps, and had to pause frequently for healing, but the battles weren't so intense that they felt they needed to withdraw to truly rest. Despite playing new 10th level characters for the first time, everyone was on top of their game. We did have the occasional rules look up, but nothing that bogged down the game.

On my side of the screen, I experimented with doing some simple rounding (to the nearest 5s or 10s) while tracking hit points. (e.g. instead of 70 - 24, I just made it 70 - 25). It's a little thing, but I found working in multiples of 5 speed things up for me. I always rounded in the party's favor, and while I didn't do it for every hit, I did it enough to make a difference.

I nerfed the nauseated condition; by default the nauseated condition reads:

Experiencing stomach distress. Nauseated creatures are unable to attack, cast spells, concentrate on spells, or do anything else requiring attention. The only action such a character can take is a single move action per turn.

So imagine this lasts for 6 rounds ... suddenly you get to do nothing for most of the combat. I changed this to a -4 penalty on all actions (skill checks, attacks, etc.) and I think it made a big difference in combat. I'm not above disabling a character in a fight (like say, trying to turn someone to stone with the gorgimera's gorgon breath weapon) but that's a fairly rare occasion. Nauseated, on the other hand, had the opportunity to show up several times during last night's game.

And finally, I think that a year playing Star Wars has done us all good, me particularly. As a GM, I'm even more focused on keeping the game moving, making sure that everyone's engaged, and avoiding the "do nothing for 1 hour" trap that we seemed to fall into with D&D. It makes me optimistic that we really could return to D&D or Pathfinder as our full-time game after Star Wars. We might not -- I'd love to see if I could talk the guys into a Rogue Trader campaign -- but I think it's a stronger possibility than it was before.

Radio Active #83: The Game Room Rebooted

Kenneth Newquist — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 02:10:16 +0000

Good news -- Nuketown Radio Active did not see its shadow, and has emerged from its winter hiatus with an episode that looks at my new gaming room, runs down the video games I've been playing, and talks about the comic book companies you should be following on Twitter.

Getting the Show

There are several ways to get the podcast:

Download the MP3 directly
Subscribe to the podcast rss feed using an aggregator (you only need to do this once; subsequent shows should download automatically)
Subscribe via iTunes (you need iTunes installed on your computer for this to work)

Show Notes

Nuketown News
- Game Room rev 3
  - The last two months have seen us hard at work on our 3rd floor (my game room, my wife's craft room)
  - New carpet, new lights, new desks, new shelves and (hopefully) a new TV for gaming, DVD watching.
  - A huge, time-consuming project but oh-so-worth-it.
  - Check out the photos on Flickr.
Promo: Accidental Survivors
- http://accidentalsurvivors.libsyn.com/
My Gaming Life
- Dragon Age: Origins ... continued
  - Rebooted with a new character after I discovered that a town was destroyed ... taking with it two NPCs.
- Mass Effect 2
  - Sequel to Bioware's SF RPG; this iteration feels more linear, and less RPG-like as it loses its inventory system (making the whole thing very Rainbow 6 like.
- Return to D&D 4E: Revenge of the Giants
  - My gaming group's playing D&D 4E again thanks to Revenge of the Giants, a megamodule involving a planar threat and (of course) lots of giants.
  - I reviewed the megamodule as part of The Tome podcast; the show should be up soon.
Promo: RPG Podcasts
- http://rpgpodcasts.com
Netheads
- Comic Companies on Twitter
  - @darkhorsecomics Because they publish Star Wars: Legacy, gave Star Wars: KOTOR a great run & are launching a new SW title
  - @marvel and @agent_m because they got the value of Twitter from the beginning and are amusing reads
  - @Dc_Nation Follow for a steady stream of DC Comics news, but don't expect the robot to talk back.
  - @Wildstorm The feed for the DC line that does Twitter better than its parent company.
Promo: SFF Audio
- http://sffaudio.com
Outro

Contact us:

Email: nuketown@gmail.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/nukehavoc
Skype: nuketown

Attachment	Size
NuRA-2010-03-03.mp3	25.81 MB

The March Initiative

Kenneth Newquist — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:31:32 +0000

Spring's in the air, or it would be if only there weren't still a half-foot of snow sitting in my backyard. Baseballs are flying in Florida and somewhere in Easton, Pa. there undoubtedly a few brave daffodil shoots fighting their way to the surface.

The last two months have been hard on my geek fitness efforts; I got of to decent starts in January and February, only to have family colds, home improvement projects, and snow storms sidetrack my plans.

With March upon us, it's time to try and get back into a routine. My immediate goal is to pick up where I left off in February, and continue my morning workouts. These are exceedingly hard for me -- I'm just not a morning person -- but it's the one surefire way I have of making sure my exercise for the day gets done. As I've demonstrated time and again, it's all too easy to let exercise slide when a meeting runs late, I get caught up in a project, or a family emergency breaks out.

I'm also going to be making a conscious effort to cut back on soda. At one point I'd gotten my daily Mountain Dew consumption down under a can a day, but it crept back up over the winter as I needed caffeine to get through the inevitable bedtime battles with the kids. With spring upon us, and the kids hopefully able to tire themselves out playing in the backyard, that battle will get easier. I might still need the energy boost to work on a particular project, but where possible I'll likely drink coffee or tea.

And finally, because I've found that setting goals helps -- I'm going to set one this month -- I want to be down to 210 lbs by April 1. That's a manageable target, and if I'm able to keep up my exercise routine and limit Mountain Dew to game days, it should be achievable.

Paizo Launches Pathfinder Novel Line

Kenneth Newquist — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 11:30:00 +0000

Paizo Publishing is launching a fiction line to support the Pathfinder RPG and Pathfinder Campaign Setting. TSR/Wizards of the Coast had good luck with this strategy, and it only makes sense that Paizo would give it a try.

The first two books on the schedule are:

Winter Witch by Elaine Cunningham (September 2010)
Prince of Wolves by Dave Gross by Dave Gross (October 2010)

These will be "300-page mass market paperback novels", to be sold through hobby shops and book stores for $9.99, but you'll also be able to subscribe through Paizo.com. As is the case with the Pathfinder adventure paths, those who subscribe will get free digital copies of the books.

Aside from Dragonlance, I've never been one for game-related fiction and I'm still on a big science fiction kick right now. As such, I'm more likely to want to pick up one of Paizo's Planet Stories books, but I am curious to see how this new fantasy line shakes out.

Fantasy Flight Games Announces Deathwatch RPG

Kenneth Newquist — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 14:34:18 +0000

Fantasy Flight Games has announced the Deathwatch Role-Playing Game, the much-anticipated third core rule book for Warhammer 40k. Players take on the role of Deathwatch Marines fighting a desperate war to restore Imperial oversight of the Jericho Reach. Space Marines are one of the most iconic aspects of the 40K universe, and I know a lot of people have been eager to get their hands on this sort of source book.

The book will use the same ruleset as Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader (so no Warhammer 3rd Edition-style-boxed sets here). It looks to be a more focused game; everyone plays some sort of Space Marine, each an elite warrior drawn from the ranks of Space Marine chapters across the galaxy.

I'm reading through Rogue Trader now, and while I think I prefer its mercantile mix of all-or-nothing trade gambles, utterly self-confident crew, and deep space horrors, Deathwatch may be a game I need to add to my library. If nothing else, I'm sure I could get my gaming group to play a one shot or two.

The Griffin's Crier Re-launched

Kenneth Newquist — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:53:13 +0000

The redesigned version of the Griffin's Crier, my gaming group's web site, is now up and running -- you can check it out at www.griffcrier.com. The GriffCrier has been around for more than a decade; our Blackrazor Guild gaming group first launched the site in 1998 as an archive for our World of Greyhawk campaign. Over time, our gaming group's evolved and added new web apps -- we now have a dedicated forum for in and out of game conversations, the archival D&D content has been moved to a Greyhawk wiki, and we've spawned several additional blogs and wikis in support of the other RPGs we play

Over time, the role of the Griffin's Crier diminished, and it was time to bring it back. Four of us are blogging now, and even more are using Twitter. We've got two campaign blogs and two corresponding wikis, all of which are producing RSS. In recent years, the home page of the Crier had been static as content was updated elsewhere; I wanted to change that by pulling in headlines from across the Blackrazor blogosphere.

The new site has a featured news section with group-specific headlines (and eventually updates from campaign blogs). Below this are four columns pulling headlines from member blogs. There are also links to all of our RPG campaign web sites and a photo archive with pictures from across our group's long history. There's a campaign calendar highlighting upcoming game days, and I'm working on putting together a Game Library to keep track of our various board games, card games and video games (we often have trouble remembering who has what, especially with multiplayer video games). I haven't integrated Twitter yet, but I'm going to talk to the guys about that -- if nothing else I may create a dedicated Twitter account for the site to post headlines and such.

For the technically minded, the new GriffCrier was built using WordPress MU -- that's the multi-site version of WordPress. I did this for several reasons:

I'm using MU at work, and I need a test bed
I want to combine all of our campaign blogs under a single, easily-maintained, easily-managed code base.
I wanted to learn more about developing WordPress themes and plugins

So far I'm pleased with how things turned out, and the guys are too. I think the thing that surprised me most is how much fun I'm having unearthing old photos and loading them to the site. My group's been around for 13 years, and there's a lot of history associated with it. Having an archive of the real-world component of that is going to be very, very cool.

Exploring D&D Battlefields with Microsoft Surface

Kenneth Newquist — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:31:12 +0000

Ever since Chewbacca defeated R2-D2 in holochess, geeks have wanted a virtual table top for their games. Things have taken a major step in that direction with SurfaceScapes, a proof-of-concept app for Microsoft surface created by students at Carnegie Mellon University. It's based on the D&D 4th Edition rules, and those who've seen it are suitably impressed:

For those who haven't seen it before, Microsoft Surface is a sort of digital coffee table; it's got a large, flat touch sensitive screen (kind of like an upsized and hard-to-move iPhone. SurfaceScapes puts an interactive map on the Surface, which you can interact with by moving around specially designed miniatures. All of the rules you need to run the game (e.g. movement, powers, etc.) are built into the game, and you can interact with your character through a handheld device (e.g. an iPod touch or smart phone).

Putting aside snide comments about 4E finally realizing its video game roots, I think this is pretty darn cool. As a GM, I love the idea of using Campaign Cartographer to create rich, beautiful maps, complete with sound effects and event-triggered background music, but it's hard to pull off in the real world (not impossible, just challenging).

Something like SurfaceScapes could let you do all that, while simultaneously abstracting away all those crunchy RPG rules (as we already do every time we fire up Dragon Age, Fallout or Mass Effect). I think games like D&D (be it 3.x or 4.x) led themselves to this sort of digitization, and I could see the hobby moving in this direction someday.

But (and you knew there had to be one) ... there's a real problem with cost. These Microsoft Surface units cost upwards of $12,500 (see Wikipedia for cost estimates) making them unrealistic for most people's weekly game, and putting them out of reach of most hobby stories.

I also wouldn't really want this to replace my conventional game -- I like using my imagination for all of this, regardless of how cumbersome the rules can be at times. But would I rent one for an afternoon at my local super arcade? You bet.

Gamer Traveler: Games & Travel Blog Carnival Roundup

Kenneth Newquist — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 12:28:37 +0000

The Gamer Traveler has posted a round up of the "Games & Travel" blog carnival from January 2010. This was a cool topic, and one I wish I'd taken the time to participate in (perhaps I will, retroactively).

While I think many campaigns tend to hand-wave away travel (perhaps after one too many random wilderness encounters during their Advanced Dungeons & Dragons days) it can make for some great adventures. Heck, one of our most memorable Star Wars campaign arcs involved our heroes bouncing out of hyperspace into a proto-star nebula. They barely escaped the nebula with their lives, the ship's outer hull having been melted into what we're now calling "star forged armor".

When they arrived at the remote world of Maltern's Folly, their enemies found it impossible to get into the ship because the outer hull had been fused solid (save for an opening cut in a single escape hatch. On the way back from their destination, their battered ship's hyperdrive went bad, forcing them to visit a shadowport for parts. The aftereffects of that journey stayed with us for months (in game and out) as we riffed on the ship's increasing fallibility, ultimately ending up with it being placed on blocks in an Outer Rim starport while it waited for repairs.

It was a great arc ... and it goes to show that sometimes its the journey, not the destination, that matters.