Wow - am I bad at keeping this thing up to date!
Anyway - the point of this (very late) post is to say that my book was published on DriveThruRPG. You can now purchase a collected volume of all of the GameMasterClass articles from Parallel Worlds (plus one more bonus chapter about ending campaigns). It's been getting very positive reviews, and if you're a GM (either established or just starting out) or a player, then it should be a great read to help you to make your campaign better. You can get it here: www.drivethrurpg.com/product/374534/Gamemasterclass and if you want to listen to a comprehensive review, you can go to Iconic Podcast (Part 1 and Part 2). We hit Copper status on DriveThruRPG a few weeks ago, and are well on the way to Silver.
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Hi friends - I have a small favour to ask.
Parallel Worlds, the magazine that I write for, is eligible for a Hugo award, but only if we can get enough nominations to make the short list. The category we're eligible for is the Best Semiprozine. Hopefully, you'll know if you're eligible to nominate - I believe you need to have attended WorldCon last year, or be registered to attend this year. If so, and you've read the magazine and enjoyed it, it would wonderful to have your nomination! Instructions for how to nominate are here. Deadline is this Friday! If you haven't given us a try yet, please do! You can find all previous issues on DriveThruRPG - most recent issues are only £4.50 digital (or £8.50 pod), and you can get the entire first year for less than £20! You can also see some of our previous articles on our webpage (not all, it's in the process of being upgraded) or listen to our podcast (many of the earlier issues and some select other features). Anyway - thanks for reading. Even if you can't nominate yourself, please ask your friends - it would be amazing to be on the shortlist. It's a New Year, which means it's been six months since I last posted here.
What am I up to, you might wonder? Well - since you've (hypothetically) asked. I'm currently in the process of redrafting my novel, Dawnpainter. It took a while to get to after I received comments from my alpha reader (and editor) as I was involved in other projects and it was a little intimidating to go back to. But that is now progressing, and draft 2 is, thus far, significantly stronger than the initial one. I've completed the first draft of a sourcebook for 7th Sea, Winds of Fate. I'm planning on publishing this through the Explorer's Society on DriveThruRPG - so look out for that later this year. It's currently being reviewed by my editor, and then still needs to go through layout and so forth. It's a book that provides backgrounds and statistics for a ten character ship's crew, including potential directions to take their stories. Those characters are also presented as potential Villains and there is a long adventure at the end. As far as I can tell, there aren't any other books available that provide this kind of information, so I'm looking forward to getting it out there. My work with Parallel Worlds is continuing. They've now published 10 of the articles in my Gamemaster Masterclass series, with 3 still to go. Once those are all available, there is talk of a collected edition being published, which is very exciting. Watch this space for information as and when we have it! Over the summer, I helped the NGO Heritage for Peace to write guidelines for protecting the heritage sector during Covid-19 and violent conflict. That's now been published. Finally, I've registered for the NYC Midnight Short Story competition 2021 - which is both very exciting and very intimidating. We'll see how that goes. Going forward, I'm going to try to be more organised, especially about updating this webpage. The intent is to post something each Friday - so please check back regularly for new material! And I hope you all have a Happy New Year. Here's to 2021. I've been remiss in failing to shamelessly self-promote recently - so here we go.
Issue 10 of Parallel Worlds is now available. As before, I'm in it with an article about Worldbuilding for an RPG campaign. If you don't subscribe, it's currently available in podcast form Issue 9 should be available for download soon, but isn't quite there yet. In this issue, I wrote about creating a good character party. When it is, you'll be able to get it here and it's also currently available in podcast form. My previous articles for them are available standalone. First was Play Safe - my article about consent and safety measures in gaming and there is also the one about Session 0 - how to start a new campaign and discuss social contracts. I'm continuing to create my own content - mostly flash fiction and video game playthrough videos on my own site, but also a couple of reviews and some RPG material here - always interested in suggestions for other stuff that people would like to see. If you have a gap in your schedule, I'd love it if folks could give some of it a read and let me know what you think. I’ve been reading the media (both social and otherwise) a great deal over the last few years, and noting what gets noticed, what gets shared, what gets commented on. There’s been a great deal over the last few years – Brexit, Trump, Covid-19, Protests, #MeToo – that has been divisive and has made disagreements all the stronger and arguments all the fiercer. It’s an old adage that nobody ever changed their mind because of Facebook or Twitter.
I don’t think that’s absolutely true, but I do agree that it is probably vanishingly rare. I’ve watched arguments, people posting at cross-purposes, people linking and re-linking to articles that help them – some of those better and more reliable sources than others. Through it all I’ve come to think that the most dangerous thing in the world right now is Confirmation Bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias). Essentially, this is the phenomenon that states that people are likely to continue to believe what they currently believe, no matter what evidence to the contrary might be presented to them. Similar to what people call the “Echo Chamber” effect, that social media has allowed people to curate the opinions they see and hear so much that they only ever see or hear people that agree with them. These two things, whilst not quite the same, I think reinforce each other, and is something that social media especially makes worse. Now, before anybody thinks I’m trying to criticise a particular side in any argument – I’m not. This is non-partisan – I’ve seen this behaviour in people who lean either way politically, religiously and so forth. Neither am I trying to say that every opinion is valid – I don’t agree with white supremacy, for example, and societal cruelty of any kind is, I think, difficult to justify. What I’m saying is that everybody is susceptible to this, no matter is they are Leaver or Remainer, Right-wing or Left-wing, Republican or Democrat, Religious or Atheist, for PvP or against PvP, or any other disagreement. I don’t hold myself above this – I’ve been guilty of it. In some ways,I’m perhaps guilty of it right now in what I’m writing (though that gets a bit meta and gives me a headache). I’ve been called out on it in the past and when I was younger that angered me and made me dig in my heels. Now I’m older, I try to thank the person who has informed me and try to consider what they are saying. They aren’t necessarily right (they also suffer from bias), but I think it’s important to consider what they say. The media (both social and otherwise) thrive on Confirmation Bias – this is why headlines are sensational and Trump has one of the most followed Twitter accounts. People click to read more of things that they agree with – it’s always great to see that somebody else agrees with you! Who doesn’t like that? Especially if they are somebody who might have some kind of authority over the topic, or that we think may be especially well informed like a journalist. Headlines don’t win arguments – they try to make you feel what you’re feeling even stronger than you did before. Then you’ll click more headlines for more validation. It’s a vicious cycle and, unfortunately, what the media has become in the days of easily accessed online articles, rather than having to buy a paper. Maybe it was just as bad then – I don’t know, I wasn’t really paying attention back then. At times, people will try to take advantage of this. They’ll write about a current piece of news and they’ll miss out some vital context. Charitably, we might think that they are simply suffering from Confirmation Bias as well – their mind simply doesn’t see the counterarguments or counter-facts. In some cases (perhaps many), unfortunately, I think it’s deliberate. When people post pictures of 10 or 20 years ago and try to use them to raise outrage today – well, that’s a fine technique if your argument is that things never change. However, you do owe it to your readers to point out that your picture is old and not taken during current events. Please – be aware that my primary criticism here is those who first create those posts – not those who then go on to share them. The same goes when an article simply states a sound-bite from a speech or event without context – context is vital. I once read an article (I’m afraid I can’t remember where from) where a reviewer was angry that words from his review were being used in some marketing for a movie. He’d written, “One of the most astounding examples of hot not to make a movie I’ve ever seen.” The marketing on the poster quoted him as saying “The most astounding… movie I’ve ever seen.” As time moves on, this is going to get even more of a problem due to technology such as DeepFakes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/robtoews/2020/05/25/deepfakes-are-going-to-wreak-havoc-on-society-we-are-not-prepared/#1393167f7494). At the moment, it’s hard to trust what we read. Going forward (and, in fact, already) it’s getting hard to trust what we see if we aren’t there to witness it first-hand. And so I ask everybody, before you share something online, to read around and check it. Read the comments on a Facebook post before you share it – somebody may have done it already for you and called out the original author. Read the news story, rather than just sharing because of the headline. Especially if the thing you are sharing supports your own views – this is when you are most in danger. If it seems too good to true – well, it might be. Check before you share. If you can’t find anything reasonably quickly to disprove it then sure – go ahead. But please, before you make things worse, before you widen gaps in society rather than mending them, have a look to make sure there is some authenticity to what you are spreading. And, above all, be kind to each other. I'm still not saying that every viewpoint is as valid as any other, but if people are your friends, you owe it to them to at least try to hear them out and understand why they are saying what they are saying. If you can't do that, perhaps you shouldn't really be friends after all. It's always nice when a Kickstarter delivers and one did today (well, actually two have today!). Sentinels of Freedom is a turn-based tactics game based upon the Sentinel Comics world, made popular by the Sentinels of the Multiverse card game.
I've uploaded a video of the first hour or so, which highlights a couple of tutorial levels and the hero creator system. I then die embarrassingly in what might actually still be tutorial... So far, I've enjoyed it, though it does throw a huge number of mook enemies at you - area effect attacks seem the way to go. I'll do a full review when I've played more of it, but if you're curious about it, you can watch the start at least. There are loads of articles out there about massive games that people now, apparently, have time to play because they aren't needing to go to work at the moment. That's all well and good, and I hope those people are enjoying their new-found gaming time. What I've seen a lack of is how to deal with isolation when you aren't alone, or are still needing to work from home. Reports that I've seen indicate that many people working from home are needing to work all the harder, because the IT systems aren't up to it, or things aren't quite as convenient, or any number of other reasons. Similarly, if there are children around, that makes everything that little bit harder, unless they are old enough to entertain themselves. So, here I present a handful of different games. These aren't sweeping epics that will take 300 hours to complete - they are games that follow a few simple rules:
Do you have any others to recommend? Slay the Spire is available for PC and Switch. Each playthrough can be completed in about an hour (less if you are good - there is an achievement for completing in 20 minutes), and the art style is nice and cartoony, so no problems with people watching. It's a rogue-like deck-builder, where you need to climb the Spire to eventually defeat the bosses and, if you want to push yourself, the Heart of the Spire itself. There are four character classes (I don't think the fourth has been released on Switch yet) and you can play through 21 escalating difficulty levels with each. Each plays very differently, and requires very different strategies. You navigate a map fighting enemies. You have a deck of cards, from which you draw some each turn and choose which to play, spending from your energy resource. Different cards might attack the enemy (or enemies), setup defence for any attacks that come at you, buff you, give penalties to your foes, give you extra energy or card-draw, or lots of other options. When you win, you get a reward of choosing a new card to add to your deck which, of course, gives more more options, but can also dilute your deck so that you are less sure about what might come up next turn. The brilliance of Slay the Spire really comes from the fact that you always know what the enemy is going to do - you get icons above their heads to tell you. So you know how much they are going to attack you for, and therefore how much defence you'll need. You know if they are going to do something else like buff themselves, so you can let loose. There is more complexity to deal with outside of battle - you can choose your route through the Spire, so that you can avoid some fights if you want to, aiming for shops (to buy new cards), campfires (to rest or upgrade cards), or aim for Elite battles, which earn you better cards and relics, which give you permanent changes to the rules and can drastically alter your playstyle for the attempt. Dicey Dungeons is available on PC (and later this year on Switch, but not there yet). Again, it's a rogue-like, but this time the action is dice based, rather than cards. You pick your class when you enter which gives you a starting ability and then head off. Each playthrough lasts about half an hour. As you go along, you'll battle enemies, pick up new equipment and so on, this time with a levelling mechanic which gives you more dice to roll each turn, more health and so on. Gameplay is simple - you roll your dice (two when you start, getting an additional one every few levels) and try to play them into your equipment and powers. Some of them have restrictions (only dice lower than 4, for example, or only odds), some require lots of dice to go in until you've put a certain value in to make it trigger and a few other ways to shake it up. You need to balance out your options through the equipment you've picked up and hope you can do well against the various enemies. As you go through, you'll start to learn more about the enemy figures, so you can predict what will work against them (you can see what you're about to fight on the map) so there is a level of strategy as well as the in-battle tactics. Again, a nice cartoon-y style makes for easy viewing, and the different classes provide replayability. Each class also comes with six different scenarios which change the rules a little (for example, one of the fighter's makes all of your equipment, including anything you find, automatically be upgraded, but you lose 2maxHP each time you level up) and can lead to vastly different strategies to win. Book of Demons (as far as I know, only available on PC) is an action RPG in the vein of Diablo, Torchlight and similar. The art-style is paper-dolls, again making it unproblematic to walk in on and if you've played this style of game before, you'll know whether you like or hate them.
As is fairly typical, there are three classes to choose between (fighter, rogue, wizard), and you collect equipment in the form of cards as you go along, unlocking slots for those cards as you level up. It can get fairly tricky in places, especially once you unlock higher difficulty levels. To be honest, it terms of pure gameplay, it isn't as good as the games it is clearly based on, but still very enjoyable if you like the style. However, it gets a mention here because of one fairly unique feature. Each time you descend into the dungeon, you can choose how long you want the level to be and it will give an estimate of how much time if will take. If you only have twenty minutes to play, you can set that up and it's generally pretty accurate. You don't descend to later levels until you've achieved a certain number of points in each, so you'll be playing it more times if you choose shorter sessions, but you'll still advance through. And this kind of feature is an absolute godsend in the current climate. The 2nd Edition of 7th Sea was released a few years ago and I really like it. I'll write more about it in the future, but for now I'm publishing some additional options for the six core sorceries in the game.
The general theme of the additions is to add more options for play at sea, but some additional basics were required for some of them before I could reach the point of those specifics. You can find it here - I hope you enjoy it! Hi everybody!
Welcome to my little home on the internet. For those that don't know, my name is Chris, and I'm a writer. I live in the north-east of England with my wife and young son. My first novel is currently undergoing editing, and my work is being published in Parallel Worlds magazine. You can my first article here, and my series on being a better RPG Gamemaster is being published monthly from April's issue onward. I've been roleplaying for over 20 years, starting with 7th Sea (1st Edition) shortly after it was first released, and have spent most of those years acting as Gamemaster. I've run lots of different styles of games, from 7th Sea and Legend of the Five Rings, Dungeons and Dragons (3.5 and 4th edition), Fate, Cortex and many more. I've made most of the possible mistakes and have, hopefully, learned from them. At the moment i'm running a campaign in the 13th Age system. I'm intending this page to be part blog and part repository for my work. I'm going to be writing reviews of popular fantasy and science-fiction, roleplaying materials and some fiction. Hope you enjoy what you find here, and feel free to drop a comment on any piece. |
AuthorChris is a writer currently working on his first novel. His work has been published in Parallel Worlds magazine and more can be found here. Archives
February 2022
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