Graph Paper Games

I've been buying very few actual gaming books lately, but have been slowly adding books about RPG's and GM techniques to my library.  The latest is a book called Hamlet's Hit Points  by Robin Laws.  For those who don't know, Laws is one of those game designers who has had his thumb in the pie of so many different RPG's out there he didn't even bother listing his bona vides in the back of the book. The core thesis behind Hamlet's Hit Points is that in movies and plays (and their descendants radio shows and television programs), there are nine identifiable "beats," specific moments in the narrative flow with a purpose.  There are two major kinds of beats: procedural, which either move the protagonist towards or away from an external goal; and dramatic, which move the protagonist towards or away from an internal goal (such as a personal relationship).  The movement towards and away from a goal creates two emotional responses from the viewer: hop...

I have to admit up front that part of my problem with Odyssey by Phil Vecchione is that I read and loved his book, Never Unprepared .  Never Unprepared dealt with session preparation for the GM and was a tight, informative, ridiculously helpful book.  I went into Odyssey, a book on campaign management, with similar hopes, but ended up disappointed.  This isn’t to say that Odyssey is a bad book, it just came under the bar of his former work. First, the good parts.  The book tackles an ambitious topic, not the running of a game session, but actually managing a full blown campaign.  The book tackles this several sections, including how to create a campaign, how to manage the campaign as it goes, and how to end it.  I find the section on ending particularly apt, given how I just ended mine.  Each area has this fictional gaming group of three players and a GM introduce and close each section, first with the GM doing it wrong and then with her doing it ...

One of the most disappointing things about this week was that I brought two not particularly good books with me to read.  The first was Dan Abnett's very Abnett-esque Ravenor Returns , and the other is the similarly licensed-product novel Edge of Destiny  by J. Robert King, a novel written in the universe of the MMORPG Guild Wars . So, where to begin.  Cardboard characters.  A detailed and even somewhat interesting first half that degenerates into a rushed second half where each chapter features the group of multi-racial, multi-class adventurers facing one uninspired Big Bad Evil Monster after another.  And then to cap it all off, an ending that basically leaves you, the reader, terribly betrayed and let down for any vestige of sentiment you might have towards any of the characters in the book.  A truly pointless ending, leaving me wonder if the idea was to open the door for a sequel, or a misbegotten attempt at pathos and tragedy by the author. Thank...

KlawBerry: Good Girl. Bad World. I spotted this book looking for a present for my kids while I'm away.   Klawberry is a modern folk-tale with an artistic style reminiscent of the old Samurai Jack  cartoons.  The main character is a good spirit whose eye is stolen by a demon who uses it to take over the world.  Klawberry, obviously, needs to get it back. In addition to the book, I also picked up the plush Klawberry doll, complete with eyepatch as well.  My daughter is a little old for the book, but she'll like the weird monsters and superpowered heroine.

I was thinking about doing something like "I is for Internet" and talking about the impact the internet has had on the RPG hobby, but it didn't sound that interesting and honestly aside from saying it has had a lot of impact. But, I did finish a book (or more correctly, a book on CD) called The Games by Ted Kosmatka Short version: Jurassic Park meets The Hunger Games .  In a dystopic future where advanced in genetic manipulation have been reached, the various countries of the world have added a new event to the Olympics--a gladiator death match featured engineered creatures whose only rule is "no human DNA."  Facing their first loss since the beginning of the games, the Olympic Committee of the US decides to forego its usual practice of designing custom DNA and instead ask the greatest supercomputer in existence (built and controlled by an autistic savant) to create the DNA code instead.  The creature, superior to any previous design and part of a gre...

Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master's Guide to Session Prep (EGP42003)  by Phil Vecchione I spotted this book at my FLGS about a month ago in the new product section and was immediately taken by the fact that the store had stocked not a gaming book but a book about gaming.  The gaming store owner told me he was trying to stock products that would appeal to a wide base of RPG customers.  It certainly appealed to me, because I'm not the greatest GM prep person in the world.  Part of that is because I am inherently disorganized, and the internal struggle between my lack of organizational discipline and venues such as work and my house makes up a lot of my life.  I've recently been reading Zen to Done , a book on how to increase productivity and organization, and Never Unprepared  reads more than a bit like the GM's version of that book (in fact both book reference the same source material). So here's what's in Never Unprepared : a step-by-step g...

Woken Furies is the third (and I believe last) book by Richard Morgan featuring the body-jumping Takeshi Kovacs.  Kovacs, back from his misadventures in Broken Angels , has returned to his home planet of Harlan's World, the mostly ocean-covered world featuring the bizarre Martial "orbitals" that blast anything out of the sky. In Woken Furies , Kovacs ends up hooking with a bunch of "decom" mercenaries whose job it is to wipe out a region on Harlan's World that is under the control of robotic drones.  The leader of the merc unit he joins turns out to have a bit of a weird glitch in her digital personality--a second persona claiming to be a notorious rebel leader.  Kovacs is then swept up in the political and military intrigue of the planet as powerful forces attempt to recover her, even employing a bootleg version of his own personality from his youth in the Envoy corps. In addition to a solid sci-fi romp, Morgan gets some of his magic back from Alter...

Takeshi Kovacs, the body-jumping soldier of the future is back in the sequel to my previously-reviewed Altered Carbon .  But while the first book was a cyberpunk noir detective story, Broken Angels  is a completely different style of story, albeit still set in the gritty far future as the first novel. Kovacs is back to being a soldier-of-fortune, rather than a detective, and is approached by a shifty individual with a plan: stake claim to a priceless alien artifact smack in the middle of a war zone.  Kovacs signs up for the caper, joining forces with an archaelogue (I do not know why Morgan doesn't use the word "archaeologist" like everyone else) and a sleazy corporate operator.  Later they recruit a band of fellow mercenaries who you know will just serve as cannon fodder for the rest of the book. Like I said before, Altered Carbon was a detective story, but Broken Angels  is much more of a techno-thriller: weird alien artifacts, mysterious deaths, an...

I mentioned a few days ago that I had read Altered Carbon , a cyberpunk novel by Richard K. Morgan, and for those who can't be convinced by my brief mention to go out and read it, here's my longer appeal. Altered Carbon  takes place centuries from now, when humanity has managed to settle a handful of planets in the galaxy but space travel remains prohibitively expensive.  One huge, society-changing technological innovation is that ability to transfer a person's memory into a digital state which is then stored on what is basically a hard drive implanted in the base of a person's skull.  If something happens to your body, you can digitally transfer your consciousness into a new body, a clone, or even an unoccupied body of someone else, called a "sleeve." Takeshi Kovacs is an ex-envoy, an elite soldier of the future trained to optimally utilize "sleeves," especially modified ones, in combat.  For decades he has been essentially emailed arou...