Tetsujin no Llama

Not quite a cat/bag situation, but I've gotten involved in writing some material around the edges of the new edition of Car Wars . My first piece for this came out today , a vignette about a biker queen in the wasteland that was once Nevada, with accompanying art by Brandon Moore . He nails it. Really, seriously nails it. I'm just sad that bit isn't part of the preview.

Recently, Blind Mapmaker put up a fair and thoughtful review of my most recent DF book. In it, he says: While the book is rules-oriented it is less so than you might expect from a DF book. This, I think, is true. A great deal of it is descriptive detail: coin shapes, largely mundane fabric types, a list of colors, and a big-ass table of decorative motifs. Very little of this gives us the pluses we so dearly love (as alluded to in the intro section, "What's The Bonus for Shiny?"). There's a reason for that, which gets into something which doesn't get discussed in much detail in places I frequent. One of the phrases which keeps coming up is "the Rule of Cool," the idea of conflating successful/effective with cool/awesome/impressive. I'm down with that, of course, but the question is, what's cool? How do we get there? How do we build cool? Consider this INCREDIBLY FREAKING AWESOME sequence which open's John Woo's Hard Boiled (go ah...

A new book of mine came out today: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Treasures 1: Glittering Prizes . The genesis of this one is...well, not unusual. After DF8 came out, I'd had some ideas about things which it might have lacked, items I'd want to expand on, and the like, but I didn't have a format for it. I pitched one of those ideas, an extended treatment of money, as an article for Pyramid . My editor countered with the suggestion of turning it into a short PDF. After a bit of back and forth, I settled on a short PDF (shorter than DF8, anyway) about adding detail to treasures: more about money to make it more than just discrete bits of precious metal, more decorative motifs, more implausible materials, and so on, incorporating many, though not all, of the treasure-related ideas I'd had since DF8 was published. And now, the theme song for the book:

The advent of a new Hot Spots volume has reminded me of a question which comes up from time to time: Why buy an historical GURPS book when you can just look up stuff on the web?  It's not just potential customers who ask this. It's a question which keeps the GURPS editorial staff up at night. Not surprisingly, I have a multi-part answer to that question: 1) The premise of the question is flawed. Contrary to what some might think, not everything is on the web. Some material is, obviously ("China is over there.  Farther. Little to the left. Up. There."), but certainly not all or even most. The depth of research in GURPS historicals is frequently such that the authors have to pick up dusty old books and page through things which haven't been digitized and exposed to the web for free nor are they likely to be any time soon, or to hit up journals and new books which are still behind paywalls or are undigitized and available only through libraries. You can Google for...

The cat is, if not out of the bag for my latest GURPS project, then at least peeking out of the mostly closed box. In the wake of the slow revival of GURPS as it has emerged from the shadow of the Ogre, I did GURPS Boardroom and Curia , then I did a DF project based on idea suggested by Kromm. My intention at that point was to do something non-DF, but a second DF project strongly suggested itself, after which I again wanted to do a non-DF book. Then a third DF project wouldn't get out of my head. But now that that's out of the way, I've put the Terribly Responsible Historian hat firmly back on to do a new Hot Spots . I shan't say much about this, save that: a) It's something I've wanted to write for quite some time; I was rather gung-ho about it even before the Ogre hiatus. 2) It's different in certain significant ways from the ones I've done before. * In any event, it's back to research and cartography. *: What ways? Who can say? Maybe i...

My brief ramblings on "Ashiwi Country" in Pyramid #74 aren't even a little game-useful, but: It's oddly appropriate for me that this article shows up in the around-Christmas issue. After getting married and earning his PhD, my father was in the Air Force for a while, a consequence of going to school on Uncle Sam's bill via ROTC. He was stationed at Kirtland AFB (next door to a Navy base, apparently, which has always seemed a bit odd to me) near Albuquerque and absolutely loved the place. My parents moved away shortly before I was born, but my father retained a certain amount of New Mexican bric-a-brac, which was most visible in the form of Christmas ornaments. As a result, I've always associated Christmas, to some extent, with the desert Southwest. I didn't get to see the Southwest until many years later, when I was part of a summer of archaeological work on the Zuni reservation. I gotta say, the people are lovely and the scenery is pretty spectacul...

This is too brief to be "designer's notes" on my article in Pyramid #72 , but it's something I wanted to mention. I note at the beginning of the article that "almost from the beginning of fantasy roleplaying games, there’s been a desire to" play dungeon crawls as monsters rather than human-ish adventurers. What I had in mind here was the 1976 game Monsters! Monsters! , developed in part by a guy at Metagaming named--wey hey!--Steve Jackson. So this is kinda going full circle.