n00b GM: My First Player Kill

Okay, so, as some of you may know, I’ve recently gotten pulled into the whole Dungeons & Dragons thing.  I didn’t mean to, but I had a few friends who liked it, I got hooked on MMOs as a gateway drug, I’ve read the Poetic Edda so I already knew lots of awesome names for Dwarves anyway…and somehow I wound up with a Level 13 rogue, a Level 7 Ranger, a Level 1 Wizard and a Level 2 News Anchor.

Uh, that last one wasn’t D&D, it was D20 modern.  It’s for a Horror campaign set in modern times that’s being played this month for Halloween.  My character’s only real skill (against all the highly trained military agents and mercenaries and such) is as a font of pop culture knowledge to say things like “No, don’t open that door.  Aim a gun at it first.”

Anyway, I’ve also been pulled into being a Game Master (or Dungeon Master for the purists), and the first session that I planned on lasting for a night took three, possibly four, sessions to get through.  I didn’t want to ruin the entire adventure with my love of mad science, so I got it out of my system with this first building, something of an alchemist’s lab gone awry.

Anyway, while I’m happy that they finished the dungeon after killing the Glod Dragon (that isn’t a typo.  They also found lots of Glod Coins, a potion that turns lead into Glod, and a spinning wheel that spins Glod out of straw), I’m more happy about getting my first character death out of the way.  I knew one would happen eventually, and I hoped it would happen sooner than later so that I could get used to it.

And how did this character assasination occur?  Well, there was a fight between the party, and a gang of two hobgoblins and five kobolds.  They were able to defeat all but one of the kobolds who was swallowed up by a strange, moving hole that glided across the floor.  Two of the party members jumped down after it, just before the hole could vanish.

Eventually, the party reunited with one of the party members, and shortly after encountered the kobold again.  They attacked it quickly, depleting its four hitpoints.  While the players were aware that the kobold was now being played by one of the players, they had the decency to not break character.  So the kobold, and hence the party member, died after the horrible brain swapping.

The Legend of Bill: Blank Label’s Newest Member

So, I was following Twitter, as I am known to do, and I noticed an interesting tweet: Blank Label Comics was going to be getting a new comic called The Legend of Bill. I’d heard of Legend of Bill once or twice before, and I had just finished my latest archive, so Legend of Bill became my new project.

I was familiar with David Reddick’s work already, as it turned out. I had read a good number of his “The Trek Life” strips years ago during one of my Star Trek kicks (I become a low-level Trekkie once every three years, it’s probably due to happen again sometime between November and January), so I had a few expectations about what I was going to see humor-wise.

The strip itself isn’t badly done. The drawing is professionally cartoonish in a manner that many modern newspaper comics probably dream about equating to, and while the plots and jokes are relatively simple, they’re still good. Like Sheldon and Shortpacked!, this is a comic strip that knows how to use flat characters well.

I do have two mild complaints though that I hope will be addressed in the eventual future. My first complaint regards the lack of story progression. It’s been more than a year now, and as the comic characters themselves noted, very little has happened (I can, off the top of my head, think of maybe four “stories” that have happened.) I want to like these characters, and I’m eager to see what happens in the current story, but at the rate of progression we’re not going to get to Princess Gina’s homeland for another year or two.

My second complaint regards the amount of guest comics. I’m not ordinarily one to speak poorly of guest strips, but The Legend of Bill has a LOT of them. I need to check to make sure, but I’d be willing to bet money that over a quarter of the strips in the archive so far are guest comics. A lot of this is because Reddick has embraced them to a certain extent and made them a regular feature called “Side Quests.” For a good portion of the archive, these Side Quests show up once for every three strips as part of the regular programming.

Ultimately, my verdict on Legend of Bill is that I’m going to stick around and keep watching it…but I sincerely hope that Reddick can come up with some spare time to draw more frequently. You have a good start that could go far, sir, and thus far and I hope you make good use of it.

Final Pushing Daisies Episode

Okay, so, for over two months now I’ve had three Saturdays marked on my calendar to remind me about the Pushing Daisies episodes, the last three episodes of season 2 and, for all forseeable realities, the last three episodes of the series (not counting the comic books that DC is going to put out which will be AWESOME! If those comics aren’t awesome HEADS WILL ROLL! Given what I’ve heard of the subject matter, that may happen anyway, but I digress…)

For the past fortnight, ABC hated me. It didn’t come in at all. It would be perfect through the end of whatever show was on before it, and then someone somewhere would push the “make the signal grainy, scrambled and impossible to watch” button. How I hate that button, and the predictability of when it gets used (the button gets turned off for commercials, at least three-fourths of the time.)

Tonight, though? I was lucky. Sure, I had a two-episode gap in my knowledge of season 2 now, but the signal was clear.

In news that may discourage some people, I thought the actual plot and banter of the show was a bit lackluster. I know! This is me we’re talkin’ about, and it’s the last episode of a show I love and would move Heaven and Earth to bring back. The episode was still much better than almost anything else on television…but still, it didn’t seem quite as snappy. Even the vague snippets I caught the previous two weeks before I gave up on the impossible signal made me cackle a bit. This episode had me grin at a few points, but none of the expected cackling.

The last ten, maybe five, minutes of the show, though, were designed to pull the heartstrings of the fans. My theory is that some hasty rewrites were called in when it was revealed that it was the last episode of the series. I could be wrong about that, they may have known all along about that (or I may be wrong in that they didn’t know but didn’t decide to change the script anyway.) Either way, however, the ending was a nice capper for the series, including (spoiler alert) a quick multi-vista cross-pan of many of the more memorable locales from earlier in the show (among them, the windmill reserve, the church, the lighthouse and others).

Back to the plot difficulties…I think my primary problem with the plot was the ease of development. This may have had something to do with the ineptness of the villain of the week, which by the villain’s own admission was the sole reason for why he wasn’t suspected initially. I don’t have any difficulty believing that the plot progressed as it did considering that character’s, er, character, but I wish that the Emerson Codd and the Pie Makers (that would be an awesome band name) had been challenged a bit more thoroughly. (Also, as a final nitpicky thing, I do kinda wish that there had been fewer fade-outs punctuated by the image of the shark bite, but that’s more of an aesthetic thing than an actual problem.)

Having said that, it was wonderful seeing you on the air again Pushing Daisies, even if this will be your farewell performance. I was always happy to see the episodes, even this one. You are, for me, one of the greatest shows ever.

And if we need a silver lining to this? I maintain that your show never jumped the shark.

Thanks again for everything Pushing Daisies, and I sincerely hope that I’ll get to see you again on TV someday. ‘Till then, see you in the funny papers.

Better Off Ted

Okay, I should say something about Better Off Ted. I’ve seen two episodes now. The first episode I watched it and said that I wanted to enjoy it, but for some reason…for some reason I just wasn’t liking what I was seeing.

It had all the elements that I like. It had all the snarky dialogue, it had well presented ideas, and it even had a huge, gigantic Mad Scientist theme that I’m always in favor of. So why wasn’t I liking it?

At this second episode I think I figured it out. This is a show that has everything I like. It’s like someone took Pushing Daisies, Scrubs and Portal and stuck ‘em in a blender.

Now, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Hard to say. The two episodes I’ve seen both followed a pretty basic plot of “Here’s something that management did that caused wackiness, and here’s how we solved the problem” formula. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. It’s a show that’s more about dialogue than actual plot. The characters are all flatter than I like, but between the fact that this is the show’s first season and the fact that it’s set up in a cold, business environment designed to make flat personalities a joke might make this unavoidable.

I think the best thing I can say about the show is that I can’t find fault with it. It’s got okay acting, okay dialogue and okay ideas. Every once in a while it comes off as feeling like a lame Saturday Night Live sketch, but those times when it comes off as a good SNL sketch instead make it okay.

So I plan on watching this more when there’s nothing else on. It didn’t necessarily dissapoint. And hey, maybe in time it’ll become as good as Scrubs or Pushing Daisies. That’d be nice.

…but I still say that they need to bring back Pushing Daisies.

Legends of Zork: a New Take on Quendor

Ok, so, on April Fool’s day I was told that for the past few months now, Activision had been setting up a new online Zork game, and that it was launching that day. And I laughed and laughed and even though I knew it was the setup for an April Fool’s Day joke, I had to follow their link.

Wow, it wasn’t a joke.

Okay, set the mood here: for over ten years now I’ve been looking for Activision to acknowledge their best franchise. And while I wanted a new game, any new game, I was expecting something I could, you know, buy in stores and play without an internet connection (no offense, but the team play for ZGI never seemed to make much sense to me. Then again, I never tried it.)

However, for much of the past ten years, I’ve been a fan of something called Legend of the Green Dragon (I play at the Central server at http://www.lotgd.net if you’re interested.) When I first saw the splash page for this Legends of Zork game, I said to myself “Oh, wow, someone modded Legend of the Green Dragon to be a Zork game.” Then I saw the Activision reminder on the bottom and decided that someone must have made a very *official* version of Legend of the Green Dragon.

Now that I’ve played a bit, I can honestly say that it’s definitely not Legend of the Green Dragon. You go into areas and fight things, collecting experience and money (Zorkmids, naturally) but that’s about where the similarities end.

A few friends of mine have expressed disappointment in the game, and I can understand that. The fighting of monsters is automatic: if you find something, you fight to the end, regardless of who the winner is. I can certainly understand the frustration there. I, however, enjoy the change. One of my major qualms with Legend of the Green Dragon is that there isn’t often a way to streamline the “look for something to kill” process unless you go to other servers (and when I *do* go to other servers, I’m almost overwhelmed by how much there is. It starts to feel like homework rather than a game.)

So the fighting style is good, in my opinion, but not necessarily gonna be for everyone.

And another word on fighting: I made a mistake by not considering weapon/armor quality and skill points. I’m not a huge RPG player, so using these things always seems a bit foreign to how I approach scenarios. But I’ve just hit level 7, and I’m realizing that hey, the monsters are getting tougher as well. Save up for big guns when you play this folks (and sometimes those guns are literal), and be prepared to use them.

In terms of gameplay, do not expect a text adventure. It isn’t a text adventure, no matter what it looks like (or you could argue that it’s a text adventure in the same way that LotGD is a text adventure: read everything, but point and click.) If you have to compare it to a previous Zork game, Beyond Zork is the way to go: you encounter a lot of monsters (some of which are brand new, but most of which are from the previous games), and you find treasure which you can sell for Zorkmids.

Now, admittedly: I might’ve preferred an actual MMORPG. A Zork based MMORPG would’ve been a lot of fun, but honestly? It wouldn’t survive against WoW. I say this as someone who’s never played WoW and never plans on it: Zork’s unique style of adventure, horror, and comedy would either seem like a ripoff of WoW, or something unnecessary to your diehard MMORPG fan. While I’d love (and would certainly pay for) an MMORPG set in the Zork universe, I don’t quite think that the time is right.

Back to this game, though: stylistically, the game gets a lot of stuff right on the nose. The art style is good (though not necessarily Zorkish) but the writing style gets a lot of the Zorkian sounds right. Lots of bars, fobs, wits, and dos in the names.

Anyway, after my second day playing it (my home computer can’t handle it, I’m afraid), I have to say that I love it. I hope this game sticks around, and I’ll love to see it improve over time (maybe they’ll make the autofight be optional.)

Hugo Awards: Best Graphic Story

Well, I just learned that a few of the webcomics I read qualify for a new Hugo category! That’s right, the humble world of webcomics qualifies for the most prestigious award that sci-fi has to offer! And I’d like to give special attention to two of them.

First of all, Phil and Kaja Foglio have an elligible story. Their 8th volume of the Girl Genius comic, “Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones” is beautifully drawn and magnificently written (which isn’t really a surprise as it is, after all, a Girl Genius comic). The story is a fun and slightly creepy adventure.

The other story I’d like to point out is Howard Taylor’s “Schlock Mercenary: The Body Politic.” Now, while Howard’s artistry isn’t quite as breathtaking as what you see in Girl Genius (by his own admission), and while his stories have comedic elements highly infused throughout all the serialized drama, I think that it actually surpasses Girl Genius in a few ways.

To begin with, while both stories are fun and adventurous romps through science fiction, I think that Howard Taylor’s work meets more of the qualification for the “science” half of the science fiction combo. Girl Genius is a gaslight fantasy, a sort of wild extrapolation of what Jules Verne might have given us. A lot of the sci-fi elements within are actually well-disguised elements of fantasy that hide behind the “Heisenburg Compensator Gambit.” (Star Trek fans and physics students probably know what I’m talking about when I mention Heisenburg Compensators, and the physics students could probably tell you why the name sounds sciencey but is in fact fantasyey.)

Now, that isn’t to say that Schlock Mercenary is completely devoid of Fantasy elements, especially not considering the story that The Body Politic presents. Though in general, Taylor’s military space opera has a firmer rooting in science than the sparks and mad scientist who play in Studio Foglio’s gaslight world.

Still, that’s the rub isn’t it? It’s very tempting for me to judge the Entire story of Schlock Mercenary against the Entire story of Girl Genius, but that’s not what’s elligible. The elligibility falls to fairly well defined aspects of those two stories, chapters within the larger framework.

Regardless, I would love it if either of these webcomics won a Hugo. That would rock so many kinds of world. Seriously, M Class on down.

For those who might be interested in reading these two stories that I mention (though there are, of course, other options. I should look into it and see if the Zap! webcomic would qualify in any way…), here’s a couple links. Knock yerself out. And if you’ve never read Schlock Mercenary or Girl Genius (or Zap!) before? Then you’re in for a major treat.

Here be the stories themselves…
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20070520.html
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20080204

And here be the websites proper.
http://www.schlockmercenary.com
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com
http://www.zapinspace.com/

And for the record, Howard Taylor has started offering this particular story for a free download to anyone who doesn’t want to go through the hassle of clicking through his archives. Excellent move, if you ask me (I initially said, “Dude, doesn’t a large part of your income depend on people buying your books?” Then I said, “Hey, self, the books are already available easily anyway, this won’t hurt the dead tree sales.”)
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/TBPHugo.pdf

So, I hope you enjoy the worlds of Schlock Mercenary and Girl Genius! Congrats to both. Here’s hoping that a webcomic takes home a Hugo! Seriously, even if it’s a webcomic that I never read I’ll probably cheer for joy. Though yeah, it’d be more awesome if it was one that I did.

The Legendary, Amazing First Post!

Heya, welcome to my humble blog, one of many billions of similar blogs on the Internet.  I doubt that this one will be of any note (much like the others), but on the off-chance that my blog leads to the creation of world peace, or to the invention of stable artificial gravity on spaceships, or some other cool thing like that, here’s the post that starts it all!

Now, I don’t know how or why a blog that is intended to basically be movie reviews, book reviews, etc. can lead to stable artificial gravity or world peace, but it might.  Let’s sit back and watch…