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In the “best news for a while” department, the kick-ass scifi military / power armor game Heavy Gear is coming back in rpg form. Dream Pod 9 and Steve Jackson Games just announced that they will be collaborating on a new 4th edition of the Heavy Gear roleplaying game, coming out in 2009. The line design will be headed by the esteemed HG-guru and line editor John Buckmaster, and will feature a new streamlined version of the Silhouette rule system with focus on making it flow smoothly and fixing some current warts in the design (Complexity, etc). There will probably be 1-2 core books in print format, and then a pile of setting material and support stuff in PDF form (and possibly POD, as well) via e23.

This is fantastic news. I’ve always had a fondness for Heavy Gear, it’s probably the most detailed scifi world in roleplaying today and it tries very hard to be realistic on many levels (well, as much as a game featuring giant power armor suits can be “realistic”). There is enough “realpolitik” in the game to make your head spin. A new edition which would compile it all into smooth form for newcomers is just what the game needs, and we can always hope that it’s reasonably easy to integrate with Heavy Gear Blitz, DP9’s excellent miniatures wargame set in the Heavy Gear world.

There’s also a thread about this on rpg.net.

In other but also game-related news, my signed copy of the Magic Burner limited first batch (#62/200) arrived today, along with a spiffy t-shirt. I’ve only had time for a quick browse so far, started to read the thing on the way to work today. So far, looking extremely good. The guys quote Ursula K LeGuin as one of their main inspirations on “how magic might work”, and that gets huge points from me – I’ve always preferred LeGuin’s (and Cherryh’s) subtle magic to the D&D “eat fireball, kobolds!” style… though that does have its charms, too :). Like the other Burning Wheel books, this is more of a toolkit for building magic for your game than a ready-made list of spells.

If the rest of the book ends up being as cool as the beginning, I may just have to actually run a test game of Burning Wheel at some point.

Flight of the Red Raven is another strong adventure module from Paizo, this time set up in the snowy north… though the writer has said that it actually ended up being placed further south (in Golarion, Paizo’s game world) than he had intended. Due to that “up north” setting, the writer has decided to use Finnish and pseudo-Finnish names for town inhabitans and sites. While there is nothing wrong with this (Finnish is an obscure language that sounds quite alien enough for a fantasy game), it does cause some hilarity for Finns. A house called “sahtisauna” is quite ok, especially since it’s what it claims to be: “a combination of bathhouse and brewery” – but I have a hard time believing Finnish players will manage to keep a straight face when NPCs have names like “Antero Ikonen”… so some renaming may be in order, for Finns.

The adventure itself is good. There’s a mystical artifact that gets stolen and the PCs go after it. So far so good. The motivation of the thief is understandable and leads on to other complications, and the motivation for the PCs is also well-realized: the artifact was protecting the town from the ravages of winter, and now that it’s gone the town faces real danger from the elements. There is a nice bit of social scenery in the town to set things off, including a celebration with lots of opportunities for mayhem. After that, the action moves on into the wilderness (as befits the “W” designation) and ends up in a very interesting and challenging situation.

One of my favorites from among the newer Pathfinder modules.

Revenge of the Kobold King was Paizo’s offering for this year’s Free RPG Day. People lucky enough to have a participating shop nearby could pick up a copy for free, the rest could either download a (free) PDF version or buy a print copy for $5. I went for the “buy a copy” option, since that was the only way for me to get a print copy. Me likes print copies.

The module is a sequel to Nicholas Logue’s earlier popular scenario, Crown of the Kobold King, and it’s a lot of fun. In the first part, an up-and-coming Kobold warlord was laid low by a bunch of “pink-skinned sword-waving psychopaths” (from the Kobold point of view). Now, the humiliated (and dead) warlord is given a new lease on (un)life and a chance for revenge. It doesn’t even matter if your players played through the first part or not – one pink-skin looks pretty much like another to a pissed-off undead kobold, anyway.

The action starts off with an attack on some lumberjacks and escalates to the PCs once again assaulting the poor would-be ruler. There’s lots of dark humor involved and it seems like a great little romp, either by itself or as a continuation to the earlier scenario. Either way, good stuff. It’s a quite compact module, clocking in at only 16 pages, but I don’t see that as a bad thing.

Poor Falcon’s Hollow. That place has been subjected to more than a few menaces so far by Paizo’s modules, and it never was a very nice place to begin with – which has always been quite refreshing, for once we have a D&D “campaign base town” which isn’t an idyllic, boring collection of farmers and the required pub (in which to meet dark strangers and be offered quests). Falcon’s Hollow owes a lot more to Charles Dickens than it does to most D&D inspirations.

Ok, that was a nice trip. Paris was very pleasant, and (unlike the stereotype) the locals were nice and friendly. Our hotel was well-situated near Bastille, and there were tons of nice small restaurants within walking distance. We did most of the “must see/do” stuff; went to Notre Dame and climbed into the belltower, clambered through the Catacombs, wandered in the Louvre, visited Versailles, checked out the Père Lachaise Cemetery and the tombs of Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison… stuff like that. The weather was mostly fine; it rained on Friday but we spent most of that day in the Louvre anyway.

Things have changed, languagewise. When I was there last, as a small kid traveling with my family some 30 years ago, I don’t remember all that many people speaking English. Now, even though I got by surprisingly often on my extremely basic-level French without having to revert to English, every time I did ask “do you speak English?” (in French, of course), the answer was “yes”. I suppose this only holds true in the Paris region, and mostly for the younger folk, but still… the city is nowhere near as hostile to non-French-speaking visitors as I was afraid it would be. Most everyone was very nice to us. I’m not sure if the fact that I at least tried to use French as much as possible had anything to do with that, but anyway…

The city remains beautiful, as much as a big city can be that. Lots of old buildings, small crooked streets, etc.

I’m glad we went. Even though it was just a short trip, I felt like I had been away for a much longer time and it felt like a real vacation. In addition, it was also our wedding anniversary, so Paris was quite suitably romantic. :)

A quick “what’s up” note, this. Ropecon 2008 came and went, I had a lot of fun despite getting very little sleep. The traditional big VTES tournament was a success once again, I now have a tournament report available for that. The other highlight of the con, for me, was managing to attend Greg Stolze’s demo of his new game, A Dirty World. It was actually the first convention rpg game that I have ever attended, and boy was it worth it. Besides being a kick-ass game designer, Greg proved to be a very cool guy and extremely competent GM. I had a ton of fun playing a heroin-addicted femme fatale…

The rest of the week has been spent in recovery, of sorts. Janka and I are both on vacation now, so we’ve just taken it easy for a while. That said, it feels like it’s been an extremely busy week, I’ve continually been doing something and feel that I managed to only do a small portion of the stuff I had intended. So it goes.

We decided that we needed a short break from all this, so we booked a flight to Paris – leaves tomorrow morning, back on Saturday. It’s been… what, 30 years since I was last there, so I don’t remember much anything, and Janka’s never been there at all. So we’ll spend three days doing the tourist things (Louvre, Notre Dame, the Catacombs, etc) while trying to get by on our extremely limited French vocabulary. Should be fun. I’m trying (in vain) to remember the basic rudiments of French verbs…. and since I know that’s doomed to failure, I’m taking along a phrase book and trying to resist the urge to go for a Monty Python French accent.

Back by the weekend.

In A History of Ashes, Paizo’s second adventure path goes over the halfway point – and it’s quite fitting that the so far city-based game takes a hike for the wild lands, as our heroes are forced to flee Korvosa (or so at least the default plot says, who know what actual PCs will want to do).

This is a nice segment. It’s mostly set in the Cinderlands, an utterly inhospitable wastelands inhabited by the Shoanti (a people heavily patterned after Native Americans). The players will need to make friends with the Shoanti, or at least stop them from attacking long enough to plead their case. This will involve a series of quests which read like they should be a lot of fun, but the author does point out that different groups have different tolerances for “go do quest A, then do quest B” stuff; some of this may need tweaking for some groups. There’s a lot of varied social interaction with native tribes, and of course a lot of action and combat, some of it against a group of assassins the PCs will probably have encountered before.

So far, I’m liking this second adventure path more than the first, and the first was already pretty good. Paizo keeps producing interesting D&D stuff, with some surprisingly adult elements included amidst the hack & slash.

Ascension of the Magdalene is a strange creature. It’s a pregen adventure set in 1610 AD Prague, dual-statted for Unknown Armies and D&D (of all things). Yes, it’s a pretty bizarre mix, and ends up being a bit problematic for the adventure in general.

The base plot is interesting, and quite suitable for UA. A notorious and religiously (perhaps) blasphemous painting has vanished, and several factions know where it is and want it for themselves. The player characters are suitable dupes who can be talked into invading a mad emperor’s castle and stealing the thing. So far, so good, and we’re given a nice set of factions and motives so that the startup can be made into something quite a bit more intresting than a “you meet a man in a pub”.

…but then things go awry. The main problem is that UA and D&D are just very, very different games, and you just can’t write up something that works as-is for both. While the writer here has to be given points for even trying, the end result is a strange semi-mystic dungeon crawl which doesn’t quite jive with either game’s tone. There are interesting bits in the thing, and I’m sure that with some effort you could get either a nice historical UA game or a nice D&D dungeon crawl out of this – but it would need some work. For UA, you’d want to remove most of the “dungeon crawl” aspects, and for D&D you’d probably want to increase them.

I hesitate to call this a totally failed product, it doesn’t deserve that. On the other hand, neither does it really work all that well. I think this project was doomed from the start.

Dreams of the First Age is the first box set that White Wolf has produced for a roleplaying game (at least as far as I remember). Apparently the production run was beset with all sorts of problems, and the WW guys commented that they’re slowly figuring out why not many companies make boxed sets…

In any case, the end result is very nice. It’s a setting supplement for Exalted, detailing the mythical First Age, when Solars were in charge and everything was great… or not so much. The box contains two books (one on the world, one on the inhabitants and character creation), a pretty full-color cloth map of Creation, a very nice cardboard “battlewheel” with counters, and a fun “Guidebook to Meru” for newly Exalted Solars. A very nice package to my mind, and well worth the money.

The contents are mostly great. The Meru guidebook is written as an “ingame” guidebook and contains lots of fun nuggets and general disdain of the “lower races”. The setting books are interesting – a lot of this stuff we already knew or guessed, but some was quite surprising. Tours into Malfeas to torment the inhabitants some more, floating sky fortresses explicitly named as insults to defeated Primordials… good stuff, and had me smiling more than once. The Solar charms in the character book have received some (deserved) criticism, but I’m not that much of a crunch guy so I can’t get too upset over a few badly written charms; I’d just ignore them, myself. In general the crunch is ok, I think, though as noted the Solar stuff needs a bit of tweaking. I personally found the most interesting bit to be the writeups on the NPCs – we’re given the “past lives” of the Exalted signature characters and lots of other interesting folks. Desus is just as much a wifebeating bastard as we’ve been given to understand, but he’s an interesting bastard. The Dragon-Blooded general Anjei Maruma is given a pretty chilling writeup, in that we know what her personality leads her to do in the future. Ma-Ha-Suchi is hilarious, in that in the First Age he’s an infamous womanizer and seducer, “The Wolf with the Red Roses”. Heh. How things change…

I really liked the thing, mainly because it gave interesting background for a lot of “current” Exalted stuff. If I were to actually run a First Age game, I’d probably go for a “police series” type of thing, with the players as Dragonblood “beat cops” trying to keep their heads above the water while fielding at times insane directives from their Solar superiors. Might be fun.

I recently got myself an emusic account and I have to say I’m pretty impressed. I remember hearing about the service quite a while ago, but didn’t try it out earlier (for some reason or the other, don’t remember). Now the topic came up in an IRC conversation and I thought I might give it a go.

Basically, you pay a monthly fee and that allows you to download a set number of songs per month. Full high-quality MP3s (with intact and full tags) and no DRM crap of any sort. The montly plans start from 6 euros per month, which gives you 10 tracks (0.60e per track), up to a 300 songs per month one. I have the one which gives me the cheapest price per track: 21 euros, 75 songs, 0.28e per track. That’s very cheap compared to other downloadable music services, and there is no DRM crap here.

What’s the catch? Well, the artist selection is limited, you won’t find most of the big mainstream artists here (though some are available). Also, the monthly schedule might not be to everyone’s taste. Me, I’m happy with the thing; it gives me an excuse to get 75 new songs per month and emusic carries a lot of artists I like a lot. You can download the songs via the web if you want, but that’s kind of cumbersome… the default method is a standalone download program which allows batch download and other convenience factors; versions exist for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. I’ve been using the Linux downloader and it seems to work fine.

When you sign up you get 50 free songs, and you can cancel the thing without paying anything if you don’t like the service. In other words, even if the service doesn’t interest you as such take it as a chance to grab some totally legal high-quality songs from some great bands. To get you started here are some of my current playlist favorites available from emusic:

• Challengers from The New Pornographers. Their latest and most melodic album, check out tracks Your Rights Versus Mine and Adventures in Solitude
• Twin Cinema from The New Pornographers. Now quite as strong as Challengers, but the song Bleeding Heart Show is fantastic
• Fox Confessor Brings the Flood from Neko Case. Alt-country with Neko Case’s fantastic voice, with story inspirations from Russian folklore, what’s not to like?
• Boxer from The National. The album has really grown on me. From the hypnotic Fake Empire to the affectionate Slow Show, this album is pure gold. Very low-key, though, and needs repeated listens.
• Exile in Guyville from Liz Phair. Even though Liz’s later albums haven’t left as much an impact, this (her debut) remains an indie classic. Check out Help Me Mary.

The Great SF Stories 5 is the fifth in a long-running anthology collected by Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg, attempting to gather what they considered to be the best science fiction stories of a given year – 1943 in this case. Yes, these are old stories.

It’s interesting to read old (or “classic”) science fiction stories. The customs and mores of the age can’t help but shine through, even though the writers are usually trying to write about the future and to be “radical”. It almost always comes off as quaint and old-fashioned, of course. Women still are mostly in the background, or in the “damsel in distress” role, though there are refreshing exceptions to this. The stories seem very… well, clean. Compared to modern stuff, the characters tend to be quite straight-laced, even when they are obviously not meant to be. There’s no sex to speak of, and the violence is mostly quite sterile. Most importantly, the stories just aren’t all that sophisticated and complex (though exceptions exist). Simpler tales from a largely simpler age… or at least one which wished that the future would be clean, happy and simple. No such luck, of course.

The stories here are quite readable, but only a few stand out. Lewis Padgett’s “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” is easily the best of the bunch, with Lawrence O’Donnell’s “Clash By Night” and Leigh Brackett’s “The Halfling” also being worth a mention. As a “best of year” collection, this one would indicate that 1943 wasn’t the best year in general for SF. Of course, it was in the middle of WW2 – so maybe there was a general demand for lightweight, optimistic stories. I guess people had enough of the “grim & gritty” in their lives without stories enforcing that… and of course, “classic” SF tends to be idea-driven and quite optimistic, in general.