Elder Sign!
Brilliant. Though probably not quite as funny if your Cthulhu Lore skill is at 0%…
Minireview: A Storm of Swords, by George R.R. Martin
A Storm of Swords is the third book in Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, and it’s also the biggest one to date (my copy has well over 1,100 pages). While it does feel a slight bit drawn out at times, that page count is mostly warranted here – the story is increasingly complex and events proceed in chaotic directions. Also, the story is totally character-based, and those characters are fairly complex ones; fast sketches would not do them justice. While I don’t think all books need to be of the “brick-sized” variety, here I think the page count makes sense and in some ways makes the story. I just don’t think the feel would be the same with, say, something like 200-300 pages being used to tell this one.
The story proceeds from where the second book left things, at the aftermath of the battle for King’s Landing. Or more exactly, it starts with a snapshot of some events elsewhere before that battle, and then jumps to others afterwards. Things are told in logical order, which is not always the exact chonological one. It works, much because the characters are spread out over a huge area and information is a scarce & unreliable resource. Nobody in the story has a fully linear knowledge of events… so we don’t either.
The kingdoms are still in chaos, and armies scour the land (almost always to the detriment of the “ordinary folk”, who don’t much care which army it is that burns the farms and rapes & kills the populance this week). King Joffrey continues his brutal psycho kid reign, Arya gets more and more adept at pure brutal survival, Rob and Catelyn try to keep their army together, various self-elected kings try to deal with each other… and Tyrion continues to breathe, despite the best attempts of his none-too-stable sister, Cersei. Oh, and Jaime actually gets both a “main character” role here and part of what he deserves. Meanwhile, armies and worse from the North are on the move, while most of the southern lands are concentrating either on killing each other or in just staying alive. The few defenders of the Wall, Jon included, are fast running out of options. We also get some first inklings of what the name of the series (“Song of Ice and Fire”) may refer to.
There are some very surprising and nasty plot turns. Logical, yes, but ones that make you go “whoah”. Martin has the same ability as Stephen King has in being able to create interesting and three-dimensional characters – so you care when something horrible happens to them. And boy… do horrible things happen to people in this book. Perhaps even more than the previous books… this one is not for the faint-of-heart, or for those who don’t like anything really bad (or permanent) happening to the main characters. Nobody is safe here. There’s also a lot of sex and violence, neither romanticized much. This is not “family-friendly” fare.
These books continue to be among the best fantasy I’ve personally ever read. Maybe the fourth book will be a relative disappointment (as some people claim), but I get the feeling that even that may be a factor of these first three books just being so damn good.
Minireview: The Inquisitor's Handbook (Dark Heresy)
The Inquisitor’s Handbook claims to be “The Ultimate Player’s Guide” (for the Dark Heresy game). Well, I don’t know about that, but it’s pretty nice and seems useful. Like most books titled as “player’s guides”, it’s more a collection of character creation and advancement options, equipment, and suchlike crunch to decorate your PC with. Oh, there is a section at the end which actually tries to describe day-to-day life in the Dark Heresy world and gives some overview of what’s what and who’s who… but the bulk of the book is “crunch” for tweaking player characters and their gear.
The book introduces one completely new career option, the Adepta Sororitas “Sisters of Battle”, open only to female characters (obviously). In addtion, the existing careers are expanded a bit with various optional advancement paths, giving some extra variablity to the as such quite fixed career progressions. Some specialist subgroups are also introduced which your PC might be a member of, these seem to work a bit like “prestige classes” in D&D 3e do – they have various sorts of prerequisites, and confer some extra benefits. Nothing to complain of in all of this; the quite static character progression was one of the complaints leveled at the core rulebook.
A big section of the book is devoted to gear. It’s nicely organized, being first divided by origin world type (hive world, feral world, etc), and then subdivided by gear type within each section. This makes it a lot nicer for figuring out character gear based on their locale and/or origins than one humongous equipment list would be. The downside is, of course, that in order to scan through, say, all the armor options, you have to do some back-and-forth skipping through the book. Not a problem in my mind, but something to be aware of.
As noted, the book ends with a section that’s more of an actual “player’s guide”, giving some PC-centric overview of how things work in the game world, and some tips on how Acolytes would usually approach problems. There is some especially nice stuff here about using contacts and alter-egos to help with investigations.
While it’s somewhat of a grab bag of character options and game world tips, it’s a good one. Were I to run a game of Dark Heresy, I’d use this book to flesh out character creation – no question of that. There is nothing here that really complicates the game, and having extra options is usually a good thing.
Winter hibernation
Still alive, though the recurring flu of this winter is (was) back for a short while. Feeling much better now, but we spent the weekend in Jyväskylä at a wedding and Sunday morning had me feeling like something the cat dragged in… and I didn’t drink that much. Decided to stay home and vegetate yesterday, was feeling pretty crappy – and it was worth it, now back at work and more or less ok. Managed to watch some small bit of my tv show backlog when I wasn’t horizontal in bed, so at least something good….
Otherwise it’s life as normal; nothing spectacular has happened but I manage to keep busy and entertained. I bought the board game Arkham Horror and most of the expansion packs, and we’ve been trying that out. Fun game, and even though it is complicated we’ve mostly managed to figure it out. FFG really does publish some brilliant board games; the newer Battlestar Galactica board game is also very, very good and a huge amount of fun.
Been playing a bit of EVE now and then, but it comes and goes. The new expansion does sound very interesting, I have to admit; I’m busy brushing up on my exploration/scanning skills so I can go try out the new “wormhole” stuff once it goes live. At the moment nobody knows how the new Tech3 stuff will work out. I suspect the devs are clueless there, too, and the “let’s tweak it as we go along” model is in play. I’m ok with that, as long as they do balance things eventually.
Oh, and I do have to mention my new (work) phone, the Nokia 6210 Navigator. Now, it’s not often that I praise anything done by Nokia, I’ve usually found their hardware to be ok but the software abysmal. Well, this thing is actually pretty sweet. Nice, compact form-factor, a navigation suite that actually works quite well, and software (on both phone and PC side) that doesn’t utterly suck. Even the PC Suite thingy was usable now, instead of the mind-eating horror it used to be. Go figure. It’s not a total home run.. the GPS reception is patchy at times, and in true Nokia fashion the menu choices and “which button does which logical thing” seem to be randomly assigned at times. But I don’t want to bitch too much – this is a very nice phone. I’m especially loving the combined A-GPS navigation plus compass… having a GPS map on a phone which rotates according to your own orientation is cool. As is the walking (or driving) routing guidance it can do. I’ve already used it as a car navigator a bit, and it works. Pretty well, in fact.
EVE Alliance Tournament videos
Ok, videos of our fight are finally up.
pre-fight commentary (most of it talks about the previous match, though)
our fight vs Star Fraction (22 minutes)
- post-fight commentary
Go Tempest ‘Hero’ Issue!
Minireview: The Paxton Gambit: Peace River Showdown (Heavy Gear)
The second published “campaign” for Heavy Gear, The Paxton Gambit is also the most popular starter campaign for the game – partly because there are extremely few of those in the first place (most of Heavy Gear concentrates on setting detail), partly because it’s a pretty good and complex scenario that drops the PCs right in the middle of the action.
For a thin book, there’s a lot in here. In typical early Heavy Gear fashion, the font is small and every page is absolutely crammed with details; you get your money’s worth in stuff per page, here. The book is mostly an outline for a campaign, separated into phases. Each phase gets a 2-3 page writeup with the main detail, assumed plot flow, NPCs, and such. The GM will need to do some fill-in work here, it’s a complicated campaign and as noted, this book just gives the main outline. If I were to run this, I’d read the book at least three times through. There’s a lot to take in and a lot of factions with interlinked motivations. Also, the NPCs aren’t black & white stereotypes, they have shifting motivations that are critical to the plot flow.
The story is set in Peace River, with the PCs assumed to be Paxton police officers (though that’s not an absolute requirement, other options are also given). Things start off simply enough; security for a high-level visit needs to be taken care of and the PCs are part of that detail. Things escalate, and sooner or later the PCs will be given more autonomy and responsibilities. Also included is detail on what happens if the PCs fail at various points (a nice touch). The whole thing is firmly in the spy-vs-spy genre, a fairly action-packed agent story with lots of covert and over maneuvering. It’s pretty cool, though complicated. Assuming the GM puts some effort into filling in the missing details here, this reads like a fun adventure. The only thing I’d really tweak is the gear action, or more exactly, the lack of it. Even though gears are in starring role in Heavy Gear in general, here they are almost totally absent. I’d perhaps try to cram in some gear piloting sequences, just to introduce that facet of the game to new players.
Minireview: Death in Luxor (Call of Cthulhu)
Death in Luxor is the first entry from a new Cthulhu licensee, Goodman Games. Up to now Goodman has been known for their “Dungeon Crawl Classics” series of D&D modules (among others), so I’m sure I wasn’t the only one a bit unsure of how their Cthulhu adventures would work out – dungeon crawls and Cthulhu don’t mix too well, though some have obstinately tried in the past.
Well, I need not have worried too much. While it is extremely pulpy, Death in Luxor is no dungeon crawl. It’s a pretty nice pseudo-freeform investigative thing set in 1920’s Luxor, with plenty of opportunities for combat (and for avoiding such, which is always a nice touch). The players are called to Luxor (from abroad) by a scientist acquaintance/friend who has made some sort of major find. Well, to seasoned Cthulhu players it will come as no great surprise that things have gone horribly wrong… there are bodies all over the place and various factions seem to be chasing… something. The showdown is suitably Cthulhu-like, in that it’s quite possible for all the PCs to die and for them to “win”.
Due to the size of the module, no background on Luxor is provided. This is natural of course, but does make running this module a bit of a challenge without some external source of info. For example, the adventure has a scene where the PCs go to a low-life bar, and that bar contains a (western) woman who is drinking heavily. How believable would that be, for Luxor in 1920? No idea. Would there even be “bars”? So… some additional historical/background material will probably be needed for this one if the GM wants to flesh out the surroundings.
The whole thing is event and scene -based, and is nicely non-linear. Kudos for that. While some links between scenes are slightly iffy, as a whole it seems pretty coherent and quite flexible. The maps and player handouts are very nice, though the sepia/red-toned ink used here makes for extremely poor contrast on some of them – some of the map details are somewhat hard to make out. Still, lots of handouts is good, and the art on those is nice. The pregenerated PCs all have nice links to the events and are all very different, so running this as a one-shot should be quite easy.
One especially nice touch is a certain scene which happens if the PCs seem to get bogged down. It’s not quite “ninjas kick in the door”, but it has that flavor. Having something like that available is good, especially in a freeform event-based scenario like this where that players could easily end up chasing all sorts of red herrings.
While this adventure is maybe a bit too pulpy for my taste, it does show that Goodman Games isn’t just a “dungeon crawl” company. There are some hints in this module that point to it being the first in an interlinked series; I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next from this “Age of Cthulhu” line. For a first foray into Cthulhu, this is a very strong showing.
Pew pew pew kaboom: Alliance Tournament finals weekend
Well, we lost that one. We fielded what we considered to be a pretty good setup, but Star Fraction brought pretty much the last thing we wanted to see – something very similar to ours, but absolutely focused on fast cruiser firepower (we had more support stuff there). As a result, they had a lot more cruiser-level dps out there than us, an also proved to have more skill than us in flying that sort of nano gang engagement. While I think we did pretty well considering (we took out quite a few of their Fleet Stabbers), in the end Star Fraction won that vicious, close-range furrball.
It was a fun fight, though… but a very short one for me. I got taken out by a huge drone swarm during the first minute. In hindsight I should have started burning away the second the fight started, but instead I did drone launch and assignment, and then got my tracking disruptor on my assigned EW target. By the time that was done, those Stabbers were pretty much on top of us, and they did the smart thing and waited to launch drones until they were on top of us. I guess I didn’t realize just how fast those Stabbers can move. I was watching my overview for drone aggro, but when it did come I didn’t have time to run much. I called for a smartbomb (and got it), but that was too late to help me – Gahrian’s smartbombs actually ended up killing me (final blow on killmail). Got my pod out with most of the pod armor gone…
The fight after that was a fast, close-range knife fight. SF did some nice maneuvering there, pulling our primaries out of our range and forcing us to chase them (took a while for us to realize what they were doing). That and their superior firepower soon left us with just a Fleet Tempest and a Damnation on the field. Those ships were seriously tanked (the commentators started talking about “Tempest Hero Tank Issue”), since their function in our team was to provide support and not die. Well, it actually took so long for SF to chew through the 250k ehp of the Tempest (and more on the Damnation) that the fight timeouted before the Damnation went down – Teo got to keep his ship intact.
In any case, SF got a deserved win. Better fleet composition versus what we brought than what we had against them, and very good FC and piloting. In the rock-paper-scissors game that is the Alliance Tournament, this time both teams brought “rock”. SF just brought more rocks than we did.
After that was done, the rest of the weekend was spent watching the rest of the tournament on our TV. Excellent fights in there, this current tourney format proved to be very nice – very few boring fights, as compared to last year’s turtle tank fest. I especially loved that hero Nighthawk pilot vs the Abaddon… awesome job from both pilots.
