Museum Fantasy

Sometimes working at what you love pays off in ways you would never have predicted. I've always loved the Science Fiction Museum at the EMP, even in the early days when it felt like not much more than the seriously-impressive handwritten manuscript of Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon alongside a whole mess of robots.

The Museum has been upgrading the past few years with nifty new permanent exhibits on horror and yes, science fiction. Opening next Friday, Fantasy: Worlds of Myth and Magic completes the triumvirate.

I helped with the brainstorming and planning stages of the fantasy exhibit and worked with the museum's Erin Wheeler to choose the characters for the Archetypes display. Erin piloted the display and brought in characters from media I'm more-or-less-illiterate in (anime, cinema). We handled the writing together with some help from a few other folks.

One of the best aspects of working on the Archetypes display was bringing in characters from writers whose works I love and who might otherwise not have been recognized. Fafhrd as a Barbarian and the Gray Mouser as a Rogue? That might or might not have happened without me. But getting N. K. Jemisin's Nahadoth the Night Lord into the display as an example of the The Earth-Shaker, and using Sethra Lavode from Steven Brust's Dragaera as an example of The Iron Woman? A sweet way to repay a bit of the pleasure I've had reading these books.

Ditto for the painting above, by friends who are two of my favorite artists, Catska and Cory Ench. This painting of Suldrun originally appeared as the cover of Lyonesse on my friend Bob Kruger's electricstory.com site. Now Cory and Catska allowed it be used as Suldrun's illustration in the Damsels section of the Archetypes display. I love it when friends' work comes together.

The exhibit opens on Saturday the 27th, but on Friday the 26th there's an opening gala involving archery, scavenger quests, sword-fighting demonstrations, photos sitting on the Iron Throne from Game of Thrones, and games run by Card Kingdom and WotC. Come sit by the river a spell, wander the gardens, or cast a spell.  

Fawning candy blink dogs

A couple months ago Ken Hite was putting together the monster list for the upcoming 13th Age Bestiary from Pelgrane Press. I'd been helping with suggestions and sample monster write-ups. Then I mentioned the monsters I wasn't sure we should cover.

Dogs.

Any time D&D did a book of monsters in 3e and 3.5, you could count on a substantial portion of the contributions amounting to dogs. Go ahead, start paging through with the core Monster Manual, you'll hit the hound archon, barghest (wolflike is doglike, man), blink dog, dire wolf, gnolls (because hyenas count), and so on, up through the warg, winter wolf, and yeth hound. The monsters just get barkier in the Fiend Folio and in the old Monster Manual II, sometimes when you don't really expect it. Caniloth? That's a dog-like not-demon/not-devil. Senmurv? That's some kind of coyote humanoid with rainbow wings. As soon as you do a race sourcebook, that race has gotta have a dog. Or three. The parade of dog-like monsters keeps spooling out like a WTF multiversal dog show.

I became aware of our canine design tendency when I was choosing minis for the D&D Miniatures game. Like other powerful unconscious tendencies, dog-ness often took us by surprise. A gravehound, a werewolf, a Nessian warhound, a gnoll priestess, an iron defender and a goblin warg rider feel like different monsters. But if you squint, they're all from Canine Kennels.

The ubiquity of dog monsters isn't a surprise. We think with what's familiar. Twisting the familiar into a monster creates scary and resonant monsters. And other creators have had weird dog-fixations. Shakespeare tended to link 'fawning' in the same sentence as candy (sweetmeats, candied jellies) along with a dog or hound or mastiff, there are upwards of seven plays that feature this precise association, something like a text analysis fingerprint. Us 'd20-rolling designers? We've got an even more obvious thread: new monster concept = obvious (or just maybe stealthy) dog.

So Ken made the call to exclude dogs from the upcoming 13th Age Bestiary. It was a good call. 13th Age is aimed at imaginative GMs and players who are being encouraged to add their own cool ideas to each campaign and session. It's clear that most of us gamers can design actually-interesting dog-monsters ourselves and we've covered a few of the obvious wolves and hellhounds in the core book. We're trying to supply ideas and inspiration you might not have had immediately on your own, so throwing more dogs onto the pile just isn't necessary.

And by the hoary breath of the winter wolf, my previous work cycle created enough pre-painted plastic dog-style miniatures that you should have no problem finding minis to suit your new creations.

Manos: the Hands of the Internet

Bruce Baugh introduced me to the Internet. We were both living in Portland in the late 80s and very early 90s. I remember Bruce showing me that his computer was dialing up a system that let it link to other computers all around the world. I’d sort of vaguely known that something like this was possible but had left it to others. Bruce was one of those others. For reasons that might have had something to do with what was working at the moment, Bruce demonstrated his computer’s worldwide connectivity by finding out what the weather was like in South Africa. At that second. Well, actually it took a minute or two and Bruce commented on the computers his query was routing through. I was impressed. I didn't know what to make of it, not really, but I was impressed. And within a few months I had an AoL account and was participating in the gaming forums, which in combination with contacts made through pre-internet Alarums & Excursions surely led me to work professionally in gaming.

I didn't have a television back then (or since . . .). So Bruce was also the man to introduce my girlfriend Lisa and me to Mystery Science Theater 3000. The first episode Lisa watched with us was the epically brain-damaging episode bludgeoning through the movie Manos: the Hands of Fate. If you aren't familiar with this film I’m not going to be the one guilty of linking to it.

When people joke about the early days of the Internet—it’s a series of tubes—I flick past the subject’s personal association with a murderous dwarf, a high priest’s orange robes that flare out into giant hands, and slap-wrestling semi-nude female cultists.

About half-right, in other words. 

Bruce. Thanks for everything. 

Three Strikes Lightning

Cleaning my desk I uncovered an envelope with two stories scrawled on its back, stories I heard in two of the rare moments I wasn't carrying a notebook.

The top of the envelope is a list of curious but ultimately non-remarkable attributes pertaining to a friend's cousins. They add up to a compelling clan in a Hillfolk game set on the 7 hills of Seattle.

But the bottom of the envelope is where things get interesting. We were hiking a ridge trail near Hurricane Ridge with ominous clouds in the distance. The conversation turned to lightning strikes and the woman passing us on the trail entered the conversation.

     "My grandfather got hit by lightning three times."
     "What? Three times?" I said. "Um, clearly he survived at least..."
     
Yes, he had survived all three lightning strikes. I believe she told me that he was still alive but not up to hiking any more, so they'd come up the Ridge without him.

Of course I wanted the details so the full story came out in about ninety seconds while she waited for the rest of her family to catch up.

Strike #1 was when her grandfather was in school. He was sitting at a desk just looking out the window and lightning came through the window and blasted him out of his chair. Didn't hurt him much though.

Strike #2 was worse. He was in the Air Force during WWII and he and two friends wanted to get back to the barracks quickly from the mess hall. Reconstructing my notes, the situation was complicated by the fact that the grandfather had suffered some sort of leg injury, he was on crutches. His two friends decided to rig up some carrying arrangement and then instead of going the long way around they cut through a drainage culvert. And that's where the lightning hit them and both his friends who were carrying him died.

Strike #3 came when his B-17 was hit. I didn't write down whether he was a pilot or a bombardier or a navigator or a gunner, but I did write down that the hit when he was in the B-17 left him blind for 6 months. But he recovered and ended up flying 25 missions for the USAF and 27 more for the RAF maybe not in that order.

     "Wow. OK. Thank you so much for that story."

     There was no sign of thunder in the clouds but if I was him I'd avoid hiking Hurricane Ridge even if my knees could handle it.

Good news, bad news

The good news is that no one got hurt. As good news goes, that's pretty much the absence of truly terrible news.

Chris Huth's apartment building in Toronto burnt down, making Chris and his girlfriend temporarily homeless.

The link above details part of Pelgrane Press' response to Chris' problem, a fire sale until tomorrow that gives Chris all proceeds. Simon's post also covers details like 13th Age's most likely new publishing date.

Chris has been doing great work on 13th Age. You can see most of the laid out final book (8 of 9 chapters) if you are one of the many people who have pre-ordered the game from Pelgrane Press. Cal Moore and I had sent comments on six of the nine classes in chapter 4 back to Chris and were waiting to comment on the remaining three classes after Chris caught up with the earlier work.

I have more to say about restarting the layout (a job that should go much faster the second time through) and working on 13 True Ways (finishing monk second-draft today, working on battle captain). But I'm going to wait until Monday to give a full assessment. I confess that my personal reaction to this type of setback is to communicate in private and spend time working harder instead of communicating widely. I'll get over my old-fashioned approach next week.

If there are any Pelgrane books you've been waiting to pick up until the right moment, the moment is here.

More next week.

--Rob

The Final Mantis

This is the first completed piece of Monster Art +13 from the 13 True Ways book. As you can see, Aaron McConnell had a lot more in mind than the striking parallel lines of the original Mantis vs. Mantis sketch. Aaron expanded the piece and did the initial colors and true to our team-up plans, Lee finished the composition.

Our backer, the Dormouse, is thrilled, and she's buying a second copy of the print to have for herself since the first will be a gift. If you'd like to buy a copy of the print yourself, email Aaron at aranmcconnell@gmail.com, he will eventually have a store operating but for now it's on a talk-to-him basis. You could also talk with him at Emerald City ComicCon this weekend, he'll be one of the Fire Opal people at the show. Me? Not as much. I'm spending the weekend helping with the final steps of the core book layout and working on monk forms that include the Deadly Mantis Fist.

Feathered Crown!

There are three Alchemist-tier 13 True Ways Kickstarter backers who gave us magic items to illustrate.

The first item is the Feathered Crown from Jered Heeschen. Look at the art from Aaron McConnell (with a touch of radiant feathering from Lee Moyer)!

Jered very much wanted the item's quirk to play as follows: Quirk: Not only do you compulsively eavesdrop, you also tend to misinterpret insults as compliments and bad news as good news. 

I decided that it sounded like just the thing for a dragon-rider to wear. "Ah, they're saying wonderful things about me. They do know what's good for them."

I like the item and the art so much that it has changed our plan about how we are going to stat up these specially illustrated treasures: we're going to provide several different versions of the mechanics to fit into the panoply of different characters and campaigns!

And speaking of changing plans about treasure, we've changed one small fact about magic shields during layout. Neither Jonathan nor I were happy with the fact that we had given shields no default magical bonus. That seemed bogus. So I rummaged through our options and changed things around. Magical shields in 13th Age now provide the default hit point boost that magical belts used to. Belts ended up with a default bonus to a character's number of recoveries, which also doesn't suck. A happy last minute correction for a muffed punt.

Our thanks to Jered,
Rob Heinsoo