Eating Authors

Today, I’m the guest author on Lawrence M. Schoen’s Eating Authors series, wherein I talk about my most memorable meal. Check it out!

Kind Words from Speculating Canada

I’ve said good things before about Speculating Canada, a web site devoted to Canadian SF. Recently, they’ve been doing a series about what Canadian SF writers are doing during the COVID-19 lockdown. Today is my turn to talk a bit about it: check it out!

I should also say that Derek Newman-Stille recently wrote a kind review of my novel Commitment Hour. Commitment Hour was my second book published, way back in 1998. It deals with gender, and the world has changed a lot since the book came out; I’m happy that Derek still found it worth reading.

Accelerated RPG Campaigns

I am the Dungeon Master for a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, and I recently had a great insight. Let me share.

Like many a DM (I think), I adapt published adventures for my players. This means I use the published adventure as the backbone of a story, then I add or modify material to meet the specific interests of players and given them an interesting character arc.

For example, one of the player characters in our group seemed to be leaning evil, and I knew the adventure I was using would eventually lead the party to a city that was a hive of scum and villainy. I therefore dropped hints that the character might be able to join an assassins guild there. When that prospect seemed to catch their interest, I arranged for the character to meet someone who told them how to contact the guild. Eventually, when the party reached the city, the character had to decide how much or how little to become involved with the guild.

The guild wasn’t part of the published adventure, but going to the city was. Thus while the party followed the plot-line of the adventure, the character had personalized opportunities that (I hope) made the game more interesting than just following the predetermined plot.

As I said, I believe a lot of DMs do the same. This approach provides a nice mix of plot (from the adventure) and character material (added by me personally).

So now my great insight: I could throw away huge amounts of the published adventure and still have a great game.

For example, suppose the adventure calls for the party to work their way through a 30-room enemy castle. Why not toss out 25 of those rooms (or more accurately make the rooms pretty much empty)? The only rooms I’d keep would be ones I found really cool, or else ones where I could insert character-based material. In other words, I could drop the “crawl” from “dungeon crawl” and distill the whole thing down to a few rewarding set-pieces.

In the old days, you crawled through a dungeon so the characters could accumulate experience points through the slow process of killing monsters. There’s some value in that—it takes a long time to achieve significant milestones, so the players feel great when they finally kill The Big Bad (or whatever). It also gives players time to learn how to use their current abilities to best effect, and to yearn for the cool new stuff they’ll get when they reach their next experience level.

But my group only meets once a month or so. Grinding through a generic battle means that no one advances their story, even if the battle is a memorable challenge. So new plan: follow the adventure’s plot, but cut it down ruthlessly to its bare essentials so that the added character material takes on a much larger percentage of the action.

Also accelerate character advancement—discard keeping track of experience points at all, and allow players to go up a level every four or five sessions. If that’s too fast, use incremental advances: let players take partial advances now and then, e.g. increasing their hit points or taking one of the new abilities they’d get at the next level. Incremental advances are a great trick I learned from 13th Age.

In this way, the campaign will make faster progress through the published adventure and through D&D levels, finally reaching the adventure’s conclusion in a reasonable time. This avoids one of the major problems of D&D campaigns: petering out before you get to a satisfying end, because the DM gets busy, or a player has to quit, or whatever.

In other words, I plan to speed things up by dropping 90% of the published material. This should let us actually reach the end of a well-rounded story, while still not feeling too rushed. I recommend the same to all DMs reading this.

Electric Blankets

A short note this time, but I want to say a word in favor of electric blankets. I own three: one on my bed, one at my writing desk, and one on the couch where I do most of my reading.

To save money, I keep my house’s central heating relatively low, and just get under a blanket whenever I need to. Unlike a space heater, an electric blanket heats me, not the room; it’s direct, and I’m pretty sure it uses less electricity. I do all my writing under an electric blanket from about October to April.

While some electric blankets are pricey, you can a decent one for under $50, especially if you’re just looking for something to cover yourself with when you’re writing or reading. And if you’re worried about the blanket getting too hot, every blanket I own turns itself off after two or three hours of operation.

There’s nothing so wonderful as turning on the blanket half an hour before bedtime so you can slip into a preheated bed. It’s virtually orgasmic on a cold night. I recommend it.

Reduction of Disbelief

Allow me to pontificate.

Recently, I’ve read a number of stories that take place in our contemporary world (more or less), wherein one or more characters come face to face with supernatural or science fictional elements. (Magic. Aliens. Etc.) The stories then spend a great deal of time during which the characters refuse to believe they’re confronting anything beyond the mundane; they prefer to think it’s an illusion, delusion, lie, hoax, etc.

This gets tiresome pretty damned quick. I soon end up yelling, “Get on to the good stuff! Quit wasting my time!”

I’m prepared to accept a short interval of doubt. If someone in our modern world walks up and says, “I’m an alien,” a character ought to have a few misgivings; otherwise, the character seems like a gullible fool, and that’s usually not what the writer wants.

On the other hand, I hate when a story spends any significant time in this phase. I want to read about cool stuff, not about someone who disbelieves in cool stuff! Disbelief is almost always boring and irritating. After all, I know the fantastic elements will turn out to be real eventually—I probably got the book from the Science Fiction & Fantasy section, and I’ve already read the cover blurb. Even if the blurb doesn’t have spoilers, it’s designed to give me a feel for the book and its general ambiance. I picked up the book it looked like it would give me magic or aliens…so writers, stop dragging your feet, and give me what I paid for!

Seriously, any more than a few paragraphs of disbelief are enough to make me skip ahead in search of something more promising. Either that, or I put the book down and never pick it up again. I strongly recommend that authors create characters who buy in quickly…or else make the encounter so clearly beyond the ordinary that even skeptical characters can’t deny what’s going on.

Please. Please.

Checking In

2020. Amazing.

What did I do in 2019? A lot of writing, almost none of which has been published yet. I’m still working on the haunted house novel, titled The Hacking of Hyll House (at least until someone tells me I can’t use the name). I hope the book will be finished in a couple of months, because other stories want to be written too, and I’m not getting any younger.

The holidays were mostly quiet, except when a water pipe developed a pin-sized hole on Christmas Eve, spraying a fine mist all over my basement. I tried to fix it with duct tape (of course), which changed the fine mist into a more manageable drip. I happened to have some old hose from my clothes dryer sitting around, so I rigged it under the drip to funnel the leak into a nearby drain. I considered taking pictures and posting them here, but it would have given my insurance agent a heart attack and/or made me go viral on some belittling website, so I decided against it. I eventually managed to get a plumber in on Monday, and life is dry again.

So that was my Christmas…although I also read Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me by Mariko Tomaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell which I heartily recommend. And I’ve been dying a lot while playing Control. Dying isn’t fun, but the game is, so it’s worth checking out.

I haven’t made any resolutions for 2020, but I do intend to blog more. So happy 2020, and I hope to write more in the near future.

Christmas Role-Playing

A week ago I tweeted the following:

“Die Hard” meets “A Christmas Carol” meets “Legend” meets “Land of the Giants”. Seriously.

— James Alan Gardner (@jamesagard) December 23, 2019

Now I can explain.

I am Games Master for two role-playing groups, and with one, we’ve developed a tradition of having a special Christmas adventure every year. These are conducted in the spirit of an imaginary story, the way that DC Comics used to do: not really in the serious continuity of the ongoing role-playing campaign. Basically, these adventures are extravagant spoofs, often ending in wild chase scenes or over-the-top fights.

So this year’s adventure: “Die Hard” meets “A Christmas Carol” meets “Legend” meets “Land of the Giants“. Seriously.

The setting is the present day in a world much like ours, but with magic and magical creatures of all kinds lurking in the shadows. The player characters are all teenage mages recently graduated from a high school that is more like Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters than Hogwarts. They are currently connected with a slightly shady “talent broker” who hires “special” people for “special” jobs.

The broker was approached by an anonymous client and asked to arrange a classic Charles Dickens scenario to convert a Scrooge-like billionaire into a nice guy. They wanted the same sequence of events as “A Christmas Carol”: Marley, then the Spirit of Christmas Past, then Christmas Present, then Christmas Yet-to-Come. Such powerful spirits do exist in this world…and a powerful mage could use rituals and bargains to induce the spirits to visit a given target. The spirits themselves have plenty enough mind-altering power to reprogram an ordinary human into someone who loves Christmas.

So the job was not impossible. But when the broker investigated the situation, he found a lot of warning flags. For example, the Scrooge-like billionaire lived in a penthouse atop Nakatomi Plaza, and the whole building was enveloped in sophisticated magic shields. It’s not unheard of in this world for a billionaire to have some protection against magic, but these shields went way beyond normal. They also had embedded triggers and characteristics so complicated it would take ages to figure out what they actually did.

The talent broker decided the job was too hinky to undertake, so he turned it down. He expected the second best broker in the city would be contacted next, so he sent a message to Broker #2, warning not to take the job. Broker #1 expected #2 would take the job anyway, so #1 started making plans to deal with what might happen if things went pear-shaped. This included having the player characters on hand on Christmas Eve, just in case.

Just past midnight, everyone in the world forgot that there had ever been previous Christmases. They thought this year’s Christmas was the first ever. Yes, it looked like the Spirit of Christmas Past had somehow disappeared from the world.

So our heroes were rushed to Nakatomi Plaza to see what was up and what they could do to set things right. They stopped at the edge of the magic barrier surrounding the building, and just as they got there, all Christmas decorations in the city disappeared. Oh no! The Spirit of Christmas Present was gone too!

Before sending the heroes any farther, the talent broker gave them magical items that he promised would make them really really hard to detect by normal security systems and magic ones. He didn’t say how they actually worked, because a moment later, our heroes were shrunk to the size of ants. (In all my years of role-playing, I’ve never shrunk an entire group of players, and it’s high time I did. And if you’re going to do a remake of “Die Hard”, isn’t it more fun when the good guys are less than an inch tall?) Anyway, the broker gave them flying ants to ride, and away they all went to save Christmas.

I won’t go into many more details, but they had to deal with a host of obstacles, some of which were easy to circumvent at ant size, and some of which were tough. (The billionaire had two cats. Uh-oh.)

When the heroes finally got to the top of the tower, the place had been transformed by an abundance of Christmas energies spilling off the captured spirits. One room was full of toys…and yes, of course, since our heroes were mages, they could change the toy helicopters so the toys really flew and shot missiles. During the adventure, our miniature heroes almost got eaten by four calling birds, three French hens, and two turtledoves, and almost got stepped on by twelve lords a-leaping…but eventually the heroes found the spirits being held prisoner in Christmas stockings, chained up by Marley’s chains. A battle ensued with the heroes driving around in toys, facing off against villainous elves riding reindeer…

Anyway, we laughed continuously for a couple of hours, and much delirious action took place. (Not even gonna mention what the toy Batmobile did to the cats.) But yippie-ki-yay to all.

(Note to GMs: I strongly recommend the occasional holiday free-for-all…if not at Christmas, then Halloween or some other favorite event. Throw away the dice completely; if a stunt makes things more fun, it automatically succeeds, and if it’s a downer, it fails. Don’t forget that Chase scenes are always a great way to end.)

[Marley’s ghost and Scrooge illustration by John Leech, from Wikimedia Commons]

At the Merril Collection

This year, I’m happy to be the Guest Speaker at the Merril Collection’s annual holiday party, Saturday, December 7, 2019, 1:30 – 4:00PM. Yay!

For those who are unfamiliar with the Merril Collection, it’s a highly respected collection of science fiction and fantasy works, part of the Toronto Public Library system. I’m honored to be invited…and I’ll be reading a bit from my current work in progress, The Hacking of Hyll House. Hope to see you there!

Back from When Words Collide

I’m finally back from When Words Collide in Calgary. I had such a great time there, it’s taken this long for me to recover, even though the con itself finished on Sunday. The weekend was a whole lot of fun, and I’d recommend the con to anyone. Afterward, I led a workshop on Monday, then spent Tuesday with Randy McCharles and Stacey Kondla of WWC, going out to see dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrell Museum.

While I was out there in Calgary, several people told me they’d really liked a workshop I led several years ago. They said they particularly appreciated a handout I’d given them on writing…and at first, I couldn’t remember any such handout at all. However, I finally realized they were referring to my Seminar on Writing Prose. Since I haven’t mentioned that much in blog posts, I thought I’d link to it here. I’d like to revise some parts of it in light of my 2019 outlook and skills, but any readers who are interested in writing still might find it useful.

Review of GUN at Speculating Canada

A great review of They Promised Me the Gun Wasn’t Loaded at Speculating Canada! And by the way, if you’ve never checked out Speculating Canada, it’s well worth looking at—a lot of insightful reviews of a lot of great books.