Review: Defiance

This is going to be an ‘holistic’ review, in that I’m reviewing Defiance as a whole; the TV series (of which I have seen the opening episode) and the computer game – which I have played to death.

Transmedia was a huge buzzword around the time that The Matrix got into full swing and The Matrix remains an exemplar of the idea of Transmedia. The Matrix had the films, comic books, animation, computer games, all of which wove together to create a whole ‘Matrix experience’ which – in theory – was superior to consuming any of the media individually.

There are problems with this approach and The Matrix fell afoul of several of them. You want to encourage people to consume all the media that your creation appears in, but you also want to make sure that each product can be consumed by itself and understood. You want to give the ‘true fans’ a frisson of excitement when they recognise something from the comic/film/animation/game in one of the other media, but you don’t want to create a cadre of arrogant know-it-alls.

The buzzword fell away somewhat but transmedia is now everywhere. Its getting to the point where it’s hard to buy a toy that doesn’t have some website connection or a property that hasn’t been merchandised to death. Ephemeral communities spring up around everything as companies attempt to provide extra value and keep their customers on board and engaged when so much else exists to grab their attention.

Enter Defiance, a TV Series and an MMORPG, one that’s bound to end up in other media as well. I’d expect there to be board games or RPGs in the works and if the series and the game succeed then there’ll likely be more.

Defiance isn’t really anything new, rather its a hodge-podge of existing science-fiction tropes and concepts all muddled together. Its unclear at this point whether the TV series will work as the start was a little shaky, it does have potential though. Star Trek TNG had a very shaky start, Eureka often wasn’t ‘stellar’ in the beginning but found its feet through humour, charm and great performances by Colin Ferguson and the rest of the cast. Defiance may never reach the heights of TNG but it definitely has the potential to match Eureka, Warehouse 13 or Andromeda’s better days.

• It’s a post-apocalyptic alien ‘invasion’ (Falling Skies).
• Its kind of a western (Firefly).
• Its centred around a lawman in a strange town (Eureka).
• Its full of weird mysteries and technology (Warehouse 13)

The innovative stroke in Defiance is bringing the universe to Earth rather than taking Earth to the universe. Instead of a crew aboard a starship you have the people of a town. I’m sure part of this is practical – re-using the same sets and locations is cheaper – but it also allows for a more interesting a deep character and community dynamic to evolve over time. It also means you can use Earth and yet add alien elements, technology, biology and have it all make a kind of sense.

The basic plot is this. A group of alien races came to Earth in Ark Ships, a voyage at sub-light lasting thousands of years. They arrived to find Earth occupied by another intelligent race but, desperate, they began to colonise and terraform anyway. Earth and the fleet went to war, a ruinous war that eventually culminated in both sides refusing to fight and an armistice being declared. The fleet was largely destroyed and now forms a ‘ruin ring’ in orbit around the Earth, chunks of which fall from the sky on a regular basis bringing artefacts, technology, life forms and terraforming technology to the surface. These materials are hunted for by ‘Arkhunters’ who are really a ragged mix of adventurers, raiders and fortune hunters.

Various settlements exist – including the town of Defiance in the ruins of St Louis – and border farms trying to resettle and eke out a living from the changed wasteland. Its a setting rich in possibilities and with a great deal of scope to tell a lot of different stories.

The series’ opening episode set the scene and had a few stand out characters (mostly the doctor) but was relatively disappointing when compared to the game. It was a very standard plot and with the invasion of the cyber-zombie Volge and the massive explosion the plot felt hurried and the story felt more like the cliffhanger end of a series rather than the beginning.

The game, however, is brilliant and the experience of playing the game definitely brought some extra value to watching the series. Like the series the game is a hodge-podge of ideas taken from other games. There are elements of Fallout, elements of Trion’s other game RIFT and a great deal of stuff copied almost exactly from Borderlands which isn’t such a bad way to go all things considered.

The storyline of the game and the frantic action gives hope for the series since the two are supposed to be somewhat integrated (quite how since the game is set in the ruins of ‘Frisco and the show is in St Louis I don’t know). Names from the game showed up in the opening episode though, so we’ll have to wait and see.

I enjoy the open-ended nature of the game, the free-roaming and the fact that you can play any ‘level’ character in just about any area of the map and still have a good and sometimes challenging time. Hooning about the landscape racing from Arkfall to Arkfall is also fun and while character/weapon optimisation is there its not so absolutely key that you can’t make roleplaying decisions and get away with them. In something like WoW you wouldn’t be able to do the same and remain and effective player.

This is helped by the fact that the game is a third-person shooter. This means your skill and knowledge as a player can compensate or outrank any optimisation that you feel you might have to do. Characters are customisable in appearance, dress, weapon loadout and weapon customisation as well as access to a high tech interface called an ‘EGO’ that gives you access to superhuman abilities such as invisibility camouflage, situational damage bonuses and so on.

The storyline in the game so far has you working for a weapons manufacturer, now running a great many superior Arkhunters in the search for game-changing technology. An Ark Core is the object of your quest north and south of the Golden Gate bridge but even after doing that there are random events and Arkfalls to keep you busy as well as cooperative and competitive instances.

I’m playing on the PS3 and while I thought I would miss having a keyboard to communicate it has actually been a boon. Most people in MMORPGs are fucking arseholes and not having to endure endless shouts of ‘N00b’ and OOC chat definitely enabled me to concentrate more on the game and playing my character. Team-ups at objectives tend to come together seamlessly and without being able to communicate people seem to be more inclined to be nice to each other.

The game does have bugs, a couple of bugged missions, frequent connection dropping and some interface annoyances, but overall it’s great.

The game gives me hope for the TV show, which is, perhaps, a little backwards.

If you’d care to hook up on the PS3 my PS3 nick is GRIMACHU and my character is James Grimm.

Update: Second episode was muuuuuch better than the first, there’s hope!

Crowdsourcing: Northwest Americana

Oh great and powerful Interwubz I beseech thee for help,

I’m working on a thing that centres on small-town America, specifically in the Pacific Northwest. My experience of America is limited to films and a handful of American cities. While I want to retain a filmic feel I want to modernise and update a bit at the same time and make things a bit more genuinely relatable.

Can you help?

• What sort of businesses and services would you find?
• How does local medical care work? Clinics? Individual doctors?
• What sort of crime and local legends are there?
• Climate?
• Street names?
• What kind of work do people do? Are there still ‘one business towns’?
• What pieces of old Americana remain? Ice cream/soda parlours?
• Local mechanics?
• Small shops or just a 7/11 or a gas station store?
• Do kids still go out ‘exploring’ and riding bikes?

Anything and everything you can come up with that you might think would be useful to me would be great.

Machinations: Final Playtest Draft!

Soon…

I will now start working on the final edit of MotSP and Satine is going full steam ahead on the art now (yay Satine!).

This is the last version you’ll see before the final book and PDF. This is also your last chance to get any feedback or suggestions in.

You can grab the file here: MotSPPlan
And so, The Great Editing begins…

A Stitch in Time – Indigo Prime

Whilst rummaging through old papers looking for contract documents (don’t ask) I stumbled across a practically prehistoric RPG of Indigo Prime I had written back in 1990-1991 or so on an Apricot and printed on faded dot matrix paper with the little punch holes in the side..

Like a lot of early scribblings it is horribly naive and derivative but its also amazingly prescient in a number of ways and a time capsule into the kinds of influences that were being shared across multiple media at the time.

I can see why I abandoned the game despite playing it a few times. In 1993 Mage the Ascension was published which goes over a lot of the same conceptual ground and would have made a good Indigo Prime game in and of itself with just a little bit of work.

From a modern gaming point of view, what was interesting was that consensual reality was there, as was warping what was and wasn’t real and how the world works through powers which – while having 20 levels – were very similar to spheres.  I’d also worked into the game a mind/body separation which I don’t believe has particularly been done – at least not as something integral to a game – until Eclipse Phase.

Maybe I should copy it up as a curiosity, if there’s any interest.

Bioshock: Infinite Possibilities

Bioshock Infinite

I’ve been watching the missus playing Bioshock: Infinite, the indirect but sort of direct sequel to Bioshock and Bioshock 2. As you may or may not know I made an RPG resource for Bioshock which can be found HERE.

Without getting too spoilerific, Infinite lives up to its name and potentially opens up the role-playing possibilities and opportunities in a whole variety of worlds, not just the ones that are presented or hinted at in the Bioshock series so far.

Bioshock, as a game, has great hooks and gets its hooks into you, but it does follow a sort of a formula. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. A formula or structure can help channel creativity and doesn’t (obviously!) indicate any paucity of imagination.

The Bioshock Formula

Extreme Ideology

Each Bioshock game taps into a form of ideology and dials it up to eleven. While the setting and expression of that ideology may be extreme and twisted it is something we do find or have had in history.

The first Bioshock presents a ‘Galt’s Gulch’, a Libertarian extreme. Bioshock Infinite presents a nightmarish extreme of American exceptionalism, theocratic tyranny and constitutional worship of the founding fathers that can still be seem in aspects of modern American politics.

Counterculture

A strong ideological culture tends to create a strong counterculture and Bioshock tries – not always especially convincingly – to present the flipside as being as bad in its own way as the dominant culture. The counterculture may exist in multiple forms. Some more extreme, some a genuine counterpoint, some wanting to take over and claim power for themselves.

Singular Genius

Each Bioshock world is centred around a cult of personality, a singular force of will that creates and/or guides the society. The counterculture also, often, has a particular voice as a counterpoint to this leader. A reaction as forceful in its own way.

Unfettered Technology

The more obvious technological aspect in Bioshock is in the form of the special powers that characters can access, giving them superhuman abilities (though at what cost). There are other technologies of course – some retaining their mystery – but consistently each Bioshock society is technologically ahead of the outside world around it by a significant degree.

How these developments came about isn’t necessarily clear but in Bioshock it is likely that many of the great leaps came at intense human cost through experimentation not unlike that carried out by the Nazis in death camps during WW2.

Isolation

The Bioshock societies are isolated – through choice – from the rest of the world in some way. In the existing Bioshocks this is a physical separation – in the air or beneath the waves – but there are plenty of other options for ways to separate one society from another. Rapture is self-sufficient it seems, while Columbia must engage in trade but despite this both maintain separation from the world at large.

Crisis Point

The Bioshock games take place at the culmination of events, where the society comes to a crux point of change and goes into a crisis – seemingly, essentially a violent one. Things shift, the society changes and is either destroyed or changed forever. The crisis point gives you your hook for any adventurers to dig in.

Example

Bioshock: City of Love
Ideology: After the great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 San Francisco was shattered and turned into an archipelago of ruined islands which were left to rot for decades until they were eventually settled by revolutionary, counterculture hippies moving into the sixties. The islands have since become a ‘free state’ under control of ‘The Guru’ and his acolytes dedicated to peace, love, drugs and freedom.

Counterculture: The dominant culture is pacifistic and insular, setting themselves aside from the ‘squares’. They believe that their way of life will naturally take over the world. The counterculture thinks that the Age of Aquarius needs a little impetus and wants to take on the world outside directly and violently as it believes is necessary. The revolution needs to begin at home by sweeping away the existing order though. The outside world is paranoid in the extreme about the islands and the strange stories coming from them and constantly tries to get their own agents to the islands.

Genius: Dr Jim is ‘The Guru’, the leader of the City of Love. A powerful, psychedelic ‘magician’ he is the visionary who opened the doors of perception and synthesized the drug derivatives, ‘tabs’, which give the denizens of Love so many of their advantages and powers. Monroe opposes him, his opposite. An intensely political individual who wants to ‘deploy’ Love’s power to end the Vietnam war and bring on the Age of Aquarius by force. Both have their problems, The Guru’s pacifist internalism leaves the world to rot and is self indulgent while Monroe seeks to impose his utopia.

Technology: ‘Tabs’ unlock metaphysical powers which can then be powered by neurotransmitters and chemicals released in the mind by sleep and drug use. Some have greater reaction to Tabs, giving them flashes of inspiration that have allowed them to create new tech that protects the islands. Weather machines, orgone collectors, new materials, imagination-shaped substances and alternative energy sources all on an artisinal scale and an economy that doesn’t work on money.

Isolation: The islands are protected by reefs and rocks, fog and the powers and technological wonders that the islanders have created. Its still in sight though and a constant ‘threat’ to mainland America.

Crisis Point: Monroe and his followers are read to take independent action to end the Vietnam War. They’ve been inventing and using more war-like tabs and technology and intend to interpose themselves between the two sides and beat them into submission. This will provoke the US into action and they have been conducting their own drug experiments on a unit of battle-hardened Marines, intending to assassinate the key leaders and open the islands up to reconquest.

What are your ideas?

Examining Games

Computer games are big business and because they’re big business they attract serious study without anyone feeling that they’re being silly for doing do. Tabletop RPGs attract less money and attention but they’re no less worthy of study in their own way and the same revelations and improvements in craft that computer games have gained in this way can – perhaps – be applied to roleplaying games.

Computer games studies such as this are a good starting point, though there’s a lot about computer games that simply doesn’t apply or that is made more complicated by the fact that between the producer and consumer there is the additional filter of the Games Master.

Matters are further complicated by the fact that RPGs run the gamut from tightly focussed games that target a single experience and mode of play to toolkits that are virtually devoid of narrative or worldbuilding content.

We have had GNS Theory, which has been the only theory to really gain any traction, despite being superseded by The Big Model. The problem with most of these approaches is that they are conspicuously ideological and, tellingly have not produced any knock-out, successful games as of yet. At least not commercially successful. Artistically successful is always arguable but the two need not be mutually exclusive. In the computer gaming world many of the most successful and impactful games are also those that have treated the audience as having intelligence and desire for good story alongside the game aspect.

I think we need a more objective, non-partisan, examination of RPG theory and practice and I’m not sure I’m the best person to do it, but somehow around work I’ll give it a try. Can anyone reference me to some more design models and approaches covered on a teaching/academic basis in computer games so that I can piggyback on their studies a little?

Munchkin: They Killed Me & Took My Stuff

Apparently Munchkin is going onto Xbox and maybe other computery game platforms too.

I have tried for a long time to be sanguine about what happened with Munchkin. Me and Steve Mortimer wrote The Munchkin’s Guide to Powergaming and from that came the d20 stuff and, eventually, the card game. Both the d20 material and the original card game contain a huge amount of material taken from or inspired by the book – but just not quite enough to trip the clause in the contract where they’d need to give us more money.

By and large my relationship with SJG is pretty good. They pay up on time and e23 does well for me – second only to RPGNOW – but at this point, with Munchkin seemingly keeping the company afloat and making them money hand-over-fist it seems… ungrateful not to have involved us again or even acknowledged us, let alone cut us in for any amount of the fortune ensuing from our humour.

Furthermore it has become clear to us recently, via another slap in the face, that our role in this gaming phenomenon is not only being ignored but actively being written out.

SJG gave us our first break in writing and essentially launched my career as a gaming professional. Perhaps it is churlish of me to feel this way but I do feel that our contribution is worth greater acknowledgement and that, perhaps, it might have been nice to do a tenth anniversary recap or to have brought us back to do a supplement.

It was even me that wanted John Kovalic to illustrate the original book, though he couldn’t do much then due to other commitments.

I’m torn on this. I feel ungrateful to be so bloody angry about this but every time we’re left out, another add on comes out or it conquers another medium its a stab in the gut and a sharp reminder of being cut out.

I don’t know what to do with how I feel about this any more. I use to just joke about it, but it’s no longer funny.

Interview at Roleplayer’s Chronicle

Me and Daniel (Camelot Cosmos) had a chat with Roleplayer’s Chronicle and you can read it HERE

4e – Dharvi

So I’m running another 4e game – weirdly – for a few people over G+.

They’re kinda-sorta n00bs, which is good because it means there are very few preconceptions and I can fuck with the rules as need be without anyone rules-lawyering me.

We have a half-elf thief with an untapped sorcerer bloodline that gives her a little wild/chaos magic and a mean streak.

We have a half-wild Eladrin ranger who isn’t quite at home in the city.

We have a huge dragonborn with an even huger warhammer and a stereotypical tendency to apply violence as a universal solution.

We also have a crippled, grossly fat dwarven warlock who is conveyed around on her giant beetle mount.

Dharvi – the world I’ve made up for this – is a chaotic world, a patchwork of chaos and weirdness that survives after an apocalyptic magical war over the last century. The walled cities and other defended settlements are islands of security enforced by a powerful Church dedicated to order – not that there aren’t other religions, it’s just that a religion of order and security has obvious appeal in a world overrun by monsters.

Previously only vaguely aware of each other our ‘heroes’ were called together by Grik, the goblin crimelord of the southern part of the city of Marat’s literal and figurative underworld. Marat is ruled strictly by the church but the poor and the unsavoury hide from their gaze in the upper levels of the mines that riddle the desert badlands in which Marat sits.

Grik had been double crossed by Silk, a smuggler and another crimelord who had promised to cut him in on a deal and had reneged. What happened? Well…

***

Silk, the lizardman smuggler who runs much of the northern section of Marat’s subterranean slums, suffered a massive setback as one of his main stashes of alchemical supplies and trading goods were destroyed after the warehouse was broken into and two of his guards were mercilessly slaughtered – one with unnatural magicks.

In completely unrelated news a swarm of acid-drooling rats burst out of a sewerage tunnel in the same area and devoured a dozen homeless and beggars before they were incinerated by an enterprising lamp-oil salesman.

Silk has placed a 500gp bounty on the people who did this to him but witnesses could only describe a _’fat, deformed little witch riding a beetle’_.

This must surely stand out.

Machinations of the Space Princess: Art Preview

They grow big out here.