Author Archives: Josh

Dungeons & Dragons…. Fifth?

So it was recently announced in a number of places that Wizards of the Coast will be working on a new edition of the Dungeons & Dragons game.

I don’t have a lot of investment in D&D at this point. I played it a lot when I was younger, and I had a long-running game during the Third Edition of the game. I bought the Fourth Edition core books and kind of read through parts of them. While it was an interesting approach in design, I never played that edition and so don’t really have an opinion of it (since it was out during my drought of tabletop gaming).

I am curious to see what is going to come out of the new edition and the crowdsourced playtesting and feedback that was mentioned in the press release. Will I pick up or play the new edition when it comes out? I don’t know… I’ll have to see what it looks like when it comes out.

Canonicity

Canon (n) – a list of writings, esp sacred writings, officially recognized as genuine.

The issue of canon is one that can come up when fans get together (whether in person or online) and talk about their shared passion. It takes an interesting twist when applied to role-playing games. The main reason for this is because a role-playing game is really just a framework on which the group hangs their own stories and adventures — a kind of fan-fiction, if you will. There is nothing wrong with this, because that it the point of a role-playing game.

When you interact with other fans of the game, and players from other groups, having a “canon” for the game can be critical because it forms the starting point for discussion about the game. That canon, generally speaking, is the material released by the publisher — rule books, setting books, adventures, etc. But things can get thorny when you get a game that has multiple editions, sometimes with different publishers — like Earthdawn, or Dungeons & Dragons (which has had some radical changes over the years).

In preparing for my new game, I need to decide on how much of the published material is going to apply. I have an advantage in my situation — I am the most familiar with the setting. My players’ knowledge of the setting is largely drawn from their prior experience with the game, they aren’t the sort who read every book and obsessively pore over the details. It will be a lot easier for me to stray from the official setting canon because they don’t have any expectations or knowledge that I will need to take into account.

The bulk of the information about Landis is in the Cara Fahd sourcebook. There is some information on its history (mostly in relation to Cara Fahd and the conflicts between those nations before the Scourge) and a little bit of current geographic information (including references to several kaers and citadels). Outside of geography, Landis is largely a blank slate — which suits my purposes well enough.

One final thought on canon as it pertains to an individual campaign. How do you incorporate developments from later releases into an existing game? It is hard to know how easy it will be to handle this sort of thing. Here is an example from my own past experience to illustrate.

In one of the earliest Earthdawn games I ran (back in the earliest days of the game), the player characters were based out of a town I created called Riverfork. I plopped Riverfork down at the intersection of the Serpent and Caucavic rivers, and developed it as a major trading hub for the area. At the time I was running the game, this area was undeveloped in official supplements.

Then the Serpent River sourcebook was released, and a conflict appeared. According to the new sourcebook, the Cliff City of House Syrtis was a stone’s throw downriver from where I had placed Riverfork, set in the walls of the Lalai Gorge — a rather significant geographic feature that I had never mentioned in my game (since I wasn’t aware of its existence). I suddenly found the center of a major t’skrang trading house less than a day’s travel from my significant trading port — without having established any kind of significant t’skrang present there. This had the potential to cause a lot of problems.

So I ignored it. I brought some of the information from Serpent River over into that game, but it was more important that I maintain my game’s internal consistency than suddenly overthrow what I had previously established.

This taught me an important lesson when it comes to canon in a role-playing game. Each campaign develops its own canon. Once the dice come out, concerns about “official” become secondary. Recognize that there will inevitably be differences between the published material and your own game, and try not to stress about it.

That said, since my game is going to involve Landis to a fairly heavy degree, I am very curious what the upcoming Lost Dynasty supplement from RedBrick has to say about the area.

Brainstorming and preliminary planning

So I take out the map. At this point, I’m largely just brainstorming — letting my mind wander and see what bubbles up. In this particular case, I’m also mentally reviewing what I’ve done in the past, and trying to find a fresh location or approach. In my opinion, one of the more important things a gamemaster needs to do as he prepares for a new game is find something interesting to him. If he doesn’t, the game will suffer.

I’ve done a lot of stuff in the heart of Barsaive — my first long-term game was very heavily centered on Throal with the characters becoming agents for the crown and becoming involved with some of the major events from the old Prelude to War epic. My second long-term game started on the eastern edge of the province, and I recall that a bunch of the action happened along the Coil River between Urupa and Throal.

With central and eastern Barsaive covered, I look to the west. I’ve dabbled in this region a little bit — an adventure here and there — but nothing really focused or based in the region. I look over the map, thinking about the different areas and what they inspire. Iopos? There are certainly some interesting options there, but mostly as a source of antagonists. I’m not sure how I would approach characters from that area — though the idea of a game where the characters are agents of the Denairastas clan is intriguing, it’s a little bit removed from “traditional” Earthdawn I add that one to my mental list of “dream games” and move on.

Moving south, the next stop is Jerris. The City of Ash has a couple of really interesting features — the Wastes to the west and the Poison Forest to the east. The Wastes offer a lot of opportunity for classic kaer-delving and treasure hunting. The Poison Forest is a little harder to handle — it always struck me as an interesting area but only in limited doses. Great for mood, but a little bit tougher in the long-term… unless you’re running a game focused on finding the source of the Forest’s corruption. Actually a bit of a thematic link to the Wastes, and the Badlands, and other corrupted lands.

Next stop, the Twilight Peaks, Cara Fahd, Landis, and Ustrecht. This interests me quite a bit. My last game had some involvement with the ork migration and the founding of Cara Fahd. My players would probably be interested in following up on that. Also, Cara Fahd and the Twilight Peaks have sourcebooks dedicated to them — this can save me some valuable prep time. It also gives me a couple of areas that don’t have a whole lot of development yet — Landis and Ustrecht. I don’t want a heavily focused Cara Fahd game, because while it would give any ork characters a lot to do, it runs the risk of marginalizing other races.

Landis looks good. Very little in the way of official development has been done there so it gives me a bit of room to develop my own stuff. (I’ll get to concerns about ‘canonicity’ in a later post.) What do I know about Landis? It was a pre-Scourge kingdom, mainly human, that has bits and pieces of game lore associated with it (like the War Helm of Landis). Cara Fahd has been reborn… perhaps I could develop a story arc around the idea of doing the same with Landis?

One other thing comes to mind. I’ve been reading A Song of Ice and Fire (aka A Game of Thrones), and I think having part of the “rebirth” storyline be a bit of political conflict between different factions, each wanting their own candidate to be the first new king of Landis. This could involve attempts at influence from different other nations — Throal, Thera, Iopos, Cara Fahd. The different factions would also allow for different patrons and antagonists, driving adventures. The largely wild and untamed land could provide its own obstacles, and characters could go kaer-diving and treasure hunting to recover different lost treasures to help influence the struggle over the “crown” of Landis.

This is the most promising idea, and one I am really interested in exploring further. But before I can start fleshing out more detail, I need to do a little bit more research. I need to go over the Cara Fahd and Crystal Raider sourcebooks to see what they have to say about Landis (current or past). I also need to take some time to review other books that might have some reference to the area. At this point I’m just looking to absorb and brush up on my knowledge of the region. My primary goal is to give my mind nuggets to chew on — knowing that my subconscious will work on it and start tossing things out for consideration.

Planning a new campaign

One of the things I’m looking at this upcoming year is getting a new tabletop game started. It has been a couple of years (give or take) since my last game, and it was a short D&D 3.5 group that didn’t really get through more than a couple of sessions. A big part of the obstacles was family — I have two young children as do another couple that were part of our regular gaming group. Dealing with that aspect of things really hampered the flow — not to mention trying to work out schedules and so forth.

But time has passed, the kids are a little older (and more able to entertain themselves) so we’re looking to — as the saying goes — “get the band back together”. I think we have all been missing the (semi-) regular get togethers. World of Warcraft is fun, but it isn’t the same thing (despite what some detractors of 4th Edition D&D might say).

With a new game starting to brew, one of the first — and most important — questions is what game to play? This is best sorted out through negotiation and getting a feel for the kind of play experience everybody wants. You also need to figure out who is going to run the game, because they have a lot of prep work to do…

…or your wife can tell you that you’re running the game, and that game is going to be Earthdawn.

I think I prefer this method.

I have a decent library of games, and there are a handful of them I would love to run at some point before the heat death of the universe. However, Earthdawn is (and has been) my go-to game of choice for almost 20 years. It is a system I know very well, and I have run two very successful long-term campaigns. While I will probably need to brush up on the rules a little bit, I can focus more on setting up the story.

Here is where the problems start to appear.

I cheat. I try to recycle/reuse as much as I can.

All but one of the players in this game were in my last long-term Earthdawn game, and one of the players has been in both of my long-term games. With this being the first time back at the table in some time, I don’t want to serve leftovers.

But I also don’t want to overburden myself. I’m an adult with a full-time job, a young family, and other commitments. The days of having a bunch of free time to work on game prep are behind me. So… what to do? I need something to kick-start my brain.

I start by taking out my map.

New beginnings

This blog and website have been silent for some time, mainly a lack of motivation and the daunting task of figuring out how to work with the changes made by Blogger back in early 2010. I haven’t been writing, editing, or gaming (outside of World of Warcraft). It has been something of a creative drought — largely of my own doing.

But a new year is on us, and I decided rather than try and rebuild my existing website, I would start over from scratch with a new host and migrate the important stuff over from the old version of the site. I’ve got a novel that I’ve been picking at in my brain for years, I’m getting back into tabletop gaming and writing/editing material for Earthdawn.

This version of The Lore Merchant (by my count this is v4) will be focused on my efforts to work on creative pursuits, and my encounters with pop culture along the way. Like life itself, it is a work in progress. I hope you’ll come along.

Upcoming changes

This blog has been quiet of late. I’m not sure exactly why, except perhaps that my life has changed quite a bit the last three years. Time is more at a premium than it used to be, and the arrival of our second child a couple of weeks ago has made that even more pronounced.

I’m not writing or working on RPG stuff the way that I used to. I’m not playing in or running a game. For the most part life is a cycle of get up in the morning, go to work, come home, spend time with the family and then wind down and go to bed. Repeat until the weekend, when chores and such become the focus.

It’s a good life, don’t get me wrong, but it hasn’t really lent itself to progress in some of the more creative parts of my life.

Anyhow, there are some changes coming. This blog is done through Blogger, published to my domain via FTP. In March, Google (who owns and operates Blogger) is going to be shutting down FTP publishing support for their blogs.

That means I need to figure out what I am going to do with this. This site has existed in one form or another for over 10 years. This is “version 3” of The Lore Merchant, and has been up and running now since January 2004, if the archives are any indication.

I think it may be time to seriously look at developing Lore Merchant v4. I’m not sure at this stage what form it will take, or what the new focus will be. It just seems strange to me that I’m paying for a domain name and hosting space but not really doing much of anything with it anymore.

Anyhow, that is all for now. Hell, I don’t even know how many people actually read and visit this blog. The Earthdawn resources I host here, as well as the old Xena commentaries are the most popular sections. The blog doesn’t have much of a focus anymore, or get any kind of feedback or commentary.

We shall see what the future brings.

Brain worm

So… I haven’t written much on here lately. Main reason for that is there hasn’t been much that has driven me to write, pontificate, vent my spleen onto a pile of electronic ones and zeroes.

Until today.

I have a brain worm in my head, and I am hoping that by typing out this screed, I will do something to resolve the pressure it is exhibiting on my brain.

It was a strange little confrontation that happened at the end of the work day Friday. There is nothing I can do about it until Monday.

Except obsess over it and wonder… “What the hell…?”

I work in customer service, receiving inbound calls for a phone company. Now when I say customer service, the actual title is “Customer Sales and Service”. Note the order of the words there, the priority given.

Sales are important in this job. It is one of the primary metrics we are judged on. While the majority of our daily calls are to help sort out general questions, billing problems, and other varieties of customer service, we need to try and sell our services to people. Upgrades to their phone service. High-speed internet. Television. We have objectives that we need to meet each month, and a lot of effort is placed in our training and such on how to sell stuff to people.

I’m pretty good at my job. I’m not at the top of the office sales charts, but I am a very solid, regular performer that usually meets objectives (or exceeds them by a small margin).

I excel in three areas. One, I kick ass at customer service. Two, years of goofing around on computers have made me very adept at navigating and using the new systems that were put in place last February — which means I am (relatively speaking) fast. Third, I love puzzles. I love figuring things out, finding a solution, solving a problem. Give me a customer with a moderately complex question about their billing history (preferably one that isn’t truly angry), and I am — as the saying goes — as happy as a pig in shit. My best days are ones where I get presented with a problem, and I solve it — or at least figure out what needs to be done to solve it.

My performance reviews are regularly positive. Not A-plus top-of-the-class brilliant, but what I lack in uber-level sales performance I more than make up for in the other areas my job covers.

However, because of the emphasis on sales, there are people who obsess over them. This is especially true of the people who have a hard time meeting objectives, and don’t have the strengths in other areas to make up for it. The policies and guidelines surrounding sales, and who gets sales credit, etc etc… they undergo frequent revision to try and cut down on disputes.

This is the story of a dispute.

My last (or second-to-last) call on Friday afternoon was a callback; a customer had been speaking with another rep and had got cut off. I pulled up the customer’s account and saw the notes the prior rep left, and that they had started an order to change from a DSL-only service to a phone-and-DSL setup. I asked a couple questions to confirm what exactly was being set up, and finished the order.

It was, in my mind, customer service at work. The order was worth a few points, but I was more concerned with making sure the order got in that day (since we were close to closing) — otherwise the order would not go in until Monday, delaying the activation of the new services. All sewed up, as far as I was concerned.

Then… well… things got weird.

As I was leaving at 6pm, the rep who had originally spoken with the customer came up to me and got in my face, clearly upset. He felt that I had ‘poached’ his order, stealing it out from under him as he was writing it.

(One little detail to keep in mind here, the way our system works, anything that I add to the order gets my ID and sales code applied to it. Since there were pieces of the order that I added in order to finish things up and out the door, I would get credit for those, even though I hadn’t really negotiated the details of the order, I was more or less just filling in the blanks.)

I was a little baffled. I really didn’t know what to say. When somebody comes up and starts a confrontation like that, especially one you are in no way mentally prepared for, it knocks you a little off balance. All I could do was apologize, state that I did not know he was working on the order at the same time (no real way to do that in the system), and let him know that I would make sure he got the credit for it (which I can do by having a word with my team lead on Monday).

The two things that really stood out for me in the whole thing were two things he said. In response to my saying I would make sure he got the sales credit: “You’re damn right you will.” And the one that really knocked me for a loop (and the main reason I am still obsessing over the encounter), “It’s in your best interest to just walk away right now.”

I mean, really? The way he delivered it, it seemed that he was moments away from winding up and socking me one. And when I apologized again as he was walking back to his desk, he turned and repeated, “Just walk away.”

All this over a few points of sales credit? You’re going to threaten a co-worker over this? (Intentional or not, I was certainly threatened by his behavior.) I know our job can be high-stress at times, but this is the most extreme example of this I have ever run across. I’ve had sales opportunities that got snatched up by other reps who spoke to the customer before I did, and it can suck. I have never felt so upset about it that I felt violent.

I’m just baffled and off-balance. Monday I am going to need to deal with this. I really don’t give a damn about the sales credit, but his reaction and behavior were not cool. It is not my intention to get anybody in trouble, but I can’t let it slide either.

Hopefully getting this all down on e-paper will let me enjoy the weekend and stop obsessing so much.

Yeah, right.

Tuesday can’t come soon enough

Hello all. I’m going to (once again) try and make an effort to update this blog more than once every couple of months. The only way to do that is to branch out what I talk about.

We have election day this upcoming Tuesday here in the US. Here in Maine, the big issue is “Question 1” — a people’s veto of the gay marriage law that was signed into law by our governor earlier this year.

I can’t wait for this Tuesday to come and get the omnipresent advertising about it out of my face. I visit RPGnet regularly, and the last couple weeks the Google banner ads that pop up have been ads for “Stand for Marriage Maine” — the group that is pushing Question 1.

For crying out loud, I go to places like RPGnet to get away from nonsense like that. The ads have popped up in Google ad banners on other sites as well, but honestly… do you think the type of person that visits sites like RPGnet is favorably inclined towards the veiled bigotry implied by Question 1?

I don’t think anybody will challenge the premise that the referendum is religiously motivated. The problem I see is that you are dealing with a matter of civil law, and the First Amendment of the US Constitution states that no law can be made “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. Laws prohibiting gay marriage, being religiously motivated, and seem to fall pretty clearly under that category.

Let us posit, for a moment, a hypothetical religious faith that condones, not condemns, homosexual unions as part of their creed. A law against gay marriage would violate the free exercise of their religion. Regardless of your personal faith-based opinions of homosexuality in general, the law of the land seems pretty clear to me.

I think that if two people want to pledge to each other, and they are both of legal age and sound mind, they should be able to do so and receive the benefits that such a commitment entails. The “slippery slope” argument that this will lead to polygamous marriages, marriages to animals, children, etc, is bullshit. There are already laws in place prohibiting such things. I don’t see how including homosexual couples in the existing legal definition of marriage does anything but encourage people who want to make that commitment to do so.

I can’t take credit for it, but there was a great line I came across the other day. “If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t get one.”

Raid jour[ CONTENT OVERRIDE: KILROY2.0 IS HERE!!! ]nal

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here. I thought I would try getting back into the swing of things by talking about how our Ulduar raids have been doing over the past few weeks.

It’s been pretty solid. We have Flame Leviathan, Razorscale, XT-002 Deconstructor, Kologarn, and Auriaya down regularly. We have beaten Iron Council a couple of times, and downed the first of
>>> [ WARNING ::: DATABASE ERROR ::: CONTENT OVERRIDE ::: SOURCE: EXTERNAL ] <<< > source terminal location: UNKNOWN
> source terminal identity: UNAVAILABLE
> source login information: ENCRYPTED
> message begins

the post you are now reading is designed to dull your senses to THE TRUTH. do not live the life of the worker bee, the cog, the well-oiled piston in the MACHINE OF DECEIT!

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>>> [ CONTENT OVERRIDE CEASES ::: DATABASE STATUS: RECOVERING ] <<<
the Keepers, Hodir, a couple of weeks ago.

Of course, it hasn’t all been tea and crumpets. Our attempt this week started off smoothly, but hit a wall on our second night. We just couldn’t get Iron Council down, and after giving up and moving on to Freya (the next Keeper we’re working on) we got hammered hard on the first trash pull leading up to her.

It was frustrating. Hopefully this upcoming week will be more successful.