153: namecheck poptimism
Hullo.
I am now a member of the Obsidian League. In Duolingo. I admit that the motivation to get there was in hope it would offer me a place in a supervillain squad. It didn’t. Life is disappointing.
DIE1.2
Ludochat
MayTheSixthIsToday
Invoicing
Antony
Byyyyeeee!!!
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New Beta release for the DIE RPG. Rather than releasing the three whole PDFs again, instead we’ve done a single PDF which lists the rule changes and provides the new character sheets. This mainly aligns the single game with the campaign game, and includes some limited character advancement. Plus the Fool is significantly improved, and involves scrawling many more symbols on your dice, like a naughty vandal.
You can download it and the rest of the Beta here.
I suspect this little bit of a page which shows the love of tables as born of MERPS and a disrespect of everything as born of Paranoia.
Also elsewhere the first RPG rulebook to namecheck poptimism? I think so.
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As Ludocrats is back on the Radar, here’s a new interview Jim and I did over at Newsarama. Here’s an example quote…
Which says a lot of the general tone, though the bit where I go “Writing Ludocrats is like a Star Trek scene where the captain shouts “DUMBER!” and the Engineer shouts back “WE CAN’T BE ANY DUMBER! WE CAN’T TAKE IT” and the captain shouts “WE HAVE TO FIND A WAY!”” also speaks to the beast. Read the rest here.
Should be out May 20th. More nearer the time. Seeing reviews creep out is fun, in terms of the response. It does please me that the first complaint of the reviewer who hated it is “There is nudity.” That may go on the back of the trade.
To celebrate the general May Star Wars Marlarkies, Reed Pop did an online panel featuring Jody Houser, Greg Pak, Charles Soule, Myself and hosted by Sam Maggs, talking about all things Star Wars. Or rather, specifically Star Wars comics, our stuff and similar. I put on a shirt and arranged my beard. This is major news. You can watch it here.
Oh – the new run of Doctor Aphra by Alyssa Wong and Marika Crestahas just launched this week as a digital first. It’ll be in shops later in the month. I just read it, and it’s a strong stuff. Alyssa is digging back to the core of Aphra-as-Archaeologist, which is the best place to start with Aphra. When you’ve got as much history as the Star Wars universe, there’s lots of fun to be had flipping over the rocks and seeing what crawls out and goes for your throat. Crestahas does the slick modern action storytelling, balancing threat and humour in the way that Star Wars needs generally, and Aphra needs specifically. If you like Aphra, you should be all over it.
I was going through my twitter stream and I remembered I’d done something to aid freelancers. Invoicing is an essential part of the freelancer’s life, and something most creatives put off as long as possible. As such, I lobbed up my template.
The key point is the two “x x “ as one would just be polite, but two implies that you really mean it. Three xs would make them think you’re being inappropriate, so don’t do that.
I was asked if it’s the same format for American publishers. It is not.
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I’ve mentioned Antony Johnson’s excellent Writing & Breathing podcast before, and this week he had me on, to discuss all things writing. It’s very much a podcast about the actual work of a writer, what we do, how we do it. If you enjoy the process stuff I drop in here, it should be your thing. I’ve known Antony longer than I’ve been in comics, and he was the first person I ever showed a comic script to back in the day, so there’s a level of perspective and honesty you don’t often get in a chat. There’s also a bit where he reveals something which my peers say about me, and you can hear me gasp in panic trying to work out what awful thing it could be. It wasn’t an awful thing. The whole series has been great – I’ll highlight the previous two with Kelly Sue DeConnick and Cherie Priest as two especially good ones.
C and I spent about ten minutes trying to work out how many days it had been since we flipped the mattress. It required the entire cognitive abilities of two adult humans to work out it had been two days ago. To echo everyone, time has lost all meaning.
I almost expanded on that, but I’ve backed off, and thinking of other times in life this has lost all meaning. I don’t want to lean this newsletter depressive. Normally it’s because of something endless and awful on a personal level, which makes me realise that at this exact moment, the weird quietness of the personal situation is more bearable. It’s the world situation which is awful, how it hits everyone we see. For all the quietness of the personal and the attempted diligence of my professional life, I’m aware that high on the list of things to do when lockdown ends is to hold this government to task.
(Once more, you see how hard that fight is – the front page in much of the right side of the press about the advisor resigning after breaking quarantine to see his lover the day the UK death toll takes the position as highest in Europe is both scandalous and offensive.)
Well, there’s that “don’t want to lean this newsletter depressive” out the window.
Work? It continues. I finished a draft of DIE 14 and am now well into DIE 15. A first draft of it will be done either tomorrow or Friday, and I am almost certainly sure it will be grotesquely overlong and is going to need an edit to get to the issue size. When I saw that looming, I decided to just write to the natural length, and then see where I am, and make choices then. To remind folks, my first drafts can be as small as a structural ghost – dialogue, panel numbers, tiny suggestive sentences of description. Point being, I keep it as molten as I can until I’m sure what the overall shape is, and then add everything to make it an actual script. This has only got more pronounced since working in Scrivener, where you can throw around elements so freely it can become a little like telekinetic writing.
I’m aware of its weaknesses, but I can also see where I’m going to work in what it’s missing. It’s a big end of arc conclusion, and has that cascading drama you’d expect from (say) WicDiv 5, 11 or 32-33, or DIE 5. However, I want to bring the non-genre elements to the fore in the execution. A skeleton of genre being used for non-genre ends has always been one of my core approaches.
Other stuff – Ludocrats and DIE’s productive schedules are being re-looked at, as Jeff and Stephanie look forward. Once & Future is motoring – Dan will just be doing final tweaks on issue 10, and moving straight onto 11. I wrote a one page story for a charity anthology which is so dumb I expected the artist to hit me instead of laughing. I’ve also agreed to do an eight-pager for an anthology, starring some characters I’ve never written before.
Also, as the release of DIE1.2 suggests, some game design.
New music of the week: Black Dresses’ Peaceful as Hell, which is definitely not peaceful in any way.
New game of the week: Codenames Duet, which takes the wonderfully elegant party word game and makes it two player with a quiet campaign mode. Demanding and quick, but thankfully requiring less cognitive power than remembering when we flipped the mattress.
New newsletter of the week: this one, which is now over, goodbye.
Kieron Gillen
London.
6.5.2020