266: Kro wouldn't do these horrible things
Hullo.
Lucas
Leaving the house
Comics
Campaign
Byyyyeeee!!!
Immortal X-men is out this week – yesterday, to be precise. The newsletter is late as yesterday got away from me. If you're buying single issues and are online, hopefully you've read it before being spoiled, as this is one where people will try and spoil it for you, perhaps by taking photos of it in their comic shop two days before release or something.
It's also the last issue with Lucas on interiors as he head off to The Thing That Will Be Talked About In More Detail At NYCC. It's been amazing to have him on this book – while all the guest artists have brought powerful things to the page, he's been the person who's defined the look and feel of the whole run. When thinking about guest artists, it's been through the filter of "How will this look next to Lucas in a trade?" A book of people sitting around a table and being mean to each other wouldn't have worked a fraction as well without Lucas' bringing the hyper-glam to the table. They gave each other looks while serving looks, and I can't see what he does on the new thing.
Anyway – here's the preview, where Selene and Shaw fence with one another, and I let Shaw let his inner Matt Berry out a little.
I'm going to be at the London MCM Expo on Sunday 29th of this month (namely, October, for the terminally confused)
I'm signing at the Rowan Rook & Decard Booth (#S1618) from 2 to 4, and then have a spotlight panel at 4 on the Creator Stage.
I don't do many London cons any more, so I'm looking forward to seeing folk. Come say Hi.
I read Ivan Brandon and V Gagnon's THE ROMAN STARS on the flight up to Edinburgh, and loved it enough to give Ivan a quote for the Kickstarter: "Psychedelic sci-fi dripping with neon, it makes one of the core stories of western history strange and new. Hell, there's sequences that Gagnon attacks so hard that my only reference is Guernica. You've never seen Caesar like this before."
I don't reference Guernica lightly. I only really became aware of Gagnon's work when I did a piece with them for the Shout Out anthology, and they've got their own approach which is given a huge, imaginative, widescreen canvas here. The comparison here is ODY-C, but this uses the Sci-fi approach in a different way – to heighten the elements of Caesar's story, and see it from a different angle. Here's some unlettered pages...
It's just started kickstarting, and you can back it here. The whole first volume is done and ready to go to the printer, and is planning to be delivered in December.
I asked for Emily Carroll's A GUEST IN THE HOUSE for a birthday present, as a rare treat like this is best appreciated as a gift. There's no-one in the western medium I'm more excited to see approach the page, and there's so much magic here. The book's a haunted house you have to explore, and there's choices here that I'll be picking over. I had a copy of her previous THROUGH THE WOODS by my desk for at least a year, and it wouldn't surprise me if this also took up residence.
My reading before bed was my advance of James Tynion IV and Joshua Hixson's THE DEVIANT, which was probably a bad idea. Really grounded, with a great eye for mood, messy queer perspectives and seasonal serial killers. I've really enjoyed Hixson's work since I first saw it in SEA OF RED, and this is an interesting diversion for Tynion. It's in his horror safe, unsafe place, but is stripped entirely of the supernatural and wears a lot of its heart on its sleeve, perhaps literally. Its FOC cut off is just after NYCC, so you should talk to your retailer to pre-order. It's now making me imagine an Eternals Tie-in. No, not that Deviant. Kro wouldn't do these horrible things.
When talking about DIE RPG we make a lot of jokes about how much we cut from it, so I thought it may be fun to share some bits and pieces here.
A lot is just that it took 100,000 words to find the right 1000 words, which I likely won't be sharing. Other stuff is just cut for style and being a little exraneous– Grant talks about the voice of the manuscript being very much like Kieron, taking you to one side in the pub and talking to you. I suspect the bit I'm going to share is one of the bits Grant was thinking about explicitly. I even talk about the pub in it.
This is the pep talk at the start of the DIE Campaign section of the manual, designed to encourage people who are feeling a bit nervous. I think most of this advice is good for anyone sitting down and running any kind of RPG campaign. Don't worry. You've got this.
THE TRICKINESS OF RUNNING A DIE CAMPAIGN
Before we get into the how, I’m going to take you to one side, buy you a drink, and explain what you’ve got yourself into. This involves explaining what I’ve got myself into. We’re in this together, you and me.
DIE RITUALS was designed to try and create a robust narrative structure that will lead to a conclusion and pay off, no matter what the players do. We have a start (”Make a bunch of damaged people and drag them into a Role-playing game”) and an end (”The damaged people get together and decide whether to go home or not”). If you have a start and an end, you’re sorted. An end means that you know where you’re heading, and even the most ramshackle series of events along the way will end in a climax.
Let’s use Lord of the Rings again. The start is Frodo gets the ring. The end is Frodo takes the ring to mount doom, and throws it in (or not). In RPG terms, it doesn’t matter which route he took - just that he took a route to Mount Doom.
The problem with a DIE campaign is that instead of the tight ending which is implicit in DIE Rituals, the DIE campaign has an open ending. Yes, it is likely going to end up in the “Go home or not?” decision, but there are many more questions to answer and I can’t give specific advice to any of them, as they depend on the group you’re playing with, the length you want a campaign to go and many other variables.
The problem with a DIE campaign is that you have to work out what your Mount Doom is going to be, and why it’s going to take so long to get there, and how to keep that interesting along the way.
Pro-tip: don’t include Tom Bombadil.
I will be giving you the best advice I can, but in a real way, the DIE campaign has a lot of the limitations removed which I included in the one off to ensure it almost always worked. I strongly suspect whatever we do won’t work in as pure a way as Rituals. It’s possible to get closer to perfect in a limited canvas. The second you expand the canvas, it’s going to be messier.
Good. The messiness and sprawl of an RPG campaign is a huge part of why people like them.
You get to make up a group of people and a world together, and live with them for a while.
And then you work out how on earth you’re going to say goodbye.
It won’t be as precise. Forgive yourself. All the players (I.e. including you) will never forget it.
I turned 48 this week. Which was fine, and didn't mess with my head at all, until literally 30 seconds ago when Rantz Hoosley messaged me to say it's the 30th anniversary of the Afghan Whigs' Gentlemen.
I spent it up with the family up in Scotland, visiting Katie West to celebrate her birthday. She had a party. It was themed around Hackers, the 1990s cult movie, which somehow C and I have never seen until a few days before, when we watched it, absolutely charmed. It was very much like me in my youth, where everyone played Wipeout on screens the size of walls to impress people.
This never worked, as I am very bad at Wipeout.
Also: banging soundtrack, which I played a huge chunk of, as Katie got Jamie and me to DJ a bit. It was like old times.
For my Birthday, we went to the zoo, where C revealed the cake she'd bought me, leaning both into the dad-hood Toblerone fetishism and our dalliance with Is It Cake?
There's a video of it being cut on my instagram. It was made by 3d Cakes of Edinburgh.
Workwise I handed in some example script to the new project, but have to turn suddenly to feed pages to an artist who is working faster than his deadlines. Which is obviously great, but also needs a bunch of stuff shunting around. I'm going to hand over most of the issue tomorrow – that's not ideal, but I've written what is basically a whole thread in the story, with the missing scenes being entirely their own thing. The problem is that he won't see what the scenes are being juxtaposed with, but I'm going to write short synopsis of the missing pages until the rest can come over early next week.
There's something else I wanted to talk about, but my mind is blanking. It probably wasn't important, or alternatively, was incredibly important. I guess we'll know about 5 minutes after I press send.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
London
5.10.2023