274: metre-long trails of dissolving slug
Hullo.
The written word is a lie
How Bizarre
Links
Byyyyeeee!!!
And we begin. Well, we begin our bit. The beginning began last week, and (to be specific) it's the beginning of the end, so I'll... well, I'll start again.
RISE OF THE POWERS OF X is RB Silva, David Curiel and Clayton Cowles' half of the event to bring the Krakoan age to a close. Like the original Powers of X, it's written to dovetail with what's happening in House of X. However, like everything I do, I also write to be self-contained. I also, like any number one, am trying all I can to be accessible. There's a lot of exposition into ammunition here, but if you want to come in – whether you dropped off the Krakoan story at some point, or have never been here at all - I'll try to give you everything you need to know, in as compulsive a form as I can.
PoX's concept was about jumping across three timezones – 10, 100 and 1000 years in the future. It was the sci-fi big idea half of Jon's story. I've tried to give this enough of the same flavour to justify reprising the name, while also carving its own space. It has proved to be a difficult one to speak about when happy. I'm lucky that RB is with me too – he's the artist for the first PoX, and returns here to give it a larger than the page sci-fi sheen, which does a lot of heavy lifting.
Here's the first page...
And the rest of the preview is here.
Here's its playlist...
...which I've used to try and kick my brain into a different place than Immortal X-men. It's very house orientated (ironically, given that this is the half of the story which isn't called “House”) and quite 1990s as I was looking to try and provoke a certain feel of science-fiction, and PoX's transdimensional focus. In the era where sampling felt alien and out of place – when you could see the joins. That seemed to catch something of the idea of dimensions rubbing up against one another.
Anyway – hope you like it. If you're the sort who follows the discourse, I'm doing next week's X-men Monday, and the deadline for questions is today. Feel free to send 'em something, and I'll try to answer, or at least dodge answering elegantly.
Pre-orders are now live for the first DIE SCENARIOS pack!
There's three scenarios in the book, one written by me (the titular Bizarre Love Triangles), one by Laurie O'Connel (Where The Vile Things Are) and one by Nathan Blades (I Go Infinite). A few details are on the page but I basically view this series picking up where the RPG left off – we allude to other ways one can play DIE in there, but this expands them hugely. I Go Infinite is a collectable-card-game driven DIE game, which uses whatever CCG game cards you like as a game element, giving players a small hand to use in play and also giving guidelines for how to “read” any CCG deck like a tarot. Where The Vile Things Are is a masterclass in showing how you can drill into a social group to generate a scenario – specifically, luckless kids at a summer camp. My own Bizarre Love Triangles uses the classic RPG scneario form of a Hex Crawl to show how one can actually write a real fully pre-generated adventure for DIE that works out the box – and is about a group of players all hung up over Ex-partners. Hence, Ex-Crawl.
(I'll go as far as saying: I think it's the best adventure I've written for DIE.)
So – all these work out the box and can get to the table easily. They're also great examples to show what one can do in DIE. They're also great source of things to rip for parts. One thing I love about adventures generally is that's exactly how they can work. I think you'll like them.
You can pre-order in physical and PDF (and all physical copies also will give you a PDF). It'll be released “on or before” May 15th. Do consider pre-ordering, as we're in the process of working out demand for this kind of thing.
- I was invited on Front Row on Radio 4 this week to talk about Warhammer in the wake of the Amazon deal. This was fun. Honestly, being on Radio 4 trying to contextualise Warhammer is probably some kind of career peak. I'm 12 minutes in.
- A Rise of The Powers of X interview over at CBR. There was a mistranscription in it when published, born of my terrible midlands hyperspeed twang. I talk about issue 1 featuring an “Emma Frost Corpse” and it was transcribed as an “Emma Frost Corps”. You can imagine the heartache of the Emma fans. It's even a good idea.
- Dead Ghost finished their DIE Actual Play REPLAY – this is the actual play actual play DIE game I mentioned before, which is still a sentence which delights me. Here's the podcast playlist and [here's the youtube version[(https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSrCv86ElbUJqVZJKXKonG2-hp5Pw0Jyq).
- Joel Morris on his frustration with recoloring of Calvin & Hobbes which prompts some thoughts about the whole process.
I deleted BlueSky on my phone. It was prompted by a few things, but mainly a moment of clarity I had over the holidays.
We were at C's parents, and I'm waiting in the front room while C chats to her mum. We're going to watch TV, so I'm killing time until she finishes. I reach for my phone, but it's in our room, at the back end of the house. That's next to where Iris is sleeping, and I've just got her down, so don't want to even risk waking her.
So instead, I look around the room (C's parents are both intense book people) and grab a random a history of Exeter. By the time C has finished, I'd read the first chapter, and so now know about trading between Africa and the south coast of England circa 200BC, and the exact point at Exeter sea-front where folks have been dragging boats up for over two thousand years.
I extrapolate that out.
I know it's not accurate, as you're not going to use all your down time optimally... but god knows, I would love to use more of my down time optimally, and should cultivate habits which are mostly likely to lead to it.
Ultimately, I'm quite liking Blue Sky. It's basically what I liked on twitter. However, twitter, even at its best, was still just twitter, and the good stuff from it (which is not insignificant) can mostly be got elsewhere, without the ongoing psychic horror of living in the panopticon.
I still have it on the desktop, but I've managed to resist going over there to check it while writing these few paragraphs.
Our Fridge has also died, a fact which took us way too long to actually realise. We're lucky that we're in the middle of a cold snap, we have turned to ancient Student Lore and tuned the whole world into a place to keep our milk.
I wrote that paragraph yesterday. Last night, I left the milk on its side. This morning, I woke to enough milk leakage to create a several metre long milk icicle on the decking out back. This seems to be a fairly studenty disaster too, akin to the time where Kid with Knife and I had the bright idea to protect our damp house from the incursions of Slugs. We would create a protective circle of salt around the whole house. We went to bed proud, only to come down in the morning to discover that slugs hit the salt, keep going while dissolving, leaving metre-long trails of dissolving slug across our kitchen floor.
Work wise? I'm concentrating on powering through X-men stuff. I just finished a draft of X-Men Forever 3, and will be onto 4 tomorrow. I've also moved from the “idle production” to “active working out how to hype this fucker” stage of TPF (I even did a little initial gnomic Q&A over on Blue Skies). I've been bouncing mails, just worked out where to announce it, how to get the artist there and other things. I'll be writing a bunch more mail when I finish this too.
Despite that, the biggest thing was a little digital spring clearing. Inspired by C using the lifehack of searching for “unsubscribe” in your inbox and then deleting all to regain space, I decided it was finally time to do something about my Starred messages in Gmail. Starring things is how I order my life. As well as just acting as a list of “mails to respond to” I do things like mail myself ideas and pdfs to proof and then star, so I can check them off. This actually mostly works – the top of the list gets cleared fairly often. However, beneath a certain point, I just... lose it. So my starred folder had about 1500 messages. Even in the front page (showing 50) the bottom mails are from 2012 or so. I had a last response to a handful of them, and then just unstarred the whole folder.
Apologies to anyone in 2008 I didn't get back to.
So, for the first time in a decade, when I click on the starred mail lists, it was empty. I felt my muscles relax. Peace.
That lasted seconds. It presently has six, so I better stop and do something about that.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
London
10.1.2024