Swords! Magic! Punching!
Greetings and salutations,
Million Colored Sun, the Sword & Sorcery zine that Leighton, Josh, and I recently Kickstarted, is in the layout stage. If things go according to plan, it will be ready to release in May.
I'm down to the last chapter of writing Castaways & Conspiracies and Leighton & Josh are working on the art. I gave myself until August to get the zine out, but if things keep moving along smoothly, I think it will be ready around June.
I recently posted four new T-shirt designs on my Etsy shop. Collect them all!
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Tales from the Camlann Frontier
Every year World Anvil does an Adventure April event. I haven't previously participated, but this year I thought it might be a good idea to write a Million Colored Sun adventure. What pushed me over the edge was an article on the World Anvil site about combining Adventure April with the Gygax 75 Challenge, which is a process for creating the first adventure and starting area for a campaign in five weeks. It's called the "Gygax 75 Challenge" because it's inspired by on an article Gary Gygax wrote in 1975.
So anyway, I set up a new World Anvil setting to use for the Gygax 75 Challenge. The game, set on the Camlann frontier is "Arthurian-inspired apocalyptic pulp sword & sorcery." So far the Camlann page just has the world meta (which roughly corresponds to what you're supposed to do in the first week of Gygax 75), but there's at least a map, a dungeon, and a town coming over the next 5 weeks. If you've got a World Anvil account, you can follow the world for notifications.
Recent Reading
The Gygax 75 Challenge PDF by Ray Otus, for obvious reasons.
Dominic's Ghosts by Michael Williams was kind of a let-down. I mainly picked it up based on the "urban fantasy set in Louisville" description Williams gave when he was a guest at last year's World Building Con. It wasn't terrible, but I'm not exactly rushing out to get the other books in the series. It feels like the story, about some kind of supernatural entities(?) who live in an otherworld connected to our own through old German films or something(?) and maybe kidnapped the main character's father(?), wants to be a Tim Powers novel.
Unfortunately, the only similarity with Powers is that Williams also has fairly boring, interchangeable characters (I regularly had to skim back up to determine if a scene as from Dominic's POV or that of his hipster frenemy). Dominic, by all appearances the protagonist, has no character arc (though some of the minor characters at least change in some way). As for the supernatural element, I'm still not exactly sure what that's all about. Williams fails to provide any sense of lore or rules to ground the supernatural stuff to the world. Other than granting some slight usefulness to the Weimar Film class I took in college, the book didn't do much for me.
Currently Reading: Illuminations by Alan Moore
Stuff I've Watched
Ricky Stanicky: I probably would have passed this up (or seen it much later) if someone hadn't posted a clip of John Cena doing his Rock Hard Rod act. I'd have missed out, because this movie is hilarious (mostly thanks to Cena).
Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain: It's a dumb SNL movie, but it's short, has lots of funny people, and isn't based on a one-note skit. Mainly worth watching for the Conan O'Brien parts.
Road House: The original is such a classic that I have trouble saying the new one is better, but the new one is very, very good. The whole "nice guy even when he's kicking your ass thing" is played up for humor, the fight scenes are well done, and Conor McGregor is really funny as the glib maniac bad guy. It was also nice to see Jessica Williams, who was always hilarious on The Daily Show, in such a big role.
Currently Watching: Resident Alien
That's all I've got for now. I'll send out another in a few weeks.
TYTYVM
Steve
©2024, Steve Johnson