Because it contains the trifecta of Coen brothers thematic elements...



...and addresses them in the text as well as in the subtext.

Tags: charts and graphs, cinema hut

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The Armitage Files is my upcoming improvised Trail Of Cthulhu campaign from Pelgrane Press. It’s now in layout, which means that the images have started rolling in.

Here’s the cover, awesome as always from the always-awesome Jerome Huguenin:



I’m guessing that the gloved figure striking the stalwart pose is Dr. Francis Morgan.

The book centers around the idea that the player handout is the defining currency of a Cthulhu game. Here, the players are given a series of handouts full of mixed-up clues to various mysteries. They then decide which of them to follow up on, prompting the Keeper to plot in reaction to their choices. (It does with the player handout what the Kaiin book for the Dying Earth Roleplaying Game did with the city guide format — making it a resource allowing players to choose from among a roster of competing story hooks.)

The fictional premise is that strange documents begin showing up at the Miskatonic Library, all in the handwriting of senior investigator Dr. Henry Armitage. However, he has no memory of having written them. Can they be from... the future?

Illustrator Sarah Wroot, who did so much fine work for DERPG and a classic hand-drawn symbol set for Campaign Cartographer, has been lured back to create the actual handouts. Here’s a sample:



The book will not be in full color, but the PDFs will, and they’ll be available to purchasers of the printed volume.

Tags: announcements, dying earth, gaming hut, gumshoe, trail of cthulhu

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Code Of Everand is a free browser-based MMORPG aimed at pre-teens. I worked on this project earlier in the year, developing the setting, naming streets and critters, and writing quests. It was created for the UK Department of Transport as essentially an interactive public service announcement. The game’s missions and mythology tacitly encourage players to be safety-conscious while crossing the street. If you’re in the UK and know a kid in the target age range, check it out and pass along a recommendation.

Tags: announcements, computer games, gaming hut

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Tags: the birds

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As it did last year, Dragonmeet provided a relaxed yet happy atmosphere for gamers to do what they do best – talk about games and refresh their sense of collective community. Attendees made the most of the day's two game slots. An impressive array of games were seen in the gaming hall. Simon was as happy (as an Englishman is permitted to be in his homeland) with the sales at the Pelgrane stand and I assume from the general sense of chuffery in the air that the other vendors felt the same. I got to see lots of folks at the booth and sign the occasional book.

Personally I consider it a victory that I felt considerably less jet-lagged this time around. Counter-evidence for this claim might yet surface in the photographic form. The fact that I have awoken in the middle of the night local time to type this blog entry might also undermine my overall point.

Seminars were well-attended. I am told the trade hall visibly emptied as various afternoon panels began. A solid turn-out materialized for the HeroQuest panel with Jeff Richard. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that about a third of the room was comprised of interested gamers who were not already part of the hardcore HQ/Glorantha community. Accordingly I ran through the basic ideas behind the design. Jeff, flushed with Orlanthi pride at the successful arrival of the gorgeous and monumental Sartar book, lovingly described its contents and laid out upcoming plans for the revitalized line. Now yet another of the products promised in the pages of RQ2 has finally become a reality. Only a few years late when you look at as part of a great cosmic rhythm, right?

The state of gaming panel, also featuring Paizo's Erik Mona, IPR's Brennan Taylor, and the multi-hatted Angus Abranson, filled the room. We covered that most perennial of topics, ways to bring new blood into the hobby. I took the contrarian position that there are still new people entering gaming the same viral way they always have. Much love was extended to the Frank Mentzer red D&D box as the sine qua non of intro products. As usual with this topic we concluded that the hobby was stubbornly refusing to enter the final death spiral we've been collectively predicting for ourselves throughout its approximately 40-year history.

For the final free-for-all Q&A we swapped out Angus for Gregor Hutton and tackled a fine set of mixed queries. We named the new games currently winning our attention, shared proofreading horror stories, and confessed to our cruelest moments as GMs. The question I found most thought-provoking concerned ways for stores to get the most from their Facebook fan pages. I also enjoyed Gregor's account of the crazy Traveller game that inspired 3:16. When asked which licenses we'd most like to tackle, assuming we were somehow given them for free, I managed to speak fastest and get my dibs on Twilight. I'm waiting for your call, Stephanie Meyer.

Tags: gaming hut, gumshoe, heroquest, on the road

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LONDON – Today's museum of choice was the British, for its Moctezuma exhibit. The show goes long on the broad historical narrative and stunning objects, with lots of sculptures in which the human hearts of sacrificial victims were stored. If you were on the lookout for a sober study of the everyday lives of the Mexica, this was not the painstaking work of cultural anthropology you had in mind. I would have been down for either approach and was happy to see the stunning objects. The Spanish propaganda art celebrating and reframing the Conquest was also interesting, and not something you'd see had the curators gone for the more ethnographic approach.

Less promoted but also stunning is a collection of Mexican political printmaking, mostly from the early 20th century. I wish I'd had more time to take in the details but by that point the call of lunch had grown too strong. It's frustrating to face the limitations of one's attention and stamina in a town so full of great museums. But you can only take in so much and it's better to remember what you do see than to greedily whoosh by a bunch of stuff for the sake of having done so.

Then it was on to Pret A Manger for the much-heralded Christmas sandwich. Whoever said that sublime moments of fleeting experience can never be recaptured has never eaten this sandwich. My trio of traveling companions agreed that I had not oversold its splendors.

A crazy thing about game publishing is that you can collaborate with people for ages without ever actually gaming with them. So this trip I contrived to run a session for simonjrogers, gbsteve, Brennan Taylor & his wife Christa, and uthoroc and his better half & last but not least spencerpine. It was a GUMSHOE recreation of “The Repairer of Reputations”, the first of Robert W. Chambers' Hastur stories. The conceit was that Chambers then-futuristic take on 1920 New York was really a dreadfully wrong alternate history, spawned by widespread reading of The King In Yellow. I used a define-as-you-go method of character generation whereby each player brought a new PC on board by describing the investigative ability they needed at the moment and the reason that PC happened to have it. The trick worked well both in getting the action rolling quickly and giving the group a sense of investment and ownership over their characters.

We broke in the middle for a fabulous repast involving the titular foodstuffs, plus fabulous cheeses. After these gustatory delights I barely had the heart to horribly destroy the player characters, but fortunately soon recovered my will to appall. Most of them managed to hold on until the climactic moment when Mr. Wilde and Hildred Castaigne staged their Hastur-backed coup attempt in alternate America. Then there was much insanity, exploding bodies, and a partially successful exit from the Government Lethal Chamber. Appropriately enough, the character who started proceedings with the slimmest grip on sanity was the sole survivor to wander into the smoking ruins of the new Hastur-free America.

Tags: archaeology, gaming hut, gumshoe, history, museums, on the road, trail of cthulhu

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LONDON – Started my sleep-truncated day with the Ed Ruscha restropective at the South Bank's Hayward Gallery. Ruscha specializes in monumental juxtapositions of landscape and typography. Sometimes the words are austere objects of interest only for their value as objects in imaginary space. At other times their meanings imply an obscure but poetic connection to the vistas they dominate. Ruscha started working in a Pollock-dominated American artscape and continues to this day as an icon of post-modernism. His work combines austere formalism with a touch of pop art, in which irony is preserved but tongue-in-cheek elements largely drained from the proceedings. My favorite piece was a recent diptych, Azteca /Atzeca In Decline. The first monumental image is of a mural seen by the artist in Mexico, containing lines and forms congruent with his own work. The second shows the mural in a state of physically impossible deterioration, with the mural elements having slid off the gray background into a gluey heap. The second canvas appears to be scored and warped; on close inspection all of the apparent damage is conjured through astoundingly simple rendering techniques, entirely in 2D.

With a short period to spare before dinner plans, I whizzed through the nearby Dali Universe, a private museum permanently devoted to the Spanish surrealist, mere steps from the London Eye. (Essay assignment: London Eye as Esoterrorist installation. Go!) Dali Universe is a rubbishy tourist trap and appalling travesty of a museum. It is thus a far more poignant encapsulation of its maddeningly paradoxical protagonist than any proper exhibition could ever be. There isn't an original painting in sight—it's all prints, mostly torn from the pages of limited edition art books. Kitschy authorized sculptures, based on his much older paintings and approved by Dali in his dotage, abound. Also present are various costumes from a Dali-inspired fashion show staged years after his death. Random bits of classical music, including Vivaldi's Four Seasons, are piped in for the punter's listening enjoyment. As Dali served as both savior and Judas to the surrealist movement and was a proud prostitutor of his own legacy, this louche treatment is entirely on point. There's even a Dali penny roller, a make-your-own T-shirt offer, and a (regrettably roped-off) children's museum celebrating the “power of art.” This last item is especially fabulous, given the wild sexual explicitness of many of the prints on display. I have no idea whether the connected print gallery allows you to purchase genuine fake Dalis produced under dodgy circumstances in his final years, but certainly hope that it does. Only that would truly convey the man and his contradictions.

After that I met for pre-dinner toast, then dinner, then post-dinner drinks with longtime pal James Wallis, new friend the prodigiously productive Gareth Hanrahan and Gareth's fiancee Edel. Subsequently we repaired to Chez Rogers for more vino & badinage with an expanded crew, including new arrivee Brennan Taylor of IPR fame and his lovely wife Christa, whose name I am, statistics tell me, probably spelling wrong.

During the evening, we mooted such new products as The Book Of Mild Disappointments and a magazine called James.

The former would be a follow-on to The Book Of Unremitting Horror, featuring creatures less interested in curdling your soul than in betraying your already lowered expectations. So you'd get the beast that wasn't quite as scary as the one you were hoping for, or the one who breaks into your house, eats your food and washes your dishes—but does a poor job, leaving food specks requiring you to redo all of its inadequate washing-up.

James would be to James Wallis what Oprah magazine is to Oprah Winfrey. It would consist entirely of complaints about printing errors and delays arising from the previous issue. Able to achieve full poignance only in hardcopy, this would not only single-handedly save the magazine industry but would be the best periodical of all time.

Did I mention that the later-mentioned portions of the evening featured a certain amount of wine consumption?

Tags: esoterrorists, gaming hut, museums, on the road, visual art

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LONDON – I am in London and safely enfolded in the fine abode of simonjrogers. Naturally the flight was filled by spectacular coughers. Let's hope that goes well.

Last night I sat in on Simon's Wednesday night let's-try-an-indie-game group for a session of ptevis' A Penny For My Thoughts. The game follows the common indie approach of asking a GM-less group to weave a story in response to a very specific and detailed series of rules structures. We experienced some confusion in identifying and following the structure. It might have benefited us to more strongly bring to mind the game's fictional framework of its memory-challenged group therapy session. I'm afraid we treated it in a rather power-gamey fashion, spotting and ruthlessly exploiting the system's incentives. We also ran with more than the recommended number of players. The screw-you factor ran high as a variety of ribald, crazy backstories were gradually unveiled for its amnesiac characters. A rare safe-for-work example would be my character, who turned out to be podcaster Paul Tevis, designer of an indie game called A Penny For My Thoughts.

I've slept in either impressively or disgracefully, depending on one's perspective on jet lag. Off to some truncated London explorations...

Tags: gaming hut, on the road

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Tags: the birds

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As mentioned previously, I’ll be doing the guest thing at Dragonmeet, in London, this coming Saturday. I’ll be taking part in the following panels:

11.00-12.00: HeroQuest, with Jeff Richards

2.30-3.30: State of Gaming, with Erik Mona, Brennan Taylor, and Angus Abranson

4:30-5:30: Q&A Free-For-All, fellow participants TBA

When not paneling I’ll be weaseling at the Pelgrane Press stand. Don’t be shy; pop by to chat, get books signed, or share particularly piquant mild disappointments. (This last requirement waived for visiting Americans.)

And don’t forget, spencerpine is offering a convention special on his book Play Unsafe: £1 off if you get me to sign it. £2 off if you successfully elicit a detail-oriented response from me explaining why I wrote it. Even if you already have one, that’s surely enough reason to purchase another.

Tags: announcements, dragonmeet, gaming hut, gumshoe, heroquest, on the road

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Tags: announcements, self-promotion, zombies

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Tags: cheese sandwich, kidding around, life, moths, photos

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[Contains spoilers for the present season of House, M.D.]

A common form of false suspense in serial media is the premise threat: a story possibility that, if not reversed, ends the premise of the property. For example, you know in any episode of Gilligan’s Island, or its descendant, Star Trek: Voyager, that any chance of rescue will be dashed by the end of a regular, non-finale episode. (I haven’t caught Stargate: Robert Carlyle but assume it too will eventually be forced to deal with the premise threat issue.)

One form of the premise threat is abandonment by an iconic hero of his iconic nature. This happens all the time in comics. I remember being shocked as a kid reading a friend’s back issues of the first “Spider-Man quits” arc. Even then I knew that he didn’t really quit, because years later, new Spidey comics were still coming out. Still I took the premise threat seriously, as I hadn’t seen it done before.

This year the writers of House have its iconic hero seemingly abandoning his iconic nature. In its season opener, which has divided fans of the show, they broke with formula to spend two hours with House in a psychiatric institution. Only one other series regular appeared; even the credit sequence was changed. After an extended homage to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, House was presented with his challenge for the season: to get his medical license back, he would have to become a kinder, gentler Gregory House. This seemed oddly incongruent with the reason for his being institutionalized, a psychotic break brought on by Vicodin addiction, but never mind.

For the next episode, the writers’ room created suspense with the premise threat, that House wouldn’t be practicing medicine any more. By its end he was ready to go back to work, although under slightly constrained circumstances. Since then, he pretty quickly crept back to being the same old satisfyingly obnoxious and devious House. Occasional lip service is given to his attempt to be a new person, but that’s the extent of the supposedly premise-shaking changes promised by the season opener. He’s found in his supposed lack of power new ways to torment his long-suffering friend and colleagues, and all is well again. Once again, as when a new cast of sidekicks was rotated in, the context around the iconic character has shifted, but the character has proved true to himself and able to execute the show’s basic formula week in and week out. As all premise threats must do, this one has left the essentials unchanged.

Since premise threats are, at their core, fake-outs, it’s usually bad news when series writers resort to them. This premise threat fizzled out surprisingly quickly, but that’s not even the show’s most striking departure from its original tone. The outré , strained and circuitous plot line used to eject a series regular has me looking around for the shark pool in the parking lot.

Although poorly executed, the premise threat does confirm House as an iconic hero. We don’t want to see a humbled or non-practicing House any more than we want to read issue after issue of Peter Parker going to school, working as a freelance photographer, and doing his laundry. By overcoming premise threats, the iconic hero embarks on a ritualized return to his comforting true nature. He proves that he is not changed by the world, but forces the world to change for him.

Tags: iconic heroes, narrative structure

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In the world of The Esoterrorists, a cabal of high-placed sorcerers weakens the membrane between this world and the dreaded Outer Dark by launching operations employing media saturation to subvert the populace’s collective sense of reality. The heroes, the dedicated men and women of the Ordo Veritatis, confront these plans, in plot hooks which have been... ripped from the headlines. These are their stories… [CHA-CHUNK]

Former Ordo Veritatis intelligence analyst Radomil Soucek departed amicably from the agency after developing theories challenging the orthodoxy of its metaphysics. Soucek argued, contrary to the accepted facts taught to every new analyst, that not all supernatural phenomena can be traced to the Outer Dark or its resident quasi-demonic entities. In his controversial study paper Other Forces, Other Realms: The Case For Non-Malevolent Numinous Forces, Soucek cited as an example the strange propensity of art thieves to steal the works of Edvard Munch. He attributed this to a supernatural force, but one unrelated to the entities the OV hunts:

“The paintings and prints, focus of so much human attention, longing, and confusion, have achieved an as yet undefined universal consciousness. Moreover, they are aware of the degradation of Munch’s work in popular culture—the ubiquity of his Scream image on coasters, mouse pads, fridge magnets and inflatable punching bags. Thieves take too-famous artworks, which they cannot sell, as units of value in an undeground economy. They take Munch’s works because they are impelled to. The images are ashamed, and wish to hide themselves away from the world until this travesty ends.”

Soucek has now disappeared. He was last seen in Helsinki, after the theft of a Munch painting from a special exhibition at the Ateneum Museum. As is standard procedure in all mysterious disappearances involving retired OV personnel, the player characters have been dispatched to find him.

Thanks to OV analyst richardthinks for spotting the original article. Also to ash1997law, who spotted some cannibalism in Russia, but hey, Russian cannibalism scenario hooks write themselves.

Tags: esoterrorists, gumshoe, ripped from the headlines

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Tags: casablanca, gaming hut, narrative structure

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When a US studio snaps up remake rights to a foreign film, it’s often hard to picture the elements that made the original special in the first place surviving the translation into the Hollywood style. The piece might depend on cultural specifics that won’t work with American characters. It might succeed on the basis of a delicately sustained tone that seems impossible to capture a second time. The impending Hollywood version of Let the Right One In comes to mind. For similar reasons I've always been glad that the long-bruited American version of The Killer never made it out of development.

Overheard [HK, Felix Chong and Alan Mak] is, on the other hand, the kind of movie Hollywood should be remaking. It’s a plot-driven thriller with a fresh premise that could occur in any country with a stock market. The film makes diverting hay of its basic concept but doesn’t knock it out of the park, leaving room for the hypothetical remake writer to improve on the original.

Three underpaid cops from an electronic surveillance division enter a slippery slope of danger and corruption when they decide to cash in on the insider trading scheme they’ve been assigned to listen in on. Lau Ching Wan downshifts his charisma into a lower key as a passive guy secretly seeing getting another chance with his supervisor’s estranged wife. Daniel Wu is a young officer pressured by his rich fiancee’s father to increase his earning potential. The truly memorable performance comes from Louis Koo, who deglamorizes to play a disaffected working-class schlub facing a family medical crisis.

Of structural interest is the way that the film shifts through different cop sub-genres for each of its three acts. It starts as a stylish techno-procedural, becomes a noirish guilt spiral in the middle, and then rounds its final turns in typically doom-laden HK fashion.

Ragged in spots and perhaps failing to wring maximum juice from its original core idea, it’s still worth a gander if you like the actors or are a diehard Hong Kong cinema fan. Like most HK movies you can safely assume that it will show up as an import DVD in fairly short order.



I caught this at the gala opening of the Reel Asian Film Festival, which meant that it was proceeded by a punishing twenty minutes of welcoming speeches. Yikes!

Tags: cinema hut

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London food critic Jay Rayner’s The Man Who Ate the World: In Search of the Perfect Dinner is part foodie text and part travelogue. Rayner travels to major centers of food and money, not always in that order, to sample the highest of high-end restaurants. He heads to Vegas, Moscow, Dubai, Tokyo, New York, Paris, and his home town, London.

Fans of the exquisitely turned, often caustic descriptive phrase will find much to savor here. For the first half of the book, Rayner delivers everything I want in travel writing: he assures me that places I won’t be going to are also places I would never want to go to. This does not apply to New York or London, which I’ve been to and like. Otherwise unable to successfully portray Paris as a hellish wasteland, he manfully attempts to render it unendurable with a high-end imitation of Morgan Spurlock in Super Size Me.

For a surprising number of the over-the-top restaurant experiences, he similarly describes the meals as ones I do not want to eat, which is definitely an added bonus. Only a couple of the spots he describes induced out-of-reach fantasies of jetting about the world dropping four figures for a meal.

If you want this to be a gaming resource, you could do worse than to use the astounding details of Moscow, Dubai and to a lesser extent Tokyo and Vegas as background detail for a high-rolling espionage campaign. That Russian restaurant with the sturgeon swimming underneath its glass floors surely has to become the setting for a Feng Shui shoot-out.

This book is not to be confused with the equally wonderful The Man Who Ate Everything, by Vogue food writer Jeffrey Steingarten which was recommended to me by (name drop alert) Jack Vance, back when we spoke about the Dying Earth roleplaying game. That book is an experiential tour through the science and gastronomy of various ingredients, including a smatter of restaurant talk and plenty of dedicated kitchen experimentation.

Tags: book hut, dying earth, feng shui, food, gaming hut, geography

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In a late-breaking comment it took me a while to spot, Sergio M asks:

What are the sources for your model of story analysis? Is it your personal creation? Where you inspired by any books or whatever? Which?

None of the major concepts are original to me, although I find myself wanting to change their frame of reference as I look further into these issues. It’s an evolving process.

Provenance of story terminology is tough to pin down sometimes.This is particularly an issue with procedural/adventure/serial/adventure fiction, which we are mostly emulating in RPGs. Most writing texts and workshops skew toward the standalone and literary side of things.Terms and concepts of use to working creators percolate out from writer’s rooms into DVD commentaries and out into the blogosphere. Perhaps someday an intrepid scholar will track the origins of such bedrock terms as “laying pipe” for exposition or “backstory” for a character’s past. Like roleplaying practice, it is in large degree an oral tradition which is codified haphazardly and in retrospect, and is subject to ongoing innovation and revision. The movie and TV industries have a several generation head start on us in the generation of useful story-making techniques and the jargon to go with them.

The pass/fail cycle is a well established term for adventure plotting, and not unique to me. Inconveniently, it’s used in other fields as well, and if you Google the term, you get one of my blog posts.I’m now leaning toward hope/fear as more useful for RPG-focused story analysis; that is my variation.

For scene analysis, I draw on a work written for actors, Michael Shurtleff’s Audition. Its analytical techniques were then broken out by acting teachers to be more broadly applicable than its original remit suggested. The book itself focuses on how you break a scene for a dynamic, killer audition. A mutated Shurtleff approach was all the rage in the York University (Toronto) theater department when I was taking a Fine Arts Studies degree there in the mid-80s.

The terms petitioner and granter, for the participants in a dramatic scene, are used by the legendary film editor Walter Murch, as interviewed by Michael Ondaatje in The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. He doesn’t claim them as unique to himself, but for all I know they're his variation on a familiar concept.

Tags: beat analysis, gaming hut, turning points

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