Fathoming “Nobilis”
Somewhere, sometime, I fell to the Dark Side, and became interested in narrative storytelling roleplaying games. I still emerge into the light from time to time, for a good crunchy sesh filled with dice rolls, range estimates, searching for secret doors, and miniatures; but, equally, I’ve become fascinated with games with a much less traditional take on what an RPG is.
I think it’s the variability of storytelling games which draws me in. The more trad RPGs all have very much a single, monolithic take on how we “do” roleplaying games: you have a character, which represents “you” in the make-believe world, and that character has attributes like Strength and Intelligence and skills like Search or Hide or whatever, plus tons of equipment to allow him to do special stuff. Then you play the game by attempting to do stuff – “tasks”, loosely speaking – by rolling dice. Up until about 10 years ago (or a little more… how time flies), 99% of roleplaying games did just that.
I discovered Hero Wars in 1999, quite by accident – I’d been expecting it to be a kind of “super RuneQuest”, and had ordered it on that basis. It wasn’t, of course: it was one of the early games which have since been variously called “indie”, “narrative”, or “story telling” games. Games where the structuralism of traditional RPGs doesn’t apply – maybe no tasks, or no attributes, or no dice – and where the “reality” of the game experience is divided up and quantified differently.
Just for shorthand, I’ll call these games “modern”, rather than try and adhere to any other label – “modern”, as opposed to “traditional”. I think I get a similar buzz from reading and playing modern RPGs as I do from reading (or writing) speculative fiction – experiencing a different and unexpected way of viewing the world, discovering a completely alternative take on the assumptions and hidden truths which lie beneath the surface of (game) reality. Hero Wars, then HeroQuest, allowed for the resolution of “contests” – absolutely any contest, from a singing contest to a mass battle – with its resolution system, and allowed anything at all to be a character ability, and assumed there were tiers of ability – called “masteries” – in the world. FATE, my current go-to system, focussed on descriptive phrases to define a character – not numeric, but literary – and built a system around that which allowed for a vast array of scales to interact, where a hero really could single-handedly bring a kingdom to its knees, or a lucky shot by a farmboy flyer destroy a space station. Lots of other games have led me down similarly fascinating paths – so, like many modern gamers, I’m hooked.
Now – Nobilis. I’ve just discovered this game, after some creeping gradual interest and a definitive chat with Ken Hite at Dragonmeet a couple of weeks back. I bought the PDF of the 3rd edition rules last week, and will be opening the hardback on Christmas morning. But, for now, I’m puzzling my way through this fascinating, and – I must admit – damned hard to understand game!
First up, you play godlike characters, with miraculous powers, who can do pretty much everything. It’s a modern-day, magical reality setting, a la Sandman, or The Dark Is Rising, or Jacob’s Ladder. But it’s also the most (and I use this word with great caution) feminine RPG I’ve ever come across. OK, feminine’s the wrong word: I’m just being provocative. 
But, in the face of pretty much all RPGs being about rampaging around attacking things, hard statistics, and plenty of artwork showing unfeasibly pneumatic females, Nobilis comes across as the most New Agey, “soft-brain”, and frankly self-consciously literary and even psychological game I’ve ever seen. And I still don’t know if I can play it.
OK, I’ll probably work it out. For now, I’m in borg-mode, assimilating everything I read, trying to identify which bits are rules and which bits background and setting. It’s that kind of game. Happily, there’s a character sheet, which I expect will shortly be my big crutch for working out how to actually run a game. But a lot of what I’m seeing is completely unfamiliar: no dice, a resource management resolution system, earth-shaking powers in the PCs’ hands, and, it seems, the power to alter reality at will. Kind of like Exalted, if Exalted was played after smoking lots of weed, taking all the rules out, then dialling everything up to eleven.
So – can anyone give me pointers? How do you play Nobilis? How much power do your PCs have in your games, and how do you structure scenarios and plots when the characters can do almost anything? I think I’ve found me another modern RPG to bend my brain, and am looking forwards to getting started! 
Mindjamming at Dragonmeet 2011
Last Saturday, the 26th November, was the day of Dragonmeet, the annual roleplaying games convention at Kensington Town Hall, London. It was also Day Three of my “Dragonmeet Roadtrip”, my last UK trip of 2011, cunningly designed to cram in piles of meetings, chats, discussions, and awesome retail opportunities (both buying and selling!) with a minimum of… what’s the word?… oh, yes – sleep. 
"Mindjammer" at Dragonmeet
I love Dragonmeet. Although it’s only a single day convention, and I never get the chance to run or play in games (there simply isn’t the time), it’s become something of an institution. It’s always the last weekend in November, just when things are starting to get seriously Christmassy, and for me it marks the dividing line between the frenetic activity of the rest of the year, and the slow, graceful decline into the Christmas break. Once Dragonmeet is past, Tinsel Time is not far away.
This year, for me, Dragonmeet was a little special. Mindjammer was there.
That’s right. My first novel, which I’ve been working on for the past 18 months, and which was launched in ebook format on the 26th October, appeared for the very first time in actual, dead-tree, trade paperback version at Dragonmeet this last weekend. And it was a thing of beauty! Dom at Cubicle 7 had expedited the printing during November so we could make the convention, and on Saturday morning I set up a wee corner of the Cubicle 7 stand dedicated to our new Cubicle 7 Fiction imprint, of which Mindjammer was the first title, hopefully of many more to come. (If you want to buy a physical paperback of Mindjammer, you can do so here!)
Happily, Mindjammer wasn’t the only fiction on display. This year we also had the privilege of displaying several of the novels of m’colleague Jonathan Green, author of (amongst *many* other things) the Pax Britannica series, which Cubicle 7 is hoping to produce as a roleplaying game book in the next year or two. Genre fiction and roleplaying games are such natural comrades – ideas bounce off each other and cross-fertilise between fiction and gaming, and having a fiction line running alongside an RPG one in the same setting adds so much more depth and pleasure to the gaming experience. It’s a natural marriage, and we’re all very excited to see how it works.
Sarah Newton and Jonathan Green at Dragonmeet with their novels
Dragonmeet this year to me seemed as busy and as vital as ever, though I found out later attendance was about 10% down on last year. Personally I’m not rushing to blame that on the state of the economy – London transport was utterly shot to pieces this last weekend, with it almost impossible to get through from the Cambridge rail line, and whole swathes of the Underground simply closed. Faced with a 3-hour commute from my in-laws in Essex, where I usually stay on Dragonmeet weekend, I found myself in a hotel near Olympia this year – without which I would not have been able to attend. I think that factor, as much as anything, probably counted for the slightly lower numbers.
Having said that, in true Dragonmeet fashion, we gamers made up for the lack of numbers with an absolutely infectious enthusiasm and a dedication to buying as much swag as possible in the convention’s 8 fun-packed hours. Over on the Cubicle 7 stand with Dom, Victoriana author Andy Peregrine, and Starblazer and Anglerre author Chris Birch, things were as busy as any other year, with excellent sales of The One Ring, Airship Pirates (and the new supplement Ruined Empires), the now plentiful Victoriana line, Cthulhu Britannica (and Shadows Over Scotland in particular, authored by Stuart Boon and one of my main development and editing projects of 2011), the Laundry RPG, Legends of Anglerre, and Starblazer Adventures. We actually sold out completely of Starblazer Adventures this time – meaning the second edition printing is now vital, the Player’s Guide of which will hopefully materialise in February or so next year, followed rapidly by the Storyteller’s Guide (you can still buy the PDF versions of the game here, of course). Amazingly, we didn’t have the Mindjammer RPG supplement at all – all our UK stocks have sold out, meaning the second edition of that is now well overdue. 2012 is looking busy!
Victoriana author Andy Peregrine modelling the latest Cubicle 7 display 
As I mentioned above, the Mindjammer novel was my personal baby this Dragonmeet, and it was flying off the stand, easily our best-selling product at the convention. As well as making me extremely bouncy and excited, it was also a great encouragement for our new Cubicle 7 Fiction imprint, as there definitely seems to be an appetite for fiction relating to our lines. Our next fiction book, a cool anthology called “World War Cthulhu”, is due to hit the shelves in July 2012, hot on the heels of the “World War Cthulhu” RPG supplement, my personal Cthulhoid baby of the past 4 years which will finally burst forth on the world in all its tentacled glory next year, featuring a host of awesome writers – stay tuned for more!
As well as hanging out on the Cubicle 7 stand meeting tons of keen fellow gamers (shout-outs to Steve and Paula Dempsey, Nathan Baron, Nick Brook, Stuart Boon, Julian Hayley, Peter Curzon, Stuart Mousir-Harrison, Dave Scott, and gazillions more), I also had the chance to take part in two seminar panels this year – the “Fiction and RPGs” one at 1.30pm, and the “Cubicle 7 – The Future!” one at 4.30pm.
Both panels were great fun, and the fiction one was especially well-attended – thanks to everyone who came! The panel comprised yours truly, plus august Fighting Fantasy, Warhammer 40K, and Pax Britannica luminary (amongst many other works!) Jonathan Green, and Star Wars and the Dark Harvest – Legacy of Frankenstein RPG writer Iain Lowson. We had a very cool hour or so chewing the cud about how our RPG and writing experiences bounce off one another, with some very perspicacious questions from the audience, including one which keenly identified the three of us as control-freak dyed-in-the-wool game masters! It was also my first opportunity trying to chair a seminar – we had no dedicated MC – so thanks to everyone who sat through my stumbling attempts to keep everything on track!
Iain Lowson, Sarah Newton, and Jonathan Green at the RPGs and Fiction panel
The Cubicle 7 seminar comprised me, plus m’colleagues Dominic McDowall-Thomas (CEO of C7), art director Jon Hodgson, and line developer (and all round RPG Writing God) Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan. The seminar was a whistle-stop tour of Cubicle 7′s plans for 2012, and in particular our dedication to getting our release schedule properly on track after the tumultuous events of the past few months. Dom and Gareth discussed plans for The One Ring, including Tales From Wilderland; Doctor Who, including the new boxed core rules, the Time Traveller’s Handbook, the Unit sourcebook, and individual Doctor boxed sets, appearing in 2012 and also into the golden year of 2013, Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary. Jon waxed lyrical about the art direction of The One Ring and the sterling work Paul Bourne has been doing on the new look-n-feel for second edition Mindjammer, releasing next year; and I took the opportunity to run through the Legends of Anglerre and Starblazer schedule for 2012, plus the plans we have for Cthulhu Britannica and World War Cthulhu. The audience fired heaps of great questions, keeping us on our toes!
I must make a special mention of Paco Jaen, a great and dear friend who I’ve known for many years, and who I met again after an almost 10 year hiatus this Dragonmeet. Paco runs the G*M*S Magazine and podcast, and sat through pretty much the whole day of podcasts at Dragonmeet this year (and still remained his lovely and charming self at the end of it all!), and I believe he’ll be posting audio podcasts of all the seminars on the G*M*S website at http://www.gmsmagazine.com/. Stop by and check it out!
Once the Cubicle 7 panel discussion was done, it was already 5.30 and the waning hour of Dragonmeet was upon us! I managed to get in some great meetings and chats, particularly with fellow Cthulhu Britannica conspirator and Shadows Over Scotland author Stuart Boon, with whom I spent some very quality time up in the gods overlooking the trade hall conspiring to inflict even more Cthulhoid Britannica madness on an unsuspecting gaming public – more on that to come! Despite corresponding with Stuart, often in great detail, for over 18 months, this was my first chance to meet him in person – and it was a great pleasure to meet such a cool and laid-back, tentacle-driven guy. Cheers Stuart!
Starblazer and Anglerre author Chris Birch at the Cubicle 7 stand
It wouldn’t be Dragonmeet if I didn’t mention my swag haul. Sadly this year was one of omission: the Pavis supplement for HeroQuest 2 didn’t *quite* make it, despite me creating a special place for it under my Christmas tree and repeatedly praying to my insane gods well in advance. Jeff Richards and Dave Scott assured me it was in the final throes of layout and imminent indeed, and I was mollified by a handout detailing the Seven Mothers Cult, which I’m sifting through today. After the awesomely brilliant quality of Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes and the Sartar Companion by Moon Design, I’m really looking forwards to Pavis – and to opening up the New and Old Cities in the Praxian wastes for business again! More on that when I get my hot little hands on a copy.
So, swag. I got a copy of [BOARDGAME NAME REDACTED], a Christmas prezzie for the Brown Dirt Cowboy, which I’ll discuss post-Christmas, plus (at long last!) a copy of Fiasco, both from Mike, Sean, and the Good People at Leisure Games, who were also running a cool Dragonmeet sale. Leisure Games also took several copies of Mindjammer for the Leisure Games shop, so please support them and Cubicle 7 Fiction if you stop by!
Then, I managed to bag some Unspeakable Oaths, a copy of Ruined Empires for Airship Pirates, Gareth Hanrahan’s Black Bag Jobs for the Laundry, and some copies of the Mindjammer novel (two of which I subsequently sold down the pub! Dom – more please!). I also ordered the Savage Worlds edition of The Day After Ragnarok by the transdimensionally luminous Kenneth Hite, and also a PDF of the 3rd edition of Nobilis – the latter on a whim, and possibly to be followed by a dead-tree version! All in all a good haul, and I managed to dispense some of the hard-earned pennies I hadn’t spent on Pavis
One thing I must mention which I didn’t buy was Night’s Black Agents, another splendiferous disgorging from the feverish and conspiracy-filled multidimensionally haunted matrix of Kenneth Hite’s brain. This was at Dragonmeet in a special Dragonmeet edition, and looks absolutely excellent. It uses Robin D. Laws’ splendid Gumshoe system, and so far I’ve bought and enjoyed pretty much all the Gumshoe games; I’m looking forwards to getting my hands on the “Redacted” version of Night’s Black Agents shortly. I also had chance to chat with Ralf on the Profantasy stand, and admire Fractal Terrains 3. I held off buying for now, as I’ve recently changed over to Mac from PC, and need to puzzle my way through the WINE emulator before I start playing with Profantasy’s excellent mapmaking software again. Incidentally, the maps in the Mindjammer RPG book are all done with Profantasy’s stuff, and there’s even a Mindjammer style in Cosmographer 3 – cool beans!
I think that’s it! Shout-outs to everyone I met, and apologies to anyone I’ve not mentioned. Thanks to Angus Abranson and his awesome support team for organizing yet another excellent convention, and see you all again at Dragonmeet 2012!
Far Too Close to Reality to Resemble Credible Fiction?
A good friend of mine once received a rejection letter for a screenplay he’d written with the immortal line “This work is far too close to reality to resemble credible fiction”. I wish to hell I’d received that letter – what an awesome accolade! – but ever since it’s resonated with me as a terrible possibility whenever I read or write. Because it’s true: when you write fiction, you have to wrestle with the expectations of your reader – what that reader is prepared to accept as “realistic”, which often may have little to do with reality. Especially your own.
.jpg.crop_display.jpg)
A thousand years ago, no one would have believed a story about someone sailing round the world. Five hundred years ago, no one could have imagined you could travel around the world in a single day. A hundred years ago, no one could have conceived of a quantum world where cause and effect seem suddenly to have a far more casual relationship.
In short, the future is likely to be full of incredible things.
Arthur C. Clarke famously said that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I don’t think it’s that simple: even “magic” is subject to rules – a wizard has to cast a spell for it to happen, a teleportation device has to pretty much transport one person intact from A to B, an FTL spaceship has to arrive in the same condition as it left, and into the same universe. These are “credibility rules” which we have all internalised as 21st century human beings, and if a writer breaks them too egregiously, their writing won’t be considered believable.
So, how do you write about an incredible future, and keep it believable?
How about this: in every era, there’s a “cap” on how far you can stretch the credibility level of a fictional work. The era of H.G.Wells had its credibility cap; as did the era of Star Wars;and as does our own. In the dead of night, at the mythical “4 am Eternal”, I can stretch my brain to imagine futures I can barely articulate in words. At times like that, this “credibility cap” seems almost to be a problem of language – if only we had the words, expressing the concept would be easy.
While it’s true that our hominid brains are absolutely not up to fathoming the weightiest truths of the universe – we are very limited creatures, after all – there is a conceptual space, just out of reach of language, which our understanding may aspire to. And all the time our brains are feverishly working to create the right conceptual tools to bootstrap our understanding to that next level.
Of course, “science” (in its loosest definition) does this all the time. “Scientists” are constantly defining new concepts, creating new words, talking about new ideas which no human being has ever talked about before – or even been able to talk about. And, if we’re lucky, science-fiction and speculative fiction sometimes participate in that dialectic: we receive concepts from science, jiggle about with them, expose them to the warpings and distortions of our 4am imagination, then return them to science badly mangled, as if to say,”Sorry, I bent your concept completely out of shape. Can you do anything with it?” And then – if we’re luckier still – science looks at the concept in another way, wipes the detritus of feverish imagination off it, and perhaps sees it in a new light.
So let’s say science is a language for a moment: it creates concepts and utterances to describe the world, but cannot “proscribe” the world. The world always exceeds the capacity of language, and the language of science, to confine, define, and express it. But, blunt though they are, language and science are the only tools we have. And they have within them the wonderful ability to overcome their own limitations, to constantly re-invent themselves, and to constantly aim to express the inexpressable, utter the unutterable.
That’s what I hope we’re doing when we read and write speculative fiction. Somewhere, out there, we hope, there is a single utterance, an ultimate tetragrammaton, which will remake the universe. And, if we all just keep remaking and stretching language and trying to say everything that can possibly be said, one day, perhaps, we will utter it. And the world will be transformed utterly.
I’m up for trying. Who’s with me?
- - Just after midnight on 9/11/11 (or 11/9/11) – this Wednesday – asteroid YU55 will pass close to earth inside the moon’s orbit – the closest approach ever for a body of this size.
- - Shortly after on 11/9/11, the USA will conduct its first ever nationwide test of its “Emergency Alert System”, in which the US government will take control of all US television and radio media. It’s unknown how this will affect the internet.
- - At the same time on 11/9/11, the UK will conduct emergency test drills at major nuclear power stations up and down the country.
- - The same day, and into Thursday, the UN will conduct “Exercise Pacific Wave 11″ – a pacific tsunami warning and communications exercise.
- - The same day, a major new UN report by the International Atomic Energy Authority is expected to report on new developments in Iran’s attempts to manufacture nukes. Moscow has requested the report be “delayed at this time of tension”.
- - Morgan Freeman is revealed to be the same person as Barack Obama.
The above are all actual news events from this coming week. OK, maybe not that last one, but you get the picture…
As anyone who knows me will attest, I’m a great fan of geopolitics and conspiracy theories, so much so that I’m often accused of blurring the lines between the two. I happen to believe that reality actually is a blurred mishmash of geopolitics and conspiracy theory. Regardless, it’s a cool way of thinking if you’re looking to generate plots.
When I first read Pushkin’s verse novel “Eugene Onegin”, I was utterly bowled over by how Pushkin had succeeded in creating a linear assembly of overtly unrelated short poems, only to use stanza structure and metre to encourage the reader to see those separate poems as belonging together. From there, Pushkin’s job was done: the reader himself would then go to great lengths to perceive those individual stanzas as belonging to a common plot – the reader would “write the novel” himself, as he read the poems. Awesome!
I still find that approach everywhere in life today – the desire to create patterns out of seemingly unrelated material is perhaps a defining human quality. That’s why I love geopolitics and conspiracy theories so much: sometimes events in the world actually *are* related – they don’t just seem so. And trying to piece together all these events is where the great fun of creating a coherent narrative lies.
This week’s post is partly just a bit of fun for my fellow tinfoil hat-wearing comrades. I’ve been doing my usual surfing of the less respectable news sites on the internet this week, as they’re great arenas for amazing concatenations of seemingly unrelated events into what look like great, globe-spanning conspiracies. And I picked out the above discrete, apparently unrelated events. Maybe Pushkin would approve – if the Father of Russian Verse were a tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist with a penchant for melodrama. (Hey, two out of three ain’t bad…)
So… 11/9/11… I’ve written my blockbuster novel from this week’s events. Have you?
Sex and the Seventeenth Millennium
Thinking and writing about sex, sexuality, and the myriad issues of gender in the Mindjammer universe has been fascinating, and a task nowhere near finished. In the first novel, “Mindjammer“, published on the 26th October 2011, I’ve kept the portrayal of gender and sexuality fairly low-key – most of the characters don’t overtly contravene the prevalent 21st century gender binary, and sexuality is only touched upon indirectly. That’s been part of my general approach in the first novel to concentrate on parts of the Commonality which are more familiar to us as 21st century readers. It seemed to me in writing that so many aspects of life in the Commonality would already be very different from what we know today, that to present all aspects of life as different and divergent all at once might be too distracting. Was I right or wrong? No idea – but that was my approach.
Even then, there are parts of Mindjammer where more diverse and multifarious identities and relationships (sexual, gender, or otherwise) can’t help but peep out from between the lines. Jackson Stark clearly has a relationship of some depth with Dizzy, the eidolon personality of his disintegrator rifle, presented as female – bringing an entirely new meaning to the phrase “I love my gun”; Wing, the Mindjammer sentient starship, attracts a great deal of admiring attention from admiring, lesser starships in orbit around Belomor – in Mindjammer, some starships really are sexier than others. Max Proffitt sometimes seems a Captain Jack of the Mindjammer universe, with a long train of more or less furious encounters across the Fringe, including his current best friend, the Rosemary Princess (yup, that’s a ship, too…); relationships between Ayumi Dentassi and her “husband” seem almost totally unbounded; and who knows what Monika Taimanishev does behind closed doors?
The point is, I guess, that when you set out to describe a society thousands of years in the future, so much is bound to have changed unrecognisably that you run the risk of not giving a contemporary reader enough “hooks” to hang his or her sympathies on. Alienness can be very alienating. But at the same time, if you’re going to achieve any kind of verisimilitude, you can’t ignore the fact that you’re describing a civilization which is as different from our own as today’s e-literate world is from our Ice Age hunter-gatherer ancestors. There’s a balance to strike – but not necessarily a balance that is ever going to be at all stable.
In the second Mindjammer novel, provisionally entitled “Transcendence”, I’m giving myself a lot more license to explore the alienness of the Commonality – to “get weird”. Mindjammer has already presented a universe which is freakishly different in so many ways, where physicality is no longer a stable part of identity, death no longer a given, relationships fluid, sexuality free from a biological binary; Transcendence pushes that concept much, much further. We’re going to be taking a look at Old Earth in some detail, and the “weirdness” of the Core Worlds, and also really exploring the implications of being a person, when perhaps the greater part of your early memories don’t even belong to you.
I guess one of the concerns about the upcoming 21st “biotech” century is the increasing role human beings are going to be playing in their own evolution. One of those concerns is the role of sex. On the level of physical and psychological pleasure, it’s hardly likely to die out soon; quite the opposite, even now it’s expanding and blossoming into newer and more complex forms. Sex, if you’ll pardon the expression, has never been so difficult to tie down. On the level of sexual reproduction, things are less clear: many futurists suggest reproduction is going to become a matter of conscious choice and design, with the “randomness” of sexual reproduction playing little part. To me, that sounds disastrous: the random element provided by sexual reproduction seems to be the crowning glory and defining characteristic of life on our planet, and we’d be foolish not to take with us its inherent advantages as we transfer our existences into less physical forms.
In Mindjammer, the society of the Solenine cluster, acting on a misunderstanding of Commonality culture, has chosen to decouple sex and reproduction, with explosive results. But even in the Commonality, the Core Worlds culture continues to promote in vitro reproduction with an ideological fervour, while the Fringe deals with sex and reproduction like it deals with everything – in a chaotic, messy, whirl of clashing “solutions” and ideas. The result: divergence. If sex is no longer necessary to ensure we reproduce, then the last link with biological necessity is severed, and everything is up for grabs. Just how far that divergence goes is something I want to explore in the Mindjammer novels.
Mindjammer is available now in trade paperback and ebook edition from Cubicle 7 Entertainment, Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, DriveThru, and hobby and game stores everywhere!
Find out more about Mindjammer at www.mindjammer.com.
Cubicle 7 Fiction – Announcing Mindjammer!
Cubicle 7 Entertainment kicked off its new “Cubicle 7 Fiction” imprint today with the launch of my novel “Mindjammer“, a far future transhuman space opera tale. It’s available right now from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and DriveThru, and shortly via iBooks and in trade paperback via direct sales from the Cubicle 7 Webstore and in hobby and games stores everywhere.
“Mindjammer” and Cubicle 7 Fiction are two huge things for me. The first, my first published novel, has been a labour of love and a topic I’ve been passionate about for years – the implications of technologies already in development now for the future nature of humanity and identity, and how we’ll deal with them. I wanted to write a novel of ideas, but in the style of the great, action-packed sci-fi tales – something which would carry you through with tons of action and excitement, and at the same time hopefully provide food for thought. Only time and (hopefully) the people who read “Mindjammer” will let me know if I’ve got anywhere near succeeding!
Second, Cubicle 7 Fiction is a project I’m incredibly excited about, as well as being highly invested in emotionally. Cubicle 7 Entertainment is first and foremost a publisher of roleplaying games and supplements, including such well-known lines as Doctor Who, The One Ring, Charles Stross’ The Laundry, Victoriana, Legends of Anglerre, Starblazer (including my very own Mindjammer), and many more. There are so many cool ideas and talented writers working on these lines, it’s a no-brainer to look into producing some quality fiction to support the games. When Angus and Dom at Cubicle 7 mentioned the cross-media possibilites of working with other companies in the Rebellion Group some 18 months ago, my heart skipped a beat: here was the perfect convergence of possibilities, and a huge potential to leverage Cubicle 7′s intellectual property in some hugely exciting ways.
Cubicle 7 Fiction is our first venture in this direction. We’re working very closely with our colleagues in Solaris Books and Abaddon Books, and they’re providing us with the benefit of their enormous talent bank and wealth of experience in editing, proofing, layout, and producing novels and anthologies as we create the new imprint. It’s my hope that with their help, and the support of game and genre fiction lovers everywhere, we can make this new venture into something wonderful – not only a line of titles supporting our roleplaying games and providing some great gamer reading, but also a range of great quality books in their own right, introducing some of Cubicle 7′s cool settings and IP to an entirely new type of reader.
You don’t have to be a gamer to enjoy Cubicle 7 Fiction. But we hope, whoever you are, you’ll find something in our upcoming titles you’ll like. Let us know what you think – this new fiction imprint will stand or fall by the support it receives from you, the reader. We hope you’ll like what you see!
And so, without further ado, here’s Mindjammer. Spread the word!
Cartophilia
I love maps. Always have. My first memory of one comes from a yonks ancient book called “Ant and Bee Go Shopping”, which I must have “read” when I was about four, a kind of antediluvian “Where’s Wally” with a mega-big cheery perspective map of a city centre where (you guessed it) Ant and his best friend Bee would indulge in some much-needed retail therapy. Great map: I remember poring over streets and buildings as I walked down them with my invisible insectoid friends.
But there was probably one earlier than that – a virtual map which lived at the top of Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree, a kind of magical dial-a-destination to lots of mysterious and mad lands above the clouds. That was half a decade before I discovered Tolkien’s gorgeous maps in The Hobbit when I was 8 or 9, but by then there was already no looking back – I was a cartographic junkie.
What is it about maps that fascinates some of us so much? Sure there’s a romance about some maps – Merrie England, Ancient Rome, battles and explorations of yore. But I can get off on a route planner of Birmingham city centre, so I’m sure it’s more than just the romance. It must be… you’ve seen Birmingham city centre, right?
I think it’s because maps are stories. Let me rephrase that: a single map is by no means a single story; instead, a single map is a myriad of stories. Every place name, street corner, bridge, river, church, mysterious lane, quarry, or “ancient earthworks” is an empty potential space in our heads begging to be described – a kind of cartographical paint-by-numbers which our minds yearn to visualise, explain, visit. But not in isolation: when you look at a map, you don’t just look at a bunch of unconnected data – your eye wanders, lingers over some elements, moves questingly from one to another. And, as it does so, you begin to construct a narrative. Maybe it’s just a journey – you start at Arthur’s Howe, then your eye flits to Darkwood Chase, and quick as lightning you’re flying over the land between them like a flock of ravens, looking down on the winding lanes below you, wondering how to travel between the two. There’s a house, there, by the river – maybe a farmhouse? No! It’s a canal, not a river, and that must be the lock-keeper’s cottage by the weir, a vision of dray horses pulling a barge laden with coal and a blacksmith’s by the riverside breathing smoke like a plume into the chill hazy air on a winter’s morning…
Then you blink, and look up. Nothing around you has changed – before you there’s still the wide white expanse of paper covered with cartographical sigils. And yet it’s like you’ve travelled, been on a journey. The map is like a distillation of a world, there beneath your fingers, beckoning you in. It’s like the biggest “choose-your-own-adventure” book you can imagine, one of infinite possibility, infinite stories.
If I could only take one book to a desert island, it would be an atlas.
The Simulation Age
(Informally dedicated with thanks to the courageous folks of the Occupy Wall Street and other global “Occupy” movements – frontline warriors in the War Against Simulation.)
I recently bought a frozen pizza. When I opened it, the pizza was half the size of the box. I felt cheated. Despite the fact that the wrapping was probably more expensive to produce than the pizza, the inexorable logic of the capitalist growth mantra meant that more and more profit had to be squeezed out of what was basically a pretty fixed paradigm: pizza of diameter X, sold in box of width Y, for price Z. Taken logically, the end result of this process will be a massive, gorgeous, whopping pizza box, with a tiny pill inside tasting mildly of pizza. And then the frozen pizza company will collapse.
Before that collapse, however, we’ll have entered the era of “simulated pizzas”.
This is a tendency I see everywhere these days. Even (damn my fuddy-duddy ear!) in popular music, where increasingly it’s the superfices of the pop music industry which are recreated before us – adoring crowds, super-lazorlight concerts, gorgeously pneumatic and sexed-to-the-max stars – while the substance, the musical content, degrades into a kind of vanilla blandness, mixed by professional muzoes in a slick corporate studio somewhere, to a tried and tested formula which will ‘get the kids going’. The music industry too is becoming a simulation of itself – and the consumer turns away, the money spent on it decreases, and so the business investment dwindles further. Eventually, music becomes a gorgeously glitzy 3 minute extravaganza of sex, lights, and dancing, but the tune is exactly the same as the last time. Simulated pop.
And even the news! In true Soviet, 1984 fashion, our news pundits peddle lies and distortions with little bearing on our experienced reality, so much so that I wonder who they’re talking to. Most of us living in the real world don’t experience an economic recovery; most of us don’t see a great mysterious overseas threat; most of us see massively higher day-to-day inflation than the laughably bogus government figures suggest; most of us aren’t that bothered about the pointless self-referential sensationalism the media invents to fill the “news hour”. So who are they talking to? They must have an audience in mind. And they do – a “simulated audience”, an ideal consumer of the fictitious broadcasts they invent. Simulated news for simulated people.
At the same time, the internet is burgeoning with news, music, art, blogs, thinking, all produced by individuals existing outside the pizza-box capitalist paradigm. People are awakening to our “simulated economy”, where those who work and pay tax get poorer, to the benefit of those – the bankers, the corporates – who break the laws, receive endless taxpayer handouts, and get rich. All around the world we have protests – online, Occupying Wall Street and other economic centres, a sudden solidarity in the face of a pernicious threat which is hollowing our lives from within, turning them into mere simulations of wealth, liberty, and happiness. We’re creating a direct route between creator and consumer, unmediated by an ideologically- and commercially-motivated “packager” sucking the value out of every transaction. The more the Simulation Age squeezes the life out of reality, the more reality turns its back on the Simulation Age and creates an alternative paradigm, leaving the Simulators to wither, and die on the vine.
When we write, we knowingly produce simulations: artificial realities, with a semblance of existence. But, beneath, what they say is true: psychologically true, emotionally true, philosophically true. We might be writing about fantasy worlds of elves and magic, or science-fiction universes of alt-humans and techno-immortals, or superhumans battling global villains and saving society from destruction; but, on a deep level, what we write has to be true – it has to be understandable, acceptable, meaningful to the reader. If our spacefarers don’t deal with life in credible ways, no amount of technobabble will make the tale ring true; but if their lives are believable, compelling, they tell us something about ourselves and our own condition, we as readers can handle any amount of artifice.
That’s a paradox. On the one hand, we have our modern post-capitalist frenzy, using the accoutrements of reality to create a scarcely believable simulation of that reality, from which people are turning away in droves. Then, on the other, we have modern-day fiction, using the accoutrements of simulation to tell believable tales of reality. We create myths and fictions to tell ourselves the truth.
And, like matter and anti-matter, when lies meet truth in the Simulation Age, they explode in a blinding burst of energy. But destructive or creative energy? There’s the rub. And that’s what we, as creators and consumers of our own stories, get to decide. And in the streets of cities all around the world, in online communities and physical world families and fellowships, that decision is being played out today.
There’s a lot to play for. Simulation or reality? Choose now.
Brave New World – The Journalistic Function
Yesterday I was surfing Amazon looking for latest thinking and theories on such diverse tekkie subjects as membrane theory, quantum decoherence, and interstellar travel. In my enthusiasm, I bought a Kindle eBook which looked very promising from the blurb, only to find when I fired it up and started reading it that it was a load of well-meaning but amateurish hogwash, and certainly nothing I could use as the scientific underpinning of some writing I’m working on. Curious (and somewhat embarrassed by throwing away money unnecessarily) I surfed Amazon further, and found a strange phenomenon I’d never really been aware of before: lots and lots of books with stupendously long and superficially very impressive titles, like “Transhumanism, Augmentation, Artificial Intelligence, Computerized Brains, Future Evolution of Human Beings”. Hardly catchy – but certainly up my street!
Then I looked further. In the blurb was the explanation: these books are compilations of articles from wikipedia.
What?!? I reeled for a moment. What?! Wow… I searched for words. What a… waste of money… what a – huge loss in reliability, trust, of the printed word. Allegedly scientific books – just compilations of unconfirmed wikipedia pages?
It’s become a truism in the second decade of the 21st century that the internet is filled with information, and most of it is rubbish. Now, with the advent of cheap and easy ebooks, which can be compiled almost by web-bot and published without the additional expense of layout, proofing, and printing, the electronic and online libraries and bookshops of the world are running the risk of becoming indundated with undifferentiated, unverified, bogus crap. All my life I’ve been used to going into a bookshop, online or not, and being secure in the knowledge that the selection I was seeing had been subject to at least a modicum of quality control.
No longer. Was it like this when the printing press was invented? When suddenly books, pamphlets, and newspapers could be easily and cheaply produced which were then dumped on an unsuspecting (and hence perhaps gullible) public?
To some extent it must have been. There must have been – indeed, there were – heaps of publications containing bogus (and often dangerous) health and ailment remedies, false histories, calumnies, and out-and-out superstition dressed up as science. How did we manage?
Of course, we managed because a class of “trusted aggregators” came into being – educated filterers of information, with integrity not to publish any old crap. People you could trust to do the job of filtering out the garbage for you. Call them publishers, editors, journalists, whatever, since that time they’ve fulfilled a very simple gatekeeper function: to make sure that any random tomnoddy with a mad idea can’t suddenly claim it to be true and hoodwink an unsuspecting public.
The internet today is in dire need of aggregators. Over the past 10 years or so I’ve relied heavily on Amazon reviewers to vet the usefulness of publications, but web-savvy indies are wise to that, and now frontload their stuff with heaps of positive reviews – the bogus book I bought had 8 out of 10 thoroughly encouraging reviews. We need something more.
When I buy an iPad app, I go to one of a number of application aggregator sites for a review first. If it ain’t there, I’m unlikely to buy it. My gut feeling is that there is a huge niche – nay, a gulf – opening up in the internet right now for precisely that kind of *journalistic function* to sift through the piles of dross for the gems, and compile them and offer them for sale. In a world of free information, that’s your “value-add” – the ability for someone, say, who’s an expert in astrophysics to sift through the net and provide regular digests of the best that’s out there. It would be a massive time-saving for those of us who don’t have the wherewithal or knowledge level to do it ourselves (hey, I *love* pop astrophysics, but I simply *can’t* differentiate between cutting edge theories and well-disguised bollocks at the top level). I’d happily pay for that journalistic function.
So – IMHO that’s what I think we’ll see emerging right now and in the immediate future on the net. Paid aggregators – a new generation of journalists, specialists in their fields, building reputations for integrity and trustworthiness, selling digests and summaries of the amazing knowledge floating out there in the World Wide Brain, often swamped by the collective mutterings of humankind.
Now – I just need to find one who can tell me about hyperspace…
So I played HeroQuest 2…
After almost a year of owning the HeroQuest 2 rules by Moon Design Publications (published by Cubicle 7 Entertainment), today I sat down and actually played a session.
I really liked it.
I’ve been a Glorantha fan since 1981, first playing tons of RuneQuest 2 and 3, then moving on to loads of Hero Wars, then a certain amount of HeroQuest 1, until about 6 years ago, when I moved onto other games such as FATE, BRP, etc, for my main games. I bought the HQ2 rules late last year, and on reading them found them extremely different from traditional RPGs – different even from HQ1 and more narrative type systems such as FATE – but felt somewhere inside there was a really cool system, if only I could grok it.
It’s taken me two tries to get my head round the system, but after our first session of play I’m getting there, and will definitely play again. My original gripe with the HeroWars and HeroQuest systems was that they were too arbitrary – very often the system seemed to revolve around the GM making up some numbers and everyone rolling dice, and then the GM kind of making up an explanation for what had just happened. Okay in the short-term, but ultimately unsatisfying, especially when it comes down to character life or death.
My first encounter with the HeroQuest 2 rules last year reinforced that impression. With no fixed numbers for the difficulties of die rolls, everything seemed to revolve around GM fiat, which isn’t my personal favourite style of play.
Then I got my head round the pass-fail cycle.
This is a really clever rules mechanic, and utterly, utterly different from anything I’ve seen in any other roleplaying game. In fact, it’s *so* different it often meets with some hostility among more traditional RPGers, including, at first, myself. That is, until I grokked how closely it’s tied in to the rest of the system.
For those unfamiliar with the pass-fail cycle, it provides GMs with a base difficulty level for pretty much *all* rolls in a given session (the GM can override). That’s right: every task you attempt, subject to GM override, has the same difficulty level. You’re not rolling your ability against how good a given opponent or tasks is; you’re rolling against the *story*.
That’s a huge departure from traditional RPGs. Sure, many GMs kind of wing this concept and factor it into their eyeballing of difficulty levels in play in other games, but in HeroQuest it’s codified into the rules. You make your die rolls against the demands of the story, not the abilities of opponents.
But if all difficulties are the same, isn’t that dull? Too bland? “Unrealistic”, even in a story sense? Here’s where the pass-fail cycle gets clever: the base difficulty is *adjusted*, based on whether you succeeded or failed in previous die rolls. If you’ve been succeeding in the story challenges you’ve been facing, then gradually the difficulty increases; if you’ve been failing all the time, gradually the die rolls get easier. The pass-fail cycle gives you a baseline difficulty, and a way of dancing around that base difficulty, up and down, in the interests of dramatic structure.
Let me give an example. In a traditional roleplaying game, when you build a scenario, you structure in a certain progression in encounter difficulties to make for a satisfying game. This is something you do explicitly, as game master, as part of your scenario design. So, you’re attacking a Lunar camp to rescue some prisoners in the RuneQuest (d100) game. Maybe you build in 4 encounters. First, you have a relatively easy combat with some guards as you break into the camp; then maybe a harder encounter as the Lunars raise the alarm; then there’s a tense bit while you try to free the prisoners; then a massive, climactic encounter with the Lunar commandant making sure you don’t escape. All great, but the key issue is: the progression of difficulty levels is determined by the GM at the moment of scenario writing.
In HeroQuest 2, this progression is determined by the *rules*. You try and break into the camp: the base difficulty is Moderate. Depending on how well you do, the encounter as the Lunars raise the alarm may be *easier* or *harder* than Moderate. If it’s easier, maybe after the initial hard fight you find a secret way to the prisoners’ cells; if harder, maybe the initial guards were a pushover, but they alert the entire camp who stand in your way. The actual description of the scenario derives from the pass-fail cycle rules. Then again, if you’ve had an easy time of it so far, actually breaking the prisoners out becomes very difficult: maybe they’re heavily defended, or the lock on their cells is something extra special. Finally, the climactic encounter has special rules all of its own, so that even if its mechanically not a high difficulty level (such as if the characters have been suffering heavily so far), the consequences will be significant and far-reaching anyway.
That really is so cool. I found it so neat to play, despite my initial unfamiliarity. My one worry was: “um, Moderate resistance is very low for most characters – this game is going to be too easy!” Then, I did the pass-fail cycle and worked out that the *next* encounter for the PCs is going to be not Moderate but High – more powerful opposition, evil monsters, nefarious sorceries, whatever.
Make no mistake; the HeroQuest 2 system requires a major re-grokking of just what a roleplaying game is, and it definitely won’t be to everyone’s liking. As a player you’re engaging with the *story*, not with the statistical parameters of, say, certain monsters or opponents. Most of the onus to work with the new and often alien concepts, however, falls on the GM; the experience is quite transparent to the players, with a few exceptions.
I took up HeroQuest 2 because of the superlative quality of the supplements Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes and the Sartar Companion – I really wanted to play them! – and my deep and lasting affection for the Glorantha setting. After my first session, I’m already looking to the next, and exploring some of the ramifications of these extremely interesting rules.
