Except for last week’s blog about running con games, I’ve been doing a lot of shameless self-promotion here recently. I’m going to continue the trend again this week, but at least this time I’m using it as a sloppy segue into the main topic of the column. But first, the whoring: Brainfart Press (which is…
“The novel is a challenge to vulgarization: write something that looks new to you: someone will point out that the thrice-accursed Greeks said it long ago.”–Charles Fort As Fort observes, there really aren’t any new ideas. The best you can really hope for is to mix old story elements in a new and interesting way…
Conducted by Carter Newton Jeffrey Johnson is a talented artist who has done a great deal of work for Hex Games. He may be best known for illustrating the cover of the ENnie Award-winning RPG Hobomancer and the Hobomancer Companion. Recently Jeffrey illustrated my novel Suicide Run: A Tale of the Hobomancers. I had some…
Conducted by Leighton Connor This is the conclusion of my interview with Carter Newton about his new novel Suicide’s Run: A Tale of the Hobomancers (on sale now!) In Part One, Carter and I talked about using the Hobomancer setting for a novel; in Part Two, we talked in more depth about the characters, and…
Conducted by Leighton Connor This is the continuation of my interview with Carter Newton about his new novel Suicide’s Run: A Tale of the Hobomancers (on sale now!) In the first part, which you can read here, Carter and I talked about how Carter went about translating an RPG setting into a novel and turning…
Conducted by Leighton Connor Carter Newton is not only a co-creator of the award-winning RPG Hobomancer but also the author of Suicide’s Run: A Tale of the Hobomancers. Suicide’s Run is the first novel Hex Games has published, and it is on sale now. I was Carter’s editor on Suicide’s Run, but, more importantly, I’m…
I realize now that I didn’t mention this back in November, but the lack of new posts for the last month and change was intentional. Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, everyone’s busy, in a food coma, pissed off, depressed, or drunk–sometimes all of them at the same time–so I don’t want to write a blog…
I usually try to avoid writing entries that are pure advertising, but this week I’m going to make an exception because (1) the thing I’m advertising is absolutely free of charge; (2) the thing I’m advertising is potentially useful even to people who don’t play QAGS; and (3) it’s been a long week and I…
Last week, I briefly mentioned how the “hack until it’s out of hit points” standard for combat in RPGs can suck every bit of the excitement and drama out of an action-oriented adventure, and that I’ve been working on ways to get around that in the new version of M-Force. This week I’m going to…
Last week, I posted an excerpt for the upcoming second edition of M-Force and mentioned that we’d been working on it for quite a while. We planned to release it much earlier this year, but it’s taken a lot longer to write than we expected. Some of the delays are the usual “real life getting…
