Browsed by
Category: Blog Entry

Tabletop Looting in Riot Quest

Tabletop Looting in Riot Quest

Comments 0 Comment

RiotQuestBox-1

The current storyline in Privateer Press’ Iron Kingdoms setting is leading toward the apocalypse, as otherworldly Infernals swarm across the nations of Immoren. Characters familiar from the Warmachine/Hordes game setting will (and already have) died, but others may escape Immoren to become the progenitors of the upcoming Warcaster science fantasy wargame (with 3 days left on its Kickstarter).

But what of those who survive, left behind on the Immoren after the Infernals have harvested souls, and broken the nations that make up the Iron Kingdoms? When the swan of Cygnar has fallen, and even the undead cannot remain safe within the land of Cryx? Well, at that point … might as well start some looting.

That is the theme of Riot Quest, released at GenCon 2019. It is a miniature arena game, where players field teams of models to go up against each other to collect treasure and cool equipment. As your team appears on the field, randomly located near one of 6 spawn gates, players try to make it to treasure chests located at randomly-determined treasure points. Once a treasure is obtained, another treasure spawns, and the race is on again. As you gain treasure, and defeat opponents, you gain loot tokens that can be used to buy special Riot Gear cards to boost your characters’ abilities.

…

Read More Read More

“Authenticity” in Sword & Sorcery Fiction

“Authenticity” in Sword & Sorcery Fiction

Comments 9 comments

Gabe S&S-small

Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

These days, in intersection with my Conan gaming (I enjoy both Monolith’s board game and Modiphius’s roleplaying game), I have been reading a lot of two things: weird fiction from the turn of last century into, maybe, the 1940s; and sword & sorcery — anything that, on its cover, features a muscled male wielding medieval weaponry — predominantly from the ‘70s or ‘80s. (This latter does the double duty of encouraging me to work out.)

As is to be expected, these works offer various levels of quality. Early-last-century weird fiction is in a class of its own, and, though writers of that era freely borrowed tropes, themes and elements from each other (they very much appear to have been in conversation, literally or otherwise), the form of the weird tale is not as calcified as that of sword & sorcery appears to be by the ‘80s. Even within this latter’s straitjacket, however, I have encountered some standouts, including John Dalmas’s The Orc Wars (beginning with The Yngling, 1971), Gordon Dickson’s and Roland Green’s Jamie the Red (an unofficial Thieves’ World novel, 1984), and John Maddox Robert’s The King of the Wood (1983). Why I like these is for the reasons that one would like any work of fiction, of course, but with one addition: they present a sense of verisimilitude. I should add here, for anyone who might not be privy to how sword & sorcery is supposed to be subdivided from its parent genre of fantasy, that sword & sorcery is supposed to be more “realistic.” The world presented in such tales is premodern. Life is hard. The cultures do not have our present technology (nor magic — magic, in this subgenre, if not “low,” is rare and mysterious and terrifying and usually very, very “wrong”) with which to ease the drudgery of existence. In other words, the characters in such stories live in the way that folks in the Middle Ages lived, possibly in the way that many of our grandparents or great-grandparents lived, if they were homesteading somewhere.

This is why I no longer write sword & sorcery. I am a city boy. I am modern. I have no idea what “real life” is like. And yet I somehow have enough of one to know — intuitively or otherwise — when a writer knows even less than I do. To catalog the many errors of some of our most famous current fantasy writers is outside of the scope of these observations, but I’ll point to the occasion that spurred me finally to write on this topic here.

…

Read More Read More

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Holmes On Screen – All of ‘Em!

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Holmes On Screen – All of ‘Em!

Comments 2 comments

Sherlock Holmes dang itI started out with  a Holmes on Screen website many years ago, about the great detective’s appearances in film and on tv. Later, I added stage performances.  Eventually I took it down and moved on to Solar Pons, but I never lost my interest in the subject matter, and over the years, I’ve written over two dozen posts about Holmes on small and big screen. So, I figured I’d put up one post with links to all of them. I go all the way back to 1900’s Sherlock Holmes Baffled, right up to BBC Sherlock and Elementary. I happen to think there’s some pretty neat stuff mixed in here. Pick a topic and do a little reading!

1900-1920 Holmes’ Before Eille Norwood
1914 James Bragington – A Study in Scarlet
1916 William Gillette – Sherlock Holmes
1921-1923 Eille Norwood – Stoll Pictures
1922 John Barrymore – Sherlock Holmes
1931 Raymond Massey – The Speckled Band
1931-1937 Arthur Wontner – Five Films
1933 Reginald Owens – A Study in Scarlet
1939 – 1946  Basil Rathbone – The Secret Weapon  & The Scarlet Claw
1949/1951  Alan Napier & Alan Wheatley – Alans on TV
1954 -1955 Ronald Howard – The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes & The First Episodes

…

Read More Read More

Privateer Press’ Warcaster on Kickstarter

Privateer Press’ Warcaster on Kickstarter

Comments 0 Comment

Warcaster_Battlefield

I recently covered some of the new storyline that is coming out for the main product line of Privateer Press, the Iron Kingdoms fantasy setting that is used for their Warmachine and Hordes miniature war games. Part of the impact of that storyline (unrolling through microfiction at the @HengeHoldScroll Twitter feed) is that some denizens from the Iron Kingdoms are escaping, guided by the clockwork god Cyriss, through a portal into another universe.

Fast forward five thousand years, and the Cyriss universe is populated by humans, who have gained dominance over the native Architect and Guardians of the Cyriss galaxy. The overwhelming governmental and military power in the universe is the draconian Iron Star Alliance, who constantly finds themselves in conflict with the independent Marcher Worlds and the shadowy cult-dominated Aeternus Continuum, through a new miniature science fantasy wargame, Warcaster: Neo-Mechanika, now available on Kickstarter and fully backed within just a few hours.

Warmachine has warcasters, as the main leader model in an army, who commands the giant mechanized warjacks, and channels magical focus to empower them. One major difference in Warcaster is that the warcaster isn’t a model on a table, but a distant commander, jacked into a command ship (called a rack) in orbit over the battle. You, in other words, are the warcaster, and you can wield the power of Arcanessence, or Arc, to empower not only the warjacks on the battlefield, but any of the units under your command, through their augmented neo-mechanika armor and weapons.

In other words, in Warcaster you can’t obtain victory by killing one uniquely-important model on the battlefield. And that isn’t the only difference …

…

Read More Read More

Rogue Blades Presents: A Night with Kevin Smith

Rogue Blades Presents: A Night with Kevin Smith

Comments 1 comment
Kevin Smith at The Carolina Theatre in Durham, NC.
Kevin Smith at The Carolina Theatre in Durham, NC.

Kevin Smith likes to talk. A lot. So much so that the most recent parts of his career allow him to talk more and more and more. He’s got a podcast. And a YouTube channel. And he’s spent much of the last decade traveling around giving talks about himself, his career, and most recently about his newest movie.

(As a side note, if you don’t know who Kevin Smith is, then you’re probably not a Gen Xer or a fan of super heroes… probably. Smith makes movies, usually funny movies, or at least that’s what he’s best known for. He’s also done other stuff, like writing, podcasting and owning comic book stores and just doing all kinds of work in movies and television.)

I can’t say I’m the biggest Smith fan in the world, though I’ve enjoyed his movies over the last few decades and I’ve generally found him entertaining when I’ve watched a video of him giving a talk, or a lecture, or whatever it’s called that he does when he’s on a stage running his mouth. Anyway, I recently had the pleasure of seeing Smith live at The Carolina Theatre in Durham, North Carolina. Smith opened with a showing of his newest movie, Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, then afterwards he gave the crowded room more than an hour of his time as he answered questions and told stories.

Smith was always the gentleman (though he might not agree with that word to describe himself) and he was always patient with the crowd. His attitude reminded me somewhat of Freddie Mercury, the late lead singer for rock band Queen, in that Smith genuinely seemed to love the audience, loved to interact with the audience, and to entertain the audience — rare qualities, in my opinion.

…

Read More Read More

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Poirot’s The Hollow & Holmes

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Poirot’s The Hollow & Holmes

Comments 2 comments

Poirot_HollowFoxA few years ago, I wrote about David Suchet’s superb performance as Agatha Christie’s Poirot a. Unfortunately, Netflix lost that show before I had finished watching every episode. So, once in a while, I still catch one of those which I haven’t seen yet. And recently I saw The Hollow, which was episode four (of four) in season nine.

The Hollow sees Poirot vacationing in a country cottage. This of course means, there’s a dead body due to turn up. John Christow is one of the guests, as is his wife Gerda, and his mistress Henrietta. When his ex-flame Veronica shows up and they have sex, it’s no surprise he shortly ends up dead, with wife standing over him, gun in hand, and mistress (and another person) present as well.

It’s another wonderful outing for Suchet. As I said in the aforementioned article, “I don’t know that we can expect to see a superior version down the line.” When a key piece of evidence is mishandled, Poirot’s angry look speaks volumes. It’s hard to explain how Suchet’s understated performance dominates every scene he’s in. The plot is twisty enough that I didn’t solve it: the norm for me with Poirot. There’s plenty of depth to the character’s emotions so that it all makes sense.

But what I noticed, as the episode went on, is that there are several Sherlockian connections in this episode. Sir Henry Angkatell and his wife, Lucy, invite Poirot to their country manor for dinner. That’s where the murder occurs the next morning. Henry is played by none other than Edward Hardwicke.

…

Read More Read More

Hot Take: Fan Fiction is Great

Hot Take: Fan Fiction is Great

Comments 0 Comment

Fantasy Book Clipart

Good day, Readers!

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking of late.  Shocking, I know. Anyway, I had been struggling with finishing the second book of a series I’m currently trying to sell, and so decided to move on to another story for a while to give my brain a break and let it figure out the story in the background while I work on other stuff.

This other project, though, is something that I’m not going to be able to sell to anyone. It is, essentially, fan fiction. Sort of. I mean, I’m absolutely using the world and assets of another thing (a video game, if you must know) in order to tell this story.  It’s fan fiction.  But this post isn’t really about the fan fiction I’m writing.  It’s about fan fiction in general, and how wonderful I think it is (with some caveats).

…

Read More Read More

Evolution of the Iron Kingdoms

Evolution of the Iron Kingdoms

Comments 2 comments

The Iron Kingdoms-small

For twenty years, the folks at Privateer Press have been creating games, primarily set in their Iron Kingdoms steampunk fantasy setting. They began with a series of RPG volumes, including an award-winning trilogy of adventures from 2001. These adventures, later collected into The Witchfire Trilogy, was built on the D20 System from Dungeons and Dragons 3E.

Then Privateer Press really came into their own with the introduction of the Warmachine miniature wargame, focusing on armies that control massive metallic warjacks, one of the iconic creatures from their Iron Kingdoms setting.

It was Warmachine that got me into their world, in about 2005. I like heroes, so I went with Cygnar, the faction that is most stereotypically the classical honorable kingdom of knights and warriors. For those who aren’t inclined toward heroism, there was the religious fanatic Protectorate of Menoth and the undead Cryx. And for those in the middle, there was Khador, thematically based on Russia and known for having the most massive, hulking warjacks in the game. And missiles. Lots of missiles. This miniature line expanded, through Hordes, into battles with savage monstrous warbeasts, fully compatible with Warmachine. The Hordes included the blighted Legion, the druidic Circle of Orboros and their werecreatures, the Trollbloods and their giant troll cousins, and the sadistic Skorne.

It was actually my reviews of Privateer Press – both their wargame line and the RPG supplements – that first landed me in the pages of Black Gate, back in Spring of 2007 in Black Gate 10, when Black Gate actually had physical pages.

…

Read More Read More

Call for Backers! Mary Shelley Presents Four Horror Stories by Victorian Women

Call for Backers! Mary Shelley Presents Four Horror Stories by Victorian Women

Comments 1 comment

Trade PBGaskellEveryone’s heard of Frankenstein, and most people also know its author, Mary Shelley, but on the 200th anniversary of that novel’s publication, Kymera Press is doing something very, very cool. Mary Shelley Presents is a graphic novel series about other Victorian women horror writers. These women were famous in their own day, but their legacies have faded over time. Now, with the help of Kickstarter, Kymera press seeks to assemble the multiple stories of this series into one trade paperback that they will then bring to life — okay, okay… I’ll hold off on any other Frankenstein metaphors…

Instead, let me introduce Debbie Daughetee, owner of Kymera Press, and have her tell the story of this book in her own words. Then head on over to Kickstarter to support the trade paperback edition!

Emily Mah: Mary Shelly is a beloved matriarch of horror and this book looks so gorgeous. Can you give us some background on how it came to be?

Debbie Daughetee: Nancy Holder and I have been wanting to work together for a long time. So when the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein loomed, I talked to Nancy about doing something to celebrate it. Neither of us wanted to revisit Frankenstein as it’s been done to death in comics. Finally, we had the thought to have Mary Shelley and her creature introduce horror stories written by Victorian Women.

Mary Shelley and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, did much for women’s rights and for women writers. It was a natural fit with Kymera Press’ mission statement of supporting women in comics. These Victorian women were as famous in their time as Charles Dickens and Bram Stoker, and yet most people haven’t heard of them. Resurrecting their voices is a fun and interesting adventure for us.

…

Read More Read More

SFWA Announces the 2019 Nebula Award Nominations

SFWA Announces the 2019 Nebula Award Nominations

Comments 2 comments
The Ten Thousand Doors of January-small Gods of Jade and Shadow-small Gideon the Ninth-small

It’s nearly the end of February. And that means that the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) has finally put an end to all that suspense, and announced the nominees for the 2019 Nebula Awards, one of the most prestigious awards our industry has to offer.

This year’s nominees are:

Novel

Marque of Caine, Charles E. Gannon (Baen)
The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow (Redhook; Orbit UK)
A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine (Tor)
Gods of Jade and Shadow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey; Jo Fletcher)
Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir (Tor.com Publishing)
A Song for a New Day, Sarah Pinsker (Berkley)

…

Read More Read More