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Vintage Bits: Lordlings of Yore

Vintage Bits: Lordlings of Yore

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Lordlings of Yore-smallThere’s a lot of interest in retro-gaming today. Seriously, it’s a thing. There are fewer sales of big-budget shooters and a lot more people hunkered over tablets and cell phones, playing games that look like they were first compiled in 1995. I’ve seen my sons jump over more platforms and spill more monster guts in low resolution on their iPad recently than on their Xbox 360, let me tell you.

I appreciate the nod to the early days of the genre, but that ain’t true retro gaming. True retro games aren’t downloaded from the Internet. True retro games don’t even come in a box.

You really want retro gaming? You need to pull open a zip-lock bag, my friend. Respect.

I own a lot of computer games. A lot of them are old. Hell, most of them are old. The bulk of my collection comes from 1989 – 2003, when I still had time to occasionally insert a disk into my desktop machine and play Icewind Dale or Mechcommander a few hours a week.

Amiga games? I got ’em. Commodore 64? Couple hundred, easy. But we’re still talking the era of boxes here. You want real retro gaming, you need to go back even before my time, to when the first computer games were sold in zip-lock bags in small hobby shops, and almost exclusively for the Apple II.

I’ve collected a few of those fascinating relics over the years, but only a very few. I have Cranston Manor, Hi-Res Adventure #3, from an outfit called Sierra On-Line, Inc (1981). I have Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure, from Synergistic Software, from 1980 (purchased on eBay nearly 10 years ago for a ridiculous sum). But the rarest game — and certainly one of the most interesting — I possess is probably Lordlings of Yore, a marvelous fantasy strategy game I found on a used game shelf in a computer store in Champaign, Illinois in 1993.

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Goth Chick News: Surviving the Dying Light

Goth Chick News: Surviving the Dying Light

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image002I absolutely love shooting dead things.

Nothing takes the edge off a stressful day like arming up to the teeth on my PS3 and blasting the snot out of rampaging zombies or other marauding creatures of darkness.

Not that I have anything against creatures of darkness – no siree. I mean, at this point, some three years into writing Goth Chick News, the reanimated dead are not only some of my most prolific subjects, but often constitute the bulk of my party guests.

It’s just that “real” violence, or in this case realistic violence (i.e. Saints Row and Hitman), makes me queasy in a way that offing the undead does not. So I was as giddy as Rick Grimes at a Home Depot axe sale when I found out about Dying Light.

Dying Light is a first-person, action survival horror game set in a vast and dangerous open world. During the day, players traverse an expansive urban environment overrun by a vicious outbreak, scavenging the world for supplies and crafting weapons to defend against the growing infected population. At night, the hunter becomes the hunted, as the infected become aggressive and more dangerous. Most frightening are the predators which only appear after sundown. Players must use everything in their power to survive until the morning’s first light.

Developed by Techland for Warner Brothers Entertainment (the geniuses who brought you Dead Island), Dying Light will be available in PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox 360 and PC formats, which is part of what I love about these guys. Development of solid games for the PC is dwindling, but until the PlayStation can fit with me in a coach airline seat, I appreciate anyone who creates this sort of fun for my lap top.

Now, join me in relishing the 12-minute gameplay walk through. It rocks utterly.

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Amazing, March 1961: A Retro-Review

Amazing, March 1961: A Retro-Review

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Amazing Stories March 1961-smallThis is a pretty strong issue of Amazing, overall. Really strong list of authors. The cover is interesting – not so much the illustration, a decent and quite accurate Leo Summers painting illustrating James Blish’s “A Dusk of Idols.” What intrigued me were the words.

Sure enough, “A Dusk of Idols,” by James Blish, adorns the cover. Makes sense. But atop the title, we read “Playboy and the Slime God.” That’s an Isaac Asimov story. Wouldn’t you think they’d have promoted Asimov’s name? But no. I can’t figure that one out.

Interiors are by Summers, Ivie, Morey, and the great Virgil Finlay. The editorial is by Norman Lobsenz as usual, and it promotes the next issue – which is to be a special All-Reprint issue, consisting of classic Amazing stories selected by Sam Moskowitz. (Sigh … I know people defend his research, and I have no dispute with that, but I do dispute his taste.)

Anyway, the issue does seem to feature some significant stories – an early Bradbury, Eando Binder’s “I, Robot,” an ERB reprint, Nowlan’s Armageddon – 2419, and pieces by Starzl, Hamilton, and Keller. Lester Del Rey’s Fact Article, “Operation Lunacy,” essentially addresses the Mutual Assured Destruction doctrine, a little presciently, it seems to me.

S. E. Cotts’s book review column, The Spectroscope, is rather harsh on balance towards two anthologies, Judith Merril’s The Year’s Best S-F, Fifth Annual Edition and Robert P. Mill’s Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Cotts opens by complaining that “there are more kinds of anthologies than you can shake a stick at… of one particular author’s output, or from one particular magazine, or on one particular subject… year’s best, year’s worst, or the year’s zaniest.”

Of Merril’s book Cotts begins kindly enough: “As far as the stories are concerned, it is the best yet.” And particular praise goes to newer writers, Daniel Keyes for “Flowers for Algernon,” Carol Emshwiller for “Day on the Beach,” and “an English author, J. G. Ballard” for “The Sound Sweep.”

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The 2013 ENnie Award Winners Announced at Gen Con

The 2013 ENnie Award Winners Announced at Gen Con

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Rise of the Runelords-smallThe Gen Con EN World RPG Awards were announced today.

The ENnies have proven very reliable at showcasing the best in innovation and excellence in role playing design and execution, and a fine predictor of long-term success — last year’s winners included some of the biggest products of the year, including Pelgrane Press’s Ashen Stars, Lords of Waterdeep from Wizards of the Coast, Savage Worlds Deluxe from Pinnacle, and the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box from Paizo.

This year, the winner’s circle is just as impressive, and includes Sarah Newton’s Achtung! Cthulhu, Shadows of Esteren from Agate Editions, the NPC Codex from Paizo Publishing, Night’s Black Agents from Pelgrane Press, Dungeon World from Sage Kobold Productions, Night’s Watch from Green Ronin — and the adventure I found most impressive this year, Paizo’s Rise of the Runelords, a massive 420-page compilation of the 6-part Pathfinder adventure.

Here’s the complete list of winners.

Best Adventure

  • Achtung! Cthulhu – Three Kings (Chronicle City/Modiphius Entertainment) *Silver Winner*
  • Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition (Paizo Publishing) *Gold Winner*

Best Aid/Accessory

  • Night’s Watch (Green Ronin) *Gold Winner*
  • The Unspeakable Oath (Arc Dream Publishing) *Silver Winner*

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Vintage Treasures: Adventure on the Final Frontier with Star Explorer

Vintage Treasures: Adventure on the Final Frontier with Star Explorer

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Star Explorer FGU-smallHow do you create a Star Trek game without a Star Trek license?

Turns out it’s not actually that hard — at least not if you follow the example of Star Explorer, the science fiction game of “Adventure on the Final Frontier” published in 1982 by Fantasy Games Unlimited.

Star Explorer was released three years after Star Fleet Battles, Steven V. Cole’s groundbreaking wargame from Task Force Games in 1979, and the same year as the first true Star Trek RPG, Star Trek: The Role Playing Game, published by FASA. Both competing titles were hits, with multiple editions over the next few decades.

In contrast, Star Explorer vanished pretty quickly, with virtually no supporting material at all. Which is a shame, because it had a lot of potential.

Star Explorer is an adventure game of exploration and encounter in deep space. It places you in the role of a starship captain who must command her ship on a variety of dangerous missions. Success depends on your ability to select the right crew for away missions and to tweak your ship design as required.

While it had some role playing aspects, it was really a board game, with a board and everything. Not a board that displayed tantalizing planets and star systems for you to explore, sadly. No, just a green, featureless tactical map used to resolve star combat. But you did get 240 colorful counters you could push around the map and imagine were exploring stuff.

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When Aliens are Delicious: Murray Leinster’s “Proxima Centauri” and the Creepy Side of Pulp SF

When Aliens are Delicious: Murray Leinster’s “Proxima Centauri” and the Creepy Side of Pulp SF

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Astounding Stories March 1935What if the first aliens we encounter were made of chocolate? Crunchy, delicious, bite-sized chocolate. Imagine that during that all-important First Contact, you decided to take an experimental bite — because, one, chocolate aliens, and two, who would blame you? — and discovered they were so delicious they brought on raptures of ecstasy.

This is more or less the premise of Murray Leinster’s rip snortin’, force-ray filled space adventure “Proxima Centauri,” from the March 1935 issue of Astounding Stories. Except that the aliens are actually highly advanced carnivorous plants who have systematically hunted every form of animal life on their home planet to extinction, and the delicious, bite-sized aliens are us.

“Proxima Centauri” has been reprinted a few times, but I’d never read it. It came up in the comments on my June 20th article on The Best of Murray Leinster, the first of the Classics of Science Fiction series I’ve been exploring recently. A reader named Doug said:

The one story of Leinster’s that impressed me the most was “Proxima Centauri.” Even if the main drive of the plot is pure pulp, the way he describes human behavior during the long trip adds a realism that counter balances the more fantastic elements (i.e. Plant Men). It’s aged incredibly well when you consider that it was written “Before the Golden Age” (I read this first in the same-named Asimov edited anthology).

Fletcher Vredenburgh concurred:

I was eleven when my dad bought and read the Leinster collection. When I asked him about it he said he didn’t think I’d like it. Fortunately, that only encouraged me to give it a try. Glad I did. The gloriously pulpy “Proxima Centauri” still creeps me out.

Well, that was enough for me. I dug out my treasured copy of Before the Golden Age and settled in to enjoy a classic tale of space travel and creepy aliens from a pulp master.

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Some Mysteries You Don’t Want to Solve: Exploring Dead Rock Seven

Some Mysteries You Don’t Want to Solve: Exploring Dead Rock Seven

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dead-rock-sevenOne of the most popular gaming articles I’ve written in the last year was my review of Robin D. Laws’s Ashen Stars, the new science fiction RPG from Pelgrane Press. Month after month, that review has been creeping up the traffic charts.

It’s not hard to see why. Ashen Stars is one of the best new SF games on the market — and one of the best new RPGs in any category. It was a winner in the “Best Setting” category in the 2012 ENnie Awards and Pelgrane Press has continued to support it with top-notch adventures and other supplements. It’s taken a while to catch on, but the industry is starting to notice.

Here’s what I said, in part, in my October review:

Robin D. Laws has created an extremely appealing game of space opera procedural mysteries. In the tradition of the best hard boiled detective fiction, players are constantly scrambling for money, equipment, and respect… all of which they’ll need to succeed in a war-ravaged perimeter where trust is a precious commodity, and very little is truly what it seems.

The players in Ashen Stars are private eyes — excuse me, licensed mercenaries — acting as freelance law enforcement on a rough-and-tumble frontier called “the Bleed,” where humans and half a dozen alien races mingle, compete, and trade. The Mohilar War that devastated the once powerful governing Combine ended seven years ago, and no one is sure exactly how. The Combine is in no shape to govern the Bleed, and rely on loosely-chartered bands like the players to maintain peace in the sector, keep a lid on crime, and investigate odd distress signals from strange corners of space…

The writing and color art are impressive throughout, and the book is filled with fascinating tidbits that will make you anxious to play, and re-introduce you to the essential joy of role playing.

Given a game with that much promise, I was anxious to see what kinds of adventures would arrive to really flesh it out. Now I finally have my hands on the first major campaign for the setting, Dead Rock Seven, a set of four scenarios by Gareth Hanrahan, and I’m pleased to report that I’m not disappointed.

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Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews The Black Opera

Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews The Black Opera

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the-black-operaThe Black Opera
By Mary Gentle
Night Shade Books ($15.99, trade paperback, 531 pages, May 2012)

I bought a copy of The Black Opera based on the sheer strength of its premise. A fat fantasy novel set in the baroque world of opera, centered around a production engineered to call Satan himself up from Hell? Sign me up for a first class ticket. If there’s anything that Andrew Lloyd Weber has taught us, it’s that opera is the perfect setting for burning passion, dark secrets, and adventure in the shadows. Adding a diabolical scheme into the mix seems like a perfect way to roll the awesome dial up past 11.

However, the first thing I noticed about The Black Opera is that it wasn’t anything close to the lurid, swash-buckling, cult-fighting novel I wanted. It is, in fact, a rather restrained and stately affair, more concerned with the enlightened intellectual climate of the early 19th century than with blood, romance, and action.

Our hero is Conrad Scalese, an opera librettist living in Naples in the third decade of the 18th century. His first great success, a heretical opera entitled Il Terrore di Parigi, has earned him the malicious regard of the iron-handed Inquisition. Only the intervention of the King Ferdinand saves him from imprisonment, but in return for the king’s protection, Conrad must accept a difficult task.

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Weird of Oz Conjures Up Some Other Horrors

Weird of Oz Conjures Up Some Other Horrors

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the-conjuring-poster-1This week, I’m going to take a break from the summer heat and my blogging of Arak, Son of Thunder to get all spooky on you. This is a topic I’d normally tackle in the autumn, closer to Hallowe’en, but it turns out that one of the surprise summer hits is a supernatural horror film called The Conjuring. If you enjoyed that film and are looking for some home-viewing follow-ups, here are a few to consider…

The Messengers (2007)

As the movie poster for The Messengers tells us, “There is evidence to suggest that children are highly susceptible to paranormal phenomena.”

One thing’s for certain: the children in this film certainly are.

A few years ago, I saw a subtitled edition of The Eye, the movie that put Hong Kong co-directors (and twin brothers) Danny and Oxide Pang on the American map, and it did induce chills. Here, as in that earlier film, the Pangs demonstrate their skill at evoking the dread of The Thing You Must Not See: you know something is behind you, but you can’t turn and look because what you’d see might make your heart freeze.

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Self-published Book Review: Sorrel in Scarlet by Peter Vialls

Self-published Book Review: Sorrel in Scarlet by Peter Vialls

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SorrelforKindle3Sorrel in Scarlet is an old-fashioned sword and sorcery tale (with just a little bit of early industrial technology), which put me in mind of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter series, not least because of the abundance of red and the scantiness of clothing. But there’s also the obvious parallel of the heroes finding themselves lost in a strange land and coming to the rescue of the people there. I do think this book comes across favorably in the comparison, since the heroine, Sorrel, is less superhuman than Captain Carter, and thus her adventures are more believable.

In the years before the story begins, the humans of Sendaal rose up against their dragon overlords… and lost. Sorrel is one of the few remaining pilots in Sendaal, and part of a group of rebels looking to achieve some measure of revenge. To that end, she steals a jasq–the living symbiote that provides sorcery to both humans and dragons–from Wrack, the very dragon who had cut her own jasq out and stolen her sorcery. Her daring escape goes less smoothly, and Sorrel crash lands her triplane in the Chasm. This deep rift in the ground is perpetually shrouded in mist, and those on the surface believe that it either leads to a sea or the center of the Earth. Instead, there’s a vast scarlet forest at the bottom of the rift. With her co-pilot dead and suffering from fatal injuries herself, Sorrel implants the jasq in herself in a desperate attempt to save her life. Implanting a second jasq is usually fatal, but in this case works… mostly. It heals her injuries, but causes agony whenever she tries to enter the magerealm to use sorcery.

One would think that being trapped in the Chasm with a dragon, a destroyed plane, and a non-functional jasq would be enough of a challenge, but Sorrel soon discovers that there are worse things in the Chasm. The red forest is crawling with deadly predators, orc-like graalur, and worst of all, the serpentine lloruk, creatures of legend thought to be extinct after their war with the elves. Fortunately, there are more or less friendly humans there too, and Sorrel soon finds herself trying to help them against the graalur. The lloruk are on the warpath, conquering and enslaving city after town, and preparing to use something worse on the surviving humans–a modified jasq called a larisq that can control the mind. Sorrel is desperate to help those who took her in; but it’s a task she can’t perform on her own, without any technology or magic, and she finds herself relying on her worst enemy, Wrack.

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