WP Platinum Blog
Very little hilarity happened today, but even so it was a good day. I had the day off work, which meant I got to sleep in, but had enough cleaning and other plans to keep me more than busy enough. We had a friend come over, but most of what I was doing were dull things like laundry. I’m going to be doing quite a lot of gaming this weekend… or at least, at lot of character building. And just to make sure the weekend is awesome I’ll be roughing it somewhat, setting up the tent and camping in our friends yard. The game should be interesting since it’s mainly a pirate game taking place in the Shackles… a hive of pirates run by a man now known as the Hurricane King. My character, Demona, is a brothel owner in the Shackles, and an information broker of no small caliber… or at least that’s the idea.
I’ve decided that she follows, at least nominally, a quartet of Arch-Demons, known as the Whore Queens. Which leads me to my gripe for today’s blog. The book has very little information on these demonic deities and from what I can tell, even the book on demons in that world simply gives the information “the whore queens are believed to be angels who fell hoping to find power and equality in Hell.” Long story short, they didn’t. But each has become powerful and worshiped in her own right, even with the bigoted male demons working against them, which is interesting. It’s not just their fight of do I/don’t I and good/evil, which every demon makes, it’s also the inner conflicts that mirror the ones they are making in their world. How did they gain power and respect? Do the other demons respect them for it after all this time or are they still treated more badly than others?
Since the books are less than useless (and I’m a “couch-feminist” in case you couldn’t already tell), I’ve decided that since the books do give me the names, I’m going to write up a story for each of them, what trials and tribulations they’ve faced, who their allies, enemies and minions are, and finally what their goals and dreams are. It would be nice to know what they require of their followers. They’re Lawful Evil… do they require sacrifices? If they do, are males the preferred offering, since in Heaven and Hell all four were treated as little more than decorative wrapping?
They say when you’re holding a hammer every problem looks like a nail… I’d like to change that slightly. When you’re a writer, you react to every situation by wanting to write about it. To quote Timothy Clarke (writing, in turn, about Lazette Gifford), “I’d be afraid to get between you and a sheet of blank paper if you had a pen in your hand.” Off hand, a fellow Nanowrimo-er re-quoted it at me last November, when I told him that I’d was pushing to get over 80k in the month, and he knew that I’d only written 2k in the first week.
Anyways, so I’m taking on a new writing project as well, in writing up the Whore Queens, to be (hopefully) used as a supplement in our Dungeons and Dragons Pathfinder game. If possible, I’d like to write 5 – 10 pages on each of the four, fleshing them, their religions and their priests out. If any of you have official information on them to help me out, I would really appreciate your help. After all, there’s no point just writing up what I happen to think if it’s going to be completely wrong and thrown out my GM’s window when/if they put out more on it, right?
This does make me stop and wonder why though. Such interesting characters, and they get a few lines in the main Pathfinder book? Even in the Book of the Damned; Princes of Evil, which focuses on the demons/devils/otherworldly evil of the Pathfinder word, a book of over 100 pages, they spend a meager four paragraphs on them, I’m assuming one each (although I don’t own the book yet. Again, if you do, letting me know what the domains of each Whore Queen is would be nice as well).
Do they truly think that nobody will care or have the desire to look into them more? It’s not just a state of the industry in this case, but a state of them deciding that women don’t constitute a large enough share of the “target audience”? Why go to the trouble of mentioning them at all if you don’t plan on expanding on the information? This is my real point of contention. In a novel, you hope to have the entire world planned, and if you are truly blessed you may be able to use 40 – 50% of the history and setting info in your book. You need enough setting to have everyone understand what the setting is, how the world works, but you can’t do so at the expense of the story. If there’s one thing I hate when I’m reading my books, it’s having the author suddenly take five pages to info dump the history of the last war on me.
With a gaming book though, you’re writing it the other way around. You want to include every organization, even rule for how the world works, all of the important people, and a bit of what their plans are. A gaming book is all about making the setting so interesting and well thought out that people won’t want to leave it. Gary Gygax, known as the Father of modern gaming, knew this and his world Living Greyhawk (Known to it’s inhabitants as Oerth) is still being played today, with its adherents who hate the idea of playing in any other world. Ed Greenwood, the creator of the Forgotten Realms setting followed in Gygax’s footsteps, and in my opinion, the Faerun source books are brilliant. More than enough information on everybody who could be important to your game, while leaving more than enough open for the GM’s to make it their own.
Now, I haven’t read the entire Pathfinder book yet, so I’m not going to argue that they haven’t done their work yet. The odds that you can fit everything into a single book is slim when you’re doing world building for a gaming system and as I have noted, Source Books are still being released for the world setting, so it’s not as if they aren’t working to fill in the gaps. I will say that thus far, I am disappointed with the information on such interesting characters and that I hope my additions will be looked at fondly, and leave it at that… for now, at least.
On a final note, I do want to let everyone know that I reserved my hotel room for SiWC later this year in October… I can’t wait to get there!
Posted in Blogs on July 22nd, 2010 by B.A. Matthews | | 8 Comments »
Well, I’m back after way too long an absence. It’s been nearly a week after all. I only got one post up and no writing up this week either. I do apologize. I was supposed to have more time than I ended up finding. On the other hand, it turned out to be an odd week all around, so perhaps it’s just par for the course.
Unfortunately, I found out that the weekend long game that I mentioned previously had been cancelled. So my weekend plans died, to be replaced by other more regular plans, although still busy enough that every day had something (for instance, Saturday officially became “recover/sleep day” from the party the night before). Speaking of which, on Thursday my husband and I went to see The Last Airbender.
It was a really fun movie and I’d suggest going to see it. However, I do suggest that you go in with low expectations. Expect a great action movie, with wonderful element-bending effects, but don’t expect much else. The acting was terrible (generally, at least. Assif Mondi did a great job as a villian, and the woman who played Princess Yue was exceptional. Uncle Iro was great, although true to the original he was not, and yet his character motivations were definitely still in place.) The story, unfortunately, turned into one big info dump and Aang decided that scaring an army without ever hurting a man, was the best way to deal with them… ‘cause you know, when army men get scared they always turn tail and run away instead of desperately attacking the thing that threatened them. I’d actually suggest watching the cartoon instead. It was much better in the places that mattered like plot and story, even if it wasn’t so cool in the “3-D/live-action” end of it.
Other than the movie though (and a new book I’m reading… don’t worry I’ll be posting a review of it next week), all I’ve been doing is gaming recently.
Alehandra, my priestess/summoner(also known as the Scourge of Lirr), has been saving people left/right and centre and had to make one of the harder decisions she’s had to make in a while. We found a torturer and one of his victims… not a pretty site, especially since the girl was still alive. Alehandra realized that she couldn’t save the woman, so she killed her out of mercy. The men in the group had tried taking on the guy, but were getting their asses whooped… and even when that’s due to insane roles on the GM’s part, it’s scary. Knowing that my character could die, especially if this guy was higher level than us, I decided that Alehandra still would insist that this evil man had to die. So, my character healed up the party and started the attack against him again. By a wonder we succeeded! My character is so energized about it. Now if we can just get these rescued people out of here, we’ll have it made.
Talia, the kick-ass swords-genasi-woman, has a just found out about a meeting arranged with her superior at work. She’s busy wondering what she could have done wrong lately, though it’s more likely that they’ll be commending her on getting Dremere to turn himself in and getting him to join the watch than wanting to punish her for something… maybe another job that they’re having trouble with? Also, her date with a Dwarven priest has been postponed, which means she may end up choosing Dremere accidently, even if as a guy he’s all wrong for her. Mind you, the dwarf did mention that it was clan matters calling him back… I’d hate to not give him a fair chance due to family concerns.
Rapture, the cheerleader sorceress, may be having the “it’s not you, it’s me” talk with her boyfriend… which is surprising in that it’s not Rapture dumping him, but him dumping her. Not that this relationship has been a match made in heaven by any means. He got out of a bad relationship about a year ago, and hasn’t really gotten on well since. And right now, Rapture seems pretty damned perfect since she’s a nympho who he can actually talk to about metaphysical stuff. The real problem is that his old fiancé is still holding a torch for him and trying to ruin the relationship. She’s smearing Rapture’s reputation by calling her a whore, and her boyfriend just made the situation worse by getting drunk and “buying” her away from her boss for an evening. On the other hand, I suppose she has just cause. Not only did Rapture steal her guy, but she also smashed the girl verbally at a party, before she knew who she was. In fact, if memory serves me, she told the girl that while Rapture’s dress may have been bought by her boyfriend, that at least she hadn’t needed her father to buy her a date. Yeah… A great smack-down, considering I had no idea who she was at the time. **Sigh** Good times, good times.
I don’t have my new brothel owner finished yet, but as I won’t get a chance to play her for a few more weeks, I can work on finishing it.
I will be putting a few of the pictures I’ve drawn up soon… I do give everybody some warning though. I’m only a hobby artist at the best of times. On the writing front, I am doing Julnowrimo, but as of Day Three, I hadn’t gotten a chance to do any writing yet. Not that I expected much more, since I knew that this week was going to be insane. I can’t wait to start writing tomorrow though… hopefully some before my game (yes, more D&D. This time I’m playing a catgirl Battle Dancer named Mmrumbra or ‘Rum for short) and definitely some afterwards!
Posted in Blogs on July 4th, 2010 by B.A. Matthews | | 6 Comments »
Yesterday as my husband was driving me to work, I heard about the worst movie ever on the “ready to be produced” list… Apparently, unwilling to stop at ruining Alice in Wonderland for everyone, Tim Burton has said that one of the projects he’s looking at is the Disney Classic, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Apparently he wants to make some changes to it, and honestly, while changes to an old idea can revitalize it, the changes proposed turn my stomach.
Apparently the ‘honourable’ Tim Burton has decided that the problem with an old story like Snow White isn’t the pretty, stupid girl, the evil wicked stepmother or the prince once again stepping out to save a woman too dumb to know that she is a D-I-D (Damsel-In-Distress). It’s that there are no dragons in it (why is it always a dragon? Are Hollywood roads today filled with dirty men on the streets holding signs saying “Have Dragon, Will Travel”?) and that there are dwarfs. Let’s focus on that for a moment now, shall we? Tim Burton has no problem producing a kid’s show about Necrophilia, (Corpse Bride, anyone), but he does have a problem with Midgets?
Seriously though, Tim Burton has gone on record as saying he wants Burglars instead of Dwarves. Hmm, Men in black outfits doing impossible high rise dexterous moves… I going to go out on a limb here and suggest that what Tim Burton is thinking of isn’t a burglar. Not a burglar, you say? What else could be thinking of? Well, what other popular ‘criminal’ character type dresses in black, operates best in the darkness and has few qualms about other people’s property and doesn’t tend to hold society’s morals in high regard? Yep, I think you know what I’m talking about. Tim Burton wants to do “Snow White and the Seven Ninja”. I can only imagine that he used his rolodex of popular and over-used ideas to come up with this one.
And what exactly is the problem with dwarves anyway? It’s not like we’re taking about the Travelocity-type Garden Gnomes here. We’re talking about Tough as Nails Dwarves. Perhaps the two words just don’t fit together in his vocabulary. I mean, come on… edgy and dwarf? How could you even work with a ridiculous idea like that right?
I can only assume that Tim Burton has never heard of the Roleplaying game, Shadowrun.
For those of you who don’t know, Shadowrun is an edgy futuristic role-playing game set in the 2050’s and on. In it, Science has continued to advance and move forward at it’s current breakneck pace, but Magic also returned to the world, creating new magical problems as well. Magic isn’t the be all/end all, but neither is Science, leaving the two sitting snug while their respective proponents to growl that “mine is better than yours”. Humanity has branched off into 5 major races. Human, Elf, Dwarf, Orc and Troll. And trust me, the Dwarfs in this game are about as likely to sing and whistle while they work as any other New Yorker. What they are likely to do is to fill you full of holes if you call them “Little People”. Here is a Shadowrun dwarf.
Dwarf Street Sam
Does this scream “cuddle” to you? No. In fact, I see a shorter than average man, who’s honestly led a hard life dealing with constant racism and has finally had enough.
Personally, I’d take out the mining, perhaps making them a retired mercenary company living in the woods. It may be a cliché way to change it, but if they insist on making them battle a dragon, at least then it would explain why they know how to fight. On a final note to Mr. Burton before I put this topic aside… Johnny Depp may be a fine actor and wonderful at playing delightfully insane yet suave characters, but if I have to sit through an hour and a half of him playing Dopey, I will be severely disappointed.
On a secondary note, I came to a conclusion about the Twilight book series yesterday as well. My husband commented that Bella was a stalker… Having read the first two books (and not hearing anything different from fans of the other two), Bella does not have the traits of a stalker. Edward, on the other hand, does (what else can you say about the behavior of watching somebody from outside their bedroom window and then creeping in after they’re asleep and cuddling with them until a few minutes before they wake up, leaving the person to wake up to their alarm?). Bella, if I had to name her psychosis and obsession would probably be best fit by Stockholm Syndrome, which is a condition seen in terrorist situations, where the victim becomes emotionally attached to one of their tormentors. This feeling can lead to dependency on the object of their obsession and feelings similar to love.
I have to admit, I may not be a fan of Mrs. Meyers books, but she does know how to make her characters have a creepy, “2-Dimensional, psych-case” feel to them.
Posted in Blogs on June 8th, 2010 by B.A. Matthews | | 4 Comments »
