Gym:
Chest, Shoulder's, Triceps, Core.
Emphasis on Shoulders.
Swim:
300 Warm Up
5 x 300 free @ 4:15
8 x 50 kick IM Order @ 1:05
400 Pull
5 x 100 free @ 1:30
100 Warm Down
Total: 3200 yards
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Today's Plan
Friday, February 26, 2010
It’s Official: Storyteller’s Playbook Business Cards are HERE!
Ha! Yeah, it’s true. I probably don’t actually NEED a Storyteller’s Playbook business card. I mean, so far as I can tell, not one single person has yet to log onto this darned blog besides me. DAMN YOU INTERNET! I mean, what’s wrong with you people? Can’t you people see that this is the AWESOMEST blog in the HISTORY of BLOGS?!
No. Scratch that.
This.
Is the awesomest blog.
In the history.
Of.
AWESOMENESS!!!
Whoa…
Anywho, as I was saying, I made myself a business card. So. When you look at it, please—PLEASE—note the address. That’s important. Tres, tres important. Muy importante! Because. If you have something to say, PLEASE DON’T POST IT IN THE COMMENTS!!!
Oh no! Noooooooooooooooooooo!
No no no no no!
Instead, what I want you to do is this: Hop your happy ass back over to your desk, pull out a pencil or a pen or a crayon or whatever the Hell it is that you kids are using these days. And write. Me. A damn LETTER!
That’s right. We’re goin’ OLD SKOOL at sp.blogspot.com!
And when you get done with that letter, I want you to seal that bad boy up. In an envelope. Then go over to your mama and beg a stamp, lick it, and then stick it. And if you want a letter back from me, don’t forget to put a Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope (SASE) inside, too! Don’t go cheap on me, you little bastards.
When you got all that crap ready, send out your letter to the following address:
DannoE
Master Storyteller, Storytellersplaybook.blogspot.com
Storyteller’s Playbook World Headquarters
Stratford, CT 06615
And now, without further ado, here’s my new business card. Read it and weep, suckers:
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Influences and Inspirations (Part 3)
“To be or not to be – that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And, by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep…”
~ Shakespeare, from Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
Alright, I’m gonna make a serious effort this week to finish up our discussion of my favorite storytelling influences. With that in mind, let’s jump straight into it, shall we?
First and foremost, R.A. Salvatore stands like a god above my Forgotten Realms game, The Sellswords of Luskan. I say this because, as the name implies, Sellswords is set primarily in Luskan, a place that we know about mostly because of Salvatore’s novels. His book The Pirate King describes in some detail Luskan’s descent into chaos, and I’ve used this description extensively in my game. Indeed, my game features Jarlaxle prominently and Athrogate to a lesser extent, and my PCs have had more than one run-in with other drow and drow-allies from Jarlaxle’s Bregan D’aerthe. More to the point, Captain Duedermont’s war with the Hosttower of the Arcane is a major plot point in my game—and honestly how could it not be with the game being primarily a Stronghold Quest focused on rebuilding the one-time City of Sails? Hell, we’re even working towards using a form Salvatore’s “Five Ships” system of government!
With all of that said, I feel like the physical place descriptions are really only the least bit of Salvatore’s influence on my gaming. Because despite the fact that Salvatore has a decided—and occasionally horrifying—tendency to break my First Rule of Avoiding Humanoid Invasions, there’s a lot to like in his writing. Most importantly, at least for me, he keeps the stakes small. Personal. I like that. With Salvatore, the Fate of the World is never at stake. Even when the host of Menzoberranzan is marching on Mithral Hall, Salvatore takes pains to keep it local and, yes, personal. And yeah, the drow invasion could mean the end for this one smallish clan of half-forgotten dwarves and their erstwhile allies, but in a larger sense, we realize that this is just a passing note in the larger tune of history. The Whole World is not in danger. In fact, even if disaster strikes—as it does in both Legacy and The Hunter’s Blades trilogy—we know that at least a few of our heroes are likely to survive and escape. Which, I think, actually serves to heighten the tension in the story. Because if the world was at stake, we’d be pretty sure that everything was gonna turn out okay. But if the world IS NOT at stake, then Bad Things can happen, and we’ll still survive to feel their consequences. That, to me, is an important story point.
I try to use it as often as I can.
As an aside, I’ve always wondered why some Bad Guys want to destroy the world and why other guys, usually Good Guys want to stop them. Especially since the Bad Guys are almost always charismatic leader types with a host of followers and a bunch of really cool toys whereas the Heroes are so often misunderstood loners who don’t actually seem to have all that much at stake in the fates of their fellow men. Consider, for example, the end of the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy finally gives it up to her guy Angel, only to have him turn into a total a-hole. Her life is wrecked, and much angst ensues, which is good. But then Angel (now Angelus) decides to Destroy The World! Say what? Why the Hell does Angelus want to destroy the world? The guy seems like he’s having a good time over there, no?
I’ve always thought that a more-logical ending to that season would have gone something like this:
Angelus (while opening the Hellmouth): Hahahaha! And now I will destroy the world! Forever!
Buffy: Good. No more slings and arrows of outrageous fortune! Adieu! T’is better to die, to sleep. Perchance to dream!
Angelus: Uh… what?
Buffy: I said, ‘Do it!’ pretty boy! What do I care? My life sucks anyway. All these a-holes hate me, you hate me, my mom’s pissed at me, school sucks, my friends suck… Do it already!
Angelus: But I… uh…
Buffy: Go on! (shakes her head) Clown.
Angelus: Ummm… Crap! How do I turn this thing off?
Buffy: Turn it off? What?! Get away from that thing!
Angelus: But, but… (starts futzing around with the “end of the world” machine) There are so many great things about this world! Like blood. And sex! And blood! And sex! I mean…
Buffy (Draws Sword): No! I won’t let you stop it. I WANT TO DIE!
Angelus (Draws Sword): But I DON’T want to die! My life is AWESOME right now! (Aside) Man, this was a STUPID freakin’ plan…
They fight. End as originally shown.
Heh.
Y’know, I’ve got one more thing to say about Salvatore before we move on: What is up with all of those damned humanoid invasions?! It’s like Brian Wood with the blond girls and attack helicopters. I mean, come on! Barbarians and goblinkin both in The Crystal Shard, the drow in Siege of Darkness, orcs and more orcs in The Hunter’s Blades trilogy, even more orcs in The Orc King, even more goblins (much, much more!) in The DemonWars books, and—the worst, most egregious violation of the First Rule of Avoiding Humanoid Invasions of all time—the fracking Yuuzhan Vong in Vector Prime! The Yuuzhan freakin’ Vong! Extra-galactic bio-terrorists from beyond the edge of space! In STAR WARS!
Seriously? Ugh. Just… ugh.
Some of those I can forgive, but Vector Prime was a crime against nature.
Next on my list of influences is Laurel K. Hamilton. I really liked maybe the first ten or so of her Anita Blake books, and indeed, I find myself incorporating more specific ideas from that series into my games than ideas from any other single source. In particular, Ms. Hamilton makes interesting and creative use of necromancy, use that’s fairly easy to model with the Fourth Edition rule set, especially if you have access to the Monster Builder via Insider. For example, I used a homebrew version of a necrotic naga taken from the werewolf biker gang in Obsidian Butterfly as one of the main baddies in a game that recently concluded. We’d been looking for a certain PC’s brother, and when we found him, it turned out that—like the poor victims in Obsidian Butterfly—the brother had been sewn living into a giant naga-like undead monstrosity. As with Ms. Blake, in our game wackiness ensued.
After Anita Blake, I’ll mention J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, but not for the reasons you’re thinking. I mean, yeah, D&D was initially based on Tolkien’s fantasy world, so at a certain level there’s no way around listing The Hobbit as an important influence. And that’s fine. But really, the reason to bring up Tolkien in this spot is that he was a master of writing journey fiction. You know what I’m saying? Sometimes the setting IS the story. The reason that the characters exist is so that they can travel the world and show it off to the reader. And yes, the plot—the whole purpose of the story in general—is to give the characters a chance to go out and explore interesting places, thereby taking us as readers out of our every day lives. The Hobbit (or There And Back Again as it’s also correctly called) is an example of this kind of storytelling at its very finest. Another example of the same kind of thing is Frank L. Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. We could even include Peter Pan or Where the Wild Things Are on this list if we’re willing to buy into the idea of a child’s imagination as a destination worth visiting.
One of the real tricks of being a successful long-term Dungeon Master, I think, is learning to balance the need for travel that’s inherent in the game’s structure with the need for your players to feel like their characters are rooted in the world around them. When I plot out my games, I try to stay focused on the reality that my players are playing because playing gives them a chance to step however briefly outside of themselves and their real-world lives. They already know what the real world looks like. They come to D&D—and specifically to the Forgotten Realms—to get away from that and into something else. Something different. Something weirder and spookier and more dangerous and more freakin’ fun. So yeah, they want to go to the Shadowfell. And the Feywild. And the Astral Sea. And even down into the City of Brass. And as a DM, it’s up to me to find reasons to take them there. It’s up to me to make those places real. Stories like The Hobbit and The Wizard of Oz provide a template for how to do that.
As another aside, the thing that makes online D&D—and specifically Play-by-Post—so awesome is that time is not a constraint. We can afford to get a little closer to the source material. I mean, look, Tolkien had a bit of tendency to let it all hang out when it came to his descriptions. The man might spend two pages on the weather and another three describing a particularly enticing bit of forest-glade. But when he was finished, those places were REAL. You knew them. You’d LIVED in them. However, when we play around a table top, this kind of description becomes a necessary casualty of the game. No one wants to listen to ten minutes of some jackass DM reading his homebrew forest-glade description. Table top D&D is about discussion. Interaction. Friendship. It’s not about one guy telling a story, and there’s nothing wrong with that. PbP, however, is an entirely different animal. Since a simple back-and-forth is all but impossible, upfront description becomes necessity rather than luxury. I mean, my players can’t ask me rapid fire questions like, “What do I see?” or “What are those guys wearing?” In PbP, that sort of thing is liable to take a week. So if I want to make it real, bottom line, I have to take the time to tell the guys what they are experiencing up front. I have to paint the picture with my words.
That can be a virtue if we embrace the medium for what it is. PbP is a storytelling medium as real and as vibrant as any other. It’s just a little more interactive than most.
And… crap. We’re almost 2000 words in, and I’m still only about halfway through my list of influences. We’ll have to come back to it again next week. But I promise that I’m getting to the point. Eventually.
Until next week, stay safe!
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
SB Nation Reporting Akbar to be New Ole Miss Mascot
I didn’t realize this, but apparently Ole Miss caved to obvious PC political pressure and retired Colonel Reb, their mascot, in 2003. So now the school is looking for a new mascot and—unfortunately—letting the students have a say in who that mascot will be. Yes, the lead vote getter is none other than Admiral Ackbar, one time commander of the Star Wars rebel alliance fleet.
So… first Lane Kiffin and now Admiral Akbar. What in the world is going on in the SEC?
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Monday, February 22, 2010
Book Review: Mother of Lies by David Duncan
I have a long commute. One way that I pass the time is—obviously—by catching up with my Dungeon Mastering or D&D character work. The other thing that I do a lot is read. Last week I read three books. My favorite was Mother of Lies by David Duncan.
Storyteller’s Playbook Official Book Review: Mother of Lies by David Duncan
David Duncan is one of my favorite pulp fantasy authors. His stuff is consistently tight, well-plotted fiction, and for that reason it rarely disappoints. Lies is the second of a two-book set begun with Children of Chaos, a book which for some reason the Sci Fi Channel picked as an “essential read.” Whatever that means. I suppose it’s a marketing gimmick, and if so then it was successful in the sense that I got the book and read it. ‘Course I got it from my local library, so no money changed hands. But still…
Anyway, the first book, Children of Chaos, follows the three sons and one daughter of the doge of the fabled city of Celebre
I generally don’t like end-of-the-world-type fiction, especially when it involves overt manipulation by the gods and/or the hands of Destiny, but in this case I’ll make an exception. In Lies, Duncan Duncan
Sunday, February 21, 2010
A Week of Training Down
Good week of training this week. I'm tired, but I feel like this was the first really good week I've had this year. I took a long off-season, which was awesome, but now I've got to come back. Which is work. So...
Monday: 18 miles on the bike
Tuesday: Off
Wednesday: Off
Thursday: Gym - Back, Core, Quads, Biceps
Friday: Swim - 2000 yards
Saturday: Short Run / Swim - 2000 yards
Sunday: Medium Run - 5 miles
92.8 points for the week. Not bad, right?
Monday: 18 miles on the bike
Tuesday: Off
Wednesday: Off
Thursday: Gym - Back, Core, Quads, Biceps
Friday: Swim - 2000 yards
Saturday: Short Run / Swim - 2000 yards
Sunday: Medium Run - 5 miles
92.8 points for the week. Not bad, right?
Dinosaur State Park!
The family and I are headed out to Connecticut's Dinosaur State Park today. I love dinosaurs. My favorite is the Ankylosaurus, aka Macetail Behemoth (Lvl 7 Soldier).
The Monster Manual says that some orcs train Macetails to act as war machines, and I've always wanted to take advantage of that and never have. I think it'd be way cool to have a party of PCs fight a platoon of orc dinosaur cavalry mounted on macetails. I figure the orc would rig some kind of fighting platform atop the macetails, kind of like a Heavy Chariot. Sound cool, right?
The Monster Manual says that some orcs train Macetails to act as war machines, and I've always wanted to take advantage of that and never have. I think it'd be way cool to have a party of PCs fight a platoon of orc dinosaur cavalry mounted on macetails. I figure the orc would rig some kind of fighting platform atop the macetails, kind of like a Heavy Chariot. Sound cool, right?
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Influences and Inspirations (Part 2)
“Some places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwrecks.”
~Robert Louis Stevenson
Last week we started talking about influences and inspirations, and I’ll be honest: talking about Star Wars got completely away from me. It happens. This is my second weekly column, and the thing I learned about it last time is that there’s no need to rush. When you get into a groove, go with it. So that’s what I did, and as a result, we ended up getting about three pages of Star Wars. And nothing else. Which is not to say that that was the plan or even that I don’t have other influences besides George Lucas. ‘Cause that ain’t true at all. In fact, I find the unedited Lucas to be every bit as plodding, wooden, and overly sentimental as even the harshest of his critics make him out to be, but that doesn’t change the fact that his first trilogy was consciously built around a story model that’s imminently useful to Dungeon Masters the world over. And yeah, Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back are both great, wonderful movies. But with that said, in my own games, we’re not out there trying to overthrow the evil empire every week. In fact, quite the opposite is usually true.
So where do I get my ideas? Well, the short answer is lots of places. Let’s start with one of my favorite failures.
If you don’t remember or never knew, CrossGen Comics executed perhaps the single greatest independent comic publisher flameout in the history of the medium. The company exploded onto the scene from parts unknown some time in 1998, publishing a full slate of full-color comics, complete with a massive shared-world universe on the scale of those currently on offer from Marvel, DC, or even Wizards of the Coast via Dragonlance or the Forgotten Realms. At the height of the its power, CrossGen published several of my favorite titles, including a clever spy spoof (Kiss Kiss Bang Band—no relation to the movie of the same name), a fascinating fantasy genre piece with an appealing female lead who was neither slut nor lesbian nor always running around in a wet T-Shirt or chainmail bikini (Barbara Kesel’s* Meridian), one of the very few decent sci fi comics ever to make it into full color release (Negation, which I think was ostensibly the company’s primary title), and finally, the comics license for R.A. Salvatore’s Demon Wars property, which in my humble opinion was MUCH better in its comic form than it was as a straight prose-piece. But like I said, CrossGen flared out in a supernova of creative brilliance, having outrun and out-produced its nascent financing by a factor of ten or more.
So why bring it up?
Well, as part of their full-scale rollout, CrossGen had none other than Barbara Kesel write up the company’s submissions guidelines, a task that she must have taken to with gusto because the result she produced was by far the most useful guide I’ve ever seen for a new would-be comic producer trying to learn to pitch his ideas. I regret that I don’t remember all of it, and alas the original page itself is no longer extant, but from what I recall, Ms. Kesel outlined three basic rules for pitches. Of those, two have stuck with me, and I’ve never violated them for any reason:
1. Never pitch a story that involves any kind of humanoid invasion.
2. Never pitch a story that involves a war between Heaven and Hell.
Folks, that’s good advice.
Now look, to be clear, I trusted Ms. Kesel’s advice instinctively the first time I ever saw it. But it wasn’t until later—when I owned my own small press comic company—that I learned WHY it was good advice. The reason is simple: those two ideas have been beaten to death. You’re never gonna find anything new down either of those roads. Better men than you have walked them and mapped them out in great detail. There’s nothing there for you. Nothing at all. You’re much better off to just steer clear. With luck, you’ll plot your own course down a different, less-traveled road.
Seriously, my little company was only in existence for about 18 months, but in that time we must have taken at least a hundred pitches from folks, and in NEARLY EVERY SINGLE ONE we saw either an invasion by some ancient evil with its army of evil humanoid minions, or a war between Heaven and Hell, or more likely, both in the same story! And the really odd thing about all of those identical pitches was this: in damned near every case, the guy submitting the idea started his cover letter with some variation of the statement, “I want to pitch you the idea for a story I’ve had in my head ever since I was 4 years old!” All of which brings me to my own, third, basic rule of writing a story, a rule that is 100% mine but which owes its existence to Ms. Kesel and her oh-so-helpful CrossGen submissions guidelines:
3. Never pitch a story that you made up when you were 4 years old.
Seriously. You’re older now. Wiser. Smarter even. You see the world differently, and it’s a good bet that your target audience will see the world differently, too. So it’s time to move on. Do yourself a favor and try it. See the world through your ADULT eyes.
Now look, I recognize that DMing is more than a little different than pitching a comic story. As a DM, you are the all-knowing, all-seeing, ultimate power in the universe. That’s heady stuff. And as such, your players, should they choose to stick around, will have no choice but go down whatever road you lead them. But this is not a reason to endlessly rehash the same bargain basement plotlines that’ve been clanking around in the D&D dungeons for the last thirty years. Or, to put it another way, yes, you can abuse your players with the same old crap time after time, but that doesn’t make it right.
So then. How to come up with something innovative?
In his book, Characters and Viewpoint, author Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game) outlines a plotting technique that I personally use all the time. He starts with a question: “What can go wrong?” And then he lays out a series of possibilities, no less than seven, as answers to his question. His theory is that the first five or six ideas you come up with are likely to be the obvious ones, so that you’re not really into the good stuff until you get to idea number seven. In my own experience, I’ve found this to be correct with the important caveat that sometimes the obvious things are useful too so long as they’re incorporated with some kind of creative twist.
I’ll give you an example:
In my game The Sellswords of Luskan, my PCs have taken a few decidedly anti-social turns, so that at this point they’re actively involved in the slave trade. After one particularly climactic battle, they took treasure in the form of slaves. About 20 to be exact, dwarves and spellscarred children, with a total value that I set arbitrarily at 5,000 golds. So... what could go wrong?
1. Well, you just can’t frog-march dwarf slaves through a city. Even in Luskan, that’s going to draw attention, and most dwarves are pugnacious and combatitve. So, clearly the PCs are setting themselves up to get attacked by an angry dwarf. Let’s call him Thoradin.
2. The PCs could lose the fight.
3. The fight could inadvertently start a riot.
4. The riot could set the city on fire!
5. The PCs could be followed back to their lair by dwarf sympathizers who then call down the paladins of Moradin on them.
6. The PCs might win the fight, only to discover that Thoradin had been one of the most popular people in city. Thus they become outcasts, even in Luskan.
7. Similarly, the PCs could win but then discover that Thoradin was the only man who’d been able to successfully run the goblin blockade outside the city. With him dead, there’s now no one left alive who can get food into Luskan. Mass starvation ensues!
8. Again similarly, the PCs could win the fight but then have the Shield of Mirabar lodge a formal protest, forcing the PCs to defend their honor against a Mirabarran champion in Luskan’s dreaded Grand Arena.
9. Or maybe Jarlaxle and his band strike quickly, using the chaos of the pitched battle/street riot to turn the tables and enslave the slavers. The drow then carry off the whole lot—sellswords, dwarves, and spellscarred children—into the lightless Hell of the Underdark.
10. Etc, ad naseum. Rinse and repeat as necessary.
In the event, I’ll admit that I was sorely tempted to use #5. However, after giving the matter some thought, I felt that #1 was so obvious that I simply had to use it. First, my PCs had made a deliberate choice to engage in slavery, and since that was a decidedly evil choice, I felt that it needed to have immediate and public consequences. By using #1, I established that slavery is lucrative but also extremely dangerous, an idea that I’ve come back to several times since. Because look, at a certain level my PCs set themselves against the world. That’s fine, but the world needs to put up a fight. And then, too, a lot of the other ideas were contingent on #1 occurring, so to set them up, I had to start with the battle with Thoradin.
After that I ran #8 and then #7, setting up both a gladiatorial contest that the players enjoyed a great deal and then a chance for the PCs to do some good for the city by relieving its starvation. To a certain extent, this served to balance their reputation within the city, which was good. I don’t mind a little evil in my campaign, but I also don’t want the game to turn into a truly chaotic mix of deliberate murder, slavery, and human sacrifice. Too much of a good thing is indeed too much.
And so there you have it. A few basic guidelines on what’s not likely to work well and a technique that I use a lot to come up with alternatives. Not bad, especially considering that the source was a defunct comic company of dubious reputation. Next week, I’ll try to wrap up this discussion of influences and inspirations, but I don’t want to make any promises. Until then, let’s just see how it goes.
*: In addition to her rather extensive CrossGen portfolio, Barbara Kesel is probably best known for her work on the DC titles Hawk and Dove and Elseworld’s Finest: Batgirl and Supergirl. Within the industry, her editing credits are more extensive than her writing credits, including a pair of Hellboy TPB collections and quite a bit of other, very innovative mainstream stuff.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
Last week we started talking about influences and inspirations, and I’ll be honest: talking about Star Wars got completely away from me. It happens. This is my second weekly column, and the thing I learned about it last time is that there’s no need to rush. When you get into a groove, go with it. So that’s what I did, and as a result, we ended up getting about three pages of Star Wars. And nothing else. Which is not to say that that was the plan or even that I don’t have other influences besides George Lucas. ‘Cause that ain’t true at all. In fact, I find the unedited Lucas to be every bit as plodding, wooden, and overly sentimental as even the harshest of his critics make him out to be, but that doesn’t change the fact that his first trilogy was consciously built around a story model that’s imminently useful to Dungeon Masters the world over. And yeah, Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back are both great, wonderful movies. But with that said, in my own games, we’re not out there trying to overthrow the evil empire every week. In fact, quite the opposite is usually true.
So where do I get my ideas? Well, the short answer is lots of places. Let’s start with one of my favorite failures.
If you don’t remember or never knew, CrossGen Comics executed perhaps the single greatest independent comic publisher flameout in the history of the medium. The company exploded onto the scene from parts unknown some time in 1998, publishing a full slate of full-color comics, complete with a massive shared-world universe on the scale of those currently on offer from Marvel, DC, or even Wizards of the Coast via Dragonlance or the Forgotten Realms. At the height of the its power, CrossGen published several of my favorite titles, including a clever spy spoof (Kiss Kiss Bang Band—no relation to the movie of the same name), a fascinating fantasy genre piece with an appealing female lead who was neither slut nor lesbian nor always running around in a wet T-Shirt or chainmail bikini (Barbara Kesel’s* Meridian), one of the very few decent sci fi comics ever to make it into full color release (Negation, which I think was ostensibly the company’s primary title), and finally, the comics license for R.A. Salvatore’s Demon Wars property, which in my humble opinion was MUCH better in its comic form than it was as a straight prose-piece. But like I said, CrossGen flared out in a supernova of creative brilliance, having outrun and out-produced its nascent financing by a factor of ten or more.
So why bring it up?
Well, as part of their full-scale rollout, CrossGen had none other than Barbara Kesel write up the company’s submissions guidelines, a task that she must have taken to with gusto because the result she produced was by far the most useful guide I’ve ever seen for a new would-be comic producer trying to learn to pitch his ideas. I regret that I don’t remember all of it, and alas the original page itself is no longer extant, but from what I recall, Ms. Kesel outlined three basic rules for pitches. Of those, two have stuck with me, and I’ve never violated them for any reason:
1. Never pitch a story that involves any kind of humanoid invasion.
2. Never pitch a story that involves a war between Heaven and Hell.
Folks, that’s good advice.
Now look, to be clear, I trusted Ms. Kesel’s advice instinctively the first time I ever saw it. But it wasn’t until later—when I owned my own small press comic company—that I learned WHY it was good advice. The reason is simple: those two ideas have been beaten to death. You’re never gonna find anything new down either of those roads. Better men than you have walked them and mapped them out in great detail. There’s nothing there for you. Nothing at all. You’re much better off to just steer clear. With luck, you’ll plot your own course down a different, less-traveled road.
Seriously, my little company was only in existence for about 18 months, but in that time we must have taken at least a hundred pitches from folks, and in NEARLY EVERY SINGLE ONE we saw either an invasion by some ancient evil with its army of evil humanoid minions, or a war between Heaven and Hell, or more likely, both in the same story! And the really odd thing about all of those identical pitches was this: in damned near every case, the guy submitting the idea started his cover letter with some variation of the statement, “I want to pitch you the idea for a story I’ve had in my head ever since I was 4 years old!” All of which brings me to my own, third, basic rule of writing a story, a rule that is 100% mine but which owes its existence to Ms. Kesel and her oh-so-helpful CrossGen submissions guidelines:
3. Never pitch a story that you made up when you were 4 years old.
Seriously. You’re older now. Wiser. Smarter even. You see the world differently, and it’s a good bet that your target audience will see the world differently, too. So it’s time to move on. Do yourself a favor and try it. See the world through your ADULT eyes.
Now look, I recognize that DMing is more than a little different than pitching a comic story. As a DM, you are the all-knowing, all-seeing, ultimate power in the universe. That’s heady stuff. And as such, your players, should they choose to stick around, will have no choice but go down whatever road you lead them. But this is not a reason to endlessly rehash the same bargain basement plotlines that’ve been clanking around in the D&D dungeons for the last thirty years. Or, to put it another way, yes, you can abuse your players with the same old crap time after time, but that doesn’t make it right.
So then. How to come up with something innovative?
In his book, Characters and Viewpoint, author Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game) outlines a plotting technique that I personally use all the time. He starts with a question: “What can go wrong?” And then he lays out a series of possibilities, no less than seven, as answers to his question. His theory is that the first five or six ideas you come up with are likely to be the obvious ones, so that you’re not really into the good stuff until you get to idea number seven. In my own experience, I’ve found this to be correct with the important caveat that sometimes the obvious things are useful too so long as they’re incorporated with some kind of creative twist.
I’ll give you an example:
In my game The Sellswords of Luskan, my PCs have taken a few decidedly anti-social turns, so that at this point they’re actively involved in the slave trade. After one particularly climactic battle, they took treasure in the form of slaves. About 20 to be exact, dwarves and spellscarred children, with a total value that I set arbitrarily at 5,000 golds. So... what could go wrong?
1. Well, you just can’t frog-march dwarf slaves through a city. Even in Luskan, that’s going to draw attention, and most dwarves are pugnacious and combatitve. So, clearly the PCs are setting themselves up to get attacked by an angry dwarf. Let’s call him Thoradin.
2. The PCs could lose the fight.
3. The fight could inadvertently start a riot.
4. The riot could set the city on fire!
5. The PCs could be followed back to their lair by dwarf sympathizers who then call down the paladins of Moradin on them.
6. The PCs might win the fight, only to discover that Thoradin had been one of the most popular people in city. Thus they become outcasts, even in Luskan.
7. Similarly, the PCs could win but then discover that Thoradin was the only man who’d been able to successfully run the goblin blockade outside the city. With him dead, there’s now no one left alive who can get food into Luskan. Mass starvation ensues!
8. Again similarly, the PCs could win the fight but then have the Shield of Mirabar lodge a formal protest, forcing the PCs to defend their honor against a Mirabarran champion in Luskan’s dreaded Grand Arena.
9. Or maybe Jarlaxle and his band strike quickly, using the chaos of the pitched battle/street riot to turn the tables and enslave the slavers. The drow then carry off the whole lot—sellswords, dwarves, and spellscarred children—into the lightless Hell of the Underdark.
10. Etc, ad naseum. Rinse and repeat as necessary.
In the event, I’ll admit that I was sorely tempted to use #5. However, after giving the matter some thought, I felt that #1 was so obvious that I simply had to use it. First, my PCs had made a deliberate choice to engage in slavery, and since that was a decidedly evil choice, I felt that it needed to have immediate and public consequences. By using #1, I established that slavery is lucrative but also extremely dangerous, an idea that I’ve come back to several times since. Because look, at a certain level my PCs set themselves against the world. That’s fine, but the world needs to put up a fight. And then, too, a lot of the other ideas were contingent on #1 occurring, so to set them up, I had to start with the battle with Thoradin.
After that I ran #8 and then #7, setting up both a gladiatorial contest that the players enjoyed a great deal and then a chance for the PCs to do some good for the city by relieving its starvation. To a certain extent, this served to balance their reputation within the city, which was good. I don’t mind a little evil in my campaign, but I also don’t want the game to turn into a truly chaotic mix of deliberate murder, slavery, and human sacrifice. Too much of a good thing is indeed too much.
And so there you have it. A few basic guidelines on what’s not likely to work well and a technique that I use a lot to come up with alternatives. Not bad, especially considering that the source was a defunct comic company of dubious reputation. Next week, I’ll try to wrap up this discussion of influences and inspirations, but I don’t want to make any promises. Until then, let’s just see how it goes.
*: In addition to her rather extensive CrossGen portfolio, Barbara Kesel is probably best known for her work on the DC titles Hawk and Dove and Elseworld’s Finest: Batgirl and Supergirl. Within the industry, her editing credits are more extensive than her writing credits, including a pair of Hellboy TPB collections and quite a bit of other, very innovative mainstream stuff.
Influences and Inspirations (Part 1)
“Mediocre writers borrow; great writer’s steal.”
--T.S. Eliot
As storytellers, we all want our work to be unique and original. Even in a game that’s as necessarily dependent on outside sources and established mythology as is Dungeons and Dragons, the fact is that there are times that we want to take our players by surprise. We want to innovate. We want to find a common theme or trope and turn it on its head. And, y’know, that’s good. It’s good to want to get outside the norm, to want to push the envelope, to want to, as Simon Cowell so often puts it, take something established and “make it your own.” And yet, even as we acknowledge that desire to be different, to stand our from the crowd, I think it’s worthwhile to take a minute to realize that without some seminal works from which we all draw inspiration as a community, well, there probably wouldn’t even be a crowd from which we could stand out. Because before you can innovate, I think you have to understand the basics. You have to be able to see the common forms and have a feel for how and why they work. And then, too, I think it’s important for storytellers to understand their own motivations and internal tics, and those are often formed as a function of our innate tendency to imitate our favorite works. I don’t say that’s a bad thing, merely that making the best use of our influences depends in large part on understand what those influences are and why. To that end, I’d like to take a little time to go through some of my personal influences, looking a bit at what I liked and why, and if nothing else, you can at least take some potential recommendations for your own future reading.
No discussion of influences of any kind—much less storytelling influences—can start for me with anything except the movie Star Wars. I saw Star Wars for the first time when I was four, and I’ve been a confirmed Sci Fi and Fantasy junkie ever since. And, y’know, Star Wars is a great influence for a D&D campaign because, bottom line, everything you could ever hope to see in your own game is laid out clearly right there in perfect detail. Epic hero? Classic bad-ass villain? Princess in distress? Myriad exotic locales serving as both background and character? Effective role-based party structure? Heck, that movie even has a few obvious skill challenges, complete with at least one titanic skill challenge failure! I mean, how else would you describe that escape from the Death Star?
Skill Challenge: Escape from the Death Star
Level X, Complexity 5 (Requires 12 successes before 3 failures)
Primary Skills: Stealth, Athletics, Bluff, Perception
Secondary Skills: Acrobatics, Streetwise, Intimidate, Insight
Success: Our heroes get away clean
Failure: The heroes have to fight their way out, and the Empire tracks them back to their home base
For me, there are basically two lessons to take away from an examination of Star Wars as an influence on a D&D campaign. The first is an understanding of the inherent structure. To a certain extent, both the movie and the game follow the monomyth structure, perhaps better known as “The Hero’s Journey.” If you’ve never heard of it, author Joseph Campbell described it this way in his landmark book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (from Wikipedia):
“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
Sounds familiar, no? It ought to. The Hero’s Journey is one of the most common storytelling structures in western fiction. You see it in everything from the myth of Hercules (back when he was called Heracles) to the marketing of NFL quarterback Brett Favre. Seriously, stop me if you’ve heard this one: a good old boy from a backwater farm in Mississippi journeys to the mythical land of Green Bay, where he learns under the mystic sage Mike Holmgren, eventually leading his team to unheralded heights of greatness. In time, Favre is forced to go on without his fabled mentor, journeying alone with only his super-powered arm, his semi-divine status, and his inherent knowledge of the Great Game to guide him. Still, he passes new and greater tests, leads different teams to victory, and triumphs repeatedly against overwhelming odds and the ravages of age. Is there any doubt, then, that one day Favre will defeat Tiamat and ascend to take his place at the throne of his father atop Mount Olympus?
In fairness, though, I should point out that with the Fourth Edition, D&D has taken some substantial strides to distance itself from some of the basics of the monomyth. For example, where once I think D&D assumed that you started out life as a purely typical underpowered waif from a rural backwater, in today’s D&D you actually start the game as an established local champion working towards tangible and significant local objectives. These days, you never really start as one of the “common” people. Still, to the extent that the game has an inherent structure, that structure is The Hero’s Journey. You are expected to journey into fabled, magical lands, to overcome ever-increasing challenges, to grow via your accomplishments, and to eventually ascend to a kind of fabled, legendary status. You are expected to raise yourself above the level of the common man by your own works. And you will eventually either ascend to some kind of immortal godhood or simply ride off into obscurity, perhaps spending your days driving your tractor back in Mississippi.
Look, there’s nothing wrong with The Hero’s Journey. It works because it resonates powerfully with most people and because, to a certain extent, it plays up to our expectations. Who hasn’t spent their share of days toiling in obscurity, ever hoping for something more and greater? Really, isn’t this what drives most of us to play D&D? Maybe you’re satisfied with your life, and maybe you’re not, but either way, I think we all have days where we wish we were somebody else. And then, too, I think that stories are sometimes more comforting and occasionally more satisfying when they play off the way we expect them to. After all, real life is chaotic, brutish and occasionally mean. It’s nice, then, to have a part of life that’s predictable, rational, and sane. In today’s economy, I suspect we could all use a second helping of predictable rationality.
And yet, there’s obviously a breaking point. There’s a point at which predictable become too predictable, at which rational becomes boring. And so this is where we look to innovate by keeping an eye on the standard conventions. How? Well, let’s look at the tropes. The Hero:
- Is a common man
- Has a Mentor (i.e. Obi-Won Kenobi)
- Journeys
- Overcomes challenges
- Grows by these challenges
- Loses his Mentor
- Faces ever greater challenges
- Overcomes and eventually reaches legendary status
So then you can turn any one of those on its head and have a new and perhaps innovative story. At a minimum, you can catch your PCs off-guard for a while. For example, maybe your PCs are already world-famous celebrities, and the world expects them to triumph in the face of overwhelming odds despite their manifest unreadiness. Here, I picture Paris Hilton as a first level tempest fighter who’s expected to battle the numberless hordes of the Underdark as they ascend from their lightless homes below. Or maybe your PCs have a mentor that they respect and follow, only to discover that he’s jealous of their growing accomplishments. Can you imagine Star Wars with Obi-Won turning Sith and hunting the now-famous Luke after his success at the Battle of Yavin? Now that’s a game I’d like to DM!
And yet, the movie Star Wars has more to offer than merely an established story structure. Let’s look again at that failed Skills Challenge back on the Death Star. That failure might have been bad for our heroes in the short-run, but it was a totally awesome turn for the story. It upped the stakes immeasurably, setting up a climactic battle after which the world can never be the same again. As DMs, that’s the kind of moment that I think our campaigns ought to be geared towards creating. To that end, then, we have to not only prepare for failed skills challenges but I think even actively encourage them at times. Because a failed skills challenge sets up a beautifully for a disaster that changes the campaign. A failed skills challenge ups the stakes, complicates the story, and thus, ultimately helps draw our players more fully into their characters. Because, bottom line, it’s the act of overcoming challenges that makes the hero great. Thus, the greater the challenge—the worse things get in the story—the greater the Hero ultimately becomes.
So that’s it for this week. If you know what’s expected in your story, then you’ll know how to innovate in a way that’s surprising—or at least interesting. And if you realize that your players’ failures are a perfect ready-made excuse for upping the stakes in your campaign, then you’ll be ready to take advantage when they do something that’s totally unexpected—and maybe a little stupid. And yeah, it’s true. That’s a lot to take out of one story. But when the story’s as seminal to our common culture as Star Wars is, well, maybe that’s just what we ought to expect out of it. A phenomenally successful and popular story ought to be able to tell us something useful, no?
Next week we’ll take a look at some more of my favorite story influences and talk a little bit about setting and maybe a few my favorite stolen plot complications.
Until then, happy trails!
--T.S. Eliot
As storytellers, we all want our work to be unique and original. Even in a game that’s as necessarily dependent on outside sources and established mythology as is Dungeons and Dragons, the fact is that there are times that we want to take our players by surprise. We want to innovate. We want to find a common theme or trope and turn it on its head. And, y’know, that’s good. It’s good to want to get outside the norm, to want to push the envelope, to want to, as Simon Cowell so often puts it, take something established and “make it your own.” And yet, even as we acknowledge that desire to be different, to stand our from the crowd, I think it’s worthwhile to take a minute to realize that without some seminal works from which we all draw inspiration as a community, well, there probably wouldn’t even be a crowd from which we could stand out. Because before you can innovate, I think you have to understand the basics. You have to be able to see the common forms and have a feel for how and why they work. And then, too, I think it’s important for storytellers to understand their own motivations and internal tics, and those are often formed as a function of our innate tendency to imitate our favorite works. I don’t say that’s a bad thing, merely that making the best use of our influences depends in large part on understand what those influences are and why. To that end, I’d like to take a little time to go through some of my personal influences, looking a bit at what I liked and why, and if nothing else, you can at least take some potential recommendations for your own future reading.
No discussion of influences of any kind—much less storytelling influences—can start for me with anything except the movie Star Wars. I saw Star Wars for the first time when I was four, and I’ve been a confirmed Sci Fi and Fantasy junkie ever since. And, y’know, Star Wars is a great influence for a D&D campaign because, bottom line, everything you could ever hope to see in your own game is laid out clearly right there in perfect detail. Epic hero? Classic bad-ass villain? Princess in distress? Myriad exotic locales serving as both background and character? Effective role-based party structure? Heck, that movie even has a few obvious skill challenges, complete with at least one titanic skill challenge failure! I mean, how else would you describe that escape from the Death Star?
Skill Challenge: Escape from the Death Star
Level X, Complexity 5 (Requires 12 successes before 3 failures)
Primary Skills: Stealth, Athletics, Bluff, Perception
Secondary Skills: Acrobatics, Streetwise, Intimidate, Insight
Success: Our heroes get away clean
Failure: The heroes have to fight their way out, and the Empire tracks them back to their home base
For me, there are basically two lessons to take away from an examination of Star Wars as an influence on a D&D campaign. The first is an understanding of the inherent structure. To a certain extent, both the movie and the game follow the monomyth structure, perhaps better known as “The Hero’s Journey.” If you’ve never heard of it, author Joseph Campbell described it this way in his landmark book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (from Wikipedia):
“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
Sounds familiar, no? It ought to. The Hero’s Journey is one of the most common storytelling structures in western fiction. You see it in everything from the myth of Hercules (back when he was called Heracles) to the marketing of NFL quarterback Brett Favre. Seriously, stop me if you’ve heard this one: a good old boy from a backwater farm in Mississippi journeys to the mythical land of Green Bay, where he learns under the mystic sage Mike Holmgren, eventually leading his team to unheralded heights of greatness. In time, Favre is forced to go on without his fabled mentor, journeying alone with only his super-powered arm, his semi-divine status, and his inherent knowledge of the Great Game to guide him. Still, he passes new and greater tests, leads different teams to victory, and triumphs repeatedly against overwhelming odds and the ravages of age. Is there any doubt, then, that one day Favre will defeat Tiamat and ascend to take his place at the throne of his father atop Mount Olympus?
In fairness, though, I should point out that with the Fourth Edition, D&D has taken some substantial strides to distance itself from some of the basics of the monomyth. For example, where once I think D&D assumed that you started out life as a purely typical underpowered waif from a rural backwater, in today’s D&D you actually start the game as an established local champion working towards tangible and significant local objectives. These days, you never really start as one of the “common” people. Still, to the extent that the game has an inherent structure, that structure is The Hero’s Journey. You are expected to journey into fabled, magical lands, to overcome ever-increasing challenges, to grow via your accomplishments, and to eventually ascend to a kind of fabled, legendary status. You are expected to raise yourself above the level of the common man by your own works. And you will eventually either ascend to some kind of immortal godhood or simply ride off into obscurity, perhaps spending your days driving your tractor back in Mississippi.
Look, there’s nothing wrong with The Hero’s Journey. It works because it resonates powerfully with most people and because, to a certain extent, it plays up to our expectations. Who hasn’t spent their share of days toiling in obscurity, ever hoping for something more and greater? Really, isn’t this what drives most of us to play D&D? Maybe you’re satisfied with your life, and maybe you’re not, but either way, I think we all have days where we wish we were somebody else. And then, too, I think that stories are sometimes more comforting and occasionally more satisfying when they play off the way we expect them to. After all, real life is chaotic, brutish and occasionally mean. It’s nice, then, to have a part of life that’s predictable, rational, and sane. In today’s economy, I suspect we could all use a second helping of predictable rationality.
And yet, there’s obviously a breaking point. There’s a point at which predictable become too predictable, at which rational becomes boring. And so this is where we look to innovate by keeping an eye on the standard conventions. How? Well, let’s look at the tropes. The Hero:
- Is a common man
- Has a Mentor (i.e. Obi-Won Kenobi)
- Journeys
- Overcomes challenges
- Grows by these challenges
- Loses his Mentor
- Faces ever greater challenges
- Overcomes and eventually reaches legendary status
So then you can turn any one of those on its head and have a new and perhaps innovative story. At a minimum, you can catch your PCs off-guard for a while. For example, maybe your PCs are already world-famous celebrities, and the world expects them to triumph in the face of overwhelming odds despite their manifest unreadiness. Here, I picture Paris Hilton as a first level tempest fighter who’s expected to battle the numberless hordes of the Underdark as they ascend from their lightless homes below. Or maybe your PCs have a mentor that they respect and follow, only to discover that he’s jealous of their growing accomplishments. Can you imagine Star Wars with Obi-Won turning Sith and hunting the now-famous Luke after his success at the Battle of Yavin? Now that’s a game I’d like to DM!
And yet, the movie Star Wars has more to offer than merely an established story structure. Let’s look again at that failed Skills Challenge back on the Death Star. That failure might have been bad for our heroes in the short-run, but it was a totally awesome turn for the story. It upped the stakes immeasurably, setting up a climactic battle after which the world can never be the same again. As DMs, that’s the kind of moment that I think our campaigns ought to be geared towards creating. To that end, then, we have to not only prepare for failed skills challenges but I think even actively encourage them at times. Because a failed skills challenge sets up a beautifully for a disaster that changes the campaign. A failed skills challenge ups the stakes, complicates the story, and thus, ultimately helps draw our players more fully into their characters. Because, bottom line, it’s the act of overcoming challenges that makes the hero great. Thus, the greater the challenge—the worse things get in the story—the greater the Hero ultimately becomes.
So that’s it for this week. If you know what’s expected in your story, then you’ll know how to innovate in a way that’s surprising—or at least interesting. And if you realize that your players’ failures are a perfect ready-made excuse for upping the stakes in your campaign, then you’ll be ready to take advantage when they do something that’s totally unexpected—and maybe a little stupid. And yeah, it’s true. That’s a lot to take out of one story. But when the story’s as seminal to our common culture as Star Wars is, well, maybe that’s just what we ought to expect out of it. A phenomenally successful and popular story ought to be able to tell us something useful, no?
Next week we’ll take a look at some more of my favorite story influences and talk a little bit about setting and maybe a few my favorite stolen plot complications.
Until then, happy trails!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)