Reviews: The Dresden Files

You may or may not know this, but Changes, the newest book in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series, comes out on April 6^th.  In honor of this momentous event, I’m reviewing a pair of Dresden-related products this week, Butcher’s own original graphic novel (OGN) Welcome to the Jungle and the Sci Fi Channel original series The Dresden Files. 

In many ways, this week’s reviews are all about expectations.  This is to say that I was super-excited when I saw Welcome to the Jungle at the Westport library, but despite—or perhaps because of—my anticipation, the book itself was disappointing.  Meanwhile, I didn’t expect much from the TV show, but y’know, so far that’s been excellent.  But let’s start with the book:

Look, I really like Butcher’s prose.  He has an amazing grasp of Scene and Sequel structure that keeps his stories moving, and his work is terse, witty, and evocative in spots without ever being overwritten.  Plus, the man has a solid sense of humor and an utter reluctance to take himself seriously that I find both appealing and entertaining, a fact that’s doubly impressive considering that it never undermines his story’s inherent tension or drama.  If anything, the fact that our Hero is a little guy in a big world heightens the suspense.  After all, the world is rarely on the line, so that means that pretty much anything can happen.  Often, it does.

With that said, the witty prose just didn’t translate in Welcome to the Jungle.  Instead, I thought it was often redundant with the images in the book and generally lacking in the kind of cynical self-reflection that makes the Dresden novels so damned entertaining.  On top of that, the artist didn’t do my man any favors.  If you’re gonna write a book about a down-on-his-luck PI, then you have to make him look like he’s down on his luck.  You can’t simply draw him straight out of the superhero playbook and then surround him with beautiful and sexy role-players who look like they might start grooving on him at any moment.  That’s not the way the world works, nor is it the way the base novels portray their protagonist.  Because look: people hate the guy who gets the girls.  And in any event, our Hero Harry is definitely not that guy.  That’s not even how the story’s written.  But that’s the way it’s drawn, leading to all manner of unfortunate chaos, confusion, thematic dissonance.

Eh.  To tell the truth, I’ve seen this problem with a lot of the art out of the various Dabel Brothers’ adaptations.  With the Dabels, the story always looks like it came out of what I call the Top Cow House Style, a storytelling mode entirely dependent on fanboy lingerie fantasies and their occasional fangirl equivalents.  And again, that style can suit—sometimes.  For example, it worked wonders with the Anita Blake adaptations.  But it’s rarely appropriate to the subtler world of losers-made-good who tend to inhabit so many sci fi and fantasy genre stories. 

Case in point: the pic on the left is from Top Cow’s Aphrodite IX.  On the right is from the Dabels’ adaptation of Patricia Briggs Cry Wolf:

Oddly, where the graphic novel went wrong—and this despite Butcher’s personal involvement—the TV show got it right.  Why?  I think it’s because the TV show succeeds in making Harry Dresden look like Harry Dresden.  He’s a broke, down-on-his-luck working stiff, and the show goes to pains to show this.  For example, my man can’t afford a real magic staff, so he uses an old hockey stick.  Brilliant!  Different from the books but entirely appropriate given the character they’re trying to create.  Plus, Harry is a guy with a sordid past but a heart-of-gold.  Again, this is something that the show takes pains to show.  That, plus a heapin’ helpin’ of narrative wit and a smattering of plot drawn from the various early novels are more than enough to keep the TV show entertaining.

“So,” you’re thinking, “where I can I find this TV show?”  Well, it’s available for live-streaming on Netflix, which is where I found it.  Alternately, you can go to Blockbuster and rent the DVDs.  Sadly, there’s only a single season’s worth of watching, but it’ll at least keep you going through the first half of this summer’s ocean of summertime reality television.  The graphic novel, on the other hand, seems to have been pretty successful.  It’s out in hardcover, and I’ve seen it in a variety of local libraries and bookstores.

No News, Need Some Filler

Your regularly scheduled book or TV review will be back as soon as I have time to write it.  In the meantime, here's the trailer for a movie based on one of my favorite comics of all time, The Losers.

Eh...  I don't know what it's gonna look like as a movie, but it was a bad-ass comic.

Busy Weekend Blues

Hey guys, sorry there was no post over the weekend.  I honestly meant to post something, but y’know, some weekends are easier than others.  In fact, lately I feel like I’ve been running at a dead sprint all the time, and there just isn’t enough of me to go around.  I hope it’s just a phase ‘cause right now I’m exhausted.  It’s hard to stay focused and motivated all the time, even for me.  I can’t remember the last time I had a relaxing day where I just didn’t have to do anything.  For example, what passed for relaxation this past weekend was seven freaking hours of ironing!  SEVEN HOURS!

Heh.  At least we have Netflix now.  I sat there and watched back episodes of the old Sci Fi Channel original show The Dresden Files (based on my very favorite series of novels) using Netflix live-streaming feature and an RGB cable plugged into the back of our TV.  I’ve had worse times.  And I made a decent-sized dent in my kiddo’s clothes’ pile.  And yeah, if you’re wondering, my wife refuses utterly to iron.  Don’t ask me why.  But my kids need clothes, and like it our not, there’s only one way that they’re gonna get ‘em.  I’m not one to shirk these implied responsibilities.

I also managed to spend some quality time in the saddle this weekend.  I pulled a muscle in my groin a few weeks ago—at least that’s what I hope happened because the alternatives all require some much more serious recuperation time—and since then, I’ve not been able to run.  Granted, this is not my first running-related injury, but it is annoying.  I seem to get injured every time I start feeling good out on the road these days.  So anyway, that left me with little to do in the way of workouts besides swim—which I can only do for so long any more—or ride.  Riding takes the longest of any of my disciplines, but it’s easily the greatest, most awe-inspiring thing I do in my day-to-day life.  If I could change one thing about my life, I’d like to have a commute that would accommodate a 2-hour ride every other day.  Truly, there are times I wish I could go back to high school and ride instead of swimming.  Anyway, I didn’t get quite two-hours a day in over the weekend—and I’m not sure that my pulled groin would’ve liked that much saddle time, in any event—but I did manage put in some time, and I even rode some hills, which was glorious.  It’ll be more glorious when I’m closer to 100%.

Sadly, there’s always Monday and the office to come back to. 

Don’t get me wrong, I like my job.  I like the fact that I have a job that’s both secure and decent in a way that keeps Sally from having to work.  These are good things.  But I get tired of my commute, and more to the point, sometimes I wish I could just train like Lance and ride and run and swim all the time.  Someplace where it’s warm.  That’d be nice—at least for a while.

‘Course, it’s raining today.  So maybe I’m just cranky.

Storyteller’s Playbook #5: Conflict and Development

“We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.”

    ~Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

Last time we had Storyteller’s Playbook, we laid out a basic formula for story structure.  Since it’s been two weeks since that last SP, let’s start this one with a review: 

  A – Open on Action  
  B – Backstory 
  C – Conflict 
  D – Development 
  E – Ending

Recall that the actual order in which we tackle the elements of our story is not important beyond the fact that we want to make sure that we open with some kind of action or conflict.  But then, what is Conflict?

Well, that’s the real question, right?  Why are we here?  Why should we care?

One of the real tricks in writing is to open your story at the right spot.  Just as a lot of beginning writers tend to want to open on Background, so too do they tend to want to start their stories too early.  The two tendencies are related.  In both cases, the writer wants to make sure that there’s enough context in place ahead of time so that when the real story starts the reader understands what’s going on and why.  The thing is, just as opening on Background is generally both boring and unnecessary, so too is opening too early.  Readers like the challenge of trying to figure out what’s going on.  They do not like to get bogged down in twenty-five pages of basically mindless back story that ultimately has little to do with the main character’s actual problem and its resolution.

So then, what is conflict?

Well, as Ms. Kirkpatrick notes above, Conflict is what happens when somebody wants something more than they want peace.  Put another way, conflict is story.  Something Happens, and our Hero can no longer sit idly by.  He or She must act, decisively, to meet the challenge, deal with the crisis, survive in the midst of danger, or escape an untenable situation.  Whatever.  Regardless of the situation, we have Conflict starting at precisely the moment when our Hero can no longer continue on as before but must instead Do Something Different.  It is that pivotal event that starts our story, and it is there that we as writers should start our story’s telling.

Our Hero wants something.  Passionately.  From this, we derive our story’s plot.

In my experience, this concept has two primary applications to gaming.  The first is that as with any other kind of writing, writing for gaming requires choosing the correct story starting point.  In this, newbie DMs are by far and away the most common offenders.  Most often, a newbie DM will start his or her campaign in a tavern somewhere long before the campaign’s primary conflict is set to emerge.  DMs do this on the grounds that starting this way provides the game’s Players with a chance to do some freeform role-playing up front and/or because it allows the Players to set the game’s general direction.  The problem with this is that character in general is formed through conflict.  Without an objective or an obstacle to stand in their way, the Players are left to act out their characters’ pre-determined traits and tendencies in a vacuum.  There’s no growth going on, and there’s no challenge.  Bottom line, nothing important is going on.  And the result is often confusion and, if I’m being honest, boredom.  In an online setting, Players soon start to disappear until, before you know it, the game has unraveled before it even truly got started.

The other application that gets overlooked by even experienced DMs is the problem of motivation.  Why are we here?  Why should we care?

In one sense, Opening on Action will resolve at least part of this problem for a DM because action necessarily involves conflict or challenge, and overcoming conflict is a fundamental part of character development.  And character development is ultimately what drives the game.  I mean, look, the game is fun—even addicting—because of the way that we get to watch our characters grow and mature over time.  As Players, there’s a sense of ownership there that makes gaming more fulfilling than any kind of passive ingestion of purely external story material no matter how well conceived or executed.  In gaming, we’re actually part of the story.  We’re part of the storytelling.  We’re actively winning when our characters are overcoming the obstacles that are set in their way.  That’s the good part.

And that’s fine.  I mean, as a technique, punishing characters is one of the most reliable methods by which a writer can make his audience bond with his protagonists.  That’s as true in gaming as it is in comics or drama or film or prose or any other storytelling medium that you want to name.  But simply hammering the PCs is not precisely the same thing as providing them with motivation, although it can lead to a certain kind of motivation if it’s done often enough and by the same antagonists.  Still, even D&D can be about more than either seeking revenge or saving the world because that’s just what heroes do.  The game works better when the PCs want something for a reason that they can easily understand and explain, and at least for my money, if that something is tangible and personal, it’s going to be a lot more effective than if it’s ephemeral or somehow “transcendant.”

One of the things I’m proudest of about my game The Sellswords of Luskan is the fact that against all odds, I think my Players actually care about the fate of Luskan, a city that, not to put too fine a point on it, has done them wrong a time or two.  But by living in the city and experiencing its hardships first hand, I think they’ve actually developed real motivation.  In storytelling terms, I’ve treated the city itself like a character, punishing it repeatedly in a way that has built my Players’ sympathy—or at least interest—and as a result, they’ve started to care passionately about what happens in their adoptive home and why.  It’s not so much that they care for the people of the city or that they want what’s best for them.  Instead, for the Sellswords, if anyone’s gonna conquer Luskan, it’ll be them, and death to any with other ideas.  But that’s still an emotional investment.  It’s still motivation—and a good one.  And this, to me, makes the game a lot more than a simple struggle for money, power, or revenge… although all of those things are and will remain part of the story we’re collectively telling.

The other thing I want to talk about this week is Development.  This is where we ask that favorite question of mine: “What else can go wrong?”  Because look, if the ABCDE formula with which we started this week’s column were written mathematically, then Development would be MOST of the equation.  In fact, it should be a full 80% of your story.  Or, to put it another way, you can pretty much screw everything else up, but if you develop and complicate your conflict competently, then the odds are good that you’re going to be writing entertaining and useful fiction.  When I was writing comics, I considered this so important that I would actually go through by page count and make sure that at least 80% of my pages were complications to the existing plotline.  Considering that some of my best-known work is actually composed of 6-page webisodes, this was no mean feat.

Fortunately, Development is a lot less tricky an issue in gaming than it is in other types of fiction.  Every time you have an encounter, you are essentially putting a new obstacle in the way of your PCs, developing the plot by way of creating ever more difficult hoops through which your Party must jump.  That’s at least one of the reasons why D&D is such a combat-oriented game.  Combat Encounters are the easiest and most effective forms of plot development available to a Dungeon Master.  And since combat is such a large part of heroic fantasy as a genre, why shouldn’t it be?

Still, the need to actively complicate your plot is important, so let’s look at an example using the 80% rule:

1.  The Sellswords are shipwrecked on an island.

2.  The island is deserted.

3.  The ship’s primary cargo was defenseless child-slaves.

4.  The waters around the shipwreck are infested with sharks and sahaguin.

5.  Once the Sellswords reach land, there is no shelter, and the kids are starving.

6.  The ruins of an old pirate settlement were obviously destroyed by a large Black Dragon.

7.  The dragon’s lizardfolk minions attack to seize and eat as many of the child-slaves as possible.

8.  The dragon’s lair turns out to be very dark and spooky.

9.  The dragon itself is a massive beast.  Mean and deadly!

10. After killing the dragon, the Sellswords seize the beast’s horde, which turns out to have a small ship in pristine condition.  They sail away and live happily ever after.

And there you have it.  Sentence 1 Opens on Action, tells as much Background as is necessary, and introduces a Conflict.  Sentences 2 through 9 make the Conflict even more perilous.  This is the essence of Development.  The actual climax of the Story takes place between sentences 9 and 10, and then in 10 we have resolution and a happy ending. 

Voila!  80% Development, 20% other stuff.

So there you have it.  Creating conflict and motivation is not necessarily easy, but it is necessary if you want to have a campaign story that’s more than just a series of randomly collected encounters with no over-arching theme.  Once you have a conflict and a reason for your PCs to pursue their objective, creating complications is easy.  The key is to make sure that there are enough complications to make the ultimate reward feel fulfilling.  After all, the harder the heroes have to work, the more heroic they will ultimately become.  Punish your PCs relentlessly, and ultimately your Players will thank you for the experience.

Wednesday Round-Up: Attacking in a Different Direction

To the extent that there’s any writing news this week, it’s this: I’m working with my old high school friend Niki to adapt Bronx Angel: Politics By Another Method for the stage.  The backstory here is that I used to own a little comic book company called Proletariat Comics, LLC.  I founded PC LLC with a friend named Jerry as a way to promote our work.  Because look, unless you’re writing a franchise property for one of the existing Big Two comic companies, the simple fact is that comics is a pay-to-play game.  Which is to say that if you want to write and produce original work of your own design, that’s fine, but no one is going to pay your art costs up front.  As with prose writing, would-be comic producers who’re starting out need to be prepared to produce fully finished work that they can take to a publisher or agent.  In many ways that’s unfortunate, but then again, it’s also reasonable from the point of view of the publishers.  I mean, I’ve been on both sides of the issue, and you can trust me when I tell you that the number of folks who think they can write comics is exponentially larger than they number who actually have any talent and/or any desire to take formal training or in any way hone their craft, and beyond that, there is a literal TON of great comics out there that are totally unknown to even the most hardcore of comic fans.  And publishers need to make an actual profit to stay in business.  They cannot afford to take on “development” cases, and even if they could, there isn’t any need when lots of folks are already willing to pay their own costs up front or basically write and draw on spec.  So since the game was a loser anyway, Jerry and I opted for max freedom and started from scratch under our own homegrown brand name.

While we’re talking, let me take this opportunity to note that “Proletariat” was a really crappy name for a comic book company.  It wasn’t meant to be half so incendiary or counter-culture as it came out, but bottom line, where we merely wanted to “revolutionize” comics by promoting new creators with high-quality non-superhero ideas (giving power to the comics “workers”, the creators), most folks instead saw us as a bunch of quasi-pinko Leninists living in New York City.  And what’s worse, the whole thing framed Bronx Angel in an entirely unintended genre-space.

Look, BA: PBAM was never meant to be a specifically anti-war book.  In fact, I started writing it well before the Invasion of Iraq made it timely.  The original high-concept came out of a story I started writing when I was stationed in Korea back in 1999, and it was based a little on my father.  At the time, my dad was suffering from some pretty severe PTSD, and it occurred to me that a lot of action heroes out of the movies would probably also suffer from PTSD if they were ever given the time on-screen to develop their characters in that direction.  But no one in Hollywood ever wanted to look at it that way back then; they preferred the summer popcorn formula of happy killers who cheerfully blow away legions and legions of bad guys without ever suffering the consequences.  So I decided to write a story about a Scottish knight who returns from the Crusades with PTSD, only to discover that his family’s place in local politics has been usurped by a local villain.  And I got about 30 pages into the manuscript before I realized that this story had been done before—in the form of the classic legend of Robin Hood—just not with the PTSD angle. 

The idea kind of sat that way for a few years, but I eventually dusted it off in 2002, about the time I started working in the South Bronx.  The imminent invasion of Iraq provided a new Crusade from which our returning Robin Hood could emerge, and with that in mind, I started writing.  The final form of the story changed a good deal, especially when I cut it from 135-pages down to the 68 that are in the version that’s currently available on WOWIO, but even now, that core idea remains.  Angel is a guy who’s dealing with his post-war demons, and half the characters are named after characters in Robin Hood, including Little John, Angel’s spotter in BA #0, and MaryAnn, Spice’s ill-fated girlfriend whose role in the original full-length script was much different than it became in the version that actually got published.  The original version also had a Father Tuck, but his storyline was one of the casualties of the cut-down.

But, you know, events kind of got away with me.  Our company was named after a widely reviled revolutionary idea, the story in PBAM actually offended my father, and when the Invasion of Iraq went so quickly sour, I wrote a new Foreword for the book that put my personally feelings about the thing front and center.  And then, too, at the time that PBAM was actually published, things were so bad that most would-be readers just didn’t want to think about the war—at all—under any circumstances.  And having passed over In the Valley of Eli any number of times at Blockbuster myself, honestly, I can hardly blame them.  The war was on TV all the time, and folks didn’t want yet another reminder of it.  Ironically, any number of reviewers later came back to me and expressed confusion about the actual story’s lack of anti-war sentiment, but of course, that was never the point.  The point was and is about my dad, and he was in Vietnam.  I wanted to show the costs that soldiers pay for their heroism on his behalf.  If readers—including me—see that cost as being disproportional to the gains achieved, well, that’s not the fault of the story.  It was more like a sign of the times.

So anyway, now it’s 2010, things have been looking up in Iraq for a good while, and I think maybe it’s time to try bring the full Bronx Angel out of the dustbin of history and find a way to get it out there—again.  I want to tell the story the way that it was meant to be told, and I want to do it in a way that doesn’t require some artist to spend 8 hours drawing each page.  So Niki and I are trying to re-write it as a play, and we’ll see how it goes. 

Here's Niki's prototype set design for the first scene:

Book Review: Runaways, Volume 2 HC and Dark Avengers: Assemble

We finally got back over to the fabulous library in Westport, CT, weekend before last for the annual book sale.  While Sally and the girls spent their time wandering amongst the rest of the bargain hunters, I headed upstairs, intent on pillaging Westport’s awesomely well-stocked graphic novels section.  I took home nearly a dozen GNs, including the two books I’m reviewing this week: Volume 2 of Marvel’s Runaways hardcover series (collecting issues #13 to #25) and the Dark Avengers: Assemble hardcover (collecting issues #1 to #6).

Although writer Brian K. Vaughn is better-known for his long-running Vertigo series Y: The Last Man, Runaways was always a personal favorite of mine.  The series’ premise is a kind of teenaged coming-of-age/rebellion story: a bunch of teens whose parents are friends discover together that their parents are collectively a bunch of super-villains.  They slowly come to realize that the adults they’ve spent their entire lives respecting are in fact bad people, and indeed, that adults of all stripes are generally people who’ve compromised their ideals in one way or another—who’ve generally given in to “evil” somehow—regardless of their overall intentions or motivations.  The series’ first story arc of 18 issues deals with the ramifications of this initial discovery and its inherent rebellion against the authority of the kids’ evil parents, so that by the second hardcover volume, we’re left with a bunch of lost and scared kids living under the unforgiving maxim that ALL adults are evil.  Or at least fundamentally self-interested.

Volume 2 of the Runaways is in many ways similar to the second season of the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  In Buffy’s first year, we spend the entire season setting up the premise and dealing with the first of what proves to be a goodly number of threats to The Entire World.  The second season, then, is a little better because the premise is established, and we can just do characterization—and the trials and tribulations of being a romantically active teenage girl.  In this second volume of Runaways, we’re also dealing with a mature idea and finally getting into the meat and potatoes of what it means to be a teen trying to live on your own in a tough city like Los Angeles.  And like Buffy-scribe Joss Whedon, Vaughn takes his idea in a bunch of clever and unexpected directions that in retrospect seem obvious given the characters and the story’s over-arching thematic elements.  Which perhaps explains why Vaughn has since worked some with Whedon, and indeed, why Whedon himself took over the scripting duties at Runaways when Vaughn himself left the series to work on the TV show Lost. 

Runaways’ art, by Adrian Alphona, adds to the story main through style.  It’s good stuff, but it’s in a style that’s well outside the typical heroic comicbook fare—and for good reason.  In business terms, Runaways was originally greenlit by Marvel as a means to appeal to the Manga crowd.  At that point, Marvel didn’t yet have a successful movie studio, and its appeal was limited to either the mainstream name recognition of its established brand-name characters—like Spider-Man—or to the long-term interest of overgrown fanboys in their 30s who’d had a subscription to either the X-Men or Iron Man since the company’s heyday back in the 1970s and 80s.  And unfortunately, the latter is a diminishing resource since fanboys grow up and move into new interests, especially in tough economic times.  So then, the company needed a fresh way to appeal to the kids.  And that was, at least in part, Runaways.  It’s an open question whether or not Runaways succeeded in its primary goal, but the point became moot with the massive success of Marvel’s independently produced Iron Man film and its subsequent acquisition by Disney.  And regardless of the series’ place in the long term history of the industry, Runaways remains an excellent idea that was well executed by a pair of masters at the tops of their games.

So if Runaways was a move to recruit new fans, then Dark Avengers: Assemble is something totally different—a move to extract even more revenue from the industry’s core demographic, the overgrown fanboys.  Which is ironic in a way but not at all unentertaining.  It’s ironic because Dark Avengers was written by Marvel uber-scribe Brian Michael Bendis, a guy who made his name writing witty banter-based indies but now turns out volume after volume of the flagship company’s flagship products, each more action-based than the last. 

Well, we’ve come a long way since Who Killed Retro Girl?

But like I said, though I picked up Dark Avengers: Assemble because I was hoping for some of that old-time Bendis repartee, I enjoyed the book despite finding the actual dialogue ultimately uninspiring.  I’ve not kept up with recent events in the Marvel Universe, but the story here was still pretty easy to follow.  In the aftermath of an abortive invasion by a legion of alien Skrulls, S.H.I.E.L.D. grand-poobah and one-time Secretary of Defense Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) is fired by the President and replaced by the national political flavor of the month, Norman Osborn, the man who was once the super-villain The Green Goblin.  Which is brilliant plotting—at least from a business and marketing standpoint.  Because look: the story is intricate.  It involves several layers of Marvel B- and C-Listers, a fact that ultimately plays to the hardcore fanboys.  However, all of the major characters are either characters from classic mythology—like Ares, the Greek god of War and Morgan Le Fey, the arch-villain from the King Arthur mythos—or they’ve been in successful movies in the past five years—like both Stark and Osborne.  All of which means that even casual fans will understand and be able to follow the series’ central plot point, that the U.S. government is on the verge of being taken over by super-villains. 

Instant accessibility in a fundamentally hardcore title?  Brilliant!

The art in Dark Avengers: Assemble is about what you’d expect.  It’s done by Mike Deodato, whom I know primarily from his previous work on The Amazing Spider-Man, and it’s in the arch-superhero style.  All of the men are super-ripped weightlifter types, and all of the women are ultra-hot Barbies dressed in a super-tight bustier, corset, or deep-dipping V-fronted lingerie top ala Jennifer Lopez from the Oscars a few years ago.  And if that’s not enough, they also wear the kind of ass-hiking swimsuit bottoms that leave their butt-cheeks hanging out.  Not that that’s a bad thing.  It’s just a stylistic choice that I personally get tired of after awhile.

Anyway, I don’t know that I would recommend that you go out and actually buy either Runaways or Dark Avengers, but that’s mainly because comics are just so damned expensive these days.  For my money, I prefer novels because there’s more story per dollar spent.  With that said, both these books are easily worth your time, especially if you’re hankering for a superhero fix and can find them at your local library.  There may also be some online sources, but I’m not as familiar with those.  Still, Marvel at least used to have a pretty advanced online comic reader.  And surely somebody’s got an iPhone app for that, right?

Back in the Saddle

So it’s Monday after the big storm and the even bigger birthday party over the weekend, and I’m headed back into the office for the first time in a week.  Feels a little strange to be back on my routine, but it’s good, too.  Don’t get me wrong: it was nice to take a little break from the normal.  But at the same time, I got off my routine, had to put my game and my tri training on hold, and was generally at a standstill with my life all week.

If you’re wondering, my daughter Emma’s 5^th Birthday Party was a whopping success.  We had it at the Beardsley Zoo in Bridgeport, CT, our local zoo, and while I think the zoo folks in general could have been a little more accommodating, I also think the kids had a good time.  The party was short and to the point—and we managed to have the party without destroying our house in the process, which is a bonus when you’re dealing 5-year-olds.  On top of that, the kids all got to see some really cool animals.  The zoo has a pair of tigers which are right near the carousel building where we held the party, and then, too, the party’s main attraction—aside from Emma and the carousel itself—was a giant blue-tongued gecko that everybody got to pet.

After we got home, I loaded up Scooby Doo: Where’s My Mummy on my laptop via Netflix, and Emma, Hannah, and I sat down to watch it.  And I gotta say this: Emma LOVES Scooby Doo.  Hannah, on the other hand, had started to feel a little under the weather while we were at the zoo, and with that in mind, Where’s My Mummy was just too much for her.  She got scared (of Scooby Doo!) and eventually started crying—and she’s 6!  After the movie, I put her down for a nap, and that seemed to help, but she still had nightmares, eventually crawling into bed with my mother, who was in town for Emma’s birthday.

The other news of the weekend is that I finally got my bike back from the shop and got back into the saddle.  It seems that when I did my 8-miler two weeks ago, I pulled a muscle in my lower back and groin, and after running on it on Thursday last week, I was pretty sore.  So getting my bike back was key, especially since the pounding of running was making me hurt worse.  So Saturday afternoon, I headed out for a little ride, putting in about 13 miles and basically taking it easy.  That seemed to help.  Sunday I headed out again, this time for about an hour and twenty minutes, which was even better.  Sunday evening I felt better still, but I’m still sore, and at this point, I’m starting to think that I have a real injury and will have to do real recovery if I want to get better.  Argh.

Meanwhile, racing season is right around the corner.  So I need to get better ASAP.  There’s a little duathlon I want to do in late April and then a 10K in early May and a much bigger duathlon at the end of May.  Bottom line, I don’t have time to be foolin’ around with no injuries.

In other news, the Sellswords finally defeated Scylla the Black Dragon.  It was touch-and-go there for a while, but as is often the case with upper-Heroic Tier characters, they started using their Daily powers and turned the tide pretty easily.  That said, they don’t know what’s coming next.  It’ll be interesting to see what they do now since they’re pretty much out of super-powers. 

Cue the evil laugh: Muwahahahaha!

Ack! Late Season Storm Destroys Westchester County!

I'm usually loath to talk about my work here--or anywhere--but with the huge late-season Nor'Easter that hit NYC and the surrounding areas last week, well, life got a little hectic.  If you're wondering, work called late Saturday and asked me to come in immediately--to work overnight.  That was no good times.  Fortunately, they called back a few minutes later and rescheduled for EARLY Sunday morning.  So I got a couple of hours sleep, went in, and was promptly assigned as the municipal liaison from my company to the Village of Harrison, NY.  The 3rd richest town in America, with something like TEN billionaires in town (including Kenneth Cole) as well as most of the Yankees, Knicks, Nets, Rangers, Jets, Giants, etc.  Basically, if you have REAL MONEY, then Harrison is where you live.  And the storm completely destroyed their electrical infrastructure.  We had to rebuild parts of it almost from scratch.

As you might imagine, my posting turned out to be a rather high-stress position.

At a certain point, I was reassigned to straight-up construction management, but that was actually even more intense--well, dealing with live wires in emergency situations is ALWAYS like that.  But at least no one was yelling at me anymore.

Anyway, I'm back now, but I doubt I'll be back daily until this weekend.  In the meantime, I hope you had a good week.

T-Rex, the Terrible Lizard!

My kids love dinosaurs

New Look

It's a new look here at Storyteller's Playbook?

Do you like it?  Can you read it?  Let me know!

Friday Mad Science: Sex & Danger Edition

I mentioned yesterday that my first story was a spy-piece that featured a seduction at gun-point.  Well, after I finished drafting yesterday’s Storyteller’s Playbook, I went searching back through my archives and managed to find a version of that story that I’d re-written as a 3-page comic teaser.  A friend of mine then drew the pages and inked them, leaving me with a cool little comic short that’s perhaps a bit confusing without its dialogue.  Still, it’s an example of a couple of principles that are often at work in gaming, and so I’d like to share it with you. 

First, as we discussed yesterday, this piece works as an opening even though we as readers have only hints of what’s going on in the larger plot.  The hints are enough, and the fact that they leave us wondering is actually a good thing. 

Second, my favorite thing about writing comics is that it’s a collaborative process.  As a novelist or short story-teller, you work in a vacuum.  But comic writers, screenwriters, playwrights, and yes, even game masters all tell stories collaboratively.  In all of these media, the story can’t come alive until someone else experiences your vision and adds to it, often in ways that are completely unpredictable.  And sure, you can cut down on the amount of unpredictability in the final product by writing very detailed, proscriptive scripts—or by railroading your players with a very narrow set of choices in order to keep them strictly on track—but any experienced comic writer, screenwriter, or even game master will tell you that this is not the way to get your best, most valuable input from your creative collaborators.  You create a more predictable product at the cost of lessening the others’ creativity.  That is rarely a wise trade-off.

Folks wonder why I’m not writing comics anymore and why I switched to writing for gaming.  One of the main reasons is that the storytelling process is very similar but writing for gaming requires a lot less overhead to see your vision turn into some kind of storytelling reality.

Writing Exercise: 3-Pages of Sex and Danger

Set-Up: Below you’ll find the link to an original 3-page comic script that was adapted from that first short story, the one I described yesterday, along with links for the actual sequential art pages based on that script.   

Exercise: Read the script and then look at the pages.  Notice how the artist changed the storytelling.  Then decide for yourself what you would have done differently, either as an artist or as a writer adapting dialogue to the finished art.  How would you have used your creativity to add to the story without changing the total intent?

Script, Page 1, Page 2, Page 3

If you get a chance, I’d appreciate some comments below.  We haven’t had any comments yet, and I’d like to change that, especially since I removed the login requirement that the Comments Section previously required.

Storyteller’s Playbook, Episode 4: Open on Action

“I do not believe we can repair the basic fabric of society until people who are willing to work have work.  Work organizes life.  It gives structure and discipline to life.”

    ~Bill Clinton

My first writing was journaling.  After getting divorced, I found myself living in a tiny little Army Bachelor’s Officer’s Quarters apartment on base at Ft. Knox, KY.  This was the first time I’d ever lived completely by myself, and the experience was in some ways unnerving.  Added to that was the reality that I was then sleeping by myself for the first time in several years, and as a result, I developed insomnia.  I kept looking around, waiting for someone to walk into my little apartment and start talking, and the fact that no one ever did was really hard for me to adjust to.  Especially at nights.  So I started journaling.  Since I couldn’t come home and talk to my wife about my day anymore, I’d get out my little notebook and write about it.  There’s a kind of peace that you can find in journaling that’s hard to describe if you’ve never experienced it.  But eventually, I got kind of bored with just keeping a simple journal, and so I started trying to fictionalize some of the more outrageous experiences from my actual life.  Professional wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin has described the process of creating his on-stage persona as essentially taking his real-life personality, dialing it up to eleven, and then letting it run wild.  This was the same approach I took with my early fiction.  My first stuff was basically about a lonely, heart-broken guy, except that instead of being a lowly soldier, the guy was a super-spy, and he was pining after a super-sexy enemy secret agent.  It was very much the fantasy of a lonely man.  In my favorite scene, our hero is seduced at gun-point, chained to a bed, and thereby allowed to wallow in his true feelings for his arch-enemy.  He couldn’t get away.  He was therefore free to love instead.

But although my early fiction had its moments, it was always missing something.  It wasn’t focused.  There was no story, and quite honestly, I didn’t know how to even begin addressing the problem.  My first stuff was basically just a rambling series of random events.  Sometimes it was entertaining.  More often, it was a mess.

It didn’t have any structure.

So.  Writing as a Game Master is different than writing as a novelist, but some things are similar.  As a Game Master, you don’t control the characters.  But you do control the situation.  And to the extent that your story is going to have any structure—to the extent that it’s going to make sense as a story—it’s up to you to impose that structure.  That doesn’t have to be a problem, but it can become one if we don’t have a framework from which to work when we’re planning our games.

I personally use an “ABCDE” structure that I learned, oddly enough, from Pulitzer Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri back before her now celebrated novel Namesake was released.  I was taking a writing class at the time, and she was teaching.  She wasn’t famous yet, she was just trying to make ends meet, and… well, I’m still not famous. 

Anyway, her simple formula worked like this:

·         A – Open on Action

·         B – Backstory

·         C – Conflict

·         D – Development

·         E – Ending

Now, maybe that’s self-explanatory, but even so, let’s take a little time and talk about it.  In fact, let’s take the next few weeks.

Opening on Action is a straightforward concept.  If you’ve ever seen a James Bond movie, you’ll know immediately what I’m talking about.  We’re dropped straight into the middle of some life-or-death situation with little warning and absolutely no explanation.  The music comes up, and suddenly James is getting it on with a bunch of bad guys who’re out to kill him.  We rarely know why.  We NEVER need to.  However, while opening with a bang is easy in concept, it’s devilishly tricky to implement with either Fantasy or Science Fiction.  Both genres require the writer to step outside the bounds of reality and imagine not only a different land, but oftentimes a completely different set of physics and mathematics and biology to go along with it.  As a storyteller, then, it’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting to explain how that world works up-front so that folks will have a clue about what’s going on when they read all of the exciting action that we have planned for later on.  Right?  I mean, that makes logical sense.

The problem is that fiction isn’t reality.  As a writer, we succeed when we draw our audience into the story.  Unfortunately, spending our first ten pages on a physics or alternate-history lesson is not the best way to accomplish this goal.  Indeed, the opposite is often true: we’d be much better off to make the reader guess.  When you’re reader is interested but wondering what’s really going on you’re working from a good starting point.

“So alright,” you say, “I can see that I want to open with a bang.  But look, it’s a GAME, not a novel.  Don’t my players need to know the rules first?”  But see, you’re already playing a game with rules.  And your players know those rules.  The fact that the bad-ass goblin chief is trying to kill them is an element of story, not an element for the rules lawyers to argue.

Opening on Action has virtue of getting the players involved in actual play right off the bat.  Even if the “action” isn’t a fight of some kind, it should still be some kind of struggle.  Because, bottom line, you want your players to bond with their characters right off the bat.  That’s gonna happen when they—as their characters—overcome some kind of difficult challenge.  The bigger the challenge, the bigger the triumph.  And then, once that’s out of the way, you can start to introduce the other story elements like backstory and setting.

As a parting shot this week, let me just note that with the exception of Opening on Action, you don’t have to address the issues of background, conflict, development, and ending in any particular order.  Once you’ve gotten your players successfully involved, it’s perfectly acceptable to tease out the realities of the situation for weeks—or even months!  In fact, a lot of players LIKE a little bit of mystery.  Again, when they’re wondering “what in the Hell is going on?” you’re probably doing something right.

And that’s all I’ve got for the old Playbook this week.  Next week, we’ll talk Background and Conflict and maybe get into a bit of timing.  Until then, have great week!

Blood, Sweat, and Tears...

I’m not gonna lie.  Today was craptastic.  It actually started yesterday and pretty much went downhill from there.  I don’t particularly want to go into all the details, but look, some people are opinionated.  They will bend facts.  They will distort reality.  They will not listen to reason. 

Seriously, I thought we were gonna have a Khrushchev moment at one point this morning.  Here I am, sitting at my desk, waiting for this dude to start banging on my desk with his shoe. 

“I will bury you!!!”

Yeesh.  I certainly hope not.

It doesn’t help that I gave blood this morning.  I mean, don’t get me wrong.  It helps.  For better or worse, I’m O+, a universal donor, which means that I’m practically obligated to give blood every time they come around.  I get it.  I’m glad I can help.  But no matter what they say, it absolutely DOES make me feel like absolute garbage for the next few hours after I give.  And since these were the prime Khrushchev hours, it was not on.  In Army parlance, it was anti-hooah.  I was not happy.

What are you gonna do?

In my case, I decided to just try to hide out for a few hours, giving in to everyone.  Unfortunately, they weren’t having it.  At all.  No, they came looking for me, hounding me, giving me no peace.  I fought with my mom then with my wife and then for an encore, I went another round with Mr. Khrushchev.

*sigh*

I think I might stay home tomorrow.

 

Film Review: The Hurt Locker

My wife Sally and I finally got around to watching The Hurt Locker over the weekend, and I thought it was a pretty good flick.  I enjoyed it.  I don’t know that I thought it deserved to win Best Picture, but it was a good film.  It succeeds at being entertaining while also making its viewers think, and that’s no mean feat.

If you have haven’t seen the movie yet, it’s the story of a U.S. Army Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) team stationed in Iraq.  When the team’s leader is killed just a few weeks before the team itself is scheduled to rotate back Stateside, Sergeant First Class William James (not to be confused with the 1970’s pop singer, Rick James) becomes the new team leader, and since Sergeant James seems to be a wild-man who actively LIKES disarming bombs, well, wackiness ensues. 

Actually, although this plot point is significant, it’s also one of the few things that I don’t think the movie does very well.  Which is to say that at the start of the movie, EOD’s Standard Operating Procedure is to dispose of bombs by blowing them up rather than disarming them.  This is in line with actual practice.  Why?  Because disarming bombs is both slower and more dangerous than simply blowing them in place.  So when SFC James comes in, and we see him out there clipping wires and doing his thing, we’re sort of left wondering what’s going on.  Is he disarming the bombs because he’s an adrenaline junkie, or is it because he thinks that disarming the bombs is a better method for some reason?  Did most viewers even notice the difference?  Unfortunately, although the movie hints about it a bit, we never get any of James’s philosophy on the matter, and I found that to be more than a little weird since he struck me as the kind of non-commissioned officer who’d have a million different little philosophies on life and a straight-up willingness to talk your ear off about them.  Also: why does he hate the robot so much?  Is it because he just likes the danger of getting up-close-and-personal or because he thinks the robot doesn’t do the job correctly?  Again, there are only hints—and not very many.  Still, by the end of the movie I think the filmmakers have come down firmly on the side of James’s emotional instability, and at least for me that didn’t ring true.  How can a mentally unstable guy consistently succeed in a high-pressure job like bomb disposal?  Personally, I don’t think he can.  And more to the point, I think it’s obvious that James is a very committed man.  He’s committed to the Army and to the cause of the Iraqi people.  We see this several times.  He is obviously NOT crazy.  And yet we’re still left to wonder—a lot—about his emotional well-being.  And that’s just not the plan at all.  Commitment and even enthusiasm for a dangerous job are not at all the same things as emotional instability.

A more common knock on The Hurt Locker is that it doesn’t get the details correct on the tactics of its subjects.  This is the critique that you see from veteran’s groups, the one set of critics that generally did not like the film.  And while I’m sure that the vet critique is accurate—I mean, who can imagine a three-man EOD team actively hunting snipers while the infantry units next door stand around watching?—I also think this critique misses the point.  Look, Hollywood simply does not understand the military.  Have you seen Avatar?  The last battle sequence in that movie is so silly as to be actively laughable.  In fact, I think James Cameron probably WAS laughing when he wrote that crap.  Oddly, the ONLY movie of 2010 that had any clue at all about military tactics was Transformers: Rise of the Fallen.  And that movie was panned by everyone for being convoluted and unrealistic!  Heh.  As if a movie about giant transforming robots could ever be considered realistic.  But seriously, Transformers got a few things right.  For example, its tank commanders know enough to use their main guns’ range to create standoff from the enemy.  For Hollywood, that is incredible realism.  Anyway, the most probable reason that Transformers looks so good in its battle sequences is that it was made with the active participation of the U.S. military.  The Army will help you with these things if you pay them to.  Meanwhile, the makers of The Hurt Locker went it alone, playing instead by the seats of their pants.  And yeah, their movie suffered for it.

So then, The Hurt Locker is a good movie but not a perfect one.  Was it the BEST movie of 2010?  That’s obviously up to the individual.  For me, I think it was about on par with Avatar.  While The Hurt Locker tackles some serious subject-matter, it does so in an oft ham-handed way that took me completely out of the story at times.  Much the same could be said for Avatar.  I thought Avatar was cool but preachy and at least twice as ridiculous as anything I’ve seen in a good long while.  In fact, Avatar’s last battle scene is right up there with the Ewoks and the Imperial Scout Walkers of Return of the Jedi in terms of its sheer absurdity.  But still… good movie.  Fun.  Sexy blue people are three kinds of awesome. 

That said, I still like the Transformers.  It’s simple math: Transforming Robots + Megan Fox = Blue People on Flying Dinosaurs.  I mean, District 9 was also a very good film, but it just can’t match that level of sheer mathematical awesomeness.  Plus, Transformers hewed amazingly close to its original source material, never mind that the source material itself was incredibly obscure and totally unnecessary.  Actually, given the sheer wacko-weirdness of something like the Autobots’ Matrix of Leadership, I think you have to give T:RotF bonus points for including it.  They certainly didn’t have to.  

Bottom line, Transformers: Rise of the Fallen was my personal Best Picture for 2010.  And no, I don’t give a crap what the Academy has to say about that because they’re all just a bunch of self-important jerk-offs anyway, and I think even they would admit as much.  Plus, if their Best Picture includes an obvious Scooby-Doo reference like “Let’s split up, so we can cover more ground” but then fails to come through with either transforming robots or big blue boobies or even a dog named Scooby Doo, then I don’t see that they have anything to complain about.

Sex Sells!

Heh.  I suppose I really ought to write about the Oscars or something.  I mean, we finally watched The Hurt Locker, and it really was a great flick, even if the story was stolen.  But then I thought to myself, "Self, we need more readers.  And y'know what sells?  SEX!  So... we need to write about sex.  Or porn.  Or just filthy girls who want me to slap their asses while they call me daddy.  Our degenerate readers probably really LIKE that stuff."

Eh... What are you gonna do?

So, without further ado, I hereby announce that I have it on very good authority that a whopping 66% of women WATCH PORN!  66%!!!  Wow!

Man, I must be missin' the boat or something.

And if that's not enough, here's a woman who claims that She's Not a Sex Machine!  Boy, I feel sorry for her man.

Lastly, Ben Rothelesburger announced that he "did not have sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky."  I mean, er, well... I mean, he did bang her and all, but...  well, she seemed like she was only a little unstable at the time, and er... it totally wasn't rape.  Mostly. 

Bunch'a filthy wankers.

*sigh*

This is the worst blog post ever.  BTW, scientists also announced that it was definitely a meteor that killed the dinosaurs.

The Black Dragon!

Ha!  The Sellswords have finally made into the lair of Scylla, the fearsome Black Dragon!

 

I'm not gonna say that I hope that they die, but it'd sure be nice to kill at least ONE of the them!

Mwhahahahaha! 

If you're wondering, Scylla is the mistress of a little desert island on the outskirts of the Nelanther Archipelago, maybe a hundred miles off the coast of the city of Athkatla.  With that in mind, I named her after a famous Greek sea monster from The Odyssey.

Rival Angels!

I exchanged emails with my friend Alan Evans today.  He's the creator of the world's most popular wrestling webcomic, Rival Angels.  I wrote a short story for him maybe eighteen months ago--a kind of a comic version PPV tag match--and now that RA is heading into its second TPB publication, my piece is coming up for print.

Hooray!

Seriously, I haven't written much besides D&D game posts since my dad died in summer 2007, so it's pretty amazing that I'm about to see print again.  And WAY COOL.

Anywho, check out Rival Angels!  It's a terrific webcomic, produced by a really terrific guy.

BTW, if you just want to cut straight to the part that I wrote, click here.  It was the infamous Halloween Special.

And that's it.  Hope you're having a good weekend!

The Jamis Dakota D29 Team was covered in this month’s Mountain Bike magazine, and I gotta admit that I want one.   

Oooooh yeah.  That’s a beautiful machine. 

Too bad it’s $5 grand.

Link:

http://www.jamisbikes.com/usa/thebikes/hardtails/dakota/10_dakota29team.html

Storyteller’s Playbook: Influences and Inspirations, Part 4

“Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us.”

     ~Julia Penelope

I meant to finally close out our discussion of Influences and Inspirations last week, but we kind of got caught up in our discussion of The Hobbit as the original piece of fantasy travel fiction.  However, thankfully there aren’t that many books and authors left on my list, and none of them are even half as iconic as some of those we’ve already discussed.  Unless something really bizarre happens, we ought to be on to the next thing when this column appears next week.  With that in mind, let’s get started!

The discussion this week is mostly going to be about my favorite current working authors, and at the top of that list sits Richard K. Morgan.  Morgan burst onto the scene a few years ago with an explosive piece of science fiction called Altered Carbon, a book that’s one of the finest sci fi novels that I’ve ever read.  I mean, yeah, a lot of authors like to use anti-heroes as protagonists.  But Morgan takes that task seriously, and indeed, his bad guys are BAD.  And he keeps it personal in a way that I’ve honestly never seen another author manage.  It’s inspiring stuff, at least to me, and it’s frequently heavy in theme and thinking, both things that I wish I could work more successfully into my own writing.

It’s Morgan that inspired me to run Sellswords of Luskan as a campaign of anti-heroes, and more to the point, it’s his idea of keeping it personal that has me continuing after our campaign’s PCs in such a dogged and particular way.  Because, as Morgan says in Altered Carbon, when someone’s trying to kill you, it doesn’t get more personal than that—regardless of what the business and political implications are.

Close behind Richard Morgan in my personal pantheon of writers is a guy I’ve already written about this week, Brandon Sanderson.  As you should already know, Sanderson is the author that Robert Jordan’s wife picked to finish up The Wheel of Time.  But he’s on this list because of his Mistborn series, specifically the second book, The Well of Ascension.  In Mistborn: The Final Empire, the first book of the larger Mistborn series, Sanderson runs a kind of conventional “overthrow the dark lord” plotline, save that the setting is a hyper-industrial dystopian wasteland, and the book itself is steeped in religious and spiritual overtones.  But still, though the setting and execution are unique, the actual plotline is strictly in line with genre expectations, and in fact, I think that’s part of what makes the whole thing hold together so well.  Sanderson doesn’t start to actually break new ground until the series’ second book, Well of Ascension.  It’s at that point that all the “good” that the heroes have done starts to really come back to haunt them, leaving the post-revolutionary world in much, much worse shape than it was before the fall of the previously dread ruler.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but suddenly, a lot of the bad guy’s policies start to look sensible now that our heroes are actually in charge.  And that’s brilliant!  Really.  In reading it, I was very much reminded of the realities of the invasion of Iraq and often found myself wondering if that was part of what inspired Sanderson to write this series in the first place.

The point of all of this is that the best of intentions can sometimes lead to terrible consequences when radical changes of policy are executed without proper care and forethought.  Or, to put it another way, sometimes bad things happen to good people, especially when those good people don’t take the time to really think through what it is that they’re trying to accomplish.  Brandon Sanderson and Richard K. Morgan are very different authors, but in this their work is complimentary.  For me personally—already running a campaign of anti-heroes—the direction to go was obvious.  Especially for a town like Luskan.  A town that was essentially destroyed by misdirected good intentions.  In my game, my players are acting in their own self-interests, but they are at least acting decisively and effectively.  In a place like Luskan, that’s better policy than the town has seen in quite some time.  I like that dichotomy—that good intentions destroyed the town and self-interest is effectively rebuilding it.  It’s like a reaffirmation of capitalist ethics.  I think it’s working in my game.

Along the same lines, I’ll include former Army military intelligence officer-turned-novelist Ralph Peters on my list of favorite influences.  I’ve been reading Peters’s stuff off and on since my Academy days—back when he was still in the Army—and I’m a fan of his thinking.  I mean, don’t get me wrong: the guy has his definite crack-pot moments.  But his stuff is fun, even when it’s terrifying.  And that’s definitely the case in his latest offering, The War After Armageddon.  Armageddon is—if nothing else—an excellent example of how one might run a campaign with an ostensibly good-aligned paladin as the primary antagonist.  I don’t know that it’s specifically influenced any one particular aspect of my current campaign, but I read it as part of a block that included a healthy dose of Richard K. Morgan’s work and came away feeling distinctly burnt and cynical.  It’s the influence of that cynicism that I’ll point to here.

So anyway, that’s a lot of books.  If you’re less literary then maybe you’d prefer something from TV, say the short-lived Sci Fi (now SyFy) Channel original series The Dresden Files.  That series was based on a set of urban fantasy noir novels by author Jim Butcher, a series that is a favorite of mine.  Now there’s a lot to like in Butcher’s work, but the thing that influences me the most is the way that Mr. Butcher structures his plots, scenes, and sequels.  I don’t want to get too much into scene structure this week, but I pay a TON of attention to it in my everyday writing, and I think it helps a lot in keeping things moving.  Jim Butcher’s work informs that because he has the best, most transparent scene structure of any of the working authors with which I’m familiar, and it inspires me.  Effective scene structure is what turns an otherwise interesting concept into a genuine page turner (or fails to, if you screw it up), and in this regard I think Jim Butcher is simply without peer.

Finally, my last two books are both modern classics, chosen purely for my love of their use of language.  Gregory Mcdonald’s Fletch is perhaps the most effective purely dialogue-driven novel that’s ever been written.  Meanwhile, I think Martin Cruz Smith deserves a place in the pantheon of English authors that’s below only Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde.  Gorky Park is already quite a well-celebrated novel, and honestly, it’s even better than advertised.  What Mcdonald and Smith have in common is tight dialogue written around sparse prose that’s nevertheless evocative in the extreme.  Bottom line: I wish that I could write like those guys.  So does everyone else in the world.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about a few of what I personally think of as anti-influences.  There are two, and they’re here mostly because they’re huge influences on others.  The first is Batman, but I could just as easily point out James Fennimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans as the genre’s original primary source material.  It’s not that Cooper’s work is bad or even that I just don’t like Batman.  Far from it.  The problem is that Cooper’s archetype—the lonely ranger who exists outside of society but nevertheless fights to defend it—has simply become far too pervasive.  So much so that it’s destructive.  Why can’t our hero be personable?  Hell, why can’t he even be happy?  Or, as Orson Scott Card would ask, why can’t he have a family?

Here’s the thing: if our hero has few ties to the world, then he has far less at stake than he could have otherwise.  That doesn’t raise the stakes.  It lowers them.  This is not the plan.  I mean, yeah, anti-heroes are cool.  But too much of a good thing is still too much, and more to the point, there are a lot more ways to tackle emotional angst than simply setting the hero outside of society and making him or her uncomfortable in it.  Occasionally, I’d like to see some other ideas explored by folks.

When applied to D&D, the Batman Problem tends to manifest as an overabundance of lonely-ranger archetypes being played by our players.  I think as DM’s, the best that we can do is to gently encourage guys to go outside the clichés and develop characters that are more talkative and fundamentally more well-rounded.  And when pressed, I think most players would rather play a character who’s opinionated and likeable rather than one who  is an angry curmudgeon that lets others take charge and tell him what to do.

My other anti-influence is the comic book Spawn, which I think we can safely blame for quite a lot of the world’s problems.  After all, Spawn is almost completely responsible for the indie glut of the late 20^th century that almost destroyed the comic industry as whole, and as if that weren’t enough, the book simultaneously inspired a raft of hideous imitators that collectively defined a new sub-genre, the execrable urban fantasy “War between Heaven and Hell” sub-genre.  Look, I get that Spawn is a decent book.  Creator Todd MacFarlane has certainly done more than his fair share of ground-breaking work, and God knows that there are legions upon legions of his fans and fanboys out there.  But for my money Spawn never quite pays off on its potential—in much the same way that the TV show The X-Files never paid off on its potential—and against that, the sheer number of imitators and that awful freakin’ movie make the entire experience less than worthwhile for me when taken as a whole.  So yeah.  I am not a fan. 

But the real reason that I bring this up is because Spawn is also an example of how not to start a story.  MacFarlane opens his epic with backstory—which is always a terrible idea—and then relies on his skill as an artist to carry where his skill as a writer falls short.  This creates confusion for the fanboys and is overall the cause of much mischief.  Because the art is really good.  And at that point, the legions of imitators think that the Right Way To Do It is to open with this hideously noir bit of backstory like Spawn does—cue the gravelly voice: “There is a War between Heaven and Hell”—and this is so, so, so not the plan.  And since they’re not sporting that crazy MacFarlane-style art, the whole effort falls flatter than Hell.  Unfortunately matters are complicated for MacFarlane-fan DMs because D&D carries its own implied requirement for some kind of divine conflict as your characters approach their inevitable immortality once they enter the Epic Tier.  And D&D doesn’t even have art to bail out poor storytelling!

So.  It’s a thorny issue, and I’m not going to sit here and tell you how to deal with it.  Certainly, I’m not telling you to eschew all divine conflict.  But I do think that you need to be careful how you approach divine conflict, and I especially think you need to be careful with how you introduce it.  You want to build it up right, and you want to pay it off right, and neither of those things is particularly easy to accomplish—especially if you’re inspired by poor source material.

Eh… maybe we’ll talk about that some more next week.  ‘Cause by then, we’ll be into something totally new.

Have a great weekend!