Mysterion opens for submissions in a week

Well, 2018 is almost over, and it's on to 2019. And with the new year comes Mysterion's first 2019 submission period. If you have any stories you want to submit, now's the time to get them ready. We look forward to reading them starting in January.

Marriage Advice: Finances

I'm probably not the best person to give marriage advice. I'm not a psychologist or marriage counselor, and I've only been married for seven years and we don't have kids. This article got me thinking about marriage, though,and in particular what advice the church can give about marriage. I think that a sermon series on marriage and relationships could be very useful, but in my experience, churches are terrible at giving practical advice. They tend to over-spiritualize every question, falling into deep theological wells about complementarism and egalitarianism rather than giving practical advice. So here I thought I'd give practical advice on a frequent source of conflict in marriage: finances. And to that end, I'll tell you what works for me and my wife.

The first rule of advice is that works for one couple may not work for others. Talk things over with your spouse and decide how you want to do things. Make sure you agree.

I'm not giving advice about how to balance your budget or pay your bills. If you can do that when you're single, you can do it once you're married. I'm focusing on a much more contentious question: how do you share?

Many couples share everything: what's yours is mine and what's mine is yours.  Every penny we make goes into a joint account, and every penny we spend comes out of it. Which is great, as long as you agree on every single expense. Often you will not. Sometimes my wife wants a fancy dinner, and I want an Xbox--and they cost the same amount. To me that sounds like an extravagant waste, while my wife thinks something similar about the Xbox. She'd never use it, and how often would I really use it after the first month? What often happens is that each person feels the other is being wasteful with their money. It's not uncommon for one partner, usually the one who makes the most money, to start putting restrictions on the other. No, you can't buy that, we can't afford it when we need groceries.

Another option is to keep separate accounts. My paycheck goes into my account, your paycheck goes into yours. Everyone has their own stuff: their own car, their own Xbox, their own meals. Joint costs are split, more or less evenly. That can also work, but what happens when one of you makes a lot more than the other? What if she can't afford to pay half the rent on the nice place close to his job, and starts to resent that he's driving a Mercedes while her clunker is giving its death rattle. What if he loses that job and his savings start to run low because he spent it all on the fancy car? Sure, she'll cover him for a few months, but how long until she starts to resent that he's living off her money.

Now it's not impossible to make either of those work, given common levels of frugality or income, but I'd like to propose another way, and it's the one my wife and I use.  All income goes into into a joint account, from which all household expenses are paid, plus each of you get a personal account. Each person gets a certain amount in their personal account each month, and can spend it however they want. The amount can be fixed, or a percentage of each paycheck.  My wife and I tend to each get 5-10%, depending on what we feel we can afford at the time.

It's important that each person gets the same amount, no matter who's making more money. This helps to avoid feeling that that it's my income or your income. It's our income, and our money, we simply designate a certain amount for each individual's personal use.

Joint expenses are just that, joint. You have to agree on joint expenses. Most are easy: rent or mortgage, bills, groceries, kids.  But if it's ambivalent, or it's expensive (we set a threshold of $200) and not something you've already agreed to, such as groceries or the mortgage, then you have to decide on it together. If you agree, great. But if not, that's not a no. It simply means you have to save up before you can pay for it from your personal account.

Modern finances being what they are, you'll also need a joint credit card and personal credit cards. Personal credit cards are paid off from the personal account, and the joint card is paid off from the joint account.

We've found this arrangement to work very well. The lion's share of our income goes to the joint account, and we spend it on necessities, or things we both enjoy, and save when we can. But we each have a fund we can draw on for things we want, without the need to worry about what the other person would think. It's also the fund we use for date nights and gifts for each other--it's more meaningful when it's our own money.

Speaking of date night, at this point of our relationship we switch off, alternating who pays for the date out of their personal account. That person also gets to plan the date. That way they get to decide how expensive it is, as long as they're willing to pay for it, and they can also pick the activity. Often it's not something the other person would have picked on their own. We typically don't drag each other to activities we know the other person will hate, but we also try to be a good sport about trying things.

So that's what works for us. It won't necessarily work for everyone. And when money's tight, what is and isn't charged to the joint account may be a point of contention, and you may need to budget even the stuff you agree on carefully. For example, is there a limit to how much you can spend on groceries from the joint account? How about clothes or toys for the kids?

But even then, it's nice to have a little money you can spend for yourself.

Not-a-Review of Mythic Orbits 2

As a general rule, I don't review anthologies and magazines that I'm in. Kristin and I both have short stories in Mythic Orbits 2, the second volume of Bear Publication's collection of speculative fiction stories by Christian authors.

My story, "Her Majesty's Guardian," was a very short piece originally published by Daily Science Fiction. It asked the question of how a magic society would deal with a royal family with a genetic predisposition toward madness and a ridiculous amount of power.

Kristin's story, "The Workshop at the End of the World," is a more whimsical tale involving elves, and to say any more about the premise would be to spoil it. It was also published in Daily Science Fiction.

We're very proud of both these stories, of course, but like I said, I don't review books that I'm in, and I especially don't review my own stories, or Kristin's. But I would like to talk about some of the other stories in Mythic Orbits, and mention a few that really worked for me.

My favorite was "Mark the Days" by Kat Heckenbach. Denver begins to live his days by the order that he marks them off in his calendar. He takes advantage of this, skipping over days and coming back to them later, when he can take advantage of knowing what the following days bring. But slowly he comes to realize that there is something terrible waiting for him on the one day he skipped at the beginning, and eventually he won't be able to avoid it any longer. I felt that this story was successful in creating a rising sense of tension, and showing how someone might deal with knowing the future, while fearing to know the past.

Another story I really enjoyed was "They Stood Still," by William Bontrager. Anyone who uses a computer knows the frustration that happens when the computer freezes, and you're afraid to do anything, in case that makes you lose all your unsaved work. This story imagines what would happen if the whole world stopped. Samuel, who lost his legs in Iraq, suddenly has to deal with a Las Vegas empty of all motion except himself. I thought this story really dealt with his dawning horror, and the fear that he would never interact with anyone or anything ever again. I didn't feel like the story quite stuck the landing, however. I would have preferred a deeper meaning to this event than what we received.

Less grim was "Unerella" by Keturah Lamb. This tells the story of the other young woman at Prince Charming's ball, who has to figure out her own way when Cinderella steals his heart. There's nothing really twisty about this story, once you figure out that it's not from Cinderella's point of view, but I enjoyed the determination of a young woman who had to learn to dream something new.

"The Other Edge" by C.W. Briar was a particularly memorable dark science fiction tale. Astronaut Varik Babel leads his crew to make first contact with a ship from another world. What he finds is not what he's looking for. I did find the ending somewhat implausible, given what I know of the technologies involved, but it was horrifying even so.

"Dragon Moon" by Linda Burklin was a bittersweet story about Darla, a young woman who slowly covers herself in tattooed scales to entertain and distract her younger brother, who's dying of cancer. While I can't imagine someone doing that--I kept thinking that she must be crazy to do so--it brought out the depth of her love for her brother. The fantastical ending to this story was dramatic and appropriate, but I felt that the denouement too easily canceled the price that Darla had paid.

These were the stories that really drew me in and which I found myself thinking about days after reading. But our experience of stories is subjective, and I suspect other readers might find themselves reliving some of the other stories in this anthology, such as that of the mother bear searching for her lost cubs, or a curator explaining Earth culture to his alien overlords, or a failed Mars colony recalled to Earth, or robots replaying forgotten memories. I think most people will find something to enjoy in this anthology. Perhaps even a story about a queen's guardian, or a workshop at the end of the world.

Review of Bard's Tale IV

I recently finished Bard's Tale IV, the thirty-years-late sequel to the Bard's Tale Trilogy. I first played these games back in the mid-80s, on a monitor with CGA 4-color 320x200 graphics. Considering those limitations, they seemed like surprisingly good graphics at the time (see the original in emulation here).  I've since upgraded to an nVidia GTX 1080 Ti with 16.7 million colors at 1920x1080.

Fortunately, Bard's Tale IV upped it's graphics game as well, as you can see below.

Skara Brae Below. Honestly, this is probably the best looking part. 

The graphics are overall pretty good, but this is a Kickstarter supported game built by a small studio, so it's not exactly the realism that you'd expect from an AAA game from a major developer.  In particular, the character art is a little cartoonish, and the dungeons--and of course there are dungeons, the original Bard's Tale bragged about its 16 levels of dungeons right there on the box--do take on a certain amount of sameness after a while. There's just not a lot of variety in stone walls.

Character models can be cartoonish.

But for all that, there are some standout visuals. The dungeons of Mangar's Tower and Kylearan's Tower early on (both reprises of dungeons I explored in the original Bard's Tale), and the few Dwarven dungeons, can be quite spectacular in places. But the best looking areas are in the wilderness. For all that Bard's Tale IV is a dungeon crawler, there's a lot of wilderness exploration--which to be honest, are merely another type of dungeon, with impassable underbrush substituting for stone walls.

Some of the best visuals are in the outdoor areas.

Much more entrancing than the visuals was the music. As you might expect for a game like Bard's Tale, there's a lot of it. NPCs are constantly singing--performing, or in groups, or just singing to themselves. Most of the music in Bard's Tale IV are traditional Scottish songs, and I occasionally stopped what I was doing just to listen to someone singing. There's a songbook with translations of some of the songs, but I wouldn't recommend it. The songs aren't always a great fit for the setting. There are four songs in English, one about each of the games, including this one, which contain important clues about certain related dungeons.

I don't judge games purely on their music, or their graphics, or their technical excellence. I judge games primarily by how obsessed I am with them. For all Mass Effect Andromeda's faults, that was a game I played straight through from beginning to end with barely a break. And while Divinity: Original Sin and Original Sin 2 are great games, I find myself drifting away from them for months at a time.

Bard's Tale IV was a game I obsessed over. I played it from beginning to end, almost every night, except for a week when I decided I had to take a break. I even got involved in developer's inXile's forums. (Granted, part of the reason for this is that the game was ridiculously buggy when it was released, and I wanted to report the bugs and maybe hunt for clues for some puzzles where I wasn't sure whether I was just stumped or if I was running into a bug. But also I just wanted to talk about the game.)

So what got me so into the game? Part of it was the lore. Many people complain that it doesn't contain really great storytelling--which I won't argue against. But it did have better storytelling than the original Bard's Tale games (basic plot: an evil wizard has shown up and is causing trouble, go kill him), and more to the point, it gave those stories context and made them part of a bigger world, explaining why Skara Brae was so often the target of evil wizards. The other part was the puzzles. The original Bard's Tale games had a lot of puzzles in how their dungeons were designed, with spinning tiles, teleporters, riddles, and all sorts of things that only really work when the graphics are simple and the perspective is fixed. Bard's Tale IV has a whole new bag of tricks when it comes to puzzles. It does have some of the "find the right item to gain access to an area" puzzles typical of RPGs, but there are also codes you have to figure out, blocks you have to slide into position, fairies you have to guide, and Dwarven gear mechanism puzzles. And each type of puzzle builds to more complex variations as the game progresses. Even combat is its own form of puzzle.

Combat on an 4x4 grid.

Combat takes place on an 4x4 grid, with the heroes on one side and the enemy on the other. Different abilities affect different squares in front of the character who's acting, so moving characters into the correct position, and forcing the enemy to move, is an important part of combat. Spells and attacks always hit and do a fixed amount of damage, depending on the ability and the character stats, so there's not really a lot of randomness to combat, except for crits and certain riders which do depend on probability.

There are a couple of clever innovations which really make combat interesting. The first is opportunity points. Almost every action requires opportunity points, but this pool is shared. If your fighter is best positioned to do damage, then he can use all the opportunity points to dish out damage. Similarly the rogue can use the opportunity points when the fighter's abilities are on cooldown or not really useful for the situation. The second innovation is how spell points are implemented. Spell points are generated starting when combat begins. Depending on how you build your character, they may gain spell points every round, or meditate or drink potions for extra spell points, or use a stance that increases spell point generation. Bards are the exception to this. While they can gain spell points through potions, they mainly gain spell points through drinking. A bard can drink alcohol to gain spell points and stacks of the drunk condition. More stacks of the drunk condition can cause bard songs (their versions of spells) to have extra effects, but drink too much (more than the bard's intelligence), and they pass out for a round.  Bard songs tend to focus on buffs and debuffs (including generating spell points) rather than direct damage. Practioners (the generic name for magic users) can buff, force enemies to move, summon, and do direct damage. Spells and bard songs don't require opportunity points to use, so they form a separate pool of actions bards and practitioners can perform, but many of the ways they gain spell points require opportunity points. It gives the combat an interesting mechanic, where practitioners and bards need several rounds to build up to their most powerful abilities, while the fighter and rogue (and bard, who can drink and fight at the same time) hold the line.

Another, not entirely novel, piece of the combat puzzle are damage types. There are three types of damage: normal, mental, and true. Normal damage can be blocked by armor, so if you're using normal damage you either need to do a lot of it to overcome the armor, or you need to first remove the armor, which you can do with certain abilities and items. Mental damage can bypass armor, and it also attacks focus. Enemies, and you, need to focus to perform certain actions, which require you to wait until your next turn to complete them. Meanwhile, you have a focus bar, which has a number of points depending on your intelligence. Mental damage affects the focus bar first, and if the enemy destroys all your focus, the action is canceled, so focus limits certain powerful abilities, and attacks that do mental damage allow you to interrupt your enemy's attempt to use those abilities. Finally, there's true damage. True damage bypasses both armor and focus.

There are four basic classes in the game. Bards have bard songs, but also a lot of combat capabilities (many of the same ones the fighter has). Rogues tend to be straight damage dealers with a lot of tricks. They're the only ones who get extra damage from critical hits (other classes recharge abilities or gain spell points). Fighters also deal decent damage, but also have abilities that draw enemy fire and protect their allies. They have the best defense in the game, and can use the best armor. Practitioners can have a lot of variety, with lots of different types of spells, and specializations--and you can specialize in all the specializations. You need to specialize in at least three of them to become an archmage, which gives you a large collection of powerful spells.

Every level, a character gains a skill point, and can use that to buy one skill in a skill tree. Every class has at least four categories of skills, most of which contain several skill trees. Everything in the game requires buying skills. Skills let you wear better armor, give you powerful combat abilities, let you craft potions and brew drinks, teach you new spells and bard songs, and provide straightforward stat bumps. As you move up a skill tree, you sometimes close off other paths, but you gain more powerful skills, including a capstone that can give your party more opportunity points, or start everyone off with an extra spell point, or mark enemies you hit with spells with an explosive mark that damages it and nearby enemies the next time someone hits them, or allow you to absorb your allies' damage, or start everyone off concealed.

And here is where, in the late game, combat tends to break down, as these powerful capstones combine to become too powerful. If you start out concealed, then you can take a round or two to build up your spell points, and then, before your enemy attacks, you can hit them with your most powerful spells. In the late game, you can end most combat encounters before the enemy gets a chance to act. It's fun, at least for a little while, to completely dominate your enemy, but eventually it starts to wear thin. I suspect that the developers will nerf this particular ability in future updates.

When your entire party starts out concealed, you can buff and charge up spell points for a combat-ending surprise attack.

Speaking of updates, the game was very buggy when it came out. Things like the rogue's critical hits doing less damage rather than more, occasionally not getting experience for battles, the inability to click on necessary items in the game world, or becoming stuck in the landscape. The bugs have certainly been reduced since the game was released (reduced damage on a critical has since been fixed, for example), but there are still quite a few.

Despite these issues, I very much enjoyed the game. It's been my favorite since Mass Effect Andromeda, and I'm hoping for more like it.

Mythic Orbits

This is a guest post, posted as part of the Mythic Orbits blog tour. Kristin and I are both in Volume 2 of Mythic Orbits.

About Mythic Orbits

You might be wondering what in the world “Mythic Orbits ” refers to. I’m not sure if it will help reassure you to tell you the name Mythic Orbits was simply intended to suggest both science fiction and fantasy and to identify these books in a distinctive way, along with any that follow after in the series.

Just as these anthologies represent a wide variety of genres, there is no common theme to these tales, though the subject of empathy or lack thereof does come up in them repeatedly. This is most definitely not an anthology about orbits which are somehow mystical.

These anthologies are a showcase for the best stories submitted in the general field of speculative fiction by Christian authors. They represent a wide variety of genres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and paranormal.

The main goal of these anthologies was to demonstrate that Christian authors can write speculative fiction well. Stories with a wide range of appeal are included here, mostly serious, some with humor, some with “happy endings” and others clearly not so happy. All of them worth reading.

Some of these stories feature Christian characters in speculative fiction worlds, some make use of Christian themes either subtly or overtly, while some have no discernible connection to Christianity at all. Christian authors are featured in this collection rather than specifically Christian-themed stories.

So, is it widely-known all over the world that Christians write speculative fiction?

Well, clearly Christians who themselves are speculative fiction writers know what they write. But does everybody else?

Especially when we're talking about theologically conservative Christians, Evangelicals of some sort, professed Bible-believing Christians, do people know about their works? Is it legitimate for people to wonder if writers with personal convictions along these lines produce speculative fiction, that is, science fiction and fantasy and related genres like LitRPG, paranormal, and horror?

These books provide an answer: Not only do Christian writers produce speculative fiction stories, they write some great ones.

Enjoy these examples!

Travis Perry (Editor and Publisher)

Mythic Orbits 2016

Fourteen of the best speculative fiction stories by Christian authors, spinning science fiction, fantasy, horror, and paranormal genres into worlds of intrigue and delight.

Featuring Graxin by Kerry Nietz, author of Amish Vampires in Space and A Star Curiously Singing, Mythic Orbits 2016 has something for every speculative fiction fan.

Mythic Orbits Vol. 2

In a series praised by both Tosca Lee, Kathy Tyers, and Kerry Nietz, this anthology of eleven speculative fiction stories by Christian authors shines in science fiction, fantasy, horror, and LitRPG genres. Featuring Kat Heckenbach’s “Mark the Days,” this collection has something for every speculative fiction fan.

Featured Authors:

• Mark Venturini (Mythic Orbits 2016)
• Jill Domschot (Mythic Orbits 2016)
• Richard New ( Mythic Orbits 2016)
• Kirk Outerbridge (Mythic Orbits 2016)
• Cindy Emmet Smith (Mythic Orbits 2016)
• Lisa Gefrides (Mythic Orbits 2016)
• L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright (Mythic Orbits 2016)
• Joshua M. Young (Mythic Orbits 2016)
• Matthew Sketchley (Mythic Orbits 2016)
• R. V. Saunders ( Mythic Orbits 2016)
• Sherry Rossman (Mythic Orbits 2016)
• Kerry Nietz (Mythic Orbits 2016)
• Linda Burklin (Mythic Orbits 2016 & Vol. 2)
• Kat Heckenbach (Mythic Orbits 2016 &Vol. 2)
• Steve Rzasa (Mythic Orbits 2)
• Donald Crankshaw (Mythic Orbits 2)
• CW Briar (Mythic Orbits 2)
• Cindy Koepp (Mythic Orbits 2)
• C. O. Bonham (Mythic Orbits 2)
• Kristin Janz (Mythic Orbits 2)
• William Bontrager (Mythic Orbits 2)
• A. K. Meek (Mythic Orbits 2)
• Keturah Lamb (Mythic Orbits 2)

Mysterion

It's been a while since I've posted here. The good news is that I haven't completely dropped off the map. I've just been focusing nearly exclusively on Mysterion.

The better news is that our hard work on Mysterion is about to bear fruit. Our first story goes up this month--in fact, Patreon supporters can read it now. I'm delighted that we'll be publishing "We Have Discerned a Potential Deal" by J.P. Sullivan. Aliens want to buy the Vatican, but what's really impressive is what they're offering in payment.

In the meantime, we've been publishing nonfiction on the site regularly. Since January, we've been publishing reviews and interviews.

In January, Kristin reviewed Jerome Stueart's The Angels of Our Better Beasts, followed by an interview with Jerome himself.

In February, Donald reviewed Andrew Klavan's The Great Good Thing, and followed that up with an interview.

And in March, Stephen Case reviewed Centipede Press's latest collection of R. A. Lafferty stories, The Man with the Speckled Eyes. Unfortunately, since R. A. Lafferty is dead, we can't interview him; March's interview was with author Maurice Broaddus, who also co-edited two of the anthologies that inspired Mysterion, Dark Faith and Dark Faith: Invocations.