13th Age RPG

I recently pre-ordered the 13th Age RPG, and I've had a chance to look through the rules and come away with some thoughts.

In the same way that Pathfinder is D&D 3.75, you could say that 13th Age is D&D 4.75. It builds on many of the ideas of 4E, and tries to improve them. At the same time, it simplifies a lot of the mechanics, moving the complexity away from the optimal choice of feat and items to the storytelling. This could be either fun or frustrating, depending on the GM and players.

Roleplaying

A lot of the storytelling is built right into the character mechanics. For example, each player receives three or more relationship dice. These are assigned to positive, negative, or conflicted relationships with the thirteen icons. The icons represent the most powerful NPCs in the game world, and can be heroic, ambiguous, or villainous. The relationship dice can be used a number of ways. They're rolled at the beginning of a session to determine which icons (or more often, which icon's organization) will be influencing the session, or they may be rolled as a result of an encounter with an icon's organization.

In addition to icon relationships, storytelling may have mechanical effects. Some class abilities depend on the player telling a good story, and leaves it to the GM to judge whether they get a bonus. It's also up to the player to convince the GM that his background applies when the situation calls for it.

Characters

Anyone who's played 4E will notice similarities, and some differences. Each player gets a certain number of recoveries (healing surges, though you're supposed to roll for the amount of healing), an AC, physical and mental defenses, HP equal to three times a base plus their con modifier, and a feat. There are bonuses to stats based on both race and class (each of which can apply to one of two stats).

Instead of skills characters get backgrounds. A background is more a description of a profession than a skill: something like court jester, temple initiate, or cat burglar. Each character starts with 8 points to spend on backgrounds, with a maximum of 5 in any one background. You add those points to any skill checks which are relevant to a background. The DM usually picks the attribute to use (for instance, is it a dexterity or intelligence check?), and the player makes the case for which background is relevant.

Each of the classes also gets 3 talents, and most of them get powers.

Talents generally customize your characters, by giving a permanent bonus or allowing you to do new things (substitute Wis for Cha in all your class abilities, for instance). But they can also give you what are effectively powers.

Powers are a lot like 4E powers. They are usually at-will, recharge, or daily. Recharge powers are similar to encounter powers in 4E, but when you take a quick rest, you have to roll to see if you recover them or not. You are usually free to choose as many powers of each type as you want, up to your limit, so it's not like 4E where you have a certain number of at will, encounter, and daily powers at each level. The classes are different in the type of powers they receive. All fighter powers (maneuvers) are at will, and they take the form of flexible attacks, where you roll your die first, and then decide which maneuver to use based on what conditions the natural roll gives (some maneuvers trigger on odd rolls, some on even, some on hits, some on misses, some at 11+ or 16+). Rogue powers are all at-will, but sometimes require momentum (that you've hit an enemy and haven't been hit by one since).

Barbarians, rangers, and paladins are considered simpler classes to play, since they don't have any powers, just talents (though the number of talents they get increase by level, unlike other classes). While clerics, sorcerers, bards, and wizards are more complex to play, since their powers are spells, and are often recharge or dailies (bards also get songs, which are sustainable spells with finishing effects, and battle cries, which are flexible attacks).

Feats are usually tied to talents or powers, increasing their effects. This can be challenging when spells, which can be changed each day, have associated feats. The rules encourage the GM to be flexible in letting players reassign feats, but leave it up to him to decide. All spells can be increased in level, filling a higher spell slot for more powerful effect. Generally, you only get spell slots at two or three levels, losing lower level spell slots, so you need to trade for the higher level versions of spells if you want to keep them.

There are only ten levels, but there's a significant advance with each one, each level giving you a feat, +1 to defenses, attack, and ability/background rolls, and another weapon die (so your basic attack does level x d6-d10). Levels are divided into tiers, with adventurer (1-4), champion (5-7), and epic (8-10).

In addition, after each session you get an incremental advancement, receiving part of your gains for the next level now.

Combat

Combat in 13th Age is considerably more abstract than in 4E. Enemies are either nearby (in which case you can reach them in a move action) or far away (you have to move to become nearby first). However, it is possible for some creatures to be behind others, in which case, the ones in front, as long as they aren't already engaged in melee, can intercept you if you try to attack the ones behind. The biggest constraint on movement is that you need to engage someone in order to hit them with a melee attack. You can't move after that without first disengaging (which requires a roll) or taking an opportunity attack. Since you have to move in order to engage, you can't attack someone else without disengaging. Of course, more than one enemy can engage you, so you can still be engaged with multiple foes at a time. Some classes have ways to disengage. For example, the fighter can intercept even when he's engaged, disengaging from his current enemies, and the rogue has numerous abilities that let him disengage.

But probably the most significant addition to combat is the escalation die. Every round after the first, the DM increments the escalation die, starting at 1 and increasing each round until it reaches the maximum of 6. Certain powers key off the escalation die (wizards' cyclic spells aren't expended when the die's even, for example). But the main effect is that the PCs add the escalation die to their attack rolls. Only the most dangerous monsters do the same. This gives the PCs a significant advantage as the fight wears on, but they have to earn it. The DM is cautioned not to advance the die if the PCs are hanging back rather than engaging the enemy.

Conclusion

I haven't had a chance to play the game yet, just to read through the rules. It looks like there are a lot of interesting ideas here, some of which sound really fun, and some of which I have my doubts about. But at this point, I'm eager to try playing it, and that's as high a praise as I can give so far.

Workbench

I spent most of last night assembling the workbench shown on the left.  It took more time that I expected, but otherwise it went quite smoothly.  The directions clear, all the pieces were clearly labeled with stickers showing part number and which direction they should be oriented, the screws were in little labeled plastic bags, each hole was properly threaded, and, unlike a lot of furniture I've assembled, all the pieces fit together smoothly like they were supposed to. The instructions said that it takes two people to assemble, but I found I only needed my wife's help twice: when we flipped it over after attaching the legs, and when we moved it to its permanent location.  Some tasks, such as putting up the pegboards and hanging the lamp, were harder for one person to do, but not impossible. In the end, the only problem was that it was two screws short.  There weren't quite as many #41 screws as there were supposed to be.  There was a small bag with one extra of every screw, bolt, and washer, but that still left me without one screw.  I was able to assemble it anyway, leaving out a screw where I thought it least mattered, but that bothered me, so picked a few screws up at the hardware store the next day and fastened in the last screw.  This is what it looks like assembled:

New workbench

I got this particular workbench, the Seville Classics UltraHD Lighted Workbench, because it was highly rated on Amazon, despite the fact that UltraHD sounds like something you'd call a smartphone. More importantly, it had everything I was looking for: a work surface, drawers, a pegboard, and a shelf.  It also came with a power strip and a flourescent light, both useful for where I set it up in my basement, which is lacking in both lighting and power outlets.


I also got a stool, so I'd have somewhere to sit while working at the bench.  The stool is also from Seville, though it lacks the fancy smartphone name.

Black Gate post

My latest Black Gate post is online.  No review this month, but I do talk about reviewing.  I'll let you decide whether that's a cop out or an improvement.

Fund drive for The Midnight Diner

Coach's Midnight Diner was one of the first places to publish one of my stories.  At the time, it was a yearly anthology of Christian genre fiction.  The Office of Second Chances was published in the second volume, and remains one of my favorite stories.

The Midnight Diner is now looking to become a regularly published paying market, and to that end, is raising money. In their own words:

The Midnight Diner is a hardboiled genre anthology with a Christian slant. No restrictions on God, no restrictions on reality. Didactic preachy works are dismissed unceremoniously; we’re looking for high quality works that are uncompromising in craft, content, and quality. Since 2007, The Diner has been released as an annual, print anthology. For the time being, the first three volumes can be found here, here and here. However, like any good creation, we’re going through changes. Evolving, as it were.

At the beginning of next year, the Diner will move to a quarterly, online format. For a nominal fee, subscribers will have access to exclusive poetry, nonfiction, short fiction and art, as well as an original serial novella. Each year’s content will also be released early the following year as a print and digital anthology. We are also switching over to a paying publication, as opposed to the prior Editor’s Choice Award model.

I look forward to seeing the new format, and would encourage anyone interested in seeing this sort of fiction flourish to take part in the fund drive.

Self-published Book Review

My latest review, of The Brightest Light by Scott J. Robinson, is now up at Black Gate.

Star Trek: Into Darkness

Kristin and I went to see the latest Star Trek movie last Friday.  We had fun, but we ultimately weren't very impressed.  It wasn't as clever as it tried to be.  There was a bit of a reversal on a different Star Trek movie, which probably seemed cleverer in concept than it turned out in execution.  But overall, I can probably forgive it.  I still had fun, and even if it's not a great Star Trek movie, it was still a fun Star Trek movie.

Exercise Helper

I was inspired by this article to start an exercise routine.  I liked the idea of a short, high intensity routine that could include both aerobic and strength training. Of course, I didn't think that I'd be able to do it at full intensity right away, so I decided not to really try.  I'd do as much as I was comfortable with, and stop when it was too much, taking significantly longer breaks between exercises than suggested.  And hopefully move up to the full routine when I was able.

But I didn't want to take too long of a break--for example, however long it would take to look up whatever exercise I was supposed to do next.  For that matter, how was I supposed to manage the timing?  Since it was based on short timed bouts rather than number of exercises (which was part of the appeal), I'd have to keep track of the time, which is a little hard to do while doing push-ups.

I decided the proper response was to write a program.  Since I'd been learning Java this past year, I had a pretty good idea how to write a Java program that would do most of what I wanted--show which exercise to do next, and time both the length of the exercise and the break between them (I wanted longer breaks between the exercise, but I still intended to keep it short).  Of course, it would be even better if my program could tell me what the next exercise was without me having to look at the screen.  So I found a Java-based voice synthesizer, Free TTS, and made that part of my program.  I also incorporated the illustrations from the above article.

The result is Exercise Helper.  It tells you what the next exercise is (speaks it out loud, actually), shows you an image which shows you how to perform the exercise, and then counts down the time to start.  Once you start, it times the duration of the exercise, while counting down out loud by ten second intervals (with a 3, 2, 1, done at the end).  And then it moves on to the next exercise.

Screen shot of Exercise Helper, sans figure.

I used the figures from the article, but since I'm not sure I can repost them here, the screenshot above blanks that part out.

Overall, it's a very useful program for me, though I'd have to do some work on it before it would be helpful for others (including the ability to load and store your own set of exercises).

Dinner at Le Hobbit

Kristin and I spent the last weekend in Quebec city, the capital of the French-speaking province of Quebec, where we saw the sights and went to a lot of nice restaurants.  For the most part, our meals were planned in advance, with dinner at Panache and Pain Beni.  But on Sunday night, we (by which I mean mainly Kristin) decided to walk down Rue Saint-Jean until we found a place that we both liked to eat.  After saying no to a couple of places, we saw a place called Le Hobbit Bistro.  With a name like that we had to check it out.

After looking at the outdoor, chalkboard menu of the specials, Kristin declared it acceptable (as the menu was in French with no English translation), and we decided to eat there.  It was a decidedly better than expected.  The restaurant was mid-price by Quebec standards (meaning it still cost about $100 for two people, admittedly with dessert for one and a glass of wine for the other), but it was also second only to Panache (a top tier restaurant which cost four times as much) in the food.  So I would highly recommend it for anyone in Quebec.  I especially liked the dessert, a Mousse Caramel et Chocolat Noir.

We did ask about the name, and got several different versions, but the one we think is probably true is that back in the 70s, when the place was a bar and artist hangout with live performances and poetry readings, it had a very low ceiling.  That is what earned it the name Le Hobbit.

On Alienated Young Men

There's been a lot of talk recently about what motivated the Marathon bombers.  The assumption is that they were following the dictates of a radical form of Islam, but a lot of people think that it was their sense of alienation that drove them toward that belief system.   A lot of people are wondering what we can do to prevent young men, especially immigrants, from feeling like outsiders.

This is the wrong question.

There are always going to be alienated young men (and women).  Young people often feel like outsiders.  For many of us, it's simply a phase we go through.  I went through a couple of  years of feeling pretty isolated myself, where I lived alone and had a work-from-home job, and barely got out of the house.  I suspect that this was a more extreme form of alienation, a combination of my innate shyness and lack of impetus to get out, than most people ever experience.  It was a very lonely time for me, a time when I would sometimes feel like my life wasn't going anywhere.  And yet, it never occurred to me to lash out.

Some of this was just my nature.  Setbacks don't generally cause me to react with anger or depression.  Which is not to say that I was driven to overcome them.  My most common reaction to setbacks is to do my best to ignore them, using television, video games, and/or books.

But another large component is simply that it would be wrong.  My own belief system is quite emphatic that hurting people is wrong, so my mind is trained not to work that way.

And I wonder if this is part of the problem that we see in the case of not just the Marathon bombers, but others who commit horrific crimes--Sandy Hook, the Aurora movie theater shootings, and others.  The dominant philosophy today is one of postmodernism, that all beliefs are equally valid (or equally invalid).  However, a philosophy like that doesn't carry much weight when you need to decide what's right and what's wrong.  So people turn to other philosophies, ones that have clear lines and a strong code.  But since there's no guidance on how to choose a philosophy, nihilism is just as valid as theism or Platonism or Essentialism.

And when it comes to moral conduct, not all philosophies are created equal.  The problem is that our society wants to enforce moral conduct not with a solid grounding of any belief system, but an appeal to emotion and self-esteem.

This is not to say that there's only one belief system that a society can operate on.  Societies have successfully operated on many different belief systems.  But not all belief systems have successfully been a basis for a society.  And a society based explicitly on a refusal to acknowledge the truth of any belief system seems destined for difficulties.

The problem is that I'm not sure there's a good solution to this problem, not one that would be acceptable in a pluralistic society.

Review of Iron Man 3

Not many plot spoilers below, but I might give away an emotional epiphany or two.

Kristin and I went to see Iron Man 3 on Saturday.  While I greatly enjoyed it, Kristin found the plot confusing: I was surprised at some of the things she didn't follow.  Now my wife's very intelligent and a talented writer, so it had me wondering whether the movie was more confusing than I realized.  It may just be that I have an easier time dealing with leaps of Hollywood and/or comic-book logic, including a very questionable hacking scene, or maybe I got distracted by the pretty explosions and didn't pay as much attention to the plot as she did.  But be aware that the movie may not make much sense to everybody.

Which is a shame, because otherwise it was a lot of fun.  Aside from the aforementioned explosions, there were some nice character notes for Tony and his relationships, especially with Pepper, Rhodey, and the cute kid.  Yes, there's a cute kid.  Surprisingly, his presence doesn't turn the movie saccharine.  Tony Stark is just as abrasive and snarky with the cute kid as with everyone else, and the kid held his own.

Which brings us back to Tony.  Tony Stark dominates the Iron Man movies.  Which isn't too surprising, as he's the main character, but he owns the movies in ways that other main characters, even superheroes, don't.  Villains, like Loki in Thor, can often steal the show, but with the Iron Man movies the villains are bit players, and it's really about Tony and his personal demons.  In the first movie we saw him becoming a hero, while in the second we saw him backslide, as being a hero went to his head. The third movie is a bit different. He's still arrogant and larger than life, which he'll no doubt always be, but he's also more mature.  He met the price of being a hero in The Avengers, and any mention of the events in New York brings on a panic attack.

What brings him resolution is realizing that whether he's fighting without the suit (which he does very effectively) or whether he's using a ton of suits (which he also does by the end), it's not the armored suit that makes him Iron Man.  And that, I thought, was an epiphany he very much needed.

Review of Avarice by Annie Bellet

My latest review for Black Gate is now up.  This month, it's Annie Bellet's Avarice.

A Week Later

It's been a week since the bombing attack on the Boston marathon, and if there's one thing you can say about the week, it sure wasn't uneventful.  First there was the bombing itself, on Monday afternoon.  I was working about a mile and a half away, and for a while I wondered if I was going to be able to get home.

On Tuesday, there was an explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas.  This is unrelated to the Boston bombing, and as far as anyone knows, accidental, but despite the intentional terror and destruction in Boston, more people were killed and injured, and more property destroyed, in Texas.

It was late Thursday afternoon when the police released the pictures of the two suspects in the Marathon bombing.  That night, I began to hear things about a gunman at MIT.  At first this seemed to be unrelated.  I went to bed knowing that a MIT police officer had been killed, but thinking that it was the result of an armed robbery at a convenience store gone bad.

I woke up on Friday to find the whole city shut down.  The public transportation wasn't running, my work was canceled, and residents were being told to shelter in place.  It seemed that the incident at MIT had turned out to be the bombing suspects after all (though it doesn't seem as though they had anything to do with the convenience store robbery).  After which, they hijacked a car, and fled to Watertown, where they got into a shootout with police, in which they used explosives (early reports said grenades, but I haven't heard confirmation on that). One of the brothers was killed, but one fled on foot, and the police were conducting a door-to-door search.

Shelter in place didn't necessarily mean stay home.  Many people were out and about when the order came down, and were trapped where they were all day.  In addition, people were evacuated from their homes as the police searched, and forced to stay with neighbors and friends. I wasn't in one of the places that received that order, but I couldn't get to work either, so I pretty much stayed home all day.

They finally lifted that order on Friday evening, and then they found the bomber about an hour later, when a vigilant citizen noticed him hiding in the boat in his backyard (leading a few to wonder how helpful that order was in the first place).

The bombers were identified as two Chechens, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.  Both were legal immigrants who'd been in the US for years, and Dzokhar is a US citizen, and a student at the University of Massachusetts.  Right now the evidence suggests that they've been becoming increasingly interested in a radical form of Islam for the past couple of years.  It remains to be seen whether they acted independently, or if they had support--whether in material or training--of any known terrorist groups.

I've been reciting this mostly from memory, and mostly because I want to write down my recollection of it as accurately as possible.  Some more information about the case, and where things stand now, can be found at Boston.com.

Explosions in Boston today

I went down to North Carolina last week to attend my grandfather's funeral, where he received military honors, including a three-volley salute.  I was going to blog on that, and probably still will later this week.  However, something that affected more people than just my family occurred upon my return, namely the bombing attack on the Boston Marathon.

Around 3 pm today, two bombs went off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.  At this point, it's not known who was responsible for the attack.  There are three dead so far, and over a hundred wounded, some critically, so that number may rise.  The Boston Herald has this to say at the moment:

Two huge explosions rocked the Boston Marathon finish line at Copley Square just before 3 p.m. today, killing three and injuring 134 at last count, including several traumatic amputations on streets crowded with runners, spectators and post-race partiers.

Many of those injured are children — including an 8-year-old killed in the blast, the Herald has learned. Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis said tonight there is "no suspect" and the death toll is now at three.

It's being called terrorism, since it is by definition a terror attack, but it's not known whether  it's domestic or foreign, an individual or a group.  We'll find out more in the coming days.

This hits pretty close to home for me. While my wife was in Arlington all day, I was at work in downtown Boston when the attack occurred.  I didn't hear the explosion myself, but it was within a mile and a half of where I work.  Still, I missed most of the chaos, and things had settled down by the time I headed home.

What I don't know is whether anyone I know was hit by the blast.  I know people who were watching the marathon, and even a few people running in it.  So far, I haven't learned whether anyone I knew was injured, but it may be a while before I hear from everyone.

New Review

My latest review at Black Gate, of Dalya Moon's Broken Shell Island, is now up.  I thought the plot could have been a little more logical, but I liked the story overall.

The Alien

C. R. Wiley has an interesting post up concerning the different views of the alien as expressed by C.S. Lewis and H.P. Lovecraft.  It's a really long article, and I encourage you to read the whole thing.

But to give you a taste of how Wiley interprets Lovecraft's view:

Lovecraft believed he possessed greater insight into the nature of things than better-adjusted, healthier people. He took dark comfort in breaking the news to the rest of us that we are all as strange and out of place as he felt he was. He wanted to take his readers Outside, or, perhaps better, to bring the Outside inside. Here’s Lovecraft from yet another letter:

To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. Only the human characters must have human qualities . . . but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown—the shadow-haunted Outside—we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold.

Meanwhile, Lewis sees things quite differently:

Because there is a “Wood Between the Worlds” for Lewis, creatures can be said to be beautifully fitted for their respective realms. Beauty does not merely reside in the eye of the beholder (although it certainly should reside there); it is recast. When prejudice and pride are cast away, the lines of alien beauty can come to the surface. Because the Wood Between the Worlds is common to all worlds, inhabitants from each world have the power to recognize the beauty resident in another world. This is not a species of relativism—it is classical Realism in a coat of many colors.

To a theist, all things are the product of God's divine purpose and grace.  They may be fallen and corrupted, but they must contain a spark of the divine, which gives beauty to even the most mundane or alien.

Reading and Writing

In a writers' forum I participate, the question has come up of whether writers really need to read.  The answer is yes.  I'm not one of those who say that a writer needs to read fiction in their genre every day.  You probably should read plenty of fiction in your genre, but I'll admit that I go through dry spells.  Sometimes I'm reading a book a week, and sometimes I may go months between reading books and even stories.  However, even given the occasional dry spell, I have amassed quite a catalog of books in my genre that I have read.  So even when a writer isn't reading a lot now, I would hope that he's read a lot in his formative years.

I sometimes think that I don't read widely enough, or read enough.  But even when I'm reading the least, I easily read ten times as much as I write.  So it's hard for me to comprehend how writers could hardly read at all.

Why is reading so important?  If you read a lot, won't your work sound just like everyone else's?  Well, yes and no.  Part of the reason to read a lot is so that you absorb the elements of writing.  At the most basic level, that's vocabulary and grammar, and how to put together coherent sentences and paragraphs.  How to describe a scene or an action.  Believe it or not, a lot of would-be writers have never learned, or at least are very rusty, with these basic skills.  They may have learned them in grade school, but a lot of people haven't practiced them since, and seeing how to use the language helps immensely.  Beyond that, there's plotting and pacing.  Mood and characterization.  I don't think anybody knows how to do these things without seeing how its done by others.  In our day to day lives, we communicate verbally.  And while verbal storytelling has its place, it's not the same thing as the written word.  Nor is video, such as televisions and movies.  The techniques used in those forms are not the same as the ones that a writer can effectively use.

I shouldn't minimize the danger of homogenization, where you start to sound like exactly what you read.  It happens (though I think that creative writing classes are more homogenizing than reading).  The cure to that is to read widely.  Read recent stories and old.  Read different genres.  Read fiction and non-fiction.  Read books written in other languages (in those languages, if you can).

Review of The Bard's Tale

I'm old enough to have played the original 1985 Bard's Tale game shortly after it came out, in glorious 320x240 4-color CGA. That may not seem like much to you kids, with your 1920x1080 16.7 million color 3D accelerated graphics, but it was a vast improvement over Bard's Tale's predecessors, such as the two color Wizardry. Like Wizardry, Bard's Tale was 3D, in that it involved exploring a dungeon in first person, with ten foot steps (none of that smooth, continuous movement of modern, or even old-school, first person shooters). Combat was text based, with you selecting each character's actions each round, but the real test was the exploration, mapping out each square of the dungeon on graph paper as you identified every trick, trap, and puzzle. And there were a lot, such as teleporters and spinners and areas of complete darkness--all intended to make mapping the area as difficult as possible.  I played through the first two games, but never made it through the third.

Well, like all things 80s, Bard's Tale is back. There's a 2004 remake sequel spiritual successor--well, a game by the same name anyway. It also has one of the same designers, Brian Fargo. Apparently, inXile Games, the designer, wasn't able to get the rights for the original game from Interplay, but they were able to, uh, borrow the name. Aside from the name, and some subtle references, there's not much similarity in story or gameplay. Which I guess is a good thing, as today's kids don't have the patience for the careful mapping it takes to play the original. Instead the new game is an action RPG in the vein of Diablo, but with less resource management.

I didn't get around to playing this new Bard's Tale until the last week or so, when I bought the recently released Kindle version for $3. After having played through it, I can say that it was well worth the time.

The protagonist and sole PC, the Bard, is not exactly a paragon of virtue. He's solely interested in coin and women, so it's curious that the imprisoned princess Caleigh has chosen him as her champion, and offered him the requisite price for his services (hint: it's not just money). Of course, Caleigh isn't picky. She's named dozens of Chosen Ones, mostly untrained farmboys, and the Bard is constantly tripping over their corpses. Fortunately, he's both more canny and more skilled than the aforementioned farmboys. Though perhaps not canny enough. He wanders around, solving almost as many problems as he causes, with the help of his summoned allies, his loyal dog, and a narrator who despises him.

The gameplay is straightforward and simple. You summon allies with your music, starting with a rat and progressing to tunes to summon knights and assassins. You can also cast spells with your limited selection of adder stones. But mostly, you whack things with your sword or shoot them with your bow. There are three levels of martial techniques for each weapon type, starting with basic competence and moving to more advanced types, all of which you can execute using just the attack and block buttons. I preferred dual weapon, with sword and dirk, but you can select weapon and shield, bow, two-handed sword, or flail. I never found the flail all that useful (while it can't be blocked, it takes too long to spin up), but some of the best weapons in the game are two-handers, and the bow makes certain fights much easier. As I mentioned earlier, Bard's Tale has simplified resource management. There are no trade-offs within a weapon type, so when you pick up a new weapon you'll either automatically equip it and convert your current weapon to silver, or convert the new find to silver, depending on which weapon is better. And while you can pick up a variety of junk, from pants to snow globes to self-help books, usually you convert them straight to silver.  Like most games, conversations usually have options, but your choices are always nice or snarky, and usually the nice is pretty snarky too.

I can go on about the gameplay and the story, but ultimately this game lives or dies by its humor.  The game is constantly poking fun at the tropes of computer role playing games, such as the cliched rats-in-the-cellar quest (it's a giant fire breathing one) and the wild animals dropping swords and silver (the narrator refuses to read those parts).  You'd also think it was a Rodgers and Hammerstein production, given the number of times drunks and monsters unaccountably break out into song and dance.  It's clear that this is a game that doesn't take itself too seriously, as you can see from the trailer:



So clearly, if you want to relive the original Bard's Tale games, you won't find it in this game.  But you should probably buy it anyway, as it comes with all three of the original games run in an emulator.  So you get the original games, and a very funny action RPG, which is a pretty good investment for $3, the going price for the Kindle version on Amazon.

You can buy the iOS version for $1.99, or find it for PCs on Steam for $9.99, which is pricey, but it's probably a better platform for the original Bard's Tale games.

Review of Ice Will Reveal by Julia Dvorin

Last October, my wife and I went to World Fantasy in Toronto.  One of the things you receive at World Fantasy is a huge bag full of free (in the sense of being included with the membership fee) books.  This year, the books included a number of cards which allowed you to download free e-books.  For the most part, I have yet to read the World Fantasy books, with the exception of Julia Dvorin's Ice Will Reveal.  This is not a coincidence.  Julia Dvorin's novel was the only e-book I downloaded from the World Fantasy book bag, since it was the only one that really grabbed my attention.  And I'm far more likely to read an e-book than a paper book.  It makes sense, really.  I have my smartphone with me at all times, and if I have some free time and nothing better to do, I can browse through my book collection and pick out something to read.  Whereas for paper books, I have to be at home in order to pick out a new book, and I can only carry one or two with me at a time.

Of course, the reason I selected Ice Will Reveal to download is because it was an unabashedly epic fantasy novel, which looked like it would be a fun read.  It was. It's about two orphans, a brother and a sister, named Jarrod and Whisper.  Jarrod is a Temple Guardsman, while Whisper is an apprentice acquirer of rarities.  In this story, that corresponds closer to thief than to adventurer, although her mistress, Mins, is certainly a high-end thief and fence.  Mins lives like minor nobility.

Jarrod is sent with companions to find a breach in the Boundary that holds back the Blight, the dead zone to the north. Jarrod already suspects that part of the reason he is being sent is as a test to see if he is indeed the Foretold, the one whom prophecy says is to repair the Blight.  He's not the only candidate for that position.  Yonenn, a Reaper Priestess, part of an order that worships the goddess in her death aspect, is also a candidate.  The prophecy says that ice will reveal who the Foretold is, so this trip to the edge of the frozen Blight is expected to resolve the prophecy. What they find is not the answer to the prophecy, and not only a breach in the boundary.  Something evil has started to come through.

Meanwhile, Whisper is sent to retrieve an important artifact necessary to repair the breach. Her quest involves significantly more grift and theft than Jarrod's, as the artifact is held by a creepy, but easily seduced, wizard, and it's up to Whisper to relieve him of it.

Things pick up once the two siblings return to the city, having found the breach and the artifact needed to seal it.  It was only a matter of time before Whisper and Jarrod joined forces.  They head out to repair the breach, and are doubly, or perhaps triply, betrayed by their companions, and then they escape and come back. And that's it, which is something of a problem.

While I thought the set up worked well in the novel, it fell short at the resolution.  We don't know whether the breach was repaired, as the one who was supposed to do it ran off with the artifact and disappeared.  We don't know what's going on with the quest to recover the Cauldron, the other artifact that's supposed to heal the Blight entirely, as the one who was supposed to do that also disappeared. We don't even know who the Foretold is for certain, although the clues point to Whisper, who wasn't even one of the candidates. In the end, the quest falls apart and the heroes go home.  Now as this is the first book of a series, I'm willing to cut the author some slack, and assume that these questions will be resolved in the next book. But I would have liked some better resolution, or at least a more satisfying climax, for this novel.

Copy

A friend of mine, and a contributor to the now defunct Storyblogging Carnival, is running a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a television pilot.  Here's the plug:

COPY is a TV show about the student media at an evangelical Christian college: An editor trying to whip his staff into shape, a blogger more TMZ than T.S. Eliot, and a university president obsessed with being “culturally relevant” - negative press be damned. How far will editor-in-chief Meshach Kilbourne and his staff go to secure the paper's independence - and glory - against the machinations of President Constantine Ward?

It's an embellished memoir of our college years. And the pilot script for COPY - which, for reasons beyond us, has been called "Sorkinesque" - reached the semifinals of the Scriptapalooza competition last year.

If you're interested, consider pledging.

Latest Black Gate Review

My latest review is up at Black Gate.  This month, it's Robert Sier's Chains of Loss, but I've been calling it Cyborgs vs. Orcs.