Sunday Night Gaming Flees From The Police

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As a followup to last session, Our Team was stuck in an underground bunker with a dead alien. One of the players couldn’t join the game this time, so her character took off (with the alien hard drive that had been our macguffin) and we agreed to meet up with her PC later. For this session, it was Evan the mad scientist/anti-alien revolutionary, Walt the Gen-En soldier with super-powers and a shortened lifespan, and Travis the disreputable party boy and habitual liar who is pretty sure he’s a good guy now since he’s doing all the good guy stuff he’s seen on TV.

But first! Travis Roman, (high concept: Corporate heir trying to do right) had to be rejiggered before the session started. When I created him, I thought we were going to be playing a game about anti-corporate pro-democratic revolutionaries, but we’re actually caught up in an alien conspiracy. As a result, he didn’t have a lot of aspects that couple be easily compelled. So I changed the aspect “I love my family but admire their enemies” to “Must protect family from itself” (since some of my siblings are obviously In On It). The aspect “Just when I thought I was out…” was changed to “The conspiracy is everywhere!”

First order of business was for Travis to note that the slow physical collapse of the Shai’lun, which was the reason they were becoming unsuitable hosts for their parasitic masters, was remarkably similar to the slow physical collapse that Walt was experiencing. The Gen-En process that gave him duplication powers was aging him very fast, and his adopted daughter, too.

Gosh, wasn’t it a coincidence that the Shai’lun were the ones who gave him his powers? You know, those aliens who saved the human race from interstellar genocide solely so we could be the new short-lived hosts for their Shinkara masters? Why, you don’t think… The Shinkara are parasites, aren’t they? And Ex-Agg messed with Walt’s body, didn’t they?

Gee, could Walt have a Shinkara parasite in him right now? Could the parasite be even now transmitting everything we say and do to our enemies? Walt might be an unwitting traitor!

Unwitting was said several times, but no mention was made of the way Walton disrupted Travis’s interrogation of the Xenari prisoner, yelling at him, hitting him with the butt of his rifle, engaging him in a stupid shouting match, and practically taunting Evan to shoot the unarmed prisoner. At no point did Walt feel he was being accused of being an deliberate traitor, but I was prepared with assurances that it wasn’t so, along with Travis’s +3 Deceive skill and the actual dice in my hand, just in case.

Returning to Evan’s home/lab, as opposed to the warehouse lab we’d visited before–I’m beginning to suspect that everything Evan owns is a blank/lab–he ran some tests on Walt and found that there was alien DNA mixed in with his human DNA. Science! Could these be traces of the Shinkara? He didn’t appear to be actually hosting an alien parasite, though, and of course we all trusted him when he assured us he was fine. Just fine.

Travis also wondered where the real Walt was, since it was completely possible that the Gen-En soldier was just a cloned and altered copy of the original man, who could even now be sleeping in one of those big glass tubes (or decomposing in a mass grave).

Walt was so pleased by all this speculation that he immediately walked out. He rushed across the city to bring his daughter to Evan’s place to have her tested, too. She doesn’t have super powers (at the moment! Dum dum DUMMMM!) but she received the Gen-En procedure and is aging quickly. Immediate decision: Split the party! Because that’s always a good idea.

Walt takes off to get his daughter from the neighbor who looks after her while he’s out shooting people, while Travis and Evan make plans for a new safe house that Walt won’t know about. Just in case.

After parking some blocks away from his babysitter’s place (in a terrible part of town–it’s nearly dawn and people are still out on the streets, scrounging and staying warm by trash can fires) Walt makes his way down the sidewalk.

Two doors of a parked car open. One of the guys who gets out is very small and the other is so freakishly large that he almost falls off the far end of the bell curve. For humans, anyway.

Walt has an investigation stunt that allows him to put an aspect on a scene, and he rolls well. The little guy is now Payton Farraday, the Ex-Agg fixer that turned Walt and his daughter into Gen-Ens.

And he’s come to bump Walt off.

Farraday fires his machine pistol at Walt. The big guy grows even bigger, his left arm swells and changes shape, and he begins to press bullets into his the skin of his forearm… where they are absorbed into his flesh. He begins shooting at Walt, Bushwacker-style.

The big guy turns out to be an Aberrant. When the Shai’lun were making Gen-En soldiers to fight off the Xenari’s genocidal attack on the Earth, the Xenari were making Aberrants to do the same thing for their side. But while Gen-Ens look human, Aberrants are monstrously deformed. One of Walt’s aspects reflects his belief that these two types of altered humans are actually one group, and the poor pitiable Aberrants should not be shunned and mistreated the way they are. However, this guy doesn’t look like he’s about to sit down with a cup of coffee and a McMuffin to discuss it.

Walt starts making duplicates of himself as he runs straight at Farraday. The GM offers a compel: For one fate point, Travis can be paranoid enough to follow Walt and join the fight next round. Travis accepts.

Gunfire continues, causing general panic on the street and even hitting some innocent bystanders. Evan and Travis jump from Evan’s car, and join the fight. The most useful attack Travis does is mental, and he throws a can at the car then yells “Incoming grenade!” in the most believable way you can imagine.

The Aberrant dodges away from it, giving Walt only enemy to deal with. Evan takes out a weird metamorphic cube he invented–essentially a multi-tool made from semi-aware nanites–and he throws it at the Aberrant.

This turns out to be a pretty spiffy move, since the nanite tool wraps around the big guy’s forearm, digging into his flesh and jamming his creepy bone gun. Travis rushes forward, shotgun in hand, and the bodyguard gets down on the ground and surrenders.

Payton Farraday concedes the fight and gives Walt what he wants, which is information. He was hired to kill Walt by one of the Roman family, and the only cure for the Gen-En procedure is to go through the Genesis project. Or Genesis procedure. (I forgot to make a note of the name.)

Having given up the info Walt wanted, Farraday and his bodyguard vanish in a flash of light, which is a neat trick that our team should learn Real Soon Now. We hear sirens in the distance, and race to fetch Walt’s daughter since he won’t do the sensible thing and leave her safe with her babysitter and get out well ahead of the police.

FYI: cops in the post apocalyptic world are not the gentle, procedure-loving Officer Friendlies of the pre-invasion world. These guys are more likely to be yahoos with guns, and we do not want to say the words “Self-defense” to them.

After fetching Ever, Walt’s daughter, Mr. Bopples, her teddy, and Joey the babysitter who wanted to shoot us when we rushed into her place, we all piled into Evan’s car.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before, but the car Evan drives is one he built himself. It looks very much like the Homer-Simpson-designed vehicle that bankrupted Homer’s brother’s car company, if you added glowing neon racing stripes to the side. It also goes very very fast.

We take off with the cops in hot pursuit. It’s a contest! I’d thought it was strange that Evan, an alien-hating mad-scientist hunted by the law as a terrorist, used one of his +3 slots for the Drive skill, but it turns out to be surprisingly useful for a wanted criminal to be good at getting away.

With a sudden turn onto a vacant lot (and two very good rolls) we leave the cops behind and return to Evan’s house with a little girl who was not nearly as traumatized as you would expect from being waken in the wee hours by a gunfight on her street, crammed into a strange car with desperate, terrified people, pressed down on the floor of said car while her father leaned out the window and laid down suppressing fire at the pursuing vehicles while sirens where wailing everywhere, and finally dragged into Evan’s bachelor pad/terrorist cell/lab. Luckily, Travis knows how to sooth people, too, and he calms her down fairly quickly.

Walt nervously asks Evan to test her DNA, and what do you know? She’s got some alien stuff mixed in there, too. What’s more, unlike Walt, she has only two months to live. If he doesn’t find the cure for her by then, his little daughter dies.

Stakes! We got ’em.

Travis receives a phone call from his sister. She’s concerned that one of his brothers (he has as many siblings as the plot requires) is really pissed at him, and wants him to be careful. Travis, at least, now has the name of the family member who tried to kill Walt. He asks his sister to set up a meeting with good old dad, since he’s not on speaking terms with the head of Roman Industries anymore.

Oh! And Evan finds a bit of the Aberrant’s blood on his cube, and he runs some tests on it. It turns out that, while the Gen-Ens have some alien DNA, the Aberrants are 100% terrestrial. Wildly distorted, yes, but they’re people.

Who do you pity now?

Next session we hope to have Finlay back. Travis needs to gather evidence to show his father about the Shinkara, not to mention the way Ex-Agg and some of his own family have sold out the human race to them. And we need to find a way to turn the human race from a suitable host species for these parasites into barren land where their seed can find no purchase.

Oh, and we still haven’t dropped a neutron bomb on the Ex-Agg dropship. Must get bomb.

Hey, if you’re a Fate player who’s new to my blog, you should know one of the rewards in the Kickstarter I’m running for my epic fantasy trilogy includes a Fate supplement: At the $30 level, you get all three books in multiple ebook formats (DRM-free, naturally) along with a little write up of the novel’s setting, an adventure or two, and whatever else seems pertinent to playing a Fate adventure in the setting of The Great Way. Check it out.


Want a free copy of one of my books?

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Are you a reader who writes reviews on your blog? Or maybe Goodreads? Or somewhere else?

Well, you can get an early copy of KING KHAN just for the asking, and when you do, you’ll also get a copy of Stephen Blackmoore’s KHAN OF MARS, the prequel to mine. That’s two books about the adventures of a fussy Oxford professor who’s also a gorilla.

All you have to do is sign up at the publisher’s site before September 30th. They’ll pick 15 names from the people who contact them, and send out both books.

You guys know Stephen Blackmoore’s work, right? His debut novel was one of Kirkus’s “Best of 2012.”

Free books, you guys. Check it out.

I know I keep promising to talk about the stretch goals for this, but I just need a little more time to nail things down.

10 Marvel characters who should guest on AGENTS OF SHIELD

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Since everyone else is doing it, why not me? So, going by the simple criteria of: are they fun/are they doable for TV/would they fit, Here are the characters that I think appear on AGENTS OF SHIELD:

1) Morbius, the Living Vampire: 

Hey, he’s not a real vampire, he’s a science vampire. He’s also a tragic figure, a good man with a terrible thirst for blood. He’s also a brilliant scientist. Cast Matthew Gray Gubler, let him be all tortured, brilliant, and dangerous, and you’ll have viewers swooning. Plus, you can bring him back a few times a year to be a scary consultant scientist to milk the concept.

Besides, viewers get the concept of the vampire, and he’s not quite a real one. So it’s easy to translate to TV.

 

 

 

2) Stilt Man:

Yeah, the concept is ridiculous, but that’s part of its charm. He’s a thief in bulletproof armor, and the stilts can do tremendous damage when they kick something. So you have the confrontation with the ridiculous armor that runs super-fast because of those long legs, and you have the protagonists of the show taking a ribbing because they couldn’t catch a guy in stilts in rush hour traffic in New York.

But the fun thing is that it’s just a suit of armor that can be passed from one person to the next–or stolen–just as it is in the comics. Stilt Man doesn’t even have to be a man after all.

 

 

3) Tigra:

So, everyone knows that comics do a terrible job with women’s costumes, and Tigra’s is especially bad. Basically, she saves the world in a bikini that shows off her tiger stripes. Worse, her official origin in the comics is an unholy mess.

However, her enhanced senses and other powers would be excellent for TV and the storyline where she hunts for her husband’s killer is a fine traditional TV plot. Add to that the fact that, for the longest time, she’s had trouble controlling the animal urges that come with her cat powers, and you have a great counterpoint to Morbius. There might even be a scene between them, in which they talk about difficult it can be to control the dangerous parts of themselves, and you have a winner.

As long as you leave out the bikini.

 

 

4) The Scarlet Witch:

Wanda Maximov hasn’t been well treated by the comics lately. She’s gone crazy and altered the world. She’s had magic powers and then she didn’t. For the show, I’d take her back to the lost young woman who had the ability to manipulate probabilities. Have her be on the run, robbing ATMs and casinos while also helping people who need it with what are essentially luck powers.

 

 

 

 

5) Jessica Jones:

She’s a private investigator with superpowers she barely knows how to use. Enough said.

 

 

6) Bushwacker:

How nineties is that picture?

Bushwacker is a trained government assassin who has two cybernetic arms. Most of the time, they look perfectly normal, but he can transform them into guns. Basically, his hand becomes shaped like a pistol or machine gun, with his skin stretched over it.

In the world of comics, this is scarcely better than being a guy with a gun in his duffel bag, but on TV that makes him an assassin who can sneak in anywhere, shoot someone, and be led out with all the other witnesses. No one is ever going to find the weapon, after all.

So, instead of being a mutant-hating spree killer (which is so boring) he should be a former Hydra agent gone freelance, and make him at least as capable as the SHIELD agents tracking him.

 

 

7) Power Pack:

Hey, everyone knows pre-teen kids can be a handful, but kids with superpowers? I’d suggest they show up trying to mimic the Avengers, but being kids they screw up in a big way and reveal their identities. When SHIELD goes to the house to talk with them (and bring them in) the kids have already vanished. Who took them and what will they do with their abilites?

 

 

8. The Blank:

This guy is pretty obscure, but bear with me: his only “power” is a gadget, a belt that projects a force field around him that also obscures his face. You can’t hurt him, you can’t grab him (force field) and if he gets into a crowd and shuts the belt off, you won’t recognize him either. Plus, it would be easy to do on TV.

Besides, the truth is that a guy with powers like Cyclops’s–energy blasters–are like gunmen who can’t have their guns taken away from them. And what happens to gunmen when they’ve been in enough fights? They get shot.

Defense is where it’s at.

 

 

9) Devil-slayer:

Oh, god, that freaking picture.

Okay. Ahem. Forget the portentous way this character is always treated, and the goofy telekinesis and translation powers: Devil-slayer is cool because of his shadow cloak. It acts as a dimensional doorway to other places and times: he can step into it and teleport, or he can reach into it and pull out all sorts of things, like futuristic ray guns and battleaxes.

Drop the monster-hunting angle and he can be a deadly thief the team can never catch.

 

 

10) Typhoid Mary:

Okay. Um. All right. Oh Christ.

So, one thing the show is going to have to deal with, if it’s a show about superpowers spreading through the population, is what happens when those powers end up in someone violently mentally unstable. Mentally ill gunmen keep popping up every few months, and the show just can’t ignore it.

Now, you can’t count on Marvel itself to handle the issue with dignity. I mean, look at that fucking picture. Can the TV show handle this well? Can the folks behind AoS show a person who is superpowered but not neurotypical without turning her into a fishnet former prostitute karate ninja?

Christ, I hope so.

 

 

There’s still time to donate to the Kickstarter (unless you’re reading this a month after I wrote it.)

Let me tell you a story about controlling people with nuisance charges

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This is something I read about a few years ago but never forgot.

It seems there was a day care center that had a problem with parents who picked their kids up late. The center was supposed to close at 6:30, but inevitably someone would get held up in traffic or stuck at work, and so maybe once or twice a week the young woman minding the kids always had to linger behind with one of the kids. Sure, the parents always apologized profusely, but the woman who owned the center wanted to fix things.

So she decided to start charging the parents money for being late.

Immediately, late pickups increased.

What the manager of the center didn’t understand was that the parents liked the day care workers and cared about the inconvenience they caused them. When a parent was late, Angela might miss the start of her night class, or her second job, or even just her dinner. The day care workers looked after their children, after all. There was a bond there.

But the bond was wrecked by putting a charge on it. Suddenly, being late to pick up your kid was not a harm you caused to someone you knew and liked, it was an entry on the balance sheet. Trying to close a big sale? Well, the commission will be 1500 bucks if you finish tonight. Picking up little Timmy 30 minutes late will only cost you ten dollars. That’s totally worth it.

Worse, once the social connection was broken it was difficult to reestablish it. Yeah, they took away the fees, but the late parents just didn’t feel sorry any more. What’s more, this isn’t something that’s happened only to on child care center. This is a pretty common phenomenon that shouldn’t surprise people as much as it does.

Why tell this story? Well, as Scott Lynch points out the latest World Fantasy Convention is trying to reduce no-shows to their Kaffeeklatsche events (essentially, coffee with an author and 19 other fans) by charging five pounds for the event. Sure, it’s also supposed to cover coffee and biscuits, but come on, 100 pounds for a coffee urn and some baked goods? Psh.

A much more powerful incentive to having people show up is to say that, if the number of no-shows is too small, the author will be sitting there at their table with a handful of fans while the other writers may have full tables. You don’t want to make your favorite writer feel bad, do you?

Not that it really matters to me; I’m not a convention person. But there’s no denying that a nuisance charge is likely to have the opposite of the intended effect (unless the money is not about no-shows at all…)

Last night, my Kickstarter blew past the 250% mark. This is wild, you guys. Also, I’m pretty much spending all my time away from the internet sending emails and answering messages. Stretch goals are coming, I promise.

In Case You Need To Get Your Rage On

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Multi-millionaire hedonist drug addict heir raises kids about as well as you could expect. It’s a #Longread, but it’s horrifying; the system failed these kids because the system can not stand up against money. Awful.



Stepping back from the internet for a day

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As I mentioned on Twitter, last night my Kickstarter passed 200% of goal. This morning it’s at 213%.

I’m waiting to hear back on some emails I sent, but in the mean time I’m going to take a day away from the internet to work on the actual book. I know, right? Crazy! A writer who’s writing.

Enjoy your Saturday.

Kickstarter Stretch Goals

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So… yeah. Yesterday was crazy. In case you were off the internet, here’s the short version: I launched a Kickstarter and it got funded in less than eight hours.

Onward: At the moment, I’m contemplating stretch goals. Actually, I’m soliciting advice from the project backers. Do people want high-end cover art? An audiobook? Co-op placement (or the online equivalent) on Amazon.com to drive sales? A fourth novel?

The answers are interesting (even though no one has yet suggested “electrolysis for the author’s back” which is… okay. For now). If you’re a backer who doesn’t read those “Project Update” emails (or someone who is not a backer but would like to be) Check it out.



I owe about a billion emails, but this right here is pretty cool.

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Funded!

That’s right. I made goal in under 8 hours.

I owe a billion responses to people and a hundred billion thank yous, but right now I cracked a bottle of my traditional celebration beer (Arrogant Bastard Ale–so tasty!) and I’m going to have dinner with my family.

Thank you, everyone. Thank you to everyone who pledged and to everyone who shared the news.

About that Kickstarter: Holy Cow (omnibus limits and stretch goals)

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As I write this, my Kickstarter project is at 80% of goal after only four and a half hours. So, that’s wacky pants and completely unexpected.

That said: As soon as we hit goal, I’ll open up more slots for the hardcover omnibus edition. That seems to be the format that most people prefer and I only limited it because they’re expensive to print and ship. Delivering physical goods is the kryptonite of most Kickstarter projects, and I guess I was over-cautious.

Also, I know I need to prepare to some stretch goals, and I’m doing my best to estimate those costs. I don’t want to rush into a promise I can’t keep.

That said, I do have A KEY, AND EGG, AND UNFORTUNATE REMARK already written (working title: “The Auntie Mame Files), and I’m doing the math to work out how much I’d need to get that book ready to publish. I already found an excellent editor to work on it, but I’d have to figure out the art and typesetting, too.

There’s also the short story collection, which will include the new Twenty Palaces story. That story will get written and the collection will be released no matter what; the pledges would only go to cover art and editing.

So, thank you to everyone who has pledged so far.

The Great Way Kickstarter is now live

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Here is the video. Warning: Contains me.

If the video doesn’t show up, you can click on the direct link.

Yes, the goal is high. I know it is, but printing those copies (especially the omnibuses) will cost quite a lot. So will shipping hardbacks with 350K worth of fiction in them.

Then there’s the art inside and out, the editing, the whole thing is spendy. Very spendy.

But yeah, I’m nervous about that goal. ::wrings hands:: Hey, even if you aren’t planning to pledge for the project, I’d like to ask folks to take a look at the video and maybe spread the word a little bit. Everything helps.