Beyond the Void

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wwdn/~3/376534645/wil-wheatons-20.html

Please excuse the indexing-friendly title. I hate it as much as you do, but I know there are literally fives of people on the Internets who may want to know this vital information for the coming weekend.

I'll be at Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle this weekend. I'm not keynoting, but I am on a couple of panels, and I will have a booth, stocked with all of my books, plus my glasses and my shoes, so I have them. I don't have a ton of stuff, though, so you should probably drop everything you're doing and go get in line right now.

My schedule looks shockingly similar to this:

Friday

3-4PM: Signing in my booth

7-8PM: Signing in my booth

Saturday

3-4PM : Signing in my booth

6-7PM: Panel - "Is Casual Killing Core Games?" in the Raven Theater. This should be an interesting conversation. I don't think casual is killing core gaming at all, but I'm interested to hear from people who think it is, and tell them why they're so very very wrong.

7-8PM: Signing in my booth

Sunday

11:30-12:30: "The Wil Wheaton Panel!" in the Serpent Theater. I'm going to be honest: I don't think a lot of people are going to come to this. There are two absolutely awesome panels at the same time, including Family Feud with Gabe and Tycho, and if the panel didn't have my name in it, I would skip it, too. However, for those of you who will be in attendance, due to your sacred vow to never watch Family Feud, I'll be reading from Happiest Days and Sunken Treasure, wand I'll do a Q&A if there's enough interest. We'll have fun (oh yes, we'll have fun. We always have fun, and we float, Georgie! We all FLOAT DOWN HERE!) and it will be awesome.

12:15-2PM: Signing in my booth

I reserve the right to bail on signings early if nobody's there, and stay a little longer if that's necessary.

Please, please, please come introduce yourself if you read my blog, especially if you're a regular commenter. It's pretty awesome to have faces to go with the names.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wwdn/~3/376507624/the-joys-of-uns.html

Inspired by my previous post and its related conversation in the geek group, my friend Andrew and I have been talking, as we so often do, about our RPG experiences. He said I could share this one:

Our college group wasn't big on subtle roleplaying. The anecdote that best exemplifies our attitude comes from a random night encounter.

The mage was on guard, heard a rustle in the woods outside the camp, and immediately unleashed a fireball.

"You aren't going to wait to see who it is?" asked the DM (different guy; we rotated). "What if it's one of your friends?"

"They can take the damage," replied the mage's player.

End of encounter.

There are times to take RPGs seriously (or so I've heard) but it's time like these that I look forward to the most when I play a tabletop RPG. If you listened to the Penny Arcade D&D podcasts (JIM DARKMAGIC FOR THE WIN!) you heard something remarkably similar to my friends and me playing . . . well, just about everything, really. That's sort of the whole reason we play games, isn't it?

I'm going to PAX this weekend, where I'm sure I'll engage in quite a bit of the video gaming. I'm especially looking forward to playing Rock Band 2 with the Enforcers, but more than anything else, I'm excited to spend some time in the Original Wireless Gaming area, which I missed last year. It's nothing but classic RPGs and hobby games, all donated and run by volunteers. Last year, there were opportunities to do a one-shot dungeon crawl, and I can't wait to get on the list for one of those if they're doing it again.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/wwdn/~3/376410013/underrated-sci.html

One of my favorite topics when I was writing Geek in Review was the Guilty Pleasures series. It gave me an excuse to watch movies without feeling like I was slacking off, and always generated entertaining discussions (and more than a few suggestions for other movies to use in future columns.)

When I checked in on The Geek Group at Propeller this morning, I saw something similar: Ten Truly Underrated Sci-Fi Movies.

Take a look, and let me know what you think. I wouldn't have included Aeon Flux, which tried real hard but couldn't close the deal, but the rest of them are great, especially Primer, which never gets the respect it deserves.

I think Groups are where Propeller is going to set itself apart from the rest of the social news world, so I really want to build and nurture the Geek group. I think it's a fantastic resource and if there's enough participation, could become a wonderful place for geeks to gather and goof off - I already check in several times a day, even when I'm not doing admin work. In support of that effort, I'm going to close comments on this post, so if you're interested in commenting and stuff, you'll do it there. (Bonus: the Conversations are a lot of fun, too. D&D geeks need to check out What's the most audacious thing you've gotten away with in D&D?)

I’ve been a huge comics fan since I was a little kid. Reading comics has always been one of my twin passions, and even as a child, I knew I’d either work in comics or in the other industry I loved, roleplaying games. Being a comic nerd and coming at things from that perspective, I always saw the division between Wizards of the Coast (or TSR as it was known back when I was a wee bairn) and White Wolf as mirroring that between DC and Marvel. WotC as the establishment, and WW as the young upstarts done good. The characters had that same sort of divide, with the Dungeons & Dragons heroes being done in the more classical mold, while in the various World of Darkness games, you played the flawed heroes, the monsters with aspirations of being men.

And then came Exalted.

At first blush, Exalted’s heroes seem to be cast in the classic D&D fantasy-game mold. There are these Solar Exalted Lawgivers returned to through down the world’s oppressors and set Creation aright. But if you look closely, there’s more WoD going on than D&D. These very Lawgivers went mad in the First Age, only to be usurped and slain by their envious Dragon-Blooded subordinates at the behest of the Solars’ hubristic Sidereal advisors, while their surprisingly unloyal Lunar mates let the deed go down. Who were the good guys here? The bad?

And the Second Age finds these players (and even more) thrown into the mix. So, again, who are the good guys? The Solars were given the Mandate of Heaven to rule over Creation… by the very gods who created all the Exalts as living weapons so they could gank their Primordial creators and take their shit. So they’re back and just as prone to being crazy as before. Then there are the Sidereals, who engineered the overthrow of Creation’s (arguably) rightful rulers and broke a whole constellation to cover up their complicity in the crime. And how about the Lunars, who abandoned their Solar mates when they were most needed and now dwell on the fringes of the Threshold, engineering societies to supplant the flawed ones of the present and past, which led to the end of the High First Age and “drove them” to their act of abandonment. And then there are the Terrestrial Exalted who’ve misruled Creation since the Usurpation, nearly losing everything under the twin strikes of the Great Contagion and the Balorian Crusade.

And that’s the thing. All of the setting’s fatsplats think of themselves as the heroes. The Solars are back to right the foundering ship of Creation. The Sidereals are trying to keep threats to the world in check. The Lunars want to build a better world. The Dragon-Bloods want to maintain order. Even the darker heroes think they’re doing the world a service. The Abyssals want to bring eternal peace and immortality. The Infernals want to put Creation back into the hands of its makers. Even the Fair Folk just want to end this horrible mechanism of destruction that was dropped into their midst and had claimed so many of their immortal lives.

OK, that’s a bit simplistic. And sure, there are complete douche bags throughout all these groups. But what’s cool to me is that Exalted eschews the rigid morality present in Dungeons & Dragons, so that it’s not as easy as good group X versus evil group Y. If there is a right side to be on in the game, it’s up to you players to define it yourselves. Man, I love that.

http://www.dorktower.com/2008/08/27/dork-tower-out-at-first/

http://www.dorktower.com/?p=3460

I hate this part of the business.

First, the printer was supposed to ship boxes to IPR, but they shipped them to me by mistake, adding a week on the shipping time to customers. So, I lug the books down to the Post Office and ship them off to IPR myself. About 20 boxes, each at least 17 pounds. 100 Limited Editions and 150 Standard Editions.

Now, it looks like the Post Office may have lost them.

I can't get in contact with any living beings at the Post Office until this afternoon. (My work hours are 6 AM - 6 PM.) And when I arrive, they'll probably tell me the same thing: we don't know where they are.

At least I bought insurance.

If you ordered books from IPR, I apologize for the delay. I'll find a way to make it up to you.

Originally published at Figures of Text. You can comment here or there.

I’m in Swindon, in the halls (or bowels) of Mongoose Publishing. The wall opposite me is about half full of my books. It’s a strange sight.

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I’ve been reading James Maliszewski’s Grognardia blog about old-school gaming with great interest. I’m trying to find the time to run an old-school campaign as modified by my own preferences in the coming months. This post cuts pretty close to the heart of what I want to achieve, and it’s a topic I’ll return to when I discuss player-gm communication.

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I’ve also been following the Tor group blog, and this post by Bruce Baugh is especially interesting. More on that later too.

http://feeds.penny-arcade.com/~r/pa-mainsite/~3/375947892/

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/8/27/woods-part-two/