Tag Archives: Conventions

Announcements

Life, The Universe, and ConFusion this weekend

This weekend I’ll be attending the 42nd annual ConFusion science fiction and fantasy convention, aptly dubbed “Life, The Universe, and ConFusion.”

I’m not on any panels, because I didn’t want to be on any panels. I’m not selling anything, because I didn’t want to be stuck in the dealers’ room. I’ll have a badge, but I’m not really *at* the convention as anything other than as an attendee who is taking a vacation this weekend.

PlanetMercenaryLogo-250pxExcept, of course, for the bit where I’m running a Planet Mercenary RPG session on Saturday morning with several of the convention’s notable guests as players. That’s a little bit like work, and it’s something that fans can come and watch. When it’s done, I will hide in my room and edit a bunch of the Planet Mercenary stuff, focusing on the bits my party of fine storytellers and wordsmiths ran roughshod over.

If you want me to sign something, or sketch in a book, I will do that for you, provided you don’t try to get me to do it during the RPG session, or while I’m eating.

If you want to talk to me, hey, that’s cool, assuming you choose to do this in a setting where approaching people for conversation is appropriate. If I’m not feeling approachable, I’ll probably hide in my room and write.

Essays, Journal

Sasquan Report

I haven’t attended a WorldCon without exhibiting since 2009 in Montreal. Sasquan, held in Spokane, Washington, would have been a fine show at which to exhibit, but I didn’t really want to spend the whole weekend working. That’s really haaaard.

So I only spent part of the weekend working. I wrote about 3600 Planet Mercenary words, and inked a week of comics. I recorded three episodes of Writing Excuses with Brandon and Dan, and I “networked” with dozens of peers in the genre fiction community.

That last bit doesn’t really feel like work. All I was really doing was talking to people about stuff I would have talked about anyway, and introducing friends, new and old, to each other.

The greatest unpleasantness was the smoke from the disastrous forest fires in western and central Washington. I inhaled enough smoke on Friday that I got sick and had to lie down, and the newfound shallow-ness of my lungs stayed with me even after the air cleared a bit on Saturday and Sunday. Walking and talking at the same time usually left me short of breath, sometimes to the point that my head would hurt and my vision would begin to narrow.

And then there was the Hugo Award thing.

The Hugo Awards, whose concomitant controversy was something I was pleased to not be sitting on stage for, have been better discussed by other writers. I watched the awards from the lobby of the Davenport Grand with friends new and old, former Hugo winners among us. I was pleased with the results, but like every year it was bittersweet.

My heart goes out to those who did not win awards this year, especially those whose work missed being on the ballot because of the hijacked slate. Their work will stand independently of this, however, and needs neither my pity nor the validation of the short-list. As a former Hugo loser, I know that it stings, but I also know that you’ve got to keep making stuff regardless of what happens with awards. I kept making Schlock Mercenary for five years after it started not winning Hugo awards. It still hasn’t won, and I’m still making it today.

Just as awards shouldn’t validate your decision to create art, they shouldn’t have any bearing on how you feel about the art you consume. Reading in particular is a deeply personal, intimate act. An award on a book is like a sticker on a banana: it might help you pick the banana, but if you eat the sticker you’re doing it wrong.

Announcements

Find Me at GenCon Indy! (the 2015 edition)

I’m exhibiting at GenCon Indy with Jim Zub and Tracy Hickman this week. You can find us at booth 1935.

GenCon2015Map

We have new pins and badge holders, and all eleven print editions of Schlock Mercenary, along with slip cases.

Here’s my event schedule:

Thursday

  • 6:00pm, Room 224  Worldbuilding: When Your World is a Character

Friday

  • 10:00 am, Room 224  Character Craft: Motivation and Obstacles
  • 5:00pm, Room 245  Business of Writing: Advanced Kickstarter
  • 7:00pm, TBA  Planet Mercenary Field Marshal Play Date (players have been pre-selected. If you want to come spectate, watch me on Twitter for the location.)

Saturday

  • 6:00pm, Room 242  Writing Excuses: The Live Studio Audience Episodes (will be recorded)

When I’m not in events I’m almost certainly at my booth, though I have been known to sneak out for breaks from time to time. Mostly, though, I’ll be glued to my seat working on the cover art for Schlock Mercenary: Force Multiplication. I’ll also have some images from the upcoming Planet Mercenary RPG book if you’d like to peek at those.

GenCon Indy is one of my favorite events of the year. We have a fantastic crew working our booth with us, and Tracy, Jim, and I have lots of fun talking with fans and with each other throughout the day. Come get stuff signed, or just stop by and watch the magic happen.

Journal, Reviews

A Planet Mercenary Play Test

On Saturday, June 27th, we had a Planet Mercenary RPG play test at LibertyCon. Alan Bahr ran the game, and Steve Jackson joined us. Our small band of mercenary officers was cast as follows:

  • The purp doctor: Howard Tayler
  • The tetrisoid attorney: Alijah Ballard
  • The ursumari engineer: Keliana Tayler
  • The mobile-chassis A.I.: David Pascoe
  • The Ob’enn captain: Steve Jackson

The adventure began at MercCon, held in a dilapidated station in orbit around Damaxuri. We roamed the expo hall looking for swag, and while the captain adorned himself with things that blinked and glowed, our one-meter-tall attorney decided to prank random strangers by injecting them with stim samples he lifted from one of the booths. When an angry neophant caught him at it and grabbed him, the doctor whipped out a syringe and said “if you want the antidote, you’ll put my friend down.” It worked, and now that we could see that our attorney player was going to play as a rogue, we adjusted our deployment to keep a better eye on him.

The A.I. went sniffing through the data-streams, and determined that there was money to be made on the surface of Damaxuri, but only if we moved fast, and got there before the news broke to the rest of the mercenaries at the convention. After evaluating several slow, or bad, or slow-and-bad options for getting to the surface, the captain decided we should find a civilian ship with immediate clearance, hijack it, and then remove its transponder to provide OUR ship with clearance.

The following thirty minutes of game play were pretty hilarious, and included safe-cracking, recruiting, remote piloting for maximum “soft” collisions, a false alarm about an outbreak of smuttorhea, and us racing to the surface well ahead of anybody else who may have wanted the job that just posted. The attorney did the safe-cracking with the ursumari’s boomex, and only the fact that the safe contained both currency and blackmail material pacified the ursumari.

I’ll spare you any further spoilers, since the adventure (with some tweaks, of course) will be part of the final product.

The final tableau: while our ursumari roared in frustration, literally bristling with shuriken from her violently defective weapon, the doctor stabilized our target and began counting out pain killers and happy-pills for the angry wall of “friendly” fur. Meanwhile the lawyer and the captain managed the “recruiting” of our target’s hench-folk, and the A.I. rolled through the warehouse evaluating whether or not we could collect the bounty *AND* salvage the inventory of a profitable criminal enterprise.

Steve, Keliana, and I had to bounce out to another event, but everybody (including us!) kept talking about what our characters would do next. The game was over, the players had to leave, but we were all still telling the story.

That’s a pretty successful game.

The “speak first, go first” initiative system worked perfectly, in part because our captain spoke first and began issuing orders. Steve Jackson played that really well, which is no surprise, and the other players rolled with it equally well. Whether or not the captain was right about this plan to blow a hole in the bulkhead, we were going to pour our bullets through it and get the job done.

The mayhem cards also worked well. The doctor’s fire team gained a bonus to all combat actions by virtue of being terrified of him, and our company’s charter lost a couple of points of reputation because despite getting the job done there was an embarrassing video of our ursumari covered in bits of her own weapon. Both of these elements would have played straight into further adventure sessions, informing our role play and the math of combat.

Most auspiciously, the game played *fast.* The fun we had voicing our characters  carried straight into the combat scenes at a pace which felt natural, and which, even though we were all still learning the system, did not bog down.

To paraphrase Steve’s remarks to Alan: “This was fun. I suspect you could run *any* game well, but you’ve got a good thing here.” I don’t remember the exact quote, but that was the spirit of it, and Alan was grinning for the rest of the day.

I had microphone responsibilities at the luncheon which followed, so I wasn’t paying enough attention while Keliana sketched. I caught just enough to realize she was drawing our Planet Mercenary party, but before I could ask to see the finished piece, she’d given it to our play-test guest of honor.