One Quarter Down, Three to Go

2013diceBack in January, I wrote the obligatory new year forecast post, listing stuff I had brewing for 2013. Now that we’re a quarter of the way into the year, it seems a good time to pause and check in on that lovely list:


  • Karthador – While there’s little to publicly show for it, I assure you this swashbuckling sci-fi setting is quietly simmering along. I’ve been developing new material and running it at local conventions to great reviews (from the 18 players at my table who’ve seen it), and can’t wait to unleash it upon the larger world.

  • Mind Strike – This tabletop RPG of psychics in a dystopian near-future America was almost done… and then I let other people see it. Thank God for playtesters! While I’d hoped to have it out in the first quarter, I’m sticking it back it the oven to add more setting details and completely revamp the psychic power system. Because if a game about psychics can’t get the powers right, that game should just go back to pumping gas.

  • One Game a Month – In three months, I finished two games. By the end of this month, I will have finished a third game (it’s a Twine project that I’ll be showing here next week). The next couple months are looking to be crazy, though, so don’t be surprised if they’re new chances for me to embrace failure.

Of course, the list from January didn’t include the exciting new projects that have cropped up since then:

  • “Project: Steel” – It’s a video game. It’s a board game. It’s got steampunk samurai and techno-ninjas. It’s not actually going to be called “Project: Steel” but will have a cooler name — with a logo and everything — when we launch the Kickstarter. Stay tuned for details.

  • Video Game Writing – My mad game writing skillz have attracted some local video game developers, so my words are now infiltrating Throne (on Kickstarter now from Lightning Studios), infesting Flytrap (a retro console arcade game), and itching to spread themselves even further.

  • Ryu X Chun Li – I have mentioned that I write comics, right? No? Well I do. Which is how I landed the cool new gig as script consultant on this dynamic fan-comic that celebrates everyone’s favorite Street Fighter power-couple. Strictly non-canon, of course, but an excellent chance to help tell a cool Street Fighter story.

Not bad for three (okay, almost four) months. Now I can’t wait to see what the rest of this year has in store.

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Reading, Collecting, and the Walking Dead

I blame The Walking Dead.

My wife has long stated her heart-felt intention to read the comics. “Oh, a new one,” she’s said every month for the past eight years. “I love zombies. I should read that.” (Every month. For eight years.)

But it wasn’t until the second season of the Walking Dead TV series on AMC that she asked me to pull the comics out for her. I gave the woop of joy unique to the geek who gets to share the media he loves with the woman he loves, sprang to the comics closet where I keep my longboxes, and realized:

Every month. For eight years. That’s a lot of comics.

I’ve always claimed that when it came to comics, I’m a reader, not a collector. But if you’re reading 5-10 comics a month since 1990 or so, you’re still going to build up quite a collection. And if you’re me (I know you’re not, but since I started this paragraph in second person, I’m feeling committed to it), you haven’t kept them quite as organized as you’d hoped, so finding all 90+ issues of a single series means digging through a lot of comics. I mean a lot a lot. I mean if one of those bookshelves of longboxes tipped over, it would have crushed me.

I found all but one or two of issues of The Walking Dead. It took hours of digging over the course of several days, but I was pleased with the results:

  1. My wife is caught up.
  2. I’m eyeballing comiXology.

For the uninitiated, comiXology is a service providing electronic versions of comics, especially on your handheld device. You could consider it an iTunes of comics.

If I’m really a reader, not a collector, this should be perfect for me — especially since I (a) now have a handheld device device and (b) am worried those “Hoarders” TV folks are going to start poking around my closets, clucking and tutting like disapproving Geiger counters.

And yet… Every month. For eight years. That’s more than a habit. That’s a tradition. Even if I do follow the future down the e-published rabbit hole, I don’t think I can give up the local comic shop.

I’m too much of a collector.

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Geeksplosion in the Comic Shop

It’s been a while since I’ve hit my local comic shop. Between the long hours at work, the weekends rebuilding the house after the zombie attack, and the visits from out-of-town relatives, it’s actually been like two months. I’ve been out of the comic loop. So I was more than a little surprised to see not one, but two of my favorite old RPGs show up in comic book form.

Deadlands is a series of one-shots from Image Comics. I missed the first issue, but the second two are fun, well-illustrated, yarns of the Weird West that capture the essence of the setting without overloading the stories with exposition – something licensed comics are too often prone to do. When I saw the comics on the shelf, it sparked a distant memory.

“Oh yeah. I’d read something about this coming.”

But when I saw the Kult comic from Dark Horse, it sparked nothing but confusion and wonder.

“No. Not Kult. Not the ultra-dark, Hellraiser-esque, kabbalistic horror RPG setting from the 1990s…”

But it was. It is. And while it’s a strange place for that property to show up, it actually makes sense. Kult is, after all, owned by Paradox, the same company that owns the rights to Conan and Solomon Kane, which are published in comic form by Dark Horse. Could this be the beginning of a resurrection of that beloved* property?

(*Beloved by me and four other people – hardly a fantastic fan base.)

Probably not. But the comic’s a decent read, and if you’re one of the other four fans of the RPG, I recommend checking it out.

 

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