Based on a True Story

Tags

Fantasy, NaNoWriMo

I larp. It’s awesome. I am not particularly remarkable as a larper and do not, to my knowledge, receive special favours over other players. (Well, I don’t think I am, anyway.) In fact my death record is terrible: I have never before had a primary character live long enough to achieve anything. I play a death-heavy system where dying is easy and living is hard, and I’ve mourned several good characters. Oddly enough, despite how much each loss hurts, I like it that way.

Here follows the story of Why I Lost NaNoWriMo 2016 — and why I have no regrets whatsoever.

(Names and locations altered/avoided to protect the guilty. Needless to say, some variant of this is already a book in prep. Detail lost towards the end because (a) if I start filling it in this post will end up being the book, and (b) I’m not normally possessive but this is a special story dammit, only those who were there get to be the first to tell it properly. Or in other words, I’m not doing my normal Creative Commons thing until it’s actually complete.)

Convergence: Black and Silver Seas

Tags

Books, Convergence, Philosophy, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

Convergence the RPG now ran two weekends ago, and with many thanks to my wonderful players, who put up with my generalised panic at suddenly running a game entirely solo for more than twice the number of players I’ve ever handled alone before, it went great! Set a year or two after the book’s base timeframe, we followed the newly graduated chrononauts of 2368 as they were sent “back through time” to the Silversea Moonbase in 2149 to find out why disaster so nearly befell it on that 50th anniversary of its permanent habitation.

And there, they found what at least appeared to them to be evidence of a renegade time traveller… but this time, one who had no record whatsoever in Chronos’ vast temporal extent.

Now, Chronos is the incredibly complex supercomputer that permits the “time travel” of the chrononauts of the Temporal Institute. It has its own dedicated power plant, which is routinely taxed almost to its limits simply to send these intrepid adventurers “through” time. Chronos’ complex memory systems are also the only known way of preserving information from one timestate to another — and this is where all those quote marks come in, because they aren’t just air quotes or scare quotes, but reflect something much more fundamental.

(There follows a digression into the temporal mechanics of Convergence.)

Hard Vacuum

Tags

Books, Chapters, Convergence, Fused, Sci-Fi

It’s finally happened! Though it took some time, and I was away running a Convergence RPG over the weekend, which worked out better than I hoped! It was amazing fun to run, although that’s the first full-weekend game I’ve ever done, but I’d love to do it again once I’ve prepared the next jaunt for my chrononauts.

But to go back to what I started to say, the next chapter of The Fused is up! Chapter 28: Hard Vacuum is here… and Lindsi is in very deep trouble indeed.

And Another Thing

Tags

Canon, Fantasy

Courtesy of the good GM, Grehstadt now has its very own long description! Go take a look!

A Fanfic With Permission!

Tags

Characters, Fanfic, Fantasy, Short stories

Brought to you from the epic city of Grehstadt with the kind permission of its creator, my friend JD, I give you this rather unfortunate tale, Paralysis! My last weekend was spent travelling in order to go to two excellent roleplay games, hosted and run by some of my friends. In the particular one I’m writing about, my character, Jax Lightweave, found himself conscious but immobile after the entire party was hit with knockout gas by a paranoid and perhaps slightly nutty human biologist. The end result was, for him, decidedly traumatising. And, since things like that tend to stick in the head (hopefully not literally…), I wrote a little story about the aftermath from Jax’s point of view – which I am absolutely delighted to be able to share with the world!

Note: his nightmares aren’t necessarily quite representative of what actually happened… although they’re also not that far off!