Check out my work in Alpha Star Magazine!

Check out my latest work with EN Publishing's current Alpha Star Issue 2 campaign on Backerkit! 

I had a great time writing an article filling out an area of sci-fi that is familiar to fans of Dune and books like Revelation Space or Hyperion. Here's the pitch on this article from the Backerkit page:

The legacies of first contact and lost remnants of ancient civilizations have shaped the peoples and cultures of the far future. Religion seeks answers to the questions of meaning and mortality amongst the stars of the void. While science and reason seek to explain and map the wondrous structures and technology, other beings live in societies shaped by their proximity to these marvels.

• 3 new backgrounds--Annointed Warrior, Explorer, Xenoarcheologist
• 2 new cultures--Devotee, Precursor

If that sounds cool please go check out their campaign! You can also scoop up a copy of the Voidrunner's Box set,  EN Publishing's sci-fi fork of 5e based upon their own Advanced 5e. The set has sold out in North America, so this is a great chance to secure a copy for perhaps the best deal that you will ever find on it. 

Review: Artificial Condition

With the second installment of Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries, I found myself enjoying the novel more than the original. The interplay of existential and exploratory dialogue between the titular Murderbot and a transport bot managing a hauler she hitches a ride on, and their eventual friendship was interesting and satisfying. The dialogue was also more engaging than I found that of the similar sci-f novel We Are Legion: We Are Bob. 

The story still just skims over the question of what it truly means to be human, hinting at the hope that we will have greater answers in future installments. So while not earth shattering in its themes or descriptions, Artificial Condition is another thrilling read. 

Style: 4 of 5.

Substance: 2 of 5

Review: All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries)

All Systems Red by Martha Wells is a tight novella, action packed, and almost a modern response to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The titular character, self dubbed “Murderbot,” is almost human in its own teenage-like ennui and devotion to watching entertainment like a futuristic Netflix binger. Yet its augmentation, weaponry, and instinctive programming also make her not quite such. 

The tense survival situation and brief mystery are satisfying, as Murderbot supports and protects the exploration team “renting” it and other equipment from an interstellar corporation. While there are some gaps from catastrophic shutdowns, the story of this unreliable narrator remains captivating and these choices further the story and strong characterization.

I’d certainly recommend All Systems Red as a short, modern sci-fi novella focusing on the question of what truly makes us human. I have not yet watched the streaming adaptation of this particular series. I found Well’s prose to provide good explanations and 

Style: 4

Substance: 3.5

GM Cognitive Load: Teaching Yourself, Then Others a New Game

Image courtesy of Pixabay

Learning a new TTRPG is freaking hard work and we don’t always talk about it enough. Sometimes there are gripes that Dungeons & Dragons is the main entry point to the hobby, but this fact is also reinforced by the ability to find now a vast library of actual play examples, video tutorials, books, and perhaps most helpful, mentoring veteran players and GMs who can teach those who aspire to play and run our games. I certainly wouldn’t have had as positive a personal experience teaching myself to play without the first group I played, then ran an adventure for.

I took a course on teaching several years back which touched on the concept of the gap in minds or cognitive distance. This concept is the difference in perception and understanding that we have with other humans. We are generally empathetic and cooperative to exist and organize in our societies, and often assume great shared understanding or experience with others when attempting to teach them. This is the slipped steps from the maths instructor that has run a proof a thousand times that utterly baffle a student learning algebra for the first time. Related to this idea is the so-called “curse of knowledge.” We actually forget, as we gain expertise, the degree to which our knowledge separates us from those who have not learned certain information or skills. It’s for this reason that we grow impatient with a new player when they ask a fifth time for an explanation of what this “sneak attack” does, when they’re still getting used to the concept that they need to roll a d20, add a modifier, and sometimes add that proficiency bonus thing—“what is a proficiency bonus again?”

TTRPGs, even rules-lite games, are complex systems that need a degree of memorization and study to understand. And much of this cognitive load when learning a new game is on the GM. They must read and digest the rules, often in their entirety. Of course, books will say “it’s alright if you get something wrong, just look it up later,” but they rarely clearly signpost something like “ALRIGHT, YOU’VE READ ENOUGH TO BE ABLE TO PLAY NOW. GOOD LUCK!” Couple that will how some games offer robust reference sheets and GM screen information. Others the information needs to be collected and painstakingly recorded by the GM to construct their own reference aids and perhaps player cheat sheets. Homework on top of homework. Then you need to do the actual fun stuff of design, then running an adventure and/or tilting at the beautiful windmill of setting design. Oh, and you have to have a sufficient mastery of this new rules material that you can teach players the core rules in an informal fashion. And be able to teach character creation or pass out pregens that you took a while figuring out how to make (every publisher should provide a QuickStart Guide with pregen characters if they can afford it—thank you to those that do! It’s the fastest way to start playing!) 

I have several games that I want to play. I recognize this process is growing easier, but we shouldn’t minimize the heavy task that learning, then teaching a new TTRPG is for GMs on top of all the work they already do. There’s some great advice on other aspects GMing, but certainly a gap on how to approach this problem (I mean specific strategies for notetaking or reading RPG rules—even ones culled from academia). 

So to my readers who have made it this far, what do you do to approach this problem? Have you played different TTRPGs? What is your experience? If it’s easy for you, what are specific habits or approaches you have to learning a game? How can you learn a new game quickly—like if you got something for Christmas and want to play it by the weekend after? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Review: For We Are Many (Bobiverse Book 2)

The second book of the Bobiverse series largely plays it safe. The story of the many replicated versions of the titular Bob continue their parallel journeys through space.

The temporal jumping back and forth through plot lines got a bit more confusing with an ever increasing number of Bob permutations to keep track of. Additionally, some of this felt a bit contrived and some information disconnects felt less plausible as the supercomputer Bobs linked up via faster than light communications. 

This particular book scores low on the ratings, but that shouldn’t be taken as negative. On the contrary, despite all my critiques above, I found it enjoyable to read. Perhaps that’s because it does pull me along. There are gems, such as the original Bob’s continued efforts to caretake an intelligent species (though he seems to forget that to achieve his visions for them an evolutionary timescale of millennia would be needed). 

So while this novel lacked anything to put it over the top as art or truly though-provoking, For We Are Many remains a charming book, with less of the obscure and unexplained Star Trek references than the original.

Style: 2

Substance: 2

200 Blog Posts

The blog hits an auspicious milestone with today’s post. About two and half years in, it has reached its 200th post. Thank you to those who have stuck around and read. An even bigger thank you to those who have commented. I hope you continue to do so in the future.

I will continue to write. It is often difficult to maintain a weekly post. I try to provide interesting and unique material that is worth a few minutes of your time to read. I will be trying to more regularly post design work that can be used in your TTRPG sessions, and am working on several personal projects that will hopefully come to fruition by the end of this year and be shared as small products you can pick up if you are interested in supporting my work.

Review: We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Mild spoilers for the book...

This novel wasn't the most impactful, artful, or memorable book I've ever encountered. But it was charming enough that I burned through it in about two days and didn't want to put it down. 

This novel explored several common sci-fi themes through the narrative vehicle of a man (Bob) who finds his consciousness preserved in a digitized form after being cryogenically frozen. Bob is from our modern day, and finds himself a digital "replicant" in a distant and hugely altered future Earth. Bob's ultimate purpose is to be uploaded to a "Von Neumann probe," a theoretical space exploration platform with the capability to self-replicate.

Perhaps the most interesting theme of the book, which I hope is developed further in the rest of the series (yes, this is my first read-through) is the relationships and divergence of aspects of the original human Bob's personality in the many copies that are created as the probes spread. The plot threads also great more difficult to follow as the number of these multiplied, even with each adopting their own distinct name. 

Multiple interesting plot-threads emerge, including the original Bob replicant exploring and taking an active role in aiding a primitive non-human species (touching on themes related to “The Prime Directive” that are perhaps better treated in other works). Another group of Bobs seeks to save the remnants of humanity from a dying world, while others continue to fight the remaining probes of other human factions. It begins to get a bit complicated to keep track of who is who, especially since they’re actually all Bob…

Other all, I enjoyed the book. I wouldn’t categorize it as art in the same sense of other influential sci-fi novels, but it provides a really interesting scenario to explore the various sci-fi tropes that occur.

I think my major reservations with this work come down to the authorial tone throughout. There’s almost a certain requirement to have watched some original Star Trek and other cultural topics that both can't be assumed, and the sneakiness and often unfunny jokes undermine any gravitas in the language. On that point, the reason I was able to essentially "binge read" this novel was that the vocabulary generally stuck to about a high school reading level. My other critique is that at times the narrative, particularly in the space battles or techno-babble, indeed skated over some description that made it more difficult to follow. It’s fine if Bob is an unreliable narrator, but he’s also a computer computing orbital intercepts in combat. More technical readouts aren’t wholly inappropriate.

Overall, as the extended internal monologue of the experience of a computerized being, it also lacked more evocative or descriptive language throughout the novel that an omniscient narrator would have afforded. On the flip side, generally it was apparently that a distinct personality flavor or strain developed in each Bob copy, with slightly different voice—this was not always consistent though, which also placed impetus on the reader to be sure to track the chapter headers indicating the date and which ”Bob” was speaking.

Style: 2

Substance: 3.5

Overall, a fun, quick read. Not one that will force you to think a lot, but that touches on many classic tropes in an interesting way. It’d probably be a pretty good reoccurring television series.