 Not to rag on the same book all over again, but this page is from Fantastic Four #558 (written by Mark Millar, drawn by Bryan Hitch), and it's a shining example of a weird, annoyingly-common phenomenon in superhero comics. Click it and take a look at the full size version. Doctor Doom is being held (according to the next page), at the Raft, a prison facility for superhuman offenders. And, for some reason, the people running this place let him keep his goddamned armor. You know, with the lasers and the forcefields and maybe a fucking time machine, for all I know. I'm sure he'd pitch a serious fit if they tried to take it away from him--especially since he's so nuts about keeping his scarred face covered up--but I kinda think it'd be worth the trouble. Hell, even if they think they've removed all the weapons from his getup, I can't imagine it'd really be safe to leaving the evil genius walking around in a whole pile of electronic scrap. And, of course, superhero comics do this shit all the time. And, of course, we all know why: character recognition. If a supervillain isn't wearing his brightly-colored tights, how are the readers supposed to know who he is? Well, okay, maybe through the dialog. Or even a narration box. But how are potential readers just flipping through a book to see if it contains something of interest supposed to recognize the dude? I guess that's what it's really about. Still. I'd call this kind of a special case, here. Why not show Victor von Doom without his armor and cape and such, but with his mask? It's enough to make him recognizable, and it'd slightly imaginable that he'd be allowed to keep something he's got such a psychological dependency on. Also, he'd present a much more interesting visual, wearing just the mask with an orange prison jumpsuit. Anyway. This silliness aside, it's a good issue. Looks like the start of a very interesting arc. Just hope it ends better than the last one did.
 Oh, man, busy days. Been helping Charlie out with the prepress stuff for the second volume of Templar, Arizona, and some related t-shirt design. Also, she's doing Wizard World Chicago this weekend, and I've been playing comics roadie for her. We met colorist Corey Greene at Wizard World's preview night (Thursday), and he seems like a cool guy. On the train ride home, we got to horrify him with the contents of my iPod. Those who know me will not be surprised: Among all the Professor Brothers shorts and episodes of Cooking Master Boy, I also have some unspeakably horrible stuff. Interestingly, this attracted the enthusiastic attention of two total strangers, a young couple named Becky and Dallas. We watched a deeply terrifying video from BME together, and that was all they needed to guess that Charlie and I are Something Awful goons like them. The Internet. Still with us wherever we go. Charlie and I have both totally been neglecting Age of Conan, which is kind of tragic. Both of us basically just got off of newb island (Are we the only people who use this term for the starting region of any MMORPG?), and then immediately stopped playing. And that is dumb. We'll get back into it soon, I think. Especially if we finally her her a copy, so that we can actually play together. (Honestly, I'm not really into the "massively multiplayer" featured of MMORPGs, so unless I can play 'em with my wife or some other people I know, I get bored fast.) Anyway, as all good humans should know, the Spore Creature Creator is finally out, and that has been taking up most of my gaming time (if you'd really call it gaming). Spore is basically going to own Charlie and me when it finally comes out for real, and even the little Creature Creator is well worth my time and money. It's just a construction kit for creatures you can't really do much with, but it is hugely, hugely fun. I've really got to make a big post sharing my creatures, soon. We're also getting back into Team Fortress 2, lately. That is such an incredibly well-made game. Charlie and I tend to play as a Medic-Heavy team (respectively), although last time we found ourselves really loving the Scout and Pyro (separately, of course). Valve is one of those companies that can just have all my damn money right now. They're just insanely reliable. (Getting real interested in their upcoming co-op zombie game, Left4Dead, by the way.) On the RPG front, I'm still running my Spirit of the Century campaign-- Lost Worlds and Secret Histories--every week (well, theoretically every week) and loving the hell out of it. I'm also playing in a monthly Amber game with almost the same bunch of people as my LWaSH players. I think after I finish up with arc of LWaSH, we might give In a Wicked Age a go. I told my crew about it, and they were immediately interested. (I really love this group. They are basically up for anything. We've really been playing a good variety of stuff.) I also kinda want to do something with 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons, if only to try it out. Also! Brian from my RPG group has been thinking about running a Stargate game for a while, now. I'm not generally a big supporter of licensed properties as RPG settings, but I'd totally be up for this. Stargate really strikes me as a hugely, awesomely gameable setting, and I'd just love to see what Brian does with it. Oh, and I'm still doing photography, even if I haven't been showing it anywhere. ... Ah, what the hell. I'll post one with this update.
 Right, so Age of Conan has sucked me back into playing a more-pig again, and while there's definitely a lot of cool stuff going on with it, elements of the usual MMORPG formula that it improves or fixes, it's also doing a lot to remind me just how wrongheaded a lot of that formula really is. I've got a whole list of complaints with MMORPGs, but the biggest one is probably this: Developers are still creating quests and quest systems as if they were for single player games. I'd assume that everybody knows what I mean by this, but there is compelling evidence that I'm the only one who actually cares, so I'll spell it out for those who don't let stuff like this bug them: Questgiver NPC Guy stands out in the middle of the town square, staying in exactly the same spot throughout all the years of the game's life cycle, endlessly telling any player characters of a certain level range about how he lost his lucky hat in the haunted forest, and would they go get it back for him? Questgiver Guy remains in that spot, collecting the lucky hats which are delivered, night and day, by an endless stream of PCs, giving each of them a fairly item (or a choice of a few items) which he has no particular reason to possess. And still he stands there, eternally hatless, eternally begging for aid from the hordes of appropriately-leveled PCs. So, naturally, if any two player characters of similar level were to share stories of their past adventures, they'd usually find their pasts to be remarkably similar, differing only in the exact order in which they did their favors for various Questgiver Guys. Worse, in a lot of games, this means often that a player won't be able to find the goblin who stole the lucky hat because some other player has already killed it. Instead, they have to wait for the goblin (and the hat) to respawn in order to kill it all over again. I think the tremendous popularity of these games is compelling evidence that other people don't really let implied absurdities like this bother them, but seriously, they drive me fuckin nuts. So what kind of alternative am I looking for? Yeah, that's a tougher question. Personally, I don't think I'm so enamored of cute banter and deep dialog trees that I'd mind randomly-generated NPCs giving out randomly-generated quests along these lines: I'm [FIRSTNAME] [LASTNAME], the [OCCUPATION] here in [TOWN]. I was attacked by [MONSTER]s over in [LOCATION], and they took my [ADJECTIVE] [OBJECT]. Could you get it back for me? I'd go after it myself, but [WEAKEXCUSE]. Hell yes I would prefer that Mad Libs shit to doing the same damn quests that every other player has already done. And, to be honest, I really think that with a flexible enough modular quest/NPC system, a big list of basic quest forms (fetch, escort, scavenger hunt, etc.), and enough attention paid to creating generators that are limited to somewhat logical results, I think this could actually be really great. And the best part might be that it would be extremely easy to add new component pieces--new OCCUPATIONs, new OBJECTs, new WEAKEXCUSEs,etc.--whenever the developers can write them up. Hell, they could even include screened submissions from the players. With enough care, I honestly think that random quest system doesn't have to result in bland and nonsensical quests. I could keep going on about this, but I think I've played backseat game designer for enough paragraphs, already.
I think I've actually found a solution to that whole customizable token thing I was musing about a while back. I got the idea from a bunch of magnets Brigid had on her refrigerator. She sent me a link to the instructions she'd used to make them, and I basically just did the same thing minus the magnet part.  Basically, I just bought a pile of these things, and all I've gotta do print out my character portraits and paste 'em on. The really remarkable bit? If I run out of glass bits, I can just scrub off the portraits and reuse them. Anyway, we've been using these things in Lost Worlds and Secret Histories to represent the PCs on my simple little hand-drawn maps. Range and positioning in Spirit of the Century is handled in a really fuzzy way, using general "zones" instead of any kind of exact measurements, so playing it fast-and-loose totally works. I think I might get a magnetic whiteboard to draw maps on, and maybe actually add magnets to the character tokens. That could be pretty convenient. Oh, one other thing: SotC frequently features hordes of minor antagonists ("minions") who really don't rate their own tokens, and would really start to crowd the map if they got 'em. So, instead of inch-and-a-half glass bits with pictures, we've been using those little " glass stones" people use to keep track of point pools in other games.
 It's pretty late, and I've only just started playing (level 10, here, which is basically nothing), so I'm only going to give a few quick impressions, here. First of all, my only character so far is the dude above: Sethek, of the sinister, pseudo-Egyptian Stygian culture (I note that they're not using the word "race", here). His class is Tempest of Set, meaning I get to call upon my malevolent snake god to annihilate my enemies with lightning, all the while yelling "SET IS THE BEST GOD" at the screen. It's pretty badass. I'll note here that the various cultures all have different available classes. The Stygians, being the only people who would worship Set, have exclusive access to the Tempest of Set class. They're also the only people dabble in sorcery, so the three non-priestly spellcaster classes are all theirs, too. I normally bitch about this kind of thing, but in this case it's just good, respectable loyalty to the source material. Anyway, Age of Conan is definitely fun. Hell, Charlie went all the way up to 14th level while I was at work (surprising absolutely no one by playing a Stygian necromancer), and I'm most definitely up past my bedtime. That said, it's not by any means a revolutionary new kind of MMORPG. It follows the basic model established by Everquest, and even carries over the now-standard refinements of World of Warcraft (seriously, Blizzard should try and claim patent rights on yellow question marks as a cash-in-your-quest-item-here indicator). Really, the main things Age of Conan adds to Warcraft's formula are actiony combat and nipples. Okay, that ain't even close to fair, really. There's a lot more to talk about, but I need to go to sleep in a minute. So for now let me just warn everybody about something kind of unusual about this game that I think hasn't gotten enough attention: its goddamned hard drive requirements.  Yes, Age of Conan requires 32 gigs of free space. I have no idea why. My whole goddamned Steam installation is barely more than half that. Does anybody out there (who hasn't recently bought a new machine or HD) actually have 32 empty gigs just lying around? I had to buy a new damned external drive in order to install this freaking thing. Right, it's 2:30am, and I've got work tomorrow. I've got a lot more--good and bad--to say about AoC, but for now, I need some sleep.
     Okay, so in last night's session of Lost Worlds and Secret Histories (5/27/2008), we finally finished up the big fight from the previous session, and also played out that phonecall that called Myrna away from the main action back in session 4. Herr Wolf pretty much stayed preoccupied throughout this session, since his player had other commitments, and Arthur Chamberlain remained absent, since his player was sick. Also, this was Abraham Hale's last session (unless I end up NPCing him or something), since his player is moving. Lost Worlds and Secret Histories
Summer, 1937 - London, EnglandMyrna, called away from the rest of the team's investigation by a phone call, finds herself on the receiving end of aggressive questions and legal threats from Sergeant Alphonse Pendergast of the police. He demands to know just what she and her associate ( Marko) said to Sir Felix Swillby-Hinderlap-Swillby when they questioned him just about an hour before, and also warns her to drop her own investigation into the Swillby affair and let the police handle things. Myrna, being very socially capable, manages to defuse his anger, and gets him to admit the reason for his sudden attention: Sir Felix left his hotel quite abruptly after talking to Myrna and Marko, leaving the police no way to contact him, and little clue as to his state of mind. The Sergeant is suspicious of the Van Helsing Society's mysterious nature--it's not exactly public knowledge that they investigate the supernatural, after all--but Myrna's mildly coquettish demeanor flusters him badly, and she manages to put him off the scent. However, she, in turn, is cowed by his legal authority, and disengages from the conversation before he can extract any promises of noninterference from her, but also before she can get much information out of him. Meanwhile, back at Bad Bob's warehouse headquarters, Abraham Hale, Marko Kraljević, Robin Stormchaser, and Herr Wolf are mopping up the remains of their fight against the blackshirts and Nazi agents. Behind the warehouse, Blackshirt leader Robert "Bad Bob" Roberts flees his one-time ally, the knife-wielding Nazi madman known as Herr Zahn, through the rainy night, hoping to escape in a truck with his surviving henchmen. Robin, fearless as ever, chases after Zahn, and Marko races out of the warehouse after her. Abraham, all the way on the other side of the warehouse and suffering from a minor leg wound, decides to get back in the car and simply drive to the action. Wolf is still inside the warehouse, bandaging the grievous wounds Abe inflicted on Herr Blitz, the Nazi turncoat. Robin shoves Herr Zahn, and the berserk German slips on the wet cobblestones, falling into a puddle. Instead of picking himself up, however, he tears open his shirt, revealing a metal plate covered in arcane designs. He turns his knife on himself, hacking and sawing at the light-gague chains the hold the plate onto his body. Robin and Marko aren't occult experts on Herr Wolf's level, but they do recognize that whatever that plate is supposed to do, breaking the chains that fasten it to Zahn will stop its effects, not activate them. Happy that Herr Zahn is distracting the Van Helsing team, Bad Bob and his five remaining blokes pile into the lorry and start up the engine. It's about then that Abraham comes around the corner, turning hard so that his car fishtails on the wet street, skidding towards the blackshirts' truck sideways. Abe leans out the window, and--with typical flawless accuracy--fires a round into the lorry's gas tank. The truck explodes, blasting Bad Bob and four surviving--but somewhat concussed and scorched--blackshirts into the street. Part of the car flies off and hits another nearby truck, this one a flatbed stacked with petrol barrels. The steel drums come loose . . . falling in a heap on top of the prone Herr Zahn, crushing one of his arms completely and knocking him unconscious. The blackshirts, deprived of their escape, stand and fight, until exploding fuel barrels and sheer terror of Marko's inhuman resilience whittle their numbers down. Eventually, Bad Bob stands alone, shot in the shoulder by Abe and unable to handle his shotgun. Robin, taking advantage of his injury, simply manhandles him into the trunk of the Van Helsing Society car. Police whistles begin to sound in the distance. Abraham delivers a dire--and entirely honest--warning to the two blackshirts who surrendered during the fight, forever cementing a very healthy terror of the Van Helsing Society into the English far-right community. They run like hell when told to do so. The police whistles are getting closer, and now the bobbies can be heard running on the cobblestones. Marko dashes back into the warehouse to ransack its office and retrieve Sir Felix's stolen parcel, and also collects Herr Wolf and Herr Blitz, exiting at the front of the building. Robin and Abe--with Bad Bob still in their trunk--drive the length of the warehouse to meet them there, and see the remaining petrol cans atop Herr Zahn explode in their rear-view mirror. Marko, Wolf, and Blitz pile in, and the whole group speeds back to the Society clubhouse. There, Abraham interrogates Bad Bob, who sings like a bird after a little persuasion. Bob reveals that the Nazi party has been supplying his gang and other blackshirt groups with money and weapons for a little less than a year, now. Just days ago, these three German agents--Blitz, Zahn, and Stahl--showed up and demanded a favor in return: They were to procure a postage parcel from Sir Felix Swillby-Hinderlap-Swillby's flat. All they were told was that the Nazis were interested in something a scientist named Bagsnip had found in Africa, and they needed information in that parcel to pinpoint his location. The blackshirts stole the package for them (not knowing they'd left behind a couple items that fell out of the box: the photo and Magnetophone recording which were later found at the scene of the crime), and Herr Blitz managed to radio the vital information to some unknown party shortly before the Van Helsing team tore into their headquarters. So now the team knows that Bagsnip has indeed found some dangerous artifact, and that the Nazis don't have it yet, but do know where to find him. With any luck, our next session will feature a trip to Africa! I was really surprised that Myrna didn't completely destroy the Sergeant in her social conflict with him. She really outclassed him in every way, but somehow the dice were just not on her side, that night. Marko had a really awesome moment when he actually got to invoke his own complication ("Full of Holes", or something like that) to improve his Intimidation role (with much success, too). Abraham was definitely the star of this session (appropriate--since it's his last--but totally unintentional), managing to do lots of great trick shots and scaring the hell out of people. He totally shut down Herr Zahn right before the Nazi bastard was about to become a real problem for the party. It was beautiful.
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Not to rag on the same book all over again, but this page is from Fantastic Four #558 (written by Mark Millar, drawn by Bryan Hitch), and it's a shining example of a weird, annoyingly-common phenomenon in superhero comics. Click it and take a look at the full size version.
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