Post date: Jan 18, 2011 5:59:33 PM
So its been a while, felt I had some minor things to bring to the blog.
First, the first supplement for Gamma World was released - Famine in Fargo:
While it pays homage to the old module of the same name, it is not a re-release of it at all.
The box comes with an expansion of rules/region guide/adventure, more tokens, maps, and a set of non-CCG cards to handle Cryptic Alliance membership.
First, the rules expansion - this book contains the rules for the following things: Skill Challenges - this is a big part of D&D 4e and I am glad to see it make its way into Gamma World. It contains rules for how to use the new Cryptic Alliance Cards (more on that later), as well as information about the various cryptic alliances (including those the PCs can be a member of and those they cannot), a whole host of monster stats, a region guide to the area around adventure,and the adventure.
The Monster Tokens are twice as good as those that came in the original game- and here is why. Unlike the original box set which had monster A on one side and monster B on the other. Here they took a page from their Monster Box and put bloodied on the other side.
The Maps are nice, small, but can be used for the adventure as well as other encounters - my only complaint about the maps is they are small, they make combat take place in a small area, my advice is make sure you put them on top of some gaming paper/battlemats to allow people to move off the smaller maps.
Then Cryptic Alliance cards are a fun, optional, set of rules. First you need to choose if they are individual to the PC or one for the whole group. They grant daily powers. If you go with the 1 card per PC you can create a Paranoia game-like atmosphere as each player wonders what their party members alliance is and how their card can hose them. There are 2 of each card so even in a party there is a chance of two members of the same alliance. Looks like fun to me.
Anyway, a good purchase if you like Gamma World and I look forward to seeing Legion of Gold in February.
Meanwhile USA Today had an interesting article on Sidekicks in anticipation of the Green Hornet Movie coming out, which gave me some thoughts about designing sidekicks in future games and also trying to identify the role of Nukey for ACE's character. (http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2011-01-14-supersidekicks14_ST_N.htm?csp=obinsite)
Batman and Robin. Captain America and Bucky. The Green Hornet and Kato. How come so many superheroes come in pairs?
It's a familiar trope, the superhero-plus-sidekick, and no accident, say academics who study comic heroes. Nearly every superhero of the comics (except, significantly, the very first one, Superman) and most of the heroes of world literature have subordinate figures to back them up in their adventures.
The earliest known literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates back more than four millennia, is the story of a Sumerian king, Gilgamesh, and his close companion, Enkidu, the wild man of Mesopotamia who accompanies the king on various quests.
And there have been scores of such pairs ever since: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Holmes and Watson. Huck and Jim. Tarzan and Cheetah. Ishmael and Queequeg. Lone Ranger and Tonto. (In fact, in the original radio series of the 1930s, Green Hornet is the Lone Ranger's great-nephew, but that's another story.)
True, some comic-book heroes besides Superman don't have sidekicks — Iron Man and Spider-Man, for instance. But many do: Green Arrow and Speedy. Captain Marvel and Captain Marvel Jr. Aquaman and Aqualad. Flash and Kid Flash. Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl. Even The Tick has a sidekick: Arthur.
There are four kinds of these characters in the comics, says Peter Coogan, director of the Institute for Comic Studies, an American studies teacher at Washington University in St. Louis and co-founder of the Comic Arts Conference at the annual Comic-Con International in San Diego.
•The assistant, who is not a superhero with superpowers (example: Batman's butler Alfred).
•The partner, a superhero with identity, code name and costume who works as an equal with another superhero (Green Arrow and Green Lantern).
•The pal, who has neither superpowers nor a costume but hangs around (Jimmy Olsen and Superman).
•The sidekick, who usually has special abilities (but not necessarily powers), an identity and a costume.
"Why are they there? In terms of narrative, sidekicks are there to give the hero someone to talk to," Coogan says.
Ideologically, he says, they're there to provide a minority figure subordinate to the dominant hero, to soften the image of the hero (as Robin does for the dark, isolated Batman), or to reinforce his superiority.
Kato, however, is in most respects smarter than Rogen's Green Hornet — he not only drives the high-tech car, but he also designed it.
Nicholas Yanes, who studies the comics as a graduate student at the University of Iowa, says this version of Kato tracks more like the Bruce Lee version on TV in the 1960s; Lee's portrayal helped bring the martial-arts craze to the West.
"The new movie "is the first time it's blatantly clear that the sidekick is more competent than the superhero," says Yanes. "Usually the Green Hornet is the superior being, but here we have Kato building the weapon and kicking the superhero as a fighter. He's not only equal but probably better than Green Hornet."
Coogan draws on contemporary literary-criticism ideas to explain that the sidekick is sometimes intended as a way to assuage audience guilt about how minorities are or have been treated.
"If Tonto is the Lone Ranger's friend, then the Lone Ranger is not guilty of genocide and we don't have to feel guilt, either," Coogan says. "The Kato figure tells fat, lazy, slovenly Americans that we can work with fast, sleek, rising China. We don't have to worry about China overtaking us in technology and resources; it's still subordinate," as Kato is.
But The Green Hornet story also is a hero-and-sidekick story reflective of the impulses that first animated human storytelling, says Coogan.
"They're about selfish boys turned into responsible men, which is what happens in The Green Hornet," he says. "The cultural function of a hero story is how to turn selfishness into selflessness."
And lastly - Just finished reading Sabbat Worlds - a compilation of shortstories editted by Dan Abbnet - while good flavor for the setting of his Gaunt's Ghost series, I found his opening Introduction about world building to be very interesting.
Here are some snippets I found of note.
"Anyone who works in what's loosely known as 'genre fiction' (ie SF, fantasy, horror, comics, a great deal of gaming, etc. etc.), is used to the process [of world building]. What's basically meant by the phrase is the deliberate and artful construction of a consistent fictional background, setting or milieu for your story or stories to operate in. There are some singularly achieved examples (Middle Earth, Arrakis, Gormenghast) and there are some spectacularly piecemeal yet inclusive examples too (the continuity of Doctor Who, the Marvel Comics Universe)....What you're basically setting out to do is establish a playing field that is logical and stable and doesn't start suddenly contradicting itself.
When I was first asked to write for Warhammer 40K, the basics of the 'world' I would be working in where already well built. Like many popular and long-running intellectual properties, 40k is a 'shared universe'- lots of individuals work within, and contribute creatively to, the whole. But the universe was truly vast, and there was a great deal of room for 'micro-invention' within it.
I don't mean this to sound like a criticism of Warhammer 40k at all, the inclusion of huge scope for individual development was a deliberately designed aspect of the universe. This was an adventure you were being invited to join in with, and contribute to. As anyone who's played the game or built his own army (and its mythology) from the ground up will testify, that's the appeal. There is room for that invention.
..I'd like to think I've contributed in two particular areas of the world building process. The first area is what might be called small-scale texture or domestic detail. With various books, but particularly the Eisenhorn trilogy, I wrote about the 40k universe away from the front line of eternal war. I created a lot of words, phrases and ideas that have been adopted as part of the basic vernacular (vox anybody? promethium?) and used by other writes, by players, and by game designers alike. That gives me a huge warm feeling inside.
The other area is an actual area. It's called the Sabbat Worlds.
...[as I wrote] I made reference to events that had happened just prior to the first story, and mentioned other places. It gave the stories a little meat, a little context.
As the novels took off, the background developed. It grew flesh over its bones. These elements have become more and more significant as I've progressed. If find it very satisfying that those early, almost throwaway references to places and events are becoming increasingly important. The series as a whole is broken down into discrete story arcs. [In] the latest arc..the readers will see how the setting is coming to drive the action more and more. Those flyaway bits of color text I decorated the story with in 1996 [when he wrote the first Gaunt's ghost short story] are no monolithic parts of the epic.
So party though my own deliberate efforts, and partly through a spontaneous creative process, the Sabbat Worlds have evolved. At one point, we produced a wallchart of them, and a campaign over view book that is rarer than hen's teeth.
I suppose the real test of a piece of world building is how well it stands up to the visits of guest creators. "
Looking this over it sounds alot like what was going through my mind as I created my corner of the Fallout Universe. So thanks to Dan Abbnet for putting to words what I could not.