Active Voice

GenCon 2011

davebrookshaw — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 19:02:02 +0000

Another year, another Con. Impressions;

The Dealer Hall was bigger, but the extra space was given over to better integrating the authors and artists, extra space for board game demos and more LARP suppliers. The number of RPG booths continued to shrink, or so it seemed.
Placement was odd. The RPG companies I was interested in were either right at the entrance or in the far back – Posthuman, Green Ronin and White Wolf had a little colony on the far side of the artists, while Paizo and WotC were as far apart as it was physically possible to get, which amused.
Outside the hall, the Con felt a lot more spread out. I never did find the wargames.
Show winners to my eye were FFG (again) and Cubicle 7. WotC seemed to be in the same “there’s other things to do than sell books” mood White Wolf were in last year. Speaking of White Wolf, now that the “In Print” / Print on Demand process is getting up to speed, it was good to see a booth with product again.

Long Time

davebrookshaw — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 18:27:02 +0000

…No post. Most of my time has been taken up with a very exciting project, trying to get the first draft in before setting off for GenCon. That was achieved with a few days to spare.

Hopefully, my work over the last year will be announced at the Con. I’m quite proud of the books I’ve worked on over the last eight months.

And so, to Indianapolis. Where Danse Macabre has been nominated for an Ennie.

The Great Unboxing

davebrookshaw — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 22:34:01 +0000

The guys at White Wolf just posted a youtube video of them receiving the advance copies of “Danse Macabre”, the last traditionally-published Vampire: the Requiem book. I had a small hand in the book (you can spot at least one of my sections as Russell is flipping through it, actually), so it’s a happy day for me.

Jobs are like buses / A Story Told / Where the Wild Things Are

davebrookshaw — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 20:07:32 +0000

Jobs are like buses

In the middle of the Death of RPGs (tm The Internet) I am now four weeks on the far side of the busiest I have ever been; two books, back-to-back, both involving hefty amounts of research and one needing me to recruit a playtester group over the Holiday period. I was pleased with both of them, they both stretched my experience and they’ll look good on the CV. The second was especially important, being the first work I’ve done *outside* White Wolf, for a company I met and talked to at GenCon. I initially balked at the word count and timeframe they were asking but memories of the only other time I turned down a job (which turned out to be something I would have loved and remains a deep regret) poked at me to say yes. Professional pride then pushed me to deliver, but the cost… I spent all the Holidays bar Christmas Day and Boxing Day writing. I even spent the New Year’s Party sat in the corner tapping away. I let pretty much everything else, web-presence-wise, slide, including the blog. My day-job went through a major reorganisation, including massive redundancies. I barely noticed, all evening run-time focused on Getting The Words Down.

So that’s where I’ve been.

A Story Told

Soul Cage is done. For the first time in a decade, I am not playing or running Mage. Once I’ve had a rest and properly planned my next rpg, the Vampire stand-in game someone else in my group has been running will finish and for the first time in a decade and a hefty bit I will not be participating in a World of Darkness game.

That still kinda shakes me.

It’s a peculiar form of Necromancy, listening to the recordings of the last few Soul Cage sessions while writing the Actual Play. Minute by Minute, I can hear it ticking away towards the end. It was a good end, informed (more than I realised at the time) by my sadness at never actually having taken “Ascension” through to the eponymous conclusion. There will be a reunion of sorts, a “lost tale” that goes between the finale and the epilogue, at GenCon 2011, but other than that I’m *done*. Off to see what other vistas I can see, a Gamesmaster rather than a Storyteller again.

Where The Wild Things Are

So I’ve been hearing a lot lately about how roleplaying hasn’t died out, it’s just shifted to a form invisible to most people we would call “roleplayers” (and by “we” I mean he average inhabitant of rpg.net). It’s a truism that the overwhelming majority of roleplaying on the internet is done in IP-based forums; collaborative Harry Potter and Twilight fiction lists, RP-based guilds lurking in the corners of MMORPGs and using the graphics engine of Warcraft to do for freeform roleplaying what the Machinima crowd do for home movies. If these masses could only be tapped, goes the wisdom, then the hobby would be saved.

The theory comes with the rider, of course, that these guys and girls (and a whole lot of them are girls, putting certain gender stereotypes to rest) are already perfectly enjoying themselves without giving us (and by “us” I mean RPG authors) any money, so why should they start now? The question of how to monetize these guys is burning a lot of midnight oil.

But that’s where most commentators stop. It’s out there, it’s vaguely disreputable and they don’t want any more to do with it other than to try to tease people on to the type of roleplaying they’re used to.

Screw that.

In the manner of an anthropologist, I am going in to live with the New Roleplayers. I shall report my findings as and when. My first foray is a relatively easy one – a hardcore Roleplaying Guild in World of Warcraft. Now, Warcraft’s a fun game in and of itself, but these guys some mutual friends introduced me to aren’t *playing* warcraft. They’ve carefully gathered gear that creates the avatar appearance they’re after, they’ve found a relatively quiet corner of one of the in-game cities with a shop hardly anyone goes in, and they’ve taken it over. There are long-running storylines, in character politics, struggles against enemies that aren’t part of the game as created by Blizzard (in fact, I’m pretty sure they don’t exist outside of the shared narrative – when in the “headquarters” the players play out their characters actions using the game engine, but when they go offscreen they resolve it through mutual agreement or by temporarily electing a GM).

Fascinating. I wonder how it fits with Toy Dogma. I’ll stick with them for a few months at least, to see how it all shakes out over time. Maybe interview a few of those involved and post the results up. But this isn’t some laugh at the other thing – I’m participating. And actually enjoying it.

I wonder if anyone can introduce me to one of those collaborative fanfic forums.

Especially Active Voice!

davebrookshaw — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 19:27:12 +0000

The latest White Wolf podcast (recorded last month at GenCon) is part one of the “nWoD retrospective”, featuring Eddy Webb, Rich Thomas, Ethan Skemp, Travis Stout and some British Guy who snuck in when they weren’t looking and keeps interjecting.

Can’t think who that might be.

http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=84151

Working Again

davebrookshaw — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 19:22:53 +0000

Ah, the research phase. Somehow it always involves buying DVDs I have always intended to see but never found the time.

All in the name of “research”. Still, I am being good. I have a notepad with me in front of the telly.

It even has notes in it!

GenCon 2010: Impressions

davebrookshaw — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 16:27:31 +0000

I’ve been back for five days now, and the Con buzz has well and truly faded. Time enough, though, to process what went on and give a few impressions.

1) This was not the Big Boys year

By which I mean WotC, White Wolf/CCP and Paizo. WotC had Dark Sun, and Paizo a Pathfinder release, but if there wasn’t a game that owned the Con the way Pathfinder did in 09 and D&D 4th edition in 08. The closest thing was Deathwatch by Fantasy Flight and DC Heroes by Green Ronin, both of which did their publishers proud. The Cubicle 7 booth was always packed, the Mongoose one slightly less so.

2) Smaller Publishers are starting to recover from the d20 years

We’re starting to see a real competition in the middleweight companies. Lots of them went out of business a few years back, but we’re starting to see a lot more innovation. These aren’t “Indy” games, they’re full developer-writer-editor jobs. And it’s good to see them.

3) Don’t get fooled by crowd size

Yes, the numbers were up. Yes, there were a lot more kids there; but how many of those kids were due to the fact that my generation of geekdom reached breeding age 6-8 years ago and our kids are now old enough to attend? The “industry” is still so tiny as to need the quote marks.

Warms the soul, though.

Oh… Yeah. New blog.

davebrookshaw — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 18:48:03 +0000

The last post wasn’t really an auspicious start, was it?

This is Active Voice. It’s officially my freelancing blog, although I probably won’t be able to keep other musings out of it. I’ll try to at least keep it to Roleplaying Games and the wider “Geek Culture”.

Why the name? I have a habit of registering on various social media sites with usernames that are a variant of “voice”, “vox”, or similar. As this is the current blog, it’s the Active Voice.

More importantly, though, it’s the first criticism I got on my work when I began Freelancing. “Dave”, said the Developer, “you need to stick to the Active Voice”.

So every time I look at this site, I am reminded. “He does” not “It is done”.

Immortality of a dubious kind.

davebrookshaw — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 18:01:40 +0000

…So I’ve made it onto TV Tropes. Or, at least, my Actual Play threads have had TV Tropes pages created for them by some of the readers.

I am at once gratified, humbled by the attention and a little bit scared.