Posts Tagged ‘canon puncture’

Wherin I sneak a little surprise into the end of the show to show off how well WildLion knows his Star Wars – and that he is the best 4-year old storyjammer I’ve ever met.

Canon Puncture 78: Extreme Dunder Mifflin at GenCon 09 : Canon Puncture.

Oh, and also there’s David and Mario talking about cool stuff they got at GenCon and ribbing me about not being on The Game Master Show.

Joe does it again with an excellent OP over at Buried Without Ceremony, this time exploring a couple of my front-burner play-preference issues like a flaming vorpal sword of awesome that slices right into my chest and tugs at my soul.

Plugging in Scenes and System via Buried Without Ceremony.

I love the concept of looking at play preferences in terms of sockets, which I first encountered by reading Mo Turkington’s blog and later scratched the surface of discussing with Rich and Chris on Canon Puncture #52. And scene framing is also a big subject of exploration for me, so Joe’s thoughts on how systems help us engage scenes through sockets is very useful to my musings on how to get more out of play and help my co-players get more out of play, too.

This is my favorite paragraph, because it clarifies so many things for me about how scene framing relates to “pushing conflict”:

It’s a common misconception that the way you do aggressive scene framing well is to frame to the moment of pregnant conflict, that you open with an opposed situation that must be diffused. I’m going to take a step back from this idea and offer a suggestion: scene framing should work to engage our sockets in a meaningful way, skipping that which doesn’t satisfy our engagement and energy. In other words, if we all have Conflict/Plot/Choice sockets, then and only then is it appropriate to frame to moments of intense conflict. If we all have Setting/Aesthetic sockets, then we should be framing with interesting and evocative images, and use scene framing to move us to those images. – Joe McDonald

I encourage you to go over to BWC and share your thoughts and ideas in the thread, and hopefully we can have a fruitful discussion that takes this topic to even more interesting levels.

My New Alter-Ego: Pocket the Fool

Hello, MisfitMonkey Nation.

If I’m still on your feed, thanks! I appreciate your desire to keep up with my harpings and I’ll make an effort to honor that by sharing my harpings more often. I’ve been … hibernating, so to speak, for the past little while. Now I’m awake, alert, and feeling good. Time to carpe diem!

Two things I want to highlight today. The first is that awhile ago I threw a tweet up on Twitter and Facebook inviting anyone in my sphere of influence who is attending GenCon to meet with me for an interview, chat, or shout-out on Canon Puncture. See, I wasn’t going to Indy this year, but circumstances have improved, and now I’m planning to come up after all on Friday evening (and stay til Sunday morning) to watch the Ennies and spend some time socializing with those of you that I hardly ever get to see – and to meet some new friends, too, of course. And I’ll be there with a media badge as the official GenCon 09 reporter for Canon Puncture.

So, if you missed my tweet about this, then hopefully you’ll catch this post – if you’re a publisher, designer, podcaster, rpg-player, booth monkey, or Canon Puncture listener and you’d like to talk to me on record about your game, product, creative endeavors – or, even better, just about your life and play experiences in our crazy hobby – then write to me at harpingmick@gmail.com or contact me in some way else, and I’ll start pulling together a list of people to connect with while I’m at the con.

Also, of course, I’m looking forward to just plain socializing and celebrating a chance to be with folks I enjoy hanging out with, so even if you don’t want to get your voice and thoughts on a podcast, then yeah, we can still get together and enjoy each other’s company!

The second thing – really more of a side-note – is that I am tempted to promise that I’ll be posting a series of VAM-related images, ideas, and concepts here on the Monkey in the next couple of weeks because I’m actually trying to pull together a playable alpha-test of the DRYH-version of VAM for possible play at GenCon and I’m trying to focus a lot of my newly-reignited creative energy on that, and I’d like to share it here while I’m doing it. And in terms of my intent, that’s all true. But I won’t actually make any such promise, because my reputation for promising such things and not delivering is already hefty enough.

But it might happen. So, stay tuned.

I’m back to do a MERP! Yay. I missed last Friday because I was actually socializing. See the “ENJOYING” paragraph below.

MAKING:

Obviously, I’m not blogging as much these days. Mostly this is due to the fact that I’m busy fairly actively searching for new freelance clients, along with trying to spend some time teaching myself some of the latest design techniques so that I’m more marketable. But I’m also happy to report that some of my non-blogging time is being spent doing something I haven’t done in years – preparing to run an rpg campaign. Specifically, I’m running Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies. So in terms of “making”, I can share with you the following Website that I’ve added as a sub-site to Canon Puncture that will be a log and resource area for our S7S campaign: http://www.canonpuncture.com/swashbucklers

ENJOYING:

Last Friday I was in St. Louis for a family reunion that was capped off on Friday night by a Cardinals ball game at the new Busch Stadium. It was my first time in the new stadium and my first time ever in a “party box” – a half-inside/half-outside section with its own bar and snack counter all served up as part of the ticket price, which I did not have to pay. The Cardinals won, the nachos, hot dogs and BBQ chicken were quite good (I think I ate 7 cheese-dogs), and the beer was … well it’s Busch Stadium, so the beer was all Bud products i.e. watered-down American barley-piss, so I was having none of that. But still, it was a very nifty evening with about 12 members of Leah’s family and a night off from parental responsibilities (the kids were all back at the hotel supervised by Leah’s teenage nieces).

Not much going on TV-wise since many of the shows I enjoy are done for the summer. I’m very glad Chuck is coming back, I hope Castle does as well, and I’m looking forward to new Burn Notice episodes coming soon. Other than that, I think it’ll be a light summer for television viewing in our house.

I saw Wolverine while in St. Louis. I actually liked it better than the reviews of my peers led me to expect, but it was entirely on the performances of the actors and not because the action or story were all that compelling. I definitely would pay to see more of Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool and Taylor Kitsch was awesome in the few minutes he clocked in as Gambit.

READING:

I’m waiting for my library to receive two books I’ve got on reserve – one of them being the new Dresden Files novel – so while I wait for that I decided to augment my S7S prep by re-reading one of my all-time favorites – Bard by Keith Taylor. It is semi-historical fantasy written in the 1980s that hews closer to R.E. Howard than J.R.R. Tolkien, and although I won’t claim it is stellar literature, it still clings to my story-loving heart even though this is now the fourth time I will have read it. It is not well known – Taylor is an Australian author and the series of five Bard novels apparently never really took off here in the States, but I really love books 1-4 and highly recommend them to anyone who might enjoy a sweeping series of yarns about an Irish Bard named Felemid mac Fal who starts off his adventures in post-Roman Britain and then ventures on to become the companion of a female Jutish pirate-queen for the next three books in the series. Yes, that’s right: an Irish bard and a woman pirate adventuring in a magic-is-real version of Northwest Europe in the 6th Century. The writing would have to be pure shit for me not to like that. But it is actually pretty good writing, in a pulpy-fantasy sort of way. Even after four readings, it holds up.

PLAYING:

Tonight Rich and I finish up Burning Wheel: Rome with Ogre Whiteside. Honestly, it is really a shame and a kinda big ball-drop for me not to have blogged about last week’s session already, because it was one of the best nights of roleplaying I’ve had in a long while. Rich wrote some stuff about it over on Canon Puncture but I really ought to have elaborated on it myself by now, I just haven’t taken the time.  Maybe a big overall wrap-up post is in order after tonight’s game brings the series to it’s conclusion. I’ll try. I’ve got lots to share about it.

Next Wednesday, we begin Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies, our long-awaited and much-anticipated campaign. As I mentioned above, I’ve added a swashbuckling sub-site to Canon Puncture to act as a campaign log and you are all invited to follow along as we move through pre-play planni ng and into actual play over the next several days.

I’m also playing in a Spirit of the Century game with Mark Kinney, Clay Karwan, and Andrew Black. We had one meeting and it went really well. Unfortunately, we had to cancel the Thursday night game this week but we’re planning on getting back to it next week.

Once upon a time, the biggest obstacle for me in anticipation of playing Primetime Adventures was that I was scared to death of those moments in play when it would be my turn to frame a scene. In my head, I’d built scene framing up to be this incredibly difficult concept that only really talented and experienced people could do well, and since I was neither talented nor experienced, when my turn came I would either call for a really lame scene covered in weak sauce, or spew a poorly-formed notion that wasn’t really a scene at all, or I’d freeze up altogether and stare down at my hands in nervous silence because I would have nothing whatsoever to propose.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been working hard to try to get a consistent pace going here on the Monkey, and I plan to continue that effort. But I also have a Vegas After Midnight writing goal to achieve this week and I’m going to focus my hobby/creativity time on that for the next 3 to 4 days, so I’m not sure how much time I’ll have to do my Monkey journaling until that’s done. I’ve got about 4 half-finished draft posts in my draft hopper, and who knows what else I’ll run across that might inspire me to want to share something, so who knows? But this week, in the creative writing department, VAM takes precedence.

In the mean time, Canon Puncture #64 was released earlier today, so if you’re inclined, you can get a little Mick-fix (and a Rich-fix, and a Judd-fix) listening to that. Whatever you feel about Canon Puncture’s recent episodes, I’d like to encourage you to listen to #64. We really had fun recording it and I think that it comes pretty close to what we want to do with the show’s main segment – which is to talk about our gaming experiences as inspired by some cool and interesting blog or forum posts that we run across. In my opinion, we’ve hit on a formula here that will be entertaining, informative, and generally positive for listeners while still being natural and fun for the Canoneers.

So, there’s the Canon Puncture sales pitch. Other than that, I’ll catch ya around later this week, probably.

Shared for your edification without comment from me (edit: actually, I’ve now commented quite a bit in the comment thread), except to say that Ryan Macklin is still someone I consider a friend.

Ryan Macklin On Canon Puncture 60 and Listener Agenda.