It’s also oddly hopeful, because I can see how far I’ve come as a person. I’m different now than I was then, and it’s good, because I like me better now than I did then. Which will sound utterly stupid when I read it tommorow.

But I digress.

Anyway, it come back to reading a friend’s blog. A friend who is much more conservative than I. And it’s kinda interesting because it made me identify the primary reason I’m not a conservative:

Becasue the past fucking sucked, and it sucks less now than it did then.

I don’t consider myself a crusader, fighting to protect a dying world, I’m a trailblazer, looking for the new horizon.

Oh god, I KNOW that’s going to look bad tomorrow…

But I digress again.

Anyway, looking at the past me, it was fun seeing the point that I started turning into the current me. It was a simple post, it was short and sweet, and it simply said that all non-indy games of the past three years sucked.

This was ridiculous, of course. But it was the point I started thinking about things functioned, not how they looked like they functioned. That adding more powerups to Mario didn’t make it better (Although in the case of Super Mario World, doesn’t necessarily make it worse). How the original Zelda is a totally different game than Ocarina of time, and I kind of like the original better. How JRPGs don’t suck, although I was playing sucky JRPGs (Lost Odyssey is still not a very good game).

Oh, and of course, how I think Marx got pretty close to how society works, but people don’t understand it’s not something you can force. ALthough, my thoughts on that will wait for some other (possibly never at all) time.

And I hope to have some solid posts that someone other than me will care about soon.

Torchwood: Children of Earth-Pretty good, better than Torchwood was last time I watched it. Preview for next episode spoiled who lives, however, killing a bunch of tension.

Aliens-Best scifi action movie ever. Maybe the best action movie period. It’s just a really good movie.

Dr Who: The Key to time-Does not feel like the episodes are linked at all. The Pirate Planet, Power Krol, and The Armegeddon factor are the best. Stones of blood has rock that chase after you and suck your blood, however.

Boy, I hope I think of something to write that’s not a review soon.

Which, interestingly, ties into rediscovering GURPS, which is what this post is going to talk about.
My first game system EVER was GURPS. Specifiably, the Discworld Roleplaying Game, also known as the funniest game book ever written.

Anyway, I loved GURPS to death. Even though I never played and RPG before it, the idea of a totally classless RPG was CRAZY to me. The rules had a logic to them I wasn’t expecting, the whole thing made sense. It didn’t even use those funny dice I heard so much about. IT only needed three six-sided dice, which I had from playing the MechWarrior collectible miniatures game.

To make a long story short, I then bought a few dozen different games, played almost none of them but Savage Worlds, and then I found myself a few months ago. Somehow hating GURPS, a game I only played five times and loved. I then looked through my GURPS 3rd and realized GURPS how much I loved GURPS when I was thirteen.  So I bought fourth edition GURPS.

Skip here if I’m getting to boring

GURPS fourth feels like a beast from another age in a lot of ways. So many games these days are really tightly designed, without many quirky details. Most also have abandoned the silly idea that and RPG needs to represent reality. GURPS does neither, it explicitly lists rules for every fucking thing the authors thought seemed like a good idea, and all of them are to be ‘realistic’.

This kind of thing drives me up a wall in most systems, but GURPS is weird in that it has five-thousand rules, but all of them are are easy to understand. In fact, GURPS is one of the easiest systems to explain to new players I’ve ever found. It uses a very brute force method of design, where the authors simply took the most obvious choice for everything. Of course, I might just think it’s obvious because my gaming assumptions are all subconsciously based on GURPS, but it seemed really intuitive when I learned it.

When I say this game has rules for everything, I really mean it. It’s got rules for radiation, bleeding, infection, magic, psychic powers, superheroes, robots, strangulation, all types of armor, making gadgets, vehicles, an entire sub-system of character creation is dedicated how your players deal with dimensional and time travel! But the crazy thing is you don’t have to use any of them if you don’t want to. It has rules for it all though, so you don’t have to wing it.
Unless you want to wing it, of course.

So I should talk about the jewel in the crown of GURPS, which is the character creation system. It’s a point based affair, with only one type of points for everything. You have basic attributes, skills, advantages, techniques, and you can get points by taking disadvantages. In fact it’s one of the earliest systems that rewarded you in some areas for taking drawbacks in others. If you know anything about gaming, you’ve encountered this stuff before. GURPS just has, again, rules for anything.

You really can make any sort fo character you can thing of out of one book in GURPS 4e. But a sad consequence of the rules is that if you have players (like I’ve had for a number of years) who don’t think of characters, they just pick the most powerful traits they can find, GURPS will not immediately reward them for making a character with more personality, something I rather like in allot of indie RPGs.

Which is pretty much how I’m going to sum up GURPS. It’s a box of Legos, really. A bunch of fun, colorful blocks that you can build to make just about anything. Sadly, if someone doesn’t know what to build out of the blocks, you’ll probably end up with a rather random collection of pieces of different clashing colors that don’t match up well.

Hey, that sounded like a conclusion

It could be, but one huge aspect of GURPS I need to talk about. GURPS has an awful GMing section. It’s filled with advice that has nothing to do with running a good game. For example, it has a whole sidebar on mapping of all things, and specifically how to make it HARDER for the players. It will often tell you to not make encounters too hard or too easy, but not tell you HOW to not make an encounter too hard or too easy.

And the biggest problem is that it doesn’t tell you how to use GURPS. It doesn’t explain how to choose which of the thousand-and-one rules you’ll need for your campaign. In fact, it only barely touches on using the rule like that at all.

So, you could say GURPS is like getting a PC today with a manual for an Apple 2. Sure, you can probably figure out some stuff from it, but you’ll still be way off.

Wait, but you like it?

Hell yes! GURPS doesn’t explain how to use the rules well, but they CAN be used well. It gives you everything you need to run just about anything, it just doesn’t explain how, which is kinda sad. But the thing is, I did learn how to run a game. I learned it from Spirit of the Century, I learned it from The Shadow of Yesterday, I learned it from MouseGauard. My experience with a lot of games I bringing to GURPS, and it’s awesome.

So, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going decompress after writing this ludicrously long post. G’bye!

Fun somewhat related fact: I was a fan of his literaly a month before everyone else knew about him, I shit you not.

Iron Council

by China Mieville

I’ve been reading this for almost a year now, my first year of college sort of distracted me from reading it. My opinion of the book sort of fluctuated over the time I read it, ranging from Mieville’s best book to his worst in my head. This has alot to do with it’s rather strange pacing.

It’s about two totally separate groups of revoloutionaries in the insane world of Bas-Lag, specifically following the City of New Crobuzon and a number of renegadede train travellers. There are all the strange creatures, monsters, and enviorments I’ve come t expect from Mieville, although Perdido Street Station still conveys the amazing world better.

It starts with quite a lot action and intrigue, and then takes a detour that lasts a third of the book. This detour is in a totally different style than the rest of it, and being practically a self contained novella in and of itself. It then returns to the style of the first third of the book, and proceeds to the inevitably strange and anticlimactic conclusion.

I should say that when it come to Mieville, anticlimaxes are not necessarily bad. Well, they are in a not happy ending sense, but not in a poorly written sense. The ending was my favorite of the Bas-Lag books, it was emotional, sad, but not nearly utterly god-damned depressing as Perdido street station. It was anticlimactic in an artistic, clever way instead of The Scar which just seemed revel in how anti-romantic it’s ending was.

Ultimately, it’s as good as The Scar overall. I prefer Perdido Street Station still, but Iron Council is a great read, just a non-standard one. If you liked his other stuff, you’ll probably like it as well.

***

Aside on the reviews of Iron Council

This is by far Mieville’s most controversial book in all the nerd circles on the internet. There’s a fairly vocal group that hates it because they say it’s too politcal. Baiscally, the revoloutionaries in the book are SOCIALISTS which is BAD in the eyes of a lot of geeks, because a fantasy book that has SOCIALISTS in it is TOO POLITCAL. They will explain it’s his preachiest book, written more to sell his politics than anything else.

This is insane, of course, because being this is a book by China Mieville it totally de-romanticizes everything. Even the socialist revolutionaries. It’s a bit of a spoiler to say this, but the both groups of revolutionaries are revealed to exist for much more materialistic reasons than they are originally presented as. And, as always, Mieville uses brutal violence to totally destroy romance of military conflict.

Trust me, it doesn’t deserve the bad press.

But I  digress.

I’m, well, reebooting the blog. All the old posts are hidden because I am far too embarrassed by them (One of my last posts was whining about Halo 3 for god’s sake).

So, I launch again, this time not as a pseudo conspiracy blog but A NERD BLOG. It was that already, but I had strange pretensions about it being something else.

My real focus, you see, will be on giving sort of a alternative nerd blog. Pretty much because there are no real moderate nerd blogs out there I can find. All the positive reactions are raves, and all the negative reactions are rants.

So, I’ll talk about RPGs, Videogames, Movies, TV, and comics.

ESPECIALLY comics! They are my favorite storytelling medium, you see.

Hell, I might post some of my own!

Tomorrow, I hope to post my first real article. I do not know what it will be yet, but it will be something that hopefully will be unique. Hopefully, I’ll also get rid of that ghastly logo as well.

See you earlier!

For those that don’t know, the games follow several supernatural occurrences through history. They started with the universally acclaimed 5 Days a Stranger. In 5DaS you control Trilby, a gentleman cat burglar who finds himself in Defoe Manor, a standard creepy Victorian manor. The mansion is (of course) haunted, and Trilby is determined to find the ghost. It’s actually pretty scary, and the puzzels are the right balance of logic and creative thinking. It’s probably the best all around game of the lot, too.

The story continues with 7 Days a Skeptic.This one takes place four hundred years after the original and has you playing as a counselor on a starship. The plot is pretty close to the first game, only in space. Even with the similarities of plot though, it’s got enough twists and turns to keep you guessing. And there’s no way you’ll see some of them coming. Don’t be afraid to use a walkthrough however, as the game’s creator has admitted some of the sequences are pretty hard.

Trilby’s Notes returns the focus to Trilby as he tracks down a loose end from the Defoe Manor incident (IE 5 Days a Stranger). The plot takes place in a hotel while Trilby shifts back and forth through space and time. This is probably my favorite installment just because it’s so freaking creepy. Playing through the game was like a nightmare, but in a good way. Notes expands the story of the games considerably, adding some very interesting attempts to create a Lovecraft-style universe. It should also be noted that this one uses a text interface rather than a graphical one, in the style of King’s Quest. Be warned, this one ends on a sort of cliffhanger, and it’s only sort of resolved in the next one.

The series closes with 6 Days a Sacrifice, a game that returns to the icon based interface of 5DaS and 7DaS. 6 Days’ protagonist is a new fellow unrelated to either protagonist of the previous games. This time, it’s almost two hundred years in the future and a cult is entering the final stages of the plan in the previous game. Honestly, this game is the weakest of the bunch. It’s puzzles are easy, it’s atmosphere isn’t nearly as creepy as the brilliant Triby’s Notes, and the plot makes very little sense. You do see the final results of the previous games stories, but 6 Days raises far more questions then it answers. The ending was…confusing to say the least. Plus, it’s shorter than any of the others. Still, it’s fairly decent, just not up to the standards of the other absolutely amazing games.

In short, play these games. The weak ending of 6 Days is not enough reason to not play the originals, and the first two games really stand on their own extremely well. Trilby’s Notes will make you want to play the final game, just be aware that you’ll have to figure out the plot on your own.