Finfin recension av Expert Nova 2.0

Sajten Sense recenserar Expert Nova och ger betyget 8/10, samt dekalen Rekommenderas. Ett citat ur recensionen:

Expert Nova är endast 63 sidor långt i A5-format (sic! — den är i det något större formatet G5), så det är inte en tjock regelbok att tugga sig igenom. Reglerna är förhållandevis enkla och lätta att lära sig. Det mest geniala med Expert Nova är att reglerna i boken kan anpassas precis hur du själv vill. Du kan använda delar av dem eller allihop, klippa och klistra för att det ska fungera med det äventyr som du vill skapa. Det som också är helt briljant är att du kan använda dessa regler till precis vilket äventyr du vill. Det kan vara dåtid, nutid, scifi eller skräck, endast fantasin sätter gränserna. Det som behövs är ett par tärningar och att skriva ut ett karaktärs-ark från hemsidan, sen är det bara att köra. På sätt och vis är det här det ultimata rollspelet, för du kan verkligen anpassa reglerna och historien precis hur du vill.

Läs hela recensionen här: https://www.senses.se/expert-nova-rollspel-recension/

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

I Second That Statement, Ma’am

Game-writing: the Power and the Pain

When my mind enters its RPG design mode at the keyboard, I shape-shift to a lesser kind of demiurge. I gain the power to create intangible realms, perhaps places that exist in the Platonic world of ideas. JRR Tolkien referred to this as being a “subcreator”. With words and pictures, I built virtual landscapes of dawn, dusk and darkness that others may explore in their thoughts and dreams.

I call myself a dreamsmith, a master of a small, specialized craft.

At several occasions people asked me: “How do you come up with all those colourful ideas?”

“I honestly don’t know,” I responded. “It is a kind of mental big bang”

I get a basic idea from somewhere – a dream, a phrase, a story, etc. That’s the singularity.

I ask myself: “What is THIS?”

BIG BANG!

I start typing: ideas, people, places – it’s cosmic inflation in my mind, my imagination running wild. Hectic hours ensue when I jot down notions, match ideas to the basic world structure, make sure that stuff fit together, that there is depth and width, a past and a future, societies and ecology.

And there it is: a new cosmos with its peculiarities, its challenges, its adventures. An intangible place that isn’t, but that ought to be.

Here lies the pain that comes with the power. I am but a man and cannot make my game worlds real – whatever I do, my subcreations remain stories in people’s minds and shadows dancing on a wall. It’s frustrating, because I want to go by steam-launch along an ancient canal from Vanzan Shor, I want to see sunrise over the ocean from the quays of the Atlantean city of Ausōpolis, I want to cross the ice plains of Alba in a juggernaut. And so on.

The most exquisite subcreations become shared realities. Tolkien’s Middle-earth is the most notable one. His readers share their visions of what that place is like, they experience it together when listening to an audiobook or watching Peter Jackson’s films. We who love Middle-earth know what it would feel like to walk the streets of Minas Tirith or the fields and copses of Ithilien.

That is the power and the pain: creating an imaginary realm but being unable to enter it. Like Moses at the borders of Canaan.

Settling quietly in my silver age

Yepp, that’s how it is.

The Tintin connection

Around 1970 several Tintin stories were published for the first time as proper albums in Swedish. Before that, they had only appeared in magazines. I found the albums in the school library and immediately fell in love with Objectif Lune and On a marché sur la Lune. The exciting adventures, the bulky pre-transistor technology, the mixture of drama and slapstick — what more could an 11-year’s old sf-fan ask for?

Fifty years have passed and I still enjoy the Tintin adventures, particularly the thrills and joys of the protagonists’ traveling to remote places. Hergé was a stickler for technical details and I can see how he honed his skills with each album. The merchant ships in L’Étoile mystérieuse were not really up to the mark, but in Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge a few years later the depictions of ocean voyages had improved notably.

The passing of time has made the content turn from “contemporary” to “retro”; the heroes’ comfortable journey to the moon is a piece of lovely 1950s tech-nostalgia. (The Apollo astronauts went to the moon inside a command module the size of small car and they drove a skeletal dune buggy on the lunar surface.)

I have subconsciously picked up one or two pieces of literary tactics from Hergé and put into to use in my own stories. The protagonists travel into the unknown aboard well-rendered vehicles/craft that are distinct “localities” by themselves. When the heroes set out on a daring adventure, it is never clear what they really are going to face. Unpredictability and danger — and clever solutions to escape the hazards. (Even though I nowadays find the denouement of Le Temple du Soleil too contrived.) When I wrote about Johnny’s and Linda’s journeys in diesel-powered juggernauts across the ice plains of Alba in The Ice War, the spirit of Hergé’s story-telling accompanied me.

Call of Cthulhu in Ukrainian

The award-wininng game publisher Chaosium launches a Ukrainian edition of its best-selling Call of Cthulhu product line.

Read more about it at Chaosium’s website

https://www.chaosium.com/blogannouncing-call-of-cthulhu-in-ukrainian-/

Cognizance and Ignorance

“The task is … not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.”
― Erwin Schrödinger

During my decades as an RPG designer, I encountered the issue depicted above at several occasions. I started by writing for Traveller, a gritty space-opera game that resembles the stories that Jerry Pournelle and Poul Anderson wrote in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1990s, as the IT evolution accelerated swiftly, it became obvious that these writers were unaware of Moore’s Law about the exponential growth of computing power. 1990s computers outperformed their fictional far-future counterparts by several orders of magnitude. An obvious case of “stuff you don’t know that you don’t know”.

By itself, this is a trivial observation that SF fans have known for decades. However, when you write RPGs, you must wrestle with this matter in a different way. A story is “then and there”, set in stone by its author. But a game is never a fixed text, but rather a never-ending creative process by its myriads of players.

My approach: An RPG is a toolbox that the gamemaster uses in any way she sees fit to create her own adventures. Therefore, the tools in the toolbox must make sense. “The computer of this far-future starships uses a mainframe computer that is less capable than my cellphone.” No, that won’t do.

Any game milieu is inevitably deficient when it comes to “stuff you don’t know that you don’t know”.

My academic background is in political science and history. I have learned my limits when it comes to technology and the physical sciences: they’ll always surprise me, that is, “stuff that I know that I don’t know”. (“Methane on Mars!” Wow. “The universe’s expansion rate is increasing!” I didn’t see that one coming. And so on.)

In my own field I end up with: “stuff you don’t know that you don’t know”. For example, I didn’t expect Putin to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year. At that time, I didn’t know Putin’s reasoning behind his unwise decision (I still don’t). Also, I didn’t see that hole in my knowledge, despite having spent a lot of time studying Russia/USSR at an academic level.

Lessons learned:
A. The past is easier to investigate than the present and the future is out of bounds for any intrepid researcher.
B. If you want to create a credible and durable game, you should make its setting resistant to “ignorance shocks”.

Conclusions:
C. Fantasy milieus operate according to you own set of physical and historical laws. What you know is what there is to know. There might be “stuff that you know that you don’t know” because you have not paid attention to them yet. But you won’t be caught by a “Fall of the Berlin Wall”-style surprise.
D. Recent history with embellishments are also a safe bet. It is easy to research (except for places like North Korea). You can also spice the setting with “classified matters”, such as espionage, conspiracies and weird science, that you design and control. However, tread with care because occasionally old secrets might surface and upset the structure of your setting. Example: The fall of the Berlin Wall opened the East German archives. They keep on revealing new unsavory facts. Your in-game “secret Stasi operations” might therefore turn out to be very different from the schemes those people carried out in reality.

Ek veit einn, at aldrei deyr

Last evening, some gamer buddies and I met at a Stockholm pub.
An unfamiliar forty-something man approached our table and asked me: “Are you Anders Blixt?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said, shook my hand and walked away.

Such encounters happen rarely, but to me they are diamonds.

I have designed role-playing games for more than forty years. It’s a mundane and solitary profession: I spend hours in front my computer trying to turn my visions into gameable texts. All the action, so to say, takes place at a closed screening inside my mind. When my part of a product is complete, after much commenting by others and many revisions by me, I hand it over to the layout artist. With some trepidation, I assure you. I may be a veteran designer, but I still write occasional duds.

Creating role-playing games has not enriched my bank account. Nowadays I am retired with a state pension that pays my bills. Earlier I had to do muggle jobs. But my writing games has enriched the lives of thousands of people. Many times, I have heard comments like: “My adolescence was miserable, but your games made me endure it.”

These days, when I am in the Indian summer of my life, I look at what joy my toil has kindled and I feel contented. I have used my talents and endurance to encourage and strengthen others. That’s what counts. Or to paraphrase the Norse poem Hávámal: “We are all mortal, but our deeds will be remembered.”

Deyr fé,
deyja frændr,
deyr sjalfr it sama,
ek veit einn,
at aldrei deyr:
dómr um dauðan hvern.

Gothcon and a Gold Medal

The long hiatus since my previous blog post is due to my younger sister passing away from cancer; my suffering from non-serious but exhausting health issues; and my volunteering with administrative chores for a charity that supports Ukraine. A tough year. Well, now I have regained at least some of my wits — once more I can look forward in life.

The biggest Swedish gaming convention Gothcon is traditionally held in Gothenburg during the Easter weekend. This year, I got a great award: best Swedish game writer during the past twelve months. Jubilation!