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Minireview: The Twice-Damned Prince (Pathfinder #30)

The Twice-Damned Prince, written by Brian Cortijo and James Jacobs, forms the finale of the Council of Thieves adventure path. The plans of the Bad Guys are fully set in motion (though in much-reduced form, thanks to probable PC interference), and the city of Westcrown is thrown into total chaos. If the PCs act smartly they may be able to turn the situation around, otherwise the Council of Thieves is the likely new ruling faction in the city.

Like the previous installment, this one also uses the city environment to good effect. The action is separated into various locales, and the whole thing is an event-based sandbox where the PCs can fairly freely decide what to do. Though there is a default sequence of events and most likely end scenario, the whole thing is quite flexible and the end result could be anything. As before, PC motivation depends strongly on their having close ties to the city, this is not an adventure path suitable for the usual “wandering hero” type (those would have left town long ago).

I like the fact that here, even if the PCs fail, the end result is just “a bunch of nasty guys take charge of a city”, instead of the all-too-often-seen “the world is doomed!” or “Evil Ancient Overlord enslaves everyone”. Those “save the world” things get old, after a while.

On the whole, the Council of Thieves did not quite live up to my expectations, but it still is a very good adventure path, easily among the better ones Paizo has done. It has some brilliant bits (the opera section is especially cool), but those are marred by lots of intervening mundane sections. Of course, everything depends on the GM and the group. Also, I’ve only read these things, not played them, so the actual in-play reality may be quite different to my impressions.

My favorite Paizo adventure path remains “Curse of the Crimson Throne”. We’ll see how the next one (Kingmaker) pans out; it looks promising based on what we know of it so far.

Minireview: Small Favor, by Jim Butcher

Being book 10 in the Dresden Files series, Small Favor is another fast-paced romp in the life and times of Harry Dresden, professional wizard (assisted by a large side cast of characters, some human, some not so much).

Like all the later Dresden books, you really don’t want to read this before reading the previous books; while earlier books were more or less standalone, the later books have increasing amounts of “metaplot” and interconnectedness. The cast of characters is pretty huge, and at times it becomes a bit difficult to keep track of who is who. The power level also increases, Harry is no longer gifted small fry, he is now a Warden and a heavy hitter – though, as this book demonstrates, he is far from being a master of the art.

This tale, like many previous ones, begins with a strange case the police are somewhat puzzled about – arson, in this case. Harry comes in to take a look, and to his horror soon finds out he’s being given an offer he cannot refuse by Mab, the reputedly-unstable and unmistakably dangerous Winter Queen. Soon some bad guys from the previous books make their (re)appearance, and things heat up until Harry is forced to call in the Archive: a young girl who is also one of the more dangerous creatures around. Cue gunfire and stuff blowing up.

It’s another fun ride. It’s also the first Dresden book that does not properly wrap up the main plot points it introduces, many things here are left somewhat unresolved (especially in the “why did X do Y” department). While this does contribute to the ongoing “big plot”, it does leave the book feeling a small bit incomplete. It’s a very minor fault – I still stayed up until the early morning hours reading this, unable to just put it down and go to bed.

Do No Evil & musical collaboration

A couple of interesting blog posts today.

First off, Tim Bray (the man behind this small thing called XML, in case you didn’t know), is now at Google. As such this is interesting, but his blog post about it is an especially fun read. He makes no bones about his hate for the Apple iPhone/iPad closed ecosystem:

The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.

I hate it.

I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient.

Amen.

I don’t own any Apple products right now, but I’m far from hating them. In fact, I have a definite love/hate relationship with the company. Like Tim, I really like their open(ish) products: Macbooks, OS X, etc. If and when I buy a “big” laptop (as opposed to my current nifty-but-limited netbook) it’ll quite probably be a Mac. Apple is really good at polishing products, and after years and years of fighting with various Linux desktops, you know… the idea of a desktop environment with a lot of polish and emphasis on the user experience is a nice idea. I like Apple computers and the OS seems decent enough (hey, it’s a Unix variant).

…but the new Apple focus on the ultra-closed iPhone/iPad ecosystem is horrible, for lots and lots of reasons. In this mode, Apple makes Microsoft seem like the Spirit of All Things Open; Apple is ridiculously control-freakish. While this has resulted in a lot of polish in the past, now it’s (imho) clearly going into areas I do not like. The idea of needing to (semi-illegally) hack my own device in order to get reasonable use out of it (“jailbreak”) isn’t a sane one to me.

So Android has been looking more and more interesting to me, as a platform. Will be interesting to see what develops, and above all: Apple needs something to give them competition and keep them in line. A future where Apple is the major player is not a future I want: they are well on the way to becoming the very same Big Brother their old 1980’s ads fought against. I suspect they’d be a lot worse than Microsoft ever was, given a monopoly position. “Think different”, my ass. “Think like Steve Jobs, or else…” more like it.

Things might become very interesting during the next few years, in this arena. Apple and Google are more and more set on a collision course.

The other interesting read this morning was a blog post by the great David Byrne about musical collaboration. While I’m purely in the “listener, not creator” box when it comes to music, I love music and find it fascinating to read “behind the scenes” stuff like this. Professionals discussing how they work is always interesting, and David’s discussions on how collaboration works for him, along with snapshots of his workspace(es), is especially nifty stuff.

I found this bit especially interesting:

The unwritten game rules in these remote collaborations seem to be to leave the other person’s stuff alone as much as you can. Work with what you’re given; don’t try to imagine it as something other than what it is.

This presents some musical challenges, of course, but the benefits generally outweigh them. The fact that half the musical decision-making has already been done bypasses a lot of waffling and worrying. I didn’t have to think about what to do and what direction to take musically — the train had already left the station and my job was to see where it wanted to go. This restriction on one’s freedom — that some creative decisions have already been made — turns out to be a great blessing. Complete creative freedom is as much a curse as a boon.

I’ve also found (in some quite different contexts) that some limits can greatly enhance creativity and productivity. It’s a weird thing, but… complete design freedom all too often result in “analysis paralysis”, too many good possible design choices start to overshadow the whole point of what you’re doing. Setting some constraints (internal or external) can smooth things, sometimes significantly. Well, it’s worked for me at least, YMMV and all that.

…and David Byrne collaborating with St. Vincent? Very nice. Looking forward to see what (if anything) results from that.

10 trillion boxes of cards on the wall...

Though it was a pleasant weekend as such, I was feeling seriously under the weather with some lightweight-but-tiring flu strain… not properly sick, but tired, head-achey and generally “meh”. That meant that I also stayed in for most of the weekend.

…which meant that on Sunday I finally got around to doing some organizing on my tons and tons of VTES cards. Oh, they were more or less in general order to begin with, but I had 3 boxes of new(ish) cards waiting to be filed and my card storage space is/was running low so I needed to weed out extra cards. Started “work” sometime before noon, and I was still at it close to midnight (with some breaks in between). Did manage to sort most of the stuff, though, and now I have a huge pile of commmons (& some uncommons) I’ll probably just donate to someone. Some cards I have way too many of.

Now that the heavy lifting has been done, I can finally get around to building some new decks based on the new Heirs to the Blood cards. Lots of potentially fun stuff there.

Otherwise, I’m waiting for this white stuff to disappear from the ground. Winter is fine and all, but I’m really looking forward to actual spring and summer now. Our yard still has ridiculous amounts of snow, and the kittehs are quite annoyed at us since their yard is full of cold, wet crap. I also want to get a new set of summer tires for my car, but most shops are still only showing “prices will be up Real Soon Now” signs and anyway, I can’t switch tires before it’s reliably above zero at night (ice and summer tires mix badly).

Oh, and I caved in and bought Mass Effect 2. It took most of Sunday to load (via Steam), I had that going while I was doing card organizing. Only got around to playing it around midnight, played around an hour before going to bed. Looks pretty nice. The controls have changed a bit, but otherwise the gameplay seems similar and the initial plot twist is interesting. We’ll see how it develops.

Minireview: Scroll of Exalts (Exalted)

Scroll of Exalts has a very cool cover picture, a tribute to the old 1st edition AD&D Player’s Handbook. Nitpickers will note that all those Exalted signature characters being gathered into one place would be highly unlikely, and their gathering without bloody mayhem ensuing is even more unlikely (apparently someone’s offed whatshername, the lizard lady Lunar, perhaps as a prelude). Nitpickers will also be totally ignored – it’s a brilliant cover.

Fortunately, the cover isn’t the only good thing here. This book is quite straightforward: it’s a collection of Exalts of different types and power levels. Some are “signature characters” we’ve seen before (without full stats, though), some are new to this book. Each is given a full page spread, with a picture, some back story, and full game stats. Included are (among others) the new Infernals, and even the new Alchemicals get a section even though that sourcebook is a later release.

Oh, and we finally get full stats for Chejop Kejak (affectionately also known as “Ketchup Carjack”). Yes, he’s scary. No big surprise.

Since statting up Exalted NPCs has always been a major chore (and one of the problems with the system, imho), I really like this book. It gives you a bunch of ready-made NPCs to play with, and it also illustrates designer intent in what various sorts of characters might be capable of. Oh, and the character writeups are also very cool, some old fairly “meh” characters have been given a new makeover, generally making them rock. Meticulous Owl, for instance, is very interesting now.

Good book. I wish more NPC writeups like this were available, it would lighten up some parts of Exalted GMing considerably.

Minireview: Third Edition Earth Companion - Modern Conquerors (Heavy Gear)

The 3rd edition Earth Companion is (unsurprisingly) the third edition compilation and update of the game material related to Earth and especially the neofascist New Earth Commonwealth, the power behind of the invading CEF (Colonial Expeditionary Force). Like much of the 3rd edition material (what little of it there is), this is largely a cut+paste of previous stuff, with small updates here and there. I think there’s some brand-new material here, some of the chapters didn’t seem familiar… but I’m not totally sure.

It does a decent job in collecting the older information (from various sourcebooks) into one tome, and the number of typos – the bane of later Heavy Gear releases – seemed to be on the lowish side here. Some of the game decisions made here (the SLEDGEs, in particular), are things that the designers have later said they’d do differently; a xenophobic nation creating artificial beings which are indistinguishable from humans doesn’t make much sense, the whole point of the GREL program was that the GRELs are obviously non-human and can easily be treated as “tools” instead of “people”. SLEDGEs, while great as covert spies, blow that crucial cultural point out of the water.

If you have the older books there isn’t all that much reason to get this, honestly. On the other hand, it’s currently the most “modern” compilation of Earth/CEF data available, so it may be interesting just for that. The new Heavy Gear Blitz! (miniatures game) supplements do update things a bit more, but those are (understandably) focused on the miniatures (i.e. gear) side of things.

Minireview: Mother of Flies (Pathfinder #29)

While starting out strong, the Council of Thieves adventure path became a bit overly conventional during the middle portions and (in my opinion) did not really make use of the city environment. This fifth part of the tale, Mother of Flies (written by Greg A. Vaughan), fixes that problem to some degree.

It’s slightly ironic that this adventure makes use of the city setting… by leaving the city altogether for small while. The initial portions here assume the PCs want to recruit the support of a presumably-crazy and possibly-evil witch (the titular Mother of Flies) who lives in a nearby wood, so in order to do that the PCs need to go on a short wilderness spree. This might result in hilarity if the PCs are totally city-bred and not too comfortable with the great outdoors. It turns out that the PCs aren’t the only ones interested in the witch, and a large battle is likely unless the players figure out something really sneaky.

In any case, the action soon returns to Westcrown, and the setup becomes more like what I had hoped from this series in general: a semi-freeform set of events and locations which the PCs can experience and/or visit, while trying to drum up support for their cause or to foil the plans of the Bad Guys. There are vampires on the loose, and the old problem of mysterious “shadow beasts” stalking the city night may finally get a solution (depending on the PC actions, naturally). All along this series the PCs have been getting “fame points” if they succeed in doing various things, presumably these will be important in the next & final part of this thing.

While not being anything spectacular, this installment is a nice toolkit for advancing the plot along, and is a quite welcome change of pace after the confined and dungeon-crawly mid portions. Running this adventure path will require PCs who really care about the city, otherwise I can easily see them packing up their toys and moving somewhere else. To Paizo’s credit, this was discussed at length in the initial setup of the series. GMs who ignored that advice will have to figure out their own sticks and carrots to keep the PCs interesting in saving the city.