I had to work at Flying Lab both Saturday and Sunday, so I didn’t have much of a weekend. I don’t mind though because today I wrote my last mission for the Pirates of the Burning Sea launch. Today the game is content complete. Each of the four nations has over thousand missions and I wrote at least a third of those. The format doesn’t lend itself to doing easy word counts, but I’d guess I’ve written at least 200,000 words in the past year. I had a real sense of accomplishment when I submited my final file. I’ve done work on RPGs, TCGs, minis games, and card games, but this is my first computer game. I’m happy that it’s a good one too.

Appropriately enough the pre-order box for Pirates of the Burning Sea should be in stores Tuesday. If you buy it, you get a couple of cool loot items (including a parrot) and you can start playing the game on January 7 instead of January 22 like the rest of the world. My team will be continuing to design new content over the coming months, but that’ll be for later updates. The content for the game’s debut is signed, sealed, and delivered. Now where’s that booty?

When we were adopting Bonnie (the bunny), there was this guy at the Seattle Animal Shelter who helped us with the procedure. He was excited that Bonnie was going to get a home and was really keen on rabbits. How keen? Well, when he gave us his e-mail address we discovered it was Bunnyhugger77. At the time I said, “I don’t know what’s worse, that he’s Bunnyhugger77 or that Bunnyhugger1 to 76 were already taken.”

So today I’m reading Rick Atkinson’s new book, The Day of Battle (Volume 2 of his Liberation Trilogy about America in WWII), and one of the many engaging anecdotes Atkinson livens up the book with involves Winston Churchill and codenames. Apparently, Churchill would approve the codenames of operations to make sure they were butch enough for the military. On the list of banned names were jaundice, aperitif, and…bunnyhug. Yes, apparently without Churchill’s intervention there might have been an Operation Bunnyhug in WWII. I can’t really blame old Winston. I’m sure it’d be difficult to get your men ready to kick ass in Operation Bunnyhug.

The last couple of weeks have been hectic. First we had the GR summit. The day after that ended my parents came to town for a week long visit. Meanwhile Pirates of the Burning Sea is in its final sprint, so we are in crunch time. I haven’t had time finish things like proofing, I’ve been terrible about answering e-mails, and I’ve made no progress on any design projects this month. However, the summit is over, my folks are flying back to New England tonight, and though I do have to work at Flying Lab this weekend things should calm down next week. I think this means that next weekend I can relax a bit and try to get caught up on things. What I’d really love to have is a week long, honest to goodness vacation. One in which I don’t do GR work or read the internet. One without bullshit, drama, flamewars, deadlines, freakouts, and crises. I don’t think Nik and I will be traveling over the holiday season, so maybe that’ll provide an opportunity.

I finally finished Hew Strachan’s The First World War, perhaps the best one volume treatment of the war I’ve read. Strachan’s work was the basis of an excellent 10 part documentary produced by the BBC a few years ago. The Military Channel runs it from time to time and it’s tone and approach are a marked contrast to most of what’s on that channel. I got a season pass for the series on Tivo and ended up watching the whole thing twice over. The book is a companion to the series and its ten chapters follow the pattern set by the documentary. What I like about Strachan is that he really tries to cut through the propaganda and challenge the accepted truths about the Great War. He also covers all theaters of the war, instead of concentrating on trench warfare of the Western Front as many histories do. You really get the big picture and a sense of how the war aims of the various countries affected their strategies in different parts of the world. My only serious disagreement with Strachan is with his assessment of the Treaty Versailles. He asserts that the real problem with the treaty was not its terms, but the Entente’s unwillingness to enforce them in the 20s and 30s. I think that treaty is a classic case of victor’s vengeance and many problems we still deal with today have their root in its short-sightedness. Still and all, both book and documentary are well worth checking out.

I also watched Ken Burns’ The War documentary recently, and that was quite excellent. It tells the story of America in WWII through the experiences of four towns spread across the country. As with Strachan’s work, The War tries to dispel some myths (like that American soldiers never shot prisoners). Nor does it shy away from showing some harsh footage, the types of images the government kept far away from the home front during the war itself. I got the companion book over the weekend, though I haven’t had a chance to read it yet (it’s too big and cumbersome to take on the bus, where I read most of The First World War, so that ones for home I guess). I did laugh every time I heard, “Funding for The War provided by…” but that’s PBS for you. All in all The War is another feather in Burns’ hat and a worthy successor to the Civil War. In fact, it’s better in some ways because he was able to interview living people, many of whom were only now willing to talk about their wartimes experiences.

When Lyndon Johnson went ahead with civil rights legislation, he famously said that it would lose the Democrats the South for a generation and if anything he underestimated the impact. He went ahead though because passing civil rights legislation was the right thing to do and it was long, long overdue. Today’s Democrat’s would never have the balls to do something like that, which indicates that they have no idea why it is that there were able to take over Congress. I am tired of watching these spineless pussies pretend that they are any kind of opposition party. They are so worried about looking weak on terrorism or weak on law and order that they continue to capitulate as the Bushies wipe their asses with the Constitution.

Hint to clueless Democrats: capitulation to bullying does not make you look strong. Actual defiance does. Maybe you should try it some time.

I’ve spent the last year working on both MMOs and tabletop RPGs. Here are some conclusions I’ve drawn.

Writing for MMOs Is Better Because Of…

Immediacy: You can write something one day and see it the next day’s build. That’s pretty cool when you are used to waiting 6-18 months to see a finished book.

Showing, Not Telling: You don’t have to worry so much about describing things because the graphics speak for themselves.

Filthy Lucre: The money is way better than what you can make doing tabletop RPGs.

Easy Updates: If you discover that your barbarian class is broken, you can just fix it in the next patch of a MMO. It’s a lot harder to fix when it has been printed in thousands and thousands of books.

Writing RPGs Is Better Because Of…

Variety: You are unlikely to spend 3 or 4 years working on the same project. It’s nice to do different things.

Unfettered Vision: As a MMO designer you’ll have lots of cool ideas that will never get in the game because the programmers or the artists say it can’t be done or they don’t have time to handle it. In a tabletop game, if you can write it, you can put it inside.

Fewer Chefs: Building a MMO is a real team effort. This has many upsides but it does mean that any game becomes a series of compromises between individuals and departments. It’s much easier to have a driving vision behind a RPG (well, except for post-TSR D&D;, which suffers from the previously described problem as well).

Failure Limits: One failed RPG book can’t kill your company unless you are really stupid. One failed MMO can, and put 70+ people out of work.

The launch date for Pirates of the Burning Sea has been set for January 22. Those of you wondering what I’ve been working on during the day for the past year can find out in just a few months. Pre-order boxes will be on sale later this month and if you get one you can actually start playing two weeks earlier. John “Cthulhu Built My Hotrod” Tynes, the game’s producer, tells you all about it here.

What’s the word I’m looking for here? Oh yeah: yaaarrrrr!

Well it took me a month but I finally got this site up and running again. My old host just went out of business with warning. This wouldn’t have been so bad but I got the domain through them. That made getting it transferred tricky because there was no one there to deal with. Now I’ve taken care of that and gotten a new hosting company. The package includes 500 e-mail addresses and I have no idea what to do with those. If there’s one thing I don’t need it’s another e-mail address.

Last night Nik and I went to see the Comedians of Comedy tour. The Showbox (site, strangely enough, of WotC’s employee Xmas party in 1999) is a pretty shitty venue for comedy, having nearly no seats. I think the Moore Theater would have been better suited for the event. Anyway, other than having to stand up for three plus hours the show was really good. The always funny Patton Oswalt warmed up the crowd, then six other comics performed before he came back to give the final performance. Brian Posehn, who’s easily the best part of the Sarah Silverman Program, put in a great set. He and Patton are like the poster nerds of comedy. They totally need to play some Mutants & Masterminds.

Tomorrow the Green Ronin Summit starts. Once a year we fly everybody out to Seattle so we can spend a few days planning, kibitzing, and organizing. We’ve found that this face time is really valuable for a company that does most of its work virtually. There are GR folks in five states spread all over the country, so we don’t have “water cooler talk” or lunch time gaming. If I have a random idea, I can’t shout over the cube wall to Rob and ask him what he thinks. You can certainly do a lot with phones and e-mail, but it’s hard to replace good old human interaction.

In 1995 I visited Vancouver, BC for the first time. I was only there for a few days but I had a great time. Of the many fun things I did there three stand out. I got to hang out with Nicole outside the convention environment for the first time. We were just friends at the time and she was pregnant with Kate but she graciously put me up and introduced me to some of the cool stuff Vancouver had to offer. On Nik’s recommendation we ate at Tojo’s, a local institutions and what became one of my favorite Japanese restaurants anywhere. Lastly, it so happened that I was there the weekend local punk legends the Subhumans were playing out for the first time since 1982. The show, at the Starfish Room, was sold out and 300 people were turned away. I hung around in the hopes of scoring a ticket and lucked into a guy with an extra. The show was awesome and I left Vancouver a happy punk.

This past weekend Nik and I were in Vancouver together once again. Since 1995 I have been back more times than I can count and it’s always a good time. This trip Nik and I were celebrating our 6 year wedding anniversary. When we heard that Tojo’s had moved to a new and bigger location we just had to go. The new space is swanky and the food is as excellent as it ever was. The tuna tataki nigiri was particularly awesome and the sablefish was like butter. Since we had skipped lunch that day, we ate dinner early and were out of Tojo’s by 7:30 pm. I had seen a listing for a Subhumans show earlier in the week, but I thought it was the English Subhumans, who we just saw a couple of weeks ago. As we were walking down the street, I saw a poster for the show and was surprised to discover that it was the Vancouver Subhumans. It was too perfect, especially when we discovered that the venue (Pub 340) was about six blocks from our hotel. So to the show we went and once again the Subhumans rocked. While not what most folks would consider a romantic anniversary activity, the show completed a weekend that brought me full circle from 1995. Thanks Vancouver!

I’ve always liked to play different sorts of games. While most of my career has been spent working on roleplaying games, I also love miniatures games, war games, card games, and board games, and I even spent some time in the TCG trenches. I see hobby gaming as a unified whole and oftentimes this seems like a minority view. Many gamers are quick to pick their category (“I’m a roleplayer,” or “I’m a miniatures gamer.”) and pooh-pooh other types of games. Hell, even within the same category gamers are often at each other’s throats (“I’m an old school roleplayer and you can take my polyhedral dice out of my cold dead hands!” or “I’m a story gamer and games designed by the Man cause brain damage!”). I guess it’s easier to find things to fight about than realize what we all have in common.

I was pondering what might be done to build bridges between these different groups within our hobby when it hit me: a Gaming Pentathlon. I envision this as an event that might run at major conventions. Participants would play five different games from different categories over the course of a day. While I suppose you could do some sort of scoring system and crown a winner, really the point would be to finish all five events and experience the full breadth of what the hobby has to offer. I think it’d also be possible to tie all five games together thematically and even to use the different mediums to tell a story throughout the day. A Gaming Pentathlon might end up looking something like this:

The Story of Rome

Round 1, Miniatures Game: DBA (Wargames Research Group) battles are used to illustrate Rome’s rise to power.

Round 2, War Game: Command & Colors Ancients (GMT) highlights Rome’s long but ultimate victorious fight against Carthage.

Round 3, Card Game: Caesar & Cleopatra (Kosmos/Rio Grande) is used to show the instability that brought the republic to an end

Round 4, Roleplaying Game: True20 Adventure Roleplay (Green Ronin) puts the players into the “bread and circuses” era with a scenario about the dangers and intrigues of the Coliseum.

Round 5, Board Game: Catan Histories: Struggle for Rome (Mayfair) is used to show how barbarians buffeted the Roman state in its end days.

Now this could be a crazy idea. It would require a fair amount of effort to organize and it’s hard to say how many players would find this idea exciting. If it worked, it’d provide conventions with another event which is unlike anything you are likely to do at home. It’d also show that game fans of all types can sit down and enjoy playing games together.