Angus Konstam, who has written many a book about pirates, just posted on the Miniatures Page that the artist Angus McBride has passed on. This is sad news. I first noticed McBride for the terrific covers he did for ICE’s old Middle Earth Roleplaying line and I still envision the Riders of Rohan as he painted them. He also illustrated dozens of Osprey books, amongst other achievements. Rest in peace, Angus.

On seeing the news about Jerry Falwell dying today, I was immediately seized with the urge to hear the Dead Kennedys song “Moral Majority”. I have the vinyl, of course, but that wasn’t going to do me any good at work. I went to I-tunes and discovered the EP on which that song appears, In God We Trust, Inc, was appended to another DK’s album, Plastic Surgery Disasters. I figured what the hell and bought it all. The chorus of “Moral Majority” (“God must be dead if you’re alive!”) is now sweetly ironic, but the song still rocks.

I was happy to get some new music on my I-tunes, but that wasn’t enough. I’m fairly sick of the music I’ve got at work and I’ve been meaning to pick up some new CDs for a couple of weeks. Today I lunch I took a short bus ride to Easy Street, one of the better record stores in Seattle and located right down the hill from Flying Lab. I picked up four CDs, two used and two new.

Christ on Parade, “Sounds of Nature”: This is another record I have on vinyl but I was tempted by the CD repackage. It includes a whole other EP and two other songs from a long forgotten comp. This is classic political hardcore from California. My old band used to cover the “Landlord Song”.

Bikini Kill, “Reject All American”: This is one of Bikini Kill’s later records and I just never got around to picking it up. Angry riot grrrls, oh yes.

The Tossers, “Agony”: I didn’t realize the Tossers put out a new record in March. Woohoo. More celto-punk? Yes, please.

The Birthday Party, “Prayers on Fire”: This is the first album by Nick Cave’s old band. Cave took awhile to grow on me but it did finally happen. Figured it was time to go back to his roots. Nicole will no doubt be sad to find out that “Release the Bats” is not on this record.

I got home from work last night to find a UPS package waiting for me. I had just gotten the package with the final two volumes of Preacher in it the day before and wasn’t expecting anything else. I opened it to discover two copies of Paizo’s new Monster Ecologies. I was pleased to get them but confused. I’ve never written an “Ecology of” article for Dragon Magazine (the source for the content of this book). I flicked to the credits and saw I was in the “special thanks” category. The mystery deepens. I then started paging through the book and on page 33 found something called “Monstrous Evolution” that showed how the look and feel of Githyanki had changed from their first appearance in the Fiend Folio to today. The top third of the page featured a quote of mine about why I like the Githyanki.

At last it all became clear. Months ago Wes Schneider at Paizo asked if I could write a little something on my favorite D&D; monster. I had thought it was for article in Dragon. When the recent news about Dragon and Dungeon hit, I had wondered if that article was going to appear before Dragon’s final issue. Question answered and mystery solved.

In part of my continuing war to organize the house, I moved our old TV and original X-Box into my office. Now if Kate or Nik is watching TV or using the 360 downstairs, I can fire up the old X-Box if I want a little console action.

In the process of setting all that up, I scoured drawers and boxes looking for a decent extension cord. At the bottom of one drawer I found an old notebook. Since it says “Ronin Publishing” on it, it must date back to 1996 or so. Looking through it was amusing and sometimes puzzling. Things I found include:

* Development notes for the Whispering Vault supplements Book of Hunts and Mortal Magic.
* A 16-point checklist for GenCon ’97.
* John Wick’s phone number at AEG and a note (“in-Clan rivalry instead of Scorpion”). This relates to a L5R adventure I wrote back then.
* Research notes on the Fifth Crusade for an Ars Magica book Nicole and I were going to write together. Later in the notebook a full outline of this book appears.
* Leads from apartment hunting from when I first moved to Seattle, including the place I eventually moved into.
* Details on a writing test I was asked to do after applying for a position at WotC to work on the D&D;/Magic: the Gathering crossover. This was the position I was hired into, though the project didn’t last more than a few months because of typical departmental in-fighting.
* Notes I took at the Confederate Museum in New Orleans on various firearms while I was on vacation. I was researching Blood of the Valiant at the time and so was digging for info on guns in use in 1850. Although I spent money I didn’t really have at the time, in retrospect I’m so glad I got to New Orleans before it was ruined.
* Several to-do lists, which include cryptic comments like “remember salmon”.
* A list of Saxon leaders from the age of King Arthur. I have no idea why these are in there. Maybe I meant to run a Pendragon campaign or something.
* Hotel details for a couple of memorable trips. And that’s all I’m saying about that.
* A list of (ironically enough) three Minutemen songs side by side with a list of three Buzzcocks song. Again, mysterious.

I’m taking a bit of a break from reading military history stuff. I think I overdid it after getting a bunch of back issues of Military History magazine for a $1 each at American Eagles and a new pile of Osprey books at the same time. I’m finding that graphic novels are a welcome change of pace. They make really good bus reading for one thing. When I’m too tired to engage in a book about the French and Indian War, for example, it’s easy to get into a graphic novel. Lately I’ve been working my way through Preacher. I had started reading it a long time ago, but never finished the series. It’s no news to anyone that is great stuff and I’m looking forward to the HBO show. I also started reading Fables, which is a hoot. Goldilocks are a violent revolutionary is genius. I had been picking these up one or two at a time. Since I can easily read one of these a day on my commute, I finally bit the bullet and just ordered a bunch online. When I get home from work I should have three more Preacher volumes, more Fables, and Top Ten: The Forty-Niners. I’ve loved the Top Ten stuff to do, so I’m particularly looking forward to that one. Alan Moore does post-WW2 supers? Sign me up.

My boss at Flying Lab is a big nerd, and I mean that in the best way. The last couple of days he’s been bringing in “spare” action figures and giving them away to the staff. The office is now Zerg-infested, as for whatever reason Rusty had an abundance of Starcraft figures. I generally prefer my toys to be smaller and made of metal, so I’ve been leaving this largess to my co-workers. Knowing that Rusty was a huge Starblazers fan though, I stopped in his office to tell him about these collectible spaceships from the series I had seen at American Eagles last week. I told him I had a couple at my desk if he wanted to take a look, noting that I of course hadn’t gotten a Yamato (because collectibility sucks). He said, “You know I’ve got a Yamato right there.” And indeed behind the Starcraft stuff there was a lovely painted Space Battleship Yamato. Oh, Starblazers, how many hours did I spend watching you after school as a teenager? Naturally, I could not pass this up, so now there’s a 16″ model of the Yamato in front of my monitors at work. “Wildstar, prepare the wave motion gun!”

GAMA Trade Show ended today. I did not attend for the first time in nearly a decade, which was a little weird. Nicole, Bill, Hal, and Rob represented for GR though and reports indicate it was a really good show for us. In addition to making the A Song of Ice and Fire announcement and the Faery’s Tale announcement, we got to show off the True20 Companion and advanced copies of Walk the Plank (a family-friendly card game), promote our new publishing strategy for Freeport, and give retailers our new slick catalog. In an era when print advertising is less and less effective, opportunities like GTS to do direct marketing to retailers are very much worthwhile.

The strange thing about this year’s GTS is the lack of big news. I had been a little worried going into the show that the A Song of Ice and Fire press release would have to compete with a lot of other big announcements. For whatever reason though this year was more subdued than any I can remember, the upside of which was that our news really got to shine. The most interesting thing I heard from the show is that some new company is bringing back Avalon Hill’s old Titan boardgame. And poor John Kovalic got food poisoning again (sorry John!).

I have to wonder if all this is just happenstance or whether it portends something about the year to come. After the last couple of years in the industry, I hope it’s the former.

Addendum: For you podcast fans, I made a return visit this week to 2d6 Feet in a Random Direction. You can hear the show at www.2d6feet.com.

I won’t post the full press release here, as this is my personal page, but I am happy to report that we announced a deal with George R.R. Martin today for Green Ronin to do A Song of Ice and Fire RPG. Everyone at GR is really excited, as we are huge fans of the books. We are going to design a new game that’s built from the ground up to reflect Martin’s world. You can check the press release at www.greenronin.com.

In short, hell yeah.

I’ve been pondering the fate of Dragon and Dungeon, trying to make sense of it like many gamers. Right now we don’t know what WotC has planned for its digital initiative and until we do we wont’ really be able to judge the wisdom of recent events. What I’m trying to understand is what about the digital initiative required the cancellation of Dragon and Dungeon as magazines?

I’m sure it has not escaped the notice of WotC’s higher ups that World of Warcraft is kicking D&D;’s ass up and down the street on a daily basis. The advantage of WoW and MMOs in general is the subscription model. Gamers pay a fee every month to play, while traditional RPG companies sell their fans a core rulebook and may never get any other sales from them. If WotC could get 100,000 people to pay them $10 a month, that would be way more profitable than publishing endless sourcebooks (not that I’d expect these to go away entirely either). The trick would then be to figure out what D&D; players would pay $10 a month for. This could be things like a way to play D&D; online, combined with the sort of social networking you see on places like MySpace. It would also no doubt have to include content (articles, adventures, etc.). This content would need to be a) good and b) exclusive to subscribers. I can see how planners of a digital initiative like this would look at Dragon and Dungeon and think they had to go as print products. Better to use those brand names to sell the new venture, right?

If WotC is going to do something bold, I salute them. It’s easy to do the same old thing, so if they really are trying to strike out a new direction, that’s great. No matter what their news plans are though, I would think that keeping at least one magazine going as an additional form of marketing would be a smart move. Any jackass can start a website, but creating a viable periodical today is ridiculously difficult. To take a successful magazine like Dragon and just abandon that market seems crazy. Why not use Dragon to complement the digital imitative? When the plan is revealed (this summer presumably) that’s the answer I’ll be looking for.

Well, this is turning into a week or nostalgia. It’s come in two flavors: happy and sad.

Reading the new Tolkien book, the Children of Hurin, is making me happy. It’s reminding me how I got into fantasy fiction and thus into gaming in the first place. If any other author opened a novel with two pages of genealogy, I’d put it down. For Tolkien though it works, because it mirrors the real world mythology he was building off and really does inform the entirety of the story. And just because his style has been imitated badly by countless authors, there’s no reason to write off its originator.

The story will be familiar to anyone who read Unfinished Tales. It’s basically a novel-length version of the tale of Turin and his sister, edited together by Christopher Tolkien from many drafts and pieces left by his father. Although Christopher tries to give readers unfamiliar with the Silmarillion enough background to make sense of the story, I think you really need to be familiar with the bigger picture of the First Age of Middle Earth to fully appreciate it. Even if you haven’t read the Silmarillion though, I’d recommend the Children of Hurin. It’ll show you how deep Tolkien’s mythology was before he even started working on the Lord of the Rings, and how it informed everything that happened in those books.

Unfortunately, this week also brought the news that the magazines Dragon and Dungeon are being taken behind the shed and shot. As with many gamers, Dragon in particular played a big part in my introduction to hobby gaming. I remember getting a subscription when I was 12 years old and it opened up a new world to me. I learned about new authors from Giants in the Earth, I discovered new games through the reviews section, and I got a wealth of material to make my D&D; games better. I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on game books back then, so Dragon was really important to me. It gave me a monthly dose of my hobby and kept me connected to what was going on.

The current state of D&D; has been making me sad for some time now, so perhaps this announcement is a fitting coda. D&D; today just doesn’t seem like the same game that captured my imagination when I was 10 years old and under its current custodians I don’t see that changing.

I wish all my compadres at Paizo good luck in navigating the waters of the RPG market sans the D&D; logo. I look forward to seeing what they have up their sleeves.