With apologies for the multi-list posting. This one goes everywhere!

== Rogue Panel Program: A-Kon 20, S. John Ross

Okay, folks, the time is nigh for A-Kon in Dallas. Come on out to game, talk
about game writing and publishing, GMing, whatever smacks your buzzer! Plus, you
know, anime and stuff! My panel workload is pretty light this year (all the
gaming guests are on the same panels, but hey, it's an anime con) so I've been
preparing the following "off the grid" gatherings to fill gaps between planned
events ... Catch me at the con, and we can form rogue groups of attendees to
duck into hotel rooms or gather at unused tables in the gaming area, etc, and
really get some convening in:

* The Gospel of Cliché: Fans of Risus and Encounter Critical and Uresia know how
much I love a good cliché, but fans of any of my work will notice the importance
of cliché to everything I do. But hey, aren't clichés supposed to be a bad
thing, a lazy thing? Not if you know their one true secret ... In this group,
we'll gather to discuss the difference between "cliché as content" and "cliché
as language," and how to get the most of it when GMing or designing.

* Fantasy Mappery: Bring your laptop, loaded up with some incarnation of
Photoshop and/or Illustrator (you don't need the latest version; I don't keep
that current, either!) and we'll jam on making some fantasy maps together. This
won't just be "S. John passes on some tips," it'll be a full-on communal
exchange of ideas, methods, design philosophies and flat-out fun. Find out why I
call Photoshop my favorite computer game.

* The Price of Freedom: I've worked just about every angle in RPG publishing:
I've freelanced for most of the major houses, I've ridden a desk on staff, I've
been part of an experimental telecommuting writing pool, and I was one of the
very first independent commercial RPG publishers (the second, to be exact, after
pioneer Eric Hotz). This panel is all about why independence kicks the most ass,
but with a focus on the hard realities: just because you haven't got a budget
doesn't mean your RPG masterpiece happens for free. Find out what it really
costs to put something on a blank page (at any scale of RPG publishing), and how
these costs - and the ethical concerns that plague every level of RPG publishing
- will relate to realistic pricing, promotion, and choice of sales outlets.

* Random-Table Round Table: I'm really in the mood to make a huge random table
(partly because Uresia 2nd already has some in it and I've been grooving on
those, partially because Jeff Rients recently spiked my random-table Kool-Aid).
Are YOU really in the mood to help out? This will be a communal exercise in the
purely ridiculous and the surprisingly useful, where we celebrate one of the
most sacred of gaming rituals: rolling stuff up. What we'll end up with, we
can't say until the dice bounce ... new mutations for Encounter Critical? Random
Skyfall relics for Uresia? Random smack-talk for Pokethulhu? Maybe all of the
above, if we get going.

* You Are My Density: I've done a lot of general purpose writing workshops over
the years, but this time around I want to do a very focused one, on how to lean
up your game writing and dramatically increase its conceptual density. I've got
a basic: one finished page should pack as much gameable material as FOUR
finished pages produced to the usual industry standard. Sometimes I even pull it
off! In this gathering, we'll not just talk about how, we'll put it into
practice and discuss each other's work. Bring some kind of writing material -
whether pen and paper or some kind of gizmo.

Note also that these are just gatherings I've actually given some thought and/or
preparation to. Feel free to bend my ear or pick what's left of my brain on any
topic we might enjoy together ... or just pounce on me and demand I run a game
(I do those too, of course!) Or, if you REALLY want to be a pal, pounce on me
and demand that I PLAY in a game; 'cause it's nice if I get to relax a bit now
and then, too :) Either way, hope to see you there. Also, now is the time to ask
me those questions that I avoid online by saying "ask me at a con sometime!"
This is the con, and this is the time. A starter question for you: "Hey S. John,
is it really true that in a very important way, Encounter Critical was born
right here at A-Kon the LAST time you were here?" And my answer begins with
"Actually, in TWO very important ways ..." and maybe I'll tell you both,
depending on whether one of the reasons is nearby listening in ...

http://a-kon.com/


=========

List-specific addendum: and yes, I'll have some FFE pregens with me and an urge
to run a game :)




|| S. John Ross
|| Husband · Cook · Writer
|| In That Order
|| http://www.io.com/~sjohn

>I know that I'm years late to the party, but I figured this was a
>great way to start my annual post.
>
>Last August, I finally started reading the Hard Case Crime books,
>starting with Steve Fisher's No House Limit. So far I haven't been
>disappointed by any of the novels, though they do vary in quality. The
>biggest surprise is that the new novels have been just as good as the
>old classics. Another nice find was Lawrence Block who I've never read
>before.

I believe they've published at least one Donald Westlake, so that makes 'em okay
in my book :)

I know it's ridiculous to even talk of it, but my long-term dream for FFE
includes "decade sourcebooks" focused on related styles of crime drama in
different time periods, in different cities, and the one I'm most likely to do
for the 1970s is New York City, focused on Westlake-style caper stories :)

>So, SJR, how has the last year treated FFE?

The year has treated FFE well, but Denver, Colorado has not :( I continue to
work on the game, and just this past weekend piled yet more resources into the
research library (the heaviest thing we moved from Austin, by far, was the FFE
resource library) ... but without a campaign, things are not progressing past a
certain point. I'm excited by the work, but there are some things that just
can't happen without table play ... not if I want to avoid suckage, anyway (and
I pretty much want to) :)

I've searched, I've placed ads, I've talked to folks at shops ... and ...

Well, I've heard legends about WotC towns, where the game WotC legally refers to
by the trademark "Dungeons & Dragons"* dominates the local idea of "gaming" in
almost absolute terms, but not until Denver have I actually ran into that wall.

I mean, I once got a campaign group assembled once in a Vermont village with a
population in the small _hundreds._

This year I'll be taking more drastic steps. I have to.

=============

* No relation.



|| S. John Ross
|| Husband · Cook · Writer
|| In That Order
|| http://www.io.com/~sjohn

I know that I'm years late to the party, but I figured this was a
great way to start my annual post.

Last August, I finally started reading the Hard Case Crime books,
starting with Steve Fisher's No House Limit. So far I haven't been
disappointed by any of the novels, though they do vary in quality. The
biggest surprise is that the new novels have been just as good as the
old classics. Another nice find was Lawrence Block who I've never read
before.

Anyway, if you're looking for source material for running the
inevitable Fly From Evil campaign, this modern pulp publisher is a
great place to look.

So, SJR, how has the last year treated FFE?

>So FFE for next Christmas? (Like that segue?)

Love it :)

Although I know it's cold consolation, I can continue to say honestly that FFE
is never far from my heart and frequently strays near my keyboard. This very
afternoon I was at the public library consuming more FFE-related material and
digesting it into draft form (including a spiffy new sidebar for the Hardboiled
Era book). Okay, that's not true of _every_ day (I've been eyeballs-deep in
Uresia for much of the past couple of weeks, and still pecking away at the
Medieval France production work, etc), but it's true pretty often. Heck, even my
newest Uresia campaign material is "hardboiled Uresia" ... :)

[And to answer the question this might raise: No. Well, probably not. Well,
maybe an appendix.]

The draft continues to grow. Nothing can make it _shrink._ There is a finite
goal in terms of material needed to call it "finished." Therefore, as long as
there's no scare about my health or anything, it is a certainty, if not one that
answers to a schedule.

I've also been posting ads at all the local game shops trying to scare together
a new FFE campaign group here in Denver, but that has _not_ been going so well.
I'm getting the impression I should doll up the graphics to make it look like
Living Greyhawk and then spring it on 'em as a surprise, but that sort of
behavior can get a man lynched :) I can't even get Cthulhu players (which lets
me do a private eye game anyway) since it also isn't Living Greyhawk, although
I've got the one Uresia campaign still underway and I've been in touch with some
Hero System gamers ... (I just hope they're not doing some kind of Living
Greyhawk thing on the sly, but using Hero and not telling anyone).

If I were a Living Greyhawk guy I'd have to hold a lottery to narrow down the
available players to pools of a half-dozen each running three shifts a day. The
only thing in Denver that seems more popular than Living Greyhawk is cigarette
smoking.

This (running some FFE) is the most important thing that can happen to
accelerate the work. When I'm GMing it, I'm _constantly_ working on it, and when
I'm not GMing it, other things shoulder in. That's just the nature of Cumberland
as a whole: I do all this stuff as a one-man-band, based on my gaming habits
rather than any kind of reading of the marketplace or considering sane business
choices. For better and worse, but mostly better, I think.

So, if you're in Denver, for pity's sake: come play FFE with me! Tough men &
women with hearts of ... some metal more valuable than zinc, let's say ...
needed for new campaign ...

Don't get me wrong, I'm lovin' Denver (and living in an early-1940s tenement),
but on matters like this I do miss Austin :)



|| S. John Ross
|| Husband · Cook · Writer
|| In That Order
|| http://www.io.com/~sjohn

Christmas was good for me this year. Namely the arrival of The Black
Lizard Big Book Of Pulps, edited by Otto Penzler. 1141 pages of pulpy
goodness. And it's filled with enough vaguely familiar names that I'm
already intimidated by how little I know about the fiction of that
era. Looks like a great (if massive) primer for only $25.

So FFE for next Christmas? (Like that segue?)

Just for the record: This afternoon (in about a half an hour) I'm kicking off my
first FFE campaign since moving to Denver (and moving into a gen-u-wine 1940s
tenement building) ;)

If anyone on this list is _in_ Denver and wants to play sometime, drop me a line
at sjohn@...



|| S. John Ross
|| Husband · Cook · Writer
|| In That Order
|| http://www.io.com/~sjohn

>I just want to be able to use my OWN yellowing, dusty 1939 guidebook
>and postcards in an FFE adventure! :)

I want that for each and every one of us :) The draft includes a sidebar
discussing the joys and respiratory dangers of pulp-era paper collectibles (and
warning against the kind of sharks that sell stuff for quadruple the fair price
at large-scale swap-meets and corporate flea-markets).

On respiratory dangers and things like them: One of my side-hobbies is buying
old crime pulps in really terrible condition (which makes them nice and cheap)
and then ripping the spines off with my bare hands [grrrowl!] in order to scan
the remains (nothing on the scale of the noble folks at websites like PulpGen,
but still something I like to dabble in - and personally I like to leave the
layout and advertisements intact).

And man o MAN. It's like all the moisture in the room gets sucked away. In
old-school fantasy gaming terms, I'd equate it to what it must feel like having
two experience levels instantly drawn out of you by some desiccated old walking
corpse :) And my eyes itch for hours and hours ... eww.



|| S. John Ross
|| Husband · Cook · Writer
|| In That Order
|| http://www.io.com/~sjohn

--- In FlyFromEvil@yahoogroups.com, "S. John Ross" <sjohn@...> wrote:

> I'm _slightly_ wounded at the notion that there'd be any worry that
> I'd somehow manage to overlook the Expo :)

I wasn't really worried - I just wanted to let you know that your
efforts in that direction are much appreciated and much anticipated.

> I've got quite a nice collection of memorabilia from it, in fact
> (guidebooks, folding maps, a ticket, etc). I've got more yellowing,
> dusty paper from 1930s SF than I have comic books nowadays ...
> || S. John Ross

I just want to be able to use my OWN yellowing, dusty 1939 guidebook
and postcards in an FFE adventure! :)

-Mark

Heya :)

>I hope you are including some material on the 1939 San Francisco
>Golden Gate International Exposition.

I'm _slightly_ wounded at the notion that there'd be any worry that I'd somehow
manage to overlook the Expo :)

I've got quite a nice collection of memorabilia from it, in fact (guidebooks,
folding maps, a ticket, etc). I've got more yellowing, dusty paper from 1930s SF
than I have comic books nowadays ...

>PS I am really looking forward to Fly From Evil - to use as a
>sourcebook for Risus adventures! :)

There are quite a few ways in which FFE uses "Risus-Think" in its systems ...
and then quite a few ways in which it doesn't. I strongly suspect it'll be one
of those games where most gamers ditch the system and just uses the resource
material ...

But that's cool. The resource material is at least 80% of the book (a percentage
that increases every time I work on it) and my days as a GURPS writer prepared
me for that kind of thing, anyway. Half the fan-mail on a book like GURPS Russia
(for example) begins with "I don't really do GURPS, _but_ ..." :)

It has been my semi-vague hope, even, that I might be able to offer the resource
material, sans system, as an alternate version ... But that's a hope that's
growing a dimmer as the resource chapters fill out. I tried to artificially
censor myself from making _any_ references to the rules in the resource
chapters, and in some sections it was easy (when glossing past the daily routine
of Italian fishermen, I don't have any "Fish Availability Chart" or "Efficacy of
Blue Paint for Good Luck Subtable" I need to refer to or anything), and in some
sections it was just ... wrong (to do a section describing poisons common in
hardboiled pulp stories and then _not_ include at least a page reference to the
_rules_ for poisoning was something I agonized over for weeks before finally
allowing myself to re-re-re-re-learn the lesson most game designers must
re-re-re-re-learn about letting some parts of the wish-list step aside so that
others may thrive).




|| S. John Ross
|| Husband · Cook · Writer
|| In That Order
|| http://www.io.com/~sjohn

S. John,

I hope you are including some material on the 1939 San Francisco
Golden Gate International Exposition. They built Treasure Island and
the Bay Bridge just for this event (though the Bay Bridge had been
discussed for years, it was the upcoming Exposition that spurred its
development). It was essentially a World's Fair that competed with the
more famous 1939 New York World's Fair. Japan had a pavilion, which
could create some interesting pre-war scenarios. Besides the riotous
fun and confusion that surrounds any event of this magnitude, you just
know that bad guys love blending into big crowds.

I can't wait to chase a murderer around the giant stature of Pacifica!

-Mark R. Brown

PS I am really looking forward to Fly From Evil - to use as a
sourcebook for Risus adventures! :)

>
>Even the related reading continues to dominate my casual time ... Right now I'm
burning through a copy of "The Heavenly City Revisited" for example. Whee :)

By which I almost certainly mean "The Un-Heavenly City Revisited." D'oh :)



|| S. John Ross
|| Husband · Cook · Writer
|| In That Order
|| http://www.io.com/~sjohn

>I just finished reading Michael Connelly's The Black Ice and have moved
>on to Dorothy B. Hughes' In A Lonely Place. While I found myself in an
>LA noir mood, I thought I'd check out the FFE group.

The usual caveat: If you're in an LA noir mood, Fly From Evil will _not_
satisfy. :) It'd be something like watching 2001: A Space Odyssey and getting
really in the mood for non-visceral, near-future in-solar-system hard SF with
slow-moving spacecraft and a thin layer of trippy surrealism under a hard-SF
exterior ... and then grabbing a copy of WEG's "Star Wars" RPG, hoping for a
fix, because it has spaceships and quasi-mysticism, too :)

>So here is my obligatory annual request to find out how my eventual
>favorite role playing game is coming.
>
>What do you say, S.J?

Other projects are taking precedence at the moment, so while not a day goes by
(and I mean that) where I don't spend at least a little time pondering FFE or
poking at the draft or adding an item to the timeline or tweaking (and
re-re-tweaking) some paragraph in the guts of the combat rules, or something,
FFE is currently back-burner again. My hope at this point is to get everything
else done and then just vanish completely from the scene for a while, working
solely on FFE like some kind of monk scribbling away at a personally-copied
manuscript of the Bible. Trouble is, I already spend enough time on it that it's
made it almost seem like I've dropped off the map _anyway._ :(

Even the related reading continues to dominate my casual time ... Right now I'm
burning through a copy of "The Heavenly City Revisited" for example. Whee :)

On the personal front, one of my long-running core playtesters - a guy you'll
eventually see given a VERY prominent place on the credits page - has left Texas
for a job somewhere in the snowy jungles of Canadia. We had intended to do a
"one last job" run where we'd visit the PCs decades later at the height of the
1960s, but the scheduling fell through :( It would have been grand. That
campaign (including those characters remaining behind) has been retired, now, so
my next FFE run will probably return us to the height of Prohibition.

As it is, we last left 'em on the brink of WWII, and I guess there they'll stay,
enshrined - for now - as the longest-running FFE campaign characters, with
nearly three semi-steady years of gaming under their navel-high belts.

I do sincerely intend to give others the chance to blow that record out of the
water. Even if Cumberland's schedule becomes so desperately mired that I have to
start jettisoning projects, it is my intention that every OTHER project would
get the axe at need, and that FFE never would. FFE has become something of a
"life's work" thing without my meaning it to :) It's also gotten even larger ...
keeping it under 400 pages (which is a kinda-sorta goal for me) may prove
impossible, which may mean some of it gets carved off into a supplemental
companion and may not ... it's too early to ponder that kind of stuff without
knowing the final bulk of it.

And I'm keeping it as dense and lean as is my normal habit.

For those who have followed the Free Stuff of the Moment page and wondered: Yes,
I'm also working on an FFE text-game thingy, as a lark. Such larks do not add or
subtract from my real work-time ... I use my "farting around playing video
games" hours for that stuff. Unless I'm farting around, playing video games with
them.



|| S. John Ross
|| Husband · Cook · Writer
|| In That Order
|| http://www.io.com/~sjohn

I just finished reading Michael Connelly's The Black Ice and have moved
on to Dorothy B. Hughes' In A Lonely Place. While I found myself in an
LA noir mood, I thought I'd check out the FFE group. And sure enough, I
found that the last status update on the game was just over a year ago.
So here is my obligatory annual request to find out how my eventual
favorite role playing game is coming.

What do you say, S.J?

> > You wouldn't love it as much as you might hope; it's still quite a mess.
> > But since you asked, I'll post another example so you can see what I
> mean :)
> >
>
>Wow, that rocks!

It's the beginning of something that rocks. It's that endlessly long period
before the band actually appears on stage :)

>And now everybody will understand why have have to wait
>for such a long time... and that it's worth it!

It is important to understand that Fly From Evil, as a project, is
fundamentally stupid and quixotic on my part. This isn't at all unusual for
me; all of my work is fundamentally stupid and quixotic in some important
way ... It's just that, with FFE, the stupidity expresses itself most
plainly in the SCALE of the thing.

But yeah, I'm pretty confident that when people see the material all
assembled (not just the game core and period resources, but also the San
Francisco sections, the GMing/adventure design resources and the sample
adventures - which now definitely includes a solitaire adventure that I've
been drafting) ... and chock full of street maps and floorplans and cute
little sidebars dense with gameable info, that they will sigh with happy
noises aplenty.

What doesn't make _anyone_ happy is what I've come to call the "Fly From
Evil guarantee," which is simply this;

Don't worry. I'm not rushing anything :)

I'm pretty much the only one that smiles at that one. But it's a very warm,
goofy sort of smile.



|| S. John Ross
|| Husband · Cook · Writer
|| In That Order
|| http://www.io.com/~sjohn

Also sprach S. John Ross:
> At 12:22 PM 1/15/2006, you wrote:
>
>>What I'd really love to see is a screen-capture of the outline of the
>>rest of the book....!
>
>
> You wouldn't love it as much as you might hope; it's still quite a mess.
> But since you asked, I'll post another example so you can see what I mean :)
>

Wow, that rocks! And now everybody will understand why have have to wait
for such a long time... and that it's worth it!

A.

At 12:22 PM 1/15/2006, you wrote:
>What I'd really love to see is a screen-capture of the outline of the
>rest of the book....!

You wouldn't love it as much as you might hope; it's still quite a mess.
But since you asked, I'll post another example so you can see what I mean :)





|| S. John Ross
|| Husband · Cook · Writer
|| In That Order
|| http://www.io.com/~sjohn

Hello,

This email message is a notification to let you know that
a file has been uploaded to the Files area of the FlyFromEvil
group.

   File        : /hardboiled-era-scrap-outline.gif
   Uploaded by : ghalev <sjohn@...>
   Description : Another, even crueler screencap by reader request, this one of
the "Hardboiled Era" general resources sections. It is in tatters ... Very
promising tatters, perhaps, but tatters. Several items are still missing
(they're in development in other files; I don't paste them into the main one
until they've got meat on their bones) and the final book is _very_ unlikely to
use the word "crapola" in a section header. But anyway, it's a glimpse at my
approach to the chapter :)

You can access this file at the URL:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FlyFromEvil/files/hardboiled-era-scrap-outline.gif

To learn more about file sharing for your group, please visit:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/groups/files

Regards,

ghalev <sjohn@...>

What I'd really love to see is a screen-capture of the outline of the
rest of the book....!

Hello,

This email message is a notification to let you know that
a file has been uploaded to the Files area of the FlyFromEvil
group.

   File        : /ffe-core-rules-abc.gif
   Uploaded by : ghalev <sjohn@...>
   Description : A screen-capture from Word showing the basic outline (A/B/C
heads only, not minor heads or sidebars) of the core rules of Fly From Evil as
of the date of the image. This represents about 20% of the game (most of it is
resources, adventures, etc). More a tease than anything, further proving that
I'm basically a mean person. On the other hand, you can deduce quite a lot from
it (it helps that FFE is 90% traditional with most of the unusual system aspects
pretty subtle ones).

You can access this file at the URL:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FlyFromEvil/files/ffe-core-rules-abc.gif

To learn more about file sharing for your group, please visit:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/groups/files

Regards,

ghalev <sjohn@...>

There was one of those "post yourself in your favorite system" thingies on
RPGnet. FFE's my favorite system, so I posted. Figured I'd paste it here,
too, to preserve it for the ages:

S. John Ross, Hardboiled Game Designer
Athletics/6 Charisma/9 Grift/10 Gunplay/5 Jimmy/7 Muscle/7 Nerve/8
Reflexes/7 Stealth/7 Wits/9
Respects/Admires: Passion, bluntness, dedication
Works/Lives For: His wife’s affections, the company of his friends, and
good food
Subplots & Obstacles: Coping with the Unexpected Secret Project, lets his
feelings get the better of him
Resources: Bed Artistry, Chef, Connections (Homeless Community), Crafty,
Eloquent, Infuriating, Inspired (Writer), Lover, Scaramouch, Smooth Talker,
Student of Human Nature
Notable Equipment: Battered and ailing ThinkPad 600 with all Internet
capabilities removed or disabled, dice, pencil, cell phone (which he
resents the existence of, but can’t give up)
Fighting Scores: Toughness/7 Vitality/6 Initiative/6-5
Notes: Fourth-generation Italian, known mostly for his homepage, the Blue
Room. Dabbled professionally in bartending, voice-work, hack journalism and
stage magic before returning to his first and greatest creative passion,
RPG writing.

I'd be toast in a firefight. But I knew that. Probably worthwhile to note
that my Homeless Community connections are more properly expressed as
Connections (South Austin Homeless) ... If I needed to find something out
downtown, it'd be blind luck if someone I knew happened to be visiting the
library or something (lots of my homeless friends use the public library
downtown for their email access, but it would still depend on an indulgent
GM looking to speed things up).




|| S. John Ross
|| Husband · Cook · Writer
|| In That Order
|| http://www.io.com/~sjohn

I contributed some material to the upcoming (GenCon release, I
think) "Pulp Hero" sourcebook for Hero Games, including some stuff on
evoking the 1930s in gameplay, the elements of pulp, villain
conception and adventure design. Not a _lot_ of material; I'm just a
cameo in a Steve Long epic in that case (I'm retired from
freelancing, so I only do small special-interest gigs), but a good
time, and worth mentioning here on the Fly From Evil list for a few
good reasons:

First, It had a tremendously energizing effect on related work I'm
writing for FFE :) And not just energizing, either; I went over word-
count by so much that a lot of the sections that didn't fit might
_become_ part of FFE ... eek. A lot of the energy, too, came from the
fun I had discussing things with Steve ... There are, obviously, a
few points of overlap between Fly From Evil (a hardboiled-specific
pulp RPG) and a book like PH, which emphasizes hero-pulp and
adventure-pulp gaming, but that still takes in portions of the whole
pulp enchilada. It was a beneficial process, since we traded some
juicy resources and historical tidbits we'd discovered ... That
alone, as they say, was worth the price of admission.

Second, it just got me really excited about Pulp Hero as a useful
resource for Fly From Evil gamers. There are a few good general-pulp
sourcebooks in gaming already, of course (Iron Crown's "Pulp
Adventures," SJ Games' "GURPS Cliffhangers," and West End Games' "The
World of Indiana Jones" for three examples), but if you've been
following the recent output of Hero Games, you'll know that they're
been putting out some BEEFY genre sourcebooks, and that most of the
beef is honest-to-betsy source material, not stat-blocks and rules
references.

While Fly From Evil will provide, hands-down, the most thorough one-
book exploration of the pulp-era United States in gaming (let alone
the San Francisco specific material), FFE's section on the exotic fun
of the globe beyond is more limited (it's be comparable in scope to
the three general pulp sourcebooks I mentioned above, which is still
above and beyond the call for a detective game, I guess, but I'm
something of a loon). That's where FFE and Pulp Hero dovetail nicely,
because the exotic fun of the globe is very much a central concern
for PH, and Steve Long has been doing a ton of research and has a
very encouraging amount of enthusiasm for the subject matter. And
beyond just chatting about it, Steve and I are having a kind of
exchange of services, providing a critical eye to one another's
manuscripts for matters of history, pulp-scholarship and more (a
relief to me, because while I'm very happy with how the FFE section
on the law is shaping up, it'll be nice to have Steve - an
experienced lawyer - give it the double-oh).

So anyway, Pulp Hero. Groovy. Drop on over to
http://www.herogames.com/ to see what good stuff they're up to!
There's also a Pulp Hero-specific portion of the Hero System message
boards, where Steve offers the occasional peek of what's to come
http://www.herogames.com/forums/


|| S. John Ross
|| Husband · Cook · Writer
|| In That Order
|| http://www.io.com/~sjohn

>So, S. John, have you seen it?

I've been looking forward to it for a long time; Lisa mentioned it to me
back in 2002 when she was first putting it together ...

I haven't had time to snag it yet (as you said: lots of plates spinning at
once!) and wasn't aware that they'd finally released it (mainly, I suspect,
because I'm terrified to email Lisa in case she asks me how the MedFrance
maps are coming) :)

I had been wondering if they'd shift it to e23; guess that answers that.


|| S. John Ross
|| Husband · Cook · Writer
|| In That Order
|| http://www.io.com/~sjohn

I haven't rabbleroused in the group for awhile since we know about at
the plates your spinning at once, especially since your recent
message on the CGnD group. So I wasn't going to bother agitating for
an update until I spotted a curious headline on GamingReport.com:
GURPS Mysteries! And with an odd bit of serendipity, it turns out to
be written by Cumberland's other author, Lisa Steele, of Fief and
Medieval France fame.

The link is: http://e23.sjgames.com/item.html?id=SJG82-0104

It looks to be the standard high level survey I'm come to expect from
the line, but that table of contents looks astounding.

So, S. John, have you seen it? It's too late for me because I bought
as soon as I could get to a credit card, but I'm sure other
FlyFromEvil hopefuls would be interested to hear your thoughts on it.

>Hi.  Recently discovered your site, and found much of interest.  I'm
>now eagerly anticipating the release of Fly From Evil.  I was just
>wondering one thing.  The game's set up with the big, bad city in
>mind, but how well would it support a less urban setting, like a
>campaign centered on a Bonnie & Clyde-type outlaw gang, raiding
>small-town banks at a far remove from the metropolises?

It wouldn't be a hardboiled game without the rural gangsters, to be sure,
and Fly From Evil touches on both the historical facts about rural
gangsterism (both the "celebrity" gangs of the Depression era and the rise
of moonshine running in the 1940s) as well as the basics of the on-the-lam
movie genre, etc., along with some other details that touch on rural
America in the period (farmer's issues in the politics chapter, the
development of hobo culture, the Dust Bowl, etc). I also include a pretty
respectable amount of reading/viewing recommendations for the rural angle
in the Media Guide/Bibliography.

To be sure, the focus of Fly From Evil is not only urban, but specifically
the urban private eye campaign. But since the crime fiction of the period
all interlocks and cross-pollinates, I give everything at least a
respectful nod, including a few subgenres that are in their infancy at the
time (like the caper story) ... It would be hyperbole for me to claim that
the game "covers" all these subgenres; it doesn't. But it's designed with a
constant awareness of them, and provides (I think) what amounts to a really
respectable amount of source material on American period-crime-drama (and
American life) that can be applied across the board.



|| S. John Ross
|| Husband · Cook · Writer
|| In That Order
|| http://www.io.com/~sjohn

Hi.  Recently discovered your site, and found much of interest.  I'm
now eagerly anticipating the release of Fly From Evil.  I was just
wondering one thing.  The game's set up with the big, bad city in
mind, but how well would it support a less urban setting, like a
campaign centered on a Bonnie & Clyde-type outlaw gang, raiding
small-town banks at a far remove from the metropolises?

>I could swear it wasn't that long ago that I has doing this, but I
>can't let you off the hook for a quarter. So here we go...

:)

>1. I absolutely loved Caravel. Everything about it.

Glad to hear it! I'm very proud of it; the Pepper's all cozy for me. :)

>And I was
>intrigued by the mini-suppliment format. Would you envision anything
>along those lines for FFE?

In more ways than one, yeah. There are a couple of points on which Caravel
is practice for things I'm doing with FFE. The fact that Caravel has
full-page 600dpi hand-drawn maps _without_ being a grotesquely large file
is the result of some techniques I've been playing with involving
transparent layers of pure-bitmap images to create a faux spot-color effect
... That's something that'll be important to the look I'm hoping for with
FFE (and of course, FFE will be packed to the gills with maps).

Okay, that's boring production drivel; I know :) But on a more substantive
level, Caravel inspired the dawning of the Uresia Master Index:
http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/uresia-master-index.htm

... which is very much a "dry run" for the Fly From Evil Master Index,
which will be, in the same spirit, a running index of the entire FFE
library as it grows. I've been wanting to do something like that for a
while (planning it specifically for FFE), but with Caravel I finally had
the excuse to teach myself the necessary techniques. It'll be extremely
useful for a game like FFE, because if you are (for example) playing an
Irishman, there will be references of interest to character background
scattered throughout the material ... specific neighborhoods in the San
Francisco sourcebook, political notes in the politics chapter, etc., in
addition to the general entry for the Irish in the Ethnic Groups chapter
... The same will be even more true if FFE is blessed with customers and
therefore supplements, so a solid cross-library index will be a real
benefit. Well, I know _I'll_ get a lot of use from it anyway; my memory
bites :)

And on the simplest level, yes, I'd love to do mini-supplements for FFE,
especially location supplements.

>2. And while I'm sucking up, I can't wait to get my hands on a FFE
>Sparks set. Is this in the works? Would you hold on to it until
>closer to the full release or could publish it as a teaser?

Very close to the full release, yes. I can't 110% confirm that such a set
will exist, but I can 110% confirm that I _intend_ for it to. In the
meantime, there are quite a few suitable Sparks in the groovy "Cairo Moon"
general-pulp-era set. http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/sprkcai.htm

>How much dice-rolling goes into
>things like Interrogation and Seduction in FFE?

No rolls at all, sometimes. One roll, sometimes. More that that, sometimes.
Depends on stakes and nature of the scene, the personal style of the GM and
players, and what kind of leverage and motive each side brings to the
conversation. "Less than in Risus" is about as close as I can get to
providing a benchmark.

I can say that, rules aside, one of my personal favorite parts of FFE are
my (pretty extensive) GM-side and Player-side tips, techniques and advice
for tackling, varying and presenting different kinds of genre-essential
scenes. So, as a player, you'll be armed with a brief-but-substantive,
non-rulesy primer on interrogation techniques and strategies that both
evoke the genre _and_ help you crack the case. As a GM, you'll be
comparably armed with a primer on interrogation scene-construction,
scene-pacing and scene-salvaging techniques. There are also related tidbits
... like a sidebar on subtle clues people give that they're lying, hiding
distress or fear, etc (useful to GMs for fine-tuning an NPC's performance;
useful to players for catching on).

So, whatever that adds up to. That many.



|| S. John Ross
|| Husband · Cook · Writer
|| In That Order
|| http://www.io.com/~sjohn

I could swear it wasn't that long ago that I has doing this, but I
can't let you off the hook for a quarter. So here we go...

1. I absolutely loved Caravel. Everything about it. And I was
intrigued by the mini-suppliment format. Would you envision anything
along those lines for FFE?

2. And while I'm sucking up, I can't wait to get my hands on a FFE
Sparks set. Is this in the works? Would you hold on to it until
closer to the full release or could publish it as a teaser?

3. Finally, a noir pastiche:

*****
When I woke up, there was blood on my shirt and I was pretty sure it
was mine. I felt my hands behind me, tied securely together by
someone who knew his knots. A sailor, maybe. My mind was wandering,
so I shook my head and tried to right it again.

"Hey, Mugs. I think he's awake."

I looked up through my swollen lids and saw a swine of a man in a
sharp suit step into the dim light. His wet, piggy eyes took me in
like he was looking for a choice cut. "I'm glad to see you lived, Mr.
Cassaday. My boy here hit you pretty hard and I thought he was on his
way to the pen."

I could keep my heavy lips from smiling. "I won't report him if you
let me go."

Piggy snorted. "Come now, Mr. Cassaday. We have business to do. Just
tell me where the broad is and Mugs won't have to hit you again."

Mugs cracked his knuckles and I waited for the blow to fall.
*****

Which leads me to my last question: while I feel the combat needs
good crunchy rules to keep uncertainty in the game, social
interactions are a hazier matter. How much dice-rolling goes into
things like Interrogation and Seduction in FFE?

Have a great day!!

--Anjin

>So what's the good (here's hoping) word on Fly From Evil??
>
>Enquiring minds with health wallets want to know!

I think quarterly would be best for these things :)

If your wallet is _very_ healthy, hop a plane to Dallas and book a room and
con badge at A-Kon. I'll be appearing as a guest, and that'll include GMing
some Fly From Evil games if there are players around in the mood to play.
The A-Kon website is at http://www.a-kon.com/

I'm scheduled on five panels but I'm keeping my gaming schedule open and
flexible. Years of con-guesting have taught me some important lessons about
the value of that approach. ;) That said, I'll have at least one nifty FFE
adventure prepped, pre-genned and ready for a pickup group, and I'll also
be open to doing character creation demos.

On a not-FFE-but-FFE related issue, I released the first "public Beta" of
the Uresia Master Index to the Uresia Mailing List last night. The reason
it's FFE related is that it finalizes what's been a hope of mine for Fly
  From Evil for some time --- that I'd be able to build a master
architecture of consistent topic terminology that'd allow me to do an FFE
Master Index, indexing all the FFE titles in a single, cross-referenced
Monster of Indexing Swellness. Fly From Evil is the project on which I
first became determined to make that work, but Uresia gave me the earliest
opportunity to actually experiment with it, thus providing handy practice :)

Okay, so indices aren't very exciting as a subject, but considering the
size of the FFE resource sections, GMs will be grateful for it, I promise
... :)



|| S. John Ross
|| Husband · Cook · Writer
|| In That Order
|| http://www.io.com/~sjohn

Can't let May get by us without a word from young Master Ross. We had an
update in early April, and now it's late May...

So what's the good (here's hoping) word on Fly From Evil??

Enquiring minds with health wallets want to know!

Dammit!!

:)

Cheers

Peter Leitch
<peter@...>
_____
Today's Quote:
There are many intelligent species in the Universe...and cats own them all.

>Anyway, make with the quarterly update, SJR, and I won't bug you
>until July.

:)

Well, in the local campaign, the players are currently playing their
characters' girlfriends, rescuing their regular characters from evil lawyers.

I'd say "it's a good deal more serious than it sounds" but that'd be a lie
in this case. The look on their faces when they realized why I was handing
them pregens was pretty classic, though. Since we're nearly to World War II
and one of the characters is Asian, I figured it'd be nice to have
something light on the plate before things get ugly.

Oh, you mean the GAME game ... The system's still done; the sample
adventures are taking shape; the GMing and playing chapters are nearly
fleshed to capacity, and the 800-pound gorilla remains the enormous black
timesink of the resource chapters, which are quite the lesson in why games
on this scale are normally done by teams of a dozen or more people, plus a
separate team for the graphics and layout and indexing. Of course, it
doesn't help, either, that my models for the game's density are each in
their fifth edition. Quixotic much?  Guilty. Still, all in all I'm really
pleased with the shape of it. There's something awfully satisfying and
certain about it, these days, since it's been slapped into its current
shape by tons and tons of for-real campaigning. I dunno if it'll feel like
a fifth edition right out of the gate, but it'll be at least the equal of
most games in their third or fourth ...

And due to unexpected turns of fate, I'll probably have a complete FRPG
available sometime between now and the FFE release, although in that case
all the setting and resource material was already written three years ago,
and I'm just hammering out the cool combat rules :)



|| S. John Ross
|| Husband · Cook · Writer
|| In That Order
|| http://www.io.com/~sjohn