Origins: Table Top Miniatures

This is a photo survey for you guys. Warning! These photos are really large because I wanted to show you the detail.

I decided to go forth and look things new to me while at Origins. One of those was the miniatures.

For scale, these tables are about 4′ by 8′. The level of detail in these models just blew my mind. Not just the careful painting, but the innovative re-use of common materials to achieve a texture, or a scaled down giant …thing. Like using cardboard egg cartons for cargo pods on a space ship, for example. The life-like representation of the models is very important to these miniaturists, and the result is stunning.

I was brave and asked a guy about the games. He made the set in the jungle scene, below, plus about three others that he was setting up.

Q: huh?

Each set up is a whole imaginative story-world, or a re-enactment of a battle. The basic premise of all of these games is a story with an unresolved plot. Each player takes on a pre-generated character and performs actions within that character’s personality and role within the story in order to drive the story. The figurines are moved around the board as the actions take place. The players have to work together or against one another to achieve the goal. One player is Director of Events (Game Master) and is the leader, making decisions and directing the story and the game.

Q: How much time does it take to do this?

The simplest figurines take about 10 to 15 minutes to paint. More complicated figurines can take over an hour. He surveys the table as he is telling me this, and then looks at me again, saying “There’s a lot of hours here. I listen to music or books while painting.”

Q: How long does it take to play?

About three hours for a noob game. Others can take days. This isn’t something you prepare and cart around and set up for a quick game. Yes, you can play a game if you are totally new to gaming. Just ask which might be the best one for you to cut your teeth on. It will depend on your interest, time availability, and the tolerance of the game master and other players for a new player, but most gamers want more gamers to game so don’t be afraid to ask.

Links

  • Boats: http://blog.sailpowergame.com/?page_id=793
  • “Tailgate This!”: http://blog.sailpowergame.com/?page_id=795
  • I lost track. But here’s a great intro to tabletop gaming from one of the vendors of one of these games.
  • I couldn’t find the Gold Digger Jones link but found what I think is the original sculptor of the pieces. Whether or not this is a match, this person does mini-dinos, so that’s a win for me.
  • Here is exactly how small this world of gaming and SF fandom is. I found this link while looking for information on the Gold Digger Jones game. This is the Star Wars table top miniature in process of being built!
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This table is about 3′ foot by 10′. These boats are incredible.

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heh-heh! Some kind of mech-warrior game with an industrial, post-apocalyptic feel.

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A pastoral setting.You can see the character sheets along the opposite side of the table.

This one was the winner of the Judgy Noob Award. “Darkest Africa: Gold Digger Jones and the Lost City”. Hot air balloons? Cool!

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The table was full of these kinds of details, such as the pseudo-Egyptian temple entrance shown here.

“Star Wars: X-Wing Episode IV, or Trench Runs are for Noobs.”

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Fond SciFi Memories: Are They Real?

David Belt Copyright 2013

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I recall as young boy thumbing through the school library (SciFi section, of course), when I came across a book called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick. I simply had to read this book, because I thought it was the most brilliant title, ever. It turned out to be one of the most brilliant books, ever, with a following in the hundreds of millions.

Never heard of it?

I’m not surprised.

Perhaps your memories have been altered…

It is said that we humans are the sum of our experiences. So what if our experiences are fabricated? Do we become fabricated beings, androids? What if an android is given all of our memories, programmed to be us? Do they become us? If the line between human and android can become grayed through the fabrication of memories, then what does it mean to be human? This is the world of Phillip K. Dick.

Still don’t recall this novel of awesome ideas? Perhaps this will shock the nodes of those droids whose experiences were programmed at the cinema: In the early 1980′s, there was Harrison Ford flick about a bounty hunter who hunted down renegade androids, passing themselves off as humans. The theatrical adaptation of this book was called “Blade Runner.”

In the story, Rick Deckard (the bounty hunter) encounters a young woman so completely programmed that she doesn’t know she is an android, which leaves an eerie question that is presented in the book, but not so directly in the movie. Rick is the best bounty hunter there is. He never fails to spot an android. He always gets his man, err droid. Rick Deckard remembers taking the human/android psyche exam and passing as human, but can he trust those memories? Or is he actually an android programmed to be the perfect bounty hunter?

This play on the fallacy of human dependence on memory for self-identification continues in many of Phillip K. Dick’s other works, most notably We Can Remember It for You, Wholesale, which movie goers will totally recall as “Total Recall” and Minority Report (you’ll have to look up the movie title on your own). All three stories take place in the same universe created by Dick and were meant to be sequels of one another. Sadly, Phillip K. Dick died before the Blade Runner project was completed and the would-be sequels were not done for more than a decade later by other film makers.

René Descartes first penned the phrase “I think, therefore I am.” As our thoughts and memories change, we change. Will this translate to Artificial Intelligence? And what if that AI thinks it is human; does it become human? At what point can we no longer trust our memories to tell us who we are?

In fond memory of a brilliant author… I think.

Suspense and Sanity

Copyright 2013 by Paula S. Jordan.suspense2

Bet you don’t know how hard suspense writers work to keep us all on the edge of our seats. I sure didn’t, until I needed to learn a bit about it myself.

I am submitting a novelette to ANALOG in the next few days (wish me luck!) which involves a farmer conducting an injured alien to safety over rough mountain roads while being chased by another species of aliens and shady officers of the law!

I never wrote anything like that before.

Here’s how I went about it.

1) I read a book (Are you surprised?).

2) I noted tricks and techniques relevant to my story and purpose.

3) I developed specific plot, character, dialogue, and narrative points appropriate to my story.

4) I figured out when and how to apply the above.

5) And I wrote them in.

The book I read: Conflict, Action, and Suspense by William Noble

Key techniques I used:

1) Character – Clearly delineate strengths, vulnerabilities, conflicts, energies, skills, goals, fears, commitment, etc.

2) Pacing

a. Appreciate the long view of the story. Measure each scene against the entire story line: rising or falling action, suspense, or tension.

b. Know when to introduce an action scene and how to play it: Alternate rising action scenes and falling action scenes to complement one another. Build suspense gradually over the full story arc to the final climax. Don’t bore readers with either anti-climax or unrelieved high tension.

c. Blend scenes smoothly with one another and build to a satisfying climax.

3) Information management

a. Be stingy – don’t spill all pertinent details at once

b. As with any story, no info dumps! (long boring stretches of background information irrelevant to the current action.)

c. Be sure the reader has all relevant information – mixed with some false leads, as you wish – at a pace that allows them to follow the action intelligently, and maybe guess at the outcome, without giving the whole thing away too soon.

4) Description – Use mood, atmosphere, culture, dramatic landscape or architecture, character(!), etc. to seize the reader’s attention and hold it … and make your tale believable.photo13cropSmart FixClarify

Note: The book named above, and others like it, gives various methods for achieving each of these goals and many more.

Putting it all together was the biggest, and maybe most interesting, part of the effort for me.

See that chart at the right? Each row shows one or more flex points, each of which marks some change in either an action or an emotional sequence in the story. (Sorry the text is not more legible.)

The flex points are shown in order as the story develops and are indentified by the stage of the story and the page number where each appears (Page 1 is at the top, the last page at the bottom.) At top and bottom are two scales for levels of intensity – one for action (shown at the top) and the other for emotion (at the bottom.)

The colored boxes identify individual flex points, each situated in the appropriate column for its level of intensity (high intensity to the right, low to the left) on its relevant scale (action or emotion). The yellow ones are action points. Both main characters are present for all the action. The other colors are emotional points; the colors indicate the character or characters involved in that particular emotional occurrence.

The wide column at the left gives room for additional handwritten notes.

As I hope is evident here, the tension/suspense in both the action and the emotional realms rise from lows (at the left) to highs (at the right) through ascending arcs, separated by slowdown periods from time to time, and concluding with the peak of action and tension at the story climax with a touch of denouement (settling down, resolution) at the end. You might also note that there is more emotional activity in the first half, and more action (that’s the road chase) in the last half of the story.

I know it’s impossible to see much detail here, but maybe you get the general idea.

It saved my sanity.

Cartoon: pirateunicorndesign.blogspot.com

Origins Stuff What I Don’t Know What It Is

Q:Pirate Cthulhu? RPG or LARP?

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A: A role-playing game, with a bar-like atmosphere. Facebook.com/roguecthulhu

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Q: Pods? HAL? What are these things?

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A: flight simulation video game. http://www.mechjock.com/

Q: An Orc tavern? An SCA outpost? Complete with …Orc?

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A: it’s a LARP, set up like a Haunted House. They outfit you with props and costume pieces, and you wander through whacking stuff with fake swords and collecting loot and maybe there’s an ale and a cheerful fire at the end. No experience necessary. It takes about an hour. …asking for a friend.

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Q: What are these giant board games?

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A: dunno but this is Mayfair Games

Q: CAVALRY In SPAAAAACE!
…huh? Is this an anachronism?

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A: no. Just a convenient holding table.

Cheers, yo. More later!
–”Game Master”

The Origins of our Origins weekend

Uh. So I guess this thing is huge.

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I’m married to the middle dot-sized head.

Origins Game Fair 2013

This is the first year that either of us will be volunteering for administrative duties at a convention. As members of CABS, we were given the opportunity to volunteer at the board game library. Additionally, I threw my hat in the ring for a few hours of Origins volunteer duty. We’ll see what that’s all about.

You can address me as Game Master from now on, thanks.

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Mostly empty warehouse sized rooms await thousands of gamers:

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We’re having a few folks stay with us for the weekend, see you guys soon and be safe. Wake up call is at 6:15 am., we don’t want to miss a moment of Origins!

Geology and Meteorology as Science Fiction (again!)

As a geologist by education*, I’m especially excited to find science fiction that references geology, earth and atmospheric sciences or ecology.

Here’s a short list of these rare finds I’ve come across thus far:

Changing Woman by W Macfarlane, a short story in The Annual World’s Best SF edited by Donald A. Wollheim. This story portrays the the science of mapping the earth from above via photography. Think: Google Earth, but 1972 and they have to do this all by hand, from piloting a plane and taking photographs, to mapping out the photo plane’s route, developing the photos, laying them all out in a merged spread… Of course there’s a nefarious purpose for this, being that Empress of Hell uses the photomontage to create atmospheric and geologic disasters upon the earth. (We’re not told why she is doing this.) The fictionalized science is more magic than science, being sympathetic rather than observation, hypothesis, or experiment. Changing Woman stops Empress of Hell by stomping on the photographed representation of the Mendocino coast. “Changing Woman danced and the world reeled under her and the Empress of Hell screamed soundlessly and screamed again.”

Wide Open by Deborah Coates (reviewed here) In this book, the magic is weather control via blood magic, but the science is observations on climate change.

In the Water Works, (Birmingham Alabama, 1888) by Caitlin R. Kiernan published in American Supernatural Tales edited by ST Joshi. A geologist is called to inspect a mysterious find deep in a tunnel being made for a water system. This is a story about finding fossils…that aren’t fossils. What if trilobites were just the larval form? Perhaps the Old Ones are best left underground? Kiernan developed the story into the novel Threshold, which I liked well enough but the short story is a masterwork. “These layers of limestone here…well, they’re probably part of the Lower Silurian system, some of the oldest with traces of living creatures in them,”…

The Many Coloured Land by Julian May. A century from today, society’s mis-fits are dumped backwards in time to the Pleistocene Era. But May doesn’t just make this into the corny story the dust jacket blurb promises. She uses geology to her advantage, conveying a real portrayal of the Earth at that time, going so far as to include flora and fauna. The fictionalized science here concerns the cause of a very real astrobleme (a scar on the earth’s surface caused by the landing of an extra-terrestrial body) known as the Ries Kessel which is found in today’s Germany. Hum… What if that scar were caused by an extra-terrestrial body that carried intelligent beings?

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* I’ve completely forgotten everything, and wasn’t a very good student in the first place, so don’t give me a hard time.

Characterization Trumps Plot!

Characterization Trumps Plot!

Or does it?

For me, what I look for in a novel is believable characterization. The plot can be Swiss cheese, the devices lame, and the voice stilted.

But boy golly! Those characters better be realistic!

Full characters got me through the StarDoc series even when the plot grew exceedingly…ridiculous. Time traveling ghosts*, blasts from a parallel past, political power that rockets from main character being an anonymous person on commuter train to viola now she’s #1 seat on the Galactic Decision Making Panel, and thus and such. But Viehl does it! I read these crazy plots, and there’s a snotty little voice feed in my head repeating “thisissodumthisissodumbthisissodumb” like a news ticker and yet I can’t pull my eyes from the page.

Last year or the year before, I read The Burning Heart of Night by Ivan Cat, a 600+ pp lost wonder from DAW. There were several brilliant scenes, most notably one where Cat has two characters experiencing time passing at different speeds relative to one another (that was way cool) but for the most part the plot kind of rambled around in swirlies and eddies. But, there I am, 3 am and can’t put it down. I am really concerned and anxious about these people, these aliens, their missions. I care ::sniffle::

Esteban from The House of the Spirits is a hateful person, a vile blot on the face of humanity. If I saw him walking into the coffee shop, I’d poke my pencil in his eye. But Allende gives me everything I need to know to dislike him this much. It’s like she gives me a little kit with all the pieces I need already packaged up, the colors already selected and the instructions right there.

Counterexamples have been anything that Alastair Reynolds has written—unbelievably exciting plot with crazy huge galactic spanning things that happen, but I could give a shit about his folks; The Great Gatsby; and The House Wars by Michelle West. I wanted so badly to like that last one but I just couldn’t get behind the main character (it was a problem with her age).

And, of course, sometimes you get a real gem, a book that has excellent characters, fab plot, and a writer voice that resonates with you. Those are the winners, you know.

Anyways, what do you think? What’s more important to you? Plot or characters?

*why would a ghost need to time travel?