Author: David Schwarz

The Force Does Not Throw Dice: The Five Room Dungeon

Posted on September 16, 2015by
Han rolled first
Han rolled the highest initiative
and thus shot fi– aw forget it

Welcome to another installment of The Force Does Not Throw Dice. This time, we are here with some advice for novice and veteran Game Masters alike. Because let’s be honest, sometimes you just have to run an adventure and just have no time to write any adventures. Thankfully, there’s a true and tried method called “The Five Room Dungeon” that can get you out of these sticky situations.

Ah, the job of a Game Master: never an easy task and most of the time a thankless one, and that’s without accounting for the hours spent writing and getting everything ready for the game. Back when we were college kids, we had all the time in the world to create our worlds, our characters, and our adventures. Things, alas, change. Being a GM and a responsible adult at the same time is not an easy task. Your friends are coming over this weekend with some pretty awesome BBQ pizza and they are going to be expecting you to be ready to guide them through several hours of fun, excitement and laughter, but you just had the worst week ever at work, plus your newborn has been crying, and you’re doing your taxes and just came back from driving your oldest to band practice… Your friends are three hours away and you are looking at an empty page. You have run out of published adventures to run. Who’s going to help the GM in desperate need for some adventure?

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Aftermath and the Present Tense of Doom

Posted on September 9, 2015by Six on the Wild Die

aftermathcvrWhen I first pitched this article I was just one-third through Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath, the first book in a trilogy that’s supposed to show us what happened to the Star Wars galaxy right after Return of the Jedi (and that apparently doesn’t involve soul-stealing velociraptors, for some strange reason). At that point I wasn’t enjoying what I was reading; it’s not that I was offended or that I thought I was reading a baby-cooking recipe book written on Satan’s scrotum with Gandhi’s blood, but I was wondering exactly where we were going. The terrible editing had started annoying me (you simply can’t have a character change races, from Rodian to Abednedo and back, and expect no one to call you on it). I wasn’t feeling the main characters, either, and I was starting to suspect the story was going to go nowhere and that the whole thing was going to end up being just another inconsequential side trip.

When I first pitched this article it had a very different tone, believe me. I was annoyed with most of Del Rey’s last offerings, from the weak Heir to the Jedi to mediocre offerings like Tarkin or Dark Disciple, and I was starting to wonder if the reboot was going to end up being a lost opportunity to improve the overall quality of Star Wars media tie-ins. But then I started to read and hear people complaining about the prose used in the book, using terms like “LiveJournal-like crap” or “hipster jive speak” (really). I had to stop reading and wonder for one second: if Wendig’s style choices alienated what seemed to be such a big part of the readership, just how much does the Star Wars readership actually read beyond Expanded Universe novels? Because no one beyond eighth grade should feel uncomfortable just because a novel doesn’t use a third person omniscient point of view, or because it doesn’t use past tense; don’t get me wrong, it’s okay to dislike it or to be annoyed by Wendig’s prose, especially if we are sick of seeing present tense used in an effort to sound contemporary and relevant, but the horror and hair-pulling that seemed ubiquitous in the fan reaction seemed to be completely out of place.

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In which we chat about the post-Endor war situation but really TFA

Posted on September 4, 2015by , , and Aggressive Negotiations

tfa-isdcrash

If you’re new to Eleven-ThirtyEight this may be the first real Aggressive Negotiations piece you’ve seen here—unlike most of our content, Aggressive Negotiations are raw, largely unproofed live chats among our staff and occasionally others. Being so very off the cuff and unscripted, they can sometimes get a little out of control (this one in particular tops out at over seven thousand words, which just might make it the longest piece on the site), but the goal is to present fandom in its most pure form—and this is absolutely that.

Today’s topic: the post-Endor political status quo, prompted by the latest round of The Force Awakens bits and pieces from Entertainment Weekly and elsewhere. I couldn’t make it to this one myself, and in fact as of this writing I haven’t even read the damned thing yet, so this ought to be fun for all of us. Force Friday ahoy! – Mike, EIC Read More

Meet the Marvels: Greg Rucka

Posted on August 24, 2015by

We are going to continue our look at representative comics penned by future writers of the Marvel Star Wars comics, trying to examine what makes them a bad or good choice to write Star Wars for the benefit of any readers that may be Star Wars fans but not comic book fans. In the past we’ve looked at Jason Aaron, Kieron Gillen, Mark Waid and Charles Soule, and now it’s time to take a good look a Greg Rucka, the writer of Shattered Empire, the comic miniseries that’s coming out as part of the Journey to The Force Awakens. And this time, choosing the comic series we are going to spotlight couldn’t have been any easier.

Greg Rucka’s writing career started with his Atticus Kodiak novels, a series of seven crime books starring a New York bodyguard, and he started writing comics with the critically-acclaimed Whiteout, an absorbing story about a female sheriff having to solve a crime at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, and finding what appears to be the work of a serial killer; he also published Queen & Country, a gritty espionage series about a British SIS agent and his world. Once his reputation as a good writer was consolidated, he went to work for DC Comics, writing Detective Comics (where he created many of the characters that would become part of the detective series Gotham Central, that he would co-write with Ed Brubaker) and Wonder Woman, and famously being part of writing team for the also-critically-acclaimed weekly series 52.

Leaving DC after being taken off the still-unpublished Wonder Woman: Earth One, Rucka came to Marvel to pencil one of the most interesting runs in The Punisher in recent history, perhaps only second to Garth Ennis’s long stint on the MAX title. If this series of accomplishments would lead you to think that Rucka is a crime writer first and foremost and has no business writing Star Wars, you couldn’t be more wrong: not only does he write the steampunk adventure comic Lady Sabre and the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether, but he also wrote for Marvel the title whose first issue we are going to be talking about today: Cyclops.

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The Force Does Not Throw Dice: Roleplaying and the New Continuity

Posted on August 5, 2015by Six on the Wild Die
The beginnings of our madness
The beginnings of our madness

Welcome to The Force Does Not Throw Dice, a new series of articles where we are going to be exploring the fun world of playing and directing tabletop roleplaying games in the Galaxy Far, Far Away, and where we are planning to impart some sage advice and encouragement to both Game Masters and players. If you’ve never played a Star Wars RPG, keep reading all the same, for our first article is going to have a small discussion on setting and canon. What should the continuity in our campaign be like? Should we discard all official materials or should we try to choose between one of the official portrayals? Hello, I’m Dave and I’ve been directing games for more than twenty years!

Playing in the Star Wars galaxy comes with a few constraints that playing in your own homebrew sci-fi setting doesn’t. First and foremost, there’s the metaplot: Luke Skywalker defeated Darth Vader and saved the galaxy, not your player characters. If you are playing tramp freighter spacers or bounty hunters, that’s probably okay with you, but many groups are used to a more heroic kind of roleplaying and find these restrictions completely unacceptable.

Many gaming groups sidestep this problem by setting their games in an alternate universe, one where their characters can fall in love with Leia and/or Han and be the ones to destroy the Death Star; some other gamers prefer to play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and have their player characters have their adventures in the cracks of the saga (like, I dunno, being the ones to steal the Death Stars plans; hey, there were official precedents!). Some of this last kind of gamers even insist on making their adventures perfectly fit with the “canon” of the saga, bending themselves over to make sure the official word is respected no matter what. Read More