A Call to the Community - Chris Pramas & Cadaver Bone

I don't normally do two blog posts in one day, but both needed posting and I didn't want one to piggy back off the other, so here goes:

Chris Pramas of Green Ronin, who I've never had dealings with personally, but who seems to be a swell guy by all accounts, and who designed the Dragon Age pen and paper RPG which I love to ABSOLUTE PIECES, is having to undergo bone fusion surgery in his neck pretty soon, and while his insurance is going to cover MOST of it, "most" means he still owes $10,000 after the surgery. Now, he's not asking for a handout...but he did ask for a little help from his friends.

I like it when friends come together and help each other out. It's just one of those things that makes me smile. So what Chris' friends have done (and by "friends" I mean an all-star line-up of guys like John "Leverage" Rogers, Ed "Forgotten Realms" Greenwood, Steve "ICONS" Kenson, Robin "Feng Shui" Laws, John "Unknown Armies" Tynes, Matt "Brave New World" Forbeck and David "Dragon Age" Gaider to name a few) is they have agreed to write a dark fantasy anthology called Cadaver Bone (because Chris is going to have a cadaver's bone fused into his neck, see) in order to raise the $10,000 to cover the remainder of Chris' medical bills.

Like I said, puts a smile on my face. As of this writing, they are almost at $7,500 with 30 days left to go.

Let's not make Chris sweat, huh? Let's help his friends help him. Heck, if you're a Mutants & Masterminds player (I'm not) you can kick in $5 and get a PDF of a villain named Cadaver Bone if that's more your speed.

I've put my money where my mouth is, because on this day I am able to, because I respect Chris' work and because I do dearly love seeing people pull together for their friends.

I wish you the absolute best of luck with your surgery and recovery, Mr. Pramas.

Tommy's Take on The API Anthology Vol. 1

This is kind of new territory for me...reviewing a fiction anthology, as opposed to an RPG product.

Hopefully it turns out better than my attempt at reviewing a video game the other day.

The API Anthology is the first anthology release by Third Eye Games for their Apocalypse Prevention Inc. setting (reviews of which can be found on my blog).

The API Anthology is a PDF clocking in at 92 pages with 9 stories featuring a few names that I recognize from the game industry and a few names that I don't...I'm cool with that: Everyone's gotta start somewhere, and I hear anthologies can be a great starting point.

The Apocalypse Prevention Inc. setting is a modern action-horror setting that is dominated largely by the very "Men in Black" type organization that hunts, captures and kills the demons that would threaten humanity. Every story in the anthology is set in this world, though not all of them necessarily revolve around the organization.

As is always the case with works featuring multiple authors, you are going to get different levels of work.

Unfortunately (or not, depending) the book begins with the weakest entry "Jezebel Sly, Private Investigator", with the titular character being beholden to working API cases after she gets involved in a supernatural incident. The story is a missing persons case with an API twist, but the authors attempts at making the main character jaded and cynical work too well...to the point that I honestly didn't like any character in the story.

"Girl Trouble" was another story that I had trouble with, for similar reasons. The heroic motivation of the protagonist never quite felt "real", and the payoff line at the end felt a bit cheesy and forced. This story, like the first, also cast API in a negative light, with the antagonist being a Burner serving as an API Agent. That said, the protagonist - an Oracle, who have bad luck effects on people around them - did have a VERY cool moment at the climax with the API agent.

"Back for Seconds" and "Fish on Dry Land" really capture the quirky, off-beat humor of the API universe, which is really not surprising with the former, as it was written by Brennan Bishop who has contributed some of the most disgusting aspects of the API universe (I'm not picking on him! He bragged about it!) and so his tale of Changelings as delicassies really hits on the black humor of the setting. "Fish on Dry Land" does a great job of portraying an overworked API unit and stars a Loch named Elvis. Both were entertaining reads, with humor intermixed with quirky drama.

"The Difference A Day Makes" features an API squad against a group of unlikely rivals with some very interesting pasts. I recognized the author, Rucht Lilavivat from White Wolf's Ravenloft line, and they did a very nice job of putting forth characters I actually wanted to read about...especially the laconic (until he needs to not be) Al. I liked both "teams" in the story, and thought it had a very nice payoff.

"Shut Up & Fish" has one of the smallest API presences in the book, but is a favorite of mine as it draws on the API Canada sourcebook, touching on The Thing Under The Ice (specifically, its effect on some poor saps who encounter it at sea).

"Failure To Communicate", ironically (or intentionally), does the best job in the book of presenting a situation from both sides: A wolf person trying to keep from losing control, and the pair of API Agents who try to stop him when he does. I particularly thought that the author did a great job of conveying the "change" in the wolf person's internal monologue.

"Loch, Stock, and Barrel" by Clint Black of Pinnacle Entertainment is probably the best offering in the book from a pure story stand point. The storytelling is tighter here than anywhere else, it hinges on a huge issue in the setting (Lochs and their difficulties reproducing) and one of the main characters undergoes a very noticeable change from the beginning of the story to the end.

That said, "The Pact" probably hit me the most with its sudden, abrupt ending. I can't say it was one I had never seen before, but the resolution surprised me with its execution, and in a good way.

The editing really needed to be tighter in a lot of places, with my eye catching typos here and there...and it seemed like there was probably an underuse of commas. In one story, I'm reasonably sure that a word got unintentionally invented. There was also an inconsistency in capitalizing the names of the demon races...for uniformity, I would have either capitalized all of them or none of them.

On a format note, I sideloaded the PDF into my Barnes & Noble nook, and the conversion process wasn't the smoothest, with my order watermark showing up at every page break (which was sometimes in the middle of the page) and one story have some odd fontal squishing going on. I'm not counting this as a knock against the anthology, mind you, just an observation...I'd love to see a release in epub format as well.

With much more good than bad, I would not be disappointed at all to see this truly just be volume 1, and for us to get volume 2 in the future. If you like API, or if you like reading action/horror fiction, it's a good buy.

When The Dead Rose

     When The Dead rose up, the world was quite surprised.  It was one of those things that the geeks talked about a lot, but all of your big game plans tend to disappear when the woman you married last year suddenly tries to eat your face.  The whole thing was ugly.  Police got overwhelmed because they are taught to aim for center mass, but The Dead can just shrug off torso shots from anything smaller than a shotgun.  The “rules” were right – aim for the head, The Dead shamble and do not run, stay away from the packs, so forth – but the reality was far too jarring.  Don’t get me wrong: It is rather disconcerting watching someone torn limb from limb.  It is dramatically worse when you realize that the person tearing them apart is dead and still taking up space above ground.
   
     At first, the media reported it as though it were the “teabaggers” rioting, which led to actual riots.  Even after The Dead started taking bites out of people, we were none the wiser – just a couple of months ago, a health care reform protestor had his finger bitten off, after all.  It took attacks from inside morgues to wake people up.  By then, The Dead had added so many to their number that cities were death sentences.  People clogged up bridges and freeways trying to escape.  I saw…I saw people pushing others off of bridges to get them out of the way.  The worst was the children.  Children were trapped in cars that had stalled out, and their parents ruthlessly cast aside.  No one bothered pulling kids from the vehicles.  They just drove on as soon as the vehicles were out of the way.  What?  No…I didn’t take any of them with me.  I couldn’t.  I don’t really know how to care for kids anyway.  Plus, I didn’t have nearly enough provisions to be taking on passengers.  Besides, my friends out in the country were expecting me, not me and a bunch of rugrats.

     Before the TV stations stopped broadcasting, the media was chasing a story related to the Swine Flu.  Ever wonder why all the pictures from Mexico during their first big outbreak showed military marching the streets in full riot gear?  Whatever drug the Mexican government gave the people reacted violently with the virus.  A European doctor working in Mexico saw it first, so the Mexicans halted treatment and moved to “containment”, which really meant extermination.  They never warned us that our vaccines would kill us.  If we would have paid attention to the nuts on the internet when they were noticing that it was the police reporting Swine Flu outbreaks instead of medical professionals, we might have asked the right questions.  We might have run AWAY from the vaccinations instead of running to them.

     I have some friends out in the country.  We’ve been here now for a couple of months.  They have a pretty secluded house, surrounded with big, open fields and an old bomb shelter that their grandpappy built back in the 50s.  We can spot The Dead coming through the fields, makes it easy to pick them off.  My boy Jim is a crack shot.  The bomb shelter’s easy to hide in whenever scavengers show up.  Yeah, we have to hide from other people now, too.  We’ve tore up the house, so that it always looks ransacked.  Keep the food and valuable stuff inside the shelter and just get what we need.  It’s a hassle, yeah, but its better than letting everything we’ve got get taken by a bunch of punks and thugs, right?  Worst night was when a group of six or so squatted in the house for a couple of days.  We had food in the shelter, yeah, but we couldn’t run the generator, so it was dark and cramped.  I admit it; I “accidentally” copped a feel on Gina while we were holed up.  I’m sure she knows it was me, but she feels sorry for me or something, which is fine by me.  Her boyfriend Heath doesn’t deserve her anyway, if you ask me.  Either way, she’s a little young for me.

     You’re the first solo traveler we’ve let in.  Nah, wasn’t anything special about you. We just figured you wouldn’t be much of a threat to us.

     Crap, what was that?  I heard something.  No, it was outside somewhere.  No, I don’t know what it was.  Sounded like someone running across the field.  Or a lot of someones.

     You.  You did it, didn’t you?  No, shut up, Jim!  This little prick brought his friends out here!  I’m gonna blow his head off if they don’t stop rushing this house!  Come here!  Come here, NOW!  Call ‘em off.  Call ‘em off, or I spread your face across the lawn, got it?  Newsflash, bucko: I think you’re full of sh--…what the Hell was that?  It jumped…from the yard to the roof.  Nothing human can do that.  THEY can’t even do that.  Get back in the house!  Everybody, get back in the house!!  It’s on the roof!  Whatever it is, it’s on the freaking roof!  They’re not supposed to run!  Don’t tell me it’s The Dead, because they don’t run and they don’t jump!  Shut up, Gina!  No!  Don’t go upstairs!!  OH MY GOD!!  THEY’RE IN THE HOUSE!  Run for the shelter!  NOW!!!

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    Hey, look…I’m sorry about that whole gun to the head thing.  I thought you were with them.  Jesus Christ.  I can’t believe they got Gina and Heath and Tammy.  Thanks.  Y’know, for helping me pull Jim down here.  My back’s kinda bad and all.  Maybe if we just lay low, we can make it out of here.  They gotta leave sooner or later…right?