tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-58343542024-03-07T17:48:50.462-05:00Dorkland!Sailors on the seas of dorkiness, since 2003 the Dorkland! blog has brought new, interviews, reviews, original content and many other things of interest to the internet. We talk about (but are not limited to) tabletop RPGs, comics, books, music, movies and many other things of passing fancy.Christopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comBlogger1857125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-71209765530319119292023-10-03T20:25:00.001-04:002023-10-03T20:25:20.396-04:00Crossover By Donny Cates and Geoff Shaw Part of my "strategy" for getting myself to post here more regularly is to focus on the things that I'm reading, watching or listening to that get me excited. My last review here on my blog was a part of that, and this one fits that bill too. Today I am looking at the comic Crossover, published by Image Comics, with writing by Danny Cates (mostly) and art by Geoff Shaw (also mostly).This isChristopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-70822336349740340852023-09-12T19:16:00.000-04:002023-09-12T19:16:32.203-04:00Dawn of DC: Birds of Prey #1I don't often finish reading a comic and think "Holy shit. I have to say something about this." Honestly, if that were the case I would have a lot more posts here on my blog. Today I decided to get out and go to the comic store, something that I haven't done in a while. I have been good with money lately, so I decided to treat myself with a couple of comics in print (rather than my usual digital Christopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-6199410262064888652023-06-14T18:23:00.003-04:002023-06-18T18:14:06.675-04:00Happy Birthday Dear MultiversesJune 14, 1961 and Barry (The Flash) Allen travelled to Earth-2 for the first time. Comics would never be the same again.Before the Silver Age of comics, comic books tended to have a loose interpretation of continuity. If previously published comics fit into a story that a creative team was currently telling, that was awesome. If it didn't, someone sat around trying to figure out why and then theyChristopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-16700120656217498952023-06-08T16:58:00.002-04:002023-06-18T18:14:45.344-04:00Action-Heroes RPG: Ground Division I am working on some expanded setting material for my Action-Heroes game that will end up, at the very least, in the hands of the backers of my Patreon. Ground Division is 90s-style conspiracy/espionage action inspired by movies of the era and a number of comics from that time.In the ramp up to launching the Kickstarter for the game, I talked about a couple of the primary Christopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-44408759545508458732023-05-26T13:45:00.003-04:002023-05-26T14:53:54.745-04:00Rebellion's "I Am The Law" By Michael Molcher History isn't as much of a cycle as people would like to think. It is a staccato drumbeat, pounding at its points until people have to listen. I think that I Am The Law is the first ever piece of non-fiction published by Rebellion, and it is an historic look at the development of British comics powerhouses Judge Dredd and the 2000AD magazine.The 2000AD magazine owes a Christopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-72445048616172385422023-04-04T19:44:00.006-04:002023-04-04T19:50:02.712-04:00H.P. Lovecraft vs. The Public DomainThe other day I had a conversation via text with my friend Ben about the legal status of the Lovecraft copyrights. As one does. That caused me to go down a rabbit hole that led to this article, and made a couple of other forks.1) The "estate" of Lovecraft, Lovecraft Properties LLC, who tried to get publishers and authors to acknowledge them as rights holders to Lovecraft's works had been Christopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-31399111177028938042023-01-14T13:02:00.000-05:002023-01-14T13:02:03.899-05:00Release The SRDs!With everything going on in open gaming in tabletop RPGs right now, I have decided that I am going to release SRDs (system reference documents) for a couple of systems based on the Fudge role-playing game, to which I have the rights. I will be calling these the Crasher and Quest SRDs/systems. They will be derived from two game systems to which I own the rights. More details will be Christopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-92224230632089191052023-01-07T17:25:00.002-05:002023-01-07T17:25:16.350-05:00Action-Heroes Is Coming!After years of development and writing, along with more than a couple of pandemic-related delays, my Action-Heroes role-playing game is finally coming to Kickstarter next week. You can click here to sign up to receive a notification when the project launches next Tuesday.I am really happy to have the game so close to the finish line, because I have put a lot of work into this Christopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-30013154458473761522022-12-21T18:20:00.004-05:002023-04-17T22:36:41.528-04:00Reading Grant Morrison's The Invisibles In 2023Please note: This series is currently on hold. Over on the Facebook page for the blog I wrote this: "I know that one of the things I promised for the blog in the new year was an ongoing series talking about Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. I started a re-read with that intent, and as I read I realized that there have really been a lot of people who have covered this ground, and I am not Christopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-5696041101006447392022-12-18T20:05:00.008-05:002024-02-12T14:33:05.538-05:00Where To Find MeWith the birdsite circling the drain, I am not posting there, accepting new followers or any active use of the site. If you want to follow me on social media, you can try the following sites.Mastodon https://mas.to/@dorkland (I have an account, but I don't use it actively)Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/dorkland.bsky.social Tumblr https://tumblr.com/dorklandInstagram Christopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-42412523238533926522022-10-31T16:25:00.001-04:002023-01-10T13:19:16.166-05:00Some Action-Heroes FAQs With the release of the ashcan edition of Action-Heroes by Outland Entertainment over at DriveThruRPG there have been a few questions that have floated around the internet and come to my attention, so I thought I would make a post of some of these questions to point people towards. I don't know how frequent these questions have been, but they have been asked about the Christopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-1645502895983273082022-09-24T18:41:00.005-04:002022-12-21T18:19:40.056-05:00The Shape Of The DCU To ComeOver at Newsarama, one of their writers talked about how many of the story seeds dropped by Scott Snyder at the end of his run of events at stories over at DC Comics didn't all pan out as expected. All of this is completely speculative on my part, as I have no idea where things are going to land.This is what happens when 1) publishers rely too much on a treadmill of events to sustain Christopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-58853690253749386702022-09-07T20:08:00.001-04:002022-09-07T20:08:51.266-04:00Chaos World Explainer Cover mockup featuring stockart by Claudio CasiniChaos World is my Fate-based fantasy role-playing game, currently in development. You can find drafts of Chaos World by backing my Patreon.I have always said that I am not a big fan of fantasy fiction. That doesn't mean that I don't like it, but that my tastes in it are fairly limited. I am a big fan of the fantasy, and scienceChristopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-39646169390596460682022-08-23T22:33:00.001-04:002022-12-21T18:20:05.081-05:00Safety And Tabletop RPGs Photo by Serge van Neck on UnsplashI have been gaming for a long time. I first started playing D&D back in 1979, when I was still in elementary school. I would have been a couple of years older than the characters in Stranger Things (I grew up in a small town in Indiana, too). When I was a kid in the 70s and 80s things were different. The general idea of dealing with Christopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-43141975535193019942022-08-01T17:04:00.003-04:002023-01-10T13:20:30.667-05:00Action-Heroes RPG Is Out In The World Ahead of the Kickstarter to fund the printing of the physical book, we have finally released the Action-Heroes RPG into the world as a PDF (Note: Now that the Kickstarter is live, the ashcan is no longer available). This ashcan release is a playable version of the game, with all of the rules needed to play and a preview of the art that will be in the final book. The final book Christopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-14937385292024577232022-06-19T18:03:00.002-04:002022-07-10T13:38:19.462-04:00Top Cow's Sara Pezzini, The Witchblade Witchblade and Sara Pezzini are copyright and trademark Top Cow.Once again I am exploring 90s comics characters, and while she might not have been among the first wave of characters put out by Image Comics or Top Cow during that time Witchblade definitely quickly became one of the iconic characters of that era.This particular writeup is a bit more modular than the previous Christopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-3232902120028471542022-06-14T17:56:00.002-04:002022-07-10T13:39:42.465-04:00Cyberforce's Stryker For Fate I have a weak spot for a lot of the early Image comics, to the point that I want to make a role-playing game that's an homage to the comics of that era. I am going to periodically post conversions of characters from the comics on posts here on my blog. The eventual mechanics of the game will be based on the Fate Condensed rules, for which you can find an SRD here.This Christopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-70011406185631795842022-03-20T14:10:00.004-04:002022-06-06T16:15:03.326-04:00Hello! Hello! Some of my older posts have been bringing people here to my blog, and I thought that I would point out that I am not very active here currently, unfortunately. I keep threatening to blog again but I don't end up pulling the trigger on it. Next year is the 20th anniversary of the blog, so who knows what might happen leading up to that.Enjoy your visit, there are a lot of cool posts to Christopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-81576003682306042462020-12-31T11:57:00.004-05:002022-09-13T16:56:12.354-04:00Influential Books And AuthorsSo there's a thing going around about influential writers, and I thought that I would give it a stab. I was going to write this up as a Facebook post, but it turned out longer than I thought and posting to my mostly unused blog also means that I can share it more places than just Facebook.Few things have influenced me quite as much as the Beat writers: William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Christopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-65439838295007830262019-11-07T10:52:00.003-05:002022-08-01T20:48:46.184-04:00My Life With Cyberpunk Gaming
photo by cheng feng
While I had read a few of his short stories in OMNI without knowing really who he was, my introduction to William Gibson came when I picked up a copy of the paperback of the novel Neuromancer when I flew off to my freshman year of college. I picked up the book after I had read a review of it, and an interview with Gibson, in Rolling Stone a month or two Christopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-78064975132719480332019-10-10T12:37:00.002-04:002022-07-10T13:41:17.034-04:00The Sound Of Breaking GlassI think that it is time to jump back into the reviewing game, because I have missed doing it. Let's talk about one of the new young adult original graphic novels that are being put out by DC Comics, in this case Harley Quinn: Breaking Glass. This is a poignant story that redefines the character of Harley Quinn in ways that make her interesting again. In this review I will look at the new originalChristopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-75942167901107639682019-05-01T17:45:00.002-04:002019-05-01T17:45:34.126-04:00The Patronage Of Paranormal Friction
You may or may not know, but I have launched a Patreon page. The reason for it is to help with funding the development of my paranormal fiction inspired and Fate-based role-playing game called Paranormal Friction.
If you have followed the blog for a while you'll know that this is something that I've worked at for a while now. I recorded a couple of YouTube videos for a couple of the very Christopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-56714413263728653432019-04-27T11:54:00.003-04:002022-07-10T13:41:58.112-04:00Law v Chaos (2)
Darkseid by J.G. Jones, from Final Crisis published by DC Comics
Over in Gallant Knight Games' first Tiny Zine Compendium there is an essay by me about the forces of Law and Chaos in fantasy role-playing games. It serves as an early promo for my Demon Codex fantasy role-playing game (still in development/writing).
I am going to go back over some of the basics from that Christopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-52736975758925500432018-12-03T10:55:00.004-05:002022-09-13T16:52:58.996-04:00The EN World ArchivesI've had a couple of people ask about reviews or articles that I wrote at EN World before the job change, so I figured that I would throw up a link to the landing page for my articles. There are a couple of gaps, from when the site had a catastrophic database crash, but this should let people find things.
I am sorry that I haven't been as active with writing here as I would have liked.Christopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5834354.post-7558190067125908492018-08-31T18:36:00.000-04:002018-09-01T09:13:32.259-04:00The Path To WhimsyA long time ago, back in the Stone Age before the internet was what it is today, there was a tool for players that was put out by White Wolf called StoryPath and Whimsy cards. Now, Nocturnal Media have relaunched the lines, and added sets of cards that were originally planned but never launched.
So what are these cards? The basic answer is that they were one of the Christopher Heltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17931046076046527750noreply@blogger.com