Showing posts with label paranormal romance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label paranormal romance. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 01, 2019

The 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 earliest playtest sessions. Honestly, I always figure that this would be something that I would write mostly for my own personal use and probably print off copies to use at conventions or home games.

The cover at left is a dummy image that I made up a couple of years ago out of some free clip art. I like the colorfulness of it.

It was probably close to twenty years ago now that I first encountered the genre of paranormal romance. I was at a Half Price Books, when I still lived in Cleveland, and as I was wandering and randomly glancing at shelves, I saw a book with the title Bitten, by Kelley Armstrong. You may have heard of Bitten from the Canadian-based television series that aired on SYFY in the United States (at the time of this writing it is available on US Netflix and I recommend it strongly). Since that book I have traveled through the worlds of Armstrong, Patricia Briggs, Gail Carriger, Devon Monk and others.

The books were filled with witches, magicians, werewolves, vampires, Fae and other things that go bump in the night (sometimes with a little grinding as well). What drew me into the fiction was things like the well-defined characters who were more than hard-bitten and grizzled anti-social loners. These were people who loved. People who had friends. People who were members of a community, who cared about the people around them and the places that they lived. I mean, yes, sometimes these characters wanted to be left alone so that they could drink their coffee in peace, but when bad things happened to people close to them, they got a to-go cup.

What I wanted, for a long time, was a role-playing game that would let me play games like the stories that I was enjoying. Some of them were close, on the surface they had supernatural creatures and people with weird powers, but the games fell out of step with fiction quickly. They aren't bad games, but they aren't what I was looking for, either.

I wanted a game that was simple. A game that could allow characters to have connections to each other, and to the world, in ways that were not only fictionally meaningful during play, but also could have some mechanical bite to them as well. I wanted the much-ballyhooed mechanics that "get out of the way" during play.

I have been a fan of the Fate rules since before Spirit of the Century ever came out. Those early free PDFs were so close to the game that I wanted, and unfortunately the variants of Spirit of the Century had an annoying habit of getting more complicated than they needed to be. And then came new versions of the rules: Fate Core and Fate Accelerated. I found the system that I needed to use in Fate Accelerated. The idea of approaches is a brilliant one, while being simple enough that I am surprised that no one hit the idea sooner in RPGs.

If you haven't played, the idea is a simple one. To streamline mechanics they came up with the idea of "What if, instead of coming up with a list of skills that outline what a character can or can't do, we instead come of with a list of ways in which a character approaches a situation? What happens when they do something forcefully or cleverly instead of having skills for all of the sciences, and the different ways that they can hit something?" It was pretty radical. And, it also opened up ways to achieve success in a situation without necessarily resorting to violence as well.

Don't get me wrong, there can be plenty of fighting and violence in paranormal romance fiction. It is just nice to be able to also have ways in an RPG where players can think outside of the box of combat when deciding their characters' actions. All of this meshed together for me, and I started combining material from the various Fate SRDs into a document and compiling it with the explanations that I have come up with for players who have never played the game previously, as well as codifying some of the things that I do when I run games for people.

I try to run my games as cooperative venture as I can. The story creation rules for Fate Core are nice because they give everyone in the group some level of input into the creation of the game's world.

So, all of this went into a pot, and over time as it cooked Paranormal Friction came out of it. I hope that you check out my Patreon page and, if my blog has given you any interesting content over the years, support me as I work to get the final yards of development done for it. There is also a Discord server for talking about the game linked through the Patreon page, and I hope to develop a community around the game.

Right now, as soon as you support the Patreon you get the current copy of my WIP document for Paranormal Friction in a text format PDF. There are still things that I am working to add to the game, and a few rough spots to smooth out yet. Hopefully you will become a part of the journey to get Paranormal Friction to the end, so we can all have a finalized game of it.

Wednesday, December 04, 2013

Devon Monk's Hell Bent

Hell Bent is Devon Monk's newest novel, a continuation of the setting from the Allie Beckstrom books that features supporting characters from that series in a leading role. Shame Flynn and Terric Conley have been promoted to the stars of the new Broken Magic series.

You don't have to have read the Allie Beckstrom books to understand or appreciate this book because they fill in the bits and pieces that you need to understand the story. That said, if you haven't read Monk's Allie Beckstrom books, I am very disappointed in you. You need to read them. Now.

I will admit that I have had trepidations about this book, since I first saw it announced. I liked Shame, as a supporting character, and Terric was never really developed enough to my taste to be a lead character. Of course neither really was Zayvion Jones.

Regardless, I picked up the book and gave it a chance. My trepidation did not go away immediately. I found the first half of the book to be slow paced and muddied by inconsistent characterizations of the leads. It seemed to me that Monk was having a difficulty with getting into the mindset, the maleness, of her characters, particularly Shame. The action and the characterizations did pick up around the middle of the book, and she seemed to be getting a much stronger read on the voice of Shame. It was still inconsistent, but it did better. By the end of the book her portrayal of the character did get legs, but it still seemed to be a bit of a struggle. The slowness of the first part of the book didn't bother me as much, the first couple of  Allie Beckstrom books could be slow burners, until she got a hold of the overarching plot of the series.

Shame's romance in the book is obviously setting the tone for the rest of this series, but it wasn't like there needed to be more reasons for the "heroes" of the story to chase down the bad guy. All of that was set up pretty strongly in the Beckstrom books.

Before thinking that I am only negative on this, I did enjoy the book as a whole. Once the plot settled into place and the new bad guys appeared on the stage, the book really took off. It wasn't as breakneck as the plots in the last few of the Beckstrom books, but it was still a good, solid, enjoyable plot. The new supporting characters of Dash and Dessa are well-fleshed out, even if Dash's full name is a bit silly.

I would recommend picking this novel up. Not as quickly as I would recommend the Beckstrom books, but it is still an enjoyable and diverting read. Hell Bent is an entertaining book, and I look forward to the next book and the further developments of Shame Flynn and Terric Conley.

I do include the book on my list of holiday gifts on our last Geeky Voices Carry vblog/podcast.