Comic Artist Gene Ha: My Life As A Gamer

You may best know artist Gene Ha from his work on the Alan Moore created comic Top 10. That has long been a favorite of mine, and Moore's combination of the police procedural in a super-hero universe with Ha's realistic approach to art is what made me interested. I first "met" Gene Ha years ago on Steve Jackson Game's now closed private forum version of Pyramid Magazine. I also am the proud owner of an signed copy of Top 10 #1 autographed by Ha at an old Chicago Comic Con. We ended up talking about the (then unreleased) GURPS 4th Edition game, much to the chagrin of the artist who was sharing a table with him.

Recently I approached him to answer some questions in one of my Life As A Gamer posts. What follows are the questions, and his answers.

With what game did you get started down the path of tabletop RPGs? About how old were you when you started?
I think I was in third or fourth grade when me and my brothers were introduced to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. We started off with the Blue Box, and quickly began assembling the AD&D books with our allowances. Despite the size of the books, it was wonderful how much it left to the imagination. There were no rules for specific wounds or maneuvers: if someone got a great hit the GM had license to describe the goblin’s head flying across the room. Tabletop roleplaying gaming is a form of improv theater. It’s an exercise to expand the imagination.

What are some of your favorite games?

I have a lot of affection for Twilight 2000. In part because the rules are so loose. Mostly because of how loosely written the adventure modules were. They had almost no stats or maps, but they worked great in play. It taught me how to improvise details once you had a solid plot.

I also love Robin Laws’ Feng Shui. Mathematically it’s a messy rule set, but the gaming advice was brilliant. It took the example I’d learned from Twilight 2000 and turned it into a philosophy. These are lessons I’ve carried into my comics artwork. When you make a script or rough sketches or pencils, always leave room for improvisation at the next stage. Don’t try to define every little detail right away. Future you is at least as creative as present moment you.

I love the idea of Microscope. I’m really eager to try it out some day.

What is the ongoing appeal of tabletop RPGs for you?
It’s exactly the same appeal as going on a road trip with a really geeky pal. It’s talking crazy ideas with my best friends. That’s the heart of it. I’m not a convention gaming guy, I don’t like gaming with a group of strangers. I’m in it more for the company and the resulting ideas than the game itself.

Are you primarily a GM or a Player? Which do you prefer?
I’d love to GM, but to do it really well takes preparation. My friend +Lowell Francis  (http://ageofravens.blogspot.com/) has given me a high standard for table running. He knows the rules backwards and forwards, he’s picked out musical tracks for probable dramatic beats, and he never lets the narrative slow down. It’s glorious to behold.

It’s like grilling a great steak. It looks simple, but I don’t have the time and tools to make a properly dry aged and grilled steak at home, so I leave it to the masters. I’m a player, because my obsessive comics work doesn’t leave room to become great at another hobby.

As an artist, is your approach to gaming different, do you think? Do you create characters/settings from a visual perspective first?

When I was a teenage Dungeon Master my older brother would stop the game if NPC actions or the setting made no sense. This made me appreciate well told minor characters in every media. Every character has their own story and reasons. Buildings are built and adapted to how the people in them live. When I draw I try to think this through. I like to start with a simple visual cue for a character, but how I flesh it out comes from gaming.

If you could work on a comic adaptation of any RPG, what would it be and why?

I’d love to do something like Jared Sorenson's octaNe: premium uNleaded, if not a licensed comic. I suspect he borrowed some ideas from my comic Oktane so I don’t feel guilty with the thought. It’s a game set in a “psychotronic” post-apocalyptic America where Elvis impersonating samurai monkeys cruise the outlaw highways with extraterrestrial luchadores and genetically engineered warrior nuns. If I ever meet Clay Moore I’d love to see if he’d be interested.

If you have one of your comics adapted to an RPG, which would it be and why?

Other than Oktane, my genius GM friend Lowell told me he’d like to run a campaign inspired by Global Frequency using the Hollowpoint rules. That makes me very, very proud.

Kenneth Hite's The Nazi Occult From Osprey Adventures

I'm not sure which came first for me, the Nazi Occultists in Raiders of the Lost Ark, or the ones that were in the early days of Roy Thomas' retro-revival comic set in the (then) World War II Earth-2 continuity of the All-Star Squadron from DC Comics. Regardless of which came first, both of these sources imprinted upon me (and probably countless other geeks of my age) that the Nazi bad guys should be occultists.

Gaming has long followed this idea, with more Nazi Occultist bad guys than you could shake a rune-scribed stick blessed by an Eastern holy man.

If you're a gamer and you do not know who +Kenneth Hite is, you can take a few minutes and go over his Wikipedia page/resume. One of the foremost horror/occult writers in tabletop RPGs, Hite has also been writing a lot of non-fiction over the years as well. The latest in his non-fiction works is for a new imprint of the historical war publishers Osprey that is called Osprey Adventures. Hite's book for this imprint The Nazi Occult combines historical fact and historical speculation to create a history book that isn't a dry or uninteresting read.

To be honest, much of what Hite covers in The Nazi Occult would be considered to probably be the material from bad horror novels...if it wasn't taken from historical facts. In part, that is also what makes this book so scary. Madmen who put so much faith and belief in myths and legends being the truth came so close to nearly controlling Europe during World War II, and a lot of these myths and legends are explained in this book.

On a level, much of what the Nazi Occultists put forward was likely to be little more than propaganda to bolster their scary and extreme viewpoints, but this book also demonstrates just how many people believed the propaganda as truth and thought that the war would be won as much by Germany's magical forces as it would be conventional troups.

The Nazi Occult is a slim volume but packed full of facts, names and information about the occult traditions of Nazi Germany, as well as the time leading up to that. The graphic design is top notch and helps to overcome what could be a blistering wall of text in the book. Hite presents a lot of information in the book in an entertaining manner. The art in the book is a combination of photos of the people involved taken at the time with scans of book and magazine covers and new art that reproduces scenes of what the Nazis thought they were doing, as well as some of Hite's historical speculation.

This is a solid, information-packed book that can be as much use to someone of interest to the period from a historical view, as it would be to a gamer. For a gamer these is a lot of information that is nearly begging to be included in World War II games that deal with the Nazis and their interest in the occult worlds. If you are in either of those two categories, I suggest that you grab a copy of this book from your local book store. You will not be disappointed in it.

Machinations Of The Space Princess Playtests

One of the things that we have been talking about behind the curtain here at the Dorkland! blog is to augment our usual "capsule" reviews (talking about games by reading them) with Hangout-based playtest reviews. Obviously, this isn't something that we are going to be able to do with everything, but when we can do it we would like to provide as many angles as we can.

Recently we played a couple of sessions of +James Desborough's Machinations of the Space Princess game. A couple of the bloggers back the Indigogo campaign, so that got us some early access to the rules. +David Rollins, one of the new bloggers here, ran a couple of sessions of it. We were all excited about the game, many of us being fans of science fiction, and that's what lead us to back, and then play a couple of sessions of the game.

Machinations of the Space Princess, despite calling itself an "old school" game, really owes a lot more to D&D 3.x and D20 Future than it does the Lamentations of the Flame Princess rules that were used as the game's starting off point. That isn't automatically a bad thing, but it did cause us some problems with expectations of the game. All of us have previous experience with Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which actually caused us trouble during play. Those expecting Machinations of the Space Princess to be the result of the equation of Lamentations of the Flame Princess + European science fiction may be disappointed. The game really diverged quickly from its base and took it into directions that were both heavier (from a rules angle) and more confusing in places.

Like I said, it could be that some of our troubles came up from the fact that we were expecting an "old school" game and instead received something different. Not different bad, but just not the game that we thought that we would be getting.

While we had fun with the game, we felt that much of that came more from the group itself than the game. Obviously what we played was a playtest draft, and hopefully there will be some changes made in the final version that is supposed to be out in July.

The parts we enjoyed: 

Character creation was fun. You can make interesting and varied characters with the system. Some of the rules were a bit confusing as to how many options characters received, but we decided on a ruling based on an extrapolation of a couple of the rules. The game went out of its way to support the weird and sleazy style of science fiction in the Heavy Metal/Metal Hurlant vein. There was plenty of support for creating weird alien races for the game. The game did a pretty good job of spelling out what kind of game that it was, and tried its best to support those things.

The parts we didn't enjoy:

The game was fiddly. The game was very fiddly for a gaming touting itself as an "old school" game. There were a lot of moving parts to character creation and combat, and they didn't always work the way that they should have. You can see us having troubles with the combat rules in our playtesting. Being called an "old school" game, our expectations were different from what we got out of the game, and I think how combat worked was a prime example of that. There was also a disconnect to the rules at time, as things were attempted in order to bring "balance" to the game that ended up not making sense in play.

The things that we didn't get to see:

This was a text-only playtest draft of the rules that we used, so we did not get to see the art from +Satine Phoenix, which was an important selling point to many of us in the initial crowdfunding campaign. This isn't a negative against the game. The cover provided, at the time, was a great and evocative piece of art, stylistically idiosyncratic and different from a lot of what you see in games today. Gaming seems to have forgotten its idiosyncratic past in favor of more homogenized experiences. Seeing that style coming back is a good thing.

Once the book is officially released, we may revisit our review of the game.

Superstar Artist Trevor Hairsine Joins Valiant as Exclusive Creator

In advance of the release of Eternal Warrior #1 this September, Valiant is proud to announce that superstar artist Trevor Hairsine has signed on as the publisher's next exclusive artist!

 

A veteran of 2000 AD and Judge Dredd Megazine, Hairsine made his mainstream comics breakthrough in 2002 as the artist of the acclaimed mini-series Cla$$war. Shortly thereafter, Hairsine moved to Marvel, where was named to the first wave of up-and-coming "Young Guns," alongside Jim Cheung, Olivier Coipel, David Finch, Adi Granov, and Steve McNiven. From 2003 onward, Hairsine penciled several high-profile titles, including Ultimate Six with writer Brian Michael Bendis, X-Men: Deadly Genesis with writer Ed Brubaker, and Ultimate Nightmare with writer Warren Ellis. 

 

Hairsine made his Valiant debut earlier in early 2013, illustrating the prelude to the best-selling "Planet Death" storyline in X-O Manowar and, at present, is completing an acclaimed four-issue run on Harbinger with co-artist Khari Evans. On September 11th, the newly Valiant-exclusive artist will launch his first ongoing series for Valiant with New York Times best-selling writer Greg Pak in the pages of Eternal Warrior #1.

 

"I had a blast working on X-O Manowar and Harbinger, and couldn't be more excited about launching Eternal Warrior with Greg Pak," said Hairsine. "Valiant's an incredibly exciting place to be, and I'm looking forward to making great comics with them for some time to come."

 

"Trevor is one of the premier artists in comics and with good reason," said Valiant Executive Editor Warren Simons. "His work is nothing short of stunning, and, at the helm of Eternal Warrior with Greg Pak, they're readying an absolute monster of a book."

 

Hitting shops on September 11th, Eternal Warrior #1 is the first issue of all-new ongoing series featuring Valiant's most feared immortal, the Eternal Warrior. Across ten millennia and a thousand battlefields, Gilad Anni-Padda has traversed the darkest, most mysterious corners of history. But the horror and bloodshed of constant warfare has finally taken its toll on the man myth calls the Eternal Warrior…and he has abdicated his duties as the Fist and the Steel of Earth for a quiet life of seclusion. But when a blood vendetta from the distant past suddenly reappears in the modern day, he must decide if he will return to the ways of war…for the child who betrayed him thousands of years ago…

 

Hairsine joins Eisner Award-winning artist Cary Nord (X-O Manowar, Conan) and New York Times best-selling writer Joshua Dysart (Harbinger Wars, Harbinger) as the next addition to Valiant’s roster of exclusive talent.

 

For more information on Eternal Warrior, X-O Manowar, and the rest of the Valiant Universe, visit Valiant on Facebook, on Twitter and at ValiantUniverse.com.

 

 

Some of the New Voices

In case you haven't seen any of these panels from the +ConTessa online convention, watch them. I think these will be a good demonstration of why I asked +Stacy Dellorfano and +David Rollins to join me here on Dorkland!

WTF is the OSR:

and the I Hit It With My Axe Reunion panel:

If you haven't seen either of these, they're some great stuff. If you have seen them, watch them again.

And of course +Josh Thompson helped our team go on to victory in the Lamentations of the Flame Princess competitive game:

And of course you can catch me on the panel about online gaming from ConTessa as well:

The New Faces of the Dorkland! Blog

Face Front True Believers!

Today starts a new era for the Dorkland! blog, as it gets closer to its 10th anniversary this September. As I mentioned the other day, three new bloggers are going to join me here on the blog. That should make us three or four times dorkier than previously (math isn't a strong suit around these parts, so we'll take what we get).

This means that Dorkland! is going to be able to expand into new areas of dorkiness beyond my regular interests and cover things that had previously been beyond the scope of just a single writer. There's already been a swell of writers, designers and publishers wanting us to talk about their stuff, and if you want to be in on this just send me an email at christopher <dot> helton at the Gmail and I will connect you with one of our fine bloggers.

Let's meet the new faces of Dorkland!

First off, +Stacy Dellorfano, the creator and organizer of +ConTessa, the online gaming convention lead by women and for everybody. She's a fan of comics and Doctor Who and (this might be the strike against her) the World of Darkness. We try to not hold that last part against her. Stacy is the most experienced in blogging of the new people (despite having done it wrong for so long, according to some), so I am hoping that she brings a unique perspective to the blog because of her being from California.

+Josh Thompson is our blogging wild card. Also hailing from the American South, he likes playing characters that allow him to stay in the hallway while everyone else is embroiled in the fighting. He's a fan of both old and new schools of gaming, and will lead the charge on coverage of the Savage Worlds game for the blog. When not writing for the Dorkland! blog he cosplays as a morning drive disc jockey.

Underneath that smiling exterior, +David Rollins apparently is plotting the downfall of the OSR. At least that's what the YouTube comments say from his panel appearance during the ConTessa convention. David is Canadian and likes maple syrup and real beers. He is a fan of D&D B/X and the Talislanta game. He is here mostly because we can now claim to be an international coalition of bloggers, which is like an Axis of Evil for some.

So, these are the new faces of the Dorkland! blog. They will be joining me in this den of iniquity and pushing their own brands of biased opinions. Over the next couple of weeks you will see their voices joining mine around here as we talk about the geeky, dorky things that get us excited (or piss us off).

Ch-ch-ch-Changes

 With the 10th anniversary of the Dorkland! blog just around the corner, there are some changes coming. I will make a formal announcement tomorrow, but the first (and probably BIGGEST) change coming is that I will be adding more bloggers to Dorkland. Starting next week a stalwart brand of three new faces will grace this blog.

The reasons for this are many. After 10 years, I get a lot of requests for interviews, reviews and other considerations by designers, writers and publishers here on the blog, more in fact than one person can handle on their own (even if that person is me). Having more bloggers talking about things here means that more of these things can get addressed. Also having more bloggers means that the scope of the blog can be widened, and things that I might not have normally addressed can get some coverage here on the blog. I am excited and nervous about the change. Since the fall of 2003, Dorkland has been my baby, and has reflected my singular and unique viewpoint of the varied worlds of geekery out there. Now, I am expanding that to include other viewpoints, ones that may not always agree with me. That is a little bit scary. However, I've known these new bloggers for a while, and I think that they are going to bring some excitement and energy along with their perspectives.

Things may be a bit clumsy over the next few weeks, as we get used to each other and working together on things. Regardless, I will work to keep my same standards for the blog. Blogging may not be journalism in my opinion, but I can attempt to try to keep some journalistic standards. While Dorkland may have biases, we will always try to be impartial and talk about things that excite us, and talk to the people who are doing cool stuff and share that stuff with all of you.

We are also in the figuring out stages of stepping into podcasting, in conjunction with the blog. That is probably going to take a little longer, as none of us have ever done podcasting before. I have come close with with the Dorkland! Roundtables (which will continue on an infrequent basis) video blogging, but that still isn't exactly the same thing. There will likely be more video blogging as we all explore the new tools that YouTube is almost constantly unveiling.

Expect a lot of changes and excitement around the blog over the next few months.

Cyberpunk 101: The Anthologies

In a few weeks I am going to be starting up a Cyberpunk 2020 game on G+ Hangouts. In addition to boning up on the rules (I don't think that I have read the Cyberpunk rules in at least 6 years), I decided to dust off some fiction on my bookshelves and reread the source material. Ever since my first paperback copy of William Gibson's Neuromancer, I have been a fan of the genre. I remember getting it to read for my first ever airplane trip, when I went off to college in Indiana. I had read about the book in a Rolling Stone review and knew that I had to read it. The rest was history.

Today, in this post, I am going to talk about fiction anthologies. For me, the stories in these anthologies represent a cross section of Cyberpunk fiction from the orthodoxy (Bruce Sterling's seminal Mirrorshades anthology) to the revelatory (Larry McCaffery's Storming The Reality Studio) to the apocrypha (Peter Lamborn Wilson and Rudy Rucker's Semiotext(E) SF). Between these three books you get an excellent cross section and sampling of Cyberpunk literature, and some of the people who influenced it as well.

Since it is likely to be the one that people are least familiar with, I am going to start by talking about Semiotext(E) SF. Semiotext(E) is an underground publishing house (originally their books were distributed by the anarchist publishing house Automedia) that specialized in cutting edge cultural and political thinking that bleeds out into both fiction and non-fiction. The Semiotext(E) SF anthology looked at the science fiction of the time (a lot of which was Cyberpunk or similar in themes) and put out what they thought was some of the best representations. Assembled by mathematician and science fiction author Rudy Rucker and philosopher Peter Lamborn Wilson, their final product was not unlike Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions, in that it showed a side of science fiction that had teeth to it, unlike much of the commercially available fiction.

Many of Cyberpunk's "usual suspects" are found in this anthology: William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley and Lewis Shiner. Other names, like Rachel Pollack, Hakim Bey, Kerry Thornley and Robert Shockley, may not be as recognizable to many science fiction fans, but they were doing some cutting edge work. Early instigators and influences like William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard and Phillip Jose Farmer are also represented in this book.

 

Storming The Reality Studio is a bit different from the other two anthologies because it was meant to be a college textbook. For me, one of the nice things about this is that it has essays about cyberpunk and postmodern writing in addition to the fiction. For those without an academic bent, those can be skipped, but I think that they help to give a place and relevance to the Cyberpunk literature. This book also has the most non-fiction of the three anthologies, which might not be a selling point for everyone. It also has the usual suspects: Gibson, Rucker, Shirley, Shiner and Sterling. It also has Ballard and Burroughs, and mixes in Thomas Pynchon and Samuel R. Delany. Some of the reasons that I like Storming the Reality Studio is that it excerpts the often ignored Life During Wartime (the title influenced by the Talking Heads song) by Lucius Sheppard and has a (non-Crow) comic by James O'Barr.

The first Cyberpunk anthology, and one of the things that helped to "kickstart" the "movement" was Bruce Sterling's Mirrorshades. I saved this for last because it is likely to be the anthology that people already have. Many of these stories appeared in the issues of OMNI magazine, the Bob Guccione published magazine of science and science fiction. Obviously, the usual suspects are all here. Unlike the other two anthologies, Mirrorshades doesn't try to go wider than the "usual suspects," it was edited by one of them after all. This isn't a criticism. The stories in this anthology are some of the best out there, and for me, Pat Cadigan's Rock On and John Shirley's Freezone are seminal and important Cyberpunk stories. Ironic that they're both about musicians. I'm pretty sure that one (or both) influenced the Rockerboy in Cyberpunk 2020.

Now I will leave you to tracking down copies and reading. There will be a book club about these books (I may be kidding about that). Hopefully this starts a few discussions, now excuse me while I get back to my game prep.

Arduin!

Arduin holds a special place in gaming history. It was one of the early 3rd party "hacks" of D&D, and along with the Perrin Conventions helped to create a "West Coast style" of gaming back then. I have never actually encountered the Arduin materials previously, gaming was just much too regionalized when I was a kid and getting material like this just wasn't much of an option in my neck of the woods.

However, I received a big, heavy package from the nice people at Emperor's Choice today, chock full of Arduin goodness.

It isn't an understatement to say that there is a lot of stuff here. The (systemless) world book alone is over 800 pages of material alone. I know what my bedside reading is going to be for a while now. Check out Emperor's Choice's website (the publishers and owners of Arduin these days) while I digest and get ready to talk about David Hargrave's creations.

Writer and Artist Jim Zub: My Life As A Gamer

Being the writer of comics like Skullkickers and the Pathfinder adaptation from Dynamite Comics, it probably shouldn't surprise anyone that Jim Zub is a gamer. Jim Zub is a writer, artist and art instructor based in Toronto, Canada. Over the past ten years he’s worked for a diverse array of publishing, movie and video game clients including Disney, Warner Bros., Capcom, Hasbro, Bandai-Namco and Mattel. He is also a project manager for UDON Entertainment (which a few of you should probably know about).

He took some time out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions for me about his life as a gamer.

With what game did you get started down the path of tabletop RPGs? About how old were you when you started?

My brother and I received the classic D&D Basic ‘Red Box’ when I was around 8 years old and he was 12. Our older cousins got us hooked on D&D and we played voraciously, even though the rules were really confusing to us at times. We didn’t realize there was a difference between D&D and AD&D at first, so we were mixing and matching rule books and modules from both systems. We figured it out eventually.

What are some of your favorite games?

I’ve been playing RPGs for almost 30 years and have gone through all sorts of phases where a particular game really hit the spot. A few high points, old and new: D&D, Call of Cthulhu, TMNT and Other Strangeness, Robotech, Vampire the Masquerade, Feng Shui, Adventure! and Pathfinder.

What is the ongoing appeal of tabletop RPGs for you?

I love the collaborative storytelling nature of it. Everyone at the table is going to contribute to the story and we don’t know exactly where it’ll go but we’re all involved. There’s a wonderful spontaneity to it. With the right group just about any game system or setting can be enjoyable and entertaining.

Are you primarily a GM or a Player? Which do you prefer?
Since high school I’ve primarily been the GM. I like managing the world and NPCs that whirl around the cast, rolling with the players’ choices and expectations.

How is comic writing different from making up stuff for a game? How do the two processes complement each other for you?

Running a good tabletop game is about balancing player needs and everyone’s entertainment, while writing comics is about creating a more cohesive plot and dramatic pacing. They both involve a lot of creativity, but GMing a game isn’t just about one story or a singular narrative voice.

Playing and running games has taught me a lot about how characters interact and made it far easier for me to “get into character”. I imagine characters in a scene, I know their motivations and I’m able to generate dialogue that reflects their personality.

If you could write a comic adaptation of any RPG, what would it be and why?

Dungeons & Dragons obviously springs to mind. The name carries such powerful nostalgia for me and gamers at large. Having a D&D story in my repertoire would be pretty great. If it could be a comic story set in the kooky Planescape campaign setting, even better.

I’d also be thrilled to push outside of people’s expectations of my work and do something darker like Call of Cthulhu or Vampire the Masquerade. They’re both great properties with atmospheric and emotional intensity.

If you have one of your comics adapted to an RPG, which would it be and why?
Skullkickers is the natural choice, of course. It’s my love letter to RPGs and sword & sorcery that marinates itself in the pulp fantasy tropes I learned from tabletop gaming. It would complete some sort of cosmic cycle of game-comic-game that would probably tear a hole in the fabric of our reality.