Concert: Marina and the Diamonds

Cambridge Corn Exchange, 20th November 2015

I've been to a handful of rock and pop concerts this year (and yeah, I've neglected to blog about them), and one thing that's become obvious is that high-quality, presumably back-projected video screens have now become financially entirely accessible to, well, a lot of the sort of bands who play the Corn Exchange. Marina and the Diamonds are using theirs to show some pretty good pop-art-flavoured visuals during their current tour, but I suspect that the system isn't entirely bug-free, and may have been the cause of the dread Technical Difficulties which generated about an hour's delay between the support act (who didn't make much of an impression on me; I think they could do with something to fill the sonic space between the thud of bass and drums and the ping of synthesisers and falsetto of the singer) and the main event. At least, the screens once or twice displayed giant Windows menu bars in that time, which I take as a sign of glitches. Add in a notable amount of time spent queueing outside before the doors opened, and, well, things ran a bit late. Then, it turned out that the lighting designer had decided to silhouette Marina herself with a full-strength white spot, angled up from behind her, for some songs. Which would be fine if it hadn't meant everyone in the balcony going "Aaargh" and shielding their eyes...

All of which techie wobbliness was rather unfortunate, because it was actually rather a good gig. Marina Diamandis combines a genuine talent for writing good old-fashioned catchy choruses with a certain amount of stage presence and charisma. This in turn meant that, although she had assembled a highly competent band for this tour, she genuinely didn't need to hire any backing singers; when she wanted vocal filling, all she had to do was point her microphone at the standing audience down at the front and tell them to supply it. (Diamandis does say that the "Diamonds" are her fans, after all...) This approach did leave her slightly more restrained and introspective songs, such as the rather cool "Immortal", looking a little out of place, but overall this was an effective pop-as-in-popular performance. Diamandis manages to be a plausible feminist while wearing three different glittery costumes, one including cute mouse ears, in a ninety minute show, too.

It has to be said that Diamandis's songs aren't as clever as they maybe think they are; the message in the likes of "Savages" is hardly subtle. But then, it's pop music, and its heart is absolutely in the right place. Worth a little waiting and some being dazzled.

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Hmm, I didn't follow up the previous post. Well, The Wars of Atlantis did appear (and still looks nice). But anyway, the other significant thing is the appearance of Transhuman Space: Bio-Tech 2100, my latest TS product, as a PDF from Warehouse 23 - an extended analysis of the place of biotechnology in the world of 2100, in both historical and game-mechanioal terms. Other stuff is still waiting. Print buying can evidently be a big job these days.

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Just in case anyone was wondering, yes, my writing projects continue.

• I've just turned in the first draft of another GURPS project. As usual, I can't talk titles, and I don't know how long this will take to filter through the several stages of the publication process... And the first draft came in seriously over-long... But anyway, it should be interesting when it eventually becomes a saleable PDF.
• The Discworld RPG is completely out of my hands, and moving forward rather slowly - but I gather it's definitely still moving, honest. I'll be running one of my demo scenarios at Stabcon this weekend, actually.
• The Wars of Atlantis is still scheduled for release on the 20th of this month - but I've now got all my comp copies, and they look very nice indeed.

Small on Paper

By way of a small footnote to the immediately previous entry; a few printed copies of The Small Folk are now available from Leisure Games; see their online catalogue here. In addition, a few more should be available from the Modiphius Entertainment stand at UK Games Expo next weekend.

Small, But Perfectly Formed

The wait is over; The Small Folk is out.

What's it about? Well, here's the blurb:

The Small Folk have been lurking on the margins of human society since before the dawn of history, but we humans don't tend to notice them. They're really good at hiding from us. They're also good at arguing, picking fights, sulking, and splitting up into cliques. But they're tough, clever (on their good days), and armed with an array of startling magical powers.

The Small Folk is a game of wainscot urban fantasy, built round the popular FATE rules engine. Take your pick of seven different cliques, from aggressive goblins to oh-so-superior brownies and technophile gremlins (or the cliqueless, because some people just have to be different), and an array of skills and magical powers, personalise your character with aspects and stunts, and get out there and get underfoot.

Oh, and watch out for cats, rats, hawks, mousetraps, and your neighbours.

 Some History, For Them As Are Interested

Ten years or so ago, I wrote a chapter for Guardians of Order's Dreaming Cities, an urban fantasy sourcebook for their Tri-Stat system. It was quite well reviewed, and some people seemed especially to like my chapter. Then GoO went broke, and the rights to the chapter reverted to me.

Over the next few years, I dabbled with various ideas about what to do with this material, and I eventually plumped for self-publishing. So I looked around for an Open Gaming License rule set to use for this purpose, and plumped for Fate, and specifically the "Free FATE" variant. After I'd plugged the system and rules together, filled and sanded the joints, and applied a layer of varnish (with the aid of some very useful peer review), I had a 116-page book which I could sell as a PDF with a reasonably clear conscience.

Then, well, stuff intervened for a while. But in due course, I commissioned Steve Stiv to do me a cover (and got a little bit of really good interior art out of the deal as well, because Steve is a great guy), and sorted out a business arrangement with Warehouse 23, and now, here it is. Yours for $11.99.

For Those Who Prefer Paper

 Although this is basically an electronic publication, just as an experiment, I had a few copies printed off by Lulu,  and I've now sold some of those on to Leisure Games. So they should be available from there soon, if not already.

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Hmm, I've got quite a lot of stuff coming along nicely at the moment, but not much about which I can be very specific. Maybe worth trailing some teasers, though...

Most of it involves Steve Jackson Games, which I guess won't surprise anyone who knows my work much. I turned in yet another Transhuman Space manuscript a little while ago, and that'll be working its way up the editorial to-do pile at the company right now. Meanwhile, the new edition of the Discworld RPG has finally escaped from the last stages of layout polishing and preparation, and so far as I know the cover design is about done, so it's basically waiting on things like print scheduling. Look for it later in the year (and look for announcements from the company for more direct news of The Process). And on top of that, I've just today signed a contract for another GURPS project, which hopefully will turn into a small string of PDF publications... But I can't say very much about that yet.

Which all comes out sounding a bit too cagey, so I'm pleased to be able to point out that one of my other projects has now been officially mentioned in public, so I can confirm its title: The Wars of Atlantis, from Osprey Books. That link goes to its Amazon page, mind you, as Osprey won't be putting it up on their own Web site just yet. And the cover will probably be different on the published book, I gather. Anyway, this was fun to do; let's just say that five parts Plato, four parts Diodorus Siculus, one part Internet lunacy, and a pinch of Athanasius Kircher's cartography, turned out to make quite a spectacular wartime epic (with an apocalyptic tragedy at  the end, naturally).

And the thing I recently said was Coming Soon is ... still coming soon, honestly. The writing, art, editing, and layout are all done; I just have to sort out the business arrangements for putting the thing on the market. Which hopefully won't need more than a few more days.

Coming Soon

I have a private project which should be going public in the next few days, but one thing I can say now is that it's got a lovely bit of art attached to it, courtesy of Steve Stiv. So here's a small teaser:

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2015 begins well, with my new Transhuman Space product seeing publication: Bioroid Bazaar. Excuse me while I quote from the official blurb:

Transhuman Space: Bioroid Bazaar completes the job started in Transhuman Space: Changing Times of updating relevant game templates from earlier Transhuman Space supplements to GURPS Fourth Edition, this time covering the setting's genetic marvels and half-human monstrosities. It also gathers a couple of Fourth Edition templates from other supplements, and features a few new designs, including the disturbing Leonardo and Bingmayong bioroids and the tragic J7-S53 "upgrade." ...

Short Time Periods, Briefly

Last year, I expressed the hope that there'd be a live album derived from the Alison Moyet tour of that time. The good news, in brief, is that there is.

"minutes and seconds live" is just a CD when all's said and done, of course, well put-together and clear on the ear but not the same as being there. Still, it preserves the interesting rearrangements of some of Moyet's classic songs, and it's a decent memento of an excellent tour. Recommended to those to whom that means something.

Time is Relative (I Guess)

Gosh, Christopher Nolan really, really wants to have made 2001: A Space Odyssey, doesn't he?

It's difficult to say much about Interstellar without either giving away large parts of the plot or going on at similar length to the two-and-three-quarter-hour movie, neither of which I'm much inclined to do here, but I'm not certain that there was one moment during that time when I wasn't asking myself which other movie this frame was borrowing from, and usually the answer was easy. (Okay. towards the end, there was a scene where I was just trying to remember which SF novel cover the image was based on.) And I'm really not a movie geek, at all. It wasn't always Kubrick's creation - actually, that point of reference didn't become blatant until some was into the movie - but Nolan's naked adoration for 2001 was clearly what made Interstellar happen. He then inflated the result into a love letter to a whole bunch of SF movies. However, he replaced Kubrick and Clarke's sometimes desperate scrabbling for the numinous with a lot of rather more Hollywood-conventional explanation, most of it unconvincing.

But I'll leave it to other people to break down the flaky astrophysics, highly dubious planetology, inexplicable spaceship design, and protracted sentimentality. The fact remains that "If you're going to steal, steal from the best" remains a pretty sound rule to live by. I don't know how much it helped that I saw this movie in a cinema with a 35mm projector - I'm really not a movie geek - and maybe IMAX would make it even better, but anyway, I'm not begrudging those three hours of my life. Sometimes, you just have to go along for the ride.

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Oops, I almost forgot to note - I had a fairly substantial article in last month's Pyramid, entitled "Dungeons of Mars" - the subject matter being crossing dungeon fantasy over with planetary romance.

And on a more substantial note - while one of my short Transhuman Space supplements moves through the production process towards publication, I've just signed a contract for another.

Gosh

I appear to have acquired a Wikipedia page. Or had one imposed on me, I suppose. Vanity tends to the first. On the other hand, "This biographical article relating to a role-playing game designer is a stub." Well, yes. It's not very complete. Kind of a strange feeling, being a stub.

(If anyone with Wikipedia-editing habits ever wants to expand it, without engaging in the dread Original Research, I can think of a number of places to find out things about me that I've put in the public domain myself. Most of them are only slightly frivolous and not actually untrue, even.)

Respect

The question has to be - how long did John Allison spend designing this? And how many of those comics would one love to see to exist?

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The Sinbad the Sailor book mentioned in the immediately preceding post is now officially on sale - and yes, I've got my paper copies, and they're gorgeous. I guess I should look for my name on Osprey spinners in bookshops. It's available in paper and electronic formats.

By way of gamer-geek celebration, I even created a GURPS treatment of Sinbad.

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(This is now listed on Osprey's 'Web page as an upcoming book, so I guess that I can talk about it here.)

A little while ago, I received one of those pleasing e-mails (as in, "an offer of paying work") from Osprey Publishing, of "military history with amazingly good art" fame. They have recently expanded into coverage of myths, legends, and other branches of the fantastical, they wanted to do a Sinbad the Sailor book, and somebody had pointed them my way.

To cut the long story short, the book is now scheduled for release in September. I'll leave it to others to comment on my work (in this case, a lot of clarifying paraphrase and some notes on the work of the likes of Tim Severin and Ray Harryhausen), but I will say now that the main illustrations, by ªRu-Mor, are absolutely gorgeous. I'm looking forward to having a paper copy in my hands.

The NHS and care.data

A matter that may be of interest to UK readers; the NHS may be trying to pull a bit of a fast one, and make the sale or release of personal patient data - not adequately anonymised - to outside organisations look like a patient care arrangement. The name "care.data" seems to be frankly misleading. See http://www.care-data.info/ for more on this, http://brief.care-data.info/ for a shorter version, or https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/14156524/caredata_trifold.pdf for an explanatory leaflet, including a form for those who want to refuse permission for their data to be released.

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Suddenly, we have a positive plethora of Transhuman Space publications. David Chart's Wings of the Rising Sun (edited by yours truly) is now available from e23.

It represents, I think, a cool extension of the setting. I sold the demo game I ran at conventions using this material as "Transhuman Space meets anime, with a touch of Supermarionation", and I think that I'd stand by that. It also offers the possibility of extended campaigns where the objective is to help people, rather than the RPG-traditional picking of fights. Though you still get to pilot hypersonic ramjets down from orbit.

On Receiving the Ebenezer Scrooge Memorial E-Mail

We buy our gas supply through EDF Energy, because they're not self-evidently worse than any other companies in the business, and I let them e-mail me the quarterly bills, because why not? However, I was a little surprised when the latest such bill showed up this morning. Yep, on December 25th, having been transmitted the same day.

Guys, really. I'm sure that it's terribly efficient keeping your computers running 24/7, but really, Christmas Day? We have no worries on this score, but some people are tight enough for cash that bills are a genuine source of stress for them. If nothing else, a company looking this clueless in relation to PR doesn't fill one with confidence regarding their cluefulness elsewhere.

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I nearly forgot to mention - but it merits a post; the latest issue of Pyramid magazine, #3/62, not only includes an article by myself, but is dedicated to the "Transhuman Space" setting, for which I'm line editor, so I feel a definite proprietorial affection for it.

Actually, I honestly think that it's a pretty good issue whatever. It has five substantial articles, and it's more or less designed to answer the tiresome old question of what gamers can actually do in Transhuman Space. There are five answers here; me talking about all the stuff one can run into in Port Lowell, on Mars; some character templates and ideas for a street-level game; the wherewithal for a military campaign; an idea about ultra-tech indentures, with assorted game possibilities; and a good bit of material on the world of the ultra-rich leisure class "Eloi", and what they can get up to in their copious free time.

Concert: Alison Moyet

Cambridge Corn Exchange, 16th October 2013.

I confess I hadn't been following any news or reviews before I went off to this gig, so I came to things quite fresh. To start with, I was interested to see what sort of backing band Alison Moyet would bring with her. This is, after all, a woman who moved from '80s pop to jazz standards, a stint on a musical, and even things like Purcell operatic arias (with a voice that can work with all this), trailing a range of backing musicians to suit. Well, come the time, on came ... a couple of synthesiser players, looking worryingly like the guys who come on when Bill Bailey is doing a Kraftwerk parody. Yes, the former lead singer of Yazoo had decided to revert to electronica for this tour.

And very good they were too, actually. The two guys were actually multi-instrumentalists (and one also acted as a backing singer, often I'm pretty sure singing higher than Moyet herself), and the set was built round a really good mix of tracks from Moyet's latest album, The Minutes, and from her back catalogue. From deep in that catalogue, in fact, as she commented when pointing out that at least one of these songs was written when she was 16. I can quite believe that the lyrics of "Nobody's Diary" came from a bright, passionate teenager; if she also created that small gem of a synthesiser riff back then, she really was a prodigy.

(Alison Moyet herself was looking damn good, by the way. Apparently, she's been saying in interviews that she thinks she may have overdone the weight loss a bit, and nobody could blame her if she put a couple of pounds back on. But she sure as hell doesn't look unhealthy in a black blouse and jeans. Definitely an inspiration to her generation.)

She announced that she had been rearranging the old songs, not wanting to act as a human jukebox; some of the rearrangements were more dramatic than others - notably slowing down "Is This Love?" to a wilful extreme, and setting "Only You" (a song whose innate melancholy is a bit at odds with its poppy jauntiness) in a minor key. In general, everything worked great, and I got the impression that Moyet herself was enjoying the process. Which probably makes this the best way to handle assembling a set of songs from across a thirty-year career. Oh, and you can dance to a lot of them, too, as was probably sort of the point of putting a straightforward rendition of "Don't Go" at the end of the encores. If some of the newer songs had fewer catchy hooks than some of the early numbers, building instead on a foundation of crunching rhythm guitar, they still worked in their own way, sounding like theme tunes for a James Bond movie if Bond went a little bit gothic.

Moyet gave "Filigree", one of the key tracks from The Minutes (and a song which is loaded with gorgeous hooks), a long introduction in which she explained it was about the experience of realising that the trick is to wait for the moments when everything comes together. I think that this gig demonstrated that for me. I just hope that we might get a live album from this tour.