Value of Fiction: Hope

Artist Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal

An important role that fiction sometimes plays is to give people hope. I know many people who have particular books that they turn to when things feel down or overwhelming in their own lives. In many cases, it's the Harry Potter series.

Everyone has moments that seem dark to them individually-the death of a loved one, financial ruin, the loss of a friendship, medical depression, etc. For all these things, there are stories, fictional or not, that have people overcoming the same challenges-or symbolically similar ones. When executed well and with consideration paid to those suffering, this can be reassuring to an individual that is going through suffering, even if the story is wholly fictional.

Descent into Laughter

I have very clear goals for what I need to focus on completing this month...

So, of course, I've gotten distracted by a smaller more personal project.

I recently tried to run a Numenera game for new players, mostly unfamiliar with tabletop RPGs or the setting of the Ninth World. I was using one of the adventures from Weird Discoveries. These adventures are designed to be run with little to no prep and sort of be the sort of thing one could recommend in the place of a board game. My experience running some of these with my regular players is that they have taken roughly 1.5-2 hours. We spent 3+ hours playing and didn't finish the adventure.

Which is fine. And I think that the players mostly had a good time, which is good. That's the objective.

But I was a bit surprised by how...slowly things seemed to go. Which isn't my normal experience with Numenera/Cypher System. Especially since I had chosen something I thought would be fast/exciting for my new players. I don't think either my players or I did anything wrong, and, as I said, it wasn't a bad experience. It just wasn't the experience I'd expected to have.

I spent a lot of time questioning if there was something that I could have run which would have been more in line with my objectives.

My objective was this: to find something that could introduce new players to roleplaying games with a simple system and fast-paced/exciting adventure.

Thus began my Descent.

Ruins & Robots Announcement

Humanity is gone. In their absence, robot-kind has grown and raised up its own civilization. 

I recently posted on my Facebook page about some of my upcoming projects, including (but not limited to Ruins & Robots. So, for those of you wondering, here's a little more about what that's all about.

Ruins and Robots is an upcoming series of books that I am working on. Like Heroism and Other Lies, these will be shorter books (between 15,000 and 30,000 words).