Wayward Pines, Last Ship, Metamorphosis Alpha, Eternal World and Dresden

Lets get right to it. The harvesting book work continues. ‘Nuff said.

Buck Who? Chapter 30 went up on Friday night. 240,000 words long as of that chapter. I finally have an end-game in the works. The next part of the book has been planned out. Still going to take a while for me to write it, but at least the end is in sight.

Another couple of mutants went up on Monday. I’ve tried to keep up with what I mentioned, about making actual deformed monstrosities. Tomorrow will see three more go up, one of which is a deformed creature, horribly so, based on a real-life genetic disorder.

This week’s mutants were the Proteus, and the Ningen Kabanoki.

Anyone who knows me or reads my weekly blog knows I collect games. A lot of the time I buy games for inspiration for my work. A few weeks ago I mentioned the new Mutant Crawl Classic which is slated to be released next year. I ended up buying the Dungeon Crawl classic RPG core book to get an idea how the system would end up working.

I’ve also picked up quite a few OSR books for various reasons, one of the biggest being nostalgia.

Over the many years I’ve been involved in the gaming world, I have seen the entire range of artwork. Some absolutely mind-blowingly beautiful. Some mediocre, and more of it just down-right horrible.

The whole point behind this is – why the hell do so many OSR insist on using lousy art for their books? I guess they want to have the retro feel to their work, but come on – lets get some of the great artists doing the work. Sure, even the less than stellar artists need to have their work profiled, but I have rather exacting taste when it comes to art.

I would much rather see great art than crappy art. So lets dump the crappy art for good art in the OSR books!

Speaking of OSR books, last week was my birthday. I turned 47. Yeah, getting old, but unlike a lot of other people, the older I get, the better I become. Many people my age slow down, let their bodies go to seed (if they were ever in shape to begin with), and so on.

I’m the exact opposite. I am stronger, faster and in the best shape of my life. My skill as a writer has continued to grow with each passing year and I’ve gained numerous skills.  The best part is that I don’t look my age – most people believe I’m in my late 30’s at the most.

Getting off track here.

My son purchased the Metamorphosis Alpha collectors edition for my birthday. I have been going through the book and reliving the OSR days of Gamma World. I never did play this particular game, but I can see how GW was influenced by it. I even went out and purchased the various modules and supplements that were available for the game through the various RPG sites.

God above, how easy it is for me to make tiny changes to my work to make it compatible with this game. I haven’t said anything to my editor Michael Varhola yet, but I would very much like to take a lot of my Wisdom from the Wastelands issues, do some minor re-writing and have them sold as MA compatible products.

For the Mutation book, I certainly will be including slight conversions so that all the mutations in the book will be fully compatible with the game. It will mean extra work once I start back in on the book, but that’s fine, I have a lot of material that needs to be added and changed anyhow.

If there is one aspect of MA that bothers me, it’s the price. I’ve had one person bitch to me about this complaint, but I don’t really give a shit what he thinks. $6 for a 20-30 page supplement, which I have to print out myself, is a little on the expensive side.

Funny thing is though – I ended up paying for the products. I have all the MA material that was available and have printed it out. I checked the Goodman games site and see a new supplement is going to be released soon, so I will purchase it and print it out as well.

After that, I will end up getting the material bound into a book so I don’t have pages and pages of material flapping all over the place.

Is this a review? I guess so. The material is seriously crunch light, which means for a gamer like myself I would have to put a lot of effort into the game. So much is left up to the GM to fill in the gaps.

Oh, and there is one thing I will point out that bugged the shit out of me. You have to use either metric or imperial, do not  mix the two! I found that happen several times in the book. As well as use Judge or Referee when speaking of the person running the game, do not mix them constantly.

Did that take away from the material for me? No, not at all. If I was reviewing this on site, would I reduce the overall score I gave the book? Again, not a chance, it’s just a minor issue for me, that’s all.

Now, as usual, last week I finished off two books. The first was a novel called Eternal World by Christopher Farnsworth. This novel, in a nutshell is about the fabled Fountain of Youth. A Spaniard did in fact discover this legend and brought friends to the site. An enemy was made in the process and so began a 500 year war between the Spaniard and this enemy.

Enter a brilliant scientists who wants to find a cure for a rare genetic disorder that killed his little sister. He is hired by a company called Conquest to do research into life-rejuvenation. Little does he know who or what he is working for and working with.

I can’t go into too much detail, but the novel is well written, and the science behind the work was researched, and as such it made a rather entertaining story of the search for eternal life. Would I recommend this novel to others? By all means!

I also finished a series of short stories by Jonathan Maberry called ‘Darkness on the edge of Town’. This is a series of short stories, all but one are set several years after the events of the Pine Deep trilogy. It was great revisiting the stories and several of the characters that survived the events of the trilogy. If you haven’t read the novels, and if you like horror, then don’t deny yourself the pleasure of these novels and especially these stories, which are an extended epilogue of the trilogy.

And as usual I did manage to finish off some Television. Two series, as a matter of fact. The first was season 1 of ‘The Last Ship’. A deadly plague has spread like wild-fire across the globe, toppling nations in a matter of a few months. A single US destroyer is in the Arctic on a secret mission to find the original source of this disease, although the captain and the crew have no idea.

The first season deals with a rogue Russian ship who is out to take the research for themselves, to use it to gain power. During the first season it is mainly about looking for a cure. The final episode sets up the theme for the second season.

Although not as good a post-apocalyptic series as say, the 100, I still really got into this series and I am very much looking forward to purchasing season 2 to watch.

Then we started watching another series called ‘Wayward Pines’. This one started out as a mystery, one centered around a small town in Idaho called Wayward Pines. It is made perfectly clear from the first episode that something is seriously wrong with the town, and by the end of the first episode the main character Ethan, discovers that the town is surrounded by a heavy, electrified wall.

It is not until episode 5 does the watcher finally discover exactly what is going on and just how messed up it really is.

I loved it! I won’t spoil it for my readers, but I cannot recommend this series enough! I also purchased the first novel in the series and I will be listening to it fairly soon.

As for the spoiler, lets put it to you this way… what a mind-fuck!

Finally I also finished off the six issue comic series ‘Down Town’. This is a Dresden Files story, and it deals with Baron Marcone and the Unseele accords. Something is murdering those who are paying Marcone for protection – but not the usual protection racket, but protection against the supernatural.

It is up to Harry, Molly, Mouse and Marcone to find what is killing the people and put an end to it.

A nice little story to tie you over until the next Dresden Files novel comes out, which I am hoping will be next year.

And that, my gentle readers, is that. This blog turned out to be a little longer than usual, but that’s okay. I actually had quite a bit to talk about this time out.

So until next Sunday, please follow me on Twitter and do me a huge favor and like my personal author page on Facebook.

Stay happy, and enjoy life!