Books 79-82

[subplotkudzu]

79) Swamp Thing, volumes 6-11 (reread): Why yes, I am missing volume 5, with the first John Constantine story. I've read it before, but don't own it. This set of volumes covers through American Gothic and the Outer Space arc, and is very, very good stuff. Got me thinking about the prevlanace of space opera/SF sequences in ongoing comic books - almost everyone has their voyage into space arc, given a long enough run from single writer.

80) The Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee: Pulled this off the shelf because Mylescorcoran and his group just ran a Judge Dee game. I'm wondering how the hell Chinese detective stories setting has not been made into a professional game system! The characters have a high degree of authroity and autonomy, the genere has reliable small groups (Jidge Dee is the judge, his sherrif/watson type, along with two martial artists and a con man for his deputies), and it's an interesting social setting. I will almost certainly pitch something on this soon.

81) The Ballad of Halo Jones: one of Alan Moore's unfinished works, this 2000 AD series with Ian Gibson is a fascinating, if depressing, analysis on the need to break out of decaying soceital niches. Moore fortunately completed enough to feel like the series has a resolution, but there's clear that there's more story for Halo.

82) The Complete DR and Quinch: I'm clearly on a Moore kick here, since his books just got shelved to the front. This violent, juvenile farce done with Alan Davis was one of my first exposures to his work, and it's quite a bit of mental whiplash between this and Halo Jones, which he was writing concurrently. Not quite as funny to me as it was 22 years ago, but still funny.

Comments

[kriz1818.livejournal.com]

Does the fact that I also own and have read that collection of Judge Dee's cases have any impact?

[(Anonymous)]

There is some mysterious connection between "D.R. and Quinch" and a series which ran in National Lampoon called "O.C. and Stiggs." The latter was made into a movie, which bombed.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

Not really - it might make you more likely to vote for it, but I'm putting together a prospectus entry regardless.

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

I just finished William Sleator's Interstellar Pic.

[40yearsagotoday.livejournal.com]

"I'm wondering how the hell Chinese detective stories setting has not been made into a professional game system! "

Because Asian systems don't do too well, and the reason for that is that not too many people in the US really know how China works. In a D&D game, there's usually a broad understanding across a group of how crypto-medieval people act and how their society works. Asian setting lack that, even though gamers love them in theory. To the extent that the public has an understanding of anything, it's popular Japanese history, and these settings have always done the best, relatively. Judge Dee, with the necessary grounding in Confucianism and Chinese law and folk culture, is completely out of most folk's depth.

-D*

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

Well, not too mysterious - Moore was riffing on the National Lampoon characters for what was meant to be a 200AD one shot, but the story was so popular it spawned sequels.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

Yes, this is the translation, not his later efforts. I suspect that the later ones are _more_westernized, which would be both good and bad. I was really inspired by van Gulik's introduction that described the more common Chinese detective mystery forms that the Judge Dee novel did not follow - especially the Colombo like bit of the readers knowing right away who the criminals were, but wanting to see how the detective traps them. I'm wondering how well I could make that trope work in a game setting.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

Who needs to know how China Works?!? Detectives! Martial Artists! Ghosts! Murders! Con Men! Vast autonomy and power in the hands of the players! Come on, surely someone could have tossed together something at least as accurate as, say, 1st edition Oriental Adventures!

(Have I done San damage to Dave yet?)

[40yearsagotoday.livejournal.com]

That's what I'm talking about. OA, Kara-Tur, they didn't sell too well. Even mushed up as they were, folks avoided them for some reason. I think it was that subconsciously, they were uncomfortable because they didn't know quite what to do, and all the cool stuff you mention couldn't balance that out.

Obviously, there are exceptions. We (and most of the people we know) are among them. But we're still exceptions.

-D*

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

Then how do you explain the gangbusters sales of "Legends of the Five Rings"? I know the card game had something to do with it, but it was a damn popular game.

To clarify however, I was more questioning the absence amongst the Indie games movement rather than why Wizards of the Coast or White Wolf haven't done a Chinese Detective Game. There's plenty of small press stuff getting wide circulation these days that has no problem with odd or complex cultures. In the age of niche gaming (which we are in now, and likely for a very long while to come) there are easily rules for exceptions.