Subplot Kudzu

 Trying to get back in the habit of this. 

1) _Trail of Cthulhu_ by Kenneth Hite: This was very good - a clear but complex discussion of the Mythos, a solid setting shift from the 20's to the 30s to differentiate it from _Call_ and a nice introduction to the Gumshoe mechanic. I obviously need to run a one or two shot game in the near future to wrap my brain around the resource management aspects of the mechanics, but the Gumshoe system plays nicely into my genre-drive narrativist GMing style. 

2) _Happy Every After_ by Nora Roberts: This is the 4th book in the 'bride quartet' and I'd read nos 1 and 3 last year in the pre-and-post baby haze. Romance isn't my favorite genre but I have to give Roberts props - she's been doing this for 30 years and she's got her craft down. The series as a whole avoids some of the insane aspects of the genre in that the manditory bumps in the road to true love all make sense within the characters she's crafted, and when people are acting stupid they generally either know it and are working to get over it or realize it and resolve it quickly. This book has an advantage in that the the couple did not include one character who had secretly been in love with the other for years - instead they'd met 10 months ago, hung out for a few months, dated for a few months and got engaged. a quick romance, but refreshingly normal. 

3) _Naked Heat_ by "Richard Castle": Rachel and I are fans of the TV show _Castle_, which has the premise of bestselling crime novelist Richard Castle tagging along with NYPD detective Kate Beckett to get inspiration for his series of novels about his new heroine, 'Nikki Heat'. So naturally ABC is releasing some ghost written _Heat_ novels to capitalize on the show's success. In the _Heat_ novels Nikki is followed around by superstar journalist Jameson Rook for a series of articles on her. While this allows the dynamic of the book to match the dynamic of the show without actually being a novel about Castle and Beckett, it does make me wish that they'd release the Jameson Rook stories about Nikki heat so the writers could grab their own navels and yank themselves into the 11th dimension.

Alas, while the book is amusing it's also a muddled mess. _Naked Heat_ contains scenes/elements/characters of virtually every episode of _Castle_'s 2nd season, which plays nicely to the conceit of the show but makes the book too overstuffed with disparate elements. I don't mind the idea - it's cute and popcorny - but the execution is overdone in a way that other TV tie-in books aren't.

No, not the Muppets. netcurmudgeon ran session 4 of 6 in his Space Marshals game today, which spurred some game theory thoughts (not to mention being a crackin' good time).
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Just a brief entry. I'm trying to do a week of horror (and backdating so 2 posts today make for 1 yesterday...), and got to thinking about Horror games I've actually run. Not too many. Some Chill back in the day, a FUDGE horror game that will be/has been mentioned tomorrow and one session of Vampire. But I have run horror style games in other genres: the Atomic Horror of the Firestorm Effect universe, though it is a little more super-hero than it is horror, and a couple of trek sessions that could be seen as Horror.

In Lysestrata the USS Carter becomes a plague ship, with all the men on board doomed to die and the women fated for perpetual isolation unless a cure can be found. I got the players to engage in some legitimate in character soul searching around that one in the classic Trek tradition.

In Red in Tooth and Claw the planet's EM field was removing the away team's senses of morals and restraint. It ended up being played partly for laughs - the Ensign introducing himself as Captain, and the hottie doctor going skinny dipping - but the security chief was starting to go just a little over the edge and there were the tigers and elephants trying to kill them. I could easily tweak something like this into a full horror setting, with the loss of control becoming a loss of identity, the masque of civilization being slowly stripped away as the super-ego feels itself crumble to forces it can't control.

These being Trek games horror wasn't exactly on the agenda, but I wonder what would have happened if I had run either as a one shot using FUDGE and let the players know in advance it was a horror game. How much would the outcome have changed?

Said Simon Fraiser at his discovery of Hell's Gate, a particularly nasty area on what eventually became the Canada Pacific railway. About a century and a half later William van Horn, president of the Canada Pacific railway, said "If we can't export the scenery we'll import the tourists."

This does not strike me as a happy solution if Fraiser was right.

The tourist nature of the railway opens things to a wide variety of PCs, the Victorian/gaslight level of technology prevents communication with the outside world when the train breaks down and is engulfed in a blizzard at the worst possible place. Isolated but with some makeshift supplies, the tourists face days or weeks in the places where no human should venture, waiting for aid to come from the railway company... when the first child goes missing.