The New Kids

You know things are going well when your 3pp "competition" are creating covers that you'd like to be writing under. While all the covers of the recently announced 3pp DCC releases look good, Cloudmaker stands out as a "whah?" sort of cover.

If you stare at it long enough, it looks like there may be some cyclopean perspective paradoxes at work, but still, that is a sexy cover. The folks at Sagaworks really nailed this one.

//H

Art & Politics

There's probably an excellent point to be made for segregating one's fandom from the politics of the artist responsible for the work. Sin City is aesthetically beautiful. Put politely, Frank Miller seems like an uniformed jerk.

Protesters = Rapists? Thank you for your contribution to the discussion. My only hope is he was drunk when he posted this.

(By the by, David Brin gives an excellent response, here. On that basis of this post alone I need to buy more of his work.)

But how does one go about reconciling the art against the artist? Should we? If it turns out tomorrow that Mignola kicks little puppies in his sleep do I dump all all his Hellboy comics? (Or worse, his Lankhmar works?)

In college, I recall watching a White Zombie video and telling Spackle it was aesthetically beautiful. (Actually, I probably just told him it was cool, but he knew what I meant.)

He came back asking if I knew what the heck the video was about; neither of us knew. Spackle's next question: If the video was promoting Fascism, would it still be great?

At the time, I told him, "yes." The visual content was beautiful. Any "undelivered" content was irrelevant.

Now I'm not so sure.

//H

Product announcements for upcoming 3rd party DCCs are are starting to hit the forums. There are a host of really cool adventures and supplements in the pipeline, written by passionate folks that love their games.

As a writer who helped contribute to the DCC RPG, it is really exciting to see other writers fired up about the game. Can't wait to start reading some of their works.

//H

Sleep

It's after midnight and the rush writing assignment is done. One part Beowulf, one part Creepy comics, all Dungeon Crawl Classic. Doug's awesome cover will look something like this.

Now if the maps and layout and illustration and playtesting and editing ... all go according to schedule, we just might have our insert for the core rules come February. But there's time enough to sweat about that tomorrow.

//H