21-Jun-2018: Book of Shadows, Again

11-Nov-2017: Assassin's Creed Origins

For some reason I wrote this review straight into Facebook. So here we go again, for all concerned...

17 hours in and I can say that I like this game a lot. It is a good game, even a very good game. But it is not a great game. It looks gorgeous and the setting, Ptolemaic Egypt, the last cultural gasp of pharaohs and mummies, is fascinating. I've never seen better water, the city of Alexandria is a close rival to Novigrad for the most impressive game city ever and the world graphics as a whole are varied, interesting and impressive. The action-rpg playstyle may turn off old AC fans but I am not one of them and while the open world has a slight MMORPG-feel to it, it does enough things right and dynamic to crawl out of that particular ditch. Well done so far. And the parkour feels smoother than in other ACs I've tried.

The open world is massive and almost imperceptibly divided into levelled zones like an MMORPG map. You can cross the borders freely, though, so the zones mainly help you find levelled content and enemies. There is also plenty of variety. Light jungles, epic seashores, rugged mountains and beast-infested wetlands abound. Sand deserts make you hallucinate if you stay there for too long but I love the desert nights. But the most impressive element of all are the towns and villages. If they've got the looks even halfway right, we are looking at the most important educational tool for casual archeology ever devised. And they have done a good effort in including all the trades and industries of the time, as well as the divisions between a Greek upperclass (set up by Alexander the Great) and the Egyptian lower classes. As for Rome, they are only starting to creep into the picture. Read some history.

Unfortunately AC:O is no Game of Thrones when it comes to writing and characters. Bayek is not bad by videogame standards but I would have liked a more drama-driven approach to the world. Now many things out there are just minigames to acquire crafting resources. And while I can live with hunting for skins, having to become a murderous bandit with a body count eclipsing Dzenghis Khan just to get some fucking wood is imbecilic. Please, give Bayek an axe! And let me dig some mines instead of these poor merchant's skulls! Killing and looting merchants and their escorts for crafting and drakhmas is effectively the grind of this game. I don't mind killing in videogames but I need more reason than that! Now I just feel like the bad guy! We, the medjay, are supposed to protect order and civilization!

That said, the dynamic combat was a welcome addition but its controls are a mess, especially if you are on mouse and keyboard and have to configure keys yourself (the default controls allow multifunction buttons but custom controls do not!). Luckily, you can always play on Easy and the game becomes forgiving for not doing all the combos and overpower moves the in-game hints are always frothing about.

Then there is the paywall. Having bought the Deluxe edition, I started out with a couple of legendary items and it soon became obvious I was never going to find anything better. So rather than explore the world in hopes finding something better, I am just grinding for drakhmas to get my shit upgraded to my level. That money grind is the second half of the overall grind in this game and there is plenty of it. The game is frugal with its coin, because it also constantly pushes the store into your face. I could, you know, just buy the fucking drakhmas. And if I did, I might also afford some of those cool outfits the tailors are selling. Or try my luck with lootboxes... sorry, hekata chest, for just 3000 drakhmas a pop.

I've only once had a total of 3000 drakhmas in this game so far. The storefront and that annoying superkid merchant can go drown in the Sea of Reeds for all I care.

So, lots of cool stuff but you have to grind your keyboard to dust to get all the crafting goods and money you need in the process, eh? Well, let me tell you about the unicorn. Yes, a fucking unicorn. I liked the game's stylish, almost philosophical low-fantasy approach to Egyptian magic and the supernatural and then that lootbox kid gives me a fucking unicorn as a quest reward. With neon-coloured sparks for hoofmarks. And it is way better than the horses in the game, so my serial-killing banditry really needs the My Little Pony. A fucking unicorn!

If anyone has seen my immersion, tell it call me every once in a while at least.



So, my overall rating for Assassins' Creed: Origin is +2. I play and I like it. With some tweaks it would have been an easy +3 but with the unicorn... no. Now, the setting has ample potential and while playing fast and loose with history, they get enough things right that my inner historical fiction fan is giddy with joy. If they had gone for a more simulationist approach with the world and more character-driven dramatic writing, we'd be in Witcher 3 territory and I'd be singing its praises. But as it stands, it represents several steps into the right direction for the AC brand. But it just isn't there yet.

30-Sep-2017: How To Skyrim

23-Sep-2017: Out Of My System

Rovers... I've long thought about a scifi RPG set on Mars, combining frontier glamour, gold prospecting, wild west anarchy and cyberpunk themes with some hard science and realistic planetology. As you know, this idea was called "Rovers" by the roving exploration vehicles currently on Mars. It is a roleplaying game of "wheeled adventurers" on the freshly colonized Red Planet, trading, exploring and troubleshooting their way into fame and riches while great corporations and Indie settlements stake their claims and prepare for the colonial wars to come.


Life in a dome.

And instead spaceships and space battles, it all hinges on rovers, the vehicles, the ability to traverse the vast expanses of desert, wasteland and unfathomably deep canyons separating the would be powers of the future. Without them, Humanity would be stuck inside domes, bubble tents and caves. And much like in mecha fiction, the vehicle with its idiosyncracies is as much part of the party as the player characters are.


Here is a rover. 

In my first iteration of Rovers, which was actually playtested, I went too far with the idea of terraforming Mars. This time screw it, if you step outside without a suit your blood boils and on a bad day you can cook eggs with cosmic radiation. Any plans to drop a comet for seeding the atmosphere are decades away. So the rover, with its thick hull of Martian metals (no problem in lower gravity), is also your shelter from the cosmic elements.



Otherwise, the setting would be similar. There was a wave of early Mars colonization by nation states and International Cooperatives. Then a financial, political and ecological collapse on Earth removed them from the play. Instead, Earth is now ruled by The Cartel, a world government of powerful corporations. Some Martian colonies submitted to the authority of the Cartel but many did not, becoming the Indies, short for Independents. As the existing infrastructure on Mars was about to be seized by Cartel loyalist, Indies packed up and left, dispersing into hundreds of new colonies and outposts throughout the Red Waste, which is basically all of Mars outside the northern polar plateau.


Xenolith deposit

Then the Xenolith Rush happened. Fossilized remains of ancient Martian life were found in Valles Marineris, deep in the heart of Indie territory. Besides the scientific value of knowing there once was a varied and sophisticated biosphere on Mars, the so-called cryptogenes extracted from the xenolith samples have unlocked entire new possibilities in genetic modification and bioengineering. As they cannot be copied or reproduced, they have become priceless and in some cases unique. There is a gold rush of sorts going on on Mars and it is centered on the Canyon.


Greetings from The Cartel

The Xenolith Rush has even split the Cartel. Red Corps invested heavily on Mars and run the infrastructure on the northern plateaus and much of the space traffic. For years, they were free to do as they liked, free from Earth intrigues. Now, following the Canyon Rush, the Blue Corps, effectively the rest of the Cartel, demand that the Cartel as a whole should take over the corporate effort on Mars, thus ensuring everybody access to xenolith prospecting. Red Corps are having none of it and tensions within the Cartel are mounting.



So what would you do? Prospect for xenoliths? Go hunting for bounties in bandits and claim jumpers? Make a mint ferrying basic goods across the Canyon that the mining camps just can't live without? Partake in the corporate intrigues for a complete planetary take over, for or against? Build a sandcastle?

01-Sep-2017: Book of Shadows

Winter is coming (sorry, I've been binge-watching Game of Thrones) and you may have noticed I have not started a new Fall-specific blog page yet. The pace of my blogging has slowed down and doing a separate page for just three entries felt of pointless. So I am writing into the old .html file for the time being. 

I went to GamesCom (a really large game industry event and consumer expo with 350000 attendees) recently with a pneumonia. Came back with the same, go figure. Not a bad pneumonia, mind you. I'd call this just a bronchitis because it lacks the hallucination-inducing fever spikes of 40+ degrees (my measured best is 40,9 degrees). However, the official diagnosis says pneumonia on the account of some noises in my lungs. This meant that walking between the vast halls of Koelnmesse often resulted in me hanging onto some railing while gasping for air (Ventoline to the rescue!). Still, I was properly impressed by the size of the event. GamesCom is truly a feat of strength from our industry.

But I can't figure out why people are willing to wait in line for two hours(!!!) to play 15 minutes of some unfinished crap that's going to come out in six months anyway. It's a kind of "emperor has no clothes" thing and I felt like shouting it at their faces. But if they realized how fucking pointless it all is, such 350K people consumer expos would have no reason to exist, would they? And don't get me started on the complexity of the ticketing. Only Germans can come up with something this complicated. Christ on a bicycle, I wish all conventions I went to were more like Ropecon. Except that at a Ropecon I wouldn't have been able to sit down with Richard "Lord British" Garriott and talk about game design. Damn, nothing is ever simple.

Richard Garriott on the left, my junior but invaluable colleague Aleksander Nikulin in the middle and my ugly mug on the right.

Now, I am back. While Space Nation keeps me busy during the days, Praedor - Book of Shadows keeps me busy in the evening. The project is still searching its shape and format. All these false starts are frustrating but no work is wasted as they get me thinking. In my mind's eye, I am already looking up at castles and towers built so high up in the Western Mountains that the air is too cold and thin for mortals. I am already passing my hand over arcane runes carved onto a riverside cliff, now so worn by time that even sorcerers could not read them. Still, their magic is real and monstrous beasts and unnamed deep water fish are drawn to the waters around them. Jaconia wasn't born, it was made. These leftovers of its creation emanate enough power to make those gifted (or cursed) with Second Sight sick.   

Shadows of Jaconia are places magic, danger, history and sometimes treasure. They are usually leftovers from the untold millennia the world was ruled by Sorcerer Kings and their immortal minions. Whatever wars, crises and upheavals shook the young world have been forgotten by mortals and even present-day sorcerers can recall only whispers and echoes. But the places are real and draw in treasure hunters and would-be adventurers. Becoming one carries none of the same social baggage as becoming a praedor but it is from this crowd of bandits and tomb robbers that some of the best praedors arise.

So what do I want out of the Book of Shadows? I want to unleash Jaconia as a fantasy setting and show the doubters and naysayers there is plenty of colour and adventure to be had even in a world without orcs. And that Praedor is not really a low-fantasy setting but pure-bred Sword & Sorcery, where the pulp-fantasy roots and the more complex and conscientious present forms of the fantasy genre meet. I really don't want to use the word "grimdark" but it is not entirely out of place here.

So, what is there, between the covers? This is still very much a work-in-progress list but the current plan is as follows:

Yes, it is a long list and includes a fair number of adventures. When I had some in the Book of Secrets, I was told nobody wants them. When I left them out of Cursed Book, I was asked where the adventures were? Make up your mind, people!

Once I have sorted out the version 1.2. stuff (character creation alternatives etc.) I am going to start writing about Warth. If that takes up half the book, so be it. I'll just drop some of the other locales to keep the timetable manageable. The release deadline is Ropecon next year, which means I have to get everything into print by late June or very early July. The printing press did a good job with Cursed Book. I just hope this time I make fewer mistakes in preparing the materials. It was a bit of a clusterfuck the last time around.

In related news, I was e-interviewed for Roolipelitiedotus and the results are now out there. If you have any further questions, come see me at Tracon on 9.-10. September. 

16-Aug-2017: Seikkailijoiden Kilta

It's been a few busy weeks since Ropecon but I finally got to reading Seikkailijoiden Kilta (transl. Adventurer's Guild). SK is the latest entry in the growing list of Finnish tabletop roleplaying games. It is a 140-page softcover book, slightly smaller than A4, with color covers and greyscale interior. The font is large and the whole thing makes a fairly quick read.

For the record, I really wanted to like this game. I have long hoped for a  fantasy alternative to Astraterra without the... creative math that plagues Heroes of the Tempest. On the surface and from what I managed to hear of the release presentation, Seikkailijoiden Kilta fits the bill.

My optimism took a hit as soon as I started reading. There is no division between player and gamemaster content. The book opens with a description of the adventurer's guild (a multinational institution that explains away the role of professional adventurers in this setting).

But then it goes into full World Book mode and spills the beans on ancient history, monsters and even powerful artifacts. Not only is a good deal of that best left to the Gamemaster, the reader won't get into the rules until page 68! And character creation until page 94! I am a big fan of world-focused RPG design but this is ass-backwards.

Going to back to the world of Saranea, it is an archipelago surrounded by the Outer Sea that no one has managed to cross. At the center lies the Realm of Vaults, the ruins of an ancient civilization where monsters and magic now run rampant. Obviously, the characters are supposed to explore it and loot the treasures. Fair enough, feels like home already.

It is surrounded by the Random Encounter Isles... sorry, the Islands of the Privateers that the adventurers have to pass through to reach their hunting grounds. And on the outside, facing the Outer Sea, lie four kingdoms, conveniently located at the cardinal points of the compass, each with a distinct identity and culture.

Saranea is a very much purpose-built world and while there is a fair amount of backstory, it still feels artificial to me.This is a shame, because my early Earth Sea -vibes from this setting felt really, really good. Also, if you are getting strong Astraterra flashbacks from the map, trust me, you are not alone.

And one more thing: Finnish RPG authors, please, please, please, put some scale indicators into your maps! It is not that hard! And anyone suggesting that the GM can decide the scale by himself (*cough* Bliaron *cough*) deserves a spanking.

Now, it is page 68 and we get into the rules. The game uses the full D&D set from D4 to D20 and the basic roll is D20 against one of eight attributes with values ranging from 2-12 for beginners, and up to 25 for veterans. There is a level system (one per adventure) and for every level you can distribute 4 points into your attributes. Fair enough.

What I don't agree with is how the game deals with difficulty grades. An Easy Roll has no modifiers, so a super-talented beginner with an attribute value of 12 has 60% chance. A Challenging Roll has -5 to the value, so the odds drop to 35%.

I belong to a school of design where a difficulty grade means what it says. Easy Rolls are not worth it unless the degree of success has a clear and demonstrable effect. Most rolls made when adventuring would be Challenging or worse but having to apply a modifier to what is effectively a "Default Roll" feels clumsy.

On the other hand, the difficulty grades are not really explained anywhere so... meh. The author also commits the cardinal sin of using examples with very poor odds and then allowing the character to succeed most of the time. Such  examples are not representative of gameplay and can be misleading.

13-Aug-2017: Worldcon75

The largest speculative fiction conference in the world, Worldcon, has just concluded in Helsinki. In theory, it covers science fiction, fantasy and horror in all mediums but there is, admittedly, a strong legacy focus on literature. Still, with 600+ shows, panels and presentations there was bound to be something for everybody. The program palette was quite good this year. Unfortunately, I had to skip most of it because I was, and still am, struggling with bronchitis. But sitting around, soaking the ambience and talking to people both strange and familiar almost made up for it. Also, this was my second Worldcon and I've also been to six Eurocons, so I already knew that pacing myself was important. Worldcons are five-day events and by day four, you could see the battle fatigue settling in the crowds.

Puolenkuun Pelit asked me for something to sell at Worldcon and I brought them a batch of ten English-language Stalker RPGs. To my delight, they sold seven of them as well as a bunch of Praedor stuff and I have to commend their attitude throughout the whole thing. As their customers crumbled over the days, the sales staff at PP stand never wavered. They were as smiling and fresh today as they had been on Wednesday.

For most intentions and purposes, Worldcon75 was a great success. We are still waiting for the final numbers but with 6000+ attendees it is already one of the largest Worldcons ever arranged (update: around 7100 visitors, second largest Worldcon ever). And it was smoothly organized, too. Everything worked, everything was more or less on time and the fact that they ran out of room on Wednesday and had to implement a strict quota of day passes was not really their fault.

Because Christ on a bicycle, people! Me and others have been ranting about this event for years! The original allotment of meeting rooms was based on tickets sold beforehand. Then half as many of you barge in on the last moment and stand around wondering why you can't fit into the rooms! This is precisely the kind of event where you are supposed to book your tickets well in advance and anyone who asks why they weren't told this deserves to get slapped! That extra space from the exhibition halls could be made available this quickly to alleviate the problem is a miracle of organizing.

I was a little miffed that parking passes for the whole event were not sold to the public (although I managed to weasel one on the account of being an programme participant) but otherwise I have no complaints about the arrangements. A great event by all accounts and my Praedor presentation for foreigners even had a grand total of one foreigner in attendance. You can see the slides here. So far a great job and we (myself and Leena) have already booked our tickets for Worldcons 2019 and 2020, held in Dublin and New Zealand, respectively.

Special thanks to all of you who came to me asking for a signature or to tell me that something I wrote (mostly Käärmetanssija) was great. That is the true reward for being genre author in Finland. People like you (and to a lesser extent events like this, which is why we tour them every year) that allow me to overcome my imposter syndrome and write fiction in the first place. Without you, I wouldn't be here either.

Also, congratulations to Johanna Mustapää for winning an award in the Masquerade for her beautiful, practical and comfortable "Farrignian Court Dress" cosplay.

But then...

As great as the event was, somebody also let an elephant into the room and I suspect the loxodonta is going to stay there for quite a while. Most of the foreign guests probably never noticed it. However, in my circles the incident was impossible to miss and I fear it will be the one thing for what this Worldcon will be remembered for.

I'll let professor Frans Mäyrä explain what happened.

I am not a larper but I was shocked and disappointed by the decision as well. For the Nordic Larp crowd, and Artante knows they are well represented in the geek circles around here, this was a slap in the face. Some have already sworn off Worldcons altogether and I don't blame them. But for the choice of medium, there go I. It was a stupid decision, it was the wrong decision, it was a royal fuck-up and I expect the Finnish organizers will be explaining their actions in future scene events until they are blue in the face. A just punishment and hopefully a shot across the bow for the future. What is the point of having a globe-trotting event if the local manifestation of geek culture and expression cannot be demonstrated there? You'd be left with something like this year's Eurocon. And trust me, you don't want that.     

Well, that's it. Next year, Worldcon is in San Jose, USA. I won't be attending but then there's going to be two in a row. My next event is Devcom/Gamescom in Cologne, Germany. It's all work, of course... Now who do I have to kill to ensure that my cough goes away by then?

  31-Jul-2017: Ropecon 2017

Yes, it has been months since my last entry. My father passed away on March 25th, after a long struggle with cancer.  We were close and I was devastated. It sort of... brought everything to a halt. I didn't have anything to say.

Paavo Kalervo Vuorela (1941-2017)

Yes, I am ugly. But fortunately Kirottu Kirja is looking great.