The beginning of your story can do many things, but one is more important than any other: capturing the reader’s interest. If they don’t keep reading, any other purpose – setting the tone, hinting at central themes, or whatever else – becomes pointless. As a … read more »
Oren, Mike and Chris philosophize on the origins and meaning of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and other speculative fiction genres. They discuss stories that cross genres, and sow confusion about the definition of “punk” and “orthogonal.” Read more »
Your players will spend a great deal of time interacting with the non-player characters. The unpredictable nature of running an adventure means that you will be improvising NPCs as often as not. Fortunately, making them up on the spot becomes easy with practice. Read more »
What if you make up 20 pages of backstory, and your character still doesn’t feel “strong”? How can you even tell? I’m going to turn the subjective quality of “strength” into clear benchmarks by detailing six traits that strong characters have in common. Read more »
When designers sit down to create the character generation section of a roleplaying game, they must decide where on the scale of structured to free form they want to fall. The question is a difficult one with no obvious answer. At one extreme are systems … read more »
Every once in a while, a team of astronomers discovers an Earth-sized planet orbiting its star equivalent to where Earth orbits the Sun. And popular science blogs go crazy, because – wow, that world could support life! It’s amazing… Or it would be, if life was as fickle as the writers of popular science blogs. Read more »
You wouldn’t want your friends to cry when they ate your cooking. You wouldn’t want to give them a prank call that made them feel they were in danger. But if they told you they cried or felt afraid while reading a story you wrote, you’d probably take that as a compliment. Read more »
The Mythcreants discuss their favorite and least favorite characters, episodes, and romances in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They compare the show to its spinoff, Angel, and complain about oversights in the Buffyverse. Read more »
One of the panels I was fortunate enough to attend at Geek Girl Con this year was “Writing for Roleplaying Games” led by Amber E. Scott. Ms. Scott is a freelance writer who has written numerous books for Paizo Publishing’s Pathfinder series, as well as … read more »
The Mythcreants had a great weekend at GeekGirlCon in Seattle. I want to share my favorite quotes and a few comments on the panels I attended. Also included are some pics I got by nervously asking cosplayers to take their picture. Next time I’ll do … read more »
