Answers, Round Final

[swan_tower]

The last set from the question post. Thanks to everybody who participated!


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stevie_carroll asked, Do you have an unlikely favourite place in London (out of your top whatever places in London as opposed to your very favourite place)?

I guess the question is, what makes a place unlikely? I love the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral -- not for any reason having to do with it being a big famous landmark, but because of the way the cathedral's position fits into the City in my head, and the way you can sit on its steps and watch the sun set over the West End and eat your yakisoba from Wasabi or pasta salad from Tesco's for dinner. It's my mental "home" in London. But that might class it as "very favorite," I guess.

I also love the fragment of the old London Wall I found on my first trip and revisited every subsequent time. It's tucked away from the busy roads, and has a lovely bit of garden around it.

I don't know if any of those count as "unlikely," though.

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dmstraylight asked, If a PnP RPG based on the Onyx Court series was produced, what system would you want it to use and why? How about for Doppelganger? Driftwood?

The obvious answer for the Onyx Court is Changeling: The Dreaming, since that's where it came from. But you'd have to do a lot of system hacking at this point to make it work, since Banality doesn't figure into the Onyx Court, and it's kind of a central idea for Changeling; rip that out and the whole thing falls apart.

If not Changeling, then maybe Deliria, which I haven't actually played, but is in my head as a reasonably flexible system for doing faerie-related stuff.

The doppelganger books, I don't have a ready answer for. I have L5R on the brain at the moment, so that's the first thing that leaps to mind (especially with the Void and all), but from what I've seen of shugenja spells, they don't lend themselves to the mixed-Element approach of the witches in my novels. Come to think of it, I have a hard time thinking of any magic system that treats conjunctional effects of that sort as a common thing, rather than an occasional exception, though I'm sure such things exist. Any suggestions from the peanut gallery?

Driftwood, of course, is easy. 1) Grab every gaming core book off your shelf. 2) Drop them on the floor to make a map of Driftwood. 3) Have fun. ^_^

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Aaaaaand that's it for this round of "ask me anything." Tune in at some indeterminate future point for more!

Comments

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

Deliria is an absolutely AMAZING RPG book - it's the one game that I think finally "grokked" Faerie. I highly recommend it. Also - a supplement book, Goblin Markets is actually about to come out. The original author, Phil Brucato, finally got the rights from the defunct company and his business partners. He's planning more Deliria stuff as well.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

The core book of Deliria is lovely and, well, kind of unplayable. I read through pretty much the whole thing, and at the end I thought it was a fabulous approach to Faerie, but I had no idea how to actually play the game.

(A criticism I gently leveled at some friends of mine who worked on the game, actually, and they agreed with me. Though I thought there was a supplement already published that helped fix the issue. Maybe that's Goblin Markets, and I was wrong about it already being out.)

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

Hehe - I used to work for LPP back in the day, and my biggest complaint was also the mechanics. They released a "Compact" supplement/addendum/thing (that's what the system was called) that helped a little, but it's still not a fantastic mechanics system, there's no denying.

Then again, I've yet to see a really great mechanics system, especially if it's one that actually tries to keep magic... well, magic. Free-flowing. Creative.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

It's a hard target to hit. Games need a degree of balance (as novels may not), which means they need rules, which means things have to be nailed down to some degree. You can try to negotiate it all on the fly, but that has its own pitfalls.