Otherworlds

Much ink could be spilled, and has been, discussing the dichotomy between the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses. Or you could watch this. Finn’s first novel A Step Beyond Context is available on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com and a few others as well. It’s a punchy genre-busting mystery with a heroine who is a Regency lady, a high tech mercenary and much more.

I write myself.  Not just between the stately study walls Where with fine pen-strokes perfect tales are shaped But in smudged ink, misspellings, blots and scrawls In rips and tears where nib on paper scraped. The page shows all; a workbook not framed art. I write myself – in whole, not just in part. Finn’s first novel A Step Beyond Context is available on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com and a few others as well. It’s a punchy genre-busting mystery with a heroine who is a Regency lady, a high tech mercenary and much more.

I’ve been roleplaying since shortly before the great flood and come across a lot of RPG systems that handle task resolution in many and varied ways. One of the big ones is always the combat system – even in rules-lite games the combat system is (usually but not always) more complex than the rest of the game system with more granular options. There are of course exceptions and some games go for the universal mechanical approach that treats combat scenes just like any other scene. The normal approach I think grew out of D&D’s roots inside the wargaming hobby and though the RPG scene (including D&D) grew quickly past the simple recreation of fantasy skirmishes there has been a big focus on the combat scene as the core activity of many role playing game sessions. Personally I’ve never been a big fan of combat for its own sake. Even when I play Fighty McFighter type characters I don’t want the game session to be taken up with lengthy combat encounters in which there is little sco

He was a strange figure, a dull lumpish creature that the locals knew only as Trog.  Whether that was the name his parents gave him or simply an unpleasant title dreamed up by the people around him nobody knew.  It was the name he called himself though and his unfortunate neighbours would often hear him lumbering around in the darkness of the night calling out obscenities and invoking his own name as if he considered himself some unseen tormentor or deity in his own life. They wanted him gone, those neighbours, for Trog was a nuisance and an unpleasant annoyance in their lives.   They never knew when a peaceful afternoon would be interrupted by cries of “Trog, Trog, Trog hates trees,” or “Trog, Trog, Trog is mighty!” and then the great shape of the thing itself would appear at their hedge or fence, looming over it and leering or grimacing at them.   They wanted him gone, but Trog was cunning and sly as well as strange and clumsy.   He had great hoards of wealth in his cave, he said,