I will be starting an artist's residency at a university here in Vancouver next month. Focus is indigenous roleplaying and art.
No more teaching juggling work & family then squeezing in time for games. Producing the full version of NUNA and art for it will be my focus for 6 months. As well as building community and learning the trade.
I am so happy.
Thanks for coming along for the ride.
Exciting things are coming.
In the meanwhile, here is a great video on writing and producing an RPG.
Video is HERE.
When we were young, we used to dream of doing gamemaster as a job. For the past year, I have run paid sessions of NUNA and Coyote & Crow at a big game store here in Vancouver. I was slated to run Stormbringer 1E today, but not enough people signed up.
So instead, I thought I'd share my experiences of being paid to run a roleplaying game.
First thing you need to know is...
Unless you have a corporate retreat or team building gig, you won't support yourself GMing for cash. My hourly rate is just above minimum wage and less than half of what I make teaching. Even if you could get a higher rate, it would be difficult to cobble together enough hours to support yourself. And like teaching or counselling, interacting with people at work is an exhausting experience because...
Paying customers bring LOTS of baggage to games. I have had players ask to get a free success after a few failed rolls, or to have me let them be the hero. Some have only played one system, and some have never played at all. Others have their beloved system and find it hard switching to another game. I've had people fake rolls, use the wrong dice, etc etc. That said, I have had a ton more positive experiences than negative. But still, these little hiccups are part and parcel of the experience, and something you will have to deal with calmly. Other important abilities you will need are...
As with friend gaming circles, preparation and improvisation are huge drains on time and energy. I prepare a situation, then let the players come in and trash it. I am not stuck on one solution to a problem, and both accept interesting player solutions while coaxing them away from useless or disruptive courses of action. I also minimize my preparation by streamlining NPC or monster stats, and having a guide to relative strengths so I can ad lib encounters. This lets me be very improvisational in ways that respond to player choices and which guide the adventure to a satisfying conclusion in the 3.5 hour session time limit. I think response to my style has been positive, but even still...
I was supposed to run Stormbringer 1E today, but only a few people signed up. I offered the session 2 weeks ago, which is a bit short, and with the end of summer people are probably preferring to spend time at home before work and school starts up again. So between the season, popularity of a game, and personal preferences, there are a lot of reasons a game might be cancelled. My NUNA and Coyote & Crow filled up super quick, so I see my games as more of a way of...
It has been VERY nice to meet players interested in indigenous gaming, and people who bring their best performance to the table. I think this shows also what games or styles are likely to get more people to sign up here in Vancouver. Stormbringer is just too niche and Eurocentric, probably. But in general, I regard paid GMing as...
Paid gamemaster is like being a video game tester. Someone needs to go to the corner of level 3 and jump 25 times to see if there is a bug, so let's pay an intern to do it until they get sick and quit. (I know a game designer how did this and it sounds terrible indeed) Paid GM is not that bad, but it is not a cakewalk either.
I think there are 2 markets where you have a good chance of getting steady work. The first is naturally running D&D 5E. I don't know what the game itself is like, but it is a marketing juggernaut that many have been programmed to believe represents the hobby. I see lots of stores and programs looking for DMs, so if that is your bag and you have the interest and ability, you should look into it if you live in an urban center that has stores or spaces that support such an activity.
The other would be running new, indie, or community oriented (ie LGBTQ) games for a cult audience. I think you would enjoy yourself more and meet a gamut of interesting folks, so the money would just be gravy.
Anyway, paid GM is no longer fantasy, so contact your FLGS or put up flyers and best of luck!
With school and work impending, I don't think I'll run more than a game a season. I am slowly getting Giri-Ninjou ready for (hopefully) Kickstarter in November, so definitely run that in a store if I can. Lots of Asians and weebs here in Vancouver, so wish me all the luck I wish you.
The title of this post comes from the last instalment in the Cornelius Quartet. As a lad, I started Moorcock by reading Elric (naturally), but finding the Jerry Cornelius books in university blew my mind and set me on the path to an MA in English.
If you haven't read them, you should. I need to order and reread them myself.
The fourth book (which won the 1977 Guardian fiction prize) follows Jerry through a shattered and surreal London as he searches for his sister/lover Catherine. The book is a trippy exploration of identity, and Jerry takes on a Harlequin persona to forward his plans. It reminds me a lot of Thomas Pynchon's work, unsurprising as Moorcock published Pynchon's early work, the story 'Entropy' (ahem), in New Worlds. Both authors share a tendency to question authority, a fascination with breakdown, and a subversion of non-literary genres into post-modern works of great depth.
Little did I know at the time, but Moorcock was actually referencing Walter Pater's 1873 opus The Renaissance, and its assertion that 'all art aspires to the condition of music.' To Pater, music was the ideal art form because it annihilated the divide between object & form, collapsed narrative for pure abstraction, and directly pushed listener's emotional buttons. Oscar Wilde was inspired by Pater, and Schopenhauer agreed that music is purer due to it being non-representational.
Of course, later critics have noted that this kind of ranking of arts has lots of issues.
So how are we to parse Moorcock's modification of the question?
First, the metaphor of art as music implies that it trends upwards to a pure form. Pure art, pure emotion as one sits listening in a salon, theatre, or sitting room. This, Pater argues, is both what the artist should aspire to, and the direction in which art naturally trends in the face of intensifying modernity.
By contrast, art as muzak implies a downward trend to a base, commodified form, good only for passing time in an elevator or NHS office. It makes me think of the Blue Harvest parody of Star Wars, where the elevator scene in the Death Star (TM) is extended and accompanied by an Imperial March that trades the militaristic drums and sinister brass for a syncopated, bouncy vibraphone bossa nova version, complete with bubble popping sounds.
So, what does this imply about Moorcock's work, and the forces of art in general?
First, Moorcock's oeuvres in fantasy have become 'muzak' versions of themselves, as evidenced in such derivative works as Game of Thrones and The Witcher, two series that I tried and failed to get interested in. The experience reminded me of when Dan Brown's simplistic DaVinci Code became all the rage, and I could only shake my head at how such a pale imitation of Eco's Foucault's Pendulum could eclipse the original. Ditto Harry Potter's fantasy slop eclipsing A Wizard of Earthsea and The Books of Magic (not to mention gaffing its name from Troll 2).
Second, all art now aspires to background status. Films are shorter and more bombastic, music lyrics have become simple and repetitive, and art is now mass produced prints. I saw this first in Japan, which is always ahead of the curve in social change, a cultural canary in the coal mine. When I arrived in the 90's, my fellow foreigners and I marvelled at how Japanese friends would put on a movie then walk around cooking, doing laundry, and talking on the phone as it played. Meanwhile, we outsiders all sat enraptured.
Now I see the same change here in Canada. When I went to see The Backrooms recently, I was also privy to an endless drama from the cellphone of the patron sitting beside me.
In a word, art is aspiring to entropy. This is only increasing as AI replaces creativity with endless pastiche, social media whittles our attention spans down from hours to minutes, and platforms for books and music push only the safest, anodyne works.
However, all is not lost.
There are spaces where amazing Indie books like This Is How You Lose The Time War and music like The Mountain Goats are trumpeted. More and more, it is not the art or artists themselves who are choosing the baser forms, but instead the corporate platforms that decide what the popular works are based on their algorithm.
But there is a resistance. Sierra Ferrell is singlehandedly reinvigorating American music with her Heavy Petal tour and moving country music back to Hank Williams levels of poetry after decades of cold beer and MAGA petulance.
(Yes I respect country music. Moorcock lives in Texas, REH did as well. Don't come for me.)
Hell, I remember when Moorcock was in every Chapters I visited, now they are rare finds.
We see this in rpgs with the how the marketing wizards for the supposed World's Most Popular RPG has helped it eclipse other games, becoming a synonym for TRPGs to the media and newcomers. But there are greater games out there, Bluebeard's Wife and Mork Borg and Mothership and Coyote & Crow and an endless embarrassment of indie or small press riches that go largely unnoticed on itch.io and Drive Thru RPG.
They are all waiting for you to find them.
With NUNA and Giri-Ninjou, I will aspire to the condition of music.
Thanks for all the support. NUNA is now 3/5 of the way to Bronze.
Sleep beckons...
In recent years, RPGs have become very accommodating and safe for everyone.
My design philosophy for Giri-Ninjou is the exact opposite.
It is a game about the ugly side of being Japanese.
Your actions are restricted.
No one can be trusted.
It'll probably end in Death, Dishonor, or at best Enlightenment.
But you'll have to wade through a river of blood to get where you are going.
Andy at Breakfast in the Ruins gives some great wisdom on running games, the perfect system, and keeping things rolling as a GM.
Podcast is HERE.
Atelihai!
In traditional roleplaying games, travel to and from destinations is usually handwaived, and does not vary much throughout the seasons. In Lord of the Rings, the ringbearers decided to walk across the whole land and only vary due to a magical snow and windstorm they deem too dangerous.
In NUNA we call this type of weather a normal Tuesday.
In pre-modern Labrador, all travel from when the snow fell in late October to April was done by dogsled. Whether you were delivering mail or taking people to a hospital, it was the only way to go as the ocean was battered by winter storms and the land was covered in snow over your head.
I am working on the Travel systems for Nuna now and found the above map of pre-aviation dogsled routes. People back then were built different, and the effort and skill needed to complete the mailroutes by dogsled back then was nothing short of superhuman.
Here is the message of the OP:
"Hello in the Big Land.