Invincible has me from the word go. I know a few folks I’ve recommended the series to found it to come off a little flat, though several others have seemed really jazzed by it. I flippantly described it on Twitter the other day as “what Smallville wanted to be before it succumbed to a fatal case of kryptonite poisoning”, though I suppose that does more to tarnish the appeal of Invincible than elucidate it. (Ah, Smallville, what an acid-trip of a show you were before I took my leave of you.)  At its core, Invincible is the story of an alt-Superman’s kid, run through a heavy Peter Parker’s Life Sucks filter.  And boy, does it make my I-want-to-play-in-some-supers-genre-games itch flare right the hell up.

But I’m also not sure that I would want to play a straight up “adaptation” of Invincible at my gaming table.  So I need to deconstruct this thing, figure out what its basic working parts are, and which of those parts speak to me as a gamer. If only so my friends can get a little closer to running the game I want to play in! (That said, the analysis will not go that deep in the interests of keeping things spoiler-free.)

The Art, Part 1: Dark things might happen, but it’s all brightly colored (I think the colorist has said that folks have called his colors “fruity” before). In a way the colors reflect the exuberance of the supers genre. It’s all a brightly-colored mess sometimes, a rainbow chaos. To read Invincible is to fill up your eyes with the truth of this. It’s a reality like our own, but poppy and bright and a little bit nuts.

The Art, Part 2: Those rubber faces! I’m not talking about some sort of super-deformed cartoony thing; I’m talking about how faces look in Invincible when they take a punch from someone who can bench a couple hundred tons. We are squishy beings, and the art shows that. It gives the bodies a sense of floppy, squishy volume that really serves the presentation of violence in the comic — which can get pretty bloody at times.

The Fights: Like I said, they can be bloody. But they can also be wacky (bad guy has device strapped to chest containing super-strong alien pet that looks like a knot of semi-sentient rubber bands), comical (squid-headed extradimensional freak has speech impediment during villainous rant), dreadful (our hero gets turned into meat paste), and poignant (family issues playing out on the battlefield). Best of all they’re pretty unpredictable. People are fragile, and this is a world where hypersonic fists and explosive power get flung around. Injuries result. Characters you’re sure will be around for a while longer turn up with a sudden case of being dead.

The Relationships: The relationships in Invincible get probably a good 75% of the screen time. You can get multiple pages of a conversation between the hero and his mom. Or his girlfriend. Or that girl who’s had a secret crush on him for years. Or his college dorm-room buddy best friend. Or the government agent guy with a mysterious facial scar. Or his tailor. You get the idea. It’s a story about growing up while shouldering the burden of massive, save-the-world responsibilities, and it never turns away from the chance to dig deep on how it’s affecting his “normal guy” life.  It regards all of this as such a priority to the story, in fact, that folks looking more for the pow-bang-zoom part may find the title disappointing. But if you buy in, as I do, it’s eat-this-up-with-a-spoon time. (And this is where the Smallville touchpoint came in for me: that show is also a place where the relationships are meant to shine, but good god the writing of those relationships is just dreadful. Invincible by contrast gets the relationships just right.)

The World, Part 1: The world is new, but recognizable. Looked at from the corner of my eye, Invincible is a DC Universe parody (among other things). The hero’s from-another-planet father is Omni-Man. There’s a big group of superheroes called The Guardians Of The Globe. Etc. But like I said, the world is still new. When they show up, they’re not standard takes on the tropes of other comics — something is askew and bent about it. At the end of the day I dig reinvention. When it’s done right it’s just magnificent — like a great, reinterpretive cover of an original song. That’s what Invincible is pulling off for me with its reinventions and homages.  It’s easy to dismiss the comic as “just another Superboy story” — which is both correct and completely off the point.

The World, Part 2: The implicit world of the comic is so much larger than the part that intersects with the hero’s story. This is a big one for me, because in a superhero story the universe itself is one of the stars.  Invincible really shines at implying a huge amount of story and setting in a small number of pages. Check out the one-page revelation (I think it was one page) of  The Immortal’s back-story as one example.  Or the just-around-the-edges bits of alien cultures. Characters that show up seem to be coming out of the middle of something else — and that makes the world feel weightier, bigger, realer.

There’s more I could get into, and specifics I could cite, but the avoidance of spoilers is important to me here.

For gaming application, my takeaways, none of which are particularly revelatory I’m afraid:

I like pain and consequence, whether it’s in relationships or in physical injury. That just about sums up the first four parts from the above list. Being a hero requires that a price has to be paid. You can either pay it deliberately or let the law of unintended consequences play out. Either way, it’s gonna hurt.

Reinterpretation/reinvention is fun and does a nice job of excusing liberal borrowing from other sources. By enabling that kind of borrowing, you bring along a lot of ideas that exist in the original source, ideas which can be understood quickly by the others at the table without having to front-load a lot of original setting knowledge. That’s a powerful shorthand (and tangentially, a big part of why I think Amber works so well for gaming).

Don’t bring anything into the story without knowing what its story is — even if it’s just to give 15 seconds of added detail. This is really a broad story-telling lesson, when it comes down to it, but is super effective for GMing. (I know that Jim Butcher has plenty of backstory in mind for the supporting cast of the Dresden Files, for example, that will rarely make it into a story, but it’s there to be tapped for his stories when he needs to motivate a character or provide foundation for a quick few paragraphs of dialogue.)  Knowing that there’s a story there, even one broadly sketched in two or three sentences on an index card, gives your world volume, weight, and life.  While the game’s story might be all about the player characters, the world isn’t all about them, and many players will respond well when it’s clear the world is not a paper-thin mirage existing only to serve them.  And by keeping these hidden little stories implicit, you’re free to change the unspoken details if you need to later. The only thing that’s locked down about that particular iceberg is the tip that’s showing above the waterline.

Pacing is a matter of paying attention to player priorities. That’s a fancy way of saying that if your players are showing up with a lot of investment in how their characters’ love lives are falling apart, don’t respond to that by giving them a session-spanning fight scene. Sometimes the fight is just a quick-cut breather between the heavier relationship stuff. Then again, sometimes it’s time to fly off to Mars with a team of heroes to see what you can do about that nasty mind-controlling squid-thing problem. Look where the camera of the players’ attention is pointed, and make things happen there. That’s a choice they’re making, and you should make sure there’s something for those cameras to film there. Combined with the implicit story strategy from my earlier point, this is a pretty easy one to follow. If everything has a little bit of story already going on with it implicitly, then wherever the cameras get pointed there’s going to be something to see.

I think there’s more here, but I’m running out of steam. Share and enjoy.

I like grim fantasy (at least in some varieties).  The horrible things that happen to characters in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire are right up my alley (though I’ve stopped reading that series until the author finishes).  Glen Cook’s work ala The Black Company also sits right in my sweet spot.  It’s not that I hate heroes — I don’t — but I really relish the explosion of chaos when a plan goes pear-shaped, and the sudden, bracing losses that happen to the people in these books.  I suppose it feels real, or at least not-Hollywood.  I like my Hollywood stories, but I also love it when those conventions get torpedoed merrily.

That said, Abercrombie has pushed me with the books in The First Law.  My little inner Hollywood got hit with a mega-quake and slid right off into the ocean.  Things end so poorly for several characters in the books, and things are so brutal along the way, that I had to put a little effort into shaking it off.  But on the balance, after I while I found myself thinking that was pretty frickin’ cool.

Naturally, my thoughts then turned to gaming.

In between the fights in Abercrombie’s fiction, there’s a lot of purposeful striving and “Things Fall Apart”-ing.  The deeper you get into the plot, the more the latter.  Of all the authors I spend time with, I think Abercrombie ranks first or close to it for mercilessly inflicting unintended consequences on the protagonists.  And his protagonists are all deeply, horiffically flawed in some way.  This is a pretty exciting (if occasionally exhausting) climate because very few of a reader’s classic assumptions can be trusted to pan out.  The bad guy might get the girl.  The good guy might murder an innocent.   The world in general is firmly, darkly gray — and feels damned real for it, like the roots of all the monstrousness that exists in it are all too understandable.

This would be a difficult world to run for players who’ve come to the table expecting some consistent joys of heroism to win out, but I gotta say there’s a part of me that really craves that experience — and craves it in a way that a bad run of the dice just can’t produce.  You play D&D and spend all night rolling single digits on your d20, that’s bad luck, and a bummer.  But it’s not a product of the world really being out to get you, of circumstances spiraling beyond your control, and of getting trapped in a prison of your own inevitable consequences.

Abercrombie’s fiction abounds with examples of characters who achieve some of what they want, but aren’t sure they like it once they’ve gotten it.  It’s entertaining in fiction, but it’d be a real knife’s edge to achieve in gaming.  I’m not sure it can be done.  There might be plenty of GMs out there who could be the kind of dick it takes to make things that rough on the players’ characters, but it’s a very rare breed that could be that and be entertaining enough to avoid a voluntary jettisoning of all his players within three sessions.  But I crave that game, oh, how I crave it.  Which is not to say I want a game where success is impossible.  Far from it.  I just want it to be really, truly hard to get to the goal line unscathed.  I want successes, rewarding when they’re achieved, but mitigated by the awful compromises it took to get there.

Then there are the fights.  Pulse-pounding and utterly fall-apart messy affairs.  Nobody really wants a fight when it comes down to it; they just have to fight because that’s how the cards fell. Many of Abercrombie’s “heroes” are incredibly adept at killing — they’d have to be to last long in his world — but there’s never a single fight they get into that you don’t end up wondering whether or not they’ll survive. Abercrombie’s portrayal of violence is so visceral that I find myself wincing and looking away from the page on occasion. It’s bloody, awful, terrifying, and exhilarating when someone survives.  So with this, too, I wonder if it can’t be made to happen in a game, without getting into the complexity of something like Rolemaster.  (And really, the fights in Abercrombie’s stuff read like someone got drunk, looked at the crit tables for Rolemaster, and decided they were for pansies.)

If I were looking at modeling the violence done in his fiction, I’d probably structure the phases of combat like so (in fact, I wouldn’t be inclined to call this a combat system so much as a violence system, or perhaps simply call it bloody f–king murder):

• Desperate Measures: Someone’s gonna get horribly, horribly hurt. It could be you. A fight begins by taking measures to make sure it’s not you. Will they be enough?  This might manifest as setting up a surprise attack, taking sudden action to kick the lead foe in the fruits, or trading some sword and shield action without landing a solid blow.  Whatever you’re gonna do, you’re gonna ache afterwards; win or lose, the fight itself always kicks your ass. But sooner or later, someone’s gonna have the firm upper hand, and the guy that doesn’t is screwed. Mechanically, I’d suggest this is all about accumulating enough advantage over the other guy to push on to the next phase (or is structured as a race to a particular finish line, last one there is a dead egg).  The desperate measures could be short or long, and honestly it’s where most combat systems live anyway, though few of them ever manage to feel well and truly desperate.  In Abercrombie’s world, by contrast, no fights fail to feel desperate: the reader’s never sure when one of the core characters is going to bite it, and the characters themselves are always terrified (whether or not they show it), with scant few exceptions.
• Stark Horror: The guy with the upper hand lands the decisive blow on the guy who lacks it.  The loser is either killed outright, in which case the fight’s over. Alternatively, and often, the loser is instead horribly maimed and may die shortly.  This phase is solely about determining whether the loser is: maimed and living, maimed and dying, or frickin’ dead.
• Pleas and Reversals: The (maimed) loser takes the lead here, tries some final desperate gambit, maybe pleading for his life while getting a dagger ready, or simply going for an I’ll-take-you-with-me lunge at the victor.  If he’s maimed and living, this might even end “amicably”, with the loser allowed to live (assuming he doesn’t try to harm the victor).  If he’s maimed and dying, well, it’s either about dignity or a last gasp of revenge.  (Sidebar: that makes me think that the “and” part of maimed, when it comes up, should be revealed secretly to the victim if possible, so the victor has no idea if the loser genuinely has a chance of survival.) Regardless, the loser can either make that last attempt, or not; in most cases it’ll simply fail but there’s always a slim and palpable chance the victor might face a little Stark Horror of his own.  Abercrombie is pretty fond of the “slow ride to death” that this phase offers: cocky mercenary now is missing half of his sword arm, staggers back screaming “wait! wait!” — he’s fumbling for his dagger, but just ends up with the victor’s boot in his face. And scene.
• Scars and Consequences: For those that survive the fight, something is going to linger, whether it’s in the flesh or in the circumstances. Nobody walks away from a fight clean of what they’ve done and had done. Whatever it is, it will haunt the character for the rest of his story.  Each fight a character gets in changes him to the core. That’s violence for you. Who you are is what gets violated.  Only the mildest of altercations might leave a man or woman unchanged.

So maybe there’s a game out there that could do this, or a game that could be made that would handle all of it, whether through the skill of the folks at the table or in the elements of system brought to the table.  But really, at the end of it, I have to wonder if anyone would actually enjoy playing it.

Besides me.

Looking at this from a completely mercenary perspective, being loud in this fashion is very much about establishing a presence and a “brand of me”.  In the Internet Age, silence is equivalent to invisibility.  You might be out there producing great things and doing interesting stuff, but if you aren’t talking about it, and if other people aren’t talking about it, it may as well not be happening. Audience is king.

But beyond the whole “I’m loud so I’m seen” thing, I’m also loud in service of the things I like and love.  I’m loud so those things are seen, too.

Silence, as they’re fond of saying, is complicity. That’s complicity with things as they are and are going to be.  When I’m loud, I’m casting a vote.  I’m voting to support the continuation of things I enjoy, or to change the things I don’t.  By gathering that audience and being loud, I’m able — occasionally — to transfer parts of that audience to the stuff I dig.  That grows its base, and a growing base begets an ongoing effort.  TV shows get renewed (not always, sure; but viewers sure help).  Podcasts continue putting out new shows.  Authors write more books (and get asked to write more books by the publishers).

But that silence equals invisibility principle applies not just as a broadcaster, but as an audience member.  As a fan of something you can either be a lurker — i.e., invisible for all intents and purposes — or a participant.  This is what I had in mind when I talked on twitter about being “no silent fan”.  I’m doing my best to be a participating audience member (I’m not always succeeding, but the effort is important).

This is particularly important at the small audience end of the scale.  If I read a blog post I like or a podcast that says something that clicks for me, I take the time to comment on it.  In smaller audiences (and let’s be real here, almost all gaming audiences qualify, among many others), each individual member counts as a nontrivial percentage of the whole.  Loud-talkin’ participant members are few (despite appearances); one comment, one tweet, can carry a lot of weight.  And that’s weight that’s felt both by the producer (say, a game’s author) and by the rest of the audience.

On the producer’s side, active fan participation undercuts that one thing that all creative types have to some degree: doubt.  Your favorite author might benefit from seeing that positive review you posted on your blog (or on the book’s Amazon listing for that matter).  It tells her that she’s reaching someone.  That she’s doing something right.  Participating as a fan is an act of giving the gift of confidence.  It’s a potent feedback loop, and the internet and social media make it possible — so long as you make the effort to be a part of it.

On the audience side, comments stimulate conversation, and conversation evokes emotional response. Get enough emotional response going and you’re guaranteed to push the conversation — and by association the thing that got you excited — out of the Zone of Mediocrity.  That’s what marketroid types call “grass roots” and “word of mouth” and all that, and most of them will also tell you it’s the most powerful force for making something succeed in today’s economy.  Advertising doesn’t do it any more (unless it’s lucky enough to move enough folks to talk about the product).  The product itself can do it with its intrinsic awesomeness (something Seth Godin calls “being remarkable”, i.e., being-worth-remarking-upon), but that’s a hard thing to do deliberately.  Only you, as a participating audience member, can deliberately make it happen.  When they’re talking about the word of mouth, the words and the mouths they’re talking about are us, the fans.  When we talk, we make more fans, and the feedback loop grows.

Participation also changes the what you’re participating in, like that whole quantum physics thang (“the act of observing changes the observed”).  No comment, no retweet, no blog review is a neutral thing. It adds context; it reframes.  That participation feedback loop includes the creator/producer you’re responding to as well as the product itself, and that’s bound to affect them both, as I’ve already said above.  How you talk elsewhere about the things you’re a fan of will affect how the word of mouth spreads (or fails to spread) and what the message is. When you talk about the stuff that excites you, you’re making it personal for the folks who read what you have to say. It’s one thing to read a product description by someone you don’t know; it’s another thing to see that a friend has gotten excited about something.

So when you get loud, make the context you add something good. Don’t bust on other things in comparison.  Tthat’s taking a crap on something other people are excited about, and you want them to respect the things you’re excited about, so be reciprocal — just as everyone can be seen as an ass by someone else, everything that you see as crap is likely seen as awesome by someone else. So instead, focus on what rocks your socks, not the stuff that leaves your socks unmolested. And don’t fail to add context when you can: a straight up retweet is okay, but a retweet that includes your own thoughts about the link/widget/idea is better: you’re making it matter more to folks who know you.

All of this touches on what Chuck Wendig’s “pebble” post is talking about: a fan spoke up and made a comment. That moved someone else to talk about it. That moved someone else to do something because of it. That something got noticed by other people. And as a result, more eyeballs (more potential fans) make it back to Chuck’s blog.  And all that that first fan did was support Chuck’s efforts by commenting rather than sitting silent. By participating.

It also connects to things I’ve done, directly, as a fan of Jim Butcher’s work.  I’m his friend from before he was Himself and all, but I was also a fan of the stuff he was writing, early on.  I started up a fan site before his first book was out (I’d had the chance to read the manuscript in advance); eventually it became Jim’s official website.  I got a mailing list for his fans going that years down the line got so hectic with the back and forth communication of the community that grew there that it had to transition into an active forum with thousands of posts. No silent fan was I.

But even in the early days, when the site was just a fan site, and the list traffic was steady but not unmanageable, we made sure that as a community we were no silent fans.  A culture of “buy the book for a friend, first one’s free” emerged — a deliberate effort to put our money where our mouths were. Inevitably plenty of the folks who got that first free book went out and bought the rest.  The audience grew.  And we weren’t content to see Jim’s work get invisible in stores.  Several of us did the whole “bookstore commando” thing, where we’d go in, locate the section where Jim’s books were, and rearranged things a little so his books got an outward rather than spine-on facing.  These are all little things, but you get enough people doing it and it adds up, especially as new fans are created and continue the same thing.

This is not to say that we can take credit for Jim’s success, but we definitely voted for that success, definitely participated in it, definitely were some of the words of mouth that pushed him forward.  Today, we don’t need to “face out” Jim’s books — the stores know to do that. Today, we don’t truly need to tell other folks to pick up the books — Jim’s latest ones have been showing up on the New York Times bestseller lists.  But he started small like anyone, and it was loud, participating fans that got him to where he is.

So what small thing are you a fan of, today? And how are you going to be loud about it?

Be no silent fan.

Anyway.

The entire flippin’ series is on sale at Amazon right now for less than $60, which is about 40% of the regular price. You should maybe really urgently buy it, or get it for someone this Christmas.

I’ve been tweeting back and forth with Brad Murray about many things (the Fate game Diaspora that he and three other gents worked on being a big part of it), one of which is our mutual admiration of Vernor Vinge’s novels A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness In The Sky.  I am not a hard sci fi sort of guy when it comes down to it, but Vinge’s novels really grabbed me. Yes, there’s bits of science and intriguing speculation flying fast and furious at your face, but he also has a master’s touch in pacing and character.

It’s been a while since I read those books, but their fingerprints were all over Diaspora.  So Brad pointed me toward Vinge’s earlier work, Marooned in Realtime.  I saw that The Peace War was essentially a prequel story to Marooned, so I picked up both and got to reading War.

Vinge owned me all over again.  I’m prone to the occasional mild bout of insomnia, but that wasn’t the case while I was reading The Peace War.  I came to bed dog tired and ready to sleep.  Then I’d pick up the damn book, and I’d be up past three A.M.  While not all of Vinge’s work grabs me this hard (I’ve never managed to get into Rainbows End, but I might give it another try later), those failures to grab are the exception.

The Peace War was written before the end of the Cold War, so it has some “future history” anachronisms in it based around that, and they just do not matter.  It’s a solid thriller with a future Earth that’s been irrevocably changed by a bit of technological blackmail and the regrets of the guy who made the technology possible.  I’d summarize more, but Vinge’s ideas are the sort that are difficult to describe without spoiling some of the essentials.  Highly recommended.

I’m starting into Marooned now, and I’m at that crucial 8 chapter mark. No chance of this going on the Later Pile, though — I’ve been staying up past three again.  The grab is in the characters, at the end of the day: I care about the characters first, and get lulled into the exploration of the hard(ish) sci fi ideas afterwards.  Which is really the way it should be: give me a great story about interesting people first, and explore ideas second.

Which has me thinking about Shock: and Diaspora both, and how my preferences relate to ‘em, but that’s a post for another time.