Over on myspace, is a free first issue of Hexed.  hexed is a urban fantasy comic, about a thief who specializes in stealing supernatural items.  In the preview, she breaks into a dance club to steal some special accessories, and then is trapped by a former boss into pulling off another job.

First impressions.  Gosh the artist likes pink.  Pink and red.  I also like the first cover, which has our protagonist busily working at something while lots of pink...stuff...swirls around her.  the second cover seems too posed

More detailed. I like that Lucifer, our heroine pulls off the example job quietly , perfectly and nonviolently.  It's common in comics to introduce a thief this way...but it's also common to have something go wrong, just so they can have a violent chase scene.   This introduces the competenceof the character without excess theatrics.  Later events serve both to show that Lucifer is both respected, works for something approaching good guys, and has a complicated past.  Fortunately, most of the internal dialogue is restricted to Lucifer talking about the job.

Lucifer is quite introspective, and somethng of a gloomy gus.  And despite what she says, she's still attractive- though admittedly not in a comic-bookish way.  The artwork itself is of a kind  I like; sketchy, but representational in a way that most comic books tend to miss.   the color is very strongly integrated in with the artwork, and feels more like watercolors than computer coloring; I suspect that the raw ink drawings would be nowhere as nice looking as the colored product (not something I can say about a lot of my favorite artists).  I do like that all the characters are very distinct, not only in face and attitude, but in body shape as well.

The story is a nice introduction, giving us the set-up for the rest of the story, and also introducing hints of background that whet the desire to know more about the character. Likewise the dialogue is fairly natural, and works to give the feeling of people discussing things of interest, without being info dumps.

Conclusion.
It's really a pretty comic, and the characters and story are interesting enough.  I think I'll check it out in the store.  The artist needs to do something about all the pink though.

By all rights, I should have never read this book. When you have a book who's cover shows a girl in a white gown next to a wolf, plus a castle, and the story involves a woman raised by wolves, brought home to be a princess, comparisons to silly new-age fiction and Mercedes Lackey books are bound to arise.

But appearances are deceiving: a closer look shows the woman on the book cover has tangled hair and wild eyes; she looks like a feral child that's been shoved into a dress. And the story itself has far more similarity with The Jungle Book or Tarzan than Women who Run with Wolves.

PLOT
Firekeeper is the only two-legged member of a pack of Royal wolves, wolves that are larger and smarter than regular wolves. When an expedition of humans arrives in her area, curiosity leads her to join them, and on their return she is hailed as Blyth, the lost daughter of a deceased contender for the throne, and is likewise a contender for the throne. The story follows Blyth's learning of human society, and also the political machinations surrounding the king who has so far, not chosen an heir. But as a wolf, Firekeeper knows about power struggles herself.


REVIEW
That may be the basis of the plot, but it really doesn't convey the charm of the book. Firekeeper/Blyth isn't a nature child, nor quite a feral child. She considers herself a wolf, albeit one who has to use a dagger as a substitute claw, and pelts as substitute fur. As such she brings a wolf-child's outsider perspective to the events. One of the nice elements of this book is the author takes her time to introduce Firekeeper to the humans; it's a process of exploration and discovery on both sides, and Firekeeper finds delightful things about humanity (like soft shirts for a start). This is definitely not a "pure nature meets the rapacious humans" tale; Firekeeper is a hunter, not a wilderness saint, being rather concerned with survival and keeping her place in the pack. At the same time, she's fascinated by these strange creatures, humans.

Lindsgold has an excellent eye for the two major types of world building. For the first, she evidently did some good research on wolves, enough to build a picture of what a society of wolves with human intelligence would be like, and without lecturing, brings out both the parallels and the differences between wolf and human cultures. Another nice worldbuilding element is this isn't quite a faux-medieval Europe. It's rather like a fantasy analog of American colonies, if there was no gunpowder, the Europe equivalent had magic to maintain their power, and the colonies had been isolated and left to go their own way due to a major plague. And of course if the Appalacians were untrod and had giant, intelligent animals in it. So while the fantasy society isn't completely original or exotic, it does have interesting differences from your standard Extruded Fantasy Product. And so far, no elves, thank the author.

The book does have it's limitations; there were a couple points where contemporary phrases seemed to be dropped in, and like in many fantasy novels, the author seems to play fast and loose with distances and travel times. She also has to at times do digressions into histories and genealogies, both important for knowing the factions. On the plus side, she does some really well-done characterizations, so that not only Firekeeper's, but also her allies and friends grow and develop in both predictable and surprising ways. And to my mind, there's nothing like seeing a happy surprise in the development of a character.

Finally, while this is a series, I appreciate that this book has a definite beginning and end. Questions about a number of characters are answered, a crisis is resolved, and then life is ready to go on.

FINAL RATING

Good enough to get a copy of the second book in the series. I recommend it.

Note: this game is free to download, up through November 25th.  that is, today and tomorrow. 

As if you didn't have enough of being at work 40+ hours a week.  MSG is an indie, resource-based narrative rpg of working for a ruthless conglomerate a hundred years from now, where coming up with a marketing plan and backstabbing your boss is even more important than gunplay. 

Like many indie games, MSG pushes he boundaries of what "RPG means.  It has some interesting indie ideas, such as one player taking the role of the corporation in each  turn, non-traditional stats (Self,  Compassion, a person you love, someone you hate, a dark secret, etc..) and a limited game play where the goal is to actually win over the corporation and the other players.   Self and Compassion are the main stats that give you a dice pool that you risk to succeed on the various unethical tasks the corporation gives you, your additional traits give you more points you can risk, and the player to end the game with the most of his dice pool left, wins the game.  Beyond that, there are a number of mechanics to give the feel of a company, such as resources, brand name and values, and if the company does badly enough, buyouts.

In tone and feel, it's like a very cynical, cyberpunk soap opera, in that the personal elements the players choose are built upon to make a story.  In fact, the additional points one can gain through bringing up say, one's dark secret are called soap.  Like other narrative RPGs , the actual role-playing appears to be subsumed into making a story and the personality mechanics; in fact, the situations are supposed to be narrated, not acted out..  As a result, the game itself is as slick, attractive, and cold as the companies it satirizes, a feeling enhanced by the graphics and between-chapter vignettes.

But what the hell, in the best of free-market principals, the game is free for a limited time only.  So one might as well download the PDF.

Gilrec, the hapless protagonist of The Far Reaches is a SciFi "hero" in a decidedly Woosterian vien. He'd really rather live out his life on his country estate playing video games, but he can't say no to anythng his remarkably stupid friends or terrifying uncle proposes. Fortunately, he has just acquired an amazingly competant robot butler named Bentley.

At first I was inclined to dislike this comic. The web-anime art style is rather old now, and a lot of the related graphic tropes just annoy me at this point. Likewise, Far Reaches lacks the brilliant dialog and writing that make the actual Jeeves and Wooster books such a pleasure. But I think I was a little hasty, because while it's taken it's time to find its pace, when Far Reaches does hit the right humor buttons, it's damn good.

Take the following scenes, for example:


( Where we see the artist does a damn good Peter Falk )


I was impressed. It's rare to find someone starting off with one joke, and finishing off with a completely different one. So, while The Far Reaches is still definitely light entertainment, it is good fun, and I'll keep reading it.

It's been ages since I did a proper webcomics review, which is a pity, since I read tons of 'em, and there's more cool webcomics coming out every second.  So here's a couple that are worth looking at.


Skin Horse From the same person who gave us "Narbonic" we have another tale of weird science, neurotic relationships, and talking animals. In this case, it's a government agency devoted to dealing with the 2,000 intelligent animals and other creations that assorted mads have left behind.  Fans of Narbonic will find the characters look somewhat familiar, and well, some of the character behaviors are familier.  However, I'm actually enjoying this one more than Narbonic, as I have less of a desire to pistol-whip some sense into the characters.  well, most of them anyway.





Dawn of Time this is a cute comic about a cute barbarian in a fur bikini, her pet dinosaur, and a couple of neo-victorian time travelers, who want to settle some questions about Iguanodons (one that actually puzzled scientists in the real world for decades).  It's well drawn for its cartoony style, and the writer isn't afraid to have entire comics without dialogue.  In fact, the wordless barbarian girl is easily worth the price of admission.






Ballad this is a seriously weird and creepy comic with exquisite artwork and a gothic sensibility. The story is hard to detail: it involves a reanimated servant, a terrifying girl "child", and a town where oddities are almost accepted as commonplace.  It swings between beautiful scenery, moody interiors, and grotesque scenes that made me flinch.  Normally it's difficult for a webcomic to actually give me a sense of horror; they usually at most gross me out.  But Ballad is so atmospheric and well drawn, that it accomplishes what it set out to do.

 
That's right: the wordless comic from binsybabythat I linked to yesterday.  The truth is, it's actually finished!  And thesecond part is even cooler than the earlier one!

I want to see this in a book, or at least I want to see the creator do more stuff.  This is incredibly, beautifully,  cute and sweet and well done.

I remember somebody, I think it was  palecur asking me the other day what happened to Emma Bull.  She wrote "The War for the Oaks, which I still have a sweet spot for, and co-authored Freedom and Necessity...but what's he been doing recently?  I wasn't sure.

But now I know.  She's been producing the brilliant supernatural crime series The Shadow Unit, which just finished it's critically acclaimed first season.   



Conclusion?  Highly regarded, check it out!

 A slow enough day that I'm even talking D&D.  Next week I'll get back to my own game projects.

Anyway, one of the common things I've been is that D&D 4th edition reminds people of an MMORPG.  Evidently the assigned roles, the at-will, encounter and daily powers, and the emphasis on combat powers, strikes people as MMORPG-ish.  A lot of that is arguable- I don't find the power splits very MMORPG-like at all, though the way armor is described seems very much like something out of World of Warcraft.  Likewise, the roles seem to pretty much harken back to classic D&D tactics.  But, I'm not here to argue that.

All that aside, do you know what really screams "MMORPG" to me? It's not any particular version of a game themself; it's actually the optimization debates where numbers are crunched to show that character A is less effcient at dealing damage per round than Character B. So in this regard, it's actually D&D 3.X that reminded me of an MMORPG, whenever people got into massive threads proving mathematically that two-weapon finesse fighters did something like 2.35 points less damage a turn than a two-handed fighter. If they simply used terms like Damage Per Round (DPR) to mimic the MMORPG term DPS, the comparasion with similar debates on the MMORPG boards would be complete.

So right now, 3.X feels the most MMORPG-ish to me, simply because there were so many people obsessed with optimization, juggling numbers, and claiming that any character that wasn't optimized was a drag on the team. I don't really remember quite that attitude with AD&D; sure there were twinks munchkins, and people argued that certain class features from some of the dodgier supplements were over-or-underpowered.   But it all didn'tget so much into the algebra, and claims that any character that wasn't optimized according to rigid math was worthless.

So far D&D-4th doesn't feel so MMORPG-ish to me, simply because I haven't seen the extensive number crunching 3.X spawned. Sure there's already people trying to optimize characters, but the combination of At-will, Encounter and Daily effects may make trying to do number crunching problematic, especially when considering that the effectiveness of those powers will depend heavily on circumstances and fellow players. 

So, whether the algebra fans show up later will affect how I feel about the MMORPG feel.

On thing I did do this morning is watch TV; the new adventures of Spiderman is OK, but failed to grab me, for some reason.  The high school Peter Parker is fairly well drawn, the situation seems OK, and the Black Cat did a nice riff on the sex kitten angle.  and yet, I kept wandering into the kitcen in a futile quest fr breakfast that wasn't freaky food from Trader Joe's.

On the other hand, I saw a new CGI show though, "Jane and the Dragon", which had interesting 3-D CGI.  It used motion capture, and the way the characters overlayed the background really reminded me of a cross between Final Fantasy 9, Ico, and old Saturday morning stop-motion animation.  It was both odd, and oddly compelling. 

An AMV: is it surprising this show has a lot of fans?

An Episode

So, courtesy of scans_daily, we have a reminder of why I love the comic Blue Beetle:
IS. THAT. A GIANT. GREEN. HAND.

For those who don't follow the comic, Jaime Reyes is a teenager who accidentally bonded with a suit of blue, insect-like alien power armor.   I was prepared to dislike this comic, as I was a fan of the former Blue Beetle, Ted Kord (an unpowered gadget-using adventurer kind of like Batman without all the issues).  However, the comic won me over with the quality of the characterization and the snappy dialog.  In may ways the new Blue Beetle is a bit like Spiderman for the current generation, if Spiderman had been written with a more natural, contemporary attitude, and without  the the over-the-top dramatics of Stan Lee.  For instance, I like that they avoided the "I must keep my secret hidden from all those I love", cliche, with Jaime immediately revealing his armor to his friends and family, and then dealing with his loved ones realizing that he may no longer be quite human. 

One other nice thing about this comic is that not only is this one of the few portrayals of latinos in mainstream comics, it's also a very positive portrayal.  Comics have a long, embarrassing history of using minorities as symbols to deal with contemporary issues in a ham-handed way, and  so its refreshing that Jaime is depicted first and foremost as a teenager, not a symbol.  Not that the comic doesen't deal with issues like gangs and immigration, but it puts it's own twist on them, and uses those elements as seeds for interesting stories, and not as proof that the writers are socially conscious.

In fact the whole comic is refreshing- witty and informed by the recent crop of teen action dramas, but so far it hasn't descended into the cloying tongue in cheek attitude of shows like Buffy.  I'm hoping it has a long, entertaining run..