A Brief History of Me and Computers

A short trip down digital memory lane, courtesy Batgirl Claus getting her son Sebastian a refurbished Mac laptop for the holiday, which got me thinking... I've had a lot of computers in my life!

1983 - 1986 
Apple IIe and "dumb" terminals
My parents got an Apple IIe for the household. Around the same time, I learned to program in BASIC, courtesy of our high school computer program (which involved a room of terminals which connected to a mainframe across the street I never saw). This was a magic time, one filled with several different text based D&D-style adventure games I wrote (and various other programs assigned by the school). On the IIe, I also played Sir Tech's Wizardry, Digdug, did my first writing with a wordprocessor called Bankstreet Writer, and played with the Koala pad, which was sort of a precursor to the mouse (and a drawing pad, to boot).

I'd be remiss not to mention the Commodore 64 owned by my friend Brett during this period. Many hours playing Ultima and some video game emulating the Hunt for Red October...

1986 - 1990
Macintosh Plus
College was an oddly computer-lite period of my life, save for a few times I accessed the computer lab in the library to write a paper. They had Mac Pluses, and I was enthralled by the 'point n click' elegance of it.

1992-1995

Macintosh Classic
Variety of PCs using Windows 3.0
The time had come--I wanted my own computer. My pal Monte had a Mac Classic and printer he wanted to sell. This was when I really learned how to experiment on an operating system to learn all its in and outs.
 
But in 1992, I started work at NeXstar (originally Nexagen) Biopharmaceuticals. One aspect of my job required spending a lot of time on a variety of PCs hooked up to DNA synthesis machines. Which was, honestly, far more computer than was required, but they were convenient for input. Right around 1992 was when the internet was really getting going, and ALL these computers were hooked straight into it. Which meant that during my free time (and nights and weekends) I immersed myself in MUDs and MUSHes (and learned a fair bit about coding C-style languages in the process).


1995-1997
Macintosh Performa 6300
TSR hired me (supposedly to code MUDs and MUSHes, branded for D&D), but nope. I stayed on to write D&D the old fashioned way, and used the Mac Performa to do it.

1998-2000
Gateway PC computer GP6-350 pentium II 
Wizards bought TSR in 1997! The first computer they started me out with was a ... I don't recall, sadly. Some sort of Mac I'm imagining. But probably the reason I don't recall is that I'd decided it was high time I buy another home computer, one with the chops to play "real" games. Which meant it was time to buy a PC. I chose a Gateway with 3 gigs of hard drive space! This cost a cool 3 grand. But I got a lot of enjoyment out of it.

2000-2002
iBook 300 Tangerine Clamshell
Then those beautiful iBook clamshells came out, and I HAD to have one. And I did. My first lap-top, and still the one I love the most--it was ergonomically perfect. It had a retractable handle!  (I still have this computer, actually, though it's stored away for some future project when I retrofit it with modern hardware.)



2002
iBook G3 Snow
I can't recall why the clamshell wasn't cutting it anymore. I may have become a crazed computer buyer, or maybe the comercials got me. Maybe it was the firewire, and I needed better hardware to make movies? Maybe the jump to OS X. That might be it. But it wasn't enough, because a year later, I gave it away to a friend (who I believe still uses it today to serve music for his home theatre system).

2003-2008
Powerbook G4 Aluminum 17 inch
I'd definitely drank the Kool-aide. I was so enamored of the concept of this machine that I PRE-ORDERED it. I'd never done that before. I even shot a short film to commemorate the unboxing! However, this computer lasted me 5 full years, when the hard drive gave out. I sold it for a few hundred dollars, remarkable given that it didn't work.

2008-2013
Macbook Pro 15 inch
I loved me some Powerbook, so even though they changed the name, I bought a replacement when my previous one gave it. I used it myself for 5 years, and it is still being used in this household, being almost daily fought over by Batgirl's kids ;-). But in 2012, I wanted something more modern, and more portable

2012 - to present
Macbook Pro 13 inch
The screen's smaller than my 17 inch, but I have a 2nd monitor set up from the home office where I do most my work. Right now, though I have it set up next to Batgirl's 17 inch Macbook pro unibody, and it looks a bit tiny. But it still gets the job done. I'm hoping for 5 years of solid service like the last 2 (though as I say, the last macbook is still going!)

Thank You! THE STRANGE is coming!

Thank you again for your support of The Strange! We’ve said it many times, but it’s still completely true: We’re utterly blown away by the interest and enthusiasm that you have shown for our project over the last five weeks. It sincerely means a lot to all of us.

Thanks for backing, and for making The Strange such a big, vibrant game line. We’ll never forget that you helped make that happen!

Check out Charles Ryan's thank you message on behalf of all MCG!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1433901524/the-strange-a-tabletop-rpg-by-bruce-cordell-and-mo/posts/671947

Last Week of The Strange Kickstarter

It's been an exhilarating, amazing, and slightly exhausting month.

We are now officially in the last week of the The Strange Kickstarter. Even though the effort isn't over, I've been working with Monte Cook on design for the actual The Strange RPG; we've got a lot of material to write! Of course in addition to that, I've been helping the rest of MCG run the crowdfunding campaign. That includes a helping hand in writing some of the various updates (though Charles Ryan is mostly the man behind the curtain on those), creating sneak peeks on that aforementioned design, fiction (a short story called The Paradox Room: Four Winds that's in second draft, which I need to try to finalize by Monday), several ongoing efforts to raise awareness that we're actually holding the campaign for the many who remain unaware, and of course, almost hourly monitoring of the pledge level.


Like I said: exhilarating, amazing, and slightly exhausting :-).

Sometime very early this morning we hit the goal that unlocked deluxe leatherbound edition of the The Strange corebook. Everytime we hit one of our stretch goals, we feel an amazing high! Which is followed within a few hours with wondering how we can best put out the word that another, newer stretch goal has been announced. You get the idea :-).

This also includes doing interviews for folks kind enough to offer us the chance to talk. Which means I've done more fun and interesting interviews in the last month than I've done during certain entire years of my past career! For instance, the great podcast Metagamers Anonymous (hosted by Prismatic Tsunami) just released today the podcast interview I did yesterday!

I'm not complaining. Far from it. I just wanted to offer people a sense of the kind of things going on behind the scenes. (A glimpse that represents about 15% of the effort, given that I'm just one of the five awesome team members making up this company, and everyone of them is working themselves silly on this project, as well as several other Numenera-related projects also ongoing--for example, Shanna Germain is even now finalizing the amazing Numenera Ninth World Bestiary).

That, and I wanted to say thank you. The attention we've received for this kickstarter is amazing, and humbling.

Everyone who has backed us and/or who spread the word about this effort to their friends has given us a gift: The ability to create another year of completely new RPG material, this time, set in The Strange.

Want A New Avatar?

If you're looking to try out a cool new avatar for your Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or other social network, take the 7 questions in our How Strange Are You? quiz! You'll discover whether you're an ally of Ruk, Ardeyn, or Earth. Then download the badge for your faction and make it your avatar!

Behind the Scenes: whichever faction of The Strange achieves its goal by the end of The Strange Kickstarter (https://www.bit.ly/TheStrange) will get an extra full-color illustration by lead artist Matt Stawicki, and all backers will receive the art as a desktop wallpaper. Further, all allies of that faction will be able to vote on the contents of the illustration.

(As of the time of this writing, Ardeyn holds onto its lead with 45% of the votes tallied. Earth remains second at 32%, while Ruk trails with only 23%. Can Ruk get back into it? Only if more people take the quiz! Tell your friends; they can take the quiz even if they're not backers!)

Something Strange On The Horizon

After I left Wizards, I started putting together an outline for a sci-fi novel. But then MCG made me an offer to join the team. So I pitched my novel idea, except as a game called The Strange. And guess what? Monte and Shanna loved it!

Which leads us to where we are today, just a couple months later. We’re going to launch a Kickstarter for a new game, co-designed by myself and Monte Cook, called The Strange (UPDATE: We launched it here!). The Strange uses the Cypher System game engine. As you probably know, the Cypher System also powers Numenera. What's cool is that The Strange is going to allow us to use the mechanics in some new and very exciting ways.

When you play The Strange, you'll be able to translate between different worlds, called recursions, that have been seeded "around" Earth. Yes, that's right: Earth. The game setting includes modern day Earth. The image showing the Space Needle in Seattle is no whim. But in some recursions, sorcery, super-science, and even stranger rules of existence are all too real.

Be ready. Something Strange is just on the horizon!

Nalurus and Numenera Design Esthetic

One of the creatures I'm working on for Numenera Bestiary has the working name Nalurus. The unedited* description follows.

A nalurus looks like an ordinary person, but one who always wears a hood or mask. It may be pretending, even to itself, that it's still human, despite the terrible infection it survived but still carries. The nalurus's infection is transmitted by sight. If a living humanoid or related creature sees a nalurus without its hood and looks full upon the disquieting lines, spirals, and geometric shapes laid out in ridges across the creature's face, the awful pattern imprints on the victim's mind. Something in the interplay of information, refraction, and the physical structure of the victim's brain itself sets off a cruel and rapid chain reaction. What begins as a pinkish nose drip ends when the victim's brain completely liquefies and exits the victim's head from eyes, nose, mouth, and ears less than a minute after the infection occurred.

My concept for the nalurus was born from my real fear of a disease called Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD). CJD is an incurable and fatal brain disease that is caused by a type of protein called a prion. Prions are misfolded proteins that infect other nearby proteins merely by being close enough to incite those proteins to misfold. It becomes a sort of chain reaction that, over months, dissolves the brain. Obviously, over a billion years, it's gotten more aggressive . . .

But telling readers all about CJD in the Nalurus monster description itself, or the science behind some other monster I'm writing, despite it being my first instinct to do so, isn't actually the way to go to maintain the Numenera design esthetic. It turns out, I needed to deprogram, and I'm thankful the MCG team was there with the design and editorial insight that allowed me to do so. At the end of the day, Numenera is a game designed to inspire a sense of wonder, mystery, and weirdness in its players, not explain the science of how prions misfold, the underlying mechanism behind spurn evolution, or how an amber monolith might be able levitate for so many thousands or even millions of years. For most people, those specific explanations will come across as technobabble. Revealing the entire answer to a mystery is sort of like telling a joke, then before anyone can appreciate it, following up with "The reason that's funny is because [proceed to ruin joke here]."

We (I, Monte, and Shanna, if they'll allow me to speak for them) are not suggesting that a designer shouldn't have such background information in his or her back pocket, possibly even to reveal the edges of in a monster description if it seems right to do so, or indeed, available for some other purpose (for instance, such as a blog post like this one). We're just saying that the main body of a Bestiary monster entry itself isn't the best place to pull back the curtain, at least not all the way and certainly not every time.

*Unedited, pre-layout, and truth-to-tell, working version of the monster. The name could change, or for reasons, we might decide this monster shouldn't go in the Bestiary.

Numenera Bestiary and the Spurn

I've been working on the Numenera Bestiary for a couple weeks. I haven't had this much fun writing monsters since I co-wrote Libris Mortis. Which, now that I think of it, was the last time I had the opportunity to create an entire new set of monsters without any real restrictions other than theme.

(Numenera? If you don't know, go read this, then come back. I'll wait.)

So, yeah, the Numenera Bestiary. It turns out I get to write about half the creatures that'll be appearing in the product. The very first creature I created has the working name "spurn." (The spurn are, so far, the only monster in my concept collection that have an irregular plural form: 1 spurn and 20 spurn are both correct usage. Later editorial oversight could nix that.)

From afar, a gang of spurn seem nothing more than humanoids in oily rags. But up close, they're revealed as creatures formed of smashed machines, shattered synth, matted hair, drippy sludge, and garbage. Spurn are self-organizing collections of refuse that evolved among the landfills and dumps of previous civilizations over deep time.

I'm biased, but I love the concept. In the Ninth World, even "simple" dirt isn't actually simple. In fact, it's not even called dirt; it's drit, a fine, artificial soil made from microscopic pieces of ancient, unknown technologies and structures. Which makes drit fertile soil for creatures like spurn to spring up, so to speak.

I'm hoping to write about what I'm working on in the Numenera Bestiary in future posts, and give you an insight into some of the ways I'm approaching design. Until then, iadece!

Parking In Seattle

I found out last night about a 'no parking w/in 5' of a driveway' law courtesy of a crazy Seattle homeowner. A necessary law or an excuse for extortion? I guess it depends on the circumstances.

I know how I come down on this particular case. It's not fun to come out of a friend's house to discover your car is mysteriously missing, and you must figure out your next steps with no clue other than the mere fact that the car is gone.

At the end of the day, I'm glad my car wasn't stolen, but instead towed, and that I had the necessary resources (friends to drive me to its new location, cash in my bank account, wits to figure out how to track it down in the first place) to get it back.

Bruce R Cordell is joining Monte Cook Games

Did you hear the big news announced last night at Gen Con? I'm joining Monte Cook Games as a Senior Game Designer! (Click here for official press release.)

Words can hardly express how excited I am to join my friends Monte, Shanna, Charles, and Tammie on Numenera.

Which is fabulous, because how could I not love a game set a BILLION years in the future? Where genetically altered monstrosities, flesh-warping radiation, creatures transplanted from distant stars, and clouds of out-of-control nanobots wander? Where ruins can be found, ruins surviving out of deep time from eight previous civilizations that rose and fell on Earth, some of which weren't even human? Yeah.

Numenera is right up my alley. Sign me up. (Wait, I've been signed up. -FIST PUMP!-) I'll have more to say later. It's going to be a wild ride, and I'm ecstatic to be on board.

I'm Going To Gen Con!

Recent developments mean that I'll be at Gen Con this year!

Of course, I just arrived home from Space City Con, where I got to tour NASA, cosplay as Dr. Horrible and Malcolm Reynolds, make friends and hang out with one of my favorite scifi authors Elizabeth Bear, run three days of D&D, and do all of this while enjoying the incomparable company of my sweetie Batgirl (and my pals Hobo Lord and Lady Gumdrop). You might imagine that Gen Con's got its work cut out for it, if it wants to follow that act.

You might imagine that, but the truth is, Gen Con 2013 is shaping up to be pretty fracking awesome in its own right. See you there?

Seven Questions

I talked with Artificer's Intuition about the 2nd Edition Monstrous Arcana "Evil Tide" adventure trilogy I penned, and other topics. 

An excerpt:

QUESTION: What's the story behind the Evil Tide adventure path? I've never really been able to find any history behind it.  

BRC: The Evil Tide adventure path got its start by being part of a planned series of "coffee-table-like books with lots of great art" (called Monstrous Arcana) that each would feature one of D&D's most notable monsters. Illithids, beholders, sahuagin, for starters. Each of these coffee-table books were slated to be supported by three connecting adventures. Skip Williams had already written the source book Sea Devils. But I was given the opportunity to write the three supporting modules.

All seven questions (and answers) can be found at:

http://artificersintuition.blogspot.com/2013/07/7-questions-with-bruce-r-cordell.html 

Space City Con Aug 2-4 in August

I'll be a gaming guest for Space City Con in Houston, Texas next month. If you're in the area in August on the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th, stop by and say hi!

Along with Robert J Schwalb and Miranda Horner, I'll be running a table of D&D Next each day. Come by and play a game at Space City Con! I promise not to TPK. Much.

While you're at it, you can meet some of the many media guests. If you're lucky, perhaps Jewel Staite will call you a ching-wah tsao duh liou mahng.

http://spacecitycon.com/