A Moment of Silence for Erick Wujcik

Erick Wujcik, RPG writer & designer, died on June 7, 2008, after a long battle with cancer.

Erick Wujcik is well known for his work on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness RPG, and the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game.

Eric Wujcik challenged how I thought about roleplaying games and systems, and I'm a better GM and player for it.

Roman's Recent News

• Mom is having cancer surgery on Thursday. Again. Fortunately they caught it very early this time. What she's truly dreading, however, is the radiation therapy afterwards, which she found far, far worse than the surgery. Keep her in your thoughts and prayers, thanks.


• A few months ago, I was approached and asked to write a proposal for a science fiction readers advisory book. I was told yesterday that my proposal was accepted. Now I suppose I actually have to write the thing ... *bemused grin*


• My nephew, now nearly four years old, god bless him, struggles with mild cerebral palsy and autism. Still, it is one of my great joys to spend time with him. Just the other day, he finally recognized me and said my name without prompting--"Unca Stee." Best gift I've gotten in a long time.

Carry on.

Thank You, Gary Gygax, and Rest in Peace

Originally, I was just going to post about tonight's DeKalb Roleplayers Meetup tonight at Borders in DeKalb at 6:00 p.m.

But something bizarrely related and even more important has come to my attention:

Gary Gygax, "Father of D&D," dies at 69

I can honestly say that my life, my mind, and my imagination are richer thanks to the work of Gary Gygax. Playing RPGs is my favorite hobby, and some of the best times in my life have been spent with good friends bellying up to the table, rolling polyhedrons, slaying monsters, getting loot, and celebrating our victories.

Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, today is also GM's Day

So go do something to honor the father of RPGs. Indulge your imagination, savor the time you have with your loved ones, and ...

Go. Play.

Reasons for Reading, Watching, Gaming

Originally, I was going to title this post "Why I Read," but the reasons are as applicable to watching films and playing RPGs--the activities of imagination, whether feeding it or exercising it.

I love good dialogue between characters. Elmore Leonard is king, with Tarantino a close second. Joss Whedon has a good ear for conversation too--witty and smart.

I love interesting characters, whether they be stylish variants of types/archetypes, or fully fleshed. (As an aside, many fans demand fully realized characters. Funnily enough, I've discovered that these same fans, when reading outside their favorite genres, call the characters two-dimensional and cardboard, then apply different standards to their favorite genres, in which their favorite characters are really little more than recognizable variants of types with very little covering the skeletons.)

I love well-done plots, whether simple, intricate, or outrageous--doesn't matter, so long as the author paces it well and ties it up skillfully.

But more than anything else, I want something that excites my sense of wonder. What I look for is something akin to what C.S. Lewis called experiencing Joy. It's as if there's this X-shaped hole, and I've stumbled across something that fits that hole perfectly, like a puzzle piece. That's my sense of wonder.

"It's about, as Alan Moore put it, 'mad and beautiful ideas'; the sense of wonder, the feeling of marvelous secret things just beyond our field of vision, and the revelations and splendours and dangers and bastards tied up in it all."
~ Warren Ellis

I want the mad ideas. Take Michael Moorcock for example. Moorcock regularly rattles off a hundred brief, beautiful, brilliant, shining mad ideas on every page of his works. Many authors would take any one of those ideas and try to craft an entire novel around it--Hell, an entire series. Moorcock, on the other hand, dispenses these ideas like candy, tossing them out to his fans, with the side effect of making his worlds that much brighter, that much more wondrous, suggesting vast gulfs of adventure, intrigue, horror, discovery, and beauty.

And mad ideas aren't the same thing as so-called "big" ideas. I've seen far too many of these "big" ideas as the focus of many novels, particularly science fiction novels, and they can't carry the novels by themselves. The idea can be something small, and precious, and bright, an author's unique combination of the most common tropes. But that combination somehow hits the "turbo" button on my imagination, and I'm daydreaming and wide-eyed, with a big goofy grin or a sly smile.

And that's what I want.

Shoot 'Em Up

I just watched the movie Shoot 'Em Up, starring Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti, and Monica Bellucci.

... and I really wish I'd seen it in the theaters when I had the chance.

First of all, any movie with the title Shoot 'Em Up and the ad campaign this film had is going to be an action movie. But Shoot 'Em Up isn't just an action film; it is a love song to gun-toting action films in the same way that Big Trouble in Little China is a love song to Hong Kong action films.

And that sentence alone will likely determine if you even see the movie or read any further.

For those of you who haven't fled in a mad burst of rapid-clicking, Shoot 'Em Up had me cheering throughout the movie. Yes, cheering. Out loud. At my television set, when I'm the only one in the house. It is a smart, genuinely funny, film.

Smart, because the movie designers know all the tropes of the action film and push them even further without tipping over into outright camp or spoof, and that takes some skill. Clive Owen is a good choice for the antihero with a bad attitude and a need for redemption, Monica Bellucci is the prostitute with a heart of gold, and Paul Giamatti is the funniest, nastiest, villain I've seen in a long time, completely stealing the show as he masticates the scenery into oblivion.

The plot is outrageous: save the baby whose sole purpose is as a bone marrow donor for a corrupt Senator desperately clinging to life. As the Senator pushes for strong gun control legislation, the gun manufacturers want the baby dead, thus effectively ending the threat from the Senator.

And then there are the action scenes, including:

• gun fights in free fall.
  
• the protagonist getting into a head-on collision with the bad guys' van, propelled forward at the moment of collision and diving through his shot-out windshield, through the bad guys' shot-out windshield, and into the back of their van, where he systematically shoots all of them
  
• gun battle while in coitus with Monica Bellucci--an Academy Award winning scene if I've ever seen one.
  

Everything in this film is turned up to, and past, 11. Everything in the film is insane, outrageous, bizarrely over the top ... and it all works. It all genuinely WORKS, without descending into spoof or outright camp, and that's what impressed me the most. I'm laughing, cheering, screaming "Oh, FUCK NO WAY!", and having a blast the entire time, without ever feeling that the movie is meant to mock the action genre or its fans.

And that takes some doing.