Numenera Write-Up, Session #4: The Qi Zeppelin Disaster

The initial goal of my Numenera campaign was to run it entirely on pregenerated modules. I’m writing novels, I said.  I don’t have the brainspace to dedicate to a campaign, I said.  I’ll just run it out of the book, I said.
AH HA HA HA HA.
No, my Numenera campaign has catapulted off the rails and into a full-blown saga, as I am wont to do, and now I’m using that writer-brainspace to design a Numenera module.  My brain hates me.
But here’s the thing: I believe GMing is an art.  And I think writeups of how an adventure went are often helpful to other GMs – kind of like tournament reports in Magic, where a well-done summary of the day’s events can show you how to be a better GM.  For years, I did this for my Planescape campaign, rehashing the plot and discussing what did or did not work, and since Numenera is such a new system, it’s kind of exciting to discuss how to be not just a better GM, but a better GM in Numenera.
So.  What happened?
In the last session, I dropped the hammer: the players discovered that the Iron Wind was actually a computer system gone berserk.  At one point, in one of the previous empires, the Iron Wind was actually a nanotechnology cloud that was everywhere, attending like genies to whoever asked – conjuring delicious food out of mid-air, genetically reconfiguring people’s bodies so that they could fly to the heights of the stratosphere or delve to the depths of the ocean, and always keeping records of their bodies so they could be reconstituted if they died.
Then something happened to it, and the Iron Wind went rogue.  Now it sweeps across the Ninth World in nightmarish nano-storms, dismantling things at random, reassembling them into worse configurations.  But if it could be repaired, then maybe everyone destroyed by the Iron Wind could be resurrected.
That was the not-so-subtle way of saying to the players: Here is your end goal.  Then, as they were wondering how they might actually accomplish this, a heavily-armored woman made of glass stepped through a dimensional rift and into the room and said, “I’m sorry.  You weren’t supposed to find that out.  Now, you have to die.”
That was the not-so-subtle way of saying to the players: Here is your end boss.
The glass woman (level 6) used all kinds of dimensional-warping tricks on the players (spurred by GM interventions), and I was pleased to see that my players were clever enough to almost take her down.  The Numenera book says that a level 6 opponent is a near-unbeatable challenge, but they did chip away at her through strong rolls and good tactics.  But in the end, I had my final GM Intervention: she waved her hand, disgusted, and said, “Just die” and teleported them up all 20,000 feet up in the air.
And that’s where we began this session.
I let the players attempt to save themselves, and they seemed appropriately panicked as they realized just how far up they were, and how little chance they had.  They weren’t even near each other, as the glass woman had separated them.
I stressed that they’d never seen this view of the land, as everywhere they’d ever been before they’d gotten to by walking or riding; flying was some crazy dream.  Which, I think, is part of good Numenera GMing; you want to remind the players that really, most of the world is still very much stuck in medieval technology, even if they are constantly exploring scientific ruins.  I think that sort of thing helps keep the wonder alive.
My players gave their “falling” their best shot: our Explores Dark Depths Jack figured out how to steer a little, the Clever Jack made some wings with a Hearth Magic, and the Barbarian just prayed.  None of them particularly worked; in terminal velocity, the wings shredded, and steering was aiming our Jack at a nearby body of water.
Then blue streaks started to zip past them.  Rexx, steering desperately, realized that someone was trying to target them with something as they plummeted – he got glimpses of hardwood floors, brass rails, and electricity in the middle of it.  Eventually, he dove into one…
…and wound up in a tank of some sort filled with a hundred smaller dimensional rifts that bled off his momentum.
Here’s one trick I did as a GM: I put the camera exclusively on Rexx while he tried to save himself, as he was the most agile, and let the other players watch as they tried to figure out what the hell they would do when their turn came up.  Then, when Rexx was rescued, I told them that he saw their characters in the tanks next to him.  Which is a nice short-hand; I think other GMs might have played it out three times in a row, but when the end result has to be “Your PCs are saved by a stranger,” then handwaving that the exact same thing happened to the other guys is a good way of building tension and then breaking it.
The stranger turned out to be a an elderly woman with a long gray braid, dressed in the starry cloak that symbolizes a member of the Order of Truth.  She apologized for not being able to save their friend (i.e., the player who’d had to, quite literally, drop out of the campaign), and then they all compared notes.
I hate the comparing notes meetings.
In the beginning, it’s usually hard for the players to know who to trust, or who to swap information with; some generally share freely, but there’s always a couple who are like, “Do we want this person to know this thing?”  Which is often quite warranted – especially when the last time you learned this information, a glass woman teleported in and killed at least one of your party.  So when you meet the initial NPCs, there’s often a lot of dancing around what sort of information you should give and what they know, and so forth.
What I always do in a campaign is try to give the players a couple of people who you can unreservedly trust.  Other NPCs may have mixed motivations, but providing them with a “base character” or two to ask for advice when they’re not sure what to do has turned out to be invaluable; quite often, the players will squabble, and you really can’t do anything as a GM because you don’t have a legitimate voice.  A couple of close allies allows you to shape the debate, turning them away from dead-ends or truncating tedious conversations, and as such – while Lexa will eventually become an ally – at first, it’s pretty forced.
But compare notes they did, and Lexa eventually revealed that as someone who studies dimension-folding, she’d seen flashes from this glass woman – who she calls Glyssa – but nobody Glyssa had ever hunted down before had survived.  The players revealed that Glyssa seemed to be acting out of some warped nobility – that by killing anyone who knew the secret of the Iron Wind, she was acting for the greater good.  (“The greater good.”)  Lexa then suggested that as a member of the Order of Truth, she could take them to the Amber Pope and perhaps the Order of Truth had some further knowledge about both the Iron Wind and what this Glyssa might be doing.
Medium-term plot: accepted.
At which point Lexa revealed that:
a)  They were not dining in a room.  They were dining in a great zeppelin, two thousand feet above the ground.
b)  The zeppelin was a living creature called “Beulah.”  c)  Did they want to learn how to pilot Beulah?
The piloting scene wasn’t planned, but the players were a little frustrated after all the “So what should we do next?” and so I decided it was time for fun and games.  So we had a few nice days where Lexa taught the PCs how to fly a great living zeppelin – going up on top of her inflatable body to drink wine and watch the sunset, scrubbing Beulah’s body to rid her of mold (which also has the benefit of petting her), discovering what happens when you piss Beulah off (she tends to drop ballast and drop you five feet at the worst times).
And there was a nice scene where they were drinking wine and Lexa got to discuss what I see as one of the key aspects of Numenera: ecological damage.  To her, this world had once been beautiful, but there – she pointed down – was a black mold from some other planet that was destroying a forest, and there was a group of pallones that were driving out the native creatures, and there were some dimensional foldings from wayward technology that was hurting the air.  The Ninth World is the scraps and leavings of great cultures, and with the wonders left behind are also messes that no one is quite sure how to clean up.
The players were quite surprised to find that the old empires spanned galaxies, and that some of the empires weren’t even human.  “Why don’t they come back?” they asked.  “What happened?”
“Maybe they collapsed,” Lexa said.  “Maybe they don’t think we’re worth talking to any more.  Maybe they’ve forgotten us.”
“Man, I am gonna be so sad when this NPC dies,” said Jerry.  Which is good.  That meant I got the players in her camp.
But as that conversation wound down, the alarm bells went off.  A horde of small, metallic flying things were scanning the top of Beulah.  Rexx and Rena went up to investigate; Raven, who had determined she was not going up top ever, stayed below with the sole parachute.  The small flying things scanned Rexx and Rena, then zoomed in and targeted their eyes and –
What I had told the players before was to make sure they knew what their characters’ worst moment was, and now they figured out why.  I started with Rena, who had lost her sister to the Iron Wind: as the bug flashed her eyes, she was back on that day, and I asked.  “So what were you doing with your sister on the last day she was alive?”  Christy said they were playing tag.  And of course, as a very evil GM, I said that her sister was hard to tag – she was athletic, had the same lanky genes that Rena did, was clearly going to grow up to be one hell of a warrior.  And her sister tackled her when it was obvious she couldn’t escape, and then said:
“I made you a present.”
“What?”
She took out a ring of daisies.  “Here,” she said.  “I’m making you Queen of the World.”
And that’s when the Iron Wind hit.  Rena tried to save her sister, picking her up and running away, but no; she would forever remember tripping, seeing her sister sprawl to the ground, the Iron Wind howling around her as it turned her lungs to diamond.  She remembered her sister turning blue, choking out the last of her life – but instead of dying, her sister instead said, “This would never have happened if you had prettier hair.  You need a better shampoo.  You need Lustrin – ”
And WHAM, they’re back on the ship.  Take 4 Intellect damage and you need, need to buy some Lustrin.
These mini-flashbacks were mostly effective, though Rena’s was by far the best; I didn’t sit down with Jerry as much to map out Rexx’s tragedy, so that was a little freeform and not as emotionally impactful, and floundered a little.  But the Odfreys were fearful; you could kill them in a single blow, but sucking Intelligence by revealing bad memories made the players hate them.  If you’re going to do something like this (and these guys will appear in the module I’m writing), I’ll have some better idea of how to frame a mini-flashback.
Rena, enraged, smashed two of the Odfreys in one shot, and they exploded, sending white-hot showers of metal down onto Beulah.  Beulah lurched, and since Raven had opted to stay down in the cabin where it was safe, a GM Intrusion sent her falling out the windshield.
A furious combat ensued on top of the zeppelin, with GM Intrusions and notable events being:
a)  Rexx had a Wall of Fire, which he wanted to use to put a barrier between him and the Odfreys.  Fortunately, an intelligence check showed that putting a wall of fire on a rapidly moving airship meant that the wall of fire would impact them shortly.  He instead dropped it behind the Odfreys so it swept past them, taking out four in one shot….
b)  But Beulah lurched at the last minute in a GM Intrusion, causing the wall of fire to burn the back of her body, causing a major leak.  Beulah was crashing.  Call for Speed rolls to not tumble off the roof.
c)  Another Intrusion meant a competing set of Odfreys arrived, blue instead of red, and immediately began fighting with each other for consumer dominance, fighting at each other with sweeps of vicious laser beams that, when dodged, tore up Beulah’s surface more.
d)  Raven fell out of the window and was attacked by an Odfrey flashback, but rolled a 20 on her recovery and managed to use the memory of her dead wife in an “I want to LIVE!” moment that let her scramble up onto the deck.
e)  Another GM Intrusion set fire to the ladder she was crawling on.  Still another had Rexx tumble through a flap in the Beulah’s roof and so he tumbled down into her body and had to rescue himself.
f)  Raven worked her Who Works Miracles angle to try to heal Beulah, aided with a little assistance from Bob the Cypher-Friend.
In the end, after a spectacularly chaotic combat, with Beulah only about 700 feet off the ground, Lexa – who had been calling up “What’s going on?” and not one PC had ever answered her – decided to use her dimensional technology to warp Beulah to a safer location.  The ship glowed blue, shimmered, and vanished.
Leaving all the players 700 feet up in empty air, with only one parachute between them.
Next session, please.
As usual, I’m quite pleased by Numenera’s mechanics, although there were four things I learned:
1)  Considering Numenera is usually so good about avoiding needless busywork, the “Might per hour” cost for armor just strikes me as a lot of remembering when someone put on or off their armor.  That’s a lot of bookkeeping that I, as a GM, don’t like.
2)  I thought getting another level of Effort was the slam-dunk easy choice to make when levelling, but Jerry proved that an Edge of 2 is still really quite good.  So go Monte and Shanna for providing balanced mechanics!
3)  Having damage come off the Intelligence track is terrifying for most people.  Once they get used to managing Might, having something attack another stat was just something that sent them flying.
4)  Players can, in theory, heal 1d6+1 to a pool by taking an action… but in no combat run thus far has anyone had a spare action to take.  Maybe I run combats too chaotically, but I’m always keeping the players busy so that they’re fending off a foe or something.  Not sure if that’s my style or just a purposeful rule to ensure that recovering points in combat has a cost.

The Kind Of Guy (Or Girl) You Shouldn't Date

It’s been hard, figuring out what movies I’ll like, now that Roger Ebert is dead. It’s not that Roger Ebert was the best critic ever; it was that I’d read him for years, and I knew what he liked, and could compensate for that.
Roger had a hard-on for slow foreign films, and really didn’t know much about good science fiction. (Aliens gets two stars, but Escape From LA gets three and a half? Oh, Roger.) So when I went to read a Roger Ebert review, I could go, “He’s turned off by excessive gore,” and could use his biases to triangulate my preferences.
Likewise, if you’re silly enough to take relationship advice from me, I figure you gotta compensate a little. I’ve got my own biases, and God forbid you swallow my thoughts wholesale. You gotta integrate ’em.
And here’s a bias I think you should be really clear on:
I don’t think someone who sees the opposite sex as a foreign entity is worth dating.
This came up when some women responded to my essay, “When Should I Have Sex With Him?,” saying that if you wanted a long-term relationship, then my advice of “Just having sex when you felt like it” was too simple. (Which, of course, it is.) They said that some guys assume that women who have sex on the first date don’t want a serious relationship, and as such sometimes you have to hold off a few dates just to give them the right impression.
But here’s my take: a guy who just assumes that your first-date sexings mean you’re not serious, and then walks away, falls into one of two categories:
1) He wasn’t actually that interested.
2) He was that interested, but is so certain that “women” act that way that he won’t even bother to ask you what you think.
And guy #2 is the guy, to my lights, who you want to stay away from at all times. Because he’s already shown you that he’s willing to prioritize his impressions ofyour entire sex over you, and chances are should you break past this and rope him in, well, he’s going to do it again. You aren’t a person: you’re a woman, and clearly all of this 50% of the population act in lockstep so consistently that he doesn’t even need to check for variance.
That’s gonna bite you in the ass in all sorts of ways. You’re not just going to break the ice once and then he’ll see you as a unique individual from now on; no, chances are pretty good he’ll assume you do whatever his preconception of “women” does and make some pretty disastrous assumptions based on that.
So if that guy walks away after sex? Good riddance. I don’t think it would have worked out well, because right off the bat he’s shown he doesn’t see you as a Person first – he sees you as a Woman.
And you see (lowercase-w) women doing that, too, assuming that “guys do this” and “guys do that” and never asking the guy what the hell it is he wants because hell, who understands men? They’re looking at men as some sort of herd animal, as though a penis means they all do X and want Y.
And that’s not to say that a lot of guys don’t act in similar ways. Demographically speaking, football appeals more to men, clothes shopping appeals more to women. But there are exceptions to every rule – and if someone’s dating you and looking to the rule first and then you, just going “HEY ALL YOU CHICKS LOVE SHOPPING” and sending you to the mall, that hardly ever works out well when applied to the ten thousand different things a lover needs in a relationship.
Hey. Some couples get along well in their separate worlds – I find it to be almost barbarically old-style, that 1940s sitcom attitude of “men live in this world, women live in this one, and neither really understand the other” – but they don’t seem like happy relationships to me, but rather a set of armed camps who’ve negotiated an acceptable truce.
No. My bias is this: you want a partner who doesn’t ever go, “Women! Am I right?” And you want a partner who doesn’t ever go, “Who understands men?” You want a partner who understands that men and women both operate from a set of mostly-rational priorities, and who sees the differences between you not as a result of them being a certain gender, but as a result of differing experiences and priorities.
More importantly: You want to be that kind of partner who doesn’t short-hand differences by shoeboxing them into a gender. You want to treat every person you’re with as someone to be checked in with frequently, so you can determine what they actually like.
You want someone who sees women as a bunch of differing people, and is not going to make dumb-ass assumptions based on Women that he acts on.
That’s controversial, I’m sure. But that’s my Ebert Bias. You may disagree. If you do, I heartily encourage you to apply that filter to all my future writings. Thank you.

The Shining vs. Doctor Sleep (WARNING: Vague Spoilers For The Hypersensitive)

The weird thing about Doctor Sleep is that it doesn’t feel like a sequel to The Shining, but rather a rebuttal of it.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a follow-up whose themes have been exactly so opposite of its parent book; it’s almost as if Stephen King regrets having written The Shining, and wanted to write something to reflect his new-found philosophies.
Which is not to say that Doctor Sleep is a bad book.  It’s an okay Stephen King book (and how weird is it that there are so many of them that we can rank them to each other?) – maybe a C or C+ in the King repertoire.  But there’s absolutely no reason why this book had to star Danny Torrance and not some other generic alcoholic with a shady past – the Overlook barely features in Doctor Sleep at all.  What really drives Danny Torrence is not seeing his father turned into a monster and devoured by the Overlook Hotel, but rather the seventy bucks he stole from a mother when he was deep in an alcoholic bender.
Realistic?  Maybe.  Danny was five when all of the Bad Things happened.  Maybe what would haunt him would be what he did when he was twenty.  But aside from a (very) brief trip back to the Overlook and a little action that feels uncomfortably too close to Ghostbusters territory, this lead character could have been just about any alcoholic with a psychic twinge.  (And it’s not like both “alcoholics” and “people with psychic twinges” haven’t featured prominently in the King mythos.)
But even more than that, I read the first hundred and fifty pages of The Shining to Gini on the way back from Connecticut, and it’s striking just how dissimilar the stories are.  In The Shining, Danny Torrence’s “gift” is erratic, not a thing that works consistently or well, full of vague dead-ends and ugliness that he can’t control.  In Doctor Sleep, the shine is treated literally like a superpower, where two people with the Shining communicate cross-country with it like they’re having a conversation.
In The Shining, the family is on the verge of breaking, like a barely-healed fracture to a three-year-old’s arm, but recovering; their history is always close at-hand, always throbbing like a cancer, always waiting to resurface.  In Doctor Sleep, Danny has some bad times – very bad times – but fixes them quickly, and that history becomes nearly background material once the new threat emerges.
In The Shining, everything is very claustrophobic; they’re swallowed by in the Overlook and its harsh winter, and cannot get out.  In Doctor Sleep, wild travelling is just a part of the deal, and it’s mentioned explicitly that maybe they could escape by running but dangit, they have to end this.
And in The Shining, the threat brings up inner demons that destroy the family, and secrets devour them wholesale.  In Doctor Sleep, the threat brings them together as a family, and the secrets revealed are ones that really needed to be brought out into the light.
There’s a few similarities – both The Shining and Doctor Sleep revolve around issues that literally would resolve themselves if the protagonists weren’t fuelling it with their shining – but mostly, they’re at odds.  And to restate, it’s not that Doctor Sleep is terrible – like pizza and sex, substandard King is usually decent – but it’s that I had difficulty relating the one book to the other.  Because it really did feel to me that Unca Steven looked back at The Shining and regretted his alcoholic days, then set out (unconsciously, as is his way) to write a book where he told the story of how it would be if he’d handled alcoholism the right way and listened to people and got into the Twelve-Step program, and still try to make it scary.
And make it scary he does, at times.  The True Knot are pretty terrifying villains, even if they turn out to be a bit Warren Ellis-esque in the end.  Yet still, why did this have to be a sequel to The Shining, one of his greatest books?  Why did this have to be Danny Torrance?  Why is the last three-quarters of the book – the one with the crazy psychic fireworks – not nearly as compelling as watching mundane old alcoholic Danny struggle towards the light?
For the third time: it’s not bad.  But as a sequel, it’s bad.  And I don’t think this’ll be one of the stanchions of the King canon.

So I've Loved Doctor Who For Almost Thirty Years Now

I just purchased tickets to see Doctor Who’s 50th Anniversary Special in 3D, at my local theater.  This proves the future is wilder than I can imagine, for as a teenaged boy I never could have envisioned Doctor Who being popular.
When I was fifteen, as a young American boy, almost nobody knew who Doctor Who was.  You couldn’t download the episodes, or even buy them, for nobody thought Doctor Who was big enough to be worth selling.  No, the only way you could actually watch Doctor Who was to pray that your local PBS affiliate would give you a handful of Tom Bakers during their semiannual fund drive, and even then they made you pay for it – you’d be barraged with reminders that the only reason they put Doctor Who on was because you, the fans, said you wanted it, and oh, we argued with our bosses to slot this in between operas and wholesome kids’ shows, and I guess if we don’t make this next hour’s pledge target you may never see Doctor Who again.
You had to wrap your life around being a fan, then.  You scheduled days off to catch the few marathons.  And if you were lucky – very lucky – you had a friend like Mark Goldstein, who was obsessive and had taped every episode individually on a VHS tape, with neatly-marked pen letters, and he would lend them to you if you promised to treat them well.  Watching him open that drawer full of tapes underneath his parents’ TV was like seeing the Ark of the Covenant yawning wide – that realization that you could watch all the Who you wanted.
Yet even then, Doctor Who was dwarfed by Star Trek and other wonders.  You could dress as the Doctor and most people wouldn’t even know who you were.  Those who did clasped you to their breasts, but in America?  There were no toys.  If you wanted a Sonic Screwdriver, you either ordered it from England and paid hideous shipping prices, or you built your own.
There was no Internet, or even BBSes.  I remember signing up for Xeroxed newsletters, mailed to me monthly for a small fee by crazy fans trying to cover costs, these typewritten sheets with blurred photographs taped to them – the Gallifrey One, the TARDIS Timesheet – each with little 300-word essays and blurbs on what companion Jamie was doing now, and rumors of the next Doctor.
I remember the wait.  It was almost two years after Colin Baker became Doctor before I got to see an episode.  I had the synopses of what the episodes were like, filtered through some English back-channel, but to see it with my own eyes?  A marvel.  And the whole time, PBS reminded me that they didn’t have to do this, this was very special, it’s a favor.  Send money.
And now Doctor Who is as mainstream as any fandom gets.  You can buy Doctor Who toys in any comics shop, buy the DVDs at Best Buy, and now the anniversary is something so big that we’re all going to go the theater to celebrate.
It feels strange.  I’m not upset.  Even though I don’t particularly like Matt Smith’s Doctor, it’s just so strange to see something that was once so small and huddled and flickering that it was a near-shameful fandom, something so rare that when you met another Whovian you immediately clasped hands and bore a deep friendship, because this fandom cost you.  You couldn’t stumble over it.  You had to go digging deep, to hunt for your love, to track it like a wild deer across thickets of static-filled broadcasts and poorly-spelled newsletters.
Now it’s everywhere.  Which is glorious.  But to me, I’m forever amazed that Doctor Who is common.  One of the big fandoms, maybe even eclipsing Star Trek.  And I look around and wonder what happened, because in my heart I truly feel that it is only me and one or two Companions, travelling in this tiny thing that’s much bigger on the inside, on adventures that no one else manages to notice.
God bless.

When Should I Have Sex With Him?

My friend Bart was talking about some women friends of his who were very confused about when to have sex with the guys they liked.  They want a relationship, but if they have sex too soon, then the guy doesn’t call, and if they waited to have sex too long, then the guy stopped calling after a couple of dates.  So what’s the sweet spot?  When should you move to the boudoir?
So to help you women, and men, I will now tell you when you should have sex with someone.  Or how soon you should call after the first date.  Or when you should ask to move in with them:
When you feel like it.
Note here that these women aren’t asking, “When do I want to do this?” but rather, “When should I do this in order to best emotionally manipulate them into staying with me?”  And as with most things that attempt to manipulate people into falling in love with you, that usually doesn’t work out that well.  If you’re not actually doing what you like when you’re with a partner, then you’re going out of your way to court someone who actually doesn’t like the things you do.
Which means, essentially, that they’re falling in love with a lie, and you’re falling in love with someone who’s unsuited to you.
This isn’t a woman thing, by the way: you see it all the time with needy guys trying to figure out how to get the hot blonde to fall in love with them.  I say, abandon the idea of entrancing them into love with you, and be who you are.  If you really want to call someone the day after the first date, and they find this so needy that they would never speak to you again, well… I hate to tell you, but they’d probably be shit at supporting you emotionally.  The best relationships occur where you naturally sync up, discovering to your delight that hey, I really wanted to hear from you now, two days in, and here we are!
Treating your potential lover like they’re a puzzle to be cracked doesn’t work out well for anyone.  The good news about gaming your partners is that you do, in fact, get more dates, as you’re suppressing all your desires to try to match theirs.  The bad news is that when you win, your prize is someone who doesn’t actually like you.  They like this imaginary construct that you actually hated being.  And as Christina Lavin so wisely sung, “It’s a good thing he can’t read my mind.”
Now, doing what you want to do often means you get dumped a lot.  That sucks.  It’s painful when you like people and they don’t like you back.  But you know what’s more painful?  Waking up one morning four years from now and realizing you’ve wasted several years of your life dating someone who you actually never liked all that much.
I’m not saying not to spruce up a little for your first date.  I’m not saying not to try new things.  But if you don’t want to have sex yet, and they leaves, then you’ve got a jerk who only cared about sex… and if you’re looking for a long-term relationship, then trying to retrain them using some Pavlovian sex-reconditioning usually gets you two unhappy people.
Do what makes you happy.  Eventually, you’ll find someone who likes doing that, too.  And you’ll be able to be happy together without some heavy compromise spackling your mess of a relationship together.
My two cents.

What Have I Found Myself Writing Now? Numenera Roleplaying Modules?

I started a perfectly nice little time-travel story last week: Ambitious, funny, well-characterized.  Yet when I sat down to write last night, what did I wind up doing?
Writing 1,000 words of a Numenera roleplaying module.
Looks like my brain wants to drag me into The Ninth World, kicking and screaming, and I suppose it’s a form of fiction so I’ll keep writing.  The question is, what the hell do I do with a Numenera module when I’m done writing it?  Shanna Germain generously informed me that I could sell my own module if I paid the $50 licensing fee, which seems about right, and it turns out that you can upload a PDF to DriveThruRPG.com and rake in 70% of the profit.  (At least until you make $2,000 at it, at which point you have to get a full Numenera license.)
The problem is, that I feel a good PDF should involve art, so I’d want to pay an artist to do at least some spot illustrations, and then I’d have to lay it out in a PDF in some sort of semi-professional way.  And while Numenera is hot right now – RPG’s Top 10 list is mostly Numenera at this point – I don’t know what “hot” means.  The Devil’s Spine (a Numenera adventure) is the #1 seller at DriveThru right now, and Vortex is #7, but what’s that mean in terms of sales?
So my mind is all like, “If I pay an artist a couple of hundred bucks to do some black-and-white illustrations, maybe offer them 20% of whatever profits gleaned, I can make it look passable.  And then… do I break even?  Can I sell this?  How quickly can I get this to market, while people are still hungry for Numenera?  Can I be, you know, the Activision of Numenera modules?”
Because I’d want to get this out within the next month, tops, and maybe within the next two to three weeks.  And then, I dunno what kind of sales one could expect to get on these.  Might be a net loss.  Might be impossible to find an artist.
The problem is, I’m writing it.  I can’t not write it.  Like the way my short stories bubble to the surface of my psyche, it’s arriving whether I monetize it or not, and Numenera isn’t accepting outside submissions.  So come a week or two from now I’m gonna have like 7,000 words of roleplaying adventure sitting on my hard drive, and I feel like I should be trying to make a profit off of it… but I want it to look nice and be clean as well.  I don’t want to sell dreck with my name on it – no, goddammit, I want this to be like The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues, a damned fine module that’s fun to read even if you never play it.
What’s the short, spoiler-free pitch (for I’m running my players through this starting next Monday, and don’t dare let them know what they’re in for)?  It’s this:

Nothing truly dies in the Ninth World; the technology of old civilizations was so advanced that mere time cannot stop them from carrying out their purpose.  The great wonders of the past may crumble, may degrade and function erratically, but the massive networks that held together star-spanning empires keep working long after people have long forgotten their purpose.
Unfortunately, the past’s more trivial works are just as enduring.

Anyway, I don’t know.  If you’re a good, quick artist and feel like drawing some crazy-ass roleplaying things for a mild amount of money – for I’d never ask anyone to work for the exposure, just for “not enough cash as you’re worth” – then contact me.  If not, well, eventually I’m gonna finish this damn Numenera module, and then if anyone has any advice or thoughts on it, I’m willin’ to listen.