Alyc Helms's Blog, page 3

Worldcon Dublin is coming! I’m heading off a few days early so I can ride a bike along the Great Western Greenway and around Inishmore, but after that I’ll be in Dublin with a few thousand other SFF geeks. Here’s where you can find me:

Making the transition from player to Games Master
Format: Workshop
16 Aug 2019, Friday 10:00 – 10:50, Wicklow Room-1 (CCD)

It can be difficult to understand exactly how to make the change from being a player in roleplaying games to running games for friends or...

We’ve all fallen down the bottomless pit that is TV Tropes (WARNING: Following this link will result in loss of time ranging from several minutes to several days or longer). Even if you don’t know what a trope is, you know what tropes are. For the purposes of this series, I’m not talking about the very broad literary definition of tropes that covers everything from irony and metaphor to plot elements and characters, but rather the narrower folkloric definition that refers to recurring motifs...

The Clarion West Write-a-thon is over, and I’m pleased to share that this year was by far my most successful year, both in terms of donations and in terms of blitzing through my main goal.

The first goal was to progress on the Super Sekrit Projekt, with 5k words a week. I can now share that the secret project is a collaboration with Marie Brennan, code-named R&R. You can read about it on my blog and hers.

We’ve been knocking out about 9k words a week, and this past week we managed a whopping...

I’ve recently made passing mention to a super secret collaborative project I’m working on. I’ve been hesitant to say more because so often projects like this die before they ever get momentum.

However, after six-ish months of planning, plotting, and worldbuilding, and three weeks of intense writing that have already pushed us past the 25k point, I feel confident in saying this is a thing.

To get a feel for the flavor, listen to this:

Capers! Heroic vigilantes and antiheroes! Identity hijinks...

For a long time I didn’t change my pronouns because I’ve spent my life correcting people on pronouncing my name, and it’s exhausting and annoying.

However, revising Chiaroscuro (especially the Sadaz chapters) has had me thinking a lot about pronouns, identity, visibility, and the importance of language in disrupting people’s gender assumptions. For that reason, I’m asking people to start using they/them when referring to me. It’s a small hill on which to pitch a battle, but every inch counts....

I went to see the touring production of The King & I on Thursday night (in order to get Hamilton touring company tickets, we had to get SHN season tickets, and The King & I is one of the season shows). Just before the King’s song “A Puzzlement,” in a line of dialogue that I don’t recall from any production I’ve seen, the King contemplates the value of building a wall around Siam vs. reaching out to French or British allies who might pose a larger existential threat to his country.

The actor h...

We’re two games in on ‘The Path to Power’ chronicle, and I’m thinking I should have subtitled it ‘Can the Subaltern Kick Ass?’ because the entire party is made up of characters from colonized indigenous groups and allied Others. We have Altani, an envoy from the local nomadic Shoanti tribes who were violently pushed off their land 300 years before by explorer expeditions from the Empire of Cheliax (and by violently, I mean about 75 years of ongoing armed conflict that the book materials most...

Two days left for the start (restart?) of The Path to Power (my chronicle title for the Crimson Throne/Korvosa game). I still have a long list of stuff to do to get ready. My to-do list, parts redacted for spoilers:

Fully outline metaplot/plot points Finish reading/skimming ALL player guides Sort out music/playlists Figure out how to play music at B&Ks Detail out first game Scene order & details Encounters/Combats Character descriptions/introductions Important hooks/information Reminder...

I spent most of my weekend in game prep. A good chunk of prep was piecing together what I’d done and what I’d planned to do five years ago. Some of my notes were helpful, some confusing. I ended up sending a timeline to the players that included two game sessions of stuff that we hadn’t gotten to yet because I’d done so much prep for those sessions that I thought we’d actually played them!

Much of the rest of my prep was figuring out (and in some cases retooling) the metaplot. I like the adve...

I’m going to be running a game. Pathfinder, based loosely on the Curse of the Crimson Throne adventure path, but so thoroughly reworked that it really only bears passing acquaintance in form or function.

This is a revamp of a game I started back in… holy macrame, 2011. It fizzled out when I went to Clarion West in the summer of 2012 and never got ramped back up again. This made me sad, because there were a few character arcs I was really looking forward to running my players through.

A few w...