anyway.

link is broken. It shouldn't be "lumpley.com/www.[etcetera]" but just "www.[etcetera]"

Why do I feel like I went on this amazing date with a smoking hot girl and the only thing she remembers is vomiting on someone's shoes?

For the record, we talked about how to swear properly, full friend rosters, and the most delicious smoothie you can make with pet supplies.

You may also have performed what could charitably be refered to as, a "robust critique" of the new Ars Magica... team.

He never sleeps the Judge. He says that he will never die.

Gives me chills.

Daniel: Hahaha!

I'm listening now and enjoying it. You're talking about James Bond and his banana peel. High five us. What a fun conversation!

Oops. I just gave a "robust critique" of Firefly too.

Fluffy bunny has lots of sex in it. I don't think it's possible for Emily and I to collaborate on something and not have there be sex in it.

I really enjoyed listening, broke it up over a few days, writing down the time when I had to walk away from the computer.

Thanks, good stuff.

Heh. That struck a few chords. I recently served Ars Magica the divorce paperwork. I was on the Berkeley list back in the late nineties, I was involved in the early stages of the newest round of Heaven and Hell books, through three long-running campaings I've had so much fun with Ars Magica.

But the numbers, oh, the seven hundred plus little points to be divided into scores of boxes across six or seven categories, just to make a fully functional mage NPC. It's been years since I didn't just fudge them. And the splatbooks, oh, the splatbooks that my eager co-players snatch up, about forging your own horseshoes and the magic of tying knots, complete with ceremonial knot-tying rules. NO MORE! I'll get campaign #3 rounded off next month, and then that's "#?%&!!! it. Unless a sixth edition comes out that is no more complex and heavy than second at the most, NEVER AGAIN!

Hum, needed to vent. Nice interview BTW.

Vincent, is there any more to your opinions about Firefly than you said in the interview? If you have a more specific critique of the series, I am interested in hearing it. My most likely anticipated reaction to what you might say is, "I never thought of it that way." My own take is that I like the series, I don't like that it was cancelled as soon as it was, but I don't see that it is the be-all and end-all of all dramatic series.

Oh my goodness, I love the idea of pocket psi run. A few dice, some folded paper, and a few cards, in a plastic freezer bag. I can easily imagine running that for a friend of mine, on the spot, when asked about rpgs.

Also, correct timings on life potions are very important, consistency man, consistency!

This was a really fun interview. The questions were interesting and Daniel has a nice way of keeping conversation going. I definitely have to listen to more of his podcast.

Vincent, how on Earth did 3:16 inspire you to write the Brainer? And were you familiar with post-apocalyptic fiction, or did you start devouring it after having had the "revelation"?

Charles: It took me some thinking but I remember precisely why I was glad. It's that for season 2 to make good on season 1, Inara has to be off the ship and out of Mal's life, or else they have to be married. I was and remain pretty sure that neither were going to happen, and that what we'd get instead is an erosion of the characters into static relationships and static versions of themselves.

I rewatched the series last summer I think with Sebastian and Elliot, and it didn't stand up very well. It reminded me how much better television has gotten in the past 10 years.

But, like, basically I'm a big fan of Firefly, not a hater, and also coincidentally a big fan of good endings. I didn't want it to go the way Buffy went, grinding out to an ending that didn't remember what we were here for and why. Better to give it a good ending with mysteries and loose ends than a bad ending with all the loose ends resolved.

Ville: 3:16 kicked my butt with what it had to say and how it went about not saying it. (What's the Kubrick quote?) It inspired not just the brainer, but Apocalypse World, whole and immediate, in the form of this is what I want to say, and this is how I want to not say it.

And oh, no, I wasn't familiar with post-apocalyptic fiction and I'm still not. At the time, Luke Crane had been working on a post-apocalyptic game too, and we compared our research notes. He'd been doing serious reading, a survey of the genre. I'd watched Doomsday.

Firefly is also the best Whedon show because it didn't live long enough to suffer from the worst Whedon tropes.

Vincent, your Front lists are really evocative coming from a guy without prior PA experience. And inspiring: it shows you don't have to have a Kenneth Hite level in stuff in order to write about stuff.

AW more or less gives you the space to inflict your own brand of post-apocalyptic imaginary on the player group in question.

That's a freedom the game affords ? for players to explore the backlog of PA swimming around in their heads, rather than imposing a designer's pre-conceived notions of a PA environment.

I'm really happy with how that's worked out, Evan, yeah. I have images from, what, 6 or 7 apocalypses in my head? Maybe more? The religious one and the nuclear one from when I was a kid, the Y2K one, the global warming one, the alien invasion one, the rise of the machines one, the peak oil one...

I figure we all do.