So, Rebecca Sean Borgstrom. She's sort of one of the best game writers on the planet. Also, apparently, completely insane. She writes this funny (read: odd) nanofiction website called Hitherby Dragons. You might've heard of it. There's an overall plot to Hitherby. It's often hard to pin down, both because the stories themselves are subtle and because there are often a lot of crazy, tangential posts between "plot" posts. What Rebecca really needs to do, I've been saying for a while, is collect the Hitherby stories into books and make them available to readers in dead-tree form. That way, we could read them all at once without the strain of sitting in front of a computer.
Ask and ye shall receive.
Hitherby today carried the announcement that the first Hitherby collection, Primal Chaos, is available for purchase from Lulu.com. The second collection should be available before another month is out. Here is a direct link to the purchase page.
If you like good fiction, insanity and buying things, in any combination, you owe it to yourself to pick this up. It's very, very worth your while.
Comments (5)
What other game stuff has she written besides Sidereals, my most hated of deformations to the Exalted cannon?
Posted by Lukas | February 20, 2005 9:16 PM
Posted on February 20, 2005 21:16
Feh. You just don't like the Sidereals 'cause we had to fight a nasty one. The Reality Ninjas and their maddening Bureaucracy are actually hella cool. (Rebecca only wrote the Charms, btw.)
Let's see...
She's done a bunch of other work for Exalted including on Fair Folk (again, Charms), Savant and Sorcerer (new summoning rules) and Outcastes (The Forest Witches section).
She's the lead writer on the forthcoming Weapons of the Gods, did one of the settings for Guardians of Order's Ex Machina cyberpunk book and wrote the freeform Psi rules in the Trinity Player's Guide.
What she's probably most known for, though, is Nobilis, which is my favorite game that I don't own. It's pleasantly insane, the book itself is a real work of art and it's... well, the best way to describe the game is "how to play Sandman as an rpg." It's awesome.
Posted by Jason | February 20, 2005 9:36 PM
Posted on February 20, 2005 21:36
Not to be argumentative, but I've actually hated Sidereals since I first read the book. I felt that it took a very elegant and interesting fantasy world and ruined it by trying to add additional layers, most of which I found tedious or downright ridiculous. And Martial Arts that cause spiritual diseases that make you dance uncontrollably? Please...
White Wolf has long had the problem of continuing to heap more and more needlessly complicated supplements onto its core games until they collapse under their own bloated weights (thus the complete re-starting of the World of Darkness). Games like Trinity, Aberrant, and Adventure! were only saved from this fate by the fact that they weren’t quite popular enough for it to get that far. To me, Sidereals is the point at which Exalted began its descent towards that inevitable tumid state.
Nobilis sounds cool, though.
Posted by Lukas | February 21, 2005 8:39 AM
Posted on February 21, 2005 08:39
speaking of which i loved Mage the asencion but it seemed like they wanted to kill the "franchise" with each new book as it made it harder and harder for the mages to cast anithing and in comparison they made each other thing in the WoD more and more powerful.
Posted by gus | February 21, 2005 9:57 AM
Posted on February 21, 2005 09:57
Dude, Lukas! You're so argumentative! ^_- Nah, seriously, I was just kidding you, both above and here.
Actually, I think to some degree you're right about both the Sidereals and White Wolf in general. I love the Sidereals, but I think they work best as something seperate from the rest of Exalted and not really mixing them (or at least not mixing the fullness of "their" aspect of the setting) into a "regular" Exalted game. I think an all-Sidereals game would rock, though.
Beyond that, well, it's hard to run a profitable game company to begin with and keep putting out new books without eventually having covered pretty much everything there is worth covering (as Justin Achilli said he felt he'd done for the old Vampire) or contradicting yourself (as a lot of Mage books ended up doing). White Wolf suffers from bloat in their game lines, yeah, but I can't think of a single company that's been releasing as many books per game for as long as WW has and doesn't have the same problem.
White Wolf are the corpulent victims of their own success! (Or something like that, since it's not like they're rolling in cash or anything...)
Posted by Jason | February 21, 2005 11:09 AM
Posted on February 21, 2005 11:09