The first episode was solid - the performances by all the actors were good, there was a bit of development as well as setup, and there was even a nice twist at the end - the outline was basically Hamlet, it seemed, where the hero's mother remarries after his father's death, but in this case, the mother is more involved in the bad side of things than the man she married. There are plenty of calls out to the gathered mythology that goes with Green Arrow, including a mention of "Speedy", his original sidekick, now a nickname for Oliver Queen's younger sister, and the appearance of Dinah Lance, who in the comics is Black Canary.

It's clear that the series is aimed at the people who used to watch Smallville (the pilot was even directed by David Nutter, who directed the pilot of Smallville, way back when). It picks up, tone-wise, more or less where the older show left off, albeit a few tones darker - which suits, since Green Arrow is a few steps toward Batman, not the boy-scout world of Superman. There's none of the high-school stuff of early Smallville, either - the audience is presumed to have grown out of that. There are also already mentions of drink and drugs, and it's very clear that Oliver is going to take a more anarchic, more violent approach than Clark Kent ever could.

However, early Smallville was very much around the Monster of the Week. In this case, two episodes in, there's no sign of a single thing that's not purely mundane - neither the villains (businessmen of shady kinds and their associates) nor Oliver himself have anything resembling a superpower. That interests me; it's still clearly a superhero story, and it'll be fascinating to see how - or if - they work in the various bits of the DC mythology down the line. There's no evidence that I've seen one way or other to suggest that any of the rest of super-powered DC continuity is in place.

Once more, I find myself picking up on visual and thematic references to other stories. There's all the background of the character from the comics, and there's Smallville. There's the Hamlet shape of the pilot episode. But there are also clear inheritances from Lost, and it's not just the island where Queen was for 5 years, it's the bit-by-bit reveal of a layered backstory. I'm reasonably certain, though, that unlike Lost, the actual story is known here, and what look like inconsistencies are being addressed, one by one.

It seemed unlikely, for instance, that a pampered young man, washed up on a desert island, could develop the archery skills Oliver Queen displays. But at the end of the second episode, we see he's not alone there, and the mysterious other figure on the island has a bow. Indeed, he or she shoots Oliver, and thus one of his many scars (shown often in the obligatory shirtless scenes) is explained. It's also very unlikely that Oliver developed the ability to speak Mandarin all on his own, and I fully expect that to be explained down the line.

It's not so much that Oliver is an unreliable or untrustworthy narrator as that he's not a narrator at all; despite seeing things only he sees and even his memories, the point of view is firmly external. Thus far, I'm enjoying Arrow, and I hope it maintains the level of quality it's started with.

I didn't like the first episode. I liked the second, third, fourth and fifth in increasing amounts.

First and foremost, I liked the treatment throughout of Rory and Amy. From the not-quite-divorce at the beginning that comes from the clash of two strong wills, right up to Amy's completely firm decision at the end to do what's necessary to be with Rory for the rest of her life. We get a better sense of both characters from these five episodes, I think, than anything preceding. Further, the ending has been walled off, explicitly, in the script, making it very difficult for any future writer to "re-visit" the characters, as RTD was wont to do.

Second, I really liked two of the features in how the Doctor was treated. It's pointed out over and over that he should not travel alone, because this does bad things to him. It sets up the actual need for a companion that has never really been explicit before. And then, it's pointed out that his current incarnation is childlike and manic (indeed, "psychopath" is what River Song says), in a way that none of the others have ever been. I saw recordings of the very first episodes on YouTube last year, and the contrast could really not be more stark. That was also pointed out by the presence of the Brigadier's daughter in the Cubes episode, contrasting the mad don't-know-what-the-hell-to-do-but-here-goes of the 11th Doctor with the methodical, diplomatic approach of the 3rd.

I would greatly like the 11th Doctor to actually have some character growth, now. Let him settle down, form some plans, and get on with something for a while, rather than bouncing randomly around the multiverse. It looks like that's a real possibility now.

And there's the odd and somewhat cheerful possibility - not in any real sense, you understand, but in a not-impossible sense - of a spin-off series of Amy and Rory in 60s New York. Even if it's never a TV series, I'd like someone to write the fanfic.

The Rory/Amy thing was interesting at first, and then, when resolved, felt a bit pointless. I feel it'd have been much more interesting if they'd gone ahead with the divorce, or if one of them had been Daleked, or... well, anything except the return to the status quo, to be honest.

I do find it interesting that Amy's day job is as a model. That's a nod to the modern world that you don't often see; we're usually supposed to believe that the stunningly attractive woman on the screen is, within the fiction, just of average looks. Acknowledging that she's not is new and different, and I did like that.

The dialogue, or at least the stuff people said, was pretty awful, to be honest. It had none of the cleverness that I've come to expect from a Steven Moffat script, and indeed, I thought it was Chris Chibnall's writing at first. Matt Smith's delivery seemed underused, most notably in the "Who do you think?" line about who killed the Daleks, which puzzled me. The trailer made it look as though it were Amy. It would have been far more in-character if it had been, given the long, long history of the companions doing the fighting and gunnery and explosives handling for him, and so the fact that it was the Doctor felt a bit flat.

And finally, I really dislike the use of the phrase "Doctor Who" in the series itself. It's not so much self-referential as completely fourth-wall-breaking, and not in a pleasant sort of knowing way, either.

I'll watch the next one, but I won't be in a hurry to catch it at broadcast time. It can wait.

My intention is to surface mine it down into neat terraces, and then recover. Since there's no need to accommodate anyone else there - no traders, merchants, wells, or other amenities - I intend to make it comfortably mazy, like an old house that's been extended a few times, had doors walled up, and so on. A few tunnels will make it interestingly three-dimensional. If I'm feeling particularly capricious, I'll shape it so that the maze eventually leads to one walled-off off-deed area where there're a few prizes of some kind in a chest.

For actual utility, I'm intending the bulk of it to be under fruit trees and crop land - that's vegetable crops, mind, not grazing pens. The horses and cattle will remain up on Parable Halls, I think, and will never be terribly numerous.

I'm wondering if something happened to the spawn rate lately, though; there was a time when there were ten and twenty mobs a day wandering onto my deed and getting killed off; it's now more on the order of two. And I haven't seen a unicorn in months. So perhaps I'll actually need to breed some more cattle, so as to have a steady meat supply. Thing is that that takes a lot of cattle; it's at least ten days for them to get to a state where they're worth butchering, and I get, at best, 4 meat from them. That's about enough for one evening's eating, really. So I'd need two cattle a day for two of us, which means two more calves per day, which basically means I need somewhere between twelve and twenty breeding cows... which means a good range of pens, and enough extra crops to reseed them when they graze and trample them. Or some enchanted grass, admittedly.

The horses are even slower to mature, but I can't ride yet, and don't use the large cart all that much. So no rush there, and I have enough of them to keep me in stock for a good while.

Basically, the idea here is that any session must move toward revealing, exploring, or changing a relationship, or even more than one.

Consider this diagram, which describes the situation known to the player characters some way into a campaign. Or maybe even at the beginning.

We've three entities here, the God of Biscuits, King Methusel, and the Order of Crows. Each has a relationship with the other two, and these are two way relationships, so there are six here to look at.

The God of Biscuits is the father of King Methusel. King Methusel hates his father.

The Order of Crows obey King Methusel, and they worship the God of Biscuits.

We don't know yet what King Methusel thinks of the Order of Crows, nor what the God of Biscuits thinks of his worshippers.

So we've instantly a whole bunch of things to do with a session here.

You can set it up to reveal the two question marks. What does King Methusel think of the Order of Crows? Does he reckon they're a bunch of weaklings, who kowtow to his hated father and obey him out of fear? Or does he seem them as upstanding men and women, loyal to the kingdom, whose worship of the God of Biscuits can be used to bring down that deity?

Alternately, maybe the God of Biscuits is looking to use the Order of Crows to reach out to his son and seek some kind of forgiveness. Or both.

You can explore the relationships. How is King Methusel's hatred of his father made clear? Has he banned his worship? Exactly howobedient are the Order of Crows?

Or you can look at changes in the relationships. Maybe the Order of Crows have been given a reason not to worship the God of Biscuits anymore. Or maybe King Methusel has grown tired of the hatred, and wants to approach his father in a spirit of good familial relationships again.

That's a whole bunch of possible adventure seeds, as it were, stemming from existing entities in the campaign. And of course, the "entity" level can be anywhere you want - I've set it here between a god, a king and an order, but you could take it down to relationships between members of the order, or courtiers in the king's palace quite easily - or alternately, consider these three as a cluster of the Biscuitites, and see how they relate to the cluster around the God of Strong Flour and the Rolling Pin God.

Considering the number of possible entities, at the various scales, in almost any campaign, there's nigh-on infinite potential for material to look at in any given session.

Elementary is a rip-off of Sherlock. It features a female Watson, and it's set in the USA. The lead even acts like Benedict Cumberbatch's Holmes. Is Sherlock Holmes sf? It seems to have been adopted, anyway.

Beauty and the Beast seems to be yet another retelling of the Barbot de Villeneuve story, with a good strong Twilight element in there. Incidentally starring Kristin Kreuk, last seen as Lana Lang in Smallville, and looking exactly as she did there.

And speaking of Smallville, the last offender in the derivative parade is Arrow - all about Green Arrow, the side character from Smallville and DC Comics before that. Played by a different actor, more's the pity, and almost certainly in a different continuity.

Why couldn't they do Blue Beetle? Too obscure? There was a version of him in Smallville!

The io9 article I pulled these from lists a few more, some of which are possibly more original. But the number of even those described as "It's like show X with element Y changed, by the guy who did show Z" is impressive.

Obviously, none of these shows are taking chances. They're taking something that clearly worked well, and copying the elements they think appealed. The idea that originality might have its own appeal seems to be lost.

Maybe I'm just getting grumpy, but games and books seem to have some more originality.

First, I've been terraforming my deed. Mostly this consists of flattening it, and laying in some paths. I've also started to work down the hill to the west a bit, in terraces (well, so far, terrace). There's a deed south and west of me that will likely disband soon, and when it does, I'll expand my deed down the hill to the coast, and those terraces will then become part of the deed rather than the perimeter. At the same time, geometry of other deeds permitting, I might extend it back a bit, to lay claim to an area of woodland that lies to the east, and which would do very nicely for ongoing wood production.

I've also gained a few animals, though the generosity of neighbours. I have three horses, and four cattle. Domestic animals can be bred, and I've started that with the cattle. Two of the horses are too young still, so that will need to wait. In the meantime, all the beasts get groomed daily, and I make sure that the pens they're in have sufficient food. I'm developing the food production skills at the same slow and steady pace, and considering which crafts I'll take up in the long run.

I do like the terraforming, but taking it up as a long term skill requires a good bit of marketing in the game, and a lot of being away from my own deed. The option, of course, is to spend time developing good, solid deeds, with farmland, trees, and so on, and then sell them, and that's a tempting way to go.

The more conventional crafts of smithing and boatbuilding are also possibilities, and carpentry as well. I'm inclined in those areas to choose one that can have its products sold via merchants, rather than things where I need to negotiate the sale myself in person. Having carpentry and masonry at high levels would also be useful for when the fabled second-story houses come in. And it does occur to me that if a second story can be coded, there's no reason a third or more could not also be managed; someone with high carpentry or masonry might become a specialised builder of towers. I did mention the long-term thing.

I also want to do some exploration, after I make or buy myself some better armour. As it is, my only real option with most aggressive creatures is to flee as quickly as possible. I'm aware of some interesting looking areas up toward the mountains, though, where it looks as though there were once deeds, and no longer are. Those areas often contain treasure - that is, stuff left behind by previous players - or areas in which nice new deeds could easily be placed. Indeed, I'd like to travel to the Independence server as well, because I hear tales of large areas of unoccupied land, treasure left, right and centre, and more abandoned deeds than you can shake a stick at. A huge cotton-growing operation on an alt, say, could be very profitable.

It's a big game, and there's more to it all the time - reeds to make papyrus to write stuff down on have only recently been added, for example, and given the amount of material already in the game, I don't think I can go fast enough to try everything.

There have, of course, been problems. The main problem in Wurm tends to be that if you want to do thing X, then you need to back up and do things A, B, C, and so forth before you can get back to X. And I made some mistakes as well.

The second mistake was not looking for iron before I laid down the deed. That may yet be a longer term problem, but I'm not yet certain.

For nearly all the basic things that can be made in Wurm, you need wood and iron. Wood is not a problem for me; there's a "back lot" which is nothing but standing timber, and every now and then I go on a sprout-picking expedition to make sure it stays that way. This also gets me a fair number of fruit trees, which are planted around the deed.

It's the iron that's a problem. There are two mines reasonably near me which have iron in them, and which are not locked or gated. "Reasonably near", however, is a relative term. One of them has a convenient forge, in which I could smelt down ore into lumps, the pure form of iron, and those are lighter and easier to bring home. But that one is further away, and while that's alright in terms of travel time - it's not that far - it means I'm away from the protection of my deed guard. So if something attacks me, I have to run all the way back to my own deed - I'm just about able to take on a wildcat or a lion at this stage, but not a bear, and spiders are death on eight legs. And they seem to love mines.

The other mine has no forge, and is down a steep hill with no road. That makes it a very slow journey back with ore, which is 20 times heavier than the iron lumps. And in both cases, I feel a bit guilty about pilfering someone else's iron.

So really, I need to find an iron vein near my own deed. Ideally, under it, so that the guard will protect me right there. But my deed rests on deep soil. About forty units of depth, actually, before you hit rock. And if you want to find where there's iron easily, you need to uncover rock. Basically, this means digging through a minimum of 160 actions, all of which produces blocks of dirt, which need to be moved somewhere. I do not fancy doing that all over the deed.

Instead, I dug down to rock on six tiles - a little off the edge of the deed, in fact, where someone had dug a starting hole before I arrived - opened a tunnel, and mined back under the deed, essentially brute-forcing the finding of iron. Except that, thus far, I haven't found any. I've carefully calculated the amount of mining I need to do, and I'm halfway through, with no sign of any iron. In one spot, I've broken through into another mine, but that's via a long, long drop shaft that you can't get back up. That mine connects to two others, as well - one of which is the iron-containing one at the bottom of the steep hill. But that doesn't improve my logistics. Poking around the rest of the opened areas through that drop-shaft, I'm seeing a lot of copper and zinc - but not much iron.

My next thinking is that I'll finish out mining under my own deed, and then, if I haven't found anything, mine out toward the coast. That way, any beasts that arrive into the mine will have to pass through the deed, unless of course they spawn in tunnels - and even then, I'll have a straight run back to my own deed and safety.

Once I find a useful source of iron, I can get on with my other intentions - tearing down fences, levelling land, and putting in some walls. And then I'm intending to start to farm crops properly, and begin a road that runs down the hill to the coast. I'm not sure if that should go straight, or if it should zig-zag down; recent changes have made steep slopes a lot more navigable by horses, so straight down might be alright - it's certainly ok on foot as it is.

This time, I created a new character, and headed for the new server where I knew some people. I was able to make it across from the spawn point to where they live, poke around a bit, and find a spot where I could set up a small deed of my own. It's up on a hill, not an unreasonable distance from water, and the neighbours are nice folk. There have been previous deeds in the area, so the spot I've claimed - all of 11 tiles square - already contains a forge, some storage, and a cobbled area. That's immensely useful, and still leaves me plenty to do. So the first thing I'm doing is puting a fence around the deed - a simple wooden one - and the second thing I'm going to do is more-or-less level it, and establish some fields and orchards.

As with everything in Wurm, the fencing is a long process - three or four nights of work have about 60% of the work done, and I'm still debating exactly how much to fence. I could, of course, just fence the whole thing, but that actually cuts me off from a useful resource. The guard that lives on the domain (well, I say lives - she's a ghost templar) kills hostile beasts that come onto my territory. If I butcher and skin those, I get meat, pelts, teeth, and so on - all useful things. But if I fence all around, they can't come on to the deed. The fence, though, marks out the borders for me - otherwise I'll have to keep on clicking on the ground to see whether that-tile-there is mine or not - and will keep animals, when I get some, on the deed. So I might end up fencing three sides, or three and a half, and leaving some open space for beasties to wander in and become dinner.

The deed down the hill from me is for sale - it's a nice patch of coastal territory, and the owner wants 12 silver for it. You can buy game currency directly - which is about as much use as it is in EVE - so if I wanted to drop €12 on it, I could get a second deed. I don't think I do, though; I've enough going on with the current deed for now, and there is a fair chance that the owner will just disband it and move elsewhere if it doesn't sell. If that happens, I could expand into that area, or I could create an alt, and establish a new deed where his was. I think that for now, I'll sit tight, and see what happens.

Wurm is going to be my MMO of choice for at least the next few months - it doesn't demand all that much time, it won't block me from getting in if I let my paid access lapse, and I can dip in and out as I want. That means it'll line up well with the spring, when I have college and then exams, and then the summer, when I'll have, in theory, some free time. It's also as sandboxy as I could reasonably want.

I've stared at this question for a few minutes, and tried to get my head around the concept of gamers who wouldn't go to conventions. I mean, if you're new to the hobby and don't know about them, or live hundreds of miles from the nearest convention, or.. I don't know, suffer from a fear of crowds, then maybe. But otherwise, it's a games convention, you play games, it's full of games, why wouldn't you go?

So yes, I've been to conventions. Not as many as I would like, but time and money sometimes get in the way.

I've also been to K2 (a small residential convention held in February or March each year in Kerry) every year for the past four or five. And I try to make it to Leprecon as often as possible despite its terrible habit of landing on a weekend when I have other commitments.

Conventions are, for me, an essential component of the hobby. The ability to get in among a large bunch of more-or-less like-minded folk and play games for two or three days straight is fantastic. And you get to try new games. Some conventions I only try new games, and that's still enough to keep me occupied throughout.

It also gives me a look at what RPGs are popular - not what's on the schedule, mind, since that's deliberately aiming for diversity, but what's on the stands. In the last few years, the stands have actually been very limited. White Wolf, D&D, and a few others - very little sign of the Fate games, Smallville, or any of the other games that get discussed a lot. Whether that's an accurate representation of the Irish games market or not, I'm not sure. It's possible that with games that consist of only one book, it's more trouble than it's worth for a retailer to stock it.

There's a fair degree to which conventions are the community celebrations that mark out the year for me. Gaelcon at one point, K2 at another, the minor celebrations along the way. Kind of, if you like, the gathering-of-the-community equivalent of Easter and Christmas for Christians, compared to the normal church service of the weekly game session. I'm sure you could make a case for rites of passage, too.

It was Gaelcon. 1995 or so. D&D. I was running it. There were six players. One of them couldn't string a sentence together, and seemed to hope that by rolling the dice, he'd convey his intentions. One of them drew on the paper tablecloth - drew very well, I might add - throughout the session, not really participating otherwise. And two of them appeared to know the entirety of Monty Python by heart, and took every single sentence I managed to get in as a cue to quote something, both of them in near perfect unison. Further, any time anyone mentioned horses, they'd sit there pretending to knock coconut halves together, and making clip-clop noises.

I didn't run a game at a convention for about a decade after that.

There is a silly streak in gaming. I don't mind it, as long as it's kept behind closed doors and doesn't bother the horses. Personally, I don't get it. I can see how Paranoia, for instance, is a funny sort of situation, but it's always struck me as a Cold War-era form of desperate comedy in the face of an incomprehensible threat. Much like the more modern Laundry game, although the Laundry is more existential and less daft. And if you're inclined toward silly games, interruptions, and not being able to get a word in edgeways, well, on you go. Just keep it away from me.

Which is not to say that I don't use any elements of comedy, or that my games are all serious. There have been plenty of segments, events and characters that were surreal, comedic, or just plain bizarre enough to make people laugh. But they've never been silly. Silly is cheap.

Further, the particular kind of silly that leads to non-stop Monty Python quoting, well, it isn't funny. It's vaguely amusing if you know the exact thing that's being quoted, but otherwise it's an out-of-context quote of something that depends on good delivery to be funny. So it's just frustrating for everyone else, and I can't honestly see the enjoyment in it for the quoter, either.

But it happens a lot, even if not to that degree. Gamers absorb references and pop culture like few other subcultures do, and can often reproduce them at a moments notice, even if they're decades old. The plots of episodes of Firefly get redone in games worldwide, over and over and over. I know of one gamer who can be relied up on bring up Gilligan's Island at any opportunity. I'm not sure if Gilligan's Island was ever aired in Ireland, so the references are pretty lost on the rest of us. And in latter years, Community and Big Bang Theory get quoted, and they're strong enough in the geek zeitgeist that many people don't quite seem to understand that I've never seen them.

Maybe it's because I don't watch much TV, and maybe because even then I will very, very rarely watch something more than once. I think there are two New Who episodes I've watched twice, and one of them was because a downloaded episode was of extraordinarily poor quality. So I don't end up memorising sections of dialogue.

These days, with the added gravitas and confidence of a further 17 years in gaming, I reckon I'd tell those players to either shut up or push off. It might be rude, but it wouldn't have been such a mess of a game.

My players don't really tend to attempt to bribe me. Or if they do so, they're subtle enough that I don't notice, or else they just say "Oi, Drew, I want more of this in the game", and then we get into the long discussion about what "this" is, which never seems to go quite right.

It is, however, a well-established fact that if you want something to happen in my games, give me some content to shape it around, and I'll happily do just that. This does mean that players from whom I get more material - be it character background, world material, or whatever - get more of what they want in the game, but that's as much a return on investment as anything else, so I don't feel bad about it.

Let me backtrack on that a bit: I have a terrible tendency to lecture. Show a combination of ignorance and interest on any topic I know about, and I will talk your ear off for a few hours, send you links by email, and generally make you wish you'd never brought it up. This is an inherited tendency, I hasten to add; my father does the same. In social situations, I've no particular fear of this; glazed eyes will give me the hint after only an hour, in most cases.

But in a game, I don't want players chasing off after irrelevant details, so I tend to outline rather than lecture. If the type of rock the buildings are made of is relevant, I'll mention it. If it's not, I'll just say "stone" and keep going. And in principle, that's fine. The issue is that "relevant" is a very movable line.

For instance, if I say that the walls are granite, and go on to note that there are coal fires burning, then it is perfectly obvious that the coal is very likely imported, and whoever has the coal fire is therefore rich. Coal is a metamorphic rock, and if you have granite at the surface, you won't have much access to coal. Obvious, right?

Likewise, if I note ornate clothing, or frequent changes of clothing in a pre-industrial setting, well, it's clear that there's a massive underclass in this society, right? You can't have ornate clothes without weeks of work, and if someone has been working for weeks on one garment, and you have lots of them, clearly there's a low-paid level of society there.

These are two examples of things I was using, and I was blind to the fact that they're utterly incomprehensible if you don't have a background in geology or pre-industrial economics. Needless to say, none of my players have either. On the other hand, I'm not the best in the world at body language, so I tend to over-describe that when it comes up, making it often much too obvious that there's a Clue there.

So getting through my own knowledge filters to know what to show and not show is hard, and it's often something I have to stop and think about, which isn't a thing I can do mid-game. I am, I think, getting better at this over time, but the requests for "can we have more of this thing in the game" and my blithe response of "it's there already!" works to show where the gaps are. It's not a particularly satisfactory exchange, though, and I'd like to improve that.

Failing all of the above, of course, buying me new game supplements, dice, tokens, stationery and beer will work wonders.

It wasn't, I think, until I saw a poll on rpg.net about campaign length with the "1-3 months" option way ahead of everything else that I realised I was doing something different.

Part of this is personal preference, of course. Having put the work into a campaign setting, I'm not going to waste it by running six sessions and calling it done. And I'm physically incapable of not developing a campaign setting once I get started. But I also suffer from some confusion around the topic. Players are barely getting to know a character after, say, ten sessions. As the GM, I'm only getting a grasp on what they really want out of the game at that stage. How could you run anything shorter and have it turn out well?

So my campaigns tend to take years to complete, and to have enough plot threads to fill that span of time. My instinct isn't actually to have an end at all; my simulationist soul claims that endings are a narrativist trick, and not worthy of attention. I'd simply have the player characters continue through interesting lives for ever, given the chance - pursuing their own interests, and uncovering a conspiracy here, a small war there, a jaunt off into the planes for whatever reason, and have the return of old nemeses happen occasionally and organically. Players, however, demand coherent plot, and plot demands resolution.

At some point, I think I'd like to run the kind of game my instincts demand. It would need player buy-in from the beginning, of course, and no expectation of a resolution that won't be coming, nor indeed an expectation of an over-arching plot. It would also need characters carefully designed for it, with clear ambitions from the start which they can work toward over the very long run - and they should also be the kind of characters who generate a "things to do" list as they go, so that when that initial ambition is completed, they've more to get on with. And it would probably need to be run in a different area of my own cosmology, rather than on the main campaign world, because by its very nature, it would develop tendrils of story that would interfere with everything else. But I think all of those are surmountable.

I've an article brewing on the practicalities of "How to Run a Long RPG Campaign", or thereabouts, but it is - appropriately - taking a while to put together.

This, I think, is where the D&D rules and I parted ways. Character death - player character death, at least - is not usually interesting. There are two ways it happens: either the player is tired of the character, and opts to have them leave the campaign by dying, or the dice come out badly, and the character runs out of hit points. In the first case, all the interest is moving toward the new character that player will have, and in the second, well... there just ISN'T any interest.

This ties back to the notion, which comes up again and again, even in such tactical games as 4th Ed D&D, of making failure interesting. And certainly, there has to be a risk, or the whole structure of the game, whatever the characters are striving for, becomes meaningless. And if a player insists on having their character do something absolutely stupid, then death is on the cards. My players, however, tend to be a lot smarter than average, so this doesn't arise.

"Failure should be interesting" is one of the things that, in my mind, distinguishes modern games from the old-school kind. The old-school games go: You don't find the secret door in the first level of the dungeon? Tough, the other nine levels remain inaccessible. You rolled six ones in a row, and now your 21st level character is dead? Tough, roll a new one. You can see how that's not interesting. Even "this door is locked" can be a show-stopper if the party's only rogue fails the "pick locks" roll, and the party are left standing outside a locked door. The failure has to do something; events have to have another fork to follow.

So, I don't have memorable character deaths because I'm not interested in them. One of the major, major advantages of the Fate system, for me, is the "taken out" result at the end of combat. Sure, that can be "dead". But it can also be kidnapped, injured, missing... all of those are far more interesting, and lead to more story.

I've played many strange characters from behind the screen. At this stage, I don't really think about how weird or not they are, just about how they think.

One of my campaign world's central notions is that it has a very deep history. It's had sentient life for about three and a half billion years. There's also the possibility of immortality. So over that span of time, quite a few creatures have become immortal. Immortals are weird anyway, but some of them are downright alien.

Davonian life is fecund. Species, as Linnean taxonomy usually uses the term, don't quite work. It's not the case that anything can crossbreed with anything, quite. Dragons can, though, and once a few of them have, normal processes will carry some of that capability down through successive generations. So anything that had an ancestor intelligent enough to appeal to a dragon has a chance of having some draconic blood, however small a fraction. And fiends and celestials, of course, have the same capability. So many of the immortals are of mixed blood.

The upshot of this is that there's a creature out there who has lived for two billion years, will never die, and is half-dragon, one quarter coral-starfish, and one quarter intelligent tree. He's lived long enough that remnants of his birth culture's artworks are turning up in igneous rocks. Every intelligent thing on the planet younger than him is probably a descendant. How do you play something like that?

I've done a lot of thinking about this, and arrived at the idea that any immortal who is out and about, rather than dormant, hiding, or in stasis of some kind, has self-selected for the ability to deal with and understand the world as it is. So while they're alien, they're at least used to getting on with humans, or their immediate ancestor species. That makes it one step easier.

Fiends, celestials, and the like are easier to play in many ways. They have aims that are more or less comprehensible to humans, and they're busily getting on with them.

Second, I don't completely have to understand them to depict them, any more than an actor playing, say, Winston Churchill, needs to understand everything of Churchill's life and thinking. And in a lot of cases, one or two strange habits of mind can account for a lot of alien-ness.

For instance, there was one relatively recent race who left very little trace in the world, called the Siroose. They left little trace because they did very little; their major cultures valued indolence, cowardice, and efficiency above all else. That alone makes for a very alien creature from our point of view; a paranoid couch-potato who occasionally acts very swiftly and decisively in order to ensure it can go on being paranoid and stationary. Playing a Siroose is therefore weird.

A lot of my thinking on the immortals - and indeed, deep history as a concept - comes from Vernor Vinge's books, A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness In The Sky. The interactions between different species there, and the communications between them on what looks very like usenet have been a massive influence.

And I take a certain comfort in thinking that even in the selection of weird creatures I've played, I still have things as peculiar as the Tines and the Skrode-riders to reach for.