The Black God’s Drums
Exploring the intersection of magic and technology, this podcast episode delves into the rich tapestry of P. Djèlí Clark's novella, *The Black God's Drums*, set in a steampunk alternative history of New Orleans. Ian Eller, Alex Jackal, and Sean Murphy join host Eric Jackson to discuss how the narrative weaves powerful themes of political intrigue and cultural identity, all while centering around the titular weapon that can summon storms. The trio shares their personal experiences as Game Masters, illustrating how they incorporate elements of magic and technology into their own campaigns, likening their creativity to a delightful mix of peanut butter and chocolate. As they dissect the novella's characters and plot intricacies, listeners are treated to a lively conversation that is both insightful and humorously candid. This episode not only celebrates the novella’s strengths but also inspires GMs to reimagine its world within their own gaming sessions.
Takeaways:
In this episode, the hosts explore the unique blend of magic and technology in gaming, drawing parallels to genres like steampunk and discussing how these elements can enhance storytelling.
Ian Eller shares a memorable game mastering experience involving a perilous quest for magical items in a crater, illustrating the thrill of integrating technology into fantasy settings.
Sean Murphy emphasizes the importance of character-driven narratives when considering game systems, suggesting that the theme often outweighs the mechanics in creating engaging stories.
The discussion touches on the rich political intrigue found in 'The Black God's Drums', highlighting how factional struggles can create compelling narratives for RPG campaigns.
The hosts recommend various RPG systems, such as Savage Worlds and Blades in the Dark, for adapting the novella into gameplay, emphasizing flexibility and narrative focus.
Alex Jackl discusses the integration of Orisha in character development, noting how distinct personalities of divine beings can enrich gameplay and differentiate character classes.
Links referenced in this episode:
Transcript:
Speaker A
00:00:00.240 - 00:00:00.560
Foreign.
Speaker B
00:00:09.120 - 00:00:36.860
Welcome to the Game Masters Book Club where great fiction becomes great RPG experiences. I'm your host Eric Jackson of K Square Productions and today we journey into a steampunk alt history of New Orleans in the novella by P.
Djeli Clark called the Black God's Drums. On this journey, our guides will be returning Game masters Ian Eller, Alex Jackal and Sean Murphy.
Join us us as we thoroughly explore all the steampunk possibilities. Let's get into the conversation.
Speaker C
00:00:38.380 - 00:00:56.540
Ayat, would you care to introduce yourself to the podcast?
And since this particular story is based around using a magical piece of tech, can you talk about a time in your game mastering when you either got magic in your tech or tech in your magic? The Reese's Peanut Butter cup of gaming?
Speaker D
00:00:56.620 - 00:01:12.670
I can definitely talk about that because that is one of the things I really really enjoy doing regardless of what specific genre or game I am running. First of all, my name is Ian Ellert, I am a sometimes freelancer and all the time GM and overall really smart and handsome guy.
Speaker B
00:01:12.830 - 00:01:15.470
This podcast is not being live fact checked.
Speaker D
00:01:15.630 - 00:02:15.250
I was told there would be no fact checking. So one of my favorite times of slipping some technology into a fantasy game was a few years ago.
I ran a Return to the Isle of Dread Adventure at Carnagecon in Killington, Vermont.
And being a big fan of Gamma World and a big fan of a generally weird fantasy that includes science fiction elements, I don't know if anybody remembers what they are, but I had a Gamma World death machine, basically a small orb of doom in a crater and the crater was full of magic items that had been dropped by the various adventurers, wizards and others that tried to get to it and and were disintegrated. So it became a question of do we or don't we? And of course they're gamers at a convention and so a couple of them did.
So it was a race across the field of this crater trying to grab as many pieces of item that they could see on the ground and get out before they were disintegrated. Sadly, only one was disintegrated.
Speaker C
00:02:15.250 - 00:02:16.570
Oh I'm so sorry.
Speaker D
00:02:16.810 - 00:02:25.370
Do love a good mixed genre. I do love a twisting of the differences. What is magic and what is technology and how do those things come together?
Speaker C
00:02:25.610 - 00:02:30.550
Sean, would you like to do your introd introductions and give us a little story as well? Sure.
Speaker E
00:02:30.870 - 00:02:41.270
Sean, I've been gaming for, I don't know, years and years, decades and decades. Not nearly as smart or handsome as I am, but you know, really trying to get to that level of things.
Speaker D
00:02:41.830 - 00:02:43.430
Keep trying buddy, you'll get there.
Speaker E
00:02:43.430 - 00:03:30.770
I don't know. It's so far away. So far you know it. I'm gonna do think it's Arthur C. Clarke. Sufficiently advanced technology is the same as magic.
So I feel like I may be introducing technology into my magic games. And most of the games I play their technology based have a magic componen component to it like Call of Cthulhu or, or something of that nature.
And I try not to bring in magic to more straight faced technology based games like Spy Game.
I think the only place that sort of directly comes up is that I do like bringing technology for vehicles into games because they can often serve as a marker for what used to be there in terms of society. And finding spare parts is a nice side quest when you can't remember what you were going to do that night for a game.
Speaker C
00:03:31.080 - 00:03:33.240
That's a darn good tip right there, Alex.
Speaker A
00:03:33.240 - 00:06:16.390
All right. Name is Alex Drachel. I'm a longtime GM and of course no one's as beautiful and as charming as Ion is. But you know, we do our best.
And I've been jamming for a long time and I love the art and the science of jamming. That's one of my fascinations in the house. Storytelling and players. What they want all weave together.
I have two places I've woven magic and technology together. One of them is that I run a campaign and I've been running it for decades. That's sort of a high fantasy, almost a classical high fantasy campaign.
And some of the characters are wizards and the wizards build artifices and that starts to look a lot like technology.
Some of the skills that those characters have created over the years and have developed over the years could be like computer programming or building equipment that then does things.
Now the physics of it is all magic, but if you were to watch the game, it would look like, wait, he's working on a panel and he's programming the thing to do the thing he wants to do. And then it does things that look like machinery that then do things. And so that's one of the ways that I've mixed.
I don't do the classic it's a gun, but it shoots laser beams or shoots magic missiles or something like that.
But when wizardry gets to a certain level, I start to have it look a lot like technology and the things that create the reality of the world that the wizards are working in. That machinery looks like machinery, it looks like computer. It has that feel of it.
The other place is ironic it was funny Sean, that you mentioned Spy Games is in Spy Games is that I weave in a little bit in the sense of to make the spy games less like in real life where if a sniper from a quarter mile away was aiming at you and then pulled the trigger, what the most likely result is is your head will explode.
In most of my spy games there is this intuition, this sense that people have and I hand wave it away and say, oh, it's a combination of your enhanced senses and your high training and blah blah, blah.
But what it basically is is spidey sense is that high level spies in the spy campaign I run have a chance to just go, hey, someone's coming up behind me. Hey, there's a sniper half a mile away that's aiming at my head.
I better, if I keep driving down this road I'm going to run right into that Mack truck that I haven't seen yet, that kind of thing. And I weave that in. It's not really technology and magic, but it's more like magic appearing in a technology oriented setting.
Those are the two kind of places where I've done that.
Speaker C
00:06:16.710 - 00:07:37.170
So just to your first one, thank you, thank you for that. But I absolutely want to recommend to you a YA series by an author named Diana Duane called so youo Want to Be a Wizard.
If you have not read these, they treat magic very much like technology and the building of the reality manipulating spells that they make is very computer program oriented. So if that's something that you like, those are great books. The first book is very YA because it deals with the youngest version of the characters.
But as the series moves on they become older and I think the plot and the characters and everything else becomes more sophisticated. So I recommend that series to you just based on that.
As far as my technology, my current campaign as a artificer who is building my characters have nicknamed them Silborgs, as in their Sylvan cyborgs. They are constructs of the magical kind, but they have all of these different adaptions to them and so they've become these sort of pseudo robots.
And also just to say, hi, I'm Eric, I'm the host, I am not going to get into this objectification of Ian. I think he's, I think he's a great guy and he's got a wonderful personality. That's our tech and magic section.
Speaker B
00:07:37.170 - 00:07:38.850
And now onto our book summary.
Speaker C
00:07:38.930 - 00:09:17.440
Today we're going to be talking about P. Gigli Clark's the Black God's Drums.
The Black God's Drums is a novella set in a steampunk alt history where the Haitian Revolution is successful thanks to a powerful weapon, the titular Black God's drums, which create powerful storms to wipe out fleets, but also causes massive collateral damage.
Also in this timeline, the Confederate states still exist, having fought the Union to a standstill and mind controlled their slave population with psychoactive gas called Drapato. The story takes place in an independent New Orleans.
Our Point of View character is a young street thief named Creeper who is also inhabited by an Orisha, which is an African God or spirit of the storm. Captain Ann Marie St.
Augustine is another character that we encounter, an airship privateer for the Free Isles, the Haitian nations, and who is also possessed of an Orisha.
She overhears a plot by the Johnny Boys, which are the local Confederate sympathizers, to kidnap the Haitian scientist Duval, who helped develop the Black God's drum. A rescue is planned and executed and though the device is set off, the storm is countered by Both Creeper and St. Augustine's Orisha base powers.
The entire story is told in the first person by Creeper and presents us with a vividly detailed and well constructed world that is, in my opinion, in need of RPG exploration. So yeah, that pretty much sums up the book. Are there other parts that you guys that I missed that I. That I should absolutely point out?
Speaker A
00:09:17.760 - 00:09:37.340
No, I think you captured most of it, but I think one of the interesting things about that book is the power politics and the factional intrigue that's in that.
I mean you, you sort of reference it, but that all those parties and all those players are all politically playing against each other and that backdrop is, I think one of the important aspects of the book.
Speaker C
00:09:37.580 - 00:10:08.950
Now we'll take that and move on to our pseudo steampunky world of the Black Gods drum and where we will set this if we were going to be picking systems if we're going to run a game in this particular world.
During our pre chat, I know you guys said that one of the good things about this being a novella is that it left a lot of space to build in your own pieces. So I'm hoping to hear where would you want to build those spaces in? Sean, why don't you go first? Sure.
Speaker E
00:10:09.510 - 00:11:19.080
So I thought that if I was going to run this as a game, I would pick 7C. I like the system, I like the flexibility. It's very built around European realities and folklore, but that's the part you could bring over.
There is the goddess that sort of occupies the lead protagonist could easily be what's called Aleshia, a nature spirit who grants magical powers to those who serve Irisa's common folk, which is a country in the Seven Seas mythology. You could easily transport all that over, move it up a little bit in time to be further from where Seven Seas generally set.
But you've got the ability to do action adventure, you've got rules that are based on how sea based ships would interact with each other and easily you could translate over into flying type ships and there's enough mythology type elements that you could port over to sort of COVID those places where it comes up. It's.
It's not overwhelming in the story, these sort of mythical creatures, but they're definitely in a background, could tie it into the individual character's background, where those come from.
Speaker C
00:11:19.720 - 00:11:24.640
Awesome. Go ahead, Alex. Would you like to take up the conversation as usual?
Speaker A
00:11:24.640 - 00:13:15.490
As everyone who knows me knows, I believe that the system is one of the least important things and the themes are more important. However, there are a couple of systems that I think would be really powerful for this, depending on which things you want to emphasize.
I was thinking Blades in the Dark might make a very good thing because of the character driven sort of play to it, the narrative play, and allows you to do handle factions well and sort of heist style missions, which is very much in the thing and maybe powered by the apocalypse because it's, you know, it's good for social intrigue, alliances, moral gray zones, and can handle some of the weirder things like spiritual possession and stuff like that.
The other thing, as I was trying to think of what systems would sort of be interesting in this, the whole part of the story where it's about people dealing with choices they make and people dealing with being possessed and having to share choices with these divine forces made me think of, and bear with me here, Thirsty Sword Lesbians. Because in Thirsty Sword Lesbians, everything is framed as a moral and ethical decision, right.
It's a choice you make based on input and listening and understanding what other people's perspectives are. And I think that is a key theme in this story and could you could really play with that to make a very interesting narrative in this kind of setting.
Those are the what I was thinking of in terms of systems for this particular story. And I think this would be a great campaign, right? There are so many different elements. People who like intrigue could like it.
People like magic could like it.
There's a lot of things you can put in here that will make a lot of different player types happy and engaged and so I think this would make a great campaign setting.
Speaker D
00:13:15.570 - 00:13:21.610
Hey, Alex, just for clarity's sake, Thirsty Sword Lesbians is in fact a Powered by the Apocalypse game. Is that true?
Speaker A
00:13:21.610 - 00:13:41.870
I don't know if it is.
It might actually use Powered by the Apocalypse as its sort of foundational structure, but it has a particular feel to it, like how it's GM'd and the rules for GMing it that have to do with the choices and stuff like that. So it might be. I literally don't know, you know, how much I pay attention to systems.
Speaker C
00:13:42.750 - 00:13:53.230
It is an evil hat production which.
Which I know they very often use Powered by the Apocalypse and it does say in their Wikipedia that it is a modification of the Powered by the Apocalypse game system.
Speaker D
00:13:53.470 - 00:13:55.630
I feel even smarter now. That's great.
Speaker C
00:13:55.630 - 00:13:59.150
Well, Ian, enlighten us in what system you would place this game.
Speaker D
00:13:59.150 - 00:15:51.720
Right.
So when I am thinking about building in a setting that has a lot of components to it that especially if it is mixed genre and such, I always almost immediately go to Savage Worlds.
The current Savage Worlds edition, Suede or the Adventure edition, is especially good given that the core book in that like covers a lot of ground and there's a lot of options that you can do and you can find that space where there's a little bit of technology and a little bit of magic and a little bit of history and characters that are capable, which is important, right?
In addition, one benefit of using Savage Worlds, any addition of Savage Worlds really, is that given that this is a fantastical steampunk alt history in America with a active Confederate States of America, you have all that Deadlands material that you can pull from like Deadlands is that genre, except it is focused primarily on the Old west part.
But a lot of those tools, a lot of that technology, a lot of that steampunkness, and a lot of those magical feelings, if you excise some of the more Call of Cthulhu esque elements of it. Deadlands has a lot of useful tools here, making Savage Worlds, I think an extra good choice just given those resources what I would do.
Because when I was reading this book I was thinking them, yes, it's fantasy, but I felt like the characters with powers were more like Super's characters than they were like fantasy wizards or clerics or whatever.
And so having a power system built in like Savage Worlds does, or even a superpower system, if you get the superpower companion, allows you to build the characters that we see in the book relatively easily without the kind of the overhead that you'd have if, say you wanted to use champions or GURPs or. Or even mutants and masterminds. It's relatively light power building in Savage World. So that I think that also makes it a good choice.
Speaker C
00:15:51.880 - 00:18:03.070
Awesome.
When I was reading through this, one of the things that I felt really strongly about it was that I have actually played in a game of Castle Falkenstein which is, I think one of the original attempts to try and do steampunk. The system of Castle Falkenstein is this card based random number gener generator system. I find it very awkward to use.
I've never really gotten it to work the way that I think it should. So in that regard, Castle Falcon scene probably isn't the best bet.
But they do have a supplement called Six Guns and Sorcery which has Air Pirates of the Gulf. And it has an independent state of Louisiana. And it has not Orishas, but it has Vodoon. It's got a little bit of that packed in there though.
Obviously those are completely separate religious systems. And you know, it is. It was written in 1996 and we've had an evolving awareness of being a bit more aware of how cultures work together.
But given that exception, I think that's a really interesting world base. If you're going to put it someplace. That's a great place to kind of drop a lot of this information.
So with that as your fictional basis, I think that combined with Spirit of the Century, the system that I would use there now. The Spirit of the Century has a great deal of grit that goes with it. It's got. Grit is a big part of it. Like pushing through and doing things.
And I felt like characters were doing that a lot in this book. It has a great minion system which the Johnny Boys definitely fit that bill. You got your lead character with the skull mask there.
So you've got your separation between your minions and your big bad.
And they've got a good consequences system where if people overstretch themselves, they don't die like they would in say like a D and D game, but they. They can be taken out of the scene, which I think happens to both characters. Creeper and our captain. I felt like those matched up really well.
So I thought a combination of the steampunk background of a Falkenstein combined with the Spirit of the Century mechanics might be how I would put that together.
Speaker D
00:18:03.070 - 00:18:28.430
And Spirit of the Century is a fake game. I think it's one of the earliest fake games, actually. Yes. And fake games are great for a kind of narrative system.
If you're not into something, say, as blatantly narrative as Powered by the Apocalypse. It's actually a pretty good middle ground between a traditional savage worlds and a narrative system like Powered by the Apocalypse.
Sean, which edition of 7th Sea were you speaking of? The first or the second?
Speaker E
00:18:28.930 - 00:18:31.570
I read through the first, but I played the second.
Speaker D
00:18:31.730 - 00:18:37.730
I was just curious because I was told once that they are kind of different, and I was just curious which one you were aiming at for our listeners.
Speaker E
00:18:38.290 - 00:18:53.890
They are, yeah. I mean, they're a different way of doing it.
And I prefer the second because I prefer a more open storytelling environment, which I think comes from the second. The first one is very, very crunchy in a way. I don't find as much of the first.
Speaker C
00:18:54.050 - 00:18:57.880
Yeah, the second one is a lot. They're, like you said, a lot more.
Speaker D
00:18:57.880 - 00:19:00.800
Narratively oriented, you people in your narrative games.
Speaker E
00:19:01.200 - 00:19:28.260
I mean, I think Spirit of the Century is a good choice as well.
And I'll echo what Ryan said, that, you know, it allows you to also draw from the Fate system in the same way that, you know, picking Savage World and swayed. You know, there's things you can pick up and bring into this as well.
That's why those systems are, I think, useful in a lot of ways for a lot of the sort of adapting a book into a system. They've got good groundwork for them.
Speaker C
00:19:28.420 - 00:19:55.490
All right. Okay, folks, now we go on to the next part of this, which will be stuff that we'd like to steal. There's a great deal of.
Again, as you guys said earlier, this is a novella. It's got lots of chunky bits in it that look like they'd be tons of fun to throw into games.
Alex, tell us what from this particular book would be a scene or a character or some part of it that you would just like to just pick up and drop into your next game.
Speaker A
00:19:56.120 - 00:21:07.730
Well, one of the things really was surprised that I liked because I didn't think I was going to like it was the Orisha aspect, people being connected to the divine. And I actually think I like that because I'm always looking for how to.
In my high fantasy campaign, for instance, how to differentiate clerics with different gods. I have a little gnat thing that really bothers me when clerics are generic. Oh, I'm just a cleric. I just do miracles. Right.
Well, whose miracles and what do you. And one thing they did pretty well was have the gods, the orisha, the spirits. They had personalities, they had preferences, they had things. They.
If you bound yourself to one of those, that actually shaped what you were going to do and the direction you were going to go in and taking some of that narrative elements out of the story, I think I would definitely do.
And I liked how they handled some of the politics that were happening in New Orleans and the interactions and I thought some of the little nuggets of oh, the Johnny Boys show up here and do this kind of thing. There was some nice flavor text in the novella about how each of the factions behaved that I think I could pull and steal and use.
Speaker C
00:21:07.730 - 00:21:11.650
Great. I do like the the various factions that are in there for sure.
Speaker D
00:21:11.890 - 00:21:49.670
Ayin yeah, I am surprised I have never run across it before or even thought about it myself. But I like the idea of Haitia winning their revolution. And if I were to run Deadlands, I think I might make the Free Isles part of that setting.
It seems like it would slot in very easily, but would also add this like a little bit of a unique and interesting place that maybe characters could visit during their adventures throughout the Deadlands world. I like the idea of the airship pirate Free Isles as an independent nation and force in the world. So I think I might move that into Deadlands.
That would be cool.
Speaker C
00:21:50.220 - 00:21:50.540
Sean.
Speaker E
00:21:51.260 - 00:22:27.170
You know, I really liked the nuns as a sort of element because they work with the poorer elements of the society. But there's something else going on there too. There's something about them where they just know things. They know. They know people, they know events.
They have their ear to the ground. I like having NPCs who have their own agenda, who aren't just there with like an exclamation point over their head to drop data on PCs.
They have things they want to have happen, but they are there to provide guidance in terms of trying to understand how a particular area works.
Speaker D
00:22:27.250 - 00:22:28.250
And gumbo.
Speaker C
00:22:28.250 - 00:22:44.930
And Gumbo, Yes. Sister Eunice and Sister Agnes. They were on my list of folks I was absolutely going to talk about my character.
I love a good crazy villain and the main Johnny Boy character within the Skeleton Mask whose name I cannot find off the top.
Speaker B
00:22:44.930 - 00:22:46.250
Thank you Alex from the chat.
Speaker C
00:22:46.250 - 00:23:35.990
John Diablique with him singing about Andrew Jackson, this absolutely bonkers character, much like the Joker to Batman. He's just completely out there. He was on my list of characters that I would add to my game. He and the and the nuns were my 2 favorite.
But I actually thought that the Drop a do the mind controlling gas is a great danger to have involved in there along with the Black God's drums itself. Both of those are great super weapons that are magical and destructive. But there's still something that the characters can interact with.
But I liked both of those super weapons. I thought both of those were scary and magical and interesting and really helped frame the world in what the stakes really were.
Speaker E
00:23:36.710 - 00:24:31.330
So I know in our pre meeting there were discussions where some people felt like this book was too short, that there wasn't enough detail, things were not fleshed out to whatever 80 some odd page book. I mean, I agree with you, those are great threats, but they're not really fleshed out. And frankly I.
I kind of prefer those sort of books when I'm trying to say, boy, I'd like to adapt this over because I find the books where there's a ton of information and. And all that going on, you just sort of trip over chronology and all. It's a little bit too overwhelming.
I think these sort of books inspire more creativity for the GM and give them more flexibility to stretch out. That's not saying I wouldn't love to have a second Vol. Volume of this book and for this to be a little bit bigger book.
But we know that those two things are threats, but we don't know very much about where they came from, what their origins are or anything like that. At a sort of a deeper level.
Speaker D
00:24:31.410 - 00:24:48.170
Right. There's a lot of room to play with say the Black God's drums because we don't know anything about how they work. Right.
And so if you're a GM wanting to use that as a thing in an adventure, you can do whatever you want with it. Right. Depending on what kinds of activities you want your players to be able to do in order to stop that threat.
Speaker C
00:24:48.170 - 00:25:04.670
Yeah, it could make it very technological if you have a research or investigatory sort of group. Or you could make it very magical and make it much more miracle and do a deep exploration of the gods and it leaves us a great deal of space.
Speaker E
00:25:05.230 - 00:25:37.830
You know, I hadn't thought about this beforehand. When I run a game, I run a zero session. I'll say, you know, these are the kind of elements we're going to have in the game.
This book is the sort of book that you could hand to your players and say this is the world you'll be playing in and you wouldn't be giving away anything overly deep, but they'd walk away 80 pages later. In the same way that sometimes there'll be player guides to campaigns. It's similar to that in that sense.
You could give the players a good sense of what was going to happen, but not so much detail that they're like that's not the way it was written in the book.
Speaker D
00:25:37.830 - 00:26:06.360
Yeah, right. It's almost like if you sat a group down and you showed them a new hope. Right. And you said, okay, our game starts the next day. Right.
You could do the same thing with this book where you're like, yep, And. And that storm was stopped by some weird force and now we start. Right. And now you are people in New Orleans and da, da, da, da.
And these are, you know, you have. You'd have a very good sense of what the world was without, like Sean said, it being like you'd be fighting against the world to play this game.
Speaker A
00:26:07.000 - 00:26:08.000
Yeah, that's great. Yeah.
Speaker C
00:26:08.000 - 00:26:16.420
I wonder if there's actually a market out there where people could get together and write short novellas and sell them as sess. Mission zeros.
Speaker D
00:26:16.420 - 00:26:58.370
Well, think about all the games from the 90s that, like, especially. I mean, World of Darkness games, of course, but even Deadlands and all.
And a lot of Those games had 50, 60, 90 pages of this is what the world is before you get to character generation. Right. Like, I'm thinking specifically just because I really like the game Aberrant. Right.
There's a ton of in world advertisements and news stories and so on and so forth. That's sort of what that is. Right.
It's a different experience because you're reading it as a novella, but the world is given as established as the first thing that a lot of those 90s games did. And then you get to, okay, so now what are you going to play in this space?
Speaker C
00:26:58.370 - 00:27:02.210
Yeah, that's Falkenstein right there. All of Falkenstein is like that. Yeah.
Speaker E
00:27:02.530 - 00:27:11.480
The new seventh edition, Call of Cthulhu starts with a Lovecraft story. You start by reading a story in that genre to sort of get your sense of how that's going to.
Speaker D
00:27:11.950 - 00:27:16.270
Is that new? Has that not always been the case? Because it would seem like that would be an important thing.
Speaker E
00:27:16.510 - 00:27:22.190
You were right, by the way, that they do have stories in the sixth edition. I just noticed it perhaps for the first time.
Speaker A
00:27:22.430 - 00:27:56.440
I remember playing a Thieves World game where, you know, we read the Thieves World books right before playing, and it was just set in that world that had a lot of those characters from the books. That was a totally enjoyable experience. I have one sci Fi campaign that I run with a friend of ours, Jim Mokul, and he actually wrote.
Wrote four little short stories set in the world, and that set the whole tone for the game in reading those little stories. So I think I'm a big proponent of that. I think it really makes a big difference in the setting.
I think this novella would be a good starting point for a campaign.
Speaker D
00:27:56.600 - 00:28:22.450
Way back when I worked on Gamma World D20 back in the day, I got to do two or three between chapters. Fictions, they were short, they were flash fiction, they were less than a thousand words. But.
But that did that thing, right, that talked about what is this world in just a little vignette.
Those are really fun to write, first of all, but also I think they provide something and I think it's something that's sort of gotten a little bit out of fashion now. Right.
Speaker C
00:28:22.690 - 00:28:54.860
Well, I would agree with you in that I think there's been a very strong push to move away from the here.
Let's give you the entire world and then build your character to move us to this era where one page RPGs are what's the shortest way you can do it so you can give everybody the most creative freedom. But then we lose the frame, right?
If you don't have a very well developed gaming group and everybody is thinking along the same lines, if you don't have a tone setter like say this novella, it's harder to to generate all of that on your own.
Speaker D
00:28:54.860 - 00:29:10.440
Right? And we use shorthand for that, right? Blades in the Dark is a heist game in a dark fantasy world. And that's all we say anymore.
Now I have a copy of Blades on the Dark on the shelf, but I can't remember whether or not it starts with a bunch of in world fiction so that you understand what the world looks like. I don't know if that's true or.
Speaker C
00:29:10.440 - 00:29:31.720
Not, but it does have a list at the back where it says, hey, if you want to play Blades in the Dark, here's a list of books and media and other things that will you find your frame. It does at least provide that. With that as a segue, let's start with Ayin.
Why don't you tell us what books or media do you think will complement this particular novella?
Speaker D
00:29:31.720 - 00:30:23.440
What's funny about that is that the book I am going to mention is actually probably on the Blades in the Dark book book list, right? Because I think that Lies of Locke Lamora, which is a great fantasy novel, first of all, is a good link here.
Not necessarily because it looks anything like Black God's Drums, but because it is about the same kinds of people in a place that is very similar. There's a lot of depth of the fantasy and the weirdness of the location.
And then these ne' er do wells and people on the fringes of their society, trying to make their way in that place. Right.
And I think that there are books and stories and movies that might be closer to Black God's Drums as far as the specific details or whatever, but I think the feel of Lies of Lockemorra actually fits pretty well with the world that was created in Black Goddess Drums.
Speaker C
00:30:23.440 - 00:30:23.920
Sean?
Speaker E
00:30:24.320 - 00:31:37.340
Yeah. I'm gonna recommend a book by a handsome and brilliant author called Elgar and the Moon.
And the similarities here for me are you start off in a world that it's clearly post apocalyp and even post post, maybe even there's a lot going on that you have to sort of figure out as you're going through the reader. Elgar on the Moon is in a different setting, so we don't have the geographic reference points and historical reference points.
We do Black God's Drums, but I think that it's fine.
And it's about a lead character who is special in their own way and sort of needs to make their way into the world essentially on the sheer force of their personality.
It's a book that's longer than Black God's drums at 251 pages, but I think it has a similar element into it in that the lead character doesn't just stay in one place. The lead character goes to different locations.
And so each of those different locations you have enough information to understand what's going on, but it leaves you wondering. There's questions unanswered, things over here that you're like, boy, you know what's going on there.
That as a reader makes you want to find out more.
Speaker C
00:31:37.500 - 00:31:43.660
And for those who are not getting the in joke or not a joke, actually is the author of that book.
Speaker D
00:31:43.660 - 00:32:05.060
Thanks for the plug, man. And the sort of the vague level of that storytelling is intentional. In Eldrin and Moon, it is supposed to feel almost like.
Again, I keep going back to this, but the Star wars world building, in which there's a neat thing there and you know a little bit about it, but, you know, it ruins it sometimes, I think to. To delve too deeply into how something works because then it, it starts to fall apart.
Speaker E
00:32:05.060 - 00:32:25.870
The other thing is, I think it's a perfect, perfect book for this particular session as well, because there's clearly magic there, but there's also technology and how they interact with each other. Got some ideas for it, but it's not laid out.
Here are the rules, which I think again gives the flexibility that I like to have when I read a book, at least when I'm thinking of adapting a book over into an RPG setting.
Speaker A
00:32:26.190 - 00:33:09.250
I have two books I think would be particularly good. One is by N.K. jemisin. It's called the City We Became. And it. And it's sort of an urban fantasy that has a lot to do with identity and myth.
And it's about a living city that's under attack, but it has the same sort of feel as this story did. And the other one is a book called Everfair by Niecy Shaw.
And that's a steampunky book, but it's set in the Congo and it has a focus on colonization and resisting colonization and speculative technology that's sort of a little magical, a little native, sort of Afrocentric. And that's very interesting. It has a similar feel. It's. It's not as short.
Speaker D
00:33:09.250 - 00:33:09.610
Right.
Speaker A
00:33:09.610 - 00:33:20.530
So it's a little bit of a deeper story. But that's also very good though. Both of those are also have that underlying philosophical. They make you think while you're reading them.
Speaker C
00:33:20.690 - 00:35:20.920
Yeah. So I have three. And they get progressively further away from the story itself.
The book that I think is the most closely related to this is a book that called Dread Nation by Justina Ireland.
It is a book where zombies appear during the Civil War and there are young black girls who are trained to fight zombies to protect young white ladies from the zombies. There's also a conspiracy at the heart of it and there's obviously a great deal of discussion about where people belong and there's racial tension.
So I think that book. Book is very much right along the same line. So that would be the most direct piece. The next one is about Skyship.
There's a novella called A Matter of Execution. It's related to the echoes of the Imperium novels by Olivia and Nicholas Atwater. It has Skyships, quirky crews instead of Orisha's.
It has Fae based magic, but there's still people being possessed. And the world. World is. It's a fantastical world rather than an alt history. So it's getting a little further away. But I really like that novel.
It's one of the more recent steampunk novels that I have read. Steampunk kind of was out, was very big for a while and now it kind of faded. And this one feels like the renaissance of that.
So I really want to just say the echoes of Imperium novels by Olivia, Nicholas Atwater are amazing. And we cannot talk about steampunk without talking about Girl Genius by Phil and Kaja Foglio. These are amazing.
Kaja is the main writer and Phil is the main illustrator and also works on the story. And this is classic steampunk genre magical engineers called Sparks.
There's sky ships and it's an alt history that takes place in Europe though but it's way crazier and wake more comical version so it's the furthest furthest away from that but still I think touches what the Black God's Drums by Pjilly Clark was all about.
Speaker B
00:35:21.080 - 00:35:25.960
Other than Ian Eller has an amazing book. Do folks have other events or writings.
Speaker C
00:35:25.960 - 00:35:30.760
Or web pages or games or anything that you're involved in that you want to talk about?
Speaker D
00:35:30.920 - 00:35:53.580
I don't have anything hard yet, but I am finally finishing a very long path through higher education in just a few weeks now and once that is complete I am going to redouble my efforts and get back to freelancing and writing and creating both fiction and games. So stay tuned as we do more of these in the future. I will have announcements.
Speaker B
00:35:53.580 - 00:35:55.780
Congratulations to you Ian for finishing that up.
Speaker C
00:35:55.780 - 00:35:56.500
That's amazing.
Speaker D
00:35:56.500 - 00:35:57.060
Thank you.
Speaker C
00:35:57.140 - 00:35:58.660
Alex, anything to add?
Speaker A
00:35:58.900 - 00:36:02.260
No Good time at Rising Phoenix Gaming, Sean?
Speaker E
00:36:02.740 - 00:36:22.160
No, I don't have anything particularly pressing.
The Skype of Cthulhu people continue to churn out episodes on a fairly regular basis, so just finishing up the Order of the Stone campaign in that and think if people are listening and are interested and want to come find us at conventions, we tend to be at Carnage, we tend to be at Total and we are absolutely at Rising Phoenix.
Speaker B
00:36:23.520 - 00:37:32.170
And that's our discussion of the Black God's Drums by P. Jelly Clark. You can find a complete transcript of today's discussion as well as links to all of our podcasts@k-square productions.com GMBC.
You can learn about upcoming episodes on our social media, on bluesky, at gmbookclub, bluesky Social, on Facebook, at Gamemasters Book Club and on Instagram gamemastersbookclub. You've been listening to the Game Masters Book Club brought to you by me, Eric Jackson and K Square Productions.
Thanks again to our returning Game Masters Alex Jackal, Sean Murphy and recent graduate Ian Eller. Congratulations again Ian.
Look for those awesome Game Masters to return when the Game Masters Book Club or reads Necroscope, the first book in the award winning horror series by the same name by Brian Lumley. Continued praise and thanks to John Corbett for the podcast artwork and Otis Galloway for our music.
Later, gamers and to paraphrase the great Terry Pratchett, always try to be the place where the falling angel meets the Rising apartment.