Colville

This Book Stole my Attention for an Entire Day

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After I finished reading Priest by Matthew Colville, I immediately picked up the sequel, Thief. It takes place immediately after the first book, though the focus has shifted a little bit. Instead of sticking almost solely to the protagonist, the view shifts between him and a few of the other important characters. Haden is certainly an interesting character to follow–that’s kind of the requirement to be a protagonist–but it was also incredibly informative to see him through the eyes of the people around him. Beyond that, the second book was an incredible step forward in depicting the scenes and the fight descriptions were exponentially better. I had to put it down shortly after picking it up in order to play D&D, but I picked it up immediately afterward and accidentally stayed up way too late in order to read more of it.

The plot picks up immediately where the first book left off, throwing in enough background information that a new reader would be able to figure out what is going on but not so much that it gets onerous for an established reader to get through. The twists from the last book are still twists, as Colville often reveals the plot information by exposing other characters to either what happened in the first book or some offshoot of it coming back to bite someone else. There are still enough new twists and plot hooks to keep you pulled in and even more of the wonderful world-building that lets you feel the size of the history without spending more time than necessary talking about it. We’re still not sure what happened to split up the group of adventurers that Haden belonged to, but we do discovered more of what happened as a result of the split. We meet some more of his old friends and discover a little more about the life that Haden lived before he retired. We also get to see more of the incredible weapons, artifacts, and allies he has gained over the course of his career and they are just as incredibly powerful and crazy as you’d expect from a high-leveled D&D campaign. Demigods, wealth beyond the dreams of most mortals, and a casual arrogance when it comes to the importance of stuff. Who cares if your building burned down when you’ve got the money to build a new one or for a wizard to just make it not have burned down in the first place?

I honestly really enjoyed seeing the sort of crazy stuff that is so common to D&D enter into a more typical fantasy novel. The wealth thing I’ve already mentioned, but the incredible fights are also a part of it. Haden gets into it with assassins, a member of his old party who he never liked, a giant elf-creature that is basically a minor deity, and a bunch of weird “undead” creatures that aren’t really undead. He overcomes all of his opponents with the exclusion of the other adventurer. He almost dies half the time, but that’s how a lot of the fights in D&D go: you almost die, but that’s only because you focused on ending the fight as quickly as possible. You could have taken a little more time to avoid injury or fix a problem, but you knew that you’d be able to overcome anything but death itself as long as you were still alive at the end of the battle. He gets poisoned by the assassins he fights, but he doesn’t waste time healing the wounds or purifying his blood, he just kills every assassin in maybe half a minute and then finally fixes himself. Even the description of the fight feels short and brutal, reflecting the way the fight would have seemed to anyone participating in it. The big fight with his ex party member is equally brutal, each participant a hair from death at any given time, only surviving by relying on their instinct, guts, and luck. It was incredible to read.

I enjoyed the expanded cast since it brought a lot of interesting character development to the books and highlighted the way we tend to make assumptions about the people we encounter in our lives. I enjoyed one of the relationships, between Haden and a friend he made a dozen years prior to the novel, and how it develops in this book as Haden realizes he maybe didn’t know as much about his friend as he thought he did, but that doesn’t mean his friend isn’t the man he’d come to appreciate and respect. None of the characters ever feel one-dimensional and, while the villain does go on a bit of a stereotypical “I’m all-powerful and can do whatever I want without consequence!” bender, his megalomania is somewhat excused by the way he’s actually cleverly set up his organization and laid his plans. If it wasn’t for Haden and a few things that can be chalked up to back luck for the villain, he’d have been entirely right. No one would have been able to stop him, even if he walked up to the king and confessed his crimes.

There were more spelling and grammar errors in this one, but the only thing that actually threw me off was a couple of places where the wrong name or pronouns were used as it made it seem like the wrong people were saying things or showing up randomly in scenes they couldn’t have been in. That’s a small price to pay for two really solid, incredibly fun books. Since Colville has plans to make some changes and do some editing, I think they both (but especially Thief) have the potential to be incredibly fun reads.

I hate that I have to wait a while longer (probably at least a couple of years, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it was more than that) for the next book and the updates Colville plans to make, but I really think Priest and Thief are both really solid already. I suggest picking them up if you’re looking for a fun fantasy book and don’t mind starting a series that doesn’t really have a release schedule of any kind.

This Week’s Theme isn’t Evolving at all!

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In keeping with this week’s unofficial theme, let’s talk about Evolve! Matthew Colville worked for Turtle Rock Studios as a writer on the creative team that designed the world and many of the core aspects of what would eventually become the asymmetrical multiplayer game, Evolve. The world was incredibly interesting and the core concept was novel, so pre-release reactions to the game were very positive. It even sold well when it came out, but it was plagued by a variety of problems that ultimately lead to its demise and the shut-down of its servers a couple of years after release.

The basic plot of the game is that you and your allies are a squad of monster killers that are occasionally called in to protect an at-risk Human colony on a new planet. The planet in question, Shear, seemed like a great place at first, but the colonies were eventually attacked by native inhabitants that showed the ability to quickly evolve in response to whatever defenses the Humans mounted. In each mission, you and your three human allies are tasked with taking out the monster. The monster, another human player, is tasked with killing all of the hunters or completing an objective (destroy a particular part of a facility or something like that). It is possible to play with fewer than 5 human players as you can set up a game with one to four AI players, but the main mode of play is online with a group of humans.

In concept, the game was a lot of fun. The battles were interesting and, though every game I played ended with the hunters winning, it was still a lot of fun to play the monster since there aren’t many games out there that have a similar style. It can be really fun to basically play hide-and-go-seek with a bunch of people online. It can also be incredibly frustrating if they always, unerringly hunt you down before you have a chance to even get established. Or if they seem to always find you as you find a hidey-hole in which to begin the annoyingly slow process of “evolving” so that you’re forced to give up your progress and flee only for it to happen again the next time you think you’re safe. Or if you wind up playing two dozen matches in row as the monster since none of your friends play the game and solo-queuing seems to always mean getting stuck as the monster.

There were a lot of problems once you got past the novelty of the game. You needed a bunch of dumb, negligent players on the hunter side of things for the monster to win and I don’t think I ever won as the monster and won maybe half of the matches I played as a hunter because my fellow hunters seemed to be incapable of working together or rudimentary communication. My hunter teams would almost always start to fall apart as soon as we started losing. Everyone ran off in their own direction, certain they alone knew what to do, and got picked off by the monster who was able to easily take us down when we separated. In short, it was every problem you’ve ever faced with online multiplayer compounded by a higher-than-average frequency of one-sided fights.

All that is without mentioning the various exploits and bugs that showed up every few weeks. The developers didn’t update very frequently (which we eventually learned wasn’t the fault of the developers but the publishing company who wouldn’t put out updates more than once every few months), so a lot of exploits and broken gear/abilities/etc stayed around long enough to make it difficult to play against.

Most of the problems could have been fixed with enough software patches and a better response from the PR team of the publisher, but they seemed very uninterested in trying to please their customers once the game had achieved commercial success. I’m sure there’s most to it than a simple money grab from the studio that published the game, but that’s what it felt like at the time and it is ultimately why I stopped playing the game.

Looking into it now, after I discovered that Matthew Colville was a part of the creation of this game and did some research since the way I felt everything played out didn’t seem to jive with the way he acted in his videos and various online accounts, I’ve learned a lot. Originally, the game team was put together to create an alien world and that’s what they did. Incredible art, different modes of evolution, how species adapt to their environment, and so much more came out of their first years of work. It wasn’t until about two years of this research and development had passed that they learned the game was going to take the form we got: asymmetrical shooter. If it had been an exploration game or a team shooter against only computers, that would have been another thing entirely. I would have loved the shit out of the game if it hadn’t been so heavily dependent on the only PvP multiplayer.

It was nice to learn that the game they poured their hearts into wasn’t the game we got. I can only imagine how disappointed the team was when they learned what all their research and work was going to turn into. From some of Matthew Colville’s posts on the matter, it sounds like they didn’t get much of a choice in the matter since no one at the publisher believed that an exploration or PvE game would sell enough to pay for the development and distribution costs. I’m pretty sure a lot of people who have bought that and the studio would be swimming in all the money they got from it if they’d actually delivered the game the writers and artists had spent two years creating. It would have been like what No Man’s Sky could have been if it hadn’t been hyped so idiotically when it was still clearly far from complete.

Honestly, as the game slowly winds its way to complete shutdown (the servers are being turned off for good in september), I’ve gone back to play it a couple of times. It still isn’t the game I would like it to have been and I’ve spent more time waiting for a match than actually playing it, but I can see the game the development studio wanted to make in the background. Knowing what it could have been makes it a little more fun to play since I’m more focused on that than the outcome of the matches, but it leaves me sad once the match is over because I feel like I’m missing out on what would have been an amazing opportunity.

Until September of 2018, the game is free to play for anyone who downloads it. If you want a glimpse into what is an amazing world and what could have been a game to remember a few decades on, download it and play a few matches, even if it’s just with a bunch of bots. You might be frustrated, but you won’t be disappointed.

Not a Young Priest or an Old Priest, but a Middle-Aged Priest

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I’m on a bit of a “Matthew Colville” tear this week, so I figured I might as well review the first book in his Ratcatchers series, Priest. As Colville often says in his videos, the best way to support him is to buy his books. Since I’ve gotten so much enjoyment and refreshing information from his videos, I figured I might as well buy his books as a way to contribute to his well-being, despite the fact that I know his recent Kickstarter has helped him build a company that will probably have more to do with his income than his book series will for the next several years. I also figured he’d be a good writer since he does an excellent job with his videos and seems to be a DM people loved to play D&D with.

Priest is a surprisingly complex and nuanced book that stands out from most of the (honestly, pretty awful) D&D-fantasy books I’ve read. To be fair to the genre, I haven’t read most of what people say are the good ones since I get most of mine from used book stores and people seem disinclined to sell the reportedly good ones. I enjoyed it, and I’d say it was a really fun fantasy novel that broke away from a lot of the typical fantasy tropes by relying on the sort of stuff that comes up in a D&D world that is a bigger deal in a typical fantasy novel world.

For instance, the gods are real and have intermediaries who do their bidding, like the titular character, a Priest named Heden who used to be an adventurer. Heden, an ex-ratcatcher–to use the term most people use to talk about adventurers and all the chaos they bring to locals–is a shut-in priest who hates leaving his closed-down inn but is tasked to go investigate The Forest by his immediate superior, the local bishop. Heden not only has to face the dangers of a forest that generally kills everyone who goes into it and brave the mysterious Green Order, an order of knights who protect the locals from the dangers of the forest, but also his own anxieties and PTSD from his past as an adventurer.

There are a lot of mysteries about Heden’s past and Colville does an excellent job of giving the reader just enough information to slowly create a picture without tipping his hand. He lets us know that the past is important because it informs who Heden is and why he’s been chosen to investigate the death of a knight from the Green Order, but he also lets us know that it isn’t a central point of the story. Heden’s PTSD and some of the horrors from his past impact the present, but the important part is him facing them, not exactly what happened years ago. In addition to the glimpses through Heden’s quickly avoided memories, you meet some of the members of his old adventuring group and get a sense that Heden was the reason they’re all retired. Clearly they had all become very powerful by the time they retired, judging from the casual power of the magic items Heden has available to him, but still they all toil away at their own solo endeavors and don’t seem to speak to each other very much.

This cleverly side-steps the problem that arises when you have a large group of very powerful people united towards a single purpose. With all of them together, there would be very little that could stand in their way. Alone, Heden misses important clues in his investigation, can be brought down by sheer numbers, and has a hard time processing what is happening because he’s alone all the time. With the full group, the story would have been over in the first quarter of the book and there would probably be no sequels. Alone, you get to see that Heden still has a lot of growing to do and there is opportunity for mishap when he has to tackle every major task on his own.

The plot was a little frustrating, but that was mostly a personal thing. Heden is supposed to investigate and then redeem or condemn the Green Order, but he struggles with the task because of his own prejudices against knights and because literally everyone seems to put all of the responsibility on him and then do their best to make his job harder. Eventually, you see everyone was acting appropriately, but felt like “there needs to be a problem so everyone is going to be stubborn and difficult” while I was reading it. In hindsight, it was a clever thing to do because it aligned the reader with Heden’s feelings on the matter, but I really dislike stories that have problems because there needs to be a problem, so I almost put it down.

I would definitely recommend this book. It was a lot of fun to read, the characters are all intricate and super interesting, and it deals with something most people don’t consider: what happens to the mental health of adventurers after they retire. Not many stories seem willing to consider they might wind up like a lot of modern combat veterans. I like that Matthew Colville clearly did his research and does an excellent job of bringing PTSD and panic attacks to life in the novel in a way that isn’t so rough that it could easily trigger someone with related issues. I suggest picking up a copy of Priest and giving it a read.

Tabletop Highlight: Running the Game

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During my current break from running any Dungeons and Dragons, I’ve started following a YouTuber/Author/Game Master named Matthew Colville. I’ve followed him on twitter for a while, because I love what he has to say, but one of my good friends encouraged me to start watching his videos on YouTube. She’d started following him because she’s working on plans for running her first D&D campaign and he has an amazing video series called “Running The Game” focused around encouraging new DMs to run a game. As a moderately experienced DM, I can definitely say that these videos are amazing and everyone who will one day run/currently runs/or once ran a D&D session should watch them.

When I was first starting out as a DM, I only had half a dozen D&D sessions under my belt as a player. I had an amazing DM as my role model, but I still knew almost nothing about running the game. Since I was a quick study, I read the books, found some online resources for rule adjudication, and took it to heart when the everywhere I read told me that I was the final arbitrator of rules. Things only ever happened because I allowed them to happen that way. Unfortunately, none of these resources prepared me for the way story-telling changes because writing or speaking a story and running a campaign with a story. I was unprepared for the way my players would insert themselves into the narrative I was trying to create, I didn’t have a firm grasp of how I should be running sessions from an administrative point of view, and I was woefully unprepared to manage the social dynamics that sprang up as a result of the campaign. I learned by making wrong choices and it almost scared me away from running games entirely.

Nowadays, I’m a much better DM. I’ve learned a lot of tough lessons and while I still am not great at keeping all of the gears and wheels hidden from my players, I can do it well when it is important to. Still, those two years of campaign and the year of avoiding new games kind of hurt and I wish I’d had a resource that taught me not just the rules but all of the stuff you don’t think of until the shit has hit the fan and you’re wondering what you did wrong. Matthew Colville is such a resource.

His first few videos establish what he’s planning to do with the series. He also sets up the basics by creating a first dungeon and the handful of encounters and sessions that would encompass getting the party together and running through the dungeon. He covers the basics of the rules and how to manage a group of people, along with everything you’d need to know in order to start your own campaign. All of the videos after that are focused around particular topics like the use of maps, how to modify monsters, how to create your own adventure, managing player dynamics, and pretty much anything you might want to know as a DM.

He is a bit of a fast-talker in his videos, but not so fast that he is difficult to understand. His videos go from eight minutes to over forty, so he has a lot of ground to cover and slowing down would almost double the length of most of his videos. He uses a lot of specialized terminology, but he does an amazing job of explaining it as he goes along. His editing skills are top-notch and he keeps the flow of information going constantly, except when he’s working in a few jokes or anecdotes to give examples of what he just said or to show that even thirty-plus years of experience doesn’t mean you won’t still make mistakes. He likes to emphasize that he isn’t a perfect DM and that even he forgets to make use of the advice he’s giving in these videos. All he wants to accomplish is to encourage people to play D&D and to share some of the knowledge he has gained and traditions he has been a part of since he started playing in the eighties.

These videos are incredible. Even though I’ve learned most of the lessons he’s shared so far (I’m still working my way through the videos), it is an incredible aid to have them formally delivered in a way that makes me think about recent applications or how I can do better in the future. Even though I’d be hard-pressed to pick out even on thing specifically that I’m going to do better as a result of these videos, I’m really excited to get back to playing regularly with my group so they can see just how much I’ve improved. So much of it was just a sort of settling-in of what I already knew so it feels more natural. It’ll take a lot less effort to run well, once I start again, and less effort to prepare since the videos have a ton of great tips for stream-lining the process.

If you want to run D&D or know someone who does, I suggest checking out his videos! They’re so accessible that you don’t even need to have played D&D before to understand them! Like Matthew Colville, I just want to be a river to my people. Go, learn to run, and then share it with your friends!