Category Archives: Writing

Warframe Has the Best Worldbuilding In Video Games

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(This article contains a discussion of the storyline of Warframe. It contains many things that some people may consider spoilers. Trust me. Read it.)

Warframe is a free-to-play online third-person sci-fi shooter by Ontario developer Digital Extremes where you control a cool, acrobatic robo-warrior in a grindy co-op game where the PR tagline is “ninjas play free”. You fight space nazis, mechanized capitalists, and a bioplague in a handful of standard mission types to get loot and level up your gear.

Warframe, written and designed by Creative Director Steve Sinclair, Lead Writer Cam Rogers, and a team of other designers and writers, is the story of a dark future set in a fallen posthuman solar empire, where the generational victims of the cruel, long-lost Orokin are in constant conflict and where solidarity and empathy are the strongest forces against an apparently-inevitable cosmic struggle borne out of the resonating echoes of exploitation and familial loss.

The Moon came back.

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ConTeXt: an alternative to LaTeX

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I’m working on a full release of my tabletop roleplaying game LORE, which I released as a beta in 2009. The game will be extensively updated with clarifications, rebalancing, enhancements, and a far-better “conflict” system that provides a unified rule set for combats, debates, and other interesting situations. There’s one problem with the LORE beta that’s more visible than any of these.

The LORE beta is ugly.

I laid it out in OpenOffice.org, which is a word processor, not a document layout application. There’s a standard solution for the terminally technical author who wants to produce beautiful documents: LaTeX, hereafter referred to as “Latex.” Unfortunately, as great as Latex is at providing low-effort, decent layout for things like academic articles, it’s really awkward and frustrating if you need to do the kind of complex page layouts that a roleplaying sourcebook demands.

My alternative? ConTeXt. Or, for my sanity, “Context.” Context is based on TeX like Latex is, but it’s focused more on general purpose typography and page layout than Latex, which mostly tries to keep those concerns out of the user’s way. Despite its frustratingly limited documentation, Context has proved far better-suited to my project. I’ll explain in more detail below.
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The Latest Death of Morim

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I’ve written another short story. This one’s called “The Latest Death of Morim,” and it’s about life, death, and music.

Morim woke up with his lungs burning. His whole body was cold. His joints were stiff, so stiff that he couldn’t move. He struggled to remember, to somehow grasp with his mind where he had just been, to hold on to some detail. But there was nothing.

“That one was the hardest yet,” a voice said. “You almost stayed dead this time.”

Read “The Latest Death of Morim” here.

Brea’s Crossing

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I’ve written a short story.

In the process of creating a fantasy setting for my roleplaying system LORE, I’ve been playing with a lot of world-building elements: cosmology, racial influences on culture, magic, spirits, and the like. A great way for me to get a feel for these elements and how they fit together is to write a story about them.

This story is called “Brea’s Crossing,” and it’s about the dangers of caravan travel, dueling, and leylines. Let me know what you think in the comments to this post. I’ll likely be releasing more stories in the future.

Read “Brea’s Crossing” here.