Brett Caron's Blog

Where does this live, can I link to it without also linking to the complete list of posts?

Two more wilderness community game setting articles for Palladium Books are being featured in The Rifter!

The first is Gohjjunk, a small town in the Pecos Badlands described in Rifter #76. This is up for sale now, so check it out – I’ll be over here staring at the cover art by Nicholas Bradshaw and drooling.

Coming soon is Nowhere, an oasis city of Techno-Wizards in those same badlands. I’m very excited to see this one in Rifter #77, currently scheduled for early March.

I’m still contributing to the Huffington Post and have an article coming in March with High Level Gaming. There’ve been other projects moved to the backburner, which is unfortunate, but I’ll post here if anything more exciting comes up, I promise. Definitely more Rifts stuff coming out in future issues of the Rifter and it’s all pretty awesome material, I can’t wait to see it in print.

Hello everyone,

My ostrich-like work ethic means that I frequently have my head buried in the sand when it comes to updating anything but the word counts on my projects.

So let’s recap!

First, The Rifter #74 is up for sale (and has been for a bit, my bad). I’ve written some game material for Rifts, focusing on a small wilderness community in the badlands of the American southwest. If you like Mad Max wastelanders, alien anteater gangsters, and bionic Russian murdermachines, you’ll like what I’m putting down.

I will have a companion article in the upcoming Rifter #76 – combined with my article in the #71/72 double issue, this will form a trilogy of neighbouring settlements in the same area, allowing for a lot of freedom for Rifts players to explore an area not yet well-defined in the setting. Best of all, it all ties into another upcoming article I’d like to have in Palladium’s hands by the end of the year!

In other news, I am progressing well with a handful of projects  – the biggest one is so close to done, and I’m in talks with an editor for the final set of revisions to be completed by the end of 2016. Stay tuned for a big announcement in early 2017!

That’s it for now – I have to get back to work, but as usual I’ll promise to try and be more consistent in these small updates only to forget completely in my rush to finish everything before I die without leaving a legacy and the sun swallows the earth and the universe winds slowly down to heat death.

Yours in good cheer,

Brett

Originally posted on the Huffington Post here.

Last Wednesday, an article titled “The 1 Word Millennials Should Stop Using Today” began making the rounds on social media. To spare anyone the chore of actually reading it, here’s a quick spoiler: the word in question is “fair.”

On the off chance that this wasn’t a work of satire, I’ve decided to get nice and pissed off about it.

The author goes out of his way to point out that he’s sick of this taboo entry in the millennial lexicon because of how it “grates and grinds against the hard-won experience of their elders.”

How it robs millennials of credibility.

How, upon hearing it, he’s put in mind of his own offspring’s bleatings whenever he lays down the law in his household. The image which precedes the article is literally a pouting child in a business suit.

Here’s a quick tip for the author and any other distressed elders:

If you want to be our employers, please try to remember that you’re not our fucking parents.

Like it or not, we are adults who have grown up into a world which is objectively unfair. We could go into the reasons why — like the deregulation of corporate shenanigans which crashed our economy and rapes our ecosystem, or the wild inflation of tuition that’s buried us in debt.

For his part, the author might hope that millennials will get around to fixing these problems, although apparently we should just shut up about them until such a time as it becomes appropriate for us to do so. But for now, let’s just focus on the Word of the Day.

“We’re all very impressed with your peerless ability to sell out.”

The author prefers to tell his child “Hey, life’s not fair,” and extends this message to millennials. What a bold, forward-thinking sentiment. If only someone would’ve had the good sense to mention that to the suffragettes, old white men like him wouldn’t have to acknowledge any pesky issues of gender equality.

Perhaps his next think piece should be directed to Black Lives Matter, advising that the world ain’t fair and they should just get used to being shot by police officers. “It’s not fair, but it’s true” should go over real well there.

Pointing out that fair trade is an admirable goal, but an “abstraction that’s contrary to reality,” is a cop-out of the worst kind. Anything that doesn’t exist yet runs contrary to reality — this long list used to include such abstractions as law, electrical power, and human flight.

The author confesses that his and “previously” generations abandoned their high-minded principles by naming them as naivete with no place in the business world. Courageous. We’re all very impressed with your peerless ability to sell out.

But maybe we don’t want to play the same game as you, we who stare down the barrel of this corrupt and rigged system which has fucked us at every turn.

Maybe we don’t want women to make less than men. Maybe we don’t want black people victimized by the state.

Maybe we don’t want already overpaid executives receiving golden parachutes courtesy of political shills, mouths and fingers still wet with the blood of this planet and the sweat of their human chattels.

Maybe we don’t want to throw out our idealism like the baby boomers did after their flirtation with free love faltered.

In case the author can’t see clearly through the haze of privilege hanging over him since birth, let’s illuminate him on something very important. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like the word. For better or for worse, the world is constantly in a state of flux. Things change. The idea is that just because the world is the way it is right now doesn’t mean it has to stay that way.

But sorry, our bad, we’ll go ahead and change the world without mentioning any of its problems out loud.

Sorry if that offends you, Oh Great and Revered White Male Elders. It makes sense that a lifetime of getting your own way from the undisputed power position in our society would breed a certain level of entitlement.

It must be a struggle, having to listen to scary words you don’t like from little people you don’t respect. Almost like you don’t think you should have to listen, by virtue of your hard-won experience of giving up on anything but the bottom line, and wish that all of us employee-children would just be quiet and respect you.

I suppose you don’t think it’s very… fair.

 

 

This article can also be found on the Huffington Post here.

Depending on the optimism of the futurist you’re asking, within 25 to 40 years we’re going to hit the singularity.

This magical point in technological progress is where virtually anything will be within our reach as a species. Space travel, free and green energy, you name it. One of the tentpoles of this Utopian ideal is cybernetics and bionics, the burgeoning field of replacing biological systems with mechanical ones.

Already we can see massive strides in this technology. Amputees who would have had extremely primitive prosthetics 20 years ago now can be equipped with legs capable ofrunning and jumping. The blind can be fitted with bionic eyes, and nearsighted people with implants which let them see better than unaugmented humans. Even artificial organs like pacemakers were a step in this direction, and those are commonplace.

The penultimate upgrade for humanity would be a perfect synthesis of human and machine — superior to an entirely biological human, but possessing the same mind in this new hybridized frame.

So what does this have to do with transgender people?

In this cybernetic scenario, if a person has their entire body replaced with machine parts to the point where they are nothing but a brain in a mechanical shell — are they still human? If the answer is yes, then a line has been drawn. A woman who, after a severe accident which requires her to be converted into a cyborg with virtually no biological components, is still a woman. She is still a she.

What’s the difference between that and a woman who is born with the body of a man? What if, after her accident, she chooses an artificial body with a penis? Is that any different? Does it change who she is underneath the plastic and the carbon nanotubes?

Transgender and non-binary people have had, to put it lightly, a difficult past — and present, for that matter. But it’s fair to say that the major issue to overcome is good old-fashioned ignorance. Historically, it has been difficult for many people to conceptualize a person who has the sex organs associated with one gender identifying as another. In a day and age where people had no options as to the modification of their bodies, this was relatively cut and dry. With our advances in reassignment surgery and general awareness, it isn’t so any longer.

But time marches on, and the future — assuming we don’t wipe ourselves from the face of the Earth in a Trumped-up slide into the narcissistic collapse of civilization as we know it — will burn away our ignorance one advance at a time.

If our understanding of humanity could be so fundamentally altered so as to say that a person with no sex organs and no hormones can be considered the same gender as a fully biological person, then it would be a huge shift in how we view ourselves. Imagine a future where you could modify your body as easily as you change your clothes. And despite what they say, clothes don’t make the man.

Of course, even in the brightest and most solar-powered future, people will still be people. Conquering this hurdle if and when the singularity occurs, it’s not a long shot to say that we’ll find all new reasons to hate each other and divide ourselves. After all, we’re only human.

Hello!

Palladium Books will be featuring an article of mine, “Rifts® Karimyo, Pecos Empire” in their upcoming issue of the Rifter! It describes a small community within the Mad Max-style wasteland of the post-apocalyptic southwestern US in the age of Rifts. Here’s a link to the pre-order page; keep your eyes peeled for its release!

More updates to come, but as ever I am very busy with various projects at the moment. When I have something to report, I guarantee that I’ll post it here before anywhere else!

I’ve had a great time working with Trese Brothers Games thus far, and sat down with them (so to speak – I was sitting down) for a brief interview. You can find the link to that here, complete with links to our 2 eBooks.  The full transcript of the interview is also included below. Enjoy!

When and how did you get into writing in the first place?

 

My first writing job was as a contributor to andPOP’s Gamer’s Mind Blog. I worked with a great editor named Josh Salem, and got a bunch of free games as part of my reviews. It was a lot of fun, and I had a great time writing about video games. But when I look back, I see writing all the way back into my childhood. My favourite assignments were all short stories or the like, and I was very protective of my scores on those. I remember getting into a very loud argument with my 7th grade teacher over whether ‘Writ’ was a word after I used it in a story title. She was not happy to be proved wrong, but I was rarely on good terms with most of my teachers.

 

You’ve now given your readers a unique look into the lives of an Explorer Captain and a Bounty Hunter — what do you think will be next?

 

Well there’s so many places to go in the Star Traders universe. I like to keep mixing it up, but what I’ve been doing is focusing on a story I’d like to tell and then figuring out who will be telling it. Even though both these stories feature Star Traders, they both revolve around members of the crew. I like the idea of a Star Trader being a larger-than-life character in this universe, just as the players are above and beyond the characters they see onscreen.

 

When you’re not working on telling tales within the Star Traders universe, what else have you been writing?

 

I try to keep busy. Right now I’m working with Palladium Books on a few different projects; last year I was an editor on their new Chaos Earth: Resurrection book (the most original take on zombie apocalypses I’ve seen in a while) and I’ll be at the Palladium table at Anime North on May 27th-29th in Toronto.

Other than that, I’m in the process of getting a book of short stories published, which is to say I’m trying to figure out if self-publishing is worth it over traditional publishing routes. I’m also outlining a couple of screenplays, and talking about coming on as an editor for an autobiography.

 

Both Subjective Vengeance and No Legacy Between the Stars have some great twists in their plots — how do you come up with those?

 

I’ve played a lot of tabletop games over the last 15 or 20 years, which is actually another way I’ve had writing in my life. What I’ve learned from these games is: if you’re the Dungeon Master or GM, and you plot out a perfect story with all the details just the way you want them, the players are invariably going to run your special snowflake ideas right off the rails.

It’s the same with writing – I’ll have this story in my head, but by the time I’m near the end I start to think, “wait – this character wouldn’t do that. She’d do this,” and it blows apart my carefully-crafted plot. Sometimes that breaks the story and I have to rewrite. Other times, it becomes the foundation of a twist – if I didn’t see that coming, would the other characters in the story see it coming? The point is that any twist is a result of identifying and subverting expectations.

 

Any exciting new gaming or fiction that has caught your eye and you’d like to recommend your readers try out?

 

The Kickstarter for the Savage Rifts RPG has just finished, and I’m really excited for that – I need to go learn the tabletop system, but I think it’s going to be great. Some of the stuff coming out of Black Library for the Horus Heresy series is pretty cool, I’m a big fan of Aaron Dembski-Bowden. I’ve heard that Altered Carbon is being made into Netflix season. That’s a book I’ve been meaning to read, although it’s not exactly a new release. Maybe readers can recommend something to me!

 

What was the thing that drew you to Star Traders RPG the most?

 

I liked the collection of influences I see in Star Traders, and the fact that there’s a lot of space between what’s already written (no pun intended) to add your own flavour to your Captain and ship. The casual nature of the gameplay appealed to me, since I’m busy most of the time and can’t get too involved with a game before I have to stop and do something else. It makes it easy to build a great character 5 or 10 minutes at a time. My favourites depend on my mood – right now that’s Able Gone, a crafty Smuggler, and Ty Ponderogus, a full-on mad dog Pirate.

 

Hello!

I wanted to put up something a little different after all the recent sci-fi,  so I went over to Reddit’s writing prompt subreddit and found this little doozy:

“A hitchhiker murderer picks up a murderous hitchhiker.”

One thing I love about these flash fiction prompts is how quickly they can flow out of you. I put this together in very little time, but with a strong and simple concept like the one above there wasn’t a lot of agonizing over where to go next. It’s a lot of fun, and if you want to do your own there’s no reason it has to be as long as this one.

Here’s my entry – and here’s a link to the Reddit thread so you can upvote my comment!

Enjoy!

Carpool

By Brett Caron

He needed better wipers. The windshield was blurry with sheets of rain, driven by a wind so strong it shoved the Toyota from side to side. He wasn’t speeding – that was a good way to get pulled over, and he’d have a hard time explaining the contents of his trunk if any over-curious highway patrol wanted to take a look. The flicker of headlights didn’t illuminate too much beyond a few meters except pounding rain and glistening pavement. The slick road felt unsure under the tires, even though he wasn’t anywhere close to the speed limit.

Of course, he hadn’t bought the car for performance, windshield wiper or otherwise. It was nondescript, one of a thousand travelling these roads, and that was just the way he liked it. Another green Toyota, another white male aged 18-30 behind the wheel, brown hair and clean-shaven. Typical. Average.

Except it wasn’t. He wasn’t. He was special. Always had been, ever since he was a little boy.

He didn’t even notice the hitchhiker until he’d almost gone right past the lonely figure waving in the rain. As he always did, he wondered what they were doing out here – even more so on a night like tonight. Pulling the car over without skidding to a stop was a bit shaky, so he slowed to a stop a bit further than the hitcher and waited with his tail lights on. He didn’t want to look desperate.

While they caught up, he fumbled in his glove box. He took out the glasses – really nerdy-looking wire frame ones, the kind that his dad used to wear. He didn’t need them – the lenses weren’t prescription and they were a bit loose on his face. But they were non-threatening, disarming. He pushed them up his nose with a practiced gesture.

Next was the water bottle. He carefully slid it into the cup holder next to his own half-finished bottle. He had just enough time to close the glove box before the door opened. The sound of rain was deafening after the silence.

“Thanks.” She was beautiful. He hadn’t been expecting that, or even a woman. This was good.

She pushed away the sopping wet strands of black hair plastered to her forehead and looked him in the eyes. “It’s a nightmare out there.”

He nodded. “No kidding. Dangerous to be driving, let alone walking. Where are you headed?”

“Alkington. Are you going that far?”

“Sure.” He wasn’t. “I can get you all the way across, I’m going right through there on my way to North Haverbrook.” Not true.

“Great, that’s great.” She looked relieved. She was soaked to the bone, but her clothes were nice – new, he guessed. “I’m Erin.”

That was weird.

“Ah… I’m Aaron. Too. Or, as well.”

She laughed, maybe a bit too easily. “It’s nice to meet you, Ah-Aaron. Can we go now?”

“Sure, of course.”

He pulled back out onto the road. They drove in silence for a few minutes. Moving slowly, not wanting to spook her, he pointed to the water bottle.

“I have an extra water.”

She smiled. “Thanks. You’d think I’d had enough water to last the rest of my life, but I couldn’t catch that much in my mouth and my mom told me not to drink rainwater. She said clouds are filthy.”

They laughed together. He watched her out of the corner of his eye as she unsealed it and took a sip. Excellent. She was relaxing. Maybe the glasses were working, or the fact that they had similar names.

But why had he told her that? He never gave his real name.

He had to keep his eyes on the road, but after a few more minutes of silence he started to notice something. She was watching him, still sipping. Not obviously, but askance – just like he’d been watching her.

She drank another mouthful of water and made a face.

“This tastes funny.”

He laughed again, a fake sound even to his ears.

“I think it’s the plastic. The gas station looked like no one had opened the cooler in years.”

“Well, it’s gross.” She screwed the cap back on, put it back in the cup holder. She smoothed the wet denim thighs of her jeans. “I feel a little weird, too.”

Better.

“Out in the rain that long, you might be catching cold. There’s a blanket in the back, if you want.”

She leaned between their seats, fumbling in the back. He tried not to look at her ass, but couldn’t help himself. His heart started to beat faster. He hoped that she’d taken enough of the water. He didn’t like the way she had been watching him. It was always easier once their eyes didn’t see anything anymore.

When she hit him in the back of the head, he almost lost control of the car. It slewed dangerously to one side, already unstable in this weather. She hit him again, hard. He saw white flashes in front of his eyes. The useless glasses tumbled off to land somewhere at his feet. He took his foot off the gas.

Then he felt the knife under his chin. It was slicing into the outermost layer of his flesh, a burning pain nicking his Adam’s apple every time he swallowed. He could feel blood at the back of his skull, wet and warm in his hair and shirt collar.

“What are you-”

“Shut the fuck up. Pull over. Now. I’ll cut your throat and leave you here if you don’t.”

There was no arguing with the cold knife or the burning pain. His head throbbed, heavier with every second. He coasted to the shoulder, shut off the engine.

This was unexpected.

Her voice was tense. Through the fog in his head, he could hear the slight slur to her words. She seemed to realize it too.

“What the- what did you do to me?”

The steel wavered for a second. He shoved her head against the window as hard as he could, heard the solid crack as her skull met the glass. The knife dragged down the side of his neck, just missing the jugular. Still, it left a ragged tear in the flesh halfway to his shoulder. The smell of blood filled the car.

He had his hands around her throat, squeezing for all he was worth. Her eyes lit up, those watcher’s eyes so much like his own. The skin around his knuckles was white, shaking.

The knife went in. He felt the burning again, this time in his guts. Bad. He knew what a knife could do there. He slammed her back against the window again, watched a spiderweb of cracks appear there.

The strength started to leave his hands. The blood gushed over both of them, hot and sticky and full of his life. She gasped for air, pulling his fingers from her throat, but the wheezing didn’t sound quite like panic. It almost sounded like she was enjoying it.

He slumped back, then, holding the mess of his ragged shirt and stomach. She coughed, but her eyes lit up again with a fierce light.

“Ah-Aaron… you’re full… of surprises.”

As she leaned in to cut his throat, knocking over the water bottle he’d so carefully drugged with a syringe before waxing the tiny hole back up, it was Aaron’s turn to smile through red teeth.

She didn’t know the half of it. The knife opened a second smile underneath the first. Everything started to spin, a black tunnel closing to a pinhole.

He wished he could see her face when she opened the trunk and discovered the bodies of his last two hitchhikers.

 

Find it on Amazon.

Find it on Google Play Books.

Find it on iBooks.

I’m glad we got that out of the way. Feel free to click away and come back here after buying it. No rush.

 

Subjective Vengeance is out. Finally! It’s great to be releasing another story with Trese Brothers Games – Andrew and Cory are spectacular humans and fun to work with. I’m really happy with this story – the world of Star Traders comes alive a little bit more every time I dive in. Thanks to them and to everyone involved!

So, if you love science fiction and have 3 bucks, pop over and pick it up – it’s a meaty read for the price of two bags of chips. From a vending machine, not like fancy root vegetable chips or anything. I can’t compete with that stuff.

If you don’t love science fiction but still have 3 bucks, why not pick it up anyway? It’s an eBook, it won’t take up space on your shelf, not even your phone! It’s the environmentally-conscious thing to do, really.

If you love science fiction but don’t have 3 bucks, let me know by email or Twitter or whatever and I’ll see what I can do – maybe one of those nice people above just bought you  one!

If you enjoy the story, my first eBook No Legacy Between the Stars is still on sale in the same markets. Check it out! Feel free to rate them (an honest?) 5 stars and share them around!

Thanks again to everyone.

Won’t be long now!

Trese Brothers Games is releasing my new eBook Subjective Vengeance as early as tomorrow! I’ll be posting as soon as it’s up, but for now here is the product description that will accompany the eBook on iBooks, Google Play, and Amazon. If everything goes according to plan (and we know how often that happens) then it’ll be up bright and early on Saturday.

Stay tuned for more!

It’s hard to make friends with bounty hunters. In a galaxy this harsh, this unforgiving, you never know who might pay them enough to conveniently forget that fact. Bell, a man who believes that the credits of any great House or Syndicate are as good as the other, has finally found people he trusts – Captain Daf Koryama and the crew of the Broken Record. He thought he’d left the back streets and vicious gangs of Steelcrank far behind him.

But when a ghost from his past appears, now a rival hunter with a valid warrant and hungering for revenge, it kickstarts a breakneck chase through intrastellar space and a terrifying journey into the void. Now Bell must decide what matters more – his friends, his life, or the credits?

—

Enter the world of Star Traders once again with Brett Caron as he takes you on a thrill ride into the darkest corners of space and the human mind.

This sci fi adventure is the second installation of original fiction set in Trese Brothers Games’ Star Traders RPG. The hit game has inspired more than a million Captains to sail the stars. This story is only a small part of the immersive Star Traders universe. Traders, Bounty Hunters, Smugglers, and Pirates span the void, a million of them. They each have their stories, and this is one.