Squish the gnomes! SQUISH THEM GOOD!

Wizards know that you should never keep your money under your mattress. That’s why you’ve placed your coins in a decorative circle in the garden and enchanted a magical groundling to guard them.

But now the garden gnomes are coming to steal your coins to fund their nefarious schemes! It seems easy enough to keep them at bay (just crush them with your thumbs!), but as the elves will tell you: Never trust a gnome! They’re wily creatures, and before you know it squishing won’t be enough to stop them.

Oh Gnomes!

Available for the Android NOW
Coming to the iPhone SOON

EDIT: This post didn’t have enough context. I didn’t have anything to do with this game, but I have done some scripting work for some other unreleased projects from Groundling Games. This particular post was just me saying, “This game is fun! Check it out!”

Every so often I give Geoff Johns a chance to convince me that he’s not a hack. I do this because he keeps getting such glowing praise that I think to myself, “It must be that I just haven’t read the right Geoff Johns comics.”

But it never works. Every time I try reading something by Geoff Johns, I always find the same thing: Mediocrity.

My latest effort has been his work on Green Lantern. I started with Green Lantern: Secret Origin (which was a decent retelling of the origin story), continued with Green Lantern: Rebirth (which was a passable effort at making a pure Tale of Grand Retcon(TM) something other than a mind-numbing exercise in dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s on the way to explaining why some other set of stories never actually happened), and landed in Green Lantern: No Fear.

These pages from the last of these volumes, taken from two back-to-back stories, tell you pretty much everything you need to know about Geoff Johns.

(You can click for larger images.)

While the surface quality has been changed, those pages both tell the exact same story: Random and essentially nameless man and woman chat for a couple of panels. The big bad guy for the issue shows up and slaughters the man in a gruesome fashion. The death of the woman is then implied, but left off-panel so that we can imagine it in our own gruesome detail.

I don’t have a problem with the story. (The first artist, in particular, does a great job of pacing it and that final panel of red is inspired.) I do have a problem with the fact that Johns is repeating himself in the most formulaic fashion.

It would be one thing if this was just some random nitpick. But the real problem here is that these pages are merely the most perfect encapsulation of what’s wrong with these volumes: At both the micro level and the macro level, Johns repeats himself. And repeats himself. And repeats himself. And repeats himself…

And once you’ve noticed it, you also can’t help noticing that Johns is also repeating a lot of other people, too.

I don’t mean this in the sense of plagiarism. I just mean that there is absolutely nothing interesting or inspiring in anything that Johns has to say: We’ve seen these stories before. And we’ve seen them done better.

If you’re brand new to superhero comics, then you might potentially find Johns’ work nifty. It’s a workman-like rendition of nifty stuff drawn from what is clearly Johns’ own passion for superhero stories. But unlike Kurt Busiek or Grant Morrison or Mark Waid (when he’s at his best), there is absolutely nothing transformative or reinvigorating or fresh in anything that Johns is doing. Instead, it’s paint-by-numbers storytelling so predictable in its technique that it’s as if Johns is dealing a hand of poker using transparent cards.

But I’m a sucker, so give me another five years and I’ll probably give the guy another shot.

GRADES:

GREEN LANTERN – SECRET ORIGIN: D
GREEN LANTERN – REBIRTH: D-
GREEN LANTERN – NO FEAR: F

Geoff Johns
Published: 2008 / 2005 / 2005
Publisher: DC Comics
Cover Price: $19.99 / $14.99 / $12.99
ISBN: 1401230857 / 1401227554 / 1401210589
Buy Now!

This tip has been updated and revised. The new version can be found here.

A couple rules of thumb I use for crafting evocative descriptions as a GM:

THREE OF FIVE: Think about your five senses. Try to include three of them in each description. Sight is a gimme and a Taste will rarely apply, so that means picking a couple out of Hearing, Smell, and Touch. Remember that you don’t actually have to touch something in order to intuit what it might feel like if you did.

TWO COOL DETAILS: Try to include two irrelevant-but-cool details. These are details that aren’t necessary for the encounter/room to function, but are still cool. It’s the broken cuckoo clock in the corner; the slightly noxious odor with no identifiable source; the graffiti scrawled on the wall; the bio-luminescent fungus; etc.

THREE-BY-THREE: Delta’s 1-2-(3)-Infinity talks about psychological research demonstrating that repeating something three times takes up the same space in our brains as repeating something infinitely. Thus, once you’ve hit the third item in a sequence, any additional items in that sequence are redundant.

Extrapolating from this, for minor scenes you can describe three things each with a single detail. At that point, you’ve filled up the “infinity queue” in your players’ brains and their imaginations will impulsively fill in the finer details of the scene you’ve evoked. For “epic” descriptions, use the full three-by-three: Describe three different elements with three details each.

Like most rules of thumb, of course, none of these should be treated like straitjackets.

I’ve been cautiously optimistic about the Green Lantern film coming out because it seemed to be truly embracing the cosmic aspect of the character. The truly cosmic, science fiction elements of mainstream superheroes are an aspect which previous films have deliberately shied away from. (Rise of the Silver Surfer and X-Men 3, for example, both galloped away from Galactus and the true scope of the Phoenix Saga as quickly as possible, for example.) So seeing a film that didn’t seem afraid to shy away from some of the coolest stuff in the superhero mythos is potentially exciting.

But I’ll be honest that the trailer they’ve been showing hasn’t exactly filled me with a lot of confidence.

A few days ago, however, this footage from WonderCon was released:

And I am now 100% sold on this movie. The release date cannot get here fast enough.

If you’ve been skeptical about Green Lantern until now, check out this new footage. One can only hope that they start distributing it as the new trailer sooner rather than later, because it’s selling the movie in way that the existing trailer completely failed to do.

A couple days ago I followed a trackback from here to a Danish gaming blog called “The Voice from the River Valley”. Curious, I used Google Translate to take a peek around. The blog line, which in Danish reads:

En blog om rollespil af Morten Greis. Fra Tryggevælde ådal en dyb klang. Elverpigernes dans. Røre i det hvide slør. Disen hyller landskabet. De gamle stammer krogede trolde.

Is currently rendered by Google Translate as:

A blog about RPG by Morten Greis. From Tryggevælde creek in a deep tone. Elfin girls dancing. Stir in the white veil. Haze clothed the landscape. The ancient tribes hull trolls.

I don’t know anything about Danish, but I’m guessing something has gone slightly awry with that last sentence. The poetic imagery got me thinking about it, though… what if the ancient tribes actually were hulling trolls?

Trolls are regenerative, right? So imagine that a tribe of (let’s say) Vikings learned how to use certain alchemical compounds and rites to warp the bones and flesh of captured troll-spawn, twisting and stretching them until they formed the endurant, regenerating hulls of their longboats. Vulnerable to fire, of course, but so is wood.

Of course, for this technique to be worthwhile the trolls would still need to be alive. And the pain must be unimaginable.

Beware the Raiders of the Screaming Ships.