At his message boards, Barry just posted a great little dissertation on How To Give a Great Talk.

I’ve done a lot of public speaking myself (between competitive debate and my legal career), and I can tell you that there is a lot of gold in there. But more than just some advice on public speaking, there are some nuggets that apply equally well to smaller settings … say … role-playing games. In fact, Barry is rather overt about it: “Your talk is a story.”

So go have a read.

After overcoming a sizeable designer’s block and undertaking a little playtesting of my own, version 2.0 of the Playtest Doc has gone out to the ever-increasing playtest group. The mechanics are fast approaching a final framework, from which there will undoubtedly be much tweaking but hopefully little major revision. In short, I’m close.

If you are interested in playtesting, please read my playtesting page for info.

In case you missed it, Fault Line is Barry’s new, non-Rain thriller. I’m about halfway through myself, but it looks like it will make good fodder for Tokyo Rain.

Bonus for Barry, the blogosphere has caught on to the book, which can only be good for exposure and sales.

Finally, for the Rainophiles, there are a couple of subtle “cameos” by everyone’s favorite assassin. Not to give anything away, but one of Rain’s prior “assignments” gets a nifty mention.

Playtesting continues apace. V2.0 should be out to playtesters by next week.

So the Kindle 2 has just been revealed by Amazon, and it looks pretty spiffy. I was very close to getting v1.0, but I knew I’d like the second generation if I could just hold out. I just put in my pre-order. Not coincidentally, John Siracusa has a fascinating article about the state of the e-book that’s worth a read.

On a Tokyo Rain related note, this is my commitment–assuming it is both technically viable and permitted under my licensing agreement–to release an e-reader friendly version of the final text.

So, are there any e-book afficionados out there? What are your e-book experiences?

If money is no object…

The Digital d6 from Q-Workshop

As of right now, I recommend 20-30 dice total for a game of Tokyo Rain. At 3.5 euros per die, that comes to … 70-105 euros. Ack! Hmmm … maybe just one or two for Friction rolls.

Q-Workshop make some great dice. I’m particularly fond of the Call of Cthulhu dice that I use for my warlock in my D&D game. So what are your favorite dice?

I finished opening all of the presents of the holiday season and found just one more waiting for me when I got back from my vacation:

Rain Fall Movie Trailer

(The site’s in Japanese, but the trailer loads automatically when you go to the web page.)

Thank goodness for the Finns. One of the cool things about the playtest group I’ve assembled so far for Tokyo Rain is that it is comprised of players from around the globe. I’ve got playtesters from Italy, Autralia, Brazil, Tokyo (natch!), and many others. And I’ve got Finns.

Most people don’t know this, but Finland has an amazingly robust role-playing game scene. In fact, you can get a national grant to design role-playing games. So it will come as no surprise that the Finnish group of Petri Leinonen, Mikko Merilainen, and Petteri Autero just dropped some amazing playtest notes on me.

Much of what they had to say will find its way in the next version of the Playtest Doc (which should be available right after the holidays). They also had this reassuring comment: “The game was great fun to play and ponder about. It was different from typical games in so many ways that it was really refreshing.”

Over the next month or two, I’ll be reposting some of my favorite posts I managed to salvage from the old site. This was a fun one:

As anyone who has read the Rain novels knows, one of the titular character’s prime abilities is to find or buy a mundane item or series of mundane items and turn it/them into a lethal weapon. In one of the books, traveling through a street market, he picks up a pair of socks and some batteries and makes a handy little blackjack. I’m also reminded of that scene in Bourne Supremacy, where the titular character does some serious damage with a rolled up magazine. These are “weapons of convenience”, and they will play an important role in the game.

As I work on Tokyo Rain and travel through my daily life, I find myself constantly eyeing the props of my mundane existence in a new light. I’m sitting at my office desk and thinking that my Sigg water bottle, filled with water, would make a nasty club. And that Winged Victory on top of my game design trophy (see how I slipped in that I won a game design contest?) would make an effective knife. Or that plastic grocery bag filled with a few of the marble chess pieces on my desk. Or, yes, even my keyboard, lashed to my arm with the power cord….

So what can you make? Right now. Give me your nastiest weapon of convenience.

Hey, look to the right! it’s a quotebox update. This is one of my favorite single sentences in the whole series. It demonstrates the real skill of Barry’s writing. It’s not just florid descriptions and juicy detail. There is nothing remarkable about that sentence in its construction. But, in the context of the story, it has all the power of an atom bomb. That is what great writing is all about.

And, of course, that emotional impact is exactly the kind of thing I am endeavoring to bring to the table with Tokyo Rain.

Playtesting for Tokyo Rain is in full swing. If you are interested in playtesting, please take a moment to fill out our brief survey. I review the surveys periodically and will be in touch. You should also keep an eye out for our playtesting badge to get the latest on how it’s coming:

Playtesting Badge