Game News Torment Kickstarter Update #14: Tony Evans On Combat, Vision Doc and HOLY CRAP Another Screenshot?!

[Wizfall]

The music is really good.
Impressive how it creates an atmosphere.
Just perfect.

 

[Infinitron]

New thread: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...ted-second-screenshot-colin-mccomb-q-a.81926/

 

[MRY]

Excellent, thank you. It's been a long time since I read Rendevous with Rama, so I'll bust that out again. Right now I'm also reading the Culture novel, "Matter" by Iain M. Banks (and man, what a heartbreak his recent news was). While it's extensively info-dumpy, it's also really good in the sense of describing extraordinarily weird alien technology and how those technologies might impact ordinary humans. Others' mileage may vary, but it was hitting exactly the right chords for me on strange tech and human augmentation that we could have as numenera in the Ninth World.

You know, as I reflect, and noting that you're expanding the net a little bit, let me throw out two more. First, Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick. Technically speaking, it's not Dying Earth, since it's not set on Earth, but the mood, style, and layering of civilizations -- combined with the essential uncanny elements and narcotic/dreamlike feel -- make it a pretty good reference. Second, in lieu of Banks, you might want to try the other mod British hard scifi writer, namely Alistair Reynolds. He's less approachable, but he does a good job of capturing the dystopian atmosphere of a far-flung future where technology is marvelous but alienating. If nothing else, the conceit of a software virus causing biological mutations in cybernetic beings (not a spoiler; you get this very early on), and the body-horror aspect of the mutation, is a really clever one.

 

[MRY]

Oh, one more: Ilium by Dan Simmons. I think it's way worse than Hyperion, but it's actually quite a good Numenera-esque setting with multiple overlapping civilizations (I'd use the term "palimpsest," but for such a great meaning, it's such a terrible word) of vastly different technological scales. It does that cool thing where you're looking at civilization A, which is more advanced than ours, and they're overawed by civilization B, and then you realize there's a civilization C that towers over them both. When it's pulled off the right way (you usually see this in space opera when the humans and their alien foes have to team up to face some ancient super power, but it doesn't come off that well), it induces a kind of vertigo. I think Ilium does it more or less right, and that vertiginous feeling would be a good one for you to try to capture in Torment.

(Also, it satisfies the decadent style that I consider integral to Dying Earth fiction, at least for part of the book.)