Dark•Heritage

Religion: setting flavor or necessary healing mechanic?

2012-01-27T10:29:00.002-05:00

I'm calling this post a DARK•HERITAGE setting post as well as an FRPG post. Kill two birds with one stone, and all that.

Although I've posted in the past about gods and religion in DARK•HERITAGE--including in my older Dungeoncraft series--I'm revisiting it slightly, and want to discuss the idea in light of a fantasy game that's not D&D. In D&D (and D&D clone fantasy heartbreakers) religion is important because of the made-up archetype of the cleric. See, the cleric isn't really a fantasy or mythological archetype (although it does bear some superficial relationships to some.) It's a gamist construct; the cleric can heal other characters, and therefore keeps the game moving in the Dungeoneering environment without having to go up and recuperate. It's been handy enough that a lot of computer games have "health packs" that offer instant healing too--it's the cleric archetype all over again. If you think about books, movies, TV shows, or anything else, though, the notion of instant healing is really kind of absurd.

So, how to you overcome this dichotmy? I think that there's two solutions, and they are not mutually exclusive; in fact, elements of both of them in play is a good thing, in my opinion. The first is the notion that "oh, maybe it's not as bad as it looked." This should be pretty familiar to anyone who's ever watched an action movie. Main characters (or villains too) can appear to be seriously injured, can appear to be taking a major drubbing in a fight, and suddenly stand up again acting as good as new, just with a bit of Hollywood style blood or bruised make-up effects to show that they were injured earlier.

After the action is over, the character may wince or limp, or otherwise remind the audience that yes, he was injured, but clearly it's not an issue when stuff needs to happen! How can this be represented in game? There is a perfectly valid mechanical option for d20 games already: the Would Points slash Vitality Points system that debuted in the d20 Star Wars game, and which is designed to accomodate exactly this paradigm. But, it requires quite a few changes to things like critical hits, sneak attack, and some other stuff, so it may be more trouble than it's worth. In d20 Modern where magical healing is not assumed to be readily available, the Heal Skill is revised to be the Treat Injury skill, which is substantially more effective at actually patching characters up. Add to that the Surgery feat and a few other bonuses, and a doctor character can get somebody up and running nearly as easily and effectively as a cleric. Well, kinda.

And 4e D&D had the concept of healing surges, which I adapted as an Action Point option. This also perfectly represents what you see in action movies where characters inexplicably get "second winds" after being heavily battered earlier. It also significantly reduces the need for "magical" healing.

The second solution is to change the paradigm of play. Don't do dungeons. Do other kinds of action movie paradigms. Chases. Spies. Intrigue. Standalone fights. Etc. If a character gets too injured for healing surges and Treat Injury to get up and at 'em immediately, then they have to stop and recuperate for a while. Hole up in a safe house or something. I've heard lots of D&D players express to me their skepticism that this will work, but trust me: most RPGs that aren't D&D (or D&D clones) already operate under this paradigm. It works quite well.

There's an interesting correllary to that, though. Most of those games don't have dedicated faith-based classes. If a character wants to be faithful to a particular creed or religion, that's just a matter of flavor that the player adds; there's no mechanical follow-through (unless, of course, that's part of the setting.) There's no need for a cleric, in other words, which means that technically, there's no need for religion in your campaign setting at all.

That said, I like the idea of religion in fantasy settings. The notion of a pantheon of mythology-like gods--like the Greek or Norse gods, or what have you--just feels right for fantasy to me. Plus, it's a good way to establish a bit of the nature of your world.

For DARK•HERITAGE, for example, since I see it as a dark fantasy with fairly strong Lovecraftian overtones, I'm eschewing the popular "good" goods; the friendly gods of the sun, of the harvest, of civilization and commerce, etc. Rather, I've got a number of rather unfriendly gods that aren't so much worshipped as they are propitiated by a benighted and superstitious populace. And, as a bit of an esoteric reference, many of the gods are characters who are familiar to D&D players or Biblical scholarship as demons or pagan gods that notoriously tempted the Israelites. I don't have Baal (mores the pity) transparently referred to, but many of the others will be familiar.

The most notable and noticeable of the pantheon are the Four Horsemen, who are frequently associated together on iconography and elsewhere. They are:

Ciernavo (from Balshatoi Czernavog), also known as the Black Pharaoh, and The Conqueror. Riding a White Horse, and firing a bow into his enemies, Ciernavo is a god associated with the spread of civilization; the wresting of new nations out of wilderness, or out of the ashes of the old, either one. He is pictured as obsidian black, with long hair and a crown-like growth of eight four to six inch horns on his head. The hamazin see him as their patron and father, pointing to their resemblance to the traditional depiction of him as evidence. (Name is slightly revised from the name of the big demon lord in Disney's "Night on Bald Mountain" segment of Fantasia, which in turn comes from Slavic mythology. He's also pictured as looking very similar to Graz'zt, the famous demon lord of D&D lore, and is also meant to subtly invoke Nyarlathotep from Lovecraftiana.)
Peronte (from Balshatoi Perun), the Thunderer. Riding a red horse and swinging a sword that flashes like lightning, Peronte represents war. He is a wild-eyed and wild-haired man, charging into battle on his horse naked except for his warpaint, and his face is obscured by constant crackling of lightning. (Name is a Italianized version of a Slavic thunder god not unlike Thor.)
Culsans (from ancient Terrasan), the Taker, The Hoarder. Riding a black horse, he's a cold god, associated with weights, measures, scales, money and civilization. Infamous for his miserly attitude, he's also associated with famine, and when famine strikes the land, it is often believed that it is Culsans withholding his bounty because he hasn't been sufficiently propitiated. (Name is an Etruscan god; aspect is pretty much exactly like that of the third Horseman, without being combined or blended with any other source.)
Caronte (from ancient Terrasan Charun); Death, The King in Yellow. Riding a pale, sickly (or even dead and mummified) horse, Caronte is depicted as an emaciated, hunched, sinister figure wrapped in yellow rags that completely obscure his features (except sometimes a skeletal face), often with a scythe or sickle in his hand, harvesting the lives of those who's time has come. Behind him is another figure walking slowly behind him, a leery, crawling demonic figure of uncertain and inconsistant depiction, known as Orcus or Hell. (Combing the fourth horseman with Charon of Greek mythology (or Charun of Etruscan who had many similarities) with further aspects of the Grim Reaper and Chamber's King in Yellow seemed fun. Caronte is all of them rolled into a single package. Reading the Biblical verse, Death was followed by Hell--not a horseman, but apparently a flunky or assistant to Death.)

Besides the horsemen, several other gods are frequently worshipped or propitiated, or depicted in art and literature around the area. These include (in much more brief format):

Istaria (uncertain origin of the name, but older versions Ishtar and Ashtarte are noted from old books), a goddess of books, libraries, and knowledge. Also pictured as lascivious and decadent, her worship is famous for it's heirodules, or temple prostitutes.
Cathulo (uncertain origin of the name, but also known by the alternate name of Dagon), a god who lives under the sea, supposedly dreaming in his underwater palaces, waiting for the day he will rise and flood the land again. His propitiation often includes the pouring of alcohol into the water, to keep him sleepy.
Susnacco (from ancient Terrasan Susinac), a god of travel with statues in most towns. When in embarking on a long journey, it is often customary to kiss the statue first.
Selvans, a wild god of the wilderness and the hunt. Tall and lean, with claws and fangs and a skull-like visage, adorned with great antlers, Selvans is a figure that represents the terror the civilized man feels at the wildness of untamed places.
Moloch (origin of name uncertain), a god of fire and the sun. While seen as friendly in some locations, most see him as untrustworthy and dangerous, and see his hand in devastating wildfires and sere crops alike.

And a few other gods are known to the scholarly, but not to the general public--they have frequently been at the core of dangerous and seditious cults. Worship of--and even knowledge of--these gods has been widely surpressed.

Demogorgon, a primal god of the earth, said to predate the other gods, and belonging to a much more wild and chthonic order of beings.
Huudrazai, the blind, idiot Stargod, who sleeps in the blackness of the void, lulled into restfullness by the incessant piping of strange and hidious entities. One day, his cultists say, the piping will stop, jolting Huudrazai to wakefulness, which will initiate the End Times.
Yaji Ash-Shuthath, an ancient entity, knowledge of which came in suppressed and forbidden texts from the jann, is The Gate; the way to communicate directly with the gods, in a certainly suicidal and mind-blasting ritual. However, lesser rites remain which skate the edges of sanity, but which canny sorcerers occasionally risk to increase their own power.

NPCs of note (Bara Gairo)

2012-01-26T12:10:00.002-05:00

Continuing my description of Bara Gairo, a small seaside town near to and associated with Porto Liure that is a good, small environment in which to start a DARK•HERITAGE game. This post is on a handful of important local NPCs around town that the player characters might wish to interact with. Clearly, its not meant to be exhaustive.

Alfonso Galland -- A middle-aged, sturdy fisherman. He owns a boat that he operates with his son, Éttiene. He's widowed and also lives with his daughter, Vittoria, who is an accomplished tracker and hunter, preferring to avoid the company of the village-folk for the solitude of the woods. Despite his rather taciturn children, Alfonso himself is friendly and kind, and amongst the villagers, is the most likely to be convinced to help in a tough spot. Bring danger or trouble to his children, though, and you'll see a dark, ugly side of Alfonso.

Braz Vargas -- Owner of the Lima's Spirits, the inn, tavern, and general store for Bara Gairo. Braz is a large man, who displays a degree of wealth unusual for this small village. His common room is nearly always full, while his rooms rarely are. In addition to running the inn, he also is the local brewer, and most of the folks in the island drink small beer brewed by Vargas as their day to day drink. Friendly on the surface, Vargas is also notoriously untrustworthy and cowardly. The locals like to hang out in his common room and drink his spirits, but otherwise don't trust him with much.

Inés Peixoto -- Although she purports to be a simple assistant and serving woman at the Lima's Spirits; a distant relative of Vargas' taken in by his charity, it's a fairly open secret that Inés is actually an agent of the Castiada crime family. Rumors are thick in town about how Vargas got saddled with her, the most popular being that he was deep into debt with the mafiosos.

Cesar Gonzalez -- An extremely skilled crafstman, Cesar claims to be able to fix anything that comes through town, and make most of what else is needed. His skill with his tools makes him a popular person in town. Idle talk around town occasionally refers to rumors that he honed his skills working wiht the Castiadas, and has "retired" to the country--with a head full of secrets.

Camilla Marcuçez -- The "mayor" and semi-official town leader, Camilla is a sturdy farmwife and highly religious person. She is greatly respected, but has little patience for fools.

Evike von Rajecz -- As a Tarushan "Gypsy" Evike is one of the most exotic townsfolk. She lives simply, long having given up her roaming days, but is famous for her fortune-telling--which is only taken half-seriously by the townsfolk.

Kemal Hajdari -- This brusque wildman is the town's primary source of non-seafood meat, furs and leathers. In addition to hunting and slaughtering, his house doubles as a small tannery and leatherworking facility. He's taken a liking to the similarly taciturn Vittoria Galland, calling her his "little niece." He knows more about the islands nearby--once you're beyond the beach, anyway--than anyone else around.

Gisati Tahhi -- A middle-aged hamazin woman, who lives in a large house with a bunch of children, none of them her own. Most of them are orphans--or presumed to be--who shipwrecked with her eleven years ago just north of the harbor. They were brought into the town, the house made for them with the wreckage from their ship (mostly by Alfonso Galland and Cesar Gonzalez), and her services as a small orphanage were seen as good for the town. A few more children were moved in after a bout of plague swept through the town. Curiously, she claims no knowledge of who her charges were or what the mission of the ship was that brought them. The captain was killed in the wreck.

Although I haven't yet committed it in writing, I'm also developing a number of secrets associated with most of these characters. Giving campaign elements secrets is one of the best ways to keep a campaign setting feeling rich, robust and alive, as well as being a potent driving force for the campaign overall--assuming you drop enough hints that the players start getting curious enough to investigate them. I'll either commit those in writing in another post, or in the comments section of this post, and I'll write a FRPG post about secrets sometime in the future.

Marked and Horsemen of the Apocalypse

2012-01-25T10:15:00.004-05:00

I gave up on Marked, the first House of Night book. Good heavens, it was terrible. Towards the end of the second disc (of eight) it started skipping a bit, but really that was more the excuse than actually the reason. How in the world can anyone like reading a book with a protagonist who's completely helpless, hapless, passive, has no confidence--and therefore doesn't do anything--and who is bratty, whiny and unrelentingly negative and insulting all the time to boot?

On top of that, the book itself was actually offensive. The "fake Christian" religion was consistently portrayed as a sham and oppressive and stupid. It's members, if they were women, were portrayed as brainwashed and hapless (and fat, curiously), if men, they were authoritarian, controlling, and were described as "beady-eyed pedophiles." Anyone rural was portrayed incredibly insultingly--beer-drenched and ignorant if boys or men, helpless little puppy dogs if women, anxious for any sign of affection. The only sympathetic adult characters were hippy Cherokee grandma, and the pagan high priestess of Nyx. Although I didn't really get into it yet, other reviews complain about the detailed and time-consuming details of the Nyxian religious ceremonies described in the book.

In other words, it was everything I hate about "romantic fantasy" that I've read in the past; wildly unsympathetic and unlikable protagonist, wildly feminist, wildly pagan, and insulting of American culture, men, and Christianity--often gratuitously, even. Major, major let-down.

Meanwhile, I have another "YA urban fantasy" book on CD from the library. Given my bad luck lately with skipping CDs, I've brought it in the house and am going to clean the surfaces of all the discs with Windex and a soft cloth before I even start. Also, I've got The Seal of Karga Kul, which I haven't been reading particularly fastish and I didn't start right away when I got either (I got it before getting Mark of Nerath, but since they were published in the opposite order, I was worried that I needed to read them in order. Vain worry--turns out there's little to no relationship between them.) It's due at the library in two days, so I need to make some major progress--I've got about 80 pages left to read and a busy evening tonight.

Meanwhile, I've also just finished the Paizo Campaign Setting book Book of the Damned, vol. 3: Horsemen of the Apocalypse which details the "daemons" in the Golarion setting. Demons and devils are relatively well established in D&D and its derivative games (probably because they were in the original Monster Manual but their "neutral evil" equivalents have always struggled to find a place and the same kind of iconic-ness. Perhaps that was inevitable when the were unfortunately named "daemons" in Monster Manual 2 where they first debuted. What exactly is the difference between a demon and a daemon anyway? That's a bit like talking about the difference between gray and grey, or color and colour. Absurd. Not that making a big divide between demons and devils wasn't already overly "splittist" as it was.

In the 2e days, there was an attempt to give the daemons their own identity. While demons became tanar'ri and devils became baatezu, the daemons became yugoloths. In the 3e era, while demons and devils regained their original name, the yugoloths did not (nor their place in supplements) ensuring their continued second class status.

Green Ronin's The Book of Fiends decided to redo the daemons envisioned as belonging to one of seven circles, each one associated with one of the seven deadly sins. Paizo took their lead and came up with another classic Christian interpretation (although a different one) making the daemons nihilistic fiends, focused on the upcoming apocalypse, hating mortality and wanting nothing more than to completely wipe it out. Their leaders--the equivalents of the archdevils or demon lords--are the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The only thing retained is that Charon, the Greek ferryman of the dead and one of the original D&D "daemons" is retained as one of the horsemen, combined here with the Grim Reaper in aspect.

I liked that idea. In fact, I liked the idea so much that I'm likely going to revise my DARK•HERITAGE pantheon to more overtly include some Lovecraftian entities and the four horsemen myself. I'm not going to use the Paizo version (Paizo has a Horseman of pestilence, which--while traditional in contemporary depictions, frequently, is actually not one of the horsemen at all. I guess modern writers borrowing the concept find war and conquest too similar to each other or something.) Other than that, it follows a relatively familiar format by this point--it talks about daemons, their semi-mythical origins, some of their past history, their hierarchy, their goals it has a prestige class for daemon-worshipers (although the book also has a hard time explaining why these exist, given that the daemons hate mortals so much) and a number of monster entry for more daemons. I didn't find many of them to be particularly inspired. In fact, in general, I found the book to be fairly serviceable, but not inspiring. Maybe that's the problem with continually putting the "daemons" off until last of the major fiendish "races" but they always seem to come across as also-rans by the time they get out there. Although I do have to give the book credit for causing me to rethink my cosmology in an effort to include the Four Horsemen in one form or another. It was at least sufficiently evocative to accomplish that.

I also just got another Paizo book, The Dragon Empires Gazetteer which I'll be reading soon as well. However, these Paizo books are slim enough that I may not end up putting it on my "What I'm Reading" list just because it'll be over and done with so quickly.

Next up on posting, I made a goal to have two campaign setting posts per week, and I haven't done one yet, and probably won't get to it today. That gives me a relatively short time to crank two out! Luckily, I already know pretty much exactly what I want to do. And as for my FRPG series, although I've already done enough to meet my "quota" I might have another of those lurking and ready to burst out before the week is over too.

Sigh

2012-01-23T15:25:00.000-05:00

I'm going to have to change my reading schedule a bit again. Or rather, my listening to audiobooks during my commute. Almost exactly halfway through Clive Cussler's Raise the Titanic I came across a disc that is skipping too badly to listen to.

I'm going to take it back, inform the librarians, and--maybe--get it back. Or maybe not. Too bad; I was actually rather liking it. And it's the book that put Cussler on the map.

Instead, I've got a few other audiobooks on file. Our library's collection of sci-fi and fantasy audiobooks isn't very good, but we do have a so-called House of Night series, a YA paranormal mystery/fantasy whatever. I'll try it out. It might be a darker, vampire themed Harry Potter, or it might be a Twilight ripoff. I guess I don't know until I try...

The Players Wanted ad

2012-01-23T13:05:00.002-05:00

I'm not going to run DARK•HERITAGE for my group any time soon. Not only did my last attempt have a woeful end due to scheduling difficulties (which plague our group at the best of times as it is--and this wasn't the best of times) but we just started another campaign, which is estimated to last at least all of 2012. For me to even suggest another game would be mutinous, not to mention rude and unfriendly at this point. But as my excitement for DARK•HERITAGE is waxing at the moment, I might be inclined to look for another group--a "mistress" group if you will, where I could run for them on the side. I don't know if I'll do this, of course, but considering what I had to do when I first moved into the area, and what I might have to do to find another group now, I thought it would be fun to craft a "Players Wanted" ad. Whether I actually use it is another thing altogether. Once crafted, aside from sitting here on my blog, where it won't get any bites, I could post reformatted versions of it on various online RPG meetup type places, and most importantly, on the bulletin board of my local gaming store (I'm lucky enough to still have one that's not very far away.)

A good Players Wanted ad needs to be brief. Who is going to be so interested in it that they'll read a Great Wall of text? Precious few potential players. But it needs to be informative. It needs to convey in brief yet clear tones what kind of game you're looking to run, so that the bites you do get will be the right kind; there's no point talking to lots of potential players to find out that all they really want to play is an elf bladesinger in a Forgotten Realms campaign. You want it to be specific enough to act as a self-selecting filter for the kinds of players who you are likely to mesh with, but you have to be careful with that so you don't come across as a holier-than-though stick-in-the-mud elitist with finicky tastes, which would be off-putting to exactly the same players that you're hoping to attract.

And most of all, it needs to be evocative. If in your pursuit of brevity and information-sharing, and correct tone placement you manage to come across as dry and boring, then you're not likely to get any hits that way either.

One good way to do so is to use the "Hollywood style" pitch idea. This is a very concise comparison of your game to a few other well-known titles, characters, or elements in the hopes of drawing attention to the similarities between them. Famously, Star Trek, the original series, was pitched to studio executives as "like Wagon Train to the stars." You probably want to be a little more exacting than that, but not much longer. And some kind of snappy graphic--a banner ad, or a fantasy picture that is evocative of your setting, can't hurt to help grab attention.

So, here's my ad--sorta. Normally, I'd actually put this in Word, pdf it, and print it, but for now, I'm just doing it as web text with a banner. It might not be perfect, but it should at least be a good enough example of what you're looking to do.

PLAYERS WANTED

Looking for 3-5 players for a fantasy roleplaying game. d20 Modern rules and a playstyle more like Call of Cthulhu than Dungeons & Dragons. It is not necessary to own any books or know the rules to play in this game!

"The Black Company and The Godfather meet spaghetti westerns and Pirates of the Caribbean!"

A homebrew setting and game that encourages wild swashbuckling action, gritty noir investigation, and Lovecraftian dark fantasy in equal measures.

Looking to play biweekly in Fakesville, USA in the evenings for 3-4 hour sessions. I am a veteran roleplayer and gamemaster looking for local players who enjoy fantasy, horror, and thoughtful roleplaying. If interested, contact me at notanemail@fake.com

Running the Game

2012-01-23T09:18:00.000-05:00

Before I get to the more enjoyable tasks of worldbuilding, or the more practical tasks of how to actually run a fantasy roleplaying game--whether D&D or anything else, actually--it's important to take stock of a few things. Notably; should you actually be running a game at all, and if so, do you have a group. In other words, what are the most basic things that you need before you can even consider running a fantasy roleplaying game?

This is adapted from a Ray Winninger column on the same subject first published in Dragon Magazine #255 back in the late '90s, and is part of the Ray Winninger "Dungeoncraft" series, which you can find archived at darkshire.net on the links tab above. But I've got some thoughts of my own to add to the question, and it's a good one to start with before I start heading off on my own direction with my own posts on my own subjects--many of which will be worldbuilding related. Besides, by "adapted" I mean nothing more than that I took the basic outline of the article and filled it in completely with my own thoughts and text. With that,

1. Do I have time and other resources to run a game?

If you don't, then don't make the attempt. In my own personal gaming group, this has killed many a campaign, including, sadly, my latest attempt to run my DARK•HERITAGE game featured on this site. This has several aspects. The first, of course, is making sure that your schedule is available to meet every session of the game. Depending on your group size and dynamic, there may be players who can and do occasionally miss sessions--I know in our group, it's actually very rare that we're full strength; we almost always have at least one and frequently two people out every time we game--but if the gamemaster isn't there, then there's no game at all. If your life is too busy to commit to spending the time to be at every session, then you're better off passing the torch to someone else.

Secondly, you need time to prepare. A player's commitment in terms of time is fairly minimal other than time spent in the actual game session itself. But a GM must spend quite a bit more time having the game ready to run. Honestly, this isn't as much time as a lot of people think--Ray Winninger's own method of carefully preparing what you need and only what you need can be a bit of an eye-opener for those who have the tendency to over-prepare; but it's still significant. Even if you're an expert at improvisational running of the game, you should probably plan on about as much time per week as your session lasts to also spend preparing for it. And keep in mind that--to a certain extent, at least--how good your sessions will be depends on how much time you put into them ahead of time.

Thirdly, there are other resources besides time that you need to have. I've played in many games where I don't own the rules, or at least haven't read them. And naturally, when playing in published adventures, I never read the adventures. The same can be true (sometimes) for published settings. I read a statistic from WotC a number of years ago that stuck with me; they estimated that on average, the person running the game spends 4-5 times as much money on gaming material as the players do. Now granted, D&D is perhaps more prone to that kind of thing than many other games, because it "prefers" minis and a battlemat for combat, and has lots and lots of options, adventures, settings, and other stuff for you to buy (whether you need it or not.) Some other games have just a single rulebook, and maybe a handful of support documents or expansions. If you're running, for example, the out of print Wheel of Time roleplaying game, then you need the rulebook and you could have the Prophecies of the Dragon campaign/module, and maybe a Dragon Magazine article or two--and that's all that was ever published for the game. That said, the game is out of print, and you need to at a minimum have the rulebook. If your players don't; they can borrow yours. Make sure you have all the material you need to run the game. Depending on your style, you might need maps, adventures (if you can get them), computer tools like NPC generators, setting information, or more. Whatever you need, make sure you have it or can get it before you commit to running the game.

Commitment and perserverance--or rather, lack thereof--has caused many, many campaigns to run aground and founder.

Related to that, just having the rulebooks isn't sufficient; you also need to know the rules well enough to run the game without constantly referring to them. I'll get to this in another post, but this does not mean that you need to be a walking rules encyclopedia. But you need to know the rules enough to run a consistent game, so players can count on rulings that they can understand and predict and plan for, and they need to count on a game that doesn't bog down with frequent rule arguments or lookups. To a certain extent, you can bluff your way through this, and you should look for players who are willing to accept GM rulings as the last word, but it also helps to have as thorough a grounding in the rules as you can. No matter what else happens, you're going to get a lot of questions from your players that are rules related.

2. Do I have sufficient restraint to run the game?

In other words, would you really rather be playing? Luckily, I've only rarely been plagued in my gaming career with this problem in my gamemasters, and it's also not really been an issue that I've had a tendency for. But, and we'll talk about this in great detail in another article sometime down the line, although you are more invested in the game than any of your players, you need to remember that the game is really for them. If you are running NPCs as if they were PCs, trying to force the players to follow your plan, or otherwise taking the focus and options away from the players that they should reasonably expect to have, then you are likely going to run a frustrating game. The game's really about them. You're more of a facilitator than a leader. The PCs are the stars, and the players should always feel in control of the PCs actions.

3. Do I have a gaming group to run the game for?

If you do, congratulations. This step is done. Assuming, of course, that they are willing to allow you to run for them, and they are willing to give the game you want to run a try. Sometimes players can be remarkably fickle or stubborn and opinionated. I should know; I certainly am! In my gaming group, for example, we tend to settle on Dungeons & Dragons so frequently not necessarily because it's our favorite, but because it is a kind of "least common denominator"--enough of us like it enough that we can all agree on it, while other games tend to be more polarizing. One guy in the group, for instance, really doesn't grok science fiction at the table. Don't know why. Neither does he. He likes science fiction. He likes gaming. But they just don't go together for him. This is, of course, unfortunate for the other guy in the group who's favorite game is Shadowrun, but there you have it. Three of us really love Call of Cthulhu (including, curiously, the no-sci-fi guy) and would step up to play it pretty much at any time. The other three or four have played it on occasion, but have significant reservations about the theme, tone, and the whole premise of the game, and are--at best--very skeptical about it. Sadly, our experiment to give it a try didn't really work as well as we'd hoped; we may struggle to get the non-Cthulhu half of the group convinced to ever try it again. So, just because you have a gaming group, it's not necessarily a given that they want to play the game that you offer. For some gaming groups, they may not have any choice. They may not have a lot of options of people who are willing to run a game--any game--and if they want to play, they have to run the game that's offered. For my group, we have the opposite situation; at least five of us consider ourselves to be GMs at least as much as we do players, and we pretty much always have game concepts in the backs of our minds that we'd be willing to run, assuming that our schedules allow. So for us, consensus on what we're playing is a group effort. Hence our "settling" so frequently on D&D.

So--if you don't have a group, or if you do but they're not buying what you're selling and you want another group on the side because you're just that interested in running the game--how do you find one? The time-honored, and frankly still quite effective way to get a group is to post an ad in a gaming store. I'm later going to have a post dedicated to exactly what I think a gaming ad should contain, and what it shouldn't, but for now, I'll just say that a brief posting describing what game you want to run, and what you're looking for in terms of scheduling commitment is a good way to round up some players. I've also had pretty good luck finding people through the internet. Places like ENWorld have a "gamers-seeking-gamers" classified ads type section. However, it's certainly no guarantee that people near you are looking at that. Meetup.com has gotten lots of groups together. Going to local cons or gaming events is another way to meet folks, and if you hit it off, you can invite them to game with you.

I personally think it's important to "interview" potential gamers in a non-threatening setting. Several of the guys now in my group meet with me at a local Chili's before we started gaming, and we talked about the hobby, what we like (and don't like) and a bit about us as people, just to make sure that we were going to hit it off fairly well before we committed to trying to game together. While I don't have any personal horror stories to tell, I've certainly heard plenty from folks who met with a new potential group of gamers and had all kinds of bizarre things happen. One guy I know had a guy and his girlfriend put on fake vampire teeth and attempt to bite another player. Take it from me; as much as you want to run the game, getting the wrong people in your group is much worse than not having anyone to game with. Take your time, and find the folks who are going to be a good fit for you. One good rule of thumb? If you could stand hanging out with them in a situation other than gaming, then you're probably on the right track. Because I'm a transplant to the area in which I now live, I had to find my gaming group this way, and we've become pretty good friends; the kinds of guys who like hanging out on the weekends because we like each other. That's how it should be; gaming is a social activity after all.

How many people should you have for your group? While certainly an interesting game could probably be run with as few as just one good player, in general, you're going to want more than that. I think the ideal gaming group size is 3-5 players and the GM. This is actually a member or two smaller than my current group, but I don't want to tell any of them they can't play, and like I said, we're almost always short at least one or two anyway. Fewer than three players usually makes the game very difficult to run, but more than about five, and you really are going to struggle to keep all of the characters (and players) equally involved. This is a game that is character driven, and if the characters become faceless and disposible, then you're migrating back into an old-fashioned D&D paradigm again, which as I've said, is not the point of this series of articles. If you want your game to even kinda-sorta resemble the type of ensemble cast TV shows or books that you like (and I certainly do, and it will be a feature of this column that I'll be attempting to show how to do that) then you really can't have a cast of protagonists that is much larger than that either. 3-4 is the perfect number, with maybe one more so you can still keep going if someone isn't available. Any more than that, and it's too much to successfully juggle and get the right kind of experience out of it.

4. How often should we play?

This is best answered by the group. If I were single, I'd probably say once a week is ideal--and heck, I'd like to run two concurrent games in the same setting. But I'm not, and running anything twice a week; or even once a week, is not going to happen anytime soon. However, there's a lot to be said for regularity. One of the things that has killed a lot of campaigns with my current group is lack of regularity and predictability about the schedule. While we're all really busy, and couldn't possibly support a once a week schedule, when we're trying to schedule each session individually, it's not unusual for it to drag out to once a month or once every six weeks between sessions. What's worked best is to plan on once every other week on Friday nights, and a consistent location, and only deviate from that as exceptions require. Having it be assumed that we're on, that we're at Kevin or Matt's house (or whatever) leads to consistent gaming. When there's a flurry of emails a week or two after our last session asking when we're going to play again, and where, then it tends to drag. This goes back to commitment and perserverance again. Sure, it's a game, and everyone understands that sometimes things happen that are more important than gaming. If you miss your kid's baptism or graduation or something, or your wife's birthday or anniversary, because, sorry, it fell on gaming night, then you've got problems. But if you can't count on every other Friday night (or whatever) being game night, then chances are you've got problems too. Gaming isn't just a game, it's also a social activity that requires a group. It's impolite and thoughtless--at best--to not take the other guys in your group into consideration, and make an honest effort to commit to doing this with them. They're doing the same for you, and if you fall through, then there's no game. It's not the end of the world if there's no game, but at the same time, you can't very well be surprised if you find that the guys end up playing with someone else if they feel they can't count on you. If nothing else, it's poor friendship.

5. What do I need to run the game?

Of course, that depends on what you're going to run. I'm going to suggest that what you need is fairly minimal, and you should already--mostly--have it. Here's my list, as well as some discussion on other options.

Must haves:

Regular internet access. This is pretty ubiquitous in the West these days, but it's crucial, I think. There's a lot of stuff available online that will greatly increase the ease with which you can prepare a quality game. And, for that matter, with internet access, you can subsitute for a lot of other material. In my case, for example, using online SRDs means you don't even need a rulebook, really. I also really like using this to find artwork and other support stuff that I can show my players to increase their enjoyment of the game.
Email. Being able to email my players between sessions about gaming related things--including scheduling and more--has also gotten pretty crucial. This is especially true if you have a group cobbled together from meetups or ads posted at a gaming store, or something like that, who may not otherwise know each other (or you) all that well, and may not live in necessarily very close proximity.
The rules. This might be, as I mentioned earlier, as simple as having access to the online SRD or a pdf of the rules for some rulesets. More likely, it means access to a book or books. Depending on the system you're using, this could be a lot or not much. My current favorite ruleset for DARK•HERITAGE has me using three books regularly, d0 Modern, d20 Past and Urban Arcana, although it also has me supporting that with numerous monster books and other occasional d20 books as well. You could probably consider The Monsternomicon (both volumes) to be core books for me to run the game, and Green Ronin's Book of Fiends to be a close second. But, I could also run games with just a single, slim rulebook or pdf. I've run games using The Window and it's completely self-contained. While it's not strictly necessary to own every single rule in play, it's usually a nice idea, which is another reason to limit them, if you're using a system that has a runaway supplement publishing schedule.
Dice. Probably needless to say, but I'll say it anyway.

Nice to haves:

"Official" character sheets. Because I use a d20 Past ruleset, I can get really pretty handy pdfs that are customized for d20 Past and that I can use pretty much exactly as is. I like to have them. I don't, however, need them. For most of my gaming career, I played using just lined notebook paper for character sheets. Trust me, it works just fine. But an actual character sheet is handy, and preferred.
A GM screen. This is more to have a platform for me to have charts and tables that I might use right in front of my face than it is for anything else. It's also nice to be able to roll behind a screen, though, and spread out notes and other papers that I may not want players seeing. And it's nice to have a platform on which I can paperclip pictures or whatever that are relevant to what's going on, so the players can look at them. It's not necessary, but it sure is nice.

Don't needs:

Laptops. While they can be handy at times, I've also found that I think setting up laptops or tablet PCs at the table can be at least as distracting as they are helpful. I actually prefer not to use one. And if your players tell you that they actually need one (as opposed to liking it because they're computer savvy and just like having computers around to support every aspect of their life) then you should seriously consider a less complex system of rules.
Adventures. In a non-D&D environment, there often aren't any adventures to be had anyway, but even so, I do not find that having published adventures is a good thing. I actually think it's more work to run published adventures than it is to run my own, because I need to spend a lot more time ensuring that I know and understand the adventure, whereas my own stuff is both much more flexible and since I came up with it, I know it really well. Without a lot of GM modification, it's also more difficult to "ground" the PCs in a published adventure. Homebrewed adventures are better in every way. That's not to say that owning adventures isn't a good idea. Adventures are full of locations, plots, NPCs, and other elements that are often pure gold when it comes to the imaginativeness of their authors. I buy, read, and pilfer elements all the time out of published adventures. I just very rarely ever run a published adventure.

Why not D&D?

2012-01-20T13:33:00.003-05:00

So you want to run a fantasy roleplaying game? Good for you! It's a lot of fun; it's in fact, one of my main hobbies. So, that means D&D, right? What? Why not?

Yeah, that's right. My game is not D&D. Even if I use the houseruled D&D rules variant (one of three acceptable variants for me!) I don't consider it to be D&D. Too many changes, and the ones that matter the most, in my opinion, aren't the ones to the rules anyway. For a lot of folks, D&D and fantasy roleplaying games are practically synonymous, and playing a fantasy RPG that's not D&D seems to be really quite a strange idea. So, why is it something that I want to do?

Although not as much an issue for me currently, it has been in the past and could be for other folks (and could be for me in the future at some point too)--there's a lot of cool non-D&D fantasy RPGs out there already. Some of them have been so-called "fantasy heartbreakers"--these are games that are pretty much the same as D&D except with a handful of often shallow topical features changed to "fix" them according to their creators. To a greater or lesser extent, these are collections of houserules to D&D. But the good ones are just plain good games in their own right. Many--maybe most--of them come with a setting implicit to the game, and in many cases, that's their main attraction. The various roleplaying games set in Middle-earth, for example (I.C.E.'s MERP or Decipher's Lord of the Rings game) are primarily focused around using the setting, and the rules are a lesser consideration--although that's not to say that they aren't optimized for the setting as it's envisioned by the authors. The Black Company or Thieves' World games by Green Ronin are also games of this nature--heck; they primarily use modified D&D rules via the OGL! Song of Ice and Fire, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying, Dragon Age, the upcoming Iron Kingdoms game and more are all--really--more about the setting than about the rules.

Other games have their fans, though, for the system. There's a fair bit that can be done in fantasy with systems like Savage Worlds, GURPS, BRP, True20, Unisystem, or FUDGE or any other number of systems, many of which have at least some measure of support for fantasy gaming. If you go back a bit, of course, there used to be many other systems, and some of them still have their fans even if they're out of print (one friend of mine is a big fan of Rolemaster, for example.)

For me personally, what turned me off from D&D wasn't so much the rules (although I've certainly got some issues with them) except where the rules informed the implicit setting of the game. D&D just didn't represent what fantasy was to me. There was little in D&D that looked familiar to me as a fan of the fantasy genre, once you scratched the surface and got past the shallow, superficial similarities. I didn't like the races, which unless you're doing a Tolkien rip-off or a D&D novel, are not common in the fantasy genre really. I didn't like the way magic worked, which stood apart from anything magical I'd ever seen before. I didn't like the migration in D&D to really best supporting a high fantasy environment, wITH black & white good and evil, and an assumption of heroism on the part of the protagonists. I didn't like the "zero to hero" aspect of leveling, where the game literally changed genres as your character advanced from low level to high level. And most of all, I didn't like the very concept of dungeons, or having anything to do with them. In other words, regardless of the rules--which I was more or less OK with except for some exceptions which were easy to deal with--it was the basic D&D experience that I wanted to change. What the whole game was about. The rules changes were just about supporting that change in implicit setting and implicit activities, not changes that I was so much making for their own sake.

Traditional fantasy... at its most traditional

It was really those implicit setting elements that most turned me off. And you probably know what I mean; the implicit details of the setting are strong enough that they overwhelm a lot of what you otherwise might try to do to differentiate. It's been said before by a lot of different people--Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms are really pretty much the same. Yeah, a few names are different, but who really cares? I'd add to that that even most other settings are basically the same too. Eberron actively tries to be different, but only manages baby-steps away from the same paradigm. Same for Iron Kingdoms too, until it abandoned D&D and went its own way (arguably, that's got a long way to go to break away from D&D too, but it's probably better to judge that after the new game comes out. The existing D&D setting is still very much a variation on the same D&D theme.) And the more the implicit setting changes, the more that forces some houserules to make the mechanics match the implicit setting, until you reach a point--somewhere--where you're not playing D&D anymore from either a mechanics standpoint or a play paradigm standpoint.

But the D&D rules aren't all bad, and there's a lot of benefits from using them as much as possible. One of them is the enormous amount of source material you can draw on if you do. Another is the familiarity with the system that your players are likely to have, making mechanics a fairly seamless issue in game. To me, those reasons were pretty huge--and I've got a lot of d20 material out there that I really wanted to use. So, to me, turning to Savage Worlds or Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying or whatever wasn't really an option. I wanted a game that was compatible enough with Third Edition D&D that I could use all the monster books, character options, magic and whatnot--all the rules elements that I have--just imported into a different playstyle. I started by gradually adding houserules. Eventually, I added a d20 Modern variant. I've gone back and forth between these two variants in terms of what I prefer repeatedly over the years. Currently, I'm leaning towards the d20 Modern again, and have for a long time. But the key issue is that d20 Modern is, for the most part, completely compatible and interchangeable with D&D for a lot of rules elements.

Part of the reason for that is that despite the rules similarities, the playstyle assumptions for d20 Modern already differ from that of D&D. I'm finding that mentally it's easier to get folks on the same page as me if the title of the game is a little different. Also, I'm finding that houseruling d20 Modern is a much less extensive affair than houseruling D&D. While in a few ways, the houseruled D&D might be closer to what I actually want, the cumbersomeness of the endeavor makes it much less optimal regardless.

As this series of articles progresses, I'll talk more and more about how I like to run the game, and how I like my settings to look and my play experience, and what I've done to faciliate them.

DMing Advice Online (New Tag)

2012-01-20T11:48:00.000-05:00

As part of a New Years's Gaming Resolution, if you will, I'm going to be somewhat reorganizing and revamping how I make posts here on this blog. I've always been a bit frustrated by my unfinished series of DungeonCraft articles--but let's be fair here; part of the reason I never finished them was because the originals are readily available online over at darkshire (see the links page) and I was starting to feel a little stifled by idea that I should rigidly follow an already developed format. This stifled feeling became more acute as I gradually started feeling that Chris Perkins' own DMing advice (again. see links page) was at least as good, despite not following a format, and despite topics coming up maybe a bit haphazardly or even randomly as he thought of them each week. I also found a third collection of DMing advice articles (again--links) which didn't follow that format, but which was fairly chock full of interesting ideas here and there.

Of course, all three of them--some to greater or lesser degrees--frustrate me because they are so focused specifically on D&D, and the play assumptions that are implicit in that game. That's not necessarily surprising, since I doubt they were ever meant to be anything other than that, and their audience as D&D players was pretty much exactly who they were hoping to reach. Plus, some of them were more concerned with giving survey type advice--i.e., here's a bunch of different ways something could be done, with only very light treatment on pros or cons for each.

For me, that's not really what I had in mind, and attempting to do that really killed my enthusiasm for my own DungeonCraft tag. So, I'm going to jettison it completely and do something different. I'm creating an all new tag, FRPG for Fantasy Roleplaying Games which will specifically focus on GMing advice--in terms of worldbuilding, running the game, and everything else--but not D&D. I'm not going to focus on any particular system either--in fact if I had anything like a long-term reader or something, it'd be obvious that I use a ruleset that's largely based on an existing D&D edition, just houseruled into a different feel. Talking about, among other things, the kinds of things that you can expect to do and have happen in a game that rejects the D&D paradigm of play and the D&D paradigm of setting design. I'm also not going to survey different ways of doing things, except in the vaguest ways possible. Although I've removed the tagline from my blog, I still claim to be the most opinionated guy on the Internet, after all. Instead, I'm going to focus on how I like to do things, why I like them, and how to make them work as best as I know how.

I also hope to have some regularity and discipline around my posts. My goal is to make two FRPG posts a week, and two DARK•HERITAGE setting related posts each week. Not saying I won't have other posts here and there as well, on other topics (or that I might now occasionally beat my goal on some weeks) but I'm setting that up as a minimum to keep my blogging more organized and more interesting to me and (hopefully) to readers. And that means that I need to get cracking--even if I count this introduction as an FRPG post, it's already Friday, and I'd like to start off right by getting two in this week!

Any questions? I've got a pretty long topic list already drawn up, but on the rare occasion that anyone would consider putting in a request for discussion, I'd be more than happy to accomodate.

Bara Gairo

2012-01-18T15:22:00.002-05:00

Biella Marçalez and her small sloop, The Crimson Eel, limped slowly and painfully up to the dock of the small village. While it was quiet, it clearly wasn't abandoned. She had seen several fishing boats in the harbor as she limped past them, their crews stopping their work momentarily to stare at her stone-faced as she waved and smiled wanly. A small elderly man, tough as old tree roots and nearly as sun-browned, with a sturdy short sword in a sheath at his waist stood at the dock as she pulled alongside. Without smiling, he took the thin hawser she tossed him and wrapped it deftly through a cat hole, then stood expectantly on the dock, blocking her progress until she spoke to him.

"Uh... hi," she said, stepping off the side of her sloop and jumping lightly to the dock two feet below. "I'm on my way to Porto Liure, but my ship is taking water and has a fairly nasty hole in the hull. Can I get it patched up here?" The old man nodded and grunted.

"Head to Lima's Spirits and ask for Gonzalez. He'll set you up, if you have some coin. But it's late; you'll probably spend a night or two in the village inn."

Biella frowned, looking at the faces of a few villagers passing through the narrow streets, who were trying to mind their own business, but were exhibiting obvious curiosity nonetheless. She thought she saw a familiar face... then she gasped. The face looking at her belonged to Silvio Verazzano. And the last time she saw him, they had been trying to kill each other. She had stumbled away from that encounter bleeding heavily, but sure that she left her mafioso opponent dead. Silvio slowly smiled as recognition dawned on his face. Biella turned briefly to the old man on the dock again. "And in what village do I have the pleasure of spending a night or two?"

The old man smiled slightly and gave a half-mocking small bow. "Welcome to Bara Gairo, milady."

Bara Gairo is a small farming town on the island of Cala Gairo, just a few miles to the northeast of Porto Liure. There's about half a dozen such small towns located near Porto Liure, and Bara Gairo is representative, in many ways, of what all of them are like.

The inhabitants of Bara Gairo are Liurans, mostly, but they live in a kind of self-imposed exile of sorts. While Gandesa--the island on which Porto Liure sits--is fairly large and contains a fair amount of arable land, Cala Gairo and its sister-villages provide much of the agrictulture that keeps Porto Liure fed; Gandesa by itself and the Liuran city-folk are incapable of doing so on their own.

There are about fifty homesteads on the island, and probably 350 or so people who live in Bara Gairo. Ten of the homesteads operate small fishing boats that plough the shoals near the town for fish and shellfish. These boats tend to be fairly old and somewhat rickety, although reasonably well maintained. They are slow and adequate for the two day long milk runs to Porto Liure required to sell their stock, as well as prowling the local waters for fish. At any given time, seven or eight will be in the area, while the others will be in Porto Liure or en route. Another thirty to thirty five homesteads are farmers who grow olives, peppers, figs, grapes, and other crops, or who tend sheep and goats for wool, milk and meat. The remaining families tend to gravitate towards other crafts--there's a blacksmith, an innkeeper, a couple carpenters, etc. The basics required to keep a rural town operating reasonably self-sufficiently.

Bara Gairo harbor

The population rarely grows or shrinks significantly. While plenty of children are born to the families in Bara Gairo, only a few of them will remain to take on their family's occupations, while the others will make their way to Porto Liure to find their fortune, apprentice to a craftsman of some kind, or take to sea on the crew of a merchant or pirate ship. Since many of the adults are retired old sea dogs, this is seen as not only acceptable, but even desireable. This also means that at any given time, a substantial portion of the population are veterans of some kind of combat experience. They keep themselves relatively well armed and trained, just to ensure that an eager or desperate pirate crew doesn't find them easy enough pickings to be tempting.

A number of the people in Bara Gairo can also be seen as retired or reserve members of the Castiadas crime family. Castiadas smugglers occasionally stop through the town, and Castiadas agents who find Porto Liure getting too hot temporarily occasionally hide out in Bara Gairo, living a quiet, unassuming life until it's safe to get back into town.

So, despite the fact that Bara Gairo is fairly sleepy and quiet, it's not completely cut-off or insular. About 20% of the time, there's a non-local boat in the harbor, usually a semi-regular visitor from Porto Liure, but sometimes other traders or sailors with different motives. And at any given time, probably 8-10 people will be in town who do not normally live there, two or three of which will be strangers; the rest of whom will be semi-regular. Lima's Spirits is the inn in town; the largest building, and place where the farmers, fisherfolk and strangers alike are likely to congretate in the evenings. And there's a small but cozy stone chapel maintained by Pare Haśteu, an Easterner with a strong accent despite having lived here now for decades.

Just outside of town, amongst the farms, is a run-down old stone building which has been sealed shut for years. Nobody lives there, but it's commonly believed to be haunted, and strange lights and sounds can occasionally be seen after dark. Local urban myth suggests that a sorcerer, looking for isolation, came to Bara Gairo years ago and somehow managed to curse the building, or was perhaps himself cursed to haunt it in some manner. In fact, the haunted Osini house has become locally famous, and is the subject of a number of urban myths in Porto Liure itself.

Bara Gairo is designed specifically to be the kind of relatively quiet and quaint starting place so many RPGs like to begin in, but unlike some of the other such examples of the genre, there should be a slightly sinister cast to it. Since many of the inhabitants are former gangsters or pirates, there are still ties to both coming through regularly--although quietly and discreetly, since it's also an important supply point for Porto Liure itself, and official notice can be brought to bear qiuckly if things look bad in town. Furtive strangers could therefore be smugglers, assassins, hiding crime bosses or cultists--or they could merely be Liurans looking to escape from the ragged urban lifestyle, if they can manage to get away. Some of them, in fact, are former residents who left as youths, but who return later, occasionally matured to unrecognizability, to see what has become of their former homes.

Aside from the village of Bara Gairo (and neighboring farms) itself, the island is rocky and steep, and covered with thick forest. While it's a small island, and therefore doesn't hold very much in the way of large game, but some small white tailed deer and javelinas do make their way through the brush, hunted by rare cougars and some feral dogs that have lived untamed on the island for generations. Occasional sightings of weirder things are reported, and in general, those of the village who like wandering the woods are looked at in askance; the villagers turn their faces towards the sea and away from the forest.

Deep in the interior, nestled amongst volcanic stones and hills, are the remnants of some past mysterious inhabitants--small stone cairns and carved standing stones, with brooding, weathered features and unreadable runes. Disquieting half-heard noises can be heard near them on occasion, and there are persistant rumors of villagers who have disappeared near these standing stones, never to be seen again.

Coming soon: More specific hooks for things to have happen in or near Bara Gairo, and some discussion on how a campaign could start there, where it could go from there, and which themes and tone elements it would best serve.

Rules of Three

2012-01-18T09:03:00.001-05:00

Three is an interesting number, and it comes up a lot in DARK•HERITAGE. Not necessarily by design, but by coincidence--and because it's just that kind of number.

The area mapped out more extensively is colloquially called the Land of the Three Empires, referring to the Terrasan Empire, the Qizmiri Caliphate, and the Baal Hamazi Empire. This is a bit of a misnomer, though--Qizmir isn't really an empire, and Baal Hamazi has been broken up into feuding city-states and squabble over the remnants of once Imperial dreams. Terrasa is also heading that same direction. Meanwhile, the Kurushat khaganate is reasonably well detailed, and is an increasingly important political player. However, I don't see Kurushat as really "central" to the action of the area like I do Qizmir, Terrasa and Baal Hamazi. Those three are really the main "protagonist" nations, if you will, of the setting.

While not necessarily mapping easily to those three empires, I see DARK•HERITAGE in terms of three main setting styles. This is in fairly crude terms, and obscures a fair amount of variation, but it still works for my purposes. By setting, I mean, in many ways, tone and feel of the game.

First, there's the mainland to the north. This is where the northern reaches of Terrasan territory gives way to wild, "Indian country"--tribesmen who are loosely inspired by the Huns, the Mongols, the Scythians, and yes, the Comanches, Sioux, Apaches, and other plains indians. The land is rugged, and greatly resembles much of the land that I myself love in the American west--the Red Rock territory of the Colorado plateau, the Sierra Nevada mountains, places I've hiked like Big Bend, and a bit of Great Basin plains country. Exotic and dangerous wildlife cribbed from the North American Pleistocene wanders the area, making it a land of adventure, much like the Victorians would have seen Africa. Dotting this feral country are the remnants of Baal Hamazi. No longer Imperial, there are some rich and civilized city-states, but the wildness in between them is more the defining factor than the severed links that once connected them. These are islands of relative calm; base-camps for exotic safaris, frontier fortresses besieged by savages.
Secondly, there's the coastline of the Mezzovian Sea itself. Although envisioned more as the Mediterranean than the Caribbean--in terms of climate and whatnot--the point of this setting is pirates. Wild strongholds like Sarabasca or Porto Liure are purposefully reminiscent of real-life pirate sanctuaries like Tripoli or Tortuga. While not as focused on exotic wildlife, this "part" of the setting is focused on dangerous people--a state of almost open warfare can exist between the merchant marines and pirates of various city-states, and the focus here is on swashbuckling action and rousing adventure. It's not just Spanish Main type piracy, though--especially as once moves eastward, the tenor of the pirates starts more and more to resemble the Pirate Round and the Barbary pirates--more exotic, more middle-eastern; semi-Ottoman in nature, heavily influenced by Qizmir.

The third main setting "type" I see for DARK•HERITAGE is the urban environments. While I mentioned the urban locales of Baal Hamazi, I see this as more specifically a Terrasan phenomena, and almost a setting within a setting all itself, while other urban environments I see more as stopping places--elements within their setting. Baal Hamazi, despite the fact that it has cities, I still see as "about" the wilderness which surrounds them, while Terrasan cities are about themselves. Reminiscent of Medieval/Rennaissance Italian or Spanish city-states like Genoa, Naples, Alghero, etc. they are decadent, dark--wretched hives of scum and villainy, to be sure. The dangers here are often political--intrigue, espionage, organized crime, dangerous underground cults, and well-hidden supernatural predators. The feel is both baroque and noir.

There are also three themes prevalent in DARK•HERITAGE--by which, I mean the main thrust and focus of a given campaign or story in broad terms. As with setting/tone, a campaign or story might have more than one of these, but probably not all three, at least not at the same time; although if interwoven carefully, that could be done as well.

Intrigue. Spies. Political fortunes. Failing empires. Questions of dynasty. Kingdoms waiting in the wings to snap up the leftovers of the aging Terrasans. Zealous patriots of the idea of Baal Hamazi hoping to spark a revolutionary renaissance of her culure and political power. Assassins. Shadowy guilds. Dark sorcerers or vampires who pull the strings from behind the scenes. This theme is basically the spy-thriller in a dark fantasy setting. Very different from the theme of a standard high fantasy, or even sword & sorcery story, this takes its cues more from John Le Carré, Frederick Forsyth, Robert Ludlum or even some of the earlier Clive Cussler.
Crime. Almost by default, all centers of urban congregation in DARK•HERITAGE become "wretched hives of scum and villainy." Warring thieves and racketeering guilds make up the majority of the action in a campaign or story based around this theme. It's The Godfather. The Usual Suspects. The Untouchables. Characters may either be involved with mafioso crime groups, or be dedicated to attempting to bring them to something like justice. Vigilanteism is also a great way to explore this theme. Like the Intrigue theme, this one requires a fair investment in the urban areas of the setting, but certainly not exclusively. Smuggling, and skullduggery on ships or caravans in the wilderness could (and should) play an important role in either of these themes.
Horror. This is, after all, fantasy. If all I wanted was intrigue and crime, I could easily have set DARK•HERITAGE up to merely be historical fiction. The supernatural is a strong element of this theme; in fact, the defining one. From nihilistic Cthulhu-esque cults, daemonologists and necromancers, ghouls hidden in the sewers, and supernatural predators hidden amongst us like vampires or werewolves, there are all kinds of supernatural threats with which to ravage the lives of the characters. It should be carefully done, however, to not be a typical D&D style action romp. Make sure that a DARK•HERITAGE game or story is scary and that the horror elements are more strongly rooted in the horror genre than the fantasy genre--despite the obvious notion that DARK•HERITAGE is a fantasy setting.

It's completely coincidental--yet oddly so--that there are three possible "approved" rulesets for running a DARK•HERITAGE game: house-ruled Pathfinder, house-ruled D&D 3.5, and house-ruled d20 Past. I imagine plenty of other rulesets--with or without houserules--would work well too, but I'm just not familiar enough with them at this stage to endorse them. Savage Worlds comes to mind as a likely one. No doubt a BRP or GURPS variant could do the trick. But, you're on your own with anything other than those three.

Races

2012-01-17T16:12:00.003-05:00

In a discussion the other day with some gamers about my setting, I mentioned the races of my campaign. Rather than describe them in detail, I handwaved them to "human, Neanderthal, tiefling, fire genasi, shifter and shadar-kai." Granted, this isn't exactly true. While the hamazin are definately conceptually the same as tieflings, and the jann are conceptually the same as fire genasi, etc., the shadar-kai is just based on shallow and coincidental resemblances. A more direct inspiration, conceptually, for them is the witches of Dathomir, from Star Wars. And frankly, Nightcrawler (from the X-men) is as important an influence on the hamazin and their look and character as D&D tieflings anyway.

But it brings to mind the notion that there really aren't that many truly innovative and new ideas under the sun, and that execution is really more important than innovation, I think. If you can present something in a way that makes it feel fresh and interesting, it doesn't matter that the idea is very similar to another one somewhere else out there.

It also brings to mind the notion of the "Hollywood pitch" and how great an idea it is. While describing something new, it's often very useful to boil it down to something else that it's similar to and use that to describe it. So, for example, while Eberron is certainly much more than this, it's helpful to describe it as "D&D meets Indiana Jones and The Maltese Falcon."

In other words, rather than making a point of highlighting how my Cannibal Isle inhabitants are different from shadar-kai--and they are, certainly, and have a completely different concept behind their initial genesis--it's often better to focus on the fact that, "hey, they really aren't all that different when it comes down to it." When I say that my hamazin are "tieflings that are like Nightcrawler meets Darth Maul", hey, that's a handy shorthand and someone can immediately identify with and run with.

You can focus on the differences later, when you're ready to dive into the details. First of all, though, a nice, easy to grasp capsule review--often in the form of a "Hollywood pitch" goes a long way towards describing how your setting, game, or any given element of it is supposed to be viewed, without boring any potential audience with long-winded details that they probably don't care about yet.

Reading List

2012-01-16T21:57:00.001-05:00

Every once in a while, I'll get questions about this mammoth reading list that I've mentioned, but which never have posted before. So, for the first time ever, I'm going to post the contents of the file on my PC called, Books I Own But Haven't Read.doc. This is, of course, a point in time document. Because I'm frequently distracted by library books, shows I'm watching or streaming, and just other things that are going on, I don't update this as frequently as I should, but about twice a month an update of some kind or another is due; either crossing a book off that I've just read, or adding a few books on that I just bought. (As an aside, I'm sitting on a $50 Barnes & Noble gift card right now and another $100 from Amazon, so I'll have a few additions soon.)

I've broken my list up into categories, which if nothing else, makes it easier for me to digest. The first (and presently smallest) category is gaming books. By this I don't mean gaming fiction; I mean actual gaming books.

Rokugan Campaign Setting
Complete Psionic

I expect a few soon to be made purchases of Paizo stuff will add to that list in a few weeks. I'm holding out for another release to order everything at once and get free shipping.

Next, game or tie-in fiction. Some of these I've picked up in odd ways; used book stores, or whatever, so there's often little rhyme or reason to what I have.

Predator: Big Game
Aliens vs. Predator: Hunter's Planet
Aliens: Rogue
Nagash the Sorcerer
Nagash the Unbroken
Nagash Immortal
Vampire Wars: the Von Carstein Trilogy
Master of Devils
Horus Rising
Doom of Kings
Word of Traitors
Tyranny of Ghosts
The Temple of the Yellow Skull
Oath of Vigilance

If you're very clued in, you'll see that I have a few incomplete series there, which means that--assuming that they're not terrible--I've got a few additions to buy to complete them.

Next, the controversial section of my list--books that I've read before, but not since I've bought the copy that I own now. Curiously, this includes the book(s) that I've read most--the Lord of the Rings, since I retired my broken and worn old copies a couple of years ago and took possession of a "like new" set from my brother, who didn't want them anymore.

Transit to Scorpio
Fellowship of the Ring
The Two Towers
The Return of the King
Unfinished Tales
Dracula
Ill-Met in Lankmar
Small Favor
Turn Coat
Changes
Return of the Black Company
The Many Deaths of the Black Company
Scar Night

Next, I have books that I legitimately haven't ever read before, and which clearly belong to the science fiction (or more specifically--usually--fantasy) genre. However, this does include my Lovecraft collections, which is a little disingenuous, since I've read most of the stories individually in other formats. But not 100% of them, so I consider the entire book "unread" for purposes of this list.

Iron Angel
God of Clocks
The Stepsister Scheme
Lords of Destruction
Tooth & Claw
The Lies of Locke Lamora
Kull: Exile of Atlantis
Savage Tales of Solomon Kane
Looking Glass Wars
Cthulhu's Reign
Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos
Dreams of Terror and Death
The Road to Madness
The Best of H.P. Lovecraft
The Horror in the Museum
Year's Best SF 10
Empress
Way of Shadows
Mistborn
Winterbirth

You may also notice that I have the first book of a few larger series on that list. Pending approval (i.e., I like the first book sufficiently) that list will eventually need books two and three (or whatever numbers they happen to be) added to the list.

The next small set of books are some that I got for free at work, usually from some coworker who was done with them, and which are kinda sorta genre-related; although I suspect that some of them will turn out to be more supernatural romance oriented than I hope (and if so, I may not finish them all.)

Search the Shadows
Wait For What Will Come
Those Who Hunt the Night
The Love Talker
Sons of the Wolf
Dark Tower III: Wasteland
Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass

I've read the first Dark Tower book (and not particularly liked it) and naturally, I won't read books III and IV without picking up II somewhere. Those are pretty iffy; again, given that I didn't really like the first one. But for now, I've got them, so I have to list them.

Next, I've got some non-genre books that I came across from various sources; usually given to me by someone or other. These tend to mostly be mainstream thriller type books.

1st to Die
Certain Prey
State of Fear
The Eye of the Tiger
Lost Light
London Bridges

And my final category are some free Kindle books that I have, which belong to the Lost Tribe of the Sith tie-in series. Clearly, they are Star Wars themed books. All of them have The Lost Tribe of the Sith as part of the title, but since it's repetitive, I'll omit it from the list, and just have the portion of the title that comes after the colon. Because they are fairly short, I'll probably actually read them all, even if they're not very good. Which, as free promotional short novels, I don't really expect them to be.

Precipice
Skyborn
Paragon
Savior
Purgatory
Sentinel

There you have it. My list--as of right now. Within a week or two, it'll probably change. And frankly, it'll probably have more additions before it has any deletions, I'm somewhat sad to say. And another comment; you may also notice that there's more than a few omnibus type collections in there, so in a way, the list is somewhat understated by at least six titles.

The Gates of Madness

2012-01-16T14:04:00.000-05:00

James Wyatt's The Gates of Madness is a novella that was originally published in five parts in five different books, in a rather clumsy attempt to build suspense for the then-upcoming Abyssal Plague series. Of course, I say then upcoming, but the series isn't really done; sometime this March or April, the third and final volume of the Abyssal Plague proper will be released, and I'll start on it for real. Meanwhile, I've read the first prologue novel, The Mark of Nerath which was only tangentially connected, and now the novella prologue, which was much more directly related. I'm also reading the other POL novel, The Seal of Karga Kul, but I'm not sure if there's any connection there at all or not yet. I'm reading it anyway; it's only about 300 pages, and it's better so far (I'm about 25% through it right now) than The Mark of Nerath was, at least.

Gates is interesting. It's too short to really have a well developed plot or characters, it also has too many characters to spend too much time developing any of them. Regardless, at least two or three of the characters seem to be reasonably sympathetic and relateable. Like many D&D novels, it relies on familiarity with the implied setting of the game and the game mechanics, spending little to no effort giving any background on what's going on. Like many of them, the mechanics of the game tend to be painfully obvious in combat scenes, which make them decidedly non-cinematic or thrilling. But given the shorter nature of this piece, those shortcuts might actually have been a benefit, because it allowed James Wyatt to do a little bit more than he otherwise would have in setting the scene for the upcoming series. Anyway, it's also such a tiny little document to read that it's hard not to recommend that any D&D fan go check the link above out and download an ebook or pdf version of it to go try it out. It's not a great novella, but it's reasonably good enough to properly set the stage and make me feel some genuine impatience for the last book to come out so I can go ahead and read the series.

I'm fairly certain that it'll be disappointing still--what D&D series hasn't been?--but with Don Bassingthwaite doing two of the three volumes, maybe he'll pull it off. He does seem to be one of the better authors who regularly contributes to D&D novels. And I am still somewhat interested in seeing where this POL setting goes, if anywhere.

I'm also tempted, now that they seem to have stopped, to get into the Eberron novels. There's another setting where, although it's a bit late to say that I'd be getting in on the ground floor, it's also not nearly as overwhelming as Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance would be. There's a rather limited amount of novels, they seem to have come to an end, and the setting is more to my taste than Dragonlance or Forgotten Realms anyway. And I've read a few of them, and have a few more in my queue of owned but not yet read books anyway.

Of course, I've also got a lot of other books in that queue, and frankly, they'll probably be better than the Eberron novels in general. But still; I find myself over and over again drawn back into the world of D&D fiction, hoping to find that it's better than the last time I looked. As I said before recently; hope springs eternal. And I end up reading just enough books that are just good enough that I think maybe they can be at least as good as regular fantasy fiction that's completely untied to anything else.

It just seems like it isn't. At least not regularly.

Recent history

2012-01-12T15:28:00.000-05:00

I finished Bill Slaviscek's The Mark of Nerath last night, after a crazy evening of running around town with all the kids. As I predicted, the "POL" setting novels got off to a bit of a rocky start. This novel really is not very good. It's greatest failing is that Slaviscek, as a gamer, couldn't find a voice that didn't sound like a nerdy gamer describing his last campaign. From off-hand references to D&D mechanics and esoterica littered throughout the book, to extremely cheesy dialogue, unlikely and forgettable characters, a rather dubious plot, and a general lack of tension or excitement, despite Slaviscek's attempt to throw disposible combat at the characters right and left, the book just didn't deliver a great experience.

Part of the problem no doubt is the cast of characters. For a novel that clocks in at just under 300 pages, a 7-8 group "adventuring party" who is supposed to be made up of interesting characters with their own backstories and personality is a tall order. To be honest, Slaviscek makes very little attempt at it, and just barrels along with the plot. The most interesting aspects of it, however, are the parts that are lead-ins to the upcoming Abyssal Plague trilogy (also the main reason that I'm reading it)--the rather limp Luke Skywalker esque character of Falon, or the wooden performances of characters like Shara or Uldane (I realize I'm just dropping names that you won't recognize--but the point is, at the end of the novel, I'm not entirely sure that the names meant much to me either) they were mostly just completely forgettable.

That said, the novel wasn't completely terrible. I've read worse. The Crimson Talisman was worse. Wizard's First Rule was worse. And heck, it was mercifully kinda short, too. And it had a pretty cool WAR cover. I'm not entirely sure if that was the best part of the novel or not, but it certainly helped. And unlike the covers in the War-Torn series that I read earlier, I actually recognized the scene in the cover art as a scene from the book.

One curious thing that the POL setting, as presented by this book, is that it refers to stuff that happens in not terribly distant history. Now, I've only been poking around with history in DARK•HERITAGE, and very little of it has been recent with the exception of the Pirate's War in which Porto Liure won independence for itself. I've got my Baal Hamazi, which is rather transparently my version of POL's Bael Turath--but that's all happened a hundred years ago or more, with the exception of recent events. It occurs to me that I can make a much richer environment, one fraught with potential intrigue, if I have a few recently concluded episodes of skullduggery and intrigue with fallout still ready to happen. Some frail dynastic events that are recently concluded, some recent revolts, riots, religious pogroms, or whatever, all make for a more rich environment.

And looking at real history, dramatic stuff often happens much faster than fantasy would have it, which stretches things out to unreasonable lengths. Think about it--the U.S. as a country has only been around for a little over 200 years (you can vary that amount by a bit depending on whether you start with the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the actual conclusion of the Revolutionary War in 1783, the Ratification of the Articles of Confederation in 1781, or if you want to be a real stickler, the victory over the British in the "Second War of Independence" in 1815.) In a fantasy setting, 200 years doesn't feel like anything, when dynasties and empires and kingdoms tend to last for thousands of years (for some reason.) Yet for us, the founding of America and the characters who walked that stage are almost as much legendary as they are historical in the popular consciousness. There's no reason to overcompress your setting's time frame, but there's also no reason to overly stretch it out.

Legend of the Seeker

2012-01-11T11:07:00.001-05:00

Ever since I decided to post a "10 most recently watched" sidebar--which I may decide is best to do away with--I've been struggling with how to handle TV shows. I watch very little on actual TV (although I do have a DVR full of stuff I've recorded from this past season) but I watch a lot of stuff via Netflix--streaming episodes if I can get them, and DVDs if not. In fact, the majority of what I'm watching are episodes of shows that I missed the first time around but still wanted to see, so I'm catching now from Netflix. How do I capture that?

I've been putting discs up as I watch them, the same as if they were movies. So, if I watch Chuck Season 2 Disc 3 (which I most recently did) then I'll put that up. But, I've also been streaming shows. I've restarted Roswell, with my kids even, thinking that they might enjoy watching that with me, and I've also started watching Legend of the Seeker. Do I just put up the each episode as I watch it? Does it even matter? Should I even be showing what I most recently watched? Does anyone even care? And if not, (which I'm sure is the case) why am I messing with it if even I find it to be more trouble than it's worth? Hence, my prediction that I'll decide within a few days to probably take it down completely if I can't come up with a better alternative.

Meanwhile, though, I've been watching Legend of the Seeker. Mostly I'm watching this because there's not a lot of traditional fantasy to watch, really. The Legend of the Seeker is more or less based on the Sword of Truth series of books by Terry Goodkind; the first season in particular is loosely based on the first novel, Wizard's First Rule. I actually owned that book at one time; I bought it at firesale pricing from Waldenbooks in the mall once, because the publishers had the idea that if they could give you a super cheap copy of the first book, that you'd then go on to buy the subsequent books in the series at full price.

Frankly, it's one of the worst books I've ever read. The dialogue and characters, plots and situations, and the entire setting and everything about it was purile, ridiculous, cheesy, cliched, sophomoric, and frankly, even frequently offensive. So why in the world am I watching a show based on it?

To be honest with you, I'm not quite sure. I'm vaguely hoping that the show will be better than the books, and like I said, the fact that there's so little fantasy in TV and movies makes me want to like it, even if I suspect that I won't.

That said, I've got a rule about new shows--I give them six episodes before I give up. Lots of shows take a few episodes to find their feet, but if by six they're still not any good, then the chances of them turning that around later are pretty low. So far, I've only seen two. So far it's not terrible, but it's also not good. We'll see where it goes from there.

Ve

2012-01-10T09:01:00.003-05:00

I'm not normally at the forefront of this kind of news, but because I have the Wizards columns on RSS feed on the side there (I was actually only trying to get the DM Experience column, but I never mucked around with the feed to figure out if I could filter it as such) I saw the announcement less than two hours after it went public. That's pretty good for me.

I'm referring, of course, to the announcement by Wizards of the Coast that they are officially working on the fifth edition of D&D. I made a quick reference to it in the comments section of my last post, but otherwise spent more time reading what I could on the announcement and a few gamer blogs rather than adding my own input to the mix. Of course now, nearly 24 hours later, I can't resist.

First, the obligatory "how interested am I in this announcement?" I'm not sure. While the design direction certainly sounds more appealing than early previews of 4e did, at the same time, I'm really not in the market for another system, as I've said many times before. I've been fairly heavily invested in the d20 system--various iterations, which have contributed to my heavily house-ruled preferred variant--and I don't feel like my investment is amortized. Certainly I'll pay attention to the game as it nears release, but I don't--at least at the moment--have any plans to actually pick it up.

Second, the timing. 4e has only been out since June 2008--so about three and a half years. That's an absurdly short product life cycle given the history of editions in this game, and it strongly suggests that 4e "failed" in some way for WotC to consider replacing it so soon. This isn't also hard to imagine given that the player base has become increasingly splintered, and Pathfinder--which is basically a minor revision to the last edition of D&D--seems to be knocking huge holes in D&D's sales. Add to that the noise of the OSR blogosphere (regardless of whether or not that's actually a large number of gamers, they do manage to make a lot of noise), the failure of the GSL to attract and sustain very intensive third party involvement, and the dissapointment in general of a large number of fans who felt alienated by the design principles of 4e, and it's not hard to think of it as a failure, despite the large number of fans who clearly quite liked it too.

Of course, it is possible (although I believe it to be unlikely) that it's not considered a failure by WotC management at all, and because of Hasbro's strategy of continually pushing for more profits, that we'll always see new editions coming out after this short of a window from now on, regardless of how successful any edition is or isn't.

Huh. Although I recently swore off ENWorld again, I'm tempted to make a small reappearance to broach that particular topic and see what comes of it, if anything.

D&D Ages

2012-01-09T12:00:00.000-05:00

Although it's quite old now, this post from James Maliszewski's blog Grognardia makes an attempt to categorize D&D into "ages" and James' attempt is strongly rooted in Hesiod's own Ages of Mankind, i.e., it posits a past Golden age followed by years of gradual decline, punctuated by events or developments that can be seen as significant enough changes to mark the boundaries of each age.

Of course, his perspective comes as a person who's enamored with the older versions of D&D and the "primary sources" that informed it, and he approaches those conventions and tropes with nearly religious fervor, seeing any deviations from them as heresies to be strictly avoided. That doesn't match my own experience with the game at all, nor--do I imagine--is it really a sufficiently common viewpoint that his ages will ever mean anything outside of the relatively narrow OSR community.

A guy in the comments section, on the other hand, takes a stab at constructing an alternative loosely based on the ages of archeology. I like this one better, as it posits, at least in broad strokes, a generally progressive history of the game. Neither one really maps perfectly to D&D, but I believe the archeological model is at least a better starting place than Hesiod (which was also mimicked by comic book fandom, which many gamers also belong to.) But unlike in the archeological model, I don't see a progression of uninterrupted progress; there is a decadant Dark Age period as well.

Anyway, rather than merely critique Mr. Malizsewski's model, I'll offer up my own alternative to it; one that, like his, is firmly rooted in the personal taste and subjective quirks of its author, but one which I think is more broadly applicable outside of the OSR.

1. The Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age (1974-1977) Comprising the period during which OD&D was published up until AD&D and BD&D were published in 1977. During this age, the rules were often ad hoc, made with little reference to other rules, arbitrary, and generally insufficient (in fact, they occasionally made reference to competitive products, assuming players would be familiar with and own them) and assumed a wargaming advent into the hobby. With very little direction and insufficient rules, gamemasters, or referees as they were often still called at this stage, had to do an awful lot of interpretation to cover missing spots, and there was little in the way of tools to support them.

2. The Neolithic, or New Stone Age (1977-1984) As with the archeological age, the Neolithic is characterized by a "revolution" in technological competence; the OD&D game, while not officiall retired right away, was largely replaced by two differing lines during this age, the game eventually known as AD&D and the game that later came to be called BD&D and its eventual successor, the Rules Cyclopedia. This is also the period of D&D's greatest mainstream popularity, including a cartoon series and a toyline, and the presence of the rulebooks in department store catalogs and shelves. While the game still had a lot of arbitrariness and is still pretty clunky and counter-intuitive in many instances, conditions inherited from its predesessor, both AD&D and BD&D made a concerted effort to better organize, write, and present the rules of the game, adding rules to cover more circumstances and otherwise making a game that ran relatively well compared to what came before.

3. The Bronze Age, (1985-1991) Shortly after the publication of the mixed reviews book Unearthed Arcana, Gary Gygax was finally completely ousted by the Blumes and D&D went into the custodianship of other hands than its creator. One of the changes that came about around this same time--perhaps able to be ushered in with the departure of Gygax--was the advent of Dragonlance, and the fallout of that hugely successful enterprise. The first Dragonlance novel was actually published in very late 1984. It wasn't the first novel associated with the D&D game, but none before then had really been very successful, and TSR were initially sceptical, ordering the minimum print run (50,000) and wishing they could have gone even lower. As it turned out, the Dragonlance novels were immensely popular, and paved the way for TSR (and later WotC) becoming one of the most prolific and well-known publishers of fantasy literature. A few months before the novel came out, however, the first Dragonlance module came out. Following on the heels of another huge successful Tracey Hickman module, Castle Ravenloft, this is perhaps more important for its impact on the game itself--the realization that a large portion of the audience wanted some setting and some story and interesting characters to their D&D, and the days of modules that were just random encounters with disposible characters and monsters in nonsensical dungeons was truly over. This focus on story continued well into the next age (and beyond--it's still a potent force in the industry).

4. The Dark Age, (1992-1999) By this time, AD&D had had another edition published, and the BD&D line was consolidated into the Rules Cyclopedia but those changes in the rules were not as important as three other changes that happened during the "Dark Age" that profoundly impacted D&D. The first was the mismanagement of the company financially by its owners. A number of really bizarre products were offered and flopped (Dragonlance was moved to a new system not D&D, for instance--failed card games and dice games also proliferated) and a general perception that TSR was putting out a number of shoddy products quickly to attempt to shore up bleeding balance sheets was widespread. When this got to its worst point, TSR, completely unable to continue paying its bills, essentially shut down completely and the product pipeline, flawed though it was, was shut off entirely until Wizards of the Coast came and acquired them, paid off their debts, and rationalized their continued product line, as well as starting development for a brand new edition that would make a much cleaner break with the past than the prior one had (more on that next age.) Besides on the business side of the house, however, two other important things happened to D&D. 1992 was--more or less--the beginning of a number of years in which TSR put out campaign setting after campaign setting. While this is frequently cited as a "bad thing" from a business perspective, at the same time, this is also seen as a Golden Age for setting aficionados, of which there are a lot amongst gamers, and many of these settings are remembered quite fondly. The third thing that happened to D&D was external--in 1991, White Wolf published the first of its Storytelling line of RPGs: Vampire: The Masquerade which, for pretty much the first time ever, was seen as a serious and significant competitor to D&D. This had a side effect of bringing a bunch of new players into the hobby, as well as a whole new conversation about how games should or could at least be played.

5. The Iron Age, (2000-2007) With the release of Third Edition Dungeons & Dragons (and the final collapse of the AD&D and D&D split) we get ushered into the Iron Age, an age of technological advancement unheard of in D&D itself, at least, for a long time. Not so much because of third edition itself (although as a cleaned up and rationalized bit of game design, it finally removed a lot of the arbitrariness and weirdness that had plagued the rules up to this point) but because of the Open Gaming License, or OGL. See, Peter Adkinson, Ryan Dancey and the others from Wizards who bought TSR did it specifically to rescue D&D because of the terrible mismanagement it had suffered during the Dark Age and the risk that it was going to--literally--disappear: be locked up in bankruptcy court and out of print indefinately. Since saving D&D was one of the primary decisions of the Wizards management--who did it as fans of the game, not necessarily as businesspeople (although making the business profitable was certainly a high priority goal), they wanted to come up with a way to protect D&D--give it to the fans forever--so it could never be mismanaged to the point where it was foreseeable that the game itself would disappear. The OGL was the vehicle that accomplished that; by putting most of the rules into an open, nontransferable and nonrevokable license so that anyone could use it, the third edition of D&D was immediately insulated from any decisions that the owners of the game could ever do to it. A remarkable (although not unforeseen) side effect was that a lot of great stuff was issued by third party publishers, greatly enriching the game beyond what it ever could have been able to do even at the height of the "Neolithic Age" when it was at its peak popularity, or even during the decadent product glut of the Dark Age. Of course, a few things happened during this Iron Age which were not foreseen. The most important one was that WotC was sold by its owners to Hasbro. This was primarily to bail the principles of WotC out of personal debt. It was also widely believed, and the WotC management had been led to believe as much from the Hasbro guys, that since WotC was more profitable than Hasbro, that it would continue to operate as it had, and that in fact the WotC management might be groomed for bigger positions within Hasbro to restructure that organization to match the WotC one. This ended up not being the case, and D&D shortly started showing the effects of Hasbro management, including a production schedule that was more focused on short term profits than long term health. Another unforeseen--or at least not committed in writing by anyone that I ever saw--circumstance was that third party publishers gradually stopped issuing very much stuff that supported the OGL, and instead used the OGL to create their own variations on the rules which were no longer compatible with the main game and therefore competed with it rather than supported it.

6. The Splintered Age, (2008-Present) Finally, in 2007 Wizards announced that the third edition (and it's revision, 3.5) had run their course and an all new design from the ground up called Fourth Edition (4e) was going to be coming out in 2008. Furthermore, it gradually came to be apparent that Wizards was not going to support the game with the OGL, but rather with a much more restrictive GSL that was not popular with the remaining significant third party publishers. The new edition came out, and sure enough, it only superficially resembled D&D that came before, which greatly divided the fanbase. In the Splintered Age, D&D was less defined as "the game that bears the brand name of Dungeons & Dragons" and is rather a state of mind that can be applied to several games. The important ones, aside from 4e, include Pathfinder, published by big time third party publisher Paizo, which takes the old OGL and updates and fixes some percieved problems with it. Pathfinder, while not bearing the D&D name, is seen by many fans as a more direct and "legitimate" heir to the D&D legacy than D&D 4e, and although sales numbers are notoriously hard to pin down, common wisdom and some circumstantial evidence suggests that Pathfinder sells in numbers comparable to D&D itself. In addition to Pathfinder, out of print 3.5 games appear to still be fairly commonplace, and on the used market, demand (and therefore price) for 3.5 books remains high. I know my group still plays as such. The third significant alternative is the OSR--or old school rennaissance, which sprung up independently from--although at about the same time as--the announcement of 4e. The big enabler of the OSR was the release of OSRIC--a fan creation that used the OGL to "back-engineer" a document that was compatible with 1e AD&D. When it was seen that this was going to pass any potential legal challenges hurled at it, the floodgates opened, and a whole movement--a do-it-yourself movement with a lot of small heads--sprang up around playing D&D using "retroclones" like OSRIC, including Labyrinth Lord, Sword & Wizardry and others, or using OGL compatible games that hybridized old school versions of D&D with some more modern innovations in game design, like Castles & Crusades and others.

This is where we are today, and although rumors of a 5th edition of D&D being in the works are fairly fast and furious and circumstantially supportable, and not denied by WotC, it seems unlikely that the splintering that occured within D&D will be undone anytime soon--the OSR crowd in particular pays little attention to what's going on at WotC, and the Pathfinder crowd is made up in large part of people who actively rejected 4e and WotC completely and may be very unwilling to give them another look.

New WAR artbook announced

2012-01-06T14:20:00.002-05:00

I've found Wayne Anthony Reynolds (WAR) a thoroughly polite and delightful man on the very scant occasions that I've had to communicate with him (an email or two, chatting for just a moment at his table at GenCon a few years ago.) In addition to being modest and friendly, he's also one of the most prolific artists in the roleplaying community these days, and he's kinda evolved into becoming the face of post Second Edition D&D and D&D like games, with art that is very prevalent throughout the entire D&D product line, especially the Eberron campaign setting, the Freeport line, the Pathfinder line, and more besides (he's also done work for Black Library--I've got some interesting skaven plates in my Loathsome Ratmen book.) And as the face of post 2e D&D... well, he's a kind of polarizing figure. While there's no denying that his work is quite popular, it's also miffed a lot of folks who prefer a more traditionalist approach to their D&D art.

I happen to be one of the folks who quite likes WAR pieces, and I've grabbed plenty of books before for no other reason than because they have WAR covers, quite honestly. Last time I emailed him, which was over a year ago now, he mentioned that he was in talks with some folks about coming out with an artbook of his art, which would be nice because his website isn't updated very frequently anymore, he's also started putting much more low resolution versions of the pictures that it does have, and in general, I see a lot of his work on books that I can't find a decent online version of for my art files anymore.

Luckily, that wasn't just idle talk: I just saw this announcement literally today (although it's probably been around for some time and I just missed it.) Anyway, I'm quite excited!

http://paizo.com/products/btpy8qac?Visions-of-WAR-The-Art-of-Wayne-Reynolds-Hardcover

D&D Fiction

2012-01-06T11:48:00.002-05:00

If you've looked at my "What I'm Reading" thingamajiggies over there on the side, you'll have noticed two D&D fiction pieces. You may also think, based on my past reviews of D&D fiction [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] that I'd be an unlikely candidate to be reading these--even my good reviews tend to be quite guarded. Ah, but therein lies the story. Let me explain.

First off, I really would like for gaming related fiction to be good. Despite many poor experiences in the past, I continue to hope for an entertaining read, and I do occasionally find one. The Paul S. Kemp books weren't terrible, and neither were two of the three Eberron novels that I read and reviewed above. I've had decent experiences with David Gross Pathfinder fiction recently, and I've had pretty good experiences with Black Library Warhammer and Warhammer 40k fiction as well. So, I guess, in spite of the many bad gaming fiction novels I've read over the years, hope springs eternal, and a few decently good ones are just good enough to encourage that perhaps foolish and vain hope.

That, and, I'm a sucker for a punchy piece of cover art. I originally got into the War-Torn series, links to reviews above, because of the Wayne Reynolds cover art. I got suckered into buying a couple of books at the book store recently for the same reason; the first two books of the Abyssal Plague series, which feature Wayne Reynolds cover art. They also feature names known for pretty good work--Don Bassingthwaite and James Wyatt--so I was hopeful. There's a third book (also by Bassingthwaite, I believe) due out in a few months, so I hadn't picked them up to read yet, but I was a little bit dismayed to find that there are preludes to them out there.

However... I was able to get both the novels that are part of the lead-up via Interlibrary loan, and the prologue novella is available as a free download (ebook and pdf). My Gates of Madness link to the side there is a link; after I take that down, you'll be on your own. Sadly, the names on the prelude novels are not know for their writing of great D&D novels; in fact, I don't know that they ever have done so. Bill Slaviscek is at least well known for his work as a game designer, but of course, that doesn't necessarily make him a good fiction writer.

However, one other thing attracted me to the concept--it's written in the unnamed "Points of Light" setting that is the default 4e setting, and which has started to develop enough cohesiveness to actually be a setting at this point. At first it was at best a micro-setting--the Nentir Vale area, plus some vague handwavey details about the world(s) beyond--but as more and more game material has been published, that's evolved. There's still not a setting bible (at least not in print; hopefully WotC have one behind the scenes) but there's quite a few details now. And these are the first novels for this new setting, so it's kinda fun to feel like I'm getting in at the ground floor on a new venture. Even if it has a rocky launch--and I'll be pleasantly suprised if it doesn't--then that's still kinda a fun thing in it's own right anyway.

Anyway, there's the story. I'm going to read the two prelude novels while I have them from Interlibrary Loan, and I'll probably read the prelude novella too, just because it's quick and easy and short. I probably won't read the main series, at least until the third book is out and I've bought a copy. So after these three prelude stories are done, I'll step away from tie-in fiction and read some "normal" fiction instead. In fact, I'm even contemplating stepping away from fantasy altogether and reading some James Patterson thrillers--I've got three or four on my bookshelf--and I've always been a fan of the notion of stepping outside of your genre and dabbling in others from time to time.

Post Holidays roundup

2012-01-03T14:39:00.001-05:00

Today was my first day back at work since December 23rd--not a particularly happy occasion. However, I've got a handful of minor updates and heads-up to pass along. Most of these are of no interest to anyone but myself, but since I use my blog as much as a rambly journal for my own enjoyment later as for any potential readers who may stumble upon it, that's OK.

First, I blogged in the past about Chris Perkins' column at Wizards website, which features every Thursday, and has since... February, I think, so nearly a year now. Whether or not you took me up on my suggestion to go try and find the column, you might be interested in knowing that for last Thursday, the 29th of December, rather than posting a new colum, the update was a 107 page pdf compilation, with new layout for the pdf format (although curiously in a landscape rather than portrain layout) of all of the columns of 2011... which is all of them that exist so far. Since it's free, it's reasonably interesting and entertaining to read on a regular basis, and it's probably the best column in RPGiana going right now in terms of giving GM advice (I'm not sure if I like it better than Ray Winninger's classic run on Dungeoncraft or not yet) it's a bargain. Go check it out! http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4dmxp/20111229

Secondly, I've made some pretty good progress on some of my books since ditching the Ancient Blades trilogy that I was reading, but probably not much that warrants a full report. Part of the reason I've made good progress was because I decided to make some headway on the 6 titles that I had in gaming books. But that's a bit of a misnomer, right? Four of the six titles actually weren't "books" they were issues of No Quarter magazine that I'd picked up but not yet read. Of the first... 22 or so issues of No Quarter, I have all but three or four, and then I have a more recent one, #37 as well. No Quarter, for the uninitiated, is like the White Dwarf magazine for Privateer Press. The early issues focus on the games of Warmachine, Hordes, and the Iron Kingdoms D&D setting, and actually featured quite a bit of RPG content... one of the main reasons I started getting the magazines (the other reason being the art. Well, and I also hadn't completely decided that I wasn't interested in miniatures yet at that point. I still appreciate a well-painted mini from time to time, even if I'm very unlikely to pick anymore up again.) And for that matter, even when it wasn't printing RPG stuff specifically, there was a lot of setting stuff that could easily be adapted to the RPG. And, for the heckuvit, it had RPG stats for a lot of the warjacks and whatnot that appear in Warmachine (most of the Hordes warbeasts were in Monsternomicon vol. 2 already, with a few exceptions.) The issues I read were 19, 20, 22, and I believe 37. The earlier ones still had some RPG content in it, including an alternate base class (the combat alchemist), stats for a warjack or two, some equipment and feat stuff here and there, and several encounters--mini-modules, if you will, although those required the Monsternomicon books to be used. Not a problem; I have them both. I found, though, that I was skimming the painting, terrain building, and wargame strategy and tactics articles. By the time we got to the more recent one, the RPG stuff was completely gone. Iron Kingdoms as a D&D setting is dead except in the games of those who still play it. Word on the street, which I've mentioned here before, is that a new book is on the horizon which will introduce the setitng anew with a house system that is more compatible with the wargames. Whether or not this is a good thing or a bad thing is debateble, I think, but at the very least I'll probably pick it up for the artwork.

Curiously, this means that No Quarter kinda paralleled the development of White Dwarf in many ways. White Dwarf used to be a gamer hobbyist mag for Brits that focused on a lot of different games. I have one reasonably old issue (#100, to be exact) which still features modules and ads from a variety of different companies and games, although its evolution into just being a house arm for Warhammer, 40k and Citadel miniatures was well on its way. Most of my heavy exposure to White Dwarf comes after it lost its earlier diversity. No Quarter always was a Privateer Press house arm, but its focus was more diverse.

Cryx, the biggest villains in the Iron Kingdoms setting

I'm curious about Privateer Press as well. Originally founded by Brian Snoddy, Matt Wilson and Matt Staroscik, with an early bringing in of Mike McVey, it's really just Wilson's company now--and I wonder if the focus on the miniatures games just wasn't the cuppa for Snoddy and some of the others. Just speculation on my part, but you've got to wonder. The setting has also evolved since those earlier days... a lot of the grittier dark fantasy elements have given way to ZOMG fantasy warfare, and the elements of it that used to be more traditional fantasy have been de-emphasized to focus on an almost fantasy WWI like vibe. A lot of the changes to the setting (consolidation of a number of threats into fewer "factions", state of more or less open warfare between two superpower nations in the setting, etc.) also limit possibilities for the roleplaying game, in many ways, while opening them up for the miniatures game. Clearly, Wilson knows where the money is, as he's presumably making quite a bit of it, given the success of his games. Warmachine is second only to Warhammer 40k in the fantasy miniatures wargaming market, and Hordes comes not far behind, just behind Warhammer. Privateer Press have made a great run at challenging the market leadership of Games Workshop and making themselves a big, 800-lbs gorilla in the market. With the upcoming release of the Warmachine video game, they're really pushing themselves into the big time.

Sadly for me, however, I think that means my interest in No Quarter has waned to the point where it won't revive. I'm not that interested in the wargames or minis anymore and with the lack of RPG content, the magazine doesn't really offer me anything I don't already have. What I really would like to do, however, is find a way to better utilize the RPG Iron Kingdoms material I do have. While I will never actually run the Iron Kingdoms as is, I liberally steal from the setting, and there are a lot of great ideas that could make an appearance in a DARK•HERITAGE game here and there.

And finally, I stumbled across this article recently: history's most under-rated mysteries. Fascinating stuff. Check it out: http://www.livescience.com/11361-history-overlooked-mysteries.html

Dominion

2011-12-29T01:33:00.005-05:00

Earlier this holiday, I finished David Chandler's A Thief in the Night. Although the final book of the Ancient Blades trilogy, Honor Among Thieves came in to me from the library, quite frankly, by the time I managed to finish book 2, I was done with the trilogy. I might possibly return to it and finish the last volume at some point, but I doubt it. Frankly, I just wasn't enjoying the series. The second book had many of the flaws of the first--wooden and unlikable characters who seemed more like caricatures than characters, a weak plot supported by dubious coincidences, a ham-fisted wink and nudge towards some genre conventions, appalling attempts at comedy by using gratuitous crudity and coarseness and even more ham-fisted attempts to cram crude social metaphors into the text as well. And to make it all worse, the setting for most of the book is a gigantic dungeon, complete with nonsensical traps, a suspicious "ecosystem" and it was--frankly--a boring setting. It's not for nothing that it was dedicated to Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, I suppose.

In any case, I enjoyed the book very little and decided to abandon the series, and return--at least for the time being--to my read-through of my newly purchased copies of the Dresden Files series.

Also, I've spent some time over the holidays playing Dominion. We already had Dominion and Dominion: Intrigue and for Christmas this year, I also landed a copy of Dominion: Prosperity. These are games that I think any "gamers", i.e. folks who play RPGs might like, and they've also taken the self-labeled "sophisticated" gamer crowd by storm as well, catering to folks who like the German board games and whatnot. Dominion is itself not a boardgame, and it has frequently been compared to a CCG like Magic: The Gathering in the sense that you build a deck. Of course, you don't buy random packs of cards; you buy the big boxed set(s) and build your decks with the cards contained therein, but the concept is still somewhat similar. There are--basically--three kinds of cards (with two sub-kinds, if you will, included as well: action cards (including reaction and attack cards) that you play first in your round, each of which has a small and simple rule subsystem that comes into play when it is played, treasure cards which you use in the next phase of your turn to buy more cards, and victory cards which you don't use for anything and which don't do anything, but which the acquisition thereof is the entire point of the game, since they're the only ones who count towards your score when you're tallying up to see who won.

The remainder of this post will assume a passing familiarity with the Dominion rules--I'm basically going to give a quick and dirty run-down of all the cards available in each of the three sets I contain, which can be freely mixed and matched in any given game (in fact, the possibility of doing so is one of the main things that gives the game such longevity; the strategies for winning with one suite of cards may not work well with another, and the amount of permutations are, for all practical purposes, limitless. To add to that, although the rules say that only ten kingdom cards are to be used in a game, I've played before with twelve or even more, and found that it works quite well (although the games go on a bit longer that way) so an even more varied experience can still be had.

Dominion

The original game has the most pragmatic and--dare I say it?--simplistic set of cards, but many of them are necessary to actually play the game, and most of the rest are sufficiently useful that they are always welcome. There are three times of treasure cards, copper, silver and gold, with increasing purchasing power. There are five types of victory cards--three are straightforward--estates, duchies and provinces give you a set number of victory points. Curse cards are negative victory point cards, and are used rarely, while the Gardens card is a relatively cheap card that gives you one victory point for every ten cards you have in your hand at the end of the game. The Garden is quite a good card; I've found the normally I end in the 40s and occasionally in the 50s (although rarely in the 30s)--in the 40s, it's a bargain on victory points at four each card, in the 50s, where it's worth five, it would almost be too good. Of course, it's hard to predict if you'll be able to get into the 50s (it happens for me rarely in a game of either three or four players) and the risk that you'll somehow end up in the high 30s and find that your Gardens were a relatively poor investment is always present.

All that said, I've found that some kingdom cards are always welcome, while others linger without being bought when we play. Most of the trashing cards get very little play, unless there is a Witch in the deck, and frankly, the Witch isn't all that popular either (curiously, since I think it's a great card--relatively low price, good basic benefit (draw 2 cards) and giving everyone else a Curse card is nice.) The trashing cards include Remodel, Feast, and Moneylender. The Mine, on the other hand, is the exception, since you can only trash money cards, and you always get a better money card when you do. The Cellar, Festival, Village, Library, Council Room, Market, Smithy, Laboratory and Woodcutter are all great cards, and actually, having several of them in your deck so that you have good chances of "mondo" turns where you keep playing actions and drawing cards, which include actions that you can play and more cards that you can draw, etc. is part of the fun of the basic Dominion cardset.

Many of the Attack cards are also sturdy, dependable and always fairly welcome. The Bureaucrat has one of the best benefits to the player who plays it (and least onerous to everyone else) but the Militia, Spy and Thief all have their place. Only the Thief is especially unpopular when played--for obvious reasons. The Throne Room, which doubles any action card, is a fun addition. The Workshop, which gives you a modest "free" card every time you play it is great for a while, although in end game, it becomes pretty superfluous. And the Adventurer is great when you really want to get at your money further down in the deck. And finally, the Moat is the best defense card in the three sets that I have, as well as the most useful all-round, and a fairly useful card to use even when you aren't defending and happen to have it in your hand. The Chancellor is the only card that I really can't see the point in at all. It, along with Remodel and Moneylender never get picked up in my home games, and like I said, the Chapel only is useful when Curses are in play.

Dominion: Intrigue

Although playable as a standalone alternative to Dominion, I'm not sure that I recommend it exactly--Intrigue replaces many of the sturdy, dependable cards of the original game with cards that have if/then statements on them, are more complicated to use, and often are less dependable--they can be good, but they can also be worthless time after time going through your hand.

Even at the basic level, the game is a bit different; rather than Gardens, they have Dukes, which are worth 1 victory point for every duchy that you have in your hand. There are also three types of victory cards that are also either treasure or action cards--Harems, Great Hall and Nobles. All of them are a bit pricey, but tend to be popular in our games, since they're useful during the scoring and also have a decent utility in play as they come up.

The Secret Chamber, in addition to sporting artwork that is an obvious homage to Harry Potter, is a lesser defense card, inferior in every way to the Moat, yet a bit more interesting in how it works. There are a number of attack options in Intrigue (as the subtitle perhaps hints at) including the Minion, who can cause everyone to have to discard their entire hand and draw a new one, the Saboteur who can cause other players to trash a card and pick up an inferior one (an altogether nasty option), the Swindler, who can ruin your well-crafted deck by changing cards out from under you to others that are nominally worth the same, but perhaps not really what you're looking for, and the Torturer, who gives Curse cards. There's another group of cards that allow you to voluntarily trash cards--never a very popular option unless Curse cards are flying about thick and heavy (which doesn't describe any of our games) and which mostly just become dead weight in your decks, including Masquerade, Trading Post and Upgrade, and the Steward and the Mining Village also give you that as an option that is rarely exercised. I've also found that the Scout and the Wishing Well get very little play, and when they do, offer very little benefit. The Courtyard's benefits also are somewhat dubious--they often don't amount to as much as you might imagine when you're stacking your deck with them.

On the other hand, the Baron, the Bridge, the Conspirator, Coppersmith, the Ironworks, the super-cheap Pawn, the Shanty Town and the Tribute cards are all quite good. Some of them, frankly, may be a bit too good; there are cards that offer similar benefits at a more expensive price in the basic set on occasion. The others are more solid and dependable.

One side effect of the way Intrigue is set up, though, is that I've noticed that the more unpopular cards, and those deemed to be more useless, are not often picked as options in our games. For all intents and purposes, the Intrigue card set is more limited than the basic one, because there are more cards that we're not interested in. Unless I mix my Intrigue kingdom cards with some other set, I really have fewer viable ones to choose from. These means that "pure" Intrigue games tend to have less variety and play more alike.

Dominion: Prosperity

I'm not quite sure why Prosperity doesn't come with the cards to make it a "full" game, but for whatever reason, it's missing the basic money and victory cards. It does, however, add newer "big money" versions of both; the platinum piece which is quite a bit better than the Gold, and the Colony, which is worth more than the Province at the end of the game. The other notable addition is the ability to get victory points as small metal tokens that sit on a mat in front of you and don't therefore have to cycle through your hand. This little off-line trade in victory points is a somewhat distracting side game, but then again, my wife swears by it, and she tends to win often by picking only a handful of cards and going big into them rather than having a broad base.

There are a number of other Treasure cards that have special conditions associated with them--Contraband can be used to buy things, but the person to your left excludes one card from you and makes it off limits. Despite this limitation, it still is a fairly good deal anytime. The Bank, Hoard, Quarry and Talisman are also great deals--the Hoard in particular is probably too good a deal; the card should cost more and should probably only give you a silver card, not a gold card, whenever you purchase a victory point card. The Royal Seal and the Venture cards, on the other hand, are somewhat less useful, and the Loan card is downright silly--I can't imagine ever being tempted to buy that card when anything else is available.

The Counting House, Mint and the City seem like especially weak action cards, and the Peddler is somewhat as well (although you can end up getting it for a steal if you're smart, which makes it at least not overpriced). I've found the Vault very useful in games with Hoard, because you end up with a lot of useless green cards in your hand that you wish you could do something useful with. Expand and Forge are fairly expensive and unpopular options in our games. The Monument and the Bishop, for the victory point tokens, are very popular on the other hand. The Goons card is way too good unless the Moat is in play, and I hate feeling like it's ruining all my turns when someone has quite a few of them and they get frequent play. The Watchtower is a decent defense against attacks that deal Curses, but is completely useless otherwise--notably, against Goons. The Mountebank and the Rabble attack cards are fairly low-key, not onerous, but sufficiently beneficial to the person playing the card to make them worthwhile nonetheless. Only Intrigue has the really "mean" attack cards that get people frustrated with the game and the lack of good defenses other than the Moat.

The Grand Market and the Worker's Village are good, all-round cards, similar to other cards in the other sets that give you a few extras with little in the way of complication, and the King's Court is kind of like an expanded version of the Throne Room. The Trade Route is another kind of needlessly complicated offline operation that tends to distract a bit from the game. The jury is still out in our group as to whether or not it's a good thing.

We don't play this often enough to justify running out and buying Seaside and Alchemy anytime soon, but I do hope to eventually get them as well, just to keep things fresh in the world of what's available with Dominion.

Ethnicity in Dark•Heritage, part 3

2011-12-23T11:24:00.002-05:00

After a long delay, here's the next part of my DARK•HERITAGE ethnicity series:

• The balshatoi, or Northshoremen, are an ancient ethnic group who live, as their name suggests, mostly on the north shore of the Mezzovian sea. They are politically subordinate to the terrasans in the empire, but many of them have been highly integrated into the fabric of society, and for the most part, the northern cities--Segrià, Iclezza, and Razina--and all the lands around them, are high in people who claim balshatoi blood. In the hinterlands, smaller villages, and backcountry, these people live much as their ancestors many generations ago--farmers and villagers with their own customs and their own languages, owing only nominal allegiance to any of the Dukes or Kings of the area--but in the cities and surrounding areas, they are fairly thoroughly "terrasanized." The balshatoi language is somewhat endangered; few speak it in urban locales except the elderly, and culture, music, cuisine, architecture and fashion are all more recent local developments that are more based on trends from the south than they are backwards looking into their own heritage. Although the culture of the north shore can be considered a hybrid of sorts between ancient balshatoi and terrasan mores, it's one that owed more to the south than the locals--this is the so-called nordero culture, described in the first part of this series.

Ancient balshatoi building styles

That said, as Terrasa weakens, a nationalist and separatist sentiment has been growing amongst the northern cities. The norderos--the hybrid northerners--more and more emphasize their links to ancient balshatoi kingdoms and peoples, like Rozovķa, Ryazan, Vuronezh, Pjarmia, and Pezhek. There have been (some merely half-hearted) efforts to revive the use of the ancient balshatoi language in its many dialects, and architecture based on ancient Rozovķan or Pezhekan designs are popular (and of course, some older buildings from the Rozovķan or Pezhekan periods still stand.

But mostly, the balshatoi people who remain in their rural fastnesses are somewhat skeptical of the intention of these norderos to embrace them as long-lost brothers, and are even more skeptical of getting caught up in talk of potential wars of seccession or revolution. The balshatoi life-style today is somewhat free, and many balshatoi men--and even entire families, clans and tribes--wander the wildernesses north of the seashore trading in furs, lumber, game and other commodities. Their settled kingdoms of the past are often referred to as a weakness and a mistake. The modern balshatoi has a reputation as a mountain man, plains-rider, and somewhat of a barbarian, albeit one painted in sympathetic "noble savage" undertones. The reality is that life for most balshatoi wanderers is somewhat harsh, and many of them are little more than mercenaries and outlaws. Indeed, many of the bandit groups that have cut off Calça from the empire are primarily balshatoi in make-up, leavened with tribesmen from even further north and other southerners. In fact, balshatoi as an ethnicity is somewhat dubious--it's more a lifestyle than a genetic heritage in many ways, since it's always been a semi-permeable society that accepted people of any heritage who did not fit into the urban lifestyle of the south, were willing to move into the wilderness, and proved to their collegues that they had something worthwhile to offer to society. Women in particular have long been multiethnic, many of them captured in slave-raids, but then turned into wives and mothers for the newer generations.

Modern balshatoi camp on the prairie

Most balshatoi have a deeply tanned skin from their time outside, but are naturally fair, and occasionally freckled. Hair colors range from dark brown to blond and even red, and eye color is brown, green, blue or gray. They often sport exotically and barbarically shaved patterns in their hair, sporting topknots or simply bald heads, and men often wear big, bushy moustaches. Balshatoi value their livestock, and the keeping of horses particularly is a notable affectation (as it is to the plains-dwellers further north as well) and one of the most insulting things you can do to a balshatoi is to bring harm to his horse.

• Before the spread of the tolosan ethnicity and their various subsets, the north shore of the Mezzovian Sea was largely populated by balshatoi kingdoms and their peoples. But they were not indigenous either, although their origins and where they came from are now lost in a maze of legends and half-truths. One thing that is known for sure is others were here before them, because one such kingdom remains, an island of a largely unmixed ethnicity--insular, xenophobic, and of dark report and reputation amongst the others. This kingdom, now shrunk from its past glories, at least somewhat, still stands strong and impenetrable eastward of the Razine peninsula, with port cities like Mnar and Mzagi but otherwise surrounded by dark and haunted forests. It's name is Tarush Noptii, and the ethnicity that populates it are the tarushans. Dark and sullen, tending towards gracility and shortness, the tarushans speak a language completely unlike any other in the region, and their manner of dress, their cuisine, and their customs and traditions strike the rest of the Mezzovian sea region as exotic and strange, and frankly, often somewhat disturbing or vulgar. Few peoples of any other ethnicity have traveled in Tarush Noptii, or visited any part of it save the port cities, so the interior of Tarush Noptii is a vast unknown, and few others have any cause or opportunity to interact with tarushans either.

Tarushan "gypsy" in the woods near Iclezza

The main exception to this is are the refugees who live in small enclaves throughout the region, or who travel Gypsy-like across the landscape. Speaking in hushed tones about fleeing the darkness of their homeland, these refugee tarushans are even more sullen and close-mouthed than the ones in Mzagi or Mnar, and are infamous for their superstition and fear of witchcraft (which ironically, they are very often suspected of dabbling in.) It's no secret that Tarush Noptii is ruled openly by a vampiric aristocracy, and groups of tarushans are frequently suspected of being the traveling companions of a vampire in disguise. They're also frequently suspected of belonging to ghoul cults--grapping the poor and unmissed from the societies amongst which they live or pass through, and feasting on their flesh in grisly rituals meant to give them the power of their rulers. Mostly, of course, this is complete nonsense, but it has been true frequently enough that they are rarely welcomed in groups, and frequently tarushans live alone or travel frequently to avoid entanglements with suspicious strangers.

• Northlanders are a group of people that are still mostly unknown to the Mezzovian area, but they live on the outskirts of it, north of the stranzero lands, and in recent years, a few of them have started filtering into the lands of the Three Empires (referring to the lands around the Mezzovian Sea and nearby--where the dominant political groups are still Terrasans, Qizmiri and the remnants of Baal Hamazi.) In truth, there's a vast population of these poor souls, living as far south as the whispered Cannibal Isle, amongst the Green Mountains and the shores of Tarqan Lake and Lake Hali, and on the plateau of Leng, in the Qashan jungle, and their benighted cities of Alar and Carcosa and possibly even Kadath itself. It's unclear the extent of their lands, what their political and cultural groupings are amongst themselves, or what their culture and goals are--too few of them come to the land of the Three Empires to get a read on them, although it is certainly possible--maybe even probable--that their own polities are as powerful as any near the Mezzovian Sea.

The few individuals who come out of their Forbidden Lands seem to almost exclusively be cultists on missions of some kind--either sorcerers looking to spawn cult cells outside of their native lands, or divine assassins, pursuing mysterious agendas, but often offering their services to bidders. While northlanders are not often recognized for what they are, even when they do appear, the reputation of Cannibal Isle, at least, as well as Carcosa, Kadath and other cities in the Forbidden Lands, is a well-known byword for horror and fear; a literal Hell on earth.

Northlanders are physically very distinctive, though. With pale, almost white eyes, chalky whitish skin that does not tan or burn, a tendency for extreme face piercings and black tattoos, frequent baldness and white hair (although coal-black hair is also common), they look like no other ethnicity in the area, and their original provenance is completely mysterious.

Points of Light

2011-12-19T15:12:00.002-05:00

From a Rich Baker article on the Wizards of the Coast website, describing the implicit setting assumptions for D&D 4e:

The Dungeons & Dragons game assumes many things about its setting: The world is populated by a variety of intelligent races, strange monsters lurk on other planes, ancient empires have left ruins across the face of the world, and so on. But one of the new key conceits about the D&D world is simply this: Civilized folk live in small, isolated points of light scattered across a big, dark, dangerous world.

Most of the world is monster-haunted wilderness. The centers of civilization are few and far between, and the world isn’t carved up between nation-states that jealously enforce their borders. A few difficult and dangerous roads tenuously link neighboring cities together, but if you stray from them you quickly find yourself immersed in goblin-infested forests, haunted barrowfields, desolate hills and marshes, and monster-hunted badlands. Anything could be waiting down that old overgrown dwarf-built road: a den of ogre marauders, a forgotten tower where a lamia awaits careless travelers, a troll’s cave, a lonely human village under the sway of a demonic cult, or a black wood where shadows and ghosts thirst for the blood of the living.

Given the perilous nature of the world around the small islands of civilization, many adventures revolve around venturing into the wild lands. For example:

• Roads are often closed by bandits, marauders such as goblins or gnolls, or hungry monsters such as griffons or dragons. The simple mission of driving off whomever or whatever is preying on unfortunate travelers is how many young heroes begin their careers.

• Since towns and villages do not stay in close contact, it’s easy for all sorts of evils to befall a settlement without anyone noticing for a long time. A village might be terrorized by a pack of werewolves or enslaved by an evil wizard, and no one else would know until adventurers stumbled into the situation.

• Many small settlements and strongholds are founded, flourish for a time, and then fall into darkness. The wild lands are filled with forgotten towers, abandoned towns, haunted castles, and ruined temples. Even people living only a few miles away from such places might know them only by rumor and legend.

The common folk of the world look upon the wild lands with dread. Few people are widely traveled—even the most ambitious merchant is careful to stick to better-known roads. The lands between towns or homesteads are wide and empty. It might be safe enough within a day’s ride of a city or an hour’s walk of a village, but go beyond that and you are taking your life into your hands. People are scared of what might be waiting in the old forest or beyond the barren hills at the far end of the valley, because whatever is out there is most likely hungry and hostile. Striking off into untraveled lands is something only heroes and adventurers do.

Another implication of this basic conceit of the world is that there is very little in the way of authority to deal with raiders and marauders, outbreaks of demon worship, rampaging monsters, deadly hauntings, or similar local problems. Settlements afflicted by troubles can only hope for a band of heroes to arrive and set things right. If there is a kingdom beyond the town’s walls, it’s still largely covered by unexplored forest and desolate hills where evil folk gather. The king’s soldiers might do a passable job of keeping the lands within a few miles of his castle free of monsters and bandits, but most of the realm’s outlying towns and villages are on their own.

In such a world, adventurers are aberrant. Commoners view them as brave at best, and insane at worst. But such a world is rife with the possibility for adventure, and no true hero will ever lack for a villain to vanquish or a quest to pursue.

How does the DARK•HERITAGE setting coincide, and how does it differ from this point of view? First off, that's largely true of my setting. The Terrasan Empire, the main force of civilization in the lands of the Mezzovian Main and surrounding areas, is a decrepit, rotted, and ineffective excuse for an empire, and honestly, calling themselves an "Empire" was perhaps more grandiose wishful thinking rather than accurate labeling in the first place. Overland travel is increasingly dangerous, and increasingly avoided, hence the "loss" of entire provinces like Calça or Baix Pallars. The major city-states that are the core of the empire, on the other hand, are connected only by sea.

Even that route is plagued with problems, though. While the Mezzovian isn't known for its tempestuous nature, making it an ideal road for travel, sudden storms aren't unknown either. More importantly, the shipping and travel lanes are more and more plagued by pirates, corsairs and raiders, and Terrasa's navy is completely unable to rise to the challenge of detering them.

Strange kingdoms, races, tribes and peoples have lived in the area. Although the terrasans and their allied peoples are ascendent (if only just) still, they are the last in a long litany of former inhabitants. Many of the inhabitants are, in fact, mysterious. The most recent kingdoms, particularly the so-called balshatoi kingdoms of the North Coast are reasonably well known, and descendents of those proud ancient peoples still live throughout the area. But before them, only the vaguest rumors, legends, ghost-stories and crumbling, mouldering ruins of often mysterious purpose still linger.

Where DARK•HERITAGE most notably differs from the D&D assumptions, as spelled out by Baker above, are in two major areas. First, in my setting, there is no assumption that the protagonists will be heroes. In fact, given my recent (although years long now) infatuation with darker, grimmer, "fantasy noir" tropes and conventions, it's a pretty good bet that my protagonists aren't heroes at all. At best they're anti-heroes, although they could frequently be likeable rascals and scoundrels or even complete and utter villains entirely. The the second way in which it differs dramatically is the incidence of monsters. In this older post of mine from about 13 months or so ago, I mentioned my preference for tropes and characteristics of supernatural horror over that of high fantasy. What that mostly means is that monsters are never disposible; they remain monstrous by being rare and frightening, never routine or commonplace. That requires a more careful touch; Baker can cheerily populate his wilds with all kinds of crazy monsters. That's what the high fantasy genre (which more and more D&D starts to resemble, despite it's sword & sorcery roots) calls for. However, my game has slightly different genre requirements.

Den of Thieves

2011-12-19T09:33:00.000-05:00

Just a few days ago, I finished David Chandler's Den of Thieves and I've already embarked on a read through of the sequel, A Thief in the Night since I had it from the library. Together with the just released (or just about to be released; I haven't been paying close attention) with Honor Among Thieves, this makes up the Ancient Blades trilogy, a very old-fashioned style fantasy story (so far.) The dedication on Den mentions Leiber, Howard and Moorcock, and the dedication on Thief is to G.G. and D.A. in the outer planes; clearly a somewhat coy reference to Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson of "we created D&D" fame. That should also give you some indication of what kind of story it is.

The books' publisher, HarperCollins, on the other hand, would have you believe that it's in the tradition of the new darker, grimmer epic fantasy; they refer pointedly to Brent Weeks, Joe Abercrombie, Scott Lynch, and even make a wild claim that Chandler might have toppled George R. R. Martin from his throne as superlative grim and gritty new fantasy writing. He was also compared to R. A. Salvatore and Raymond Feist; in my opinion, those are more reasonable (and accurate) comparisons.

In Den of Thieves, the setting is basically a single city, the Free City of Ness, where no man is a serf or villein. The setting is very Medieval in some ways--rather than merely being "generically" Medieval like a lot of fantasy, this one referred specifically a lot of Medieval institutions and practices, much moreso than most fantasy that I've read (it did use the word villein, after all, as one example.) That said, it's hardly meant to be a work of thinly veiled historical fiction; the main character, Malden, is a thief with a fairly modern attitude, who finds himself caught up in a web of intrigue and sorcery somewhat by accident. The main action of the book is two "dungeoncrawls" where he raids two separate facilities to steal the same crown. Both have a very D&D dungeoncrawl feel to them, including magical traps, demons to overcome and more.

In fact, in all ways, I had a funny feeling that this was the kind of book Gary Gygax himself would have enjoyed, and would have seen as iconically D&D (especially keeping in mind that Gygax also liked to use more authentic Medievalisms than is popular in the game--or the fantasy genre overall--today.)

I found it a little bit less satisfying. Much less so than, say, Douglas Hulick's recently released novel, which had a similar title and somewhat similar premise. There were three "main" characters, Malden the thief, Sir Croy, a painfully naive knight, and Cythera, the cursed witch with whom both of those two fall in love (but who cannot touch either of them, and who is enslaved to the main antagonist, sorcerer Hazoth.) A few minor characters round out the call sheet; Cutbill, the head of the organized crime outfit that employs Malden, the Burgrave, the leader of the Free City, Bikker, the mentor and trainer of Sir Croy, who has turned cynical and mercenary, Slag the dwarf, who makes all of Malden's fancy thief tools, and Kemper, the cursed card shark who assists Malden in his second, more dangerous, heist.

For the most part, I found all of those characters flat and unengaging--more like wooden caricatures than real characters. This was a major turn-off, as a character like Malden really needs to be somewhat charming and likeable to work. Sir Croy, in some ways, was the more engaging character, until during the last act of the book, he became frustrating and annoying, and seemed like a tool whereby Chandler could deliver the ham-handed message that honor and idealism is for suckers.

Although the book is reasonably well paced and the action scenes are described beautifully, I also thought the plot and motivations were pretty weak and unconvincing. More than once, I found myself scratching my head (not literally) and wondering exactly why something had happened, only to decide that it happened because it had to happen to advance the plot, and for no other reason. Needless to say, that kind of thing takes you out of the book's "reality" when you're reading, and breaks the fourth wall on accident; never a good thing. One good--and interesting--bit of world building that Chandler did was the concept of the Ancient Blades, which the series is named after. A number of magical (albeit ugly and utilitarian rather than fancy and Excalibur-like) magical swords, which are the only ways in which demons may be harmed, make up the backstory of Croy and Bikker. Curiously, this first book doesn't advance that very far, leaves no real open ends to tie up, and leaves little indication that it's part of a trilogy of any kind; it's a very self-contained book, and the series title would seem to be not very apt based on just this book alone.

I think a lot of D&D players will like this book. It has a very D&Dish feel; maybe even moreso, in some ways, than the official D&D novels. However, it seems to have some of the same weaknesses that a lot of D&D fiction does; it feels too much like a D&D game and less like a novel in which organic events happen to real-seeming characters. I'm glad I convinced my library to spring for this series for me; I would have been disappointed if I'd bought these books myself.

Meanwhile, I'm halfway through the sequel already, A Thief In the Night, which looks like it will have much of the same flaws and strengths. Curiously, I'm still waiting for this to feel like a trilogy and not just unconnected adventures which happen to feature (some of) the same characters. We'll see how it goes as I advance through the series; the third one is "On Order" via the library, and I'll get it as soon as they have it available and processed.

Gaming update

2011-12-14T10:01:00.001-05:00

My own recent attempt to run a game of DARK•HERITAGE fell victim to time constraints, and I had to bow out and not run anymore, after kicking off a few initially successful sessions, and then devolving into mediocre sessions where I "punted" and just ran the characters through lame quick and dirty Dungeon module adaptations. After that, we fell back into our Rise of the Runelords game. We're about halfway thorugh that, having finished three (of six) modules, I believe. However, we've been plagued by poor scheduling, and the "bombshell" revelation of a few days ago--the GM is feeling burnt out, feeling like other priorities in his life are suffering as a result of his dedication to always being there and always having to prepare, and--in a nutshell--he's pulling the plug on the campaign.

It looks like now that a long-anticipated (by much of the group, anyway) Star Wars game run by one of the other guys that I've never played under is our current direction. We'll see how that goes. Personally, I'm a bit leery of the notion of playing in a pre-written game--and when he makes comments like "rewriting the NPC monologues" and stuff like that, I further cringe, as those are usually danger signs of a major railroad and possibly oh-so-precious game by a would-be novelist.

But that's speaking in the abstract. As I said, I've never played under this guy, and he's been a good enough player and good enough friend that I'm certainly willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and try his game out before writing it off as incompatible with my preferred style.

Hiking and Sightseeing 2

2011-12-05T11:10:00.001-05:00

OK, here's my revised itinerary. This includes a drastically reduced stay at Colorado National Monument, including eliminating most of the more serious backcountry hikes, but adds a nearly full exploration of the hiking potential of Arches National Park and Natual Bridges National Monument. It also presents a more even mix of staying in el cheapo hotels along the way and camping, plus eating fast food on the way vs. cooking myself or packing in lunches when possible. Part of my "sales strategy" for this trip is that it'll be cheap, after all.

Day 1: Drive from Metro Detroit area to Lexington, NE (15 hours). Let my oldest son get in some practice on the freeway while I'm at it, although he should be (barely) officially licensed and good to go by then.

Day 2: Drive from Lexington to Scott's Bluff National Monument (about four hours) then stick around for about three hours there stretching our legs, and seeing the visitor's center briefly and what hiking there is to do. The hiking isn't much... there's a mile and a half hike to the top of the bluff (and then a mile and a half back--but you can take a shuttle. I'm thinking shuttle up and hike down makes sense). Hit the road again and drive the remaining seven and a half hours to Grand Junction, CO, probably arriving a bit late.

Day 3: Sleep in, go to church in the morning, then go to the monument, sign in for a campsite and set up tent. Do the Rimrock drive, plus four ½ hour hikes that have trailheads either at the visitor's center, the campground, or along the road, including the Window Rock Trail, the Canyon Rim Trail, the Alcove Nature Trail, and Otto's Trail.

Day 4: Sleep in a bit, and spend the entire day doing slightly more ambitious hikes, including the Coke Ovens Trail, the Devil's Kitchen Trail and the Liberty Cap Trail.

Day 5: Get up early, take down tent and drive two and a half hours across the state line to Arches National Park. Again, go register for camping (reservations to have been made in advance); I'll spend two nights in this campground, cooking on the camp stove and eating pre-packed lunches. There are a number of very short hikes (about half an hour or so) that are off the main drive at Arches; the plan is to do all of them (if possible) this first day, although there should be enough time in the later two days to catch one or two if they get missed. These include Balanced Rock, Broken Arch, Courthouse Wash Rock Art Panel, the Delicate Arch Viewpoint, Double Arch, Sand Dune Arch and Skyline Arch.

Day 6: Some of the moderate length hikes within Arches, including the Park Avenue hike, Landscape Arch, The Windows Hike, Tower Arch, and Delicate Arch (the real hike, not the Viewpoint hike, which we'll do the day before.)

Day 7: Pack up the tent nice and early, and do two longer hikes, the Devil's Garden Primitive Loop, and Double O Arch. Also, the guided Fiery Furnace hike, which can only be done with a ranger, I believe. Spend the night in a hotel in Moab, taking showers and maybe picking up some fast food.

Day 8: Morning drive to Natural Bridges National Monument--three hours away--get campsite, and then spend the afternoon hiking all the (relatively short) trails. Relaxed evening by the campsite, and early bedtime.

Days 9 and 10: Long drive home, stopping halfway in Omaha or Lincoln or somewhere 'round there. It still makes for two fourteen hour days, though.

Curiously, three of the four parks are smack in the heart of "red rock country" and therefore will be offering, in many ways, very similar scenery to enjoy. In particular, I wonder if Natural Bridges will feel somewhat underwhelming after three days at Arches. Ah, well. If it is, well it is. It's not even a full day, really, and that's kind of the last, more relaxing stab at doing something fun before the grueling drive back home, so it'll be whatever it'll be, I suppose.

Sightseeing and hiking

2011-12-04T20:11:00.001-05:00

For those who have followed my blog--that is, for me basically, and maybe my mom (hi, mom), it shouldn't be any surprise that my idea of a perfect vacation is to escape to a wilderness area somewhere in the great American west and hike around, seeing as few people as possible, and generally absorbing the wilderness ambiance that--not coincidentally--makes up an important part of the DARK•HERITAGE setting. Of course, so would be hanging around the Mediterranean coasts of Spain, France and Italy, as well as exploring Sicily, Sardinia, some of the Moorish architecture of Andalusia, and maybe hanging out in Casablanca or Marrakesh. That's less likely to happen in the near future, but I've made a tentative plan for a late spring ten-day sojourn westward. My wife's not completely on board yet, but I'm thinking me and the boys in my smaller car is a better bet than the whole family in the minivan anyway. Here's the tentative itinerary, just for the curious.

Day 1: Drive from my home in the Detroit area to Lexington, NE--about 15 hours. This is enough to keep me busy all day; that's a lot of hours to drive all by yourself. Of course, my oldest son can take a turn behind the wheel if he comes--but he doesn't have any experience with long-distance driving yet, so I'm not going to have him log all that many hours, I don't think.

Day 2: Drive from Lexington to Grand Junction Colorado, with a small detour to Scott's Bluff National Monument, which shouldn't take more than about three hours and which will give us a nice chance to stretch our legs and get out of the car for a while. The bluff itself is kind of a singular geographic feature, so there's not a lot of hiking to do. Basically, you see the visitors center, spend maybe an hour or two on the few short trails, and take a bunch of pictures of the bluff, and then a bunch of pictures from the top of the bluff. Then you get back in your car and hit the road again.

Day 3: After sleeping in a little bit, we go to Colorado National Monument, register for a campsite (because they're first come first served, although I've been told by the ranger that they rarely ever fill up) go see the visitors center, and do the Rimrock drive. There are a number of short (about half hour or so) hikes that have trailheads along the Rimrock drive, so we'll do those on Day 1. These include the Window Rock Trail, the Canyon Rim Trail, the Alcove Nature Trail and Otto's Trail. Starting this day, we also eat only what we brought with us--six days of backpack lunches and dinners cooked over a camp stove in the evening. We're also in the desert, so everyone drinks three bottles of water every day, plus as much as you want in the morning and evening.

Day 4: Three slightly longer trails, including the Coke Ovens Trail, the CCC Trail, and the Devil's Kitchen Trail.

Day 5: Now we get into more serious, backcountry trails, including Serpents Trail (called the crookedest road in the world) and the Black Ridge Trail, each of which is a good half-day of hiking.

Day 6: Two other 4-5 hour hikes: Monument Canyon Trail and Liberty Cap Trail.

Day 7: Three other backcountry trails: Ute Canyon Trail, Old Gordon Trail, and Corkscrew Trail Loop.

Day 8: The most ambitious of them all, the all-day un-maintained No Thoroughfare Canyon Trail. As the name implies, the last few miles are basically trailless, so we'll probably be bushwhacking. In the evening, we leave the monument, stay in a hotel, eat out, and take showers.

Days 9 and 10: Driving home in two 12 hour stretches.

When we're done, we will have completed pretty much all that those two national monuments have to offer, as well as having done some fairly ambitious hiking. Without going on multiday backcountry hikes, which I'm not ready for, especially if I really do bring my two younger boys along, it's about as ambitious as you can get, especially the No Thoroughfare Canyon hike which is an all-day walk in the desert on a trail that ranges from poor to nonexistent.

Not only that, my budget for a trip like this is fairly small; I can do the whole trip for just a little over $1,000. Bonus.

Relapse -- and fudging in RPGs

2011-11-30T07:52:00.001-05:00

Well, I relapsed. After several months of staying away, I found myself drawn to ENWorld a couple of weeks ago after a Google search took me there looking for something else, and I stayed a little bit, got involved in some discussions, and made myself--at least a little bit--at home again.

Of course, it didn't take long for the banal and the pedantic and the passive aggressive trolls who are sadly too common there to make me wonder what I was doing. Although the moderator who was the target of my disappointment last time around was a voice of reason this time around. At least that's a plus. This time, I got involved in a discussion about the merits (or lack thereof) of fudging as a GM.

My impression, and the impression of most who were posting in the discussion, I believe, is that fudging is inevitable, but its generally considered a bit gauche to show your hand and make it obvious that you're doing so. You may find that a combat that you expected to be challenging turns out to be a cakewalk. Or, a combat that you expect to be routine, turns out to threaten the lives of the entire party. A major villain with months of build-up goes down like a chump to the first spell cast in combat. In a rather routine maneuver, a PC really blows a low DC check of some kind and falls to his death. Etc., etc. The endless stream of scenarios that are totally unexpected in any RPG of any kind.

Many of these need to be expected, or at least the expectation that they could happen needs to be factored into the calculations of a good GM. A good GM, if for whatever reason, is unwilling to accept all the possible results of a die roll, then in reality, he shouldn't be calling for a die roll. Just use your "GM fiat" ability (not an automotive joint venture, despite the sound) to move the game forward, and then save your dice for when you are willing to let chance decide. The element of chance is an important part of the game, and if the PCs feel too "safe"; i.e., you won't actually let anything too bad happen to them, then for most players of the game, that's a detriment to its fun. However, not all of them.

And even in a more rigorous GMing environment, it's an important GMing skill to recognize when things aren't going in a way that's likely to be fun for the players and be able to make adjustments on the fly to correct them. Sometimes that means that, yeah, you need to fudge a damage modifer to give a character one more chance to pull their bacon out of the fire. Sometimes it means lopping a few extra hit points off an enemy combatant so they can drop when the combat is starting to get too long and tedious rather than exciting or fun. On occasion, it even means something more drastic. Hopefully very much on occasion, but there you have it.

On my GM Merit Badge banner over there to the side, I picked that I roll the dice in the open. My interpretation of this badge is in regards to my general style. I prefer to let the dice decide things, as I think that that's more fun. I don't literally always roll out in front of everyone, because it's not very convenient from a placing standpoint; I'd have to stand up and reach over my screen every time I rolled any dice, which I don't do. But I'm not secretive about my dice rolls. I think putting your fate into the hands of the dice is a way to build tension--fun tension, not the other kind--in game, so I encourage it. That said: I reserve the right to fudge on occasion if, in my estimation, it will improve the game for everyone involved. And no, I probably won't tell you about it either, although after the fact, I might not care too much.

Again, it's my opinion that this is very common and in fact almost all GMs do this. Scratch that: almost all good GM's do this, because it's a tool to allow GMs to improve the game. That's the whole point of it, after all. If you're sacrificing something that would be fun so you can take the moral high ground of playing a "purer game" or some such nonsense, that's a poor consolation prize, in my estimation.

Needless to say, there are a number of gamers at ENWorld--or at least a few very vocal ones--who find that notion inconcievable. Which is fine; I certainly don't need to always be agreed with, and people can reasonably disagree, especially around issues of taste. But many of these posters did not go in for reasonable disagreement. They were posters who, in fact, insinuated passive-aggressively that people who want rolls fudged, should find some other term for their games, since they're clearly not "true" roleplaying games. Who said that people who want their game fudged are--apparently--not adults. Who said that people who allow some fudging here and there should stop playing D&D, because it's not the game for them. Who created strawman arguments that if you're going to allow a little fudging here and there, then why even bother having dice at all, since clearly the GM is just telling his story to the players without any input or willingness to deviate from his foreordained plot.

Frankly, the absurdity of the discussion was quite frustrating, and reminded me again of why I left posting on RPG related messageboards in the first place, and why I shouldn't really have made a return, probably. But I'm curious from the blogosphere: what's your position on fudging? Do you allow it? Frequently? Infrequently? Do you do it openly, or are you more discrete?

Yeah, yeah... I realize I won't get any comments. Nobody actually reads this blog. The only hits I have are from Google image searches. I'm going to ask the question anyway, just in case. And... here's an image of Selena Gomez in a bikini. Just to keep those Google image searches coming.

¡Viva los Estados Unidos!

2011-11-29T11:18:00.001-05:00

Much of the English language fantasy genre is very loosely based on a northern European medieval European vibe. This isn't surprising; the English language genre is largely derived from the mythology, folklore and medieval romances that predated fantasy per se. I've obviously gone in some different directions--on purpose, in an attempt to create a different feel. While the Crown of Aragon and a kind of Latin Mediterranean vibe is a huge part of the DARK•HERITAGE setting, at least culturally, and I've got a nation that is clearly modelled somewhat transparently on some aspects of the Moorish caliphate combined with Ottoman Barbary pirates. I also see certain aspects of my setting as specifically trying to model other historical scenarios, perhaps transparently, and perhaps not. I've got an Old West of sorts. I've got a Caribbean from the Golden Age of Piracy. I've got Cajuns. I've got South Pacific natives here and there.

I've also got stuff borrowed from fiction. I've got plenty of Lovecraftiana. I've got my take on Bael Turath, from the Dungeons & Dragons 4e points of light setting.

Mostly, though, the terrain, much of the setting detail, the assumed animals, the weather, and no small amount of the culture of all of the countries in the region, is most heavily influenced by my own homeland, the western half of the United States of America (notwithstanding that I actually live in the northern Midwest right now--sadly, well east of the Mississippi.) Huge tracts of land mirror the Red Rock country of the Grand Circle and if a DARK•HERITAGE movie were ever made, it'd probably be filmed in Monument Valley or something like that. Large parts are heavily influenced by the Comancheria. There's even a cognate (if I can use that word in this context) to the Goodnight-Loving trail, and the Oregon trail. I've got parts influenced by the Llano Estacado. I've got parts influenced by Cajun country, and the scrubby forests of East Texas and Louisiana. I've got areas heavily influenced by the various scenic parts of the Rocky Mountains--like the Tetons, Yellowstone, or Glacier National Park. I've got parts influenced by Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada. I've got coastline like Big Sur or the chaparral. The animals you might see in DARK•HERITAGE are less influenced by medieval Europe and more influenced by the La Brea Tar Pits and the American west. And on the fringe, I've even got areas that are not unlike the Ozarks, the Cumberland Gap, the Great Smoky Mountains, and other earlier western frontiers.

Why? Because I love my homeland, that's why. I have a kind of chauvinistic preference for the stuff that I saw or at least stuff that happened in my backyard, and which is part of my heritage.

Not that the northern European stuff isn't part of my heritage too--I just think that aspect of my heritage is already adequately covered in the modern fantasty genre, and it's past time to explore more. I'm also part Mediterranean, via a Portuguese great-great grandfather, and of course, after many generations, I'm really much more American than I am European anyway. America is my home. I love it. I want that to be reflected in my fantasy.

A few quick updates

2011-11-23T14:02:00.001-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving! A day early (there's no way I'm logging in tomorrow to make updates.) I finished two books, and thought I'd comment quickly on the two of them.

First, I read the third and final Conan compilation. Some of the stories it had were ones that I haven't read in a long time (over twenty years) and I'm not 100% sure that I've even read all of them before. Now I have; I've read every single Conan story, and much of the Conan ephemera, that Bob Howard ever wrote. I still have two other REH compilations: the Kull and the Solomon Kane ones, but I'm not going to get to them immediately.

A few impressions of the Conan canon--despite it's place as one of the pillars of the modern fantasy genre, and the origin of a lot of the tropes and conventions that still ring clearly throughout it, I didn't find the Conan stories were necessarily all that great. Conan as a character was very one-, or at best, two-dimensional, and the fact that he was a superman, always supremely capable, always better than anyone else he encountered, got fairly tiring after a while. I think it's important to remember that when these were first published, nobody was reading Conan story after Conan story back to back. Even at its fastest, you'd read them once a month as they were published. This would actually improve them; cramming them together made their weaknesses all too apparent, and their flaws stand out in stark relief. I often found that while reading an individual story, I moved along at a pretty good clip, I often stalled between stories, struggling to find motivation to start the next one and finish the book.

At the end of the day, that's just one of the hazards of being first, I guess. In the ninety or so odd years since Conan was first published, the fantasy genre has come a long way. While it hasn't necessarily always improved, there's been a lot of guys who've done a lot of really interesting things with the genre. Guys who were, frankly, more skilled writers than Howard. A lot of others have been mediocre, or even less skilled, but over time, the really good ones are remembered and the poorer ones tend to be forgotten. Howard's work reads like a pioneering work; innovative, fresh, blazing new trails, but by necessity fairly rough around the edges.

Also, I found the constant theme of barbarism vs. civilization, and Howard's frankly kind of bizarre take on the inevitability of barbarism a bit hard to swallow. Not to mention repetitive after a time. Also, I often hear complaints about "racism" in Howard's work, and I think those complaints are vastly overstated. Sure, there's some moments of political incorrectness. But those who think Howard's portrayal of the black kindgoms south of Stygia, or the Hyrkanian or Turanian peoples, or whatever are insulting and offensive should take a step back and consider Howard's portrayal of the Hyborians--his equivalents to Western Europeans, basically. Arrogant, decadent, corrupt, useless, and grossly ineffective, these are the guys who take the most abuse from Howard. And arguably, they were his own people, to a great extent. I think those who are offended by racial portrayals by Howard are those who are going out of their way to be offended. I tend not to have much sympathy for that kind of entitlement and victimization mentality.

American Indians, on the other hand, I think might have a legitimate complaint. The Picts, who are very clearly based on them (for reasons that don't make a lot of sense, since the Picts were most likely a Celtic offshoot in real life) are very frequently installed as the bad guys, and portrayed as irredeemably savage and nearly bestial. But even then, I'd nod a bit in acknowledgement and then advise them to get over themselves. Although frankly, at this point we're starting to wander a bit astray from talking about any merits of Howard and more into talking about my impatience with whiners and crybabies... i.e, this is more about me than him. So time to move on to another topic.

I also read Proven Guilty, which I bought since I last read it (checked out from the library) and reviewed it here on this blog. I still say that it's a rather sloppily constructed Dresden Files book--it leaves some open questions, you're not clear who the villain really is (still, several books later) and it feels more like a grab bag of things that needed to get done to set the books up for the remainder of the series than a tightly plotted novel in its own right. Still, this time around, I found myself feeling more charitable towards the book and I enjoyed it more than the last time I read it. I also read it quite a bit faster than last time; within about 36 hours (including two work days) I had finished it and refiled it on my shelf. It was nice to knock a few books off my to-read list, and frankly, reading Proven Guilty kinda made me feel motivated to quickly get on to White Night which starts a great run of about four or five books in the series that are all just absolutely supurb. It's actually a bit unfortunate in that I think Ghost Story kinda dropped the ball a bit and set the series back a ways. It felt, again, like it was too strong on high concept, and too keen on advancing the status quo to something else and less like a tightly written novel in its own right. But White Night, Small Favor, Turn Coat and Changes--and even Side Jobs there too--are all very high quality works. Rather than feeling somewhat deflated after reading Proven Guilty I find myself further motivated. Not bad. I wonder if my own low expectations of the experience helped it to be better. Could be.

Despite my motivation, I won't be immediately reading any of those stories. I've got two books--books 1 and 2 of a three book series--checked out from the library right now, and book 3 will be released within weeks... maybe even within days; I can't remember the release date, although apparently it's already available in the UK... and the library has already ordered a copy with my name on it. So I need to keep moving on these books while I can. The series is the Ancient Blades trilogy, a trilogy by first time fantasy author (but apparently relatively experienced horror writer under another nom de plume) David Chandler. I've also heard from many early reviewers that the series has a strong, old skool sword & sorcery vibe to it. About fifty pages into the first book, I'm not sure if I can confirm or deny that yet, but I do find it curious that it's yet another book of urban intrigue in a fantasy version of a wretched hive of scum and villainy with a main character who's a thief and a member of a fantasy version of the Mafia. With titles like Den of Thieves, A Thief in the Night, and finally Honor Among Thieves, you can see how this slots nicely into my tastes as they've developed lately. In fact, with such eerily similar titles, I'm very curious to eventually compare the series to the recently read Among Thieves by Douglas Hulick. I may have to do just a bit of a compare and contrast exercise, like we used to do back in school. Just for fun.

Ethnicity in Dark•Heritage, part 2

2011-11-21T08:29:00.001-05:00

After much delay, here's part 2 of the ethnicity of DARK•HERITAGE series. I expect that I'll need a few more posts yet to finish the series.

The Hasparans are a coastal ethnic group found eastward of the tolosans on the southern shore of the Mezzovian. While the hasparans recognize their kinship with the tolosans, they also emphasize their differences. They often say that while the tolosans spread throughout the Mezzovian area, it was actually hasparan culture that they spread. The hasparans claim to be autochthonous; that is, they claim to be a sister group to the tolosans, not descendents of them. When the tolosans were just a tribe of fishermen on the coast and southern isles, long before they dreamed of empire or expansion, the hasparans were already on the other side of the Colomà swamp living their own lives. Physically, the hasparans look very much like the tolosans; they are gracile and average in height, with olive skin and dark eyes, mostly. Their dark hair is often treated with henna, which causes it to turn a dark reddish color. They also often utilize henna tattoos as decoration. Sént-Haspar is the urban metropolis which most strongly identifies with the hasparans, and still today, the Archduke of Sént-Haspar claims most of the area that makes up the ancient kingdom of Halasparia as his fiefdom. Halasparia has an ancient historical and military tradition, but perhaps what it is most known for is its cuisine, architecture, art and music moreso than for anything else. In many ways, much of this cultural heritage has been coopted by the tolosans, and across much of the Mezzovian main, hasparan food, hasparan gittern music and hasparan architecture is associated with the Terrasan empire overall. Despite this, most hasparans do not see themselves at odds with the terrasans, but rather in symbiosis and close association. Wile hasparans are frequently very proud of their ethnic heritage, there is very little separatist or nationalist sentiment amongst them.
The frequently rustic stranzeros are occasionally called Sarabascans, since the majority of them that are known outside their dark woods, swamps, and fields of the far east on the north side of the Mezzovian come from that area. More of a region than ever a country or polity, the stranzeros mostly live in hinterlands and far-flung locations, and have managed to stay out of mainstream society in the Mezzovian Main area for the most part, with the exception of Sarabasca, the stranzero's face to the world. Most stranzeros still live in small hamlets, tribes, villages or family groups, and recognize no authority to govern them other than their own local ones. In this regard, the stranzeros have evolved a culture of independence and freedom that many other folk caricaturize to an extent, but who's ideas have also galvanized many of the nascent nationalist movements around the mainland. Stranzeros are even shorter and darker of color than the tolosans and others around them, having never mixed at all with any balshatoi or tarushan population, and having remained largely isolated and insular. However, that is not true of the population of Sarabasca itself, which is a very cosmopolitan city, and which has come under the sway of both Terrasa and Qizmir in recent years, and other prior kingdoms and principalities before that. As folks from all over the Mezzovian have moved or passed through Sarabasca over the years, there are a number of folks who self-identify as stranzero, but who resemble people from anywhere else. This could possibly be the source of some tension within the stranzero community... except that, frankly, there is little interaction between these cosmopolitan stranzeros and the more insular back-country ones. People from Sarabasca do trade with the "swampies" as they are sometimes called, and Sarabasca itself is an important safety valve for those who for whatever reason fail to fit into the tight-knit back-country communities, but by and large the two "halves" of the stranzero community find themselves passing each other like ships in the night, mostly indifferent to the other's presence. Stranzeros are also somewhat feared around the region, when they travel, due to the rumored malign practices of their shamans and priests, known as bocori, who practice a form of black magic. In other places where stranzeros gather in numbers, they tend to form enclavces or ghettos and keep to themselves.
The forasteros, or pallarans as they're sometimes called, are another far-flung ethnic group with ancient ties to the tolosans. Making up the majority of the population to the east and south of the hasparans, the forasteros are undergoing a very different sort of nationalism, under very different conditions, than most of the rest of the ethnic groups who are associated with the Terrasan empire. At it's greatest extent, both the kingdom of Halasparia, and later the Terrasan Empire claimed much of the territory where the forasteros live, although they generally left them alone as long as tribute continued to flow in. When the jann landed at Qattara, founded their kingdom, and subjugated the native inhabitants of the island, it was forasteros that they enslaved. When the jann continued to the Golden peninsula, they further subjugated more forasteros. Today, only a small portion of the forastero ethnicity lives outside the Qizmiri yoke, and as their sense of nationalism has grown, rather than fostering independence, it's fostered a sense of kinship with the tolosans, the hasparans, and the Terrasan Empire, in the hopes that they'll return in force and roll back the jann. This seems unlikely as the political and military strength of Terrasa wanes, and separatist and nationalist sentiments grow stronger, pulling apart the fiber of the Empire. Many forasteros, therefore, have fled, and now live in exile in Terrasan lands. Many others, of course, have come to terms with Qizmiri subjugation. As it turns out, few enough of the natives are actually enslaved, and if forasteros are unlikely to get far ahead in the government of the jann; well, many forget that that was true under the Terrasans as well. They're lot is not so bad, and many forasteros have left behind much of their heritage, speaking and dressing in Qizmiri styles. Many of them, even prosper. But nationalist sentiments are not always logical, and many chafe under the jann. In fact, this truculence is arguably one of the main reasons that Qizmir has not yet managed to roll further west than it already has, and knock on the doors of Terrasa itself. There is a compelling need to deal with forastero unrest at home. Forasteros, in physical appearance, are not unlike rustic tolosans or hasparans. They tend to be of average height, perhaps slightly darker skin tone, with dark hair and eyes as well. Although they do not frequently use henna in their hair, henna tattoos are not uncommon, at least for special occasions. Their hair and beards tend to be think and very curly, almost kinky, in nature. Men and women both often keep their hair fairly short, but men almost always grow beards.

Iron Kingdoms

2011-11-11T12:54:00.001-05:00

Well, I'm not doing part 2 of DARK•HERITAGE ethnicities yet. I have a head-ache, and frankly I just don't have enough energy to compose that much original material. Rambling about something else that I don't need to think too hard about; that seems more my speed right now.

Although I'm in the middle of reading the third Conan compilation--and in fact, I only have two stories to go; one of which is the famous "Red Nails"--I've gotten kind of distracted from it by picking up The Monsternomicon by Privateer Press. This is one of the early books from PP--long before the Warmachine or Hordes games were a glimmer in Matt Wilson's eye. Back then, the company was Matt Staroscik, Matt Wilson and Brian Snōddy (I don't know if the line over the o is just an affectation so folks pronounce his name correctly or not, but I've seen it thus spelled online recently--at his website, no less). Only Wilson remains today, and the company has grown tremendously--but at the same time, it's no longer what it used to be. The Iron Kingdoms setting was, once upon a time, a roleplaying game setting; specifically a D&D setting, albeit one with a twist. For quite a long time, that's where Privateer Press put their efforts; the Witchfire Trilogy modules (which actually also contain a 4th entry; "Fool's Errand" a small minimodule that slide in between the 1st and 2nd published module. It had a pdf only release, until it was bundled with the other three in a reprinting of the entire trilogy.) Then there was Monsternomicon. Eventually there was even the Lock & Load Character Primer. Privateer Press had a reputation back then of being high quality (especially the monster book) but very slow to put new stuff out, and any release dates they projected were taken with a truckload of salt.

A few things happened to this picture in the next few years. I don't remember exactly the order of each, but they all became pretty important game-changers for Privateer Press.

3.5. While in the middle of writing the campaign setting book, the system of the SRD changed from 3e to 3.5. Privateer were left a little in the lurch. Do we go back and fix everything to be updated to the new system, or carry on as is? They ended up doing the former. What was already a very lengthy project that we'd been waiting literally years for dragged on even more. Not only that, the book grew to a size that defied reason. There were 800 pages of the setting book. It was eventually released in two massive 400 page parts; the first being mostly (but not exclusively, as is sometimes claimed) rules and setting basics, the second being almost completely systemless.
Warmachine got released. At first it was a pretty modest, small skirmish game. It sells like hotcakes. It makes much more money (presumably) than the RPG. Eventually, the game grows to encompass large battles with lots of miniatures, gains a few new factions, and becomes the second best selling miniatures game, after Warhammer 40k. The "savage spin-off" hordes becomes the fourth best selling miniatures game, after Warhammer. (For the math impaired, yet that means that 40k was 1st and Warhammer is 3rd. Based on the most recent sales data for summer 2011, that is.) Because of this, the RPG line suffers, getting only two more books after the setting, as well as a reprint of the original modules. A few articles with RPG content appear in the No Quarter magazine, but after a while even these dry up, and No Quarter becomes the Iron Kingdoms version of White Dwarf.
The tone and feel of the setting start to change. Whereas at first, Iron Kingdoms in the RPG line is presented as a kind of grim and gritty, pseudo-horror-like dark fantasy, struggling with a burgeoning industrial age, and peppered with a lot of independent threats and weirdness, it starts to coalesce into a setting that favors the wargame. Independents are vaccuumed up into the factions. There's no reason for some of the countries of the RPG setting to exist anymore, so they're invaded and incorporated into the bigger superpowers. A state of open warfare between the countries is now presented as canonical; whereas before, it was a kind of tense cold war feel, but clearly characters could be well traveled (look at Professor Pendrake's notes in Monsternomicon for an example.) As opportunities for the wargame were favored in the setting, opportunities for the RPG were sacrificed.
In addition to that major change, instead of a darker, primitive fantasy just starting to get some industrialization--very early industrial age feel--the setting is advanced to a nearly modern, or at least WWI in fantasy feel. Suddenly firearms are nowhere nearly as rare as the RPG implies. Warjacks of various kinds start to spill all over. The whole feel of the setting is less grim and dark and now more "HOLY COW, WE'RE TURNED UP TO ELEVENTY OVER HERE!!!! AREN'T WE AWESOME?!?!" This is reflected in the art as well as... well, as well as everything else. Heck, they even get a computer game developer to pardner up with them.

Finally, after years of sitting fallow, Privateer Press announces that they are going to release a house roleplaying system, the Privateer Press Roleplaying Game, to come out sometime in latish 2012 (it's not clear to me if PP has become trustworthy on release dates due to their Warmachine experience or not. I'm crossing my fingers, but at the same time, I won't be surprised if 2012 comes and goes without this being released.) The system is going to be at least somewhat based on the Warmachine and Hordes game in terms of rules.

See, to me, I don't know if this is a tragedy or a cool thing, or just a thing. I don't really play, nor am I interested in playing, any more systems. I don't actually use the Iron Kingdoms setting, although I liberally steal stuff from it, and like I said, the Monsternomicon is by far my favorite monster book(s). So material in a new system? What am I going to do with that? Unless I love the game for it's own sake (unlikely) it'll just be a (hopefully) pretty book of art and fluff that I turn to occasionally to look at the pretty pictures.

Speaking of which, Privateer Press have released this relatively lo-res sneak peak of a pretty picture, supposedly from the game. It does look nice. Like I said, I'd buy the book probably for the artwork alone (just like I did Warmachine: Escalation and some others) but I'd like to think I could get some more usage out of it than that, if I'm lucky.

Big scary machines

2011-11-10T10:05:00.004-05:00

I can't continue the series on ethnicity in DARK•HERITAGE today, unfortunately, because I left my notebook and folder with the information I'd need to make the update on my dresser at home. And, I anticipate being way too busy tonight, so I'll try to get to that tomorrow. In the meantime, another thought has crossed my mind (again.) I've long been impressed by the design sensibilities of the Iron Kingdoms by Privateer Press. I've been a fan ever since their first publication, The Longest Night a 3e D&D adventure module, and part one of the so-called Witchfire Trilogy. Curiously, one of the most notorious (at least to me) cases of vaporware is the advertised Corvis Compendium; a guide to the city of Corvis where the Witchfire Trilogy mostly takes place, that was supposed to come out in late 2001, if I remember. Privateer did a number of d20 books--and I have all but one of them (including, even, the pdf only Fool's Errand, a mini-module that's meant to take place between parts 1 and 2 of the Witchfire Trilogy. I also have a number of issues of the No Quarter magazine, which also occasionally had RPG stuff in it.

Of course, now Privateer have largely abandoned the RPG market (although there are persistant rumors that they may yet revive their efforts therein) in favor of their (probably) much more profitable tabletop miniatures battlegames Warmachine and Hordes--which have been giving Games Workshop a real run for their money for a time there in that market. And hey, that's mostly OK after all. Warmachine gives us all kinds of really cool miniatures and really cool artwork, in full color, of these big scary warmachines (hence the name of the game); steampunk robots belching soot and smoke from their coal furnaces, mostly. Here's a great example of a Khadorian warcaster, Sorscha, with one of these nasty machines, coming in out of a snowy night. Scanned from my copy of Warmachine: Escalation.

Now, I don't play Warmachine (or Hordes; the more savage big monster version of the same idea) but I do occasionally buy the books for their artwork and flavor text. It's a fascinating setting, and although I could never really run someone else's setting and enjoy it the same, I've had a lot of items stolen directly from the Iron Kingdoms over the years in DARK•HERITAGE and will probably have quite a few more before it's done. I've mostly backed off of having really overt steampunklike influences; the steamjacks in particular are too specific to Iron Kingdoms to be easily portable to another setting without being obvious. I have quite enjoyed the concept of Cryx, though--a nation that combines necromancy, piracy, blasphemous dragon-worship and constructs to have a totally scary and yet cool villain aesthetic all it's own. Here's one of the big nasty constructs from Cryx, the Nightmare, a soul-burning furnace powering it's giant iron frame.

I have had nations that were direct analogs of Cryx (and sometimes were, exactly, Cryx) in various of the settings I've run in the past, including my "Pirates of the Mezzovian Main" setting, and my Freeport homebrew setting. I don't have a direct analog in DARK•HERITAGE today, and probably won't exactly, but some aspects of Cryx will make their ways into such various nightmare realms as Tarush Noptii and the "Sith Lord" wannabes from the Cannibal Isle. Undead have always been one of my favorite villains, and this kind of industrialized undead business, a totally steampunk version of them, is really pretty fun.

I think mostly I just wanted an excuse to post all these images, because I like 'em, though. Tomorrow, or as soon as I get a good chance, I'll continue the ethnicities of the setting. For now I'll leave you with one more Cryx image; this time, some of the undead themselves, not soul-burning mechanical monstrosities. Although it's curious how the art for Cryx has made it often difficult to tell the two apart in many ways.

Ethnicity in Dark•Heritage, Part 1

2011-11-08T16:10:00.004-05:00

I'd been looking through my copy of Five Fingers recently, for fun. One of the narrators of one chapter is the historian for a mercenary company called the Sons of Thuria. In the Iron Kingdoms, Thuria is an ancient kingdom that doesn't exist anymore, and the Thurian ethnicity is straddles a major state border; they are common both in the south of Ord and the northwest of Cygna in cities like (no surprise here) Five Fingers and Ceryl. Curiously, after reading this passage at night, before falling asleep, I had a dream in which I was eating and using Sons of Thuria barbecue sauce. The Thurians make some tasty sauce, as I recall.

After this, I made sure I had BBQ for lunch the next day (and regretted that I now live in the Midwest instead of Texas), but I also got down my copy of some of my Iron Kingdoms source material, notably the IKCG or Iron Kingdoms Character Guide and the older Lock & Load: Iron Kingdoms Character Primer both of which discuss the various human ethnicities in the Iron Kingdoms. In the larger IKCG, they are illustrated--a sample bust type portrait of a man and woman of each race. In the L&L book, they are described physically. Curiously, you need both books to get a complete picture of what a "typical" member of each ethnicity looks like.

After that, I also checked out my Pathfinder Chronicles: Campaign Setting, the guide to Golarion, and especially the Inner Sea region. Both books do a pretty good job of describing human ethnicities and making them interesting choices to pick in play. The Iron Kingdoms takes the dubious step of creating mechanical differences between them, while Pathfinder instead has "half feats"; traits that are based on either culture, country, or environment of origin, which also serve to give some cultural flavor to the various human ethnicities.

Not that other settings don't have ethnicities, but these two do a particularly good job of integrating them. Others, like Forgotten Realms, or Eberron, for example, tend to come at us with the overly simplistic Belgariad model, where cultures and countries are 100% mappable, and individuals from each are a caricature of their cultural traits. No, the real world is more subtle.

There are two ways to approach ethnicities in roleplaying games. Pathfinder, for example, tends to paint with a pretty broad brush. Their ethnicities are like Garundi, which make up the majority of the ethnic make-up of an entire continent. In real world terms, that would also be applicable to DARK•HERITAGE, that would be sort of like making "Mediterranean" an ethnicity, and brushing together whatever differences there may be from someone from Barcelona, Nice, Venice, Sicily, Crete, Malta or Tunisia. For my purposes, that's clearly too coarse. But I don't want to go to the other extreme, where I'm saying that even within Greater Catalonia, for example, Valencians, Andorrans and folks from the Balearic Isles are different ethnicities. In real life, there's actually controversy over issues like that.

The genesis of an ethnicity is also a complicated issue. Not every ethnicity is made up of an ancient population core that has persisted for generation after generation after generation for thousands of years (although some are.) Sometimes ethnogenesis requires only circumstances that cause geographically proximate peoples, regardless of origin, to see each other as "their people", to begin to (if they aren't already) interbreed with each other, and to develop common culture, language and traditions. This can actually happen fairly quickly in the right circumstances, and some ethnicities in DARK•HERITAGE are really quite young, all things considered. Others are suitably ancient.

So for DARK•HERITAGE, I'm looking for an approach that is broad enough, yet not too broad. An approach similar to that taken by the Iron Kingdoms, actually. Here's the ethnicities of the setting, speaking broadly:

The Kurushi are a group of peoples who live in the very southwest areas that are mapped. Their name comes from the major country in the area, Kurushat, but in reality, many of them have only recently been integrated into that polity, and some of them have more loyalty to their local traditions than to the grand, national one. Be that as it may, the kurushans have a similar appearance, traditions, language and way of life, even if their more or less unity into a single country is a recent thing. Fiercely militaristic, frequently even jingoistic to the point of obnoxiousness, and an active, virile and growing group of people, the kurushans are ready to take on the Mezzovian region by storm... except that, well, they're still relatively removed from the area, and have enough of their own issues going on around the shores of the much smaller inland Karkose Sea to deal with. Fractuous and proud, they will probably always have to deal with local pride, insubordination and other issues within their khaganate, especially as the old khagan sees the end of his life approaching and the tempestuous scrabbling for his position that will no doubt follow his death among his eligible heirs apparent. The Kurushi are fairly tall and pale-skinned except when tanned by summers of campaigning and other outdoor activity. They value achievement and ambition, and even the wealthy and the nobility pursue scholarly, athletic, military, or even mercantile pursuits. Success in any of these arenas brings prestige. Because of this, many kurushans are fairly tanned; they maintain an active, outdoor lifestyle. They have dark hair and extremely pale gray eyes, which are often almond shaped due to modest epicanthic folds. Kurushans have only fairly recently been coming into the lands of other peoples, have been isolated on the other side of the Black Mountains and the Cavusto steppes, but when they have come into contact with isolated settlements, villages, or even full cities other other nationalities, their response has often been aggressive: raiding or even outright conquering and enslaving of thousands of people. They now have diplomatic relationships with Terrasa and others, so much of that has been officially curtailed, but the kurushans, once they get past their local issues, have been eyeing the rich lands of the Mezzovian region and seeing themselves as the natural overlords.
The Calçans, or Calçinos are a young, still crystalizing ethnic group, located up in the "lost province" of Calça. Exactly who the core population core of this region were is lost to time. Clearly there were some autochthonous peoples here when Terrasan settlers, soldiers, colonists and conquistadores arrived, but the culture and language owe much more to Terrasa than to the origin natives. That said, the calçinos have always viewed themselves as a people apart from the rest of the empire; more fiercely independent, more ruggedly frontiersmen-like in outlook, stubborn and free. Of late, that has been quite literally true; the province isn't called "the Lost Province" for nothing. Calça has essentially been abandoned by the empire. No imperial official has been seen in over a generation, and that counts the dubious presence of the men and woman who supported the late Archduke; who himself operated independently and forgotten of the Imperial center. On the books, Calça still belongs to the Empire, but as it's will and political capital wither, the chances that it will make an attempt to reintegrate the province get more and more slim. Calça is as much cut off from the empire by trackless forests, snow-covered (at least in winter) dramatic mountain peaks, and faint old roads that are frequently plagued by bandits and highwaymen. For a number of generaitons, the calçinos have developed in isolation, and have become somewhat unique and even peculiar in that time. While friendly enough to people they know, calçans are often surly, slow to trust, and wary of outsiders. Even folks from other villages get a wary eye when they pass through. Hardworking and rural in economy, Calça is a province of agriculture, fishing and livestock. There are few genuine luxuries amongst calçans, and they distrust open display of ostentatious wealth. While lower class terrasans clearly are a major element of the mix that became calçans, in general they are physically somewhat distinct. Calçans often have fairer and often quite freckly skin, and rather than luxurious black hair, they're more likely to have various shades of brown, and brown eyes. The further north you go in Calça, the taller and fairer in general the Calçans become, and some folks have theorized that the original inhabitants must have been settled and agricultural relatives of the Haltash tribes. In fact, there are a few semi-legendary old stories amongst the Haltash that they are, in fact, the descendants of the natives of Calça who refused to submit to the coming terrasans, and instead crossed the Vajol Downs to live the pastoral nomadism life of a tribesman. Scholars from places like Simashki say this is nonsense; the Baal Hamazi empire has records of Haltash tribesmen in those lands since long before the terrasans come to the area. Nonetheless, the possibility of a kinship of some kind between the calçinos and the Haltash tribes is a popular one on both sides of the downs.
The tolosans are the dominant group on the western side of the Mezzovian sea. In addition, they've contributed to the development of various other "hybrid" ethnicities; ethnicities like the calçans, norderos, stranzeros or forasteros who crystalized when ancient tolosans came across other populations and mingled with them over time to form all new societies and cultures. Despite recognizing a kinship to these ancient splinter groups, the tolosans are also cognizant of being their own, distinct ethnicity, and even the most anti-Terrasan Liuran pirate feels a sense of ethnic patriotism when thinking of the accomplishments of his people, the spectacular skyline of Terrasa, the spread of the Terrasan language family and the long reach of its king. Proud and passionate, quick to anger, and quick to forgive, the fiery, mercurial temper of the tolosans is legendary (and frankly, quite exaggerated). With usually fine, sometimes even sharp features, thick dark hair, dark brown eyes and olive skin, the tolosans tend to be a good-looking people, although their rich traditional cuisine makes many of the indolent and older population lose their svelte younger figures over time.
The norderos are the most populous ethnic group of the central north Mezzovian area. They are particularly common in the Razine peninsula. Although the norderos recognize a kinship with the tolosans, and acknowledge that some of their ancestors were tolosan settlers and colonists, those same tolosans left the Tolosan Isles region before the rise of the Terrasan polity, and the Razines have, in general, always set uneasily and unhappily with foreign rulers, ever since the Kings of Terrasa "acquired" the title to the duchy of Razina through dynastic union. Today, the city of Razina itself has a significant tolosan population, close to half the population, and probably a plurality. But the countryside for hundreds of leagues round about belongs to the norderos. Because of this political unsettledness, the norderos often downplay the tolosan angle of their ancestry, and rather focus on the old kingdom of Rozovka from many centuries ago, which sat in--more or less--similar boundaries to the duchy. Interest in the once-endangered Balshatoi language has been rekindled, and the norderos stress their relationship with their northern brethren now. Be that as it may, they clearly as a hybrid population, and no matter the current waxing of interest in all things balshatoi, the norderos are something else entirely. Not tall, but often fairly thick-bodied, with wide, freckled faces and brown hair, with green, blue or brown eyes, the norderos also have a fairly distinctive look to them.

Next time: more. This post got too long and I didn't want to put everyone on it at once.

Coinage in Dark•Heritage

2011-11-04T11:36:00.002-04:00

Well, the last two weeks have been absolutely crazy. I've had in mind two updates to the DARK•HERITAGE setting through this blog, but haven't had time to type them up. Right now, I'm making the effort to at least put one of them out there, with the hope that the second will follow later today or at least this weekend.

I've said before that for the sake of simplicity, I'd probably keep the D&D standard coinage of copper pieces (cp), silver pieces (sp)(worth 10 cp) and gold pieces (gp)(worth 10 sp), but give them more flavorful names at least. I've now got that, plus a few "filler" coins that some mints have issued. I've also got a slightly more complex option for those who want them; after all, is it really reasonable that all copper pieces are the exact same weight and purity, regardless of mint and country of origin? For most, reasonableness in terms of verisimilitude takes a back seat to ease of use, and I can dig that. I want to offer a slightly more complicated picture, for those who want it, though.

The default, and "standard" (as well as most traded and most respected in the area) coinage is that of Terrasa itself, unsurprisingly. Terrasa uses the following set of coins, which track exactly to the D&D standard, with a few extras.

The pillar, or pilar is a copper coin (worth 1 cp) stamped with the image of a pillar on one side, and usually the current king in Terrasa on the other.
The real is a much larger copper coin (worth 5 cp) with a larger picture of the king, with more detail, and the queen on the other side. Because it has double heads with two royals, it was named the real (or royal).
The escudo, or shield, is a small silver penny (worth 1 sp) with a stylized image of the seal of Terrasa embossed on a shield.
The ducat is a much larger silver coin (worth 5 sp) with different faces on them. They are minted in smaller batches, typically, and have the face of a person who is in royal favor at the time of minting.
The doubloon, or "double ducat" is a smaller gold coin (worth 1 gp) with a picture of Rossolló, an ancestor of the current king and folk hero to the Terrasan people.
Finally, the guilder is a large gold coin, the most valuable in current circulaton of the Terrasan coins, worth 5 gp. It has a picture of a sailing ship on one side, and the palace in Terrasa on the other.

The other city-states who are part of the Terrasan empire do occasionally mint coins, usually to commemorate a special occasion. However, past kings have passed and enforced strict laws governing the weight and purity, and so while such coins may have different images on them, they are worth the exact same; they are sorta like the various state quarters in the US currently--still quarters, but with a "collectable" face. A few of these have their own nicknames, but mostly the differences between them are ignored, and they circulate freely like their more common cousins.

Porto Liure is a city that trades in all kinds of coins, and it's not unusual to see trades happening on the street with a mixed bag of all kinds of coins from all kinds of places. Terrasan coins are probably the most commonly traded, but Porto Liure does mint its own coins, and they see a fair bit of local circulation. For the simple version of coinage, assume that the values are equal (i.e., 1 cp is 1 cp, regardless of whether it's a Terrasan pilar or a Liuran pistole), but in reality, the purity and weights of the Liuran coins is not as good as that of the Terrasan coins. Typically, Liuran coins trade for 70-80% of the value of standard Terrasan coins, and for worn or suspected shaved coins, they could trade for as low as 50%.

The pistole, marked with the image of crossed blackpowder pistols, is a small copper penny (1 cp)
The ecu, marked with the image of various lords of the Port, is a larger copper piece. While no longer minted, these do have some value as collectors items, and can sometimes fetch rather hefty prices, depending on the demand of the buyer. In general, based on copper content alone, it's worth 3-4 cps, but many merchants will not take them.
The plata is the silver piece, marked with an image of the lighthouse in the Port's harbor. (1 sp)
The piece of eight, so named because it was originally worth eight ecus, has since been standardized to be a simple gold piece (1 gp) but the name remains nonetheless. This coin is stamped with a stylized image of the naval battle of Gandesa, a decisive victory for the Liurans, and the battle most directly responsible for their independent status today.
A number of black market coins called cobs see circulation in Porto Liure amongst the criminal element. These are usually made of melted down ore, often from items that are more difficult to fence, such as stolen silver, bullion or jewelry. Molded into a roughly round, flat shape, and stamped or carved--sometimes--with the seal of a gang or smuggler, the weight and purity of these coins is very suspect and variable. Anyone willing to deal with cobs better take some ranks in the Appraise skill, and even so: caveat emptor. This is not to say that cobs are not valuable--they are made of precious metal after all, simply that without any governing force, the exact value of any particular cob could be almost anything.

When the Qizmiri came to these shores, they had no tradition--so they say--of using coins, but contact with the Terrasans soon cottoned them on to the benefits of a monetary system. They use a system that's similar to the Terrasan model, but stripped down to simply one coin of each metal (copper, silver and gold.) You can go the simple route and treat them as copper pieces, silver pieces and gold pieces, or recognize that they are actually somewhat larger than their Terrasan counterparts, and usually perforated. Some are also not round. In fact, some have protruding parts that can break off, so traders are careful to inspect Qizmiri coins and ensure that they are all in one piece--either that or weigh the total carefully. If whole, Qizmiri coins are usually worth about 125% of a Terrasan coin, due to their larger size.

The drachma is the copper piece, with an image of the first sultan of the Qizmir island itself, and an old-fashioned trireme on the other side.
The dirham is a silver piece. Like the Terrasan ducats, there are a number of personalities who have been minted on these coins, although they all still circulate easily enough.
The dinar is the gold coin, always minted with the current caliph--although older coins with former caliphs still circulate as well.

Baal Hamazi used to issue coins, and most of the successor states do as well, based on the coinage of the former empire. In reality, there'd likely be a bewildering array of coins of various sizes and purities, but for simplicity's sake, I'm going to consolidate all Hamazin coins to a single coinage, and the details between them will just be the names and faces stamped on them. In Baal Hamazi, they prefer to keep things at the silver level, as much as possible. Copper coins circulate as well, as do gold, but gold coins are much more rare, and for large purchases, writs, gems or other items are preferred. The hamazin coins are somewhat larger, worth about 110% of the Terrasan equivalent. Unless, of course, you prefer to simply harmonize all your weights and values to a standard, for ease of use.

The lu is worth 1 cp.
The luhhan is worth 1 sp
The namme is worth 2½ sp, or 25 cp
The rashi is worth 5 sp
The zizi is worth 1 gp.

Trading with Kurushat is much more difficult, as they don't use a simple base 10 system, where copper and silver and gold are equivalent to 10 of the next higher denomination. In addition, their "coins" are actually chits of mother-of-pearl cut from shells found in the Karkose Sea. Their money sees little to no use outside of Kurushat itself, and because Kurushat is separated from Terrasa by the Black Mountains and the Cavusto steppes, direct trade is not common between the two areas anyway. What does happen tends to be more about barter and takes place at a high level between powerful merchant brokers, nobles or caravan owners, involving entire barge loads or caravan loads of goods, if not more. That said, here are the various mother-of-pearl standard chits and their relative value:

The mazad is worth 3 cp. It is very small, and easily misplaced by the careless.
The ashad is worth 18 cp--often rounded up to 2 sp for convenience. Especially if trading in the silver pieces favor.
The arkhad is worth 6 sp.
The jharad is a fairly large piece of mother of pearl, as big as a man's palm. It is worth 2 gp.

The Three Musketeers

2011-10-24T09:57:00.003-04:00

One of my favorite movies of all time is David Lester's The Three Musketeers from 1973. You know the one; stars Michael York, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, Raquel Welch, Faye Dunnaway, Christopher Lee and Charleton Heston. Among others. Great movie. One of the best adaptations of probably the most adapted movie of all time. Since that time, we've seen mostly forgettable adaptaions from 1993, with Chris O'Donnell as D'Artagnan, a semi-wire-fu very loose adaptation called The Musketeer from 2001, which I barely remembered even now, a 2004 animated version starring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy as the three musketeers, which features very little of the original plot, and most recently, a Paul W. S. Anderson Matrix-like adaptation that just came out this last weekend. It had a disappointing weekend (I think, anyway) opening at #4 for just under $9 domestically, although it's already made over $73 M worldwide, and will no doubt prove to have been a profitable venture.

Although my expectations for the movie were never too high, they actually plummeted significantly when I realized Paul W. S. Anderson was the director. While I've never seen the Resident Evil movies, they never really looked all that great. And Mortal Kombat and Alien vs. Predator and his other movies had some good moments, but were largely kinda forgettable and dull. I actually think the new adaptation, The Three Musketeers that just came out, may be his best movie yet. That doesn't mean that it's a great adaptation, but it's a reasonably fun one, and it actually does a decent job of following the plot of the novel, all things considered.

The king, while still useless, is made surprisingly likeable. Buckingham is more of a villain that the Cardinal in many ways. D'Artagnan is surprisingly less likeable in many ways than anyone else in the cast, as kind of a jerky mouth-off. Constance is vacuous, but very pretty. Rochefort is not played by a young Christopher Lee, and partly because of that, he ends up being too over-the-top and hammish. My wife and I both rolled our eyes when Countess de Winter was fished out of the English Channel after plummeting to what should have been her certain death from a good thousand feet up. And the notion of these balloon warships is really just pretty silly; all it takes is a good shot or two to the balloon itself and the whole thing comes plummeting to the ground, killing all on board.

That said, the movie was pretty much everything I hoped it would be. Based on the preview, I didn't hope that it would stand alongside David Lester's adaptation as a fairly serious version of the story. I expected it to be silly, over-the-top, shallow, and most of all, I expected it to be fun. It was all of those. It exceeded my expectations. In fact, I'm already plotting to go see it again, this time with the kids.

Eisenhorn

2011-10-21T08:41:00.001-04:00

I finished Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn omnibus, which includes the three Eisenhorn novels (Xenos, Malleus and Hereticus) as well as bridging short stories that connect them. It was a fairly lengthy doorstop of a book; in large trade paperback format and nearly 800 pages long. Granted, that still makes it smaller (as an omnibus) than some other single books in series like The Wheel of Time, The Sword of Truth or The Song of Fire and Ice. Among others. For those of you (ha! As if any of you would care enough to do this) who follow my "What I'm Reading" sidebar over there (on the left side) may have noticed, I've had this one on my list for quite a long time. Months, actually. Since sometime in the early summer. It's now late October. Most of that time can be explained by the fact that, well, yeah, it is a pretty big book, and it's been an absolutely crazy time in real life for me. I've had very little free time to read, and I've also been interrupted, sometimes for relatively long periods of time, where I had to put Eisenhorn down and read something else due to constraints that had nothing to do with my desire to finish Eisenhorn. But, I also have to admit that not all of that delay was caused by external constraints. I'll get to that in a moment.

Eisenhorn is a Black Library imprint. Black Library is the fiction publishing arm of Games Workshop, the company that makes, among other things, the Warhammer miniatures game, Warhammer 40,000, Blood Bowl, Necromunda, Inquisitor, Mordheim and more besides. They've also in recent years had some pretty good success marketing those intellectual properties into computer games. And, as any stop by pretty much any bookstore in America (Barnes & Noble, I guess? Now that Borders is gone, are there any other chains I'm missing out on that are significant?) will show you, the Black Library section has grown just in the last few years to take up a surprisingly large amount of shelf space, at least equal to the Wizards of the Coast D&D novels lines, or the Star Wars and Star Trek novels lines. Maybe larger. Black Library is becoming a major force in fantasy and science fiction publishing. And, as you can guess, their novels are set in the same fictional universes as their games--so they've basically got Warhammer--a darker, grimmer, Germanic take on standard Tolkienian fantasy with a heavy dose of Lovecraftian horror--and Warhammer 40k, a darker, grimmer take on a heavily Dune-inspired space opera that also has a heavy dose of Lovecraftian horror. And curiously, a lot of fantasy, including space elves, space orcs, space hobbits and space dwarves. There's also space demons and space wizards of sorts. It's not hard sci-fi, by any means, but then again, not much of what seems to be really popular these days is, so I certainly don't hold that against it. And, in fact, as a bigger fan of fantasy than of science fiction (in general) I wouldn't find that a problem in any case.

I went into Eisenhorn with extremely high expectations, which is usually not a good thing, based on the fact that I'd heard it described so often as "the best shared-world, licensed fiction that money can buy." I could have possibly tempered that expectation by pointing out (to myself, at least) that that isn't necessarily saying much, as there's so much really bad shared world fiction out there, and only very limited shining stars in that field. After having read the omnibus, I'm not sure if I agree or not. It's good--don't get me wrong--in fact, Eisenhorn is very good. But the best? I dunno that I'd go that far.

The novels are told in a kind of retrospective, past-tense first person viewpoint. Normally, a first person viewpoint helps to bring a sense of immediacy to a novel, but in this case, I think it did not. Part of it was the past tense retrospective approach, where Abnett often would throw out asides that made it sound like it was all written long after the fact ('Gideon went on to be famous for his scholarly writings on this or that topic', for example, is an interesting bit of color about a fairly minor character. It doesn't really bring a sense of immediacy to the writing, though, nor make us feel that Gideon is facing any significant risk in the narrative we're reading now.) Part of this also may have been Eisenhorn's somewhat clinical, cold "voice" which was an important part of his character, but which made us feel oddly alienated from him, even as we got the story in his own words and from his own perspective. Or maybe it's just the innate Britishness of Abnett that makes the book seem somewhat detached from this American's perspective. Most likely it's a combination of all three factors.

An odd side effect of this curious detachment is that when I hit stopping places, I didn't really mind putting it down and letting myself be distracted, and I also didn't always feel compelled to pick it up again as soon as I was available. There were times--even when I wasn't distracted by books that I had to read immediately because I needed to give them back, or movies or TV shows that I needed to watch and send back to Netflix, or whatever--where I just didn't make much progress in the novel because I just didn't feel like I had to dive into it an devour it--I was more than happy to take my time sipping from the novel, sometimes no more than a page or two a day for a week or more at a stretch. Other times, though, the well-paced and well-structured plots of each individual novel had me reading a hundred or more pages at a stretch, unwilling to put the book down except when I had no choice. But the odd, detached voice made me feel less connected to characters who should otherwise have been really quite intriguing; I found I didn't necessarily care all that much what happened to them. Part of this was also the structure of the trilogy (as opposed to the structures of the individual novels within the series) where the plot did not flow as easily, and there were huge gaps, off-screen deaths and departures (or arrivals) and other significant changes to characters that we didn't actually get to witness. I wonder if Abnett really initially envisioned this as a trilogy, or if that's an artifact of how they were later put together. I'd be willing to believe that each novel was written as a stand-alone follow-up to the predecessor, without any eye towards what may follow later--it just doesn't feel tightly bound together as a trilogy to me.

Possibly, the next subsequent trilogy, the Ravenor omnibus, benefits from having been structured as a planned trilogy, although I've not heard that report from folks who have read it. And Abnett is now claiming that he will top off the two trilogies with a third--a trilogy of trilogies, if you will--called the Bequin trilogy, and again, involving many of the same characters, although presumably significantly advanced in time from the point of departure where Eisenhorn ends. Curiously, Eisenhorn also stops more than it ends, I thought. The novel is clearly done, and then we get brief notes on what many of the characters did afterwards with their life, but at the same time, the final denoument is oddly lacking and unsatisfying, and it seems to preclude leaving a lot of open loose ends for the Ravenor or Bequin trilogies to follow up on.

In fact, all in all, I'd say that the Eisenhorn novels were strongly driven by plot, and not by character. Not that the characters weren't interesting, because many of them were, but we got too little insight into most of them, and too little chance to see them as characters--with the exception of Gregor Eisenhorn himself. In that case, what kind of plot do the novels have? The main character, Gregor Eisenhorn, is an Inquisitor, a kind of intragalactic Special Agent in a setting where the lives of individuals are not highly valued. It's also a setting where the danger from Lovecraftian entities from "The Warp", a kind of extradimensional space that is both the setting's equivalent to hyperspace and therefore a way to travel the stars as well as a source of psychic powers (i.e., space magic), daemons (I do love the British spelling of that word, by the way), and a dimension that is also strongly driven by human emotions, many of which, personified, have become humanities worst enemies--the Greater Daemons of Chaos--godlike powers who seek the ruination of the physical world. Eisenhorn starts off as a fairly puritanical witch-hunter type, and the one character arc that we get to really see develop over the course of the novel is his "fall" if you will into radicalism; colluding with the forces of the alien and the daemon if necessary for the greater good.

There's some pretty nifty scenes that have a slight horror overlay, although Eisenhorn is way too much of an action novel to ever really stir any emotional response to the horror, but in many ways Abnett took some Lovecraftian concepts and made them his own. Lovecraft never made non-Euclidean geometry sound like anything other than a dry and somewhat esoteric obsession; Abnett makes it seem genuinely disturbing at times. He also does a good job of taking the concept of the "forbidden tome" and making it pretty creepy, including the Necroteuch (a science fictional homage to the Necronomicon, no doubt) and the Malus Codicium. In addition, perhaps as an Easter egg to readers, Abnett specifically mentions The Book of Eibon as well, which is perhaps just enough Yog-Sothothery to tie the Warhammer Chaos mythos to the Cthulhu Mythos. It was clearly heavily influenced by Lovecraft anyway.

One side effect of reading an omnibus is that I'm now strongly in the mood to read some unconnected and shorter stuff. I'm going to finish the Conan collections by Del Rey by reading the third (of three) compilations, and I'm actually already fairly well on my way there. After that, we'll see. In general, after reading some short fiction, I crave the longer structure and detail of a novel, but I don't think I'm necessarily craving the often rambling and long-winded approach of a series. I'll play it by ear and see what I'm in the mood to read after Conan is done--in spite of what my On Deck sidebar says.

For Eisenhorn, I definitely recommend the omnibus. It's fun stuff for any fan of darker, action and mystery oriented space opera. It's fun stuff for any fan of Lovecraftiana. It's got a good pace and plot within each novel, although they feel like they were not originally intended to be a trilogy; just organic sequels that grew after the first one after it proved popular enough to spawn them. I also don't know that I'd say this is the best shared world fiction I've read, or even if it is, if that makes it amongst the best that the genre overall can offer. My impression of Eisenhorn is that it's pretty good---but it's not great. I may eventually pick up the Ravenor omnibus too, but not anytime soon.

Sonic Legends

2011-10-17T21:35:00.003-04:00

I've said before that I prefer actual movie music soundtracks to be the background music for my games, and I've even posted a preferred playlist of sorts for my DARK•HERITAGE setting.

That said, I've spent much more time and money than I really should picking up some other background stuff. Stuff that, musically, may not be as deft, but as background music, it may be even better in some ways; it fades a bit more into the background, while still conjuring up a mood. I've blogged briefly about guys like Midnight Syndicate and Nox Arcana in the past (and given the season, they are both appropriate right now. Both also have new(ish) CDs available; The Dark Tower by NA and Carnival Arcane by MS).

One that I had not blogged about before, but which is kinda cool, is Sonic Legends. This isn't really a band per se; it's more a collection of loosely associated artists who release stuff. Here's their website. You can listen to much of their stuff there, and you can also listen to samples (and buy tracks) at places like the Paizo store, RPGNow or DriveThruRPG. I've bought them at Paizo in the past, but the price and process is pretty much the same everywhere else.

These tracks are interesting and loopable; on the main website for Sonic Legends, they apparently have provided them for indie computer game use as their primary target, although Paizo sells them as if they were RPG themed. Really, there's not a lot of difference. I've got quite a few tracks now:

"Ancient Archives"
"Arabian Bazaar"
"City of the Dark Elves"
"Country Village"
"Forest Journey"
"Magical Spell"
"On the Open Sea"
"The Summoning"

They tend to be a mix of darker and lighter sounds, and many of them have sound effects mingled with the music. If you're going to use them in a game, you need to be ready to play it on cue, and let it roll fairly quietly in the background, probably from a laptop or tablet PC that you're using as a DM tool. I haven't quite gotten that fancy, but I'd like to some day. In the meantime, it works as background music for me while I work, just like the Nox Arcana, Midnight Syndicate and the actual movie music soundtracks do.

Some fun Yog-Sothothery

2011-10-12T15:16:00.002-04:00

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/1/post/2011/10/forbidden-history-images-of-great-cthulhu.html
Couldn't resist reposting this link of some historical images of Cthulhu, from Mayan carvings, and Medieval books and charts.

Needs to add some Chinese and Egyptian, and we'd really be set.

Real history into game events

2011-10-12T10:17:00.003-04:00

Looking through the actual history of the world we live in is more likely to pay dividends for ideas to incorporate into your fantasy world than any amount of reading of other fantasy novels. As an example for today, I give you the history of Nice with regards to the Italian Risorgimiento.

Giusseppe Garibaldi

Giusseppe Garibaldi, the hero of the Italian Unification, was actually a Nizzardo Italian. He very strongly pushed for inclusion of Nice in the United Italy, but the Italians ceded Nice to France (from the Kingdom of Piedmont/Sardinia) in exchange for their support. The Niçard language is a bit difficult to classify; it's not clear if it's a "northern Italian" language, similar to Monagesque, Ligurian or Piedmontese, or an Occitan dialect. Clearly it's got major input from both. There's a school of thought that the Occitan (and subsequent French) influence has grown considerably since the ceding of the city to France.

In fact, Giulio Vignoli wrote that nearly a third of the population of Nice either fled or was forced to move from Nice across the border into Italy, and that France subsequently encouraged neighboring Provençal settlers to move into the area, thus changing the language dynamic almost overnight. Today, the Niçard dialect (whether it be a Ligurian or Occitan language, it's a dialect influenced heavily by the other, either way) is clearly "wandering" closer to French. Occitan itself is a fading language, as are most of the north Italian languages, who enjoy no official capacity from the Italian government. Piedmontese wasn't even successful in being declared one of the official languages of the Olympic Games in Torino--even though Torino is the center of the Piedmontese language!

A number of Italians were very unhappy about the disposition of Nice, in particularly Nizzardo Italians (as you can imagine, since they were either handed off to a foreign country or displaced). For a time, irredentism revanchism was a popular conceit amongst them, as well as Italian nationalists in general. Today, I don't believe that to be a major force, but there is an effort to preseve the Niçard language, and to use the "classical orthography" which is much less "frenchified" than the alternative.

In actuality, this irredentism is a bit curious; Nice has frequently been on both sides of the "italian" and French borders--I put Italian in lower case and quotes because much of that time predates the foundation of the nation of Italy, of course. From the fall of the Roman Empire until 1388--with the exception of about half a century of independence as a maritime city-state, Nice was part of of the County of Provence, which was, of course, part of the kingdom of the Merovingian and later Carolingian Frankish kings. Thus, it's history after being a Roman holding was primarily always French, up into the late-middle Middle Ages.

From 1388 until 1860--with the exception of the time from 1792-1814 when it was again ruled by the French following the successes of Napolean (himself an "Italian" from Corsica, which was also a French possession) the Savoy's ruled Nice as part of their Kingdom of Sardinia, which was the core around which the Italian Unification was achieved. Like I said, it was famously traded to France for their support against the meddling of Austria, and the ceding of the Lombardy to the newly uniting Italy. Of course, this didn't change the nature of the people, language or culture of the area. Up until the French and Italian (and Spanish--this happened there too) attempts to stamp out the various regional languages within their borders, much of the countryside around Nice would have been part of a much larger Liguirian community of speakers, who's dialects gradually converged into Provençal to the west and northwest, and into Piedmontese to the north, and Emiliagno to the east. Nice would have been merely an important population blip, with a regional dialect that may have contested with Genoese as the most important Ligurian dialectal center.

How to use this in fantasy? Well, I'm a bit of a nut for linguistic topics, but linguistics often underlies a population's sense of identity. The notion of people being forced to leave, or voluntarily leaving their homes due to a sense of nationalism, patriotism, and identity with one rather than another state, the notion of seething irredentism or revanchism leading to riots, exodus, or other political games--this would be something that any fantasy RPG should be glad to incorporate. The notion that all inhabitants of all places just sit quietly, happy with their situation all the time, is not one that history itself suggests is likely. Plus, that kind of intrigue is much more exciting (to me, at least) then finding a hole in the ground with monsters in it.

Among Thieves

2011-10-11T09:03:00.001-04:00

US Cover

Yesterday late afternoon, despite a very busy schedule, I was able to polish off Douglas Hulick's debut novel, Among Thieves. This is a fantastic novel, and it manages to do a lot of what I would want fantasy to do. The main character, Drothe, is a charming scoundrel, not a hero. In fact, we're introduced to him as he's supervising the torture of a smuggler who failed to deliver the product that he promised. Drothe himself is a somewhat locally prominent member of "the Kin" which is local slang for the fantasy Mafia.

This torture scene is perhaps for a bit of schock value, though. Among Thieves does not wallow in sordidness or violence, it also makes it clear that such is part of life in the setting as presented. It used violence to make a point, but in general, the main character and his friends are sympathetic and likeable. This torture scene starts a chain of events that entangles Drothe in a much bigger game than he is aware, putting him and those he cares about in harm's way repeatedly. From this point on, the pacing and structure of the novel greatly resembles that of a mainstream bestseller thriller in many regards--something that I've actually specifically advocated. Unlike Polansky's Low Town, which I also recently reviewed, magic and the fantastic in general are a bit more suffused in the story, though. Not so much that it isn't at heart a swashbuckling thriller of down-to-earth scoundrels--because that's certainly exactly what it is--but enough that it doesn't feel like the story could simply have been set in an actual historical setting and been told pretty much as is without any problem either.

All in all, this is a very strong debut novel. To make matters even better, Hulick was contracted to write at least three novels, and the second has a cover already unveiled--even though pre-orders from Amazon indicate that it's a good nine months away from being released. The third should be out in 2013, so they're due to come out at a decent clip. I enjoyed it enough that I'm excited to see the follow-ups, and I hope it sells well enough that the three aren't the only novels we get in the series. I think there's a lot more that can be done with the book than we got here.

Jann in Dark•Heritage

On a minor note, there were a lot of correspondences to my own DARK•HERITAGE setting too, although many of them were minor. All of the action takes place in Ildrecca (which sounds a bit like my own city of Iclezza, I thought) which Hulick says is vaguely a fantasy analog of Byzantium or Constantinople (and later, of course, Istanbul. They Might Be Giants actually left off the original name there.) This gives the whole setting--what we see of it, anyway--a vaguely early Middle Ages or Late Antiquity Mediterranean feel, and names in the story are often somewhat Italian or Greek sounding (I don't have any Greek in DARK•HERITAGE, of course, but I've got lots of Italian and Catalan and pseudo-Spanish.) And Hulick makes a few references to (and has a semi-major character who's a member of) a middle-eastern pseudo Persian/Arabian/Turkish ethnicity called the Djan or Djanese, which is seems like a slightly novel take on the transliterations jann and djinn; combining the first part of the latter with the vowel of the former. My setting, of course, has the jann--not exactly genies, but rather a culture with a fantasy vaguely Arabian Nights-like feel--which seems to be exactly what Hulick did, again.

UK Cover

So, if the novel did exactly what I think a fantasy novel should in terms of structure and format, managed to do it well, and even has a few obvious similarities to my own setting, I should have loved this novel. It should shoot to near the top of my list of favorite fantasy novels of all time in fact. Well... it didn't quite do that. I do like it a lot, but I didn't completely love it all the way, and while I'm excited to read the follow ups, I'm not going to turn in my library copy and run out and buy my own because, heck, I know I'll re-read it over and over again still. So, while it seems a bit gauche to complain about a novel that I liked quite a bit, and possibly change the tenor of an overwhelmingly positive review to one that sounds a bit mixed (although that's not my intention) I'm going to do it anyway, because reading this novel, and seeing where Hulick wasn't quite able to make it work for me, was--if nothing else--very educational. It gave me some important flags to watch out for myself.

First; the novel didn't do a lot of setting development. While this isn't necessarily a problem--and I don't mean to imply that none was done of course; there were a few interesting takes on the organizations of Ildrecca, the history and theology of the Empire, the nature of magic, and a few other things--there wasn't quite enough. There's a specific reason for this, which I'll get to in a moment. Without this specific reason, it probably would have been sufficient, and in fact, you've gotta be careful as a fantasy writer to not dally too long in the travelogue aspect of your setting. While I think that it's actually one of the things that fantasy readers in general want from their books, I've read plenty of fantasy books where momentum, plot, and other essential features of a well-written novel are completely thrown out the door while the author meanders through a lecture on the history, geography or anthropology of his setting. Bad form. You've got to be careful to give the readers enough to scratch their itch to explore through the book while not derailing the other aspects of what makes a well-written novel actually be well-written. So, being very careful, and in fact possibly quite spare, in setting description isn't a bad thing.

However Hulick's plot revolves around a "secret history" theme. That what the characters know and take for granted actually is not true. I love secret histories (thanks X-files!) but it's a little difficult to pull them off in fantasy. In the real world, what the characters take for granted is the same as what the readers take for granted, which makes it easy. If I posit a secret history in which John Kennedy was actually an alien doppelganger of some kind, making Lee Harvey Oswald a self-sacrificing hero who saved the human race from alien invasion, the "shock value" of that secret history is easy to maintain, because, well, we all know about the Kennedy assassination, and we all know that John F. Kennedy was, of course, a guy from the East Coast, not an alien lookalike. In a fantasy setting, though, if you want to throw a secret history out there, you first have to strongly and firmly ground the "establishment" story. Otherwise, when you hint that there's a secret history behind the establishment story... well, yeah, OK. Whatever. Hulick either 1) didn't ground his establishment story well enough, or 2) threw the secret history monkey wrench out there too early (in a subsequent book might have worked better, maybe?) or 3) both.

Also; in a similar theme, stuff that I gather we (as readers) were meant to find shocking or emotional, I often did not. When friends, neighbors, or people that Drothe cares for are beaten or otherwise threatened, it lacks the emotional punch that I think it's meant to have; again, because we haven't yet come to care about them enough. In his effort to keep the plot moving, Hulick failed to sufficiently develop the characters as well as the setting, so that when things happen to them later in the novel, we're left wondering why we should care too much, except from an academic perspective. For that matter, Drothe himself, while charming, doesn't necessarily inspire a lot of tension from his first persion narrative. I think the tone of the book is a little too easy-going and--dare I say it--swashbuckling to really convey the darkness that the plot and descriptions are trying to make us sense.

And I almost hesitate to call either of them problems, because in general, I think fantasy is notorious for being over-blown, over-written and glacially slow in its pace. The brisk pace of novels like Low Town and Among Thieves are godsends--but they also both go a little too far. We need to see enough of the setting and the characters if we're going to care about them later in the book. And in the wake of the success of lots of darker, grim n gritty fantasy authors, wallowing in darkness is becoming a bit of a strong theme too; one that I don't care to see expanded too much. I like some darkness to my stories--and I like it quite a lot, actually--and I'm feeling a bit done with the "bright and polite" style of much of the fantasy genre of the past. But, again, that's a trend that's easy to overdo--guys like Joe Abercrombie or Mark Lawrence (reportedly; I haven't read him yet and may not based on a number of reviews I've read) or any number of others can frequently go too far, making the darkness gratuitous and sordid rather than a compelling feature. But again; Hulick probably could have done a little bit more than he did there. Not because the events described in the book weren't frequently fairly dark, but because the tone didn't quite match them. The tone made the book feel like it was The Three Musketeers trying to pretend like it was The Godfather but not quite managing to pull it off convincingly all the time.

Now that I've finished it, I really need to refrain from picking up anything else at the library for a little while, finish Eisenhorn, and knock back a few more of the books I've bought before I get distracted away from them again.

The Mezzovian Sea

2011-10-07T14:05:00.002-04:00

The world of DARK•HERITAGE is one that, like our world, is subject to continental drift, which is a major force in describing how the land came to be as it is now. That said, some cataclysmic events that plate tectonics cannot explain seem to have had huge impacts on the world as well--dramatic shifting of continents on occasion, pole shifts, crustal displacement, and just plain old continents sinking under the sea (or rising from the sea) in a way that plate tectonics tells us is impossible--well it could happen here. It has in the past, at least.

Like our earth, the continent on which the Mezzovian Sea action takes place--the Mezzovian continent, for lack of any other label (its inhabitants don't really understand the concept of continent like we do, lacking a strong knowledge or feel for global geography) is an ancient landmass, but it's really made up of smaller terranes, cratons, islands and other pieces of crust that accreted and became sutured together. Evidence of this can be seen in the form of the old, hoary and worn-down mountain chains that cross north to south across the face of the continent (the Romeu and Garriga Mountains) that are not unlike the Urals, Caledonian mountains, Appalachians, or other older mountains that were formed when ancient continents collided and then remained fused together in new formations altogether. This ancient chain of mountains basically straddles the north and south shores of the Mezzovian Sea, and even extends underneath it; the Tolosa Islands are essentially parts of these mountain ranges that have their feet submerged in the water.

The Mezzovian basin itself is an aulacogen, or "failed rift" that sunk below the general level of the continental and became the floor of a shallow epicontinental sea. Because of this, it's not very deep, but there are pockets where the crust has collapsed to a surprising depth here and there in the distant past (millions of years ago, if not tens of millions). The shallow water and tropical/subtropical lattitudes combine to make the sea warm and pleasant.

Although subject to sometimes swiftly growing fierce storms, in general, the Mezzovian is known for being rather calm. Because of this, it has become a major highway for trade and conquest. The earliest group to develop a nearly circum-Mezzovian state was the Balshatoi, who were centered on the Razine peninsula. Their kingdoms and fiefdoms collapsed under economic and military pressure as the Terrasans surged northwards from their homelands in and immediately south of the Tolosa Isles.

Today, the Terrassan Empire maintains a nearly circum-Mezzovian hegemony as well, and this has kept the Mezzovian sea-lanes safe and secure. Due to the waning military presence of the Terrasans, piracy is becoming more of a problem, however. And in the east, rivals to Terrasa are surging forwards, eager for the old Empire to finally die and move on; vampiric Tarush Noptii with its shadow-shrouded shores, and the new conquests of Qizmir as well.
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While the Mezzovian Sea is a single large body of water, islands, peninsulas and bends in its own shoreline have created a number of "subseas" and other subsets that are important enough to have been named. The Novilda Sea is the westernmost; a great bight or bay that extends westward from the northernmost Tolosa Islands to reach the Erau, Urt and Volo river deltas. The most important regional power in the Novilda Sea is Segrià, one of the Terrasan cities.

East of the Novilda Sea is the Benàz Sea, bounded on the south and west by Tolosa islands, on the east by the Razine peninsula, and in the north by the Tec river delta and Iclezza. The southernmost reaches of this subsea border on Porto Liure as well. To the south, on the other hand, after passing through the waters of the Tolosa Islands, you come to Tolosa Bay. This is a relatively wild and untamed stretch of wilderness, and no land-based roads have been maintained that cross from Segrià and Alcàsser to Terrasa itself on the easternmost edge of the bay.
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East of the Tolosa Islands, the Razine peninsula hangs down, and the southern Mezzovian shoreline curves northward to "pinch" the Mezzovian a bit. This semi-enclosed waterway is known as the Chistau Sea, and is famous for its calm waters and network of trade routes taking goods and passengers to ports all throughout the entire inner sea region. The Terrasan hegemony only extends a bit further to the east from here; a series of long islands divides the waters east of the Chistau into the Nosferatu Sea on the north and the Farriq Sea in the south. Razine ships sail the westernmost waters of the Nosferatu Sea and the attached northerly Razine Bay, but cede its more easterly waters to the control of Tarush Noptii and its benighted ports of Mnar and Mzagin. To the south, the easternmost Terrasan city, Sènt-Haspar, holds the shoreline at the western end of the Farriq Sea, but beyond that you find the relatively recently founded ports of Qizmir.

To the very east of the Mezzovian, the sea pinches again to the rough and dangerous waters of the Sea of Storms, which in turns pinches even tighter to Shipwreck Strait, which leaves the Mezzovian and goes into the open ocean. Because the Sea of Storms, and even more Shipwreck Strait are difficult and dangerous to navigate, Qizmiran ships rarely pass through them, and Qizmiran sailors are divided between "ocean" and "sea" sailors; those that stay beyond the strait, and those who sail within the waters of the Mezzovian itself. This has also forced the Qizmirans to establish caravan routes that cross the Golden Peninsula and ensure that the inner sea colonies get the support that they need from the capital.

Daydreaming about travel

2011-10-07T10:50:00.001-04:00

Access to Google Maps can occasionally be dangerous.

I was wondering how much out of the way it would be, if I get back to Glacier National Park sometimes in the nearish future, to pop up over the border and check out the Banff/Jasper/Yoho/Kootenay park complex up in Canada. Turns out it's less than 300 miles from Glacier to Banff.

Then I thought, it'd be fun to take my youngest two on a trip out there. A big road trip with lots of hiking and driving and taking pictures and wading in ice cold mountain lakes, and all that jazz. The boys are really excited about the prospect of the Rocky Mountains, and seeing them, and you can't do much better than Glacier and Waterton Lakes up on the Montana/Alberta border and then pop up north for the big Canadian Rockies super-park.

So I added more destinations, bracketed it with our address on either said, and whipped out a route in Google maps. Except... well, my one son really wanted to see Rocky Mountian National Park specifically. I think it's the name. So, I added that. It wasn't too far out of the way, really. Well, it kinda is, but if I'm going to go to all this trouble anyway, why not? My other son really wanted to see Yellowstone, and it turns out that between Rocky Mountains National Park and Glacier Naitonal Park, you have to go pretty darn close to Yellowstone anyway. And if I'm going to go to Yellowstone for his sake, then I also want to see next-door Grand Teton National Park for mine.

Now we had a lot of destinations and a lot of miles. But it occurred to me that I could make the drive from the Great Lakes to the Rockies a little more palatable if I looked for a stop or two along the way. It wouldn't add too much distance to put Mt. Rushmore on the trip. And then Devil's Tower which is nearby. And then, hey, it looks like from Mt. Rushmore and Devil's Tower National Monuments to Rocky Mountain National Park, well, you have to drive within a few miles of Scott's Bluff National Monument.

All of this took me about ten to fifteen minutes to plan out with Google Maps. I need to save this ambitious route and plan for taking the entire month of July... sometime... to do this. After this, my boys (and maybe even me) should be completely Rocky Mountained out.

And just to punctuate how awesome all these Rocky Mountains are, here's a shot of the "Twenty Dollar View" across Lake Moraine in the Valley of the Ten Peaks in Banff National Park.

Addiction

2011-10-06T14:36:00.003-04:00

Today I demonstrated yet again today that I find it easier to buy books than to read them, apparently.

A number of months ago--last January or February, I think, I picked up Karen Fonstaad's novel Empress, the first in a trilogy of big fat fantasy books. Although I still haven't read it, I thought the concept was good; books that long I sometimes struggle to finish if I get them from the library, especially if I'm busy, before they're due. And I can pick up just the first book to see how it goes before I commit myself to the whole series.

So today, I picked up three new novels; each the first in a trilogy. Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson and The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks I've actually had my eye on for months, but Winterbirth by Brian Ruckley just caught my eye at the local Barnes & Noble; I hadn't otherwise ever heard of it.

Of course, what I'm reading now is a few library books, so I'm not even making any progress on my own books--which now number almost 70 in the "bought but not yet read" category.

I did, however, finish the audiobook by Susan Hill: The Woman in Black. It's a pretty classic ghost story, with an almost Victorian feel. On the back of the case, it even says that it's as close as we'll get to a ghost story written by Jane Austen! I don't know that I'd necessarily call it that, but for my two oldest kids, who wanted to borrow it as soon as I was done done, I'm going to actually recommend that they not listen to it. It isn't particularly horrifying, I didn't think. It wasn't even particularly tense. I think the combination of the unfamiliar (to them) accent it's read in, the stylized, antique writing style, the reference to things that are quite beyond their frame of reference, and the slow pacing will actually quite put them off and possibly even actively confuse them.

Also, apparently the upcoming movie changed the plot quite a bit anyway... hopefully for the better. While I found the book well-written and interesting as a period piece, I found it a bit dull and cliched as a ghost story.

Most dangerous city in America

2011-10-05T16:41:00.001-04:00

http://realestate.yahoo.com/promo/americas-most-dangerous-cities-2011.html

Woo-hoo! Detroit wins again! Aren't we awesome? Suck it, Memphis.

(I live in the Detroit Metro. My brother lives in Memphis Metro. But we're in fairly safe neighborhoods.)

LEGO Police Station

2011-10-04T07:50:00.002-04:00

I've noticed from looking at my stats, that curiously most of the hits to my blog are probably not for the content on my blog, per se. In fact, I think most of them come from Google image searches. One of the most popular posts on my blog to date has been this retrospective of LEGO police stations, which I picked because it was one of the most consistent themes since before the debut of the minifigure even--since the mid-70s at least, there was pretty much always been a LEGO police station set of some kind or another available for sale.

In fact, there is now a newer version of the police station than the one I posted in that post--the newest then had a 2008 vintage. The 2011 police station, in fact, is one that we just got. My youngest son just turned 8, and that was what he wanted more than anything.

So, although big LEGO sets are pricier than we normally would like to pick up, especially considering that there were some other things we needed to get for him this year, we got the brand-new LEGO police station for him. Grandma also got him the LEGO police truck; a kind of mobile command base (which is what I think its predecessor was literally called, if I remember correctly.) I supervised him building the truck last night--the station sits still unopened in the box; a bit intimidating of a project for a kid that young, yet also one that he can't wait to have built.

Anyway, I'm adding the images as a kind of "add-on" to my other post. This new set isn't quite as "homey" as the last one. There aren't flowers and trees. It's a bit more of a business-like operation. It's got two garage doors, two cars/trucks, a bicycle, and a three story office building of sorts. Above the garage is the holding cell. Curiously, there's a helipad on top of the tower... but no copter. Several of the past sets, if you look at the retrospective, have copters, but this does not. Of course, there is a police helicopter set... sold separately. The boys have been saving up some money for a little while now, unsure exactly what to buy with it; I imagine once this is built, my younger son will definately clamor for the police helicopter to move t othe top of the list.

Reading

2011-10-04T07:34:00.002-04:00

It looks like I'm reading more than I can handle, but in reality, things aren't so bad. I just added Susan Hill's The Woman in Black to my What I'm Reading list there to the side, but in reality, I'm listening to it as an audiobook as I commute. I'm also reading Among Thieves by Douglas Hulick, and I'm in the midst of the Eisenhorn omnibus by Dan Abnett--although I just finished the second novel within the omnibus, so it's a good "rest stop" while I consume some other stuff that I got from the library.

Sadly, I was prevailed upon by my stupid curiosity to pick up the first book of the Prince of Nothing series, which is in itself, a subseries of the greater Second Apocalypse series. Again; since I picked it up from the library, I'll have to proceed with it fairly quickly, and give it priority over books that I already own. That means poor Gregor Eisenhorn will have to wait yet again to get finished, and I won't be reading Nagash, Conan, Solomon Kane, or whatever else it is that I decide is next for at least a few weeks, I wager.

In fact, after reading several weighty novels and sections of series, and whatnot, I actually think that a short story collection is exactly what I'm in the mood for. As it turns out, I own several short story collections that need reading, including the third (and final) of the Conan collections, the Solomon Kane collection, the Kull collection, the first White Wolf printing of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series, the complete Lovecraft collection (in four volumes) and a few other sundry collections that I've stumbled across over the recent years as well. I have an older Years Best Sci-Fi and a modern Cthulhu collection too, at least, that I'm aware of off the top of my head.

While many people really enjoy short story collections, I find that I take them best in smallish doses. One collection at a time, and then I'm craving the structure and depth of a novel all over again. We'll see how it goes, though.

Battle of Naboo

2011-10-03T13:26:00.001-04:00

An oldie but a goodie. How the Battle of Naboo should have been edited and orchestrated.

Iceberg Lake

2011-09-30T10:32:00.000-04:00

My greatest regret about my Glacier National Park trip was that we weren't there long enough, and the weather didn't cooperate very well all the time, making us unable to do some of the things that I would have loved to do before our time was up. We really didn't get to see the Many Glacier area very well at all, because it was cool and rainy the whole time we were up that direction, and many of the trails were closed due to mud, flooding, or bear danger (i.e., an animal carcass on the trail.)

One of the hikes that I most wanted to do, with a trailhead up near Many Glacier Lodge, was the Iceberg Lake trail. Behold:

Low Town

2011-09-28T14:18:00.000-04:00

I just finished the novel Low Town by Daniel Polansky, a first time published novelist writing in that kind of dark fantasy noir mindset that seems to be sweeping the genre lately. Curiously, his novel has also been published in the UK with a completely different title, The Straight Razor Cure although it still seems to be subtitlted Low Town, as if it were a series name or something. And in German, it was published as Der Herr der Unterstadt--"The Lord of the Low Town" although I don't know of the phrase Unterstadt has any colloquial meanings like underworld or anything like that. My German's way too weak for that. I personally like the British title best, and it echoes a line of dialogue from near the end of the book. The British book cover, on the other hand, has a generic looking wizard, hooded and cowled in a red robe with his face nearly completely concealed and his hand on fire. I have no idea who he's supposed to represent, as no character in the book looks like that. Then again, the art-less American cover isn't exactly setting my imagination on fire either.

Don't know much about Polansky, as this is his first published book, and his biographical info is pretty sparse, indicating merely that he's from Baltimore, this is his first novel, and he has a BA in philosophy, of all things. The Wikipedia article on Low Town suggests that it is partly autobiographical, but that's probably patently absurd, as you'll probably see just from my quick summary below. I also presume that Daniel Polansky is not related to Roman Polanski, but I caught myself almost typing the latter several times while composing this post.

Polansky and his critics have made a big deal out of his melding of fantasy and hardboiled crime novels--too much of a big deal, in my opinion. There's been a strong trend that way for a long time, although exaclty how much and what kind of melding is, of course, variable by work. I've blogged here already about stuff written by guys like Glen Cook, Simon R. Green, Alex Bledsoe, and even David Gross that happily takes a fair amount of noir or mystery novel influence and applies it to the fantasy genre. Some of those guys have done what they were doing years ago. But just because the innovativeness and novelty of Polansky's work is, perhaps, overstated in the buzz around his work doesn't mean that the book itself suffers, by any means. Let's take a look at what we've got:

1) The voice. Low Town was deliberately written to echo the voice made famous by writers like Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler. First person, cynical, wise-cracking, and depressing, the voice is very much a noir voice. Classically so, even. As Polansky himself intimated, in the quick youtube snippet below, fantasy often has a tendency of being over-written, bloated and paced so that it can outrun your average glacier. Barely. Matching that with the hard-hitting pacing and terse, cynical voice of the noir novel is a good match in many ways. Not that Polansky is the first (or only) fantasy writer to go that route, but he's one of the best at getting the voice to hit the right notes. In fact, it's one of the most intriguing narrative voices I've read in some time.

2) Do any of you (two or three readers that may stumble across this) remember Bat Durston? He used to appear as a semi-satirical character who could slip from one genre to the next without any substantive change; usually from a western to a space opera, with only cosmetic changes. The American southwest became the Martian landscape, his horse became a speeder of some kind, the Apaches became Martians, the cattle rustlers became... I dunno, some other kind of bandit. The point was, some stories can easily slip from genre to genre because they don't actually incorporate the narrative tropes and conventions of the genre that they appear in. Low Town fits this description in many ways. In many ways, it's an iconic noir novel. There's little about it that makes it have to take place in a fantasy setting, and in fact, there's little about the fantasy setting that is unique or unusual, or even fantastic. Maybe that's deliberate, because that would clash somewhat with the noir sensibilities, but it's true. Heck, even the sorcery becomes more of a macguffin than an integral plot point. Magic becomes the murder weapon, but it could easily have been something else. The Warden, the protagonist of Low Town, is a Bat Durston. He doesn't come from a Western, but the story, the characters, the voice, the plot--everything could have been a "regular" noir novel, and the fantasy is just a cosmetic overlay that gives Low Town a bit of a twist, and the opportunity to be read by a new audience who otherwise may not have discovered it.

Again; I'm not voicing that as a complaint. In fact, I think that's a perfectly reasonable tack to take. But it is what it is. Low Town isn't really treading in some new, gee-whiz, innovative and uncharted territory. It's an iconic, almost by-the-numbers, if I can say it, hardboiled detective novel that just happens to have some fantasy overlay, including a secondary world setting and a magical macguffin.

3) Being written as it is in a first person limited point of view, the protagonist slash narrator has to be a great character, and The Warden fits the bill. He's also an iconic noir type character--a former hero of sorts; a war veteran, a spy slash detective career after that, a fall from grace and dishonorable discharge from service, and he's now a tough guy around town peddling drugs and running a reasonable successful criminal business. Against his better judgement, he gets involved in an investigation of some grisly murders. His past comes back to haunt him. He gets stuck between the secret police and gang bosses and unscrupulous noble murderers and more, and has to navigate an increasingly difficult, intrigue-laden plot to confront what ends up being a dark secret with ties to his own past. All fairly textbook noir tropes, frankly, with the exception of the vaguely Lovecraftian horrors from the spaces between the worlds that are being summoned to murder people. But very well executed. The main mystery wasn't quite as surprising as all that. I've never been great at sussing out the riddle of who's guilty in mysteries ahead of time, really, but this time, Polansky really telegraphed somewhat transparently that there was something hinky going on with the villain, so when revealed, it's not a big shocker, it's more like, "y'know, I was wondering what was going on there. That makes sense." Good point or bad point? I dunno. I enjoy it. Then again, I don't read a lot of pure mystery, because I don't necessarily enjoy the game between author and readers that the genre presupposes. I'm OK with an author telling me what happens without me being expected to try and figure it out myself.

4) The Warden isn't the only great character, though, although he naturally gets top billing. Several other characters, including the nobleman, his sorcerous henchman, the Warden's husband and wife landlord slash old war time friend, the bitter ex-partner from the force, the young kid who starts tagging along behind them, the benevolent father figure, even Yancey the medieval rap artist are all reasonably well developed and interesting characters who have a part to play. And the cryptic dialogue between the Warden and the leader of the Triad-like syndicate Ling Qi is just outright fun and hilarious while managing to also be surprisingly sinister to read.

5) Like dark fantasy everywhere, the ending is somewhat Pyrrhic and depressing; hard choices are made, and the protagonist (I can't really call him a hero in any sense of the word) is left with little more than a handful of ashes for his trouble. Will there be a sequel? I'm sure that depends on the sales of this book, which has only been out a little over a month now. I strongly recommend it. It was a great read. Polansky has a great, polished voice, and the characters deserve more screen-time. I've love to see the world of Low Town get a bit more development. And as I've long been lauding the practice of merging some of the good features of other genres with fantasy, of course I'm a cheerleader for a book that does it and manages to be supremely well executed.

Next up, another book with a similar vibe--a fantasy crime type premise--by another first time author, Among Thieves by Douglas Hulick. I'll be sure and review that one too. It's got at least one advantage over Polansky's book--not counting the cover art, which I greatly prefer--it's been pimped a fair amount by Brent Weeks, who's a bit of a superstar in the fantasy genre of sorts right now, so Hulick's book comes with high expectations and lots of pre-release buzz. Of course, I didn't exactly get it on release day or anything either; there's probably many reviews out by now, many of them several months old (I think the book was released in April? Maybe May) but by my standards, it's still pretty new.

Editions of D&D

2011-09-27T15:31:00.000-04:00

While participating in a discussion online about D&D, it occured to me that each "edition" of D&D could be reasonably well summed up in a few key points or words for what it was most "known for." By this, I mean numbered editions; Original Brown and White Box D&D, or the Basic and Up lines were sidelines of D&D that had a lot of good points, but I don't believe anything that's particularly.... unique, for lack of a better word.

Meanwhile, the numbered editions do. So, without further ado, here's where I see each edition of D&D making its mark on the brand.

First edition AD&D is mostly known for being classic. While wandering about through a type of product adolescence, D&D was gathering momentum and market and whantot until it became AD&D. Then it was a mature product, a mature line, and it became, well the classic D&D that most people remember from the classic days of the game. The classic PHB. The classic Monster Manual. The classic Gygaxian prose of the Dungeonmaster's Guide. The classic modules. Everything about it is classic, and in a sense, almost canonized by much of the D&D playing public. Whatever AD&D did, it typically did it first. The first Manual of the Planes. The first Underdark (in the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, or whatever it was exactly that that book was called.) In many ways, it's fard to fault these early pioneers, because there wasn't anything to compare them too.

In all fairness, though, they weren't always that good. The art and layout was often amateurish. Gygax's prose stunk, and he needed a good editor, and someone with a better sense of organization to help him write that DMG. So many of those classic monsters were laughably stupid. So many of those classic modules were so poorly designed. And the play paradigm was strongly rooted in Gygax's own miniatures wargaming background, despite the fact that much of the audience was not.

Second edition: what can you say? Settings. Second edition is most well-known for settings. Some of them didn't actually launch during 2e--Forgotten Realms, for instance, started in the late 1e days--but this is the grand floruit of setting detail, setting development, and so many new settings. Forgotten Realms was fairly mainstream, as was Mystara and a few others, but we also got a lot of really esoteric stuff like Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Planescape, Ravenloft, etc.

Second edition was also well known for increasingly bad mechanics. Sure, it was mostly just 1e reorganized... at least until Skills and Powers and kits came out. While not a bad idea--they needed to do something to alleviate the straight-jacket like class structure, this solution probably caused more problems than it solved.

Third edition: the OGL, clearly. Hordes and hordes of third party stuff; some of it absolutely terrible, but some of it amongst the best stuff ever published for the game. The setting search and Eberron. The "half edition" update in 3.5. Harmonized and synchronous mechanics. It's curious to me that the mechanical simplicity that was lauded at 3e's launch was decried as a straight-jacket, as needlessly pedantic, as stifling by the time 3.5 was near the end of its product cycle. Did the game itself actually change that much? In my opinion, no, not really. But somehow people's perception of it sure did. Oh, and plastic, prepainted, randomly sorted mini packs.

Fourth edition: huge focus on miniatures and tactical combat. Points of light. The DDI. Massive change to the mechanical fundamentals, many of which wooed those disenchanted with the "stifling" environment of third edition, but many of which alienated other long-time players who felt like this new game simply wasn't D&D anymore. There was another mid-stream "half edition" of sorts, in the form of D&D Essentials. Also well-known for having to compete with itself, in a way, in the form of Pathfinder. Lots of internet rivalry between fans of the two editions.

Baix Pallars

2011-09-27T08:50:00.000-04:00

Far to the southeast of the main Terrasan lands is the little country of Baix Pallars. Nestled in the hilly land between the southerly cool lodgepole and cedar dominated Follà Forest, the Nijat River, the Azar Shahr mountains, and the Sahir savannah, Baix Pallars is an island of Terrasan colonial culture amidst pristine wilderness and encroaching Qizmiri interests. Like Calça, the so-called "lost province", Baix Pallars has been abandoned by a Terrasan administration unable to cope with colonial holdings so far away from the center of gravity of an increasingly ponderous realm. However, rather than being so remote as to be virtually unthreatened by any outside power, as Calça is, Baix Pallars is smack-dab in the path of expanding Qizmiri interests, and has it's back to a wilderness wall with Qizmir breathing right in its face as it is. While jann are still rare in this area, culturally Qizmiri humans are common, and many of the names of local features are more commonly given in Qizmiri than in their Terrasan forms, and the bustling river town of Qaserun is nearby--and nearly as populous as all of the scattered villages and hamlets of Baix Pallars in their entirety.

Many of the Terrasans of Baix Pallars don't really care; Terrasa has abandoned them--mostly for the best--they add, and they're far enough away from any major Qizmiri administrative center that their is little expectation of a heavy hand if they decide to annex the hilly region. But others find the very notion of a Qizmiri yoke intolerable, and these have increasingly been stirred up by radical and desperate elements. Some of them have taken to preemptive guerilla strikes, ignoring the advice of others who suggest that their actions are more likely to cause the Qizmiri to pacify the region rather than prevent it. Others are increasingly fleeing deeper into the mountains or the forest, as small groups of families or friends.

And others are turning to dark powers. Entire hamlets and villages have turned to the worship of Hastur, Nergal, Iog-Sotôt or others, and frightening and disturbing occult activity has turned Baix Pallars into a hotbed of seething intrigue, sacrifices or worse. Savvy travelers have started avoiding the area entirely, and lone travelers frequently go in but fail to come out. This has hastened the flight of the decent and respectable members of the area into the picturesque mountains or forests, which hastens the fall of Baix Pallars itself into complete degeneracy.

Delay on Black Library fiction

2011-09-26T10:08:00.000-04:00

I've really been struggling with reading lately. I've had the Eisenhorn omnibus on my "What I'm Reading" list for months--although I've really only been seriously at it for a few weeks. I put it on when I started, but was immediately distracted and set it aside for most of that time.

For my "On Deck" list, I had another Black Library series, the Nagash series by Mike Lee coming up.

However, I'm rearranging the schedule again slightly. A book that I requested that the library buy came in. I finished up the novel within the Eisenhorn omnibus that I was reading (2 of 3), set it aside again, and now I'm going to read two library books before I pick it back up. After that... I'm not sure if I'll dive into Nagash right away after all, or if I'll have a look at some of the other stuff in my collection that isn't getting read. Honestly, I'm kinda in the mood for some quick n dirty short fiction, and I have both some Robert E. Howard and some H. P. Lovecraft on my "To read" list, since I've bought the collections and not yet read them (although I have read many--maybe even most--of the individual stories in the collection in some other format.)

Because of the length of time it's taking me to sort out my reading the last few months, and the amount of blathering I've done about what I'm reading, I'd like to actually do full-fledged reviews of these few books. One of them, Low Town by Daniel Polansky, is a freshman effort by a new author, which is kinda fun.

And I'll leave you with an image search result I picked up of Eisenhorn, which has really gotten the short end of the stick in my reading efforts lately. Sadly, it's not well-deserved; I think it's a reasonably good book (or books, technically) that I've struggled to finish for reasons completely unrelated to its quality as a novel.

Romantic fantasy is everywhere

2011-09-23T11:10:00.000-04:00

With regards to the post title, romantic fantasy--that is, fantasy books that intersect in their conventions, tropes and execution with the romance genre--has been around almost as long as I've been reading fantasy. Stuff by Tamora Pierce, Mercedes Lackey, and others was always on the shelf, and frankly, stuff by Anne McCaffrey or Marion Zimmer Bradley didn't fall too far from that angle either, in regards to the market they were hoping to corner with their feminist or romantic-tendency books. I actually think that that's probably a good thing for fantasy, and I've said many times before that I think fantasy tends to become too insular, and needs to be aware of and take advantage of trends in other genres. Plus, hey, romance is the biggest genre of fiction out there, and crossing that into fantasy breeds a lot more fantasy readers, which in turn breeds a lot more fantasy getting published.

That said--I don't really have any interest in reading romantic fantasy. Not too long ago, it wasn't hard to figure out which fantasy was going to go down that route. There were visual cues in the cover art, there were relatively fewer authors, and the descriptions had a lot of key words that made it kinda obvious. So, I could mostly avoid what I wasn't interested in, and read other stuff instead.

Now, however, I notice that it's not nearly as obvious as it once was. I've been caught "off guard" a good half a dozen times recently with stuff that was very overtly romance genre fantasy, without any obvious clues beforehand that that's what I was going to be reading. I suspect, perhaps, that some of the authors themselves would maybe dispute the label, and maybe that's why. But I'm a bit of a purist; I don't mind watching romcoms with my wife (in fact, I usually enjoy them unless they're badly done--but that's true of any kind of movie) but a number of books I've read recently have an obvious target audience of women, not men in fantasy, and as part of that, they are heavily draped in conventions, character-types, and scenarios that are common to the romance genre.

Am I just really out of touch? Has there been a major change? Why am I getting "suckered" into checking out books from the library--and occasionally even buying--that clearly are not intending me as the target audience?

Tazitta death cults

2011-09-19T13:42:00.000-04:00

As one leaves the Garriga Mountains to the north of the Terrasan lands, and enters the high ground of the Shutruk plateau, one finds the massive, landlocked Indash Salt Sea, a kind of Lake Bonneville. While the Indash Sea has a number of civilized city-states on its shores, including Tahrah and glittering Simashki, in many ways it is most well-known to outsiders of the Hamazi region as the homeland of the Tazitta tribes. The Tazitta are nestled between the sea and the Dagan Mountains in a long, vertically oriented chimney. Their homeland is rocky and hilly, but not nearly as dramatic as the carved and sculpted canyonlands to the north and west. Pinyon-juniper woodlands cover much of the area, while more open territory is home to sagebruch, rabbitbrush, ephedra and golden bunchgrasses, forming a dry prairie.

While there are many interesting things to be said about the Tazitta tribes, their most memorable trait, at least to those from outside, is there devotion to what is usually referred to as a "death cult." Visually striking, death cult fanatics paint themselves with white and black, to make themselves look like stylized representations of a human skeleton. The beginnings of the cult date back to the heyday of the Baal Hamazi Empire, when the Tazitta tribes did not live free in the woodlands, but were either in hiding in the mountains, or enslaved by the hamazin on the high prairie. The hamazin treated them a bit like game; hunting them for sport or pleasure, in those days. The Shazada of Pnakot, a colonial holding of Baal Hamazi on the other side of the mountains, at the shores of Lake Kidin, in particular made use of the Tazitta for sport, and the city-state of Shushun was a small pit-stop at the time. He was rumored to have had an advisor from the black land of Tarush Noptii--either a vampire or an expert on vampirism of some sorts. Whether true or not, the Shazada was a notorious necromancer, and rather than utilize his own people for his dark experimentation--they were far too valuable--he rounded up Tazitta tribesmen as much as possible. Thousands of the Tazitta were taken into horrible unlife. And the Tazitta death-cults were formed as the remaining tribesmen swore fell oaths to never let themselves fall into the same trap; to die cleanly. They celebrated a clean death. They grew to revere, even to worship the force of death itself.

Of course, the Shazada didn't last forever. Neither did the Baal Hamazi empire, and the rule of the hamazin over the area. Pnakoth still exists, a shadow of its former self, a back-water mouldering fishing town on the shores of Lake Kidin, slowly falling into disrepair, decripitude and haunted empty buildings. No longer are the Tazitta at threat from Pnakoth. Yet, the death cults remain, evolved--or perhaps corrupted--from their former purpose into a fanatical obsession with death and dying. Many Death Pilgrims wander the world, traveling far from their homelands to bring death to those who unnaturally cling to life--especially undead. Despite this noble appearing mission, most Death Pilgrims are truly little more than brutal, psychotic killers for hire--mercenaries or assassins.

Despite the prominant role the death cults have in Tazitta culture, not all tribesmen belong to the cults, and many who do are just normal folks, of course, following their cultural traditions without the wild-eyed appearance or manners of a zealot. In fact, Tazitta who do not use the body paint are often mistaken by outsiders as Untash or even Haltash tribesmen--they have the same look, accent, and manner of dressing.

Analyzing GM Merit Badges

2011-09-14T14:57:00.000-04:00

Well, although I've been out of the loop of RPG related message boards for several months now, an unrelated Google search brought me back to ENWorld, and I ended up browsing the front page. On a whim, I posted the merit badges, since I couldn't see any evidence that they'd been posted already. In fact, I made it a poll so I could generate some data for discussion. Two things:

1) The first reply (and several subsequent ones) confirmed quickly that I'd made the right call in distancing myself from places like this. Pedantic nitpicking, and--to use the phrase from the thread I posted--the compulsive, nerdy need to over-analyze the whimsical--not to mention a moderator's (no less) self-righteous and sadly not at all ironic smug pontification on the folly of calling them "merit badges" when they didn't have enough correspondences to the actual Scouting program of the same name very quickly reminded me of why I abandoned such banal discussions long ago. I doubt I'll be looking to increase my involvement again anytime soon, based on this disappointing experience.

2) I know that this isn't a scientific poll, but there shouldn't be too many self-selection biases or endogeneity problems other than those which possibly plague ENWorld as a whole. In any case, I'm not going to be submitting the poll findings to The Quarterly Journal of Economics or anything, so I'm not going to be too concerned about a strictly rigorous scientific study. I'll talk about the results that I have so far, and speculate on them, and they are what they are, warts and all.

First off, with 42 votes over the last... oh, about 20 hours... I've got enough responses to be interesting, but I might update this yet in a few days when I have more. Here's the raw numbers. This includes the original 24 badges from the post, as well as the two additional ones that were added to the Cafe Press store. Italics are my own response, which you can see both on the side of the blog and in the last post.

I found it interesting that the Interesting Story badge got such high numbers. Suck it, sandbox fundamentalists! Although that number as a percentage went down a fair bit with more votes, it's still by far the strongest single response. Rule 0 was fairly high and By the Book very low, as was Likely character death. This didn't seem to jive with my totally unscientific impression of the results looking at OSR blogs, where posting of these badges seems to have been most prevalent. Of course, a lot of gamers would say that their impression of the OSR is that it's got a strong vibe of fundamentalism and fetishization of what the OSR crowd perceives (arguably) as the "old school" way of gaming--so, if they're (we're, honestly) right, then that's to be expected. I suspect that this being posted somewhere like Dragonsfoot, where OSR fans are a much larger percentage of the posters, might get a different pattern of responses.

I was also... well, not exactly surprised, but disappointed nonetheless to see that Scary, PvP and Gonzo were all fairly low--although frankly, the number of folks who picked Disturbing was higher than I expected.

Most of the other results were either not surprising, or didn't turn out particularly interesting, with kinda middling numbers.

Anyway, like I said, I thought the results were interesting. I might post an update after I get 100 responses, assuming that I get that high. Or maybe even more, depending on how fast responses come in. At the least, I'll note if anything makes a dynamic change after more results come in.

Tactics are an important part of my games.	21	50.00%
My games will tell an interesting story.	36	85.71%
My games will be scary.	11	26.19%
My game focuses on exploration and mystery.	27	64.29%
There will be player vs player combat allowed in my game.	11	26.19%
My games are safe and you don't need to worry about content or character death.	4	9.52%
I will mirror back player ideas that I think are interesting in game.	31	73.81%
My games use a pre-made map and pre-scripted content.	15	35.71%
The GM is in charge in my games and rule zero is in effect.	28	66.67%
My games rely on improvisation rather than pre-scripted content.	16	38.10%
My games are gonzo and can include lots of strangeness.	5	11.90%
Characters in my game are destined for greatness, not random death.	19	45.24%
I roll dice in the open and don't fudge results.	18	42.86%
My games include disturbing content.	13	30.95%
My games focus on interesting characters and drama.	21	50.00%
Player character death is likely in my games.	16	38.10%
I play by the book and rule zero is not used to alter existing rules.	7	16.67%
My games are more of a social fun "beer and pretzels" style game.	9	21.43%
My game is primarily non-combat in nature.	5	11.90%
Players in my game should be prepared to run when odds are stacked against them.	29	69.05%
My game has shared GMing responsibilty with one or more of the other players.	3	7.14%
I frequently tinker with the rules of the game.	22	52.38%
My game focuses on player skill rather than character abilities.	5	11.90%
My game is more enjoyable when I keep my GMing style unknown.	2	4.76%
My game focuses on espionage and politics.	13	30.95%
My games contain sexy content.	10	23.81%