Expansion of dinosaur ages spreadsheet

A while ago, I found myself increasingly frustrated by the inability to find a good chart that showed all of the divisions of the Dinosaur Age (The Mesozoic). Even when you did find such a chart, it was invariably "upside down"; that is, it started from the most recent age and went backwards rather than starting from the beginning and going forward. That makes some sense, I'll grant you, since these are all brought to us by rock stratigraphy, but from a chronological perspective, I didn't like it. Plus, just knowing what those ages were and what their cut-off dates were, wasn't all that helpful without some context. So, my chart had all of the subdivisions, starting from the earliest Triassic going down to the end of the Cretaceous, with notes on which formations feature in each age. After all, the whole point of this was to figure out which dinosaurs (and other animals) were likely to have crossed each other's paths on the morning commute, right? I've found this increasingly helpful to me over the years with understanding the global context on dinosaurs, where they came from, how they evolved and spread, and whatnot.

However, it also occurred to me that to greater enhance its use as a tool for context, to say nothing of the fact that lately I've found pre-dinosaurian tetrapods more interesting than actual dinosaurs (probably due to my own personal familiarity with dinosaurs---thecodonts and therapsids are like the exciting mistress that I'm still discovering, I suppose) I recently went back and added the Permian, Carboniferous and even the Devonian ages to the chart as well.

I could have gone back and added the Silurian, Ordovician and even the Cambrian too, but the Devonian, the so-called "Age of Fishes", is a good starting point for a number of reasons. The earliest Devonian is when vertebrates actually became an important and significant faunal component overall. Vascular plants had started some tentative colonization of terrestrial environments in the earlier Silurian period, but it was really the Devonian where land plants came into their own, and the first forests started spreading across at least the wetter terrestrial regions. And, at the end of the Devonian, the first tetrapods evolved from some lobe-finned fish; guys like Acanthostega and Ichthyostega took their first shuddering steps out of the water and onto the mud.

That said, it's really after the first diapsids and synapsids appeared in the Carboniferous that things started getting interesting. The Permian seems like a transitional period; one that perhaps doesn't actually belong thematically in the Paleozoic after all. From the Permian on down, the history of vertebrate life on land is the history of the dynastic struggles of the synapsids vs. the diapsids. The synapsids took an early lead, but lost ground steadily after the Permian-Triassic extinction event (the worst in the history of the world) and were displaced completely by the diapsids before the Jurassic even arrived. The diapsids' major success was in the run-up to, and subsequent domination by the dinosaurs. The degree and longevity of their reign is somewhat startling, really.

Of course, as we all know, it didn't last either. The diapsid dominance came to a screeching halt at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary and the synapsids put their newer models, the true mammals, up in a bid for a hostile takeover that seems to be going strong still today. It's interesting to note that if you count the Cenozoic Era plus the Permian period as times when synapsids dominated the terrestrial megafauna together (113 million years), they still don't equal the amount of time that the diapsids dominated the terrestrial megafauna during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods (134 million years.) We've got a ways to go if we want to prove that we're even the equal of dinosaurs in that regard. Note: I didn't count the Triassic, because it was a contested period of just over 50 million years, but if I did, I'd probably have to give most if not all of it to the diapsids anyway. The apex predators of the early Triassic were archosauromorphs like the eurythrosuchids, and by the middle of the period, diapsids were knocking on the doors of, if not already dominating, almost every large-bodied animal ecological niche, while the increasingly mammal-like therapsids were getting smaller, and smaller, and more and more migrating into small-bodied, nocturnal animals rather than contenders for the sexy positions of apex predators, large-bodied herbivores, or even medium sized animals, for that matter.

What is the secret of the diapsid success during the Triassic, anyway? Nobody's really sure. Part of that hinges on the still mysterious, yet tantalizing question of the physiology of the earlier non-dinosaurian therapsids and thecodonts. Were they warm-blooded? If so, to what degree? In any case, this is exactly why I've found the Triassic to be one of my most fascinating periods of life on earth. It starts off with a world in recovery, after the greatest natural disaster (still!) in the history of our planet, and throughout the Triassic, environmental conditions were difficult. Even so, the rapid turnover of dynasties as one group of animals after another put in their bids for supremacy in guild after guild of large-bodied terrestrial and semi-aquatic ecological niches, only to be (relatively) quickly turned over and replaced by a new king on the hill is fascinating to reconstruct. Looking at this broader context, the story of the Triassic, and the story of the diapsids and synapsids as a "big picture" dynastic conflict, is one of the most interesting I can think of in the natural history of our planet.

Dresden Files

I just recently finished the latest Dresden Files novel, Turn Coat by Jim Butcher, which has only been on sale for... oh, almost a week now. The Dresden Files books are books that in general I find to be quick, breezy, and very fun reads. This is the first one I've had to wait for; having discovered the series fairly recently.

Although I still like it, I was struck by a few nagging uncertainties with it and the series as a whole recently. First off: eleven books now, and apparently plans are for over twenty in total? Holy crap. I know it's a bit of a cash cow and Butcher probably wants to milk it for as long as he's able to, but it really struck me that it seems unlikely that the level of tension and high quality is really supportable that long. I'm already starting to feel like the formula is too... well, formulaic. Can we really stand twenty novels of formulaic "case files" and then a few novels of "meta-plot conclusion" before we're kinda tired of it already? It seems unlikely. I hope that Butcher has some great ideas still brewing, because I'd hate to find that this series that I've come to quite enjoy fades out with a whimper. Secondly (and related) the very slow unraveling of the meta-plot is starting to feel artificial. At the risk of some very minor spoilers (not much beyond what you'd find on the dust jacket) the premise of Turn Coat is that a traitor among the wizardly White Council is at work, and of course, it's up to Harry to see what he can do to uncover said traitor while clearing the name of a collegue. That initially sounded to me like a major development of the meta-plot, but Butcher managed to ratchet back the ramifications of the novel-specific plot to relatively minor ones.

So, all in all, my complaints (or perhaps more accurately, apprehensions) are not related to this novel per se which, while not my favorite of the series, is still pretty solid, but rather looking at the series architecture in general with increasing worry that it seems like something that is going to be difficult, if not impossible, to hold onto for the proposed life of the series.

Anyway, check it out. If you haven't read any of Butcher's Dresden Files books, I imagine that they have very broad appeal. To borrow a phrase that I don't much like, but which I think does actually apply here; they're not great literature, but they're fun. The characters are likeable and easy to read about, and the novels are written with the page-turner urgency of a mainstream thriller. The detective noir take on urban fantasy seems to be a common theme in a lot of very popular novel series lately, but Butcher's good at it. Perhaps in spite of himself.

Grognardia

Lately, I've spend a fair amount of time reading the Grognardia blog (http://grognardia.blogspot.com/). To those who are familiar with my gaming tastes, this may seem quite odd. I'm rather firmly opposed to old-school D&D type gameplay these days. I despise dungeons. I dislike Vancian magic. The lack of defined options in the game is a turn-off. I left D&D before 2e because it didn't adquetately emulate what I wanted fantasy roleplaying to emulate (i.e., it didn't feel anything at all like the fantasy novels I was reading feverishly at the time as a junior high kid in the mid-80s.

I'm certainly old enough to be a fairly grognardy type guy, and I did get my start with D&D sometime prior 1980 or so (not sure with which edition, although it must have been some variety of pre-BD&D). At the time, my friend who was trying to run an adventure for me didn't seem to get that I was clearly much more interested in his Kenner Star Wars toy collection. Ah, Clark. How I missed you when you moved away, and took your Death Star playset with you. His collection was actually the most complete I'd ever seen. He had it all. This was all prior to the release of The Empire Strikes Back.

A few years later I actually made a move into D&D on purpose; reading through the Moldvay and Mentzer sets with some friends who were into it. This was, of course, the heyday of D&D when it was available in mainstream retail outlets and almost every male kid my age at least tried it out or looked into it. Probably right around 1982-3. I didn't play it religiously, though. I migrated briefly into AD&D over the next few years, and also tried out some other TSR produced roleplaying games like Gamma World, Top Secret (one of my favorites still today), Star Frontiers, etc. But none of them really crystalized as a hobby of choice for me.

That didn't happen until later. In the 90s, I was still not really playing but hanging around the fringes of hobby, buying the occasional product and whatnot, and I got somewhat excited about the White Wolf movement. I always preferred Werewolf to Vampire, but still... the gist of both of them was the same anyway. I managed to play some Top Secret again with some friends of mine as an adult, and holy crap, this was a lot more fun with adults than it ever had been as a kid. As a kid, I enjoyed tinkering with homebrewing and drawing maps much more than I actually enjoyed playing, but now that was no longer the case. I stumbled across Third Edition D&D right as it was only a month or two from being released, and that's when I finally made it really my #1 hobby (well, #2. I still like reading more.)

Over time, I found that many of the D&Disms that I didn't like back in the day... well, I still didn't like them. I didn't like the tactical, miniatures combat element of d20. I preferred to focus on some "non-standard" options to the exclusion of the standard ones, and play a bit fast and loose with the rules rather than interpret them strictly. I migrated more to d20 Modern as a generic tool as opposed to D&D's more specific nature. When 4th edition came out just recently, I was politely disinterested from the get-go.

Today, I've found that I'm a bit more tolerant of D&D's foibles, at least as the 3.5 edition has them. Part of that is the numerous options I have of dealing with them; alternate core classes, alernate magic systems, and an entire book of "official" houserules to patch and modify the way the game plays.

But even so, I like the Grognardia blog. The author seems a nice guy, and although I'm not that interested in his style of gaming, I think he still manages to drum up some really interesting discussion points, even for a guy like me.

Dave Arneson, RIP

Well, with the recent passing of Gary Gygax followed so soon by the passing of Dungeons & Dragons co-creater Dave Arneson... that's a bizarre twist of irony there. Arneson was a much less public face to D&D, and exactly what his involvement was (vs. Gygax's) is still somewhat mysterious. And now probably will be forever.

RIP, Dave! You'll be missed.

In other news, the new Jim Butcher Dresden Files novel is out. I had my local public library buy it and I had the first hold on it. I just got an email this morning that it's done cataloging and is ready to pick up. So... after diverting away from all the books I have to read for all those Black Company books, now I'm going to continue the diversion and read this. Poor Black Arrow. I do promise that I will finish you someday. Soon.

Black Company... done.

Well, I mentioned earlier that I was reading through the later Black Company books; in fact, I read all ten of the books in order (see list below.) That's a lot of reading. Despite that, I don’t feel like I read too much; in fact, in many ways the whole deal with the Black Company books is that they don't really fill out the setting, the characters or even the plot. Stuff moves quickly and is often poorly described. Although this is part of its charm to its fans, I still can't say that I'm totally sold on the voice. In fact, in the later books, I think it was as much a disservice as a service---the impact of what should have been highly emotional, dramatic moments was deliberately muted. To me, that's a case of the concern for voice going all out of proportion to what it should be. The voice worked well in the first three books, as presenting a world-weary, low-brow soldier's point of view. I think it worked more poorly as the characters, plotlines and situations evolved and matured.

Still; I do like the plotlines a lot. I do like the thematic elements. A lot. I mentioned that in the last post I made on the Black Company books, but the idea of these wild and crazy (yet extremely rare) sorcerers being either 1) corrupted by power, or 2) corrupted by comletely justified paranoia is just too cool for words. I've always been a fan of the idea that in the ancient past people came from other worlds (my own settings often feature such things; it's how I justify to my overly scientifically minded mind how fantasy settings can be a mixture of earthlike and unearthly flora and fauna.) I recommend the books whole-heartedly, with only the caveat that they're written in a very different voice than most fantasy fans (or most fiction fans in general, with some exceptions) are used to reading in. This voice is at times a strength and at others a significant weakness. Also, the hinted at yet untold stories implicit in the text are both tantalizingly interesting, and extremely frustrating at the same time. It's almost as if Cook went out of his way to hint at stories and then not tell them for no reason other than to tease us.

Anyway, here's the complete list of all the books, in the order I read them. As mentioned in an earlier post, The Silver Spike was put into the omnibus edition in an order that I wouldn't have thought to have used, but that's the order I ended up reading them in anyway.

1. The Black Company

2. Shadows Linger

3. The White Rose

4. Shadow Games

5. Dreams of Steel

6. The Silver Spike

7. Bleak Seasons

8. She Is The Darkness

9. Water Sleeps

10. Soldiers Live

Sword & Planet

I've been a big fan of the subgenre dubbed "Sword & Planet" for a long time. However, as our knowledge of planetary science has grown, the genre has gradually obsoleted itself. The original Sword & Planet authors (long before the genre tag existed) like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Otis Adelbert Kline and Ralph Milne Farley were, of course, operating under the burden of a much more scanty body of knowledge about what the planets were like when they wrote in the Teens, Twenties and Thirties. Their characters' adventures on Mars and Venus were, as far as anyone knew, scientifically plausible at the time. In fact, with the prevalence of Percival Lloyd's Martian canal obsession, they may well have been fueled by scientific understanding of the time.
When they came back into print in the 1960s, that was no longer the case. However, a new generation of writers cropped up who imitated the genre conventions (and this is where the genre tag was coined by Don Wollheim (of DAW books fame) and they had to contend with the fact that our understanding of planetary science had made the entire genre impossible, and therefore not within the realm of science fiction, even remotely.

There were two approaches to it that seem common at that time. Guys like Lin Carter with his Jandar of Callisto series and Mike Resnick with his Ganymede series, just ignored it, made some vague claim at the beginning of the novel that the protagonist realised that science said his story was impossible, but that it was true nonetheless! This was a bit of a wink and a nudge at the readers, though, and other series did things differently. Lin Carter's Green Star series (as well as many other series, such as F. Gardner Fox's Llarn series, Kenneth Bulmer's Dray Prescott series, and L. Sprague de Camp's Krishna series) set their stories outside of the solar system where nobody could argue with the idea of human aliens living on worlds that we knew to be inhospitable to human life.

Most recently, a handful of neo-Sword & Planet books have popped up. In particular I'm thinking of S. M. Stirling's series set on Venus and Mars that are alternate history; the Russian Venera probe operated about as long as it really did, but instead of being destroyed by the hostile environment, it was clubbed by a caveman.

You know what I'd like to see? A far-distant future that sees the planets of our solar system terraformed, to a certain extent, and then society falling backwards to a pre-space traveling technological age, stranding human colonists for generations until they become natives of their planets. Either that, or some other pseudo-scientific explanation that includes the possibilities of human-like life on the frozen worlds beyond the asteroid belt. I like fantasy as much as the next guy (probably a good deal more, actually) but I even more like to integrate as much plausibility, reality and SCIENCE as possible. I guess I'm an old school "Weird Tales" fan when you get right down to it. Back in the day before science fiction and fantasy parted ways in the minds of most audiences and became two completely different things.

Long time no post

Well... title says it all. Whoops! I've been quietly busy with other things lately.

Here's a few randomish thoughts. I like Spiderman. In fact, I like superheroes in general, and I always have. I never really grew out of liking them. In fact, now that I have small boys who are discovering them all over again, it's that much easier to like them. Of course, it's also easier to like them because the marketing guys at Marvel and other places have discovered that their audience does not consist entirely of children anymore. And even when it does, children increasingly demand more sophistication in their entertainment. More sophisticated plots, characterizations and dialogue.

Also: I never really read comic books as a kid. I liked superheroes from the cartoons. Spiderman was a very early favorite, but he used to have that cartoon show. You know, the one with the famous themesong. Have you watched that recently? I've seen an episode or two, with the kids, and frankly, it's painfully unwatchable. Friggin' terrible. When I was a little older, I used to watch Spiderman and his Amazing Friends, an all-new show that was better, yet watching it again now, is still painfully unwatchable as well.

Those two shows didn't really do anything interesting with the Spiderman story. The characters and plots were pretty much exactly the same as they used to be in the original comic book, or they were new plots but the existing main plotlines were implicitly the same. That changed in the 90s with the newer animated Spiderman show. This is still obviously focused on children and has laughably bad dialogue and action, but plotwise, it's kinda interesting, and it actually struck out in its own way, creating its own vision of the Spiderman mythos.

There are, today, three good avenues for such revisionist Spiderman, aimed at a broad audience (i.e., adults can enjoy it, not just kids). The first are the Sam Raimi movies with Tobey MacGuire and Kirsten Dunst. Chances are you've already seen these. Next, are the trade paperbacks of the Ultimate Spiderman; an all new comic book that "reboots" the entire franchise. Plus, it's got Peter Parker back in High School again (and keeps him there for the time being) which was always half the fun of the character. The third one is the new animated show Spectacular Spiderman; the first season of which just got released on DVD recently. My youngest son stumbled across the first DVD at the library and brought it home. I'd already been DVRing the episodes to watch with the kids, so I was certainly familiar with it, but frankly, this is surprisingly good. Good dialogue, good re-imagining of the Spiderman mythos, good characterization, and fun presentation.

Black Company

I still don't have any pictures handy, so I'll wait on posting that update.

I did, however, finish reading The White Rose and now I'm already ploughing ahead into my three-in-one book of The Books of the South. Specifically, I'm now more than halfway through Shadow Games, which the omnibus edition puts first (they put the two actual books of the South together in order, but then have The Silver Spike tacked on at the end. In publication order, it came out the same year as Shadow Games and before I bought this omnibus, it was actually my intention to read The Silver Spike first and then start the real books of the south. Since The Silver Spike is kinda a spin-off, I suppose it doesn't really matter too much, though.)

Anyway. Fun stuff. I have really warmed up to Croaker as a narrator. I know he doesn't narrate all of the remaining books, but I've kinda come to like him after all. It was a bit of a struggle; I do like my third person with more description, but Croaker's got an interesting personality that really shows through in the narration.

The the storylines; epic sorcerers, who with absolute power find themselves absolutely corrupted (so far, pretty much completely without exception) in an otherwise somewhat rather mundane world is exactly my vibe. I really like it.

Update

Well, I'm back from my trip to Big Bend National Park, Big Bend Ranch State Park, and other associated weird places in south Texas. Spencer and I went hiking there with Grandma and Grandpa and had a blast, saw cool stuff, and were a heckuva lot warmer than we would have been had we remained in Michigan that week.

But, I'll make that the subject of another blog. With pictures. Right now, I'm just going to mention that I spent a fair amount of the time on planes and in airports (as you can probably imagine) and I took The Black Company with me. Anticipating that I might finish that and want to read some more, I took the follow-up book, Shadows Linger. Unexpectedly (at least, I didn't expect it) I nearly finished them both in just two days of travel.

I've read them both before (more than once even), but I've never read beyond the original three books of the Black Company series. A few months ago, however, I picked up the next three books in Omnibus format, and I decided that before I read them I'd re-acquaint myself with the original three. Right now, I'm about halfway through the third book, The White Rose after which I'll read the Ombibus Books of the South which includes the formerly solo novels Shadow Games, Dreams of Steel and the technically spin-off book, The Silver Spike.

I like these books. The style is not my favorite; it's too conversational, too Spartan, lacking in details, and generally not as fun to read (for me) because I'm always aware of the narrator and never completely "sink" into the text. Not that Croaker isn't a competent and interesting character to serve as a viewpoint character in a first person story (he plays around with that a bit by giving us other viewpoints in the second and third books: Shed the inkeeper turned murderer, Corbie the disguised version of an older Raven, and Bomanz, the too-curious wizard who kinda sorta started all the problems that the books chronicle) but I just don't prefer that style of writing.

However, the story itself is enough to win me over. As do the tropes and conventions that The Black Company sets up. The Black Company is often called the first "military fantasy"---taking military fiction and placing it in a fantasy setting. It's also unabashedly dark fantasy; not only does it contain a fair number of horror elements, but it also is grim, gritty, and focuses on the nastiness of human nature. It combines elements of Sword & Sorcery, namely the mundane vs. the rather nasty magical, the amoral viewpoint and the rather gritty nature of the stories, but has elements from High Fantasy as well, including the world-shaking consequences, Dark Lords, and epic battles. "The Lady"---revealed later to be Dorotea Senjak---is one of the more intriguing characters in fantasy; a Dark Lord who isn't really all that dark when you get down to it, and who is later very humanized and made sympathetic towards the end of the run (of what I've read so far; apparently that trend will continue as I get to the Books of the South and the Glittering Stone story arcs.)

Anyway; reviews of the "new" (to me, anyway) Black Company books when I'm done with them. Afterwards, I'm not sure what I'll read, but I'm kinda angling towards the second Malazan book, Deadhouse Gates.

Books

I finished Force Unleashed and since I had already played the Wii version of the game all the way through, I thought the novel was somewhat superfluous. I mean, it did a better job with character motivations, interior monologue and whatnot, but the action sequences were kind of weak, and the plot was the same. Eh. Nice cover art, but it's the same as the game. Maybe I can pick up the RPG supplement?

I also finished James Silke's Prisoner of the Horned Helmet. It's fairly turgid. Which is why it took so long for me to get through it, of course. Silke is a huge fan of over-the-top metaphor. Except sometimes you can't tell when it's metaphor and when it's real. I was really surprised when the flaming eyes of Gath of Baal actually managed to catch someone on fire. Oh, you mean that was literal? Weird. I kinda wish I hadn't also picked up the next two in the series at the used bookstore when I got that one, because now I'm going to feel obligated to read them eventually, and this book didn't do much for me. The characters were kinda weak, the plot was predictable and cliched, the descriptions and action set-pieces were bleagh, and all in all the book was mediocre in just about every way.

Now that it's done, I picked up Splinter of the Mind's Eye which I've had for years but never read for some reason. This was an Alan Dean Foster book that was published in 1978, and the plot was worked out between Foster and George Lucas as a potential low-budget sequel to Star Wars. Foster actually wrote the novelization of the film, too, for that matter, which was published before the film's release. It's interesting to see which ways the story could have gone. Clearly Vader is not yet Luke's father, nor the Emperor's main man here (he's referred to as a "henchman" of Tarkin) and the relationship between Luke and Leia wasn't even a glimmer in anyone's eye (the romantic tension just in the first chapter is pretty palpable.) Of course, I've mentioned more than once that the idea that Lucas had all the details of his story mapped out this early is patently ridiculous, but this is pretty blatant evidence to that effect right here.

Well... nevermind

I lied. I finished Secrets of Sarlona and instead of picking up my Force Unleashed or my Prisoner of the Horned Helmet to finish it, I grabbed The Guide to Absalom.

Oh, well.

Update (D&D)

I'm almost done with Secrets of Sarlona, in fact, it's likely that I'll finish reading it if I take a break from work at some point to go to my car and read it. I've only got 20-25 pages left, and with illustrations and everything, that's really only 15-20 pages of text at most. Maybe not even that.

So; for game-related reading, I've got Libris Mortis, Weapons of Legacy, Monster Manual V, Expanded Psionic Handbook, Complete Psionic and Guide to Absalom to read. I'll probably start with the last of those listed. I'm also trying to re-read Monsternomicon II, but I got sidetracked. And I may yet pick up another book or two also.

In the meantime, I'm still camping on Force Unleashed and Prisoner of the Horned Helmet as novels that I'm taking forever to read. I actually think my plan is to finish Sarlona and then finish one (or both) of those novels before picking up another gamebook. It's getting a bit ridiculous how long I've been camped on those novels. Given that I have so many novels on deck still to read, I need to start making some more significant progress.

I also got the Shelley Mazzanoble book from Interlibrary Loan; the Confessions of a Part-time Sorceress; billed as the girlie-girl's guide to Dungeons & Dragons from a girly girl (in her thirties, but still) who took a regular corporate type job at Wizards of the Coast, got introduced to D&D naturally while working there, and had it become a real, significant hobby for her. I thought it was cute, but clearly I wasn't the target market for the book. The description of D&D was too simplistic to be useful to me, and I'm not sufficiently girly to get the rest of the book for the entire run of it: about halfway through I decided I'd seen enough to have had the experience and I could comfortably quit knowing I wasn't missing much that I still needed.

Still, I recommend it as a fun read, and for female gamers who can probably relate to it more, it's probably even better.

PCs

Player characters are funny things. Franz, for example, makes characters that are consistently overpowered and "broken." Yet, somehow, he manages to have his character die about three or four times more than the rest of us. Combined. We've more or less decided that his powergamer tendencies are necessary as a handicap.

Recently some similar shenanigans led to some funny moments in my Pbp game. Ricardo, the unrelenting Don Juan of the group, went and got himself killed. Totally unnecessarily. However, the Mist Demon Lady (it would be nice if someone would figure out her name so I don't have to refer to her by nickname all the time) didn't really want Ricardo dead, so she brought him back. Sadly for Ricardo, she stuck his soul in the body of one of the amazon girls that they knew. That kinda takes his concept and totally turns it on its head.

Lash, another rather notoriously broadly played character ;), decided that he would ignore the warning to get out of the way as she brought his soul back. He got caught in the backlash and his soul ended up in a gorilla's body.

Secrets of Sarlona

One of the oft-misunderstood taglines of the D&D setting Eberron is that everything in D&D has a place there. Of course, that doesn't mean that everything in D&D is in Eberron, like some crazy goulash, but it does mean that if it exists in D&D anywhere, there's a place in Eberron where it can logically fit. A nice concept.

One section of the setting, the continent of Sarlona, is a bit different. For most intents and purposes, you could almost treat Sarlona as a separate setting entirely, one that's at best only tenuously connected to the "main" setting, which is the continent of Khorvaire (with the Xen'drik annex, maybe.) And Sarlona is built on a very different model, and one which I quite like: the idea of picking only a handful of unusual D&D elements to create a setting that utilizes D&D material, but doesn't feel very much like D&D. In large part, this is because of the notable things that it lack, but that's part of what makes it fun.

For instance, the population of Sarlona is mostly human, but when it's not, you don't get your standard elves, dwarves, halflings, orcs, goblinoids, etc. Instead, you get a sizeable number of shifters, some changelings, ogres (and ogre magi), skulks, kalashtar, and a culture of duergar and dwarves that are well integrated with each other.

There are little (if any) of the standard magic-using classes around; instead we have psionics to give us the wahoo factor. A lot of D&D players don't dig psionics; they feel too "science fictiony" to belong in fantasy, but heck; that's a big part of the attraction to them for me. Most of Sarlona is ruled by Imperial Riedra, a giant nation that is highly stratified, populated by religious fanatics, and secretly under the thumb of nightmarish creatures from another dimension. Kind of like Star Wars imperial menace combined with some H. P. Lovecraft. An obvious campaign idea is having the PCs be "part of the rebel alliance" that struggles to overthrow or at least mitigate the spread of this Empire.

Dice bag

Ugh. The lighting on these shots isn't very good, and there's a weird colored reflection of some kind. Oh, well.

Quick snapshots.

Prestige classes

I just found an index on the Wizards of the Coast website that has all of the prestige classes along with a quick description, and the product and page number they appear on. There are 782 of them. 700. And 82.

And that's just the official prestige classes. The third party prestige classes multiply that number exponentially. Heck, that doesn't even include classes from Dragon Magazine (unless they were subsequently reprinted in an official book, which did often happen.) It's also a bit overstated, as some classes were updated, appear in two products, and are subsequently listed twice. But still. Holy cow. I had no idea there were so many.

I tried to make a quick list of "base" classes; 1-20 level classes that appeared in official products, and I got 44. I'm not sure that's completely comprehensive, but it's gotta be pretty close. If anything, the number goes up a little, but I'd be surprised if it goes past 50.

Now I should count up playable races. I mean, with Savage Species almost every monster entry can be converted to a race, but I mean ones that have actually been seriously proposed as a playable race. I'm sure it's somewhere between 50-100, if not even more.

That, my friends, is a lot of options.

Birthday update

I never did comment on what I got for my birthday, did I? I got some cash from Julie... not a ton, but in today's environment, more than enough to make me happy. She also finally went ahead and made the dice bag that I had bought fabric for. There's actually enough fabric left over that she may make a second one, if I can talk her into it. I also got a gift card from my in-laws at Barnes & Noble.

That doesn't really answer the question, though: what did I get--cash begs the question; what did I then spend that cash on? Here's the rundown on stuff I either bought outright or ordered and am waiting on it to arrive. I think this is more or less complete:

RPG Books:

Expanded Psionics Handbook
Complete Psion
Weapons of Legacy
Libris Mortis
Guide to Absalom
Osirion: Land of the Pharoahs

Other Books:

Ultimate Dangergirl!
The Scent of Shadows

Movies:

Mummy 3
Prince Caspian
Incredible Hulk
Alien vs. Predator: Requiem
Clone Wars
The Dark Knight

All clear

Well, we just had the "all clear" meeting saying that all headcount reduction actions were done. For whatever reason, I'd almost convinced myself that I was going to get laid off, and needless to say, I haven't been.

So, that's a relief. Although in some ways, I'd almost have been relieved to have been laid off and forced to go somewhere else too. If nothing else, this whole episode has opened my eyes to how little I've been enjoying this job in a while. So, while my urgency is somewhat removed, my desire to get out of Dodge (and by Dodge, I actually don't mean that literally of course) is still there.

We'll see what happens in the next few months. If nothing else, I'll have to go through some transition, as my boss was moved to a new assignment as part of a consolidation scheme.

Layoff task

Well, the layoffs for my department have been going on around me this morning. It may be a bit early to call it, but it looks like maybe I was worried for nothing. I think that they're done laying people off.

Poor lady across the aisle from me got it.

On a lighter note, I never posted the thread I was talking about last time. In fact, I've posted very little. Even when I've had the time for it, the sites have been moving glacially slow; to the point where it's not even worth it to me to wait for pages to load so I can bother reading them. It's really putting a crimp in my Pbp, though, sadly. Hopefully whatever's causing all this lag gets sorted out quickly.

Update (D&D)

In reading over again from some of the Complete books, I remembered how much fun all the organizations were. I like organizations. They provide interesting hooks to propel the game forward and give the players something cool to do. They can be motivated and ubiquitous recurring antagonists, allies, patrons, or even something that the PCs aspire to join.

I think I'm going to start a thread at CM (or maybe ENWorld. Or maybe both) soliciting the creation of new organizations that I can post in my modular campaign setting wiki. I should get some interesting feedback.

Still not laid off

For whatever that's worth.

I've had trouble concentrating on hobby pursuits lately, and my blog, which I mostly contrain to gaming or dinosaur related topics anyway, is certainly one of those. But the good news is, I'm still hanging on there. By early February, I'll know for sure one way or another how things are going to shake out for the short term, and I'll be able to settle down a bit.

Assuming I'm not laid off, though, I'm still going to be busy. For one thing, I don't think our industry is going to improve much in 2009, and I'm not confident there won't be another lay-off task coming yet. For another, even if there isn't, this whole affair has brought to mind how much I realized that I don't really like my job, don't like my company and am profoundly disinterested in the entire industry in which I work. I need a new job even so.

So, that's one of my New Year's resolutions: one way or another come to terms with my job. Right now, I'm thinking that means I need a new one.

One of my other New Years resolutions is to write this razzin' frazzin' novel that I've been dinking with for the better part of several years. I think that I find myself intimidated by the thought of actually writing it, so I either put it off, or go back and plan some more. Last night, I looked at the rather pathetic 6,000 words I've written so far (which don't even get me quite to the end of the prologue---fantasy novels are long these days. I've gotta plan on getting well over 100,000 words to sell it in today's market) I got a bit excited to move forward again. I think one thing that's really slowed me down last year was the sheer mental exhaustion I felt after a day at a job that had me all wound up all the time. I wasn't realizing how much work was affecting my personal life.

Again; time for a change. One way or another. So, I'll be busy for the time being, even if I'm not forced to be busy by virtue of being laid off. But I'll try to get this blog thing moving a bit more steadily nonetheless.

I like D&D

I've described for a long time my strange love/hate relationship with D&D, but I've come to a realization lately. I actually do like it. When I'm not playing it, I crave it. As much as I'm enjoying playing some Call of Cthulhu right now (and I am very much enjoying it) I've got D&D character concepts going on in my head that I can't get around.

Maybe part of it is that I've buying up a bunch of 3.5 books that I never got before (I just ordered the Expanded Psionics Handbook, Complete Psionic and Weapons of Legacy with a Barnes & Noble gift card I got for my birthday... I'd been using my old Psionics Handbook combined with the online SRD to get psionics up 'til now. I actually didn't have much interest in Weapons of Legacy but it was dirt cheap and it filled out what was left on the gift card much more nicely than anything else that I'd rather have bought... which would have cost a lot more. Now I've got $.91 left on the card.) As I've been reading these books that I've bought, I'm getting more and more excited about using them, of course.

Also, though, I've just come to the conclusion that there's something very satisfying about D&D. I don't know for sure what it is; like I said, I've often been very unhappy with it in the past, but when it works well, it's been some of my best gaming. I really enjoyed playing in the Age of Worms campaign for instance. The Pirates of the Mezzovian Main game I ran was tons of fun until I started running out of steam near the end. The Demons in the Mist game is great.

Granted, except for the Age of Worms, all of those were unusual, to say the least, for D&D games, but still. I've found that D&D, at least of the third edition persuasion, is a better vehicle for delivering great gaming that I had previously given it credit for.

New links

I added a few new links to the side over there. I actually have four wikis for game settings. That's a little out of control. Especially considering the state of unfinishedness (or whatever the appropriate real, actual word should be there) of all four of them.

Anyway, I added them. The Pbp setting wiki (Demons in the Mist) is reasonably useful, but that's partly because I'm not the only one who's working on it. That certainly helps it advance at a more reasonable rate rather than getting mere bare bones and then sitting like that for months at a time.

Happy Birthday to me!

I need to take some pictures, but one thing I got for my birthday was a new dice bag. My wife actually made it. It's really, really sweet. It's black (faux) crocodile skin on the exterior, with a skull and crossbones patch, on the interior it's got a nice lining of soft black cloth with additional little skull and crossbones prints on it.

It's really nice. And just in time; I've got my first Cthulhu session of the year tomorrow night.

I don't know what else (if anything) I'll get for my birthday. My wife was kinda upset at me for not actually telling her what I wanted, but frankly, I'm kinda thinking it's smart to hold off making big purchases until we get through the immediate concern with my job and industry in a couple of weeks. Our head-count reduction task is supposed to be done by the end of the month.

Then, I'll probably get something "useful" rather than something fun. Our vaccuum cleaner needs to be replaced, for example.

I'd love to get a PS2 since they're now so cheap, and a few games for it like Fatal Fury Battle Archives 2, King of Fighters XI and Street Fighter Alpha Anthology but we'll see. I could probably do all that for only $100-120.

Update

I've been familiar (through copies circulating around my gaming group) with pretty much every single book that was released by WotC during the 3e and 3.5 era, but there's still plenty of books that I never actually bought myself.

Over the last few months, I took steps to narrow that gap; picking up no fewer than seven books that were on my RPG "to buy" list, including Complete Warrior, Complete Adventurer, Monster Manual III, Monster Manual V, Drow of the Underdark, and Secrets of Sarlona. I guess The Art of Dragon Magazine wasn't really on my "to buy" list, but I got that anyway. A few more entries on the Complete series, the newer psionics book, a few of the environmental books, and one or two other odd books here and there and I can consider myself done with buying 3.5. I'm not being a real strict collector, trying to get literally everything, but there's only a few 3e and 3.5 era books that I probably won't ever want to own. And the only place where I'm really lagging are in the setting specific books.

And anyway, those are all owned by at least someone in my gaming group anyway, so I can still get most of the benefits of owning them by borrowing and reading them at any time without having to actually buy them.

Quite liking Complete Warrior by the way. I had forgotten that, among other things, it offered a pretty good substitution for the ranger and the paladin to make them spell-less. Whoops. I could have specifically encouraged those options for my Demons in the Mist game. Although a paladin would have been certainly out of character considering what the rest of the group ended up as.

Update

Well, I had a very quiet vacation, in which I was almost completely offline. So, as you can imagine, I've got a lot on my mind, but I can't possibly even attempt to capture it all right here right now.

The first thought I have is related to gaming. My big hobby. There's a pretty nifty Star Wars game that's built on the same basic game engine as Dungeons & Dragons (the d20 game engine). It's got three editions that all came out over the course of about five years. I bought the first two, barely cracked them open after first getting them, and decided to pass on the third edition. Which is too bad, as purportedly it's the best of the bunch.

Still; the idea that I've had kicking around for some time in the back of my head is to use the Star Wars d20 system for a fantasy setting. Let the two Jedi classes and the Force Adept be magic users, convert the lightsaber into some kind of magic blade, sorta like Psylocke's mindblade (from the X-men), tweak a few unnecessary skills out (like the ability pilot starships or repair droids, for example), grab a few races from fantasy sources, replace blasters with flintlocks or something, and run with it.

I think the game would feel more like Flash Gordon on Mongo or John Carter of Mars than it does like D&D, but I'm perfectly OK with that. In fact, that's a strength of the idea for someone like me, who's a bit lukewarm to D&D anyway.

Other than that basic idea, though, I haven't ever done any development. I have no idea where else this would go.

Update

Well, the Pbp (as well as any other recreational pursuit, really) has slowed down considerably as my industry goes into further tailspin. I really need to spend more time finding a way out, and into something else. Presumably the public sector has purchasing people too, right? You have no idea how attractive that sounds right now. If my kids' school district were to hire a Procurement Manager for about the same salary I make now, I'd jump on that in a heartbeat. Or a university nearby. Or pretty much any public sector job, where I wouldn't have to stress constantly about what's going on in the external environment.

Plus, frankly, I'm not all that interested in the business of making cars. The fact that I've been in this job for almost nine years now is a strong testimony to the power of inertia and complacency.

Demons in the Mist

I'm really pleased with my game. Over the course of just a few weeks, it's generated over 1300 game posts and another over 1200 out of game posts. That's massive in case you don't know. I've been watching another game that started just a week or two before mine and features a lot of similar themes and even one or two of the same players, and its just over 300 posts in game. I don't mean to demean that game, because by all accounts it's brilliant, and probably quite a bit better than mine anyway. So why is mine generating so much traction?

I sure wish I knew. I've never had one that I've tried to run before that's been as successful as this one was been. I really, really, wish I knew what the secret to the success of this game was, so I could replicate it.

But I don't.

Miracinonyx

Just for fun, here's some artwork I found with a GIS for Miracinonyx, the American "cheetah." The artist decided here to give the animal a very cheetah-like coat.

Update

Well, it's been a little while since I've made an update. We had relatives in town for Thanksgiving, and frankly, also, my blog's kinda a frivolous thing. It's hard to spend mental effort and energy on frivolous things when you're worried about things like your job, your company and even your whole industry going up in smoke.

But I've managed to do a little bit, at least. I checked out BBC's Prehistoric America on DVD from my public library. I've actually had that title before, but for some reason only watched the four episodes on the first disk and didn't see the other two on the second disk. The first episode that I hadn't seen, "American Serengeti" was probably my favorite. I'm a big fan of the almost Africa-like North American Pleistocene megafauna, which I think I've mentioned here before. Frankly, I feel kinda gypped about the animals that have lived historically (and currently) in North America when we had several varieties of elephant, lions, saber-tooths, five kinds of wild horse, two kinds of wild bison, four or five kinds of pronghorn, cheetah-like cats and more just a few thousand years ago. The show was kinda cheap about it: they intercut scenes of an actual cheetah running in Africa with scenes of pronghorns running in North America, and didn't say that the American "cheetah" wasn't actually a true cheetah at all, even though it would have been built very similarly. One of the two species of Miracinonyx was very similar morphologically to the cheetah (Acinonyx) but the other species was midway between a cheetah and a puma. And neither were all that closely related to an actual cheetah, they'd be obviously a different animal if we saw them side by side. The American "cheetah" was less closely related to the actual cheetah than a tiger is to a leopard, and those are easy enough to tell apart.

My favorite animal from the Pleistocene megafauna of North America is the American elephant, though. Better known as the Columbian mammoth, the Imperial mammoth and sometimes even the Jeffersonian mammoth, I believe that's its only a historical accident that we call them mammoths. If mammoth bones hadn't been discovered and identified in Europe first (they were one of the key points Baron Georges Cuvier used to outline and defend the theory of extinction) things might have gone very differently. Mammoths are as closely related to African and Asian elephants as African and Asian elephants are to each other. Maybe even closer to Asian elephants, actually. The non-wooly variety, the Columbian, Imperial or Jeffersonian elephant, would probably also be relatively hairless and gray-skinned, like extant elephants. It's not hard to make the case that if it had survived long enough to have been seen by Europeans, it certainly would simply have been called the American elephant. The wooly mammoth might also be the wooly elephant.

There's a curious passage in the Book of Mormon about them, actually. I know, I know, plenty of my (one or two) readers don't think the Book of Mormon is important or anything, but I think this passage is curious no matter what you believe about it. The Book of Mormon purports to be, regardless of what you believe, the record of ancient people in North America that was found and translated by Joseph Smith in the early 1800s. One such nation, the Jaredites as they were known to later people, kinda existed independently of the rest of the narrative, and their records were in turn found by the Nephites (the main "protagonist" culture of the Book of Mormon narrative) when their last king was found wandering all alone in the "land northwards." They had apparently engaged in a genocidal civil war so epic in scale that their entire civilization collapsed. Some Book of Mormon scholars point to trace evidence of lingering Jaredite linguistic influence in one branch of the Nephite people, which frankly makes more sense than actual complete and total military annihilation of the entire populace, but that's neither here nor there. The Jaredite history, which is summarized very quickly near the end of the Book of Mormon and recast by the Book of Mormon compilers as more of a cautionary morality tale than an actual detailed history lesson, has a rough date of 3100-580 B.C. give or take a couple of centuries on the beginning date. The passage in question is fairly simple: "And they [the Jaredites] also had horses, and asses, and there were elephants and cureloms and cumoms; all of which were useful unto man, and more especially the elephants and cureloms and cumoms." Nobody's sure what is meant by cureloms and cumoms, although there are plenty of candidates for North American megafauna that we know of that Joseph Smith wouldn't have, but the horses, asses and elephants are problematic, since in Joseph Smith's time, it was well known that none of those three were native to North America, and horses only came with the Spanish. However, during the Pleistocene, there were five varieties of "horse" including animals that would be very horse-like, animals that would be fairly zebra like (no comment on the stripes or not; these are known from skeletons) and animals very like wild ass and/or onager. And the Columbian mammoth is a good candidate for the elephant.

Although much of the Pleistocene megafauna's notional extinction date is roughly 8,000 B.C. although a few samples suggest that they may have hung on longer than previously believed. In Tennessee, one specimen of a Columbian mammoth was fairly reliably dated to about 5,800 B.C. That certainly puts it within spitting range of the Jaredites, especially if you assume that the scanty nature of fossil finds makes reliable end-dates very difficult to pin down. One find can push it into younger territory by fairly large margins.

Mostly, though, I don't bring this up for any reason other than I think it'd be really cool to have complex, metropolitan civilizations that lived in Pleistocene North America, domesticated mammoths (and probably other animals as well) and were generally a visual treat to look at. How cool is that? The passage referenced above just got me going on that. The sword & sorcery setting that I've been kicking around for a few weeks is also based on pretty much that exact same premise, and I like it more and more as I dig around to refresh my memory of the North American pleistocene megafauna.

Update

My reading has stumbled a bit. All these books, and I'm not as excited as I used to be to read them. I think it's because I've read a series of them that are fairly mediocre. I haven't yet figured out exactly what I am currently excited about doing, so it's been a few weeks that I've been kinda drifting relatively purposeless. I'll eventually finish The Prisoner of the Horned Helmet but I'm not in a big hurry to do so. I watched Quantum of Solace which I quite liked and Twilight which I didn't mind, but didn't really like. The 007 film was better, in my opinion, than Casino Royale although apparently I'm in the minority for thinking so. I preferred the plot structure, if nothing else, and I even liked the villain better. I liked the development of the Quantum mythos; it's been a long time that Bond has needed a non-silly equivalent to SPECTRE to rear its ugly head, after all. But maybe I was alone-ish in thinking that Casino had a rough go with the pace-dragging recuperation scenes and the tacked on longish epilogue. I did, however, think that Quantum suffered from lack of exposition. I hadn't seen Casino recently, and Julie and I kept turning to each other and going "who was that again that they're talking about?" "what was this all about again?" I suspect that Casino and Quantum will stand together very well; they're quite tightly intertwined.

Twilight's target audience is teenage girls, so it's not terribly surprising that I was mostly unenthused by it. Not being a teenager anymore and never having been a girl, that is. I thought it was a bit slow and occasionally emotionally over-wrought, but not exactly terrible.

Mostly repaired

Well, I've mostly repaired my blog. I still can't figure out exactly why I have that weird little dark rectangle up in the top right hand corner. However, since I also don't have that weird scrunching up that I used to have, maybe I'll live with it for now.

If anyone is an expert on the CSS used to create these blog templates and can figure out what's wrong up there, let me know! I'd love to get rid of that little unsightly formatting gaffe.

EDIT: Hey, a little playing around and it's gone. Suh-weet!

Whoops!

I deleted some files from my Photobucket account without realizing that they actually were an hotlinked in my blog rather than having been uploaded to blogger. Whoops! Shoulda known; I mucked with the code myself, I'd just forgotten.

Anyway, over the next few days, I may play around with the look and feel of the blog a bit, since I don't really remember the formatting html I used, and I don't actually have those images anymore. It'll take a little work to settle on a look and file that I like. I'd like to return to the dark text on ivory/parchment look eventually, though.

S&S Setting

Although it's hardly a new idea, I've been (off and on) fascinated with the concept of a prehistoric sword & sorcery setting. This isn't terribly different than the idea behind the iconic Sword & Sorcery setting, Howard's Hyborian Age or his earlier Pre-Cataclysmic Age of Kull of Atlantis. Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborean cycle of prehistoric, temperate Greenland also fit into this mold, as do L. Sprague de Camp's Conan ripoff stories of the Pusadian Cycle. However, the primary source that really kicked off this idea in me several months ago was the mediocre movie 10,000 B.C. which takes an excellent idea, and then fails to do anything really dramatic with it.

More recently, I started reading James Silke's Death Dealer novels (I found the first three of four in a used book store for $2 each a month or so ago) which are set in the Mediterranean Basin during the Ice Age, a time which he assumes the basin was not flooded. As near as I can tell, this view is not supported by anyone anymore, and the closest thing is the Messinian Salinity Crisis some 5 odd million years ago in the late Miocene when the Mediterreanean partially (or maybe completely) dried up. Of course, this was twice as long ago as the best estimate for the appearance of Homo sapiens so naturally it doesn't work. Still; the idea of a Pleistocene high civilization that has since vanished without a trace is not a new one, and some archeological suspect, yet entertaining nonetheless books about the subject do appear from time to time. Heck; Graham Hancock seems to have built an entire career in trying to prove the existence of global high civilization that existed some 10,000 years or so ago and which subsequently disappeared and set humanity back eons to claw its way back up to where it had previously been only after thousands of years of suffering through the most prolonged dark age known to man.

I don't believe this kind of stuff for a minute, but... what if it's true? What if high civilization existed during the Pleistocene, perhaps in North America even? I started looking around for some geologically interesting places where I could construct such a setting, and came up with the idea of Lake Agassiz. This gigantic lake was once situation right in the heart of North America, and it took up more real estate than all of the Great Lakes today do combined. During the Younger Dryas, the last glacial maximum and cooling period of the Ice Age, Lake Agassiz was drained into the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, some scientists claim that it's feasible that the rapid draining of Lake Agassiz in fact caused the Younger Dryas, by putting all that cooler fresh water into the ocean and disrupting current flow. In any case, Lake Agassiz is a candidate for catastrophic, rapid draining; walls of water racing across the continental face in an event that would have been a suitable candidate for the elimination of the civilization that dwelt on its shores.

In addition to Lake Agassiz, Lake Bonneville is another good candidate; a gigantic lake that covered pretty much the entirety of what is now the state of Utah. This is another one that's believed to have flooded catastrophically about 14,500 years ago. See, this would be the difference between my setting and some of the others I've read; the utilization of real life geography as much as possible as the building blocks of the setting.

I know, I know, for anyone besides me, who cares? But I think it's an interesting challenge to try and build a setting, set around the shores of prehistoric Lake Bonneville, featuring the Pleistocene megafauna, and conforming to sword & sorcery conventions for wildness and fun.

Anyway, I'm excited. I've started making notes and playing around with maps already, and I'm eager to see what I can come up with here.

Atronomy pic of the day

If you haven't ever checked out the Atronomy pic of the day link, you should.

Here's a slightly older one of some bright, blue stars in a star-forming nebula in the Small Magellanic cloud. Get the full-sized version to check out all the background galaxies you can see. Wild stuff.

Predator

For some reason, I've been on a bit of a Predator kick. I've watched both the movies, and read the Concrete Jungle novel and am now reading the Cold War novel. They're not brilliant, by any means: both are by Nathan Archer, who was a newcomer to the writing gig at the time, and both are adaptations of prior Dark Horse comic book runs. Both of those original source materials were (apparently) written in the interlude between the first Predator movie and the second, since they completely fail to allude to anything in the second Predator movie, which honestly doesn't make sense unless they were simply written first.

Not brilliant... but fun enough and easy to read. Disposible fiction (probably why I bought them at used book stores) and frankly kinda mindless in a way; retreading the movies significantly, yet... after slogging through Gardens of the Moon that really kinda hit the spot. I'll read the rest of the Aliens and Predator and Aliens vs. Predator books that I picked up before I attempt anything a bit more serious.

Gardens of the Moon

Precision with terminology is a pet peeve of mine. In particular, I'm thinking about labels for subdivisions of fantasy fiction. At least at the moment. I've heard plenty of really sloppy labeling, like calling the Lord of the Rings movies Sword & Sorcery for example. One example that's not quite as blatant, yet is nuanced and significant nonetheless is the mislabeling of any fantasy that is highly fantastical as High Fantasy. High Fantasy as a subgenre is many things; ironically, having a high level of wahoo fantasy is not necessarily one of them, and in fact is probably a good indication that the work in question is not High Fantasy at all. High Fantasy tends to take place in fairly realistic worlds that closely resemble some real world society on many levels, usually a medieval one.

The reason I bring this up is because I finally finished reading Gardens of the Moon last night. And frankly, I don't think it's High Fantasy at all, although it is highly fantastic. You've got flying giant bugs, for example, that serve as mounts for army couriers. You've got gods and godlike beings that play around in the mortal worlds as a matter of course, and in fact the clash between several such beings is the pivotal climax at the end of Gardens. But the book is not High Fantasy. It's fairly dark in many ways, it's gritty, it's got tons of intrigue and espionage, it's got strong military themes: it does a lot of things, but adhering closely to standard High Fantasy plot points, setting points and other familiar themes is not one of the things that it does at all.

I can't say that I really liked it. I thought it was poorly structured. For hundreds of pages, I really didn't have any idea what was going on, who the characters being described were, and why I should care about the bizarre, inexplicable and unexplained things that were happening to them. That changed a bit as the book got on and I started to be able to follow plot threads, even though they still bounced around like the literary version of ADD without any explanation of what was going on. As the book wound up to its climax, though, I found that I was underwhelmed by the entire thing. There were some cool ideas in it, but I just never really bought into the characters or their plights, and the subplot resolutions felt empty to me. Not only did I not really like most of the characters, some of them very actively annoyed me (Kruppe being the biggest offender here, but Lorn, Rake and a few others count as well.) The characters all felt very flat and poorly conceived, and their cardboard motivations, or sometimes lack thereof, made them unsympathetic and boring to read about.

Many other things were introduced and then not fully explored, while other things got tons of activity, but it felt like buzzing around in a great deal of rather pointless noise. The plot structure really needed a stronger focus and concentration on accomplishing goals, and the characters (and dialogue) needed a lot of work. The setting was decent, although also not as well explored as perhaps it could have been. It wasn't showcased well enough to make it a real asset.

Do I like the book well enough to go on? Well, frankly, I've already bought Deadhouse Gates so that's a moot point. If I bought it, eventually I'll read it. If I hadn't bought it already, would I now that I've finished Gardens? Honestly: probably not.

Pbp

One problem with a Play-by-post game is that you're stuck according to vagaries that don't plague face-to-face games. One of them is that people aren't necessarily posting at the same time. Games can lag for even simple tasks that could be resolved in seconds in face-to-face.

Another issue, and this has been plagueing me today, is server availability. Circvs Maximvs, where I run the "Demons in the Mist" game, has been flaky today, and quite frequently as I've tried to update it, I've found it unavailable. Grrr... One of the things that has made this game (so far) so successful was the fast pace. I'm concerned long term about losing momentum. These server issues, right on the heels of a long, weird, holiday weekend where folks weren't as available as they had been prior, is worrisome, as it can cause the game to slow down and never pick back up again as well as it had been.

Also; just a minor thing; I changed the settings so comments are now on a pop-up window instead of a new page. Maybe I'll get a few more that way.

Sword & Sorcery

Just for fun, I spent a little bit of time earlier on the Wikipedia article for Sword & Sorcery, and I like what it says about the subgenre in terms of influences. I think what's occasionally forgotten, especially today, is the influence of swashbuckling authors like Alexandre Dumas and Rafael Sabatini, and the influence of the classic Arabian Nights style Orientalism that also informed guys like H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

This is really just a plug, though... Rafael Sabatini. If you haven't read this guy, you should. In my opinion, his best novels are Scaramouche, Captain Blood and The Black Swan. Captain Blood also got a credible film adaptation in the 30s; the movie that made Errol Flynn and Olivia de Haviland both into superstars. The adaptations of Scaramouche (with Stewart Granger) and The Black Swan (with Tyrone Power) aren't bad, but aren't as good. Don't miss out on the original novels, though... Sabatini's skill with prose is considerable.

Sword & Planet

I really, really applaud Paizo for putting together the Planet Stories imprint to bring a lot of older pulp stories back into print. I've talked about it here and there from time to time, but I'm fairly anti-establishment in terms of literature, and part of that means that I eschew "sophistication" (to some extent) and celebrate the cheap and gratuitous thrills of the pulps. Of course, that's not really anti-establishment, especially since some of the pulp writers have now been dead long enough that its fashionable to like them again.

Be that as it may, I applaud Paizo for publishing the stuff, but I haven't yet become a consumer myself. In part, this is because I already have so many of these works from their earlier published efforts (especially the Leight Brackett and Otis Adelbert Kline.) I realize that in many cases, those earlier DAW or Ace versions or heavily expurgated and badly mauled, but I'm a tightwad by nature and it goes against the flow to buy something that I already have, even if the newer version is better. Other times, they just haven't happened to hit on stuff that I liked (the Michael Moorcock Mars books, for example, are absolutely terrible. I'd never buy those, no matter how fancy the new cover art is.)

That said, there are a few of their imprints that I actually really want to buy, including those by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore.

In any case, if you're unfamiliar with Paizo's line, or the whole brand of planetary romance and sword & sorcery pulp fantasy/science fiction in general, then do yourself a favor and browse through their catalog.

Rat Bastard vs. Cuddly Puppydog Love-a-thon

I've found myself somewhat subconsciously pulling my punches a bit in this Pbp, in part because I'm enjoying the character interactions too much to bring them to a premature end this early. That ever happen to you? Shautha really probably should've died this weekend, but she pulled through. Just barely. I didn't "cheat" per se, but I also didn't really give her the full treatment that I would have otherwise.

Meet the characters

I know I've been babbling on about my Play-by-post D&D game more than most of you are probably interested in, but hey, I'm still on the honeymoon with it, so you'll have to indulge.

Here's the PCs I've got, in alphabetical order:

1) Lash: a hobgoblin fighter/rogue, whip specialist. A down-on his luck hobgoblin version of Indiana Jones. Fairly steady, except when a get-rich scheme comes to mind, with a brash exterior and control issues. A natural leader.

2) Nixzaliz: human rogue. A young orphan woman who grew up on the mean streets of Zin and is out trying to make her fortune. She's got a bit of a cynical bite and has occasional bouts of extreme luck... both good and bad.

3) Ricardo Murciélago: human swashbuckler. All smooth, all the time. Ricardo can't ever seem to see past the nearest feminine face, and his sowing of wild oats reaches epic proportions. And causes him most of his trouble as well.

4) Scritch: shifter ninja. Rat-like savage assassin and quiet guy; keeps his thoughts to himself.

5) Shautha Voksdottir: Half-orc lady who thinks that maybe she's beautiful (she's not) but is constantly searching for male companionship.

6) Vuukran: Hobgoblin soulknife who served in Xoth-Sarnath's legions and who may have been hit in the head one too many times during combat training.

You can get the full picture of everyone right here.

AWOL Player back

My AWOL player is no longer AWOL, and it looks like we're in business. I've got her character introduced to the rest of the group, Ricardo's already flirting with her like mad, and I've sent some really creepy critters coming up out of the Mist to screw with them.

Fun times!

I actually re-read the entire game thread last night; it's surprisingly a really good read. These characters and their interactions really make it good, though. It's like the perfect storm of gaming awesome.

Demons in the Mist 3

Well, the first "scene" of my Pbp is over. It was a meeting with the patroness of their little adventure, that turned into a wild and crazy chase scene as they found a spy eavesdropping on their meeting. The players all rolled really terribly, which made for a lot of unintentional comedy. One player said that the game resembled every single Robin Hood and Three Musketeers movie ever made; in some ways it seemed to more resemble Robin Hood: Men in Tights. All in all, a highly entertaining kick-off.

I'm one player short; one of them never posted her character and has been AWOL for a few days. I sent her a private message and if I don't hear from her in a day or two, I'll go tap the first alternate to see if he's interested in taking over.

Gardens of the Moon

For what it's worth, I'm finally starting to really get into Gardens of the Moon, the first book in the "Malazan Book of the Fallen" by Steven Erikson. Who may be spelled Stephen or Steven or Erikson or Ericson, but I'm not going to the trouble of checking right now.

I checked it out from the library a long time ago, and about 100 pages in I turned it back in (because it was due) and I was really struggling to get into it. I had had the series recommended to me too many times to give up that easily, though, so I bought a copy and figgered that way I could take my time reading it. Why would I want to read a book that I was struggling so much with in the first place, you might ask. Good question.

I've actually been told by many that it's the weakest book in the series (ironic for a series opener, and unfortunate) and that it improves as it goes on. I'd even been told that Gardens itself improves as you get into it. So I decided that I needed to swallow it like a really big pill and trust that it would improve. Seems like maybe it finally is. I'll write a full review of the book here when I'm completely done. With any luck, that'll be sometime this coming week still.

New logo

You like it? I do!

I started (officially) my Pbp today. I mean, just a few minutes ago, really, so not much to report yet. I do really like the Spirit of the Century rule for chargen that I borrowed; each player writes for his character a small vignette that represents a novel or story that happened in the past; his own pulp adventure novel, if you like. It's not supposed to be long; a couple of paragraphs tops. Kinda like the dust jacket or back cover blurb on a real book.

Then, when everyone's done that, you randomly assign that character to two other players, so that everyone has two players and everyone was picked twice. They in turn write a couple of sentences emeshing their character in a supporting role in the backstory vignette of another character.

This way, every character has a connection to, at a barest minimum if the randomized picking comes up bad, two other characters in the group, more likely three and possibly four. This 1) gives them a reason to work together, because hey! they have in the past and know each other, and 2) have some instant roleplaying hooks to latch onto within the group.

So far, I'm not 100% sure how it's working out, but it was fun to try anyway. I like the process and will probably use it from now on.

Book queue

Just recently I made a pit stop by my two local used bookstores that I frequent, and picked up a few. Then, this morning, I decided I'd make a list of books that I own, but haven't yet read (or at least, I haven't read them since I bought them--some of them I've read before, just not as an actual owner of the book.) I included all the new ones I just got, naturally, but I had a few others too. I was surprised how many books it came to.

In no particular order (other than that I'm starting with the book that I'm currently in the middle of) I've got:

Gardens of the Moon
Deadhouse Gates
Aliens vs Predator: Hunter's Planet
Aliens: Rogue
Predator: Big Game
Predator: Cold War
Splinter of the Mind's Eye
Transit to Scorpio
Prisoner of the Horned Helmet
Lords of Destruction
Tooth and Claw
The Lies of Locke Lamora
The Books of the South (actually three Black Company novels consolidated into a single volume)
The Ginger Star
The Hounds of Skaith
The Reavers of Skaith
Warrior of Llarn
Thief of Llarn
The Black Arrow

Also, although it's not on my bookcase, somewhere kicking around in the house I've got a copy of Stan Nicholls Orc: First Blood that I haven't read.

So... I doubt I'll be spending too much time at the library for the next few months. I've got plenty to read already. As you can probably see, that's a fairly wide-ranging selection (well, relatively speaking.) I've got everything from the Classics (The Black Arrow) to formulaic write for hire books (the Predator and Alien titles) to disposible sword & planet hackwork (the Llarn and Scorpio books) to reasonably serious fantasy novels (Locke Lamora and the Malazan titles.)

Demons in the Mist 2

I've created a new wiki: http://demonsinthemist.wikispaces.com/ to cover the new Pbp I'm going to be running. I've invited everyone who's playing to have membership (and therefore editing rights) but so far only barsoomcore's signed on. Which is OK; barsoomcore and I have a demonstrated 95+% shared brain functionality, so I completely trust any edits he makes, assuming he makes any, to be almost exactly what I wanted to do or even cooler, anyway.

Anyway, check it out. I'm pretty excited about the campaign premise, and naturally, the game is made up of solid Circvs Maximvs A-listers.

Demons in the Mist, by Jango Dall

I've decided to try my hand at running a Pbp game again, mostly because I've been caught up in a strange campaign idea that Rel had with an otherwordly (and toxic) mist that blankets the world at lower altitudes, meaning that only mountain tops are habitable. I actually decided to make super-plateaus, sorta like the tepuis of Venezuela, only sometimes even bigger (I've got two side by side that are nearly the size of Puerto Rico or Jamaica, for example). The mist covers solid ground, but it's incredibly dangerous solid ground, rife with demons and monsters, and the mist itself will kill you.

I also wanted to see what I could do with running a D&D game that didn't feel at all like D&D because it had a bunch of different racial and class choices. So any class with a spellcasting progression was specifically disallowed, while psionics was specifically encouraged in its place. I used a few other house rules too, but I can get to those in a later post.

Mostly, I wanted to post my map. I did a search of "archipelago" in Google image search, and one hit was this picture of the British Isles, but with the sea level raised, giving it a very different coastline. I took that, faded it somewhat and added a bunch of names. I'll include a Gazeteer of those names later, but for now, here's the map.

Also; assume that this is all about half the size of the actual British Isles. You'll probably need to click through to get the full sized image if you want to actually read any of the names.

Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp

I have a funny relationship with these two men. Not that I know either of them personally (both have been dead for a number of years anyway) but I have a weird relationship nonetheless.

Today, Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp are mostly known for making a hash out of the Conan stories, revising them (badly) and putting them in print in a badly expurgated form, and maintaining that state of affairs for many years until Del Rey recently stepped in and "saved" us by publishing original versions.

However, both were notable science fiction and fantasy writers in their own regard, although both also wrote a number of really derivative works. Lin Carter in particular aped other writers, especially Edgar Rice Burroughs with his Callisto series (like ERB's Mars books), his Green Star series (sorta like ERB's Venus books), his Zanthadon series (very similar to ERB's Pellucidar books), his Mysteries of Mars series (very similar to Leigh Brackett's Mars books), his Prince Zarkon (very similar to Kenneth Robeson's Doc Savage stories)... well, you get the idea. L. Sprague de Camp wasn't above doing it either with his eight book Planet Krishna series (very similar to Barsoom) and his Pusadian Series (marked similarities to Howards Hyborian Age.)

The difference between them is that Lin Carter was probably a less accomplished writer, yet he made up for it with his unabashed, earnest "fanboyism" of his source material, which made his poorly done copies somewhat endearing rather than annoying. L. Sprague de Camp, on the other hand, didn't really seem to understand what made those original works fun in the first place, and had the off-puttingly elitist attitude of "I'm going to get it right!" by "correcting" what he saw as literary absurdities in Howard's and Burroughs' work. His own, then, had a kind of dry lecturing taste to it, with faint hints of self-congratulation lurking in the corners.

That said, I kinda get the concept of being a fundamentally less talented yet enthusiastic fan of something and attempting to recreate it to some extent in your own image. I tend to think that I'm not exactly innovative and imaginative when it comes to generating ideas, but I do have some modest talent for synthesizing various elements, shamelessly borrowed, and putting them together into an attractive repackaging scheme.

So, in that regard, I find I can summon a fair bit of sympathy for L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. In spite of their rather pointedly second-rate "original" fiction. In spite of what they did to the Conan stories for decades. In fact, I wish I could be as successful as they've been, even if their success has turned out to be ephemeral. I'd take ephemeral success in a heartbeat for my own work, frankly.

d20

I've probably blogged about this in the past, but the question came up again and I've been giving it some thought.

Psion questioned, on TheRPGSite, the wisdom of using d20 for a planetary romance game, after finding that his Mars d20 game didn't exactly live up to his expectations. He's been running the genre with Spirit of the Century more recently, and been happier. At the same time, I was convinced to start another Pbp in a slightly unusual D&D-esque mileu. I'm using 3.5 with a few custom parameters. In doing this, though, I grabbed a concept that Rel came up with and is going to be running for his regular group using D&D 4e. So, the question is, why?

The answer comes in several parts, and one of those is quite simple: I'm lazy. I just don't have any interest in playing around with new systems anymore. When I was younger, system experimentation was fun, and I did it on purpose. Now, I'm more than happy to stick with a system that I know well, even if it doesn't do everything I'd like perfectly. Don't underestimate the benefit of system familiarity either; it's nice that I know d20 well enough that I can run it on the fly without much (if any) prior preparation to make sure I know what I'm doing. I also know it well enough that I can run it fairly fast and loose; utilizing the skill system to enable almost anything that you could think of as a player to attempt. Big benefit there.

Another benefit is the modularity of d20. Because of the open gaming license, tons of top notch game designers have tried their hand at d20, making up alternate rules that you can use for all kinds of reasons. Wizards of the Coast themselves put out a book of "official" house rule options called Unearthed Arcana that has a lot of cool options in it. The end result of this is that many of the things that I don't think d20 does well have already been more than adequately patched by someone... in many cases, I have more than one suitable patch to choose from, even. I'm not a huge fan of levels and the massive power discrepancy between low and high level, but if you run a game in a more limited setting, that problem takes care of itself (I rarely start at 1st level, and rarely run higher than 7th or 8th level before wrapping a game up.) And the E6 houserule set "officially" eliminates my level problem. I don't like how there's no AC progression to match To Hit progression, but UA has a houserule to take care of that. Various Action Points, Hero Points, Fate Points, etc. take care of many of my other problems with the system. Incantations and other alternate magic systems give me a magic system I like when the D&D default doesn't please.

A related benefit is the huge library of compatible material. This benefit is very hard to turn away from; I have access to literally thousands of feats, spells, classes, monsters, and everything else to choose from to use. In fact, this reason alone would be sufficient to keep me turning to d20 first, but the others ensure that I really have little interest in any other system most days. d20 may not be the literal "Holy Grail" system that does everything for me exactly the way I want it to, but I've had a really difficult time finding any other system that comes closer, and the other benefits of d20 give it the lead every single time I turn to run.

Pathfinder

Not that long ago, I had the opportunity to pick up the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting, a new OGL product from Paizo where they elucidate the details of the setting they invented to house the Pathfinder Adventure Path modules.

I'm a setting fan. I like settings. I don't really use them, per se, but I liberally steal from them. Therefore, even settings like the Forgotten Realms, which I cordially (sometimes) dislike are still of use to me, and settings like Eberron or Iron Kingdoms are goldmines. The Paizo folks, by and large, had impressed me, so I came into this setting book with high expections. As you'll see, they were more or less met, or even exceeded. This is a high quality product that offers something a bit unique to me; a setting that is both iconically D&D and yet very strangely attractive to me.

See; typically I don't like iconic D&D that much. Like I said, I don't like Forgotten Realms. I don't like Greyhawk. I don't like Blackmoor. I don't like Mystara (the Known World.) To me, they feel tired, bland, and even when they were new, they weren't that great. Pathfinder somehow manages to tap into everything that was good about those kinds of settings while simultaneously eliminating the stuff that wasn't. It feels very pulpish and classic fantasy (making obvious nods to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and others) while at the same time very modern.

That said, it wasn't a perfect book. It's pretty… it has a nice Wayne Reynolds cover, nice interior art, it's full color, quality paper, and attractively laid out. It's pricey, though. Cover price is $49.99 and it's got about 265 pages or so. The Eberron or Forgotten Realms books, on the other hand, sold for $39.99 and were at least fifty pages longer. Also, full color, with attractive cover art (also Wayne Reynolds even, in the case of Eberron) and attractively laid out. So right off the bat, I was a bit stung by the price. Indeed, the price probably introduced significant delay in me picking the book up. Once I committed to the plunge, though, I'm glad I bought the book.

It's got five chapters, and almost half the book is made up of Chapter 2: the different countries and regions. Chapter 1 is a little bit on races, cultures, classes and whatnot. Not my favorite type of material, but arguably important to include. I could take it or leave it. I did, however, appreciate the fact that they differentiated (at least in fluff, if not crunch---arguably that's the best way to do it anyway) between many different human cultures.

Chapter 2 is the real meat of the book, though, and I'm going to brush over it with a bit more detail. I can't comment on all the countries/regions, but a few highlights struck me. Absalom, for example, is the cosmopolitan port city where you can have it all if you like urban, intrigue type adventures Fun, decadent place. Cheliax, the "Nazi devil-worshippers" was a very interesting idea. Although described as in decline, I can easily see that nation poised like Germany shortly after the Nazi takeover, soon to be expanding at the expense of its neighbors, and causing all kinds of adventure possibilities in the meantime. Druma, the land of bizarre merchant-cultists make for intriguing and interesting patrons. Hermea, the land of the "eugenics dragon" is interestingly morally ambiguous (that's actually common in this setting… it may not have ditched alignment, or even officially downplayed it as Eberron did, but it's got that real amoral Sword & Sorcery vibe going all through it). Irrisen was another favorite; the ice kindgom of Baba Yaga and her heirs. Katapesh is another amoral merchant society, but much more alien than Absalom. The Mwangi Expanse was one of my favorites, as it is a catch-all for a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughsisms: a combination of Tarzan's Africa and the Land that Time Forgot all at once. I especially liked the gorilla kindgom. It's almost begging to have Opar buried in it somewhere, though. Osirion is this setting's Egypt, and they've decided to give it a kind of 18th century vibe, with the leaders having invited "archeologists" to come and raid their tombs for profit. Qadira is an interesting combination of the more liberal and progressive Islamic caliphates, the Persian Empire, and anything else interesting from the Middle East, with a nice, spooky bit where Asmodeus has caged the an even worse evil in a gigantic fissure in the ground. Ustalav has a nice gothic horror vibe going on; it's like Transylvannia of Stoker turned into a fantasy setting. Varisia is a large frontier region with only regional city-states separated by wilderness. The Worldwound is where demons sprout from the ground, inspiring crusades of varying effectiveness from its neighbors.

In the next chapters, gods and cosmology are discussed (which feels familiar to longtime D&D players, but not exactly the Great Wheel either), organizations like the Red Mantis assassins, the Hellknights (the SS of Cheliax) and the Pathfinder Society (adventurer patrons, mostly). The book finishes up by talking about all kinds of miscellany: a timeline, the Darklands (I guess the Underdark is a trademarked name; this is essentially the same thing), some mechanics (feats, prestige classes, etc.), Languages, trade routes, weather and climate.

The setting is designed to be used, of course, as is, but it's also easily raidable for use in any other setting, or homebrew. Like I said, as a bit of a D&D sceptic, who prefers a different take on fantasy than D&D usually has, I still found much to appreciate in this setting, and frankly, it made me kinda appreciate D&D a lot more. It showed me, if nothing else, that classic fantasy can be done in D&D without the overly intrusive D&Disms that tend to intrude.

As an aside, there are a few minor areas where the few mechanics it has do not exactly match the Pathfinder RPG. Technically this is an OGL product, presumably for use with D&D 3.5, that just happens to also be compatible with the Pathfinder RPG. It's a little less compatible with 4e even if you ignore the mechanics, because it frequently references classes and races that are not part of the 4e package to date, and you have to find a way to work in things like the Dragonborn, for instance. That said, the tieflings and Cheliax seem like a match made in …er… Heaven.

Fluffwise, there's no reason why you couldn't run a 4e game in the Pathfinder Setting with only a little work… either eliminating the dragonborn or finding a place to put them.

Settings

After a bit of delay, here's the last settings I meant to cover. Some of them are iffy---not D&D settings at all, but d20 settings that are really meant for slightly different games. But what they hey; this is my last post on the subject, so I figgered I'd go all out.

Freeport: This is one of my favorite d20 settings, although ironically the in print and best Freeport book is system neutral and could be used for any system (there are, in fact, companions designed to "port" the setting into d20, True20, Savage Worlds, and Castles & Crusades, as well as a blog post at publisher Green Ronin that gives some suggestions on using Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying.) That said, the setting is pretty iconically D&D, and obviously so, even though it doesn't have any system. The setting assumptions have elves, halflings, gnomes, dwarves, orcs, goblinoids, etc. and the presence of arcane magic users and clerics who perform their roles exactly as in D&D are inherent setting assumptions.

What I really like about the setting is that it very successfully ported D&D into the Golden Age of piracy. It did away with simplistic notions like alignment, and is pretty gritty, dirty, and yet still very interesting and fun.

Dragonlance: This was licensed and published by Sovereign Press, which is the company of (among others) Margaret Weis, co-creater of the setting in the first place. Decent setting. It always struck me as more appropriate for novels than for gaming; but I could be biased by the terrible earlier modules that were published by TSR back in the day. In any case, the setting has the annoying tendency to "blow up" regularly and get completely rebuilt from scratch. It's got some notable differences from "default" D&D, but bizarrely, rather than being a help, it's a bit of a hindrance in this case, in my opinion. The setting is too D&D to accept these differences with good grace.

Planescape: Maybe I'm cheating a bit by including this one. Technically, it hasn't been published, but in actuality, Planescape was pretty much folded into the core setting (it was also originally built on the core setting back in the day, too) so a number of core books get pretty close to recreating the setting in a 3e milieu anyway. I like it. It's wide open and somewhat crazy, but it pulls that vibe off with panache.

The Wheel of Time: One of the first alt.D&D's built off the d20 engine, the Wheel of Time game is the setting for the Wheel of Time book series, naturally. This is another one that has some interesting things about it, but isn't a good setting to use for gaming. The big story's already being told in the novels, obviously, and the heroes of the novels are the heroes of the story. That makes using the setting difficult. Add to that that the author is, again, "blowing up" the setting and rebuilding it as he goes, and the setting has some things that are worth borrowing, but it isn't a good one to use as is.

Star Wars: Now I'm really far afield, but this is a favorite setting of mine. It's pretty wide open, if you remove your game from the events of the movie somewhat. I like moving it forward a few hundred years in time, but the Knights of the Old Republic video game proved it could be done moving backwards a few thousand years too.

Traveller: Again; a not-D&D setting, and the "T20" book doesn't actually have much setting in it, but it's a fun setting. Another "wide open" one that actually encourages an awful lot of GM creating, and gives you good tools to do so.

Fantasy settings continued

Here's the next wave of fantasy settings I'm commenting on. Probably one more post on this topic too.

Dragonstar: Briefly in the early days of Third Edition D&D, Fantasy Flight Games put out this setting, which was essentially "D&D in space." And I don't mean that in the Warhammer 40,000 sense of having "elves" and "orcs" and "dwarves"; I mean that in that it is literally Dungeons & Dragons in space. On spaceships. Casting spells and everything.

Kinda a fun idea; honestly I was never really sure what to do with it, though.

Urban Arcana: This one is a little iffy; technically it's a d20 Modern setting, not a D&D setting, but d20 Modern and D&D are already essentially the same thing to begin with system-wise. This setting was more explicitly D&D in modern times though; it even has drow fer goodness sakes. For my money, I'd rather play this as a kind of Dresden Files meets Buffy meets Shadowrun.

Sovereign Stone: This setting was most notable for 1) being written by Margaret Weis of Dragonlance fame, being illustrated by Larry Elmore (of all kinds of older D&D product cover artwork fame) and having a pretty nifty new magic system to replace the D&D default.

Sadly, other than that, it fell pretty flat. So the elves are samurai and the dwarves are Mongols... that's not original, that's just swapping one tired paradigm for one that's silly. I bought these books on the cheap from an old Wizards of the Coast outlet store in the mall back when they were closing all those stores, otherwise I probably wouldn't have bothered. Other than the magic system, there's not even anything worth borrowing here.

Northwall: Not so much a setting as the seed of one included in FFG's Darkness & Dread book, which is otherwise a book of alternate rules and GMing advice for running a horror fantasy game. Northwall is a chapter near the end that serves as a kind of mini-campaign setting. As a setting itself, it's not that interesting, original, or fleshed out, although it is kinda nice. The book is really more notable for the alternate rules.

Scarred Lands: Famous for getting a monster book out before the Third Edition Monster Manual was on sale, this setting is kinda interesting. The premise is that there was a war between the gods the titans a la Greek mythology; except that instead of happening in the distant past, it just got over with a few decades ago. The world is still scarred from the conflict (hence the setting name) and it's got a bit of a fantasy post-apocalyptic vibe going through it. Sadly, the setting is difficult to encapsulate in a single product; the Gazetteer being the closest thing to an actual setting book. Rather, it trickled out via various products over several years.

It's got some great things to borrow; tons of original monsters, Hallowfaust, d20 "skaven" and more, but it's a little difficult to run coherently on its own, I think. Plus, it's kinda weird, frankly. And not always in a good way. Too many "out there" ideas rather than a few well developed ones lead to a scattershot feeling setting.

Rokugan: Technically introduced as a D&D setting in the Oriental Adventures product, this was also released as a setting book by AEG as well (I have both.) Sadly, although Oriental Adventures was an easy read, I have struggled to get all the way through Rokugan, even thought the setting appeals to me. It's a kind of sorta ancient China, samurai Japan and D&D all rolled into one. The AEG book starts off with a lot of alternate rules, which have been handy for borrowing, no doubt, but which also make the book extremely difficult to read.