Converting SOG to a novel outline

Because I'll be moving several states over shortly, my "D&D" game will be on hold probably permanently, although we are talking about possibly playing over Teams or Google Meet or something similar. But I'm getting kind of motivated to revisit it regardless right now, so I'm thinking what else I can do. The first thing, and one that I've literally been talking about for years but never really done much with, is trying to put together a story, book, or even full-on novel based on the SOG outline. Honestly, it might be more than one novel, given that there are more than five fronts in SOG, especially if I keep my novel length to modest novel lengths before High Fantasy doorstoppers from the likes of Robert Jordan changed the landscape of fantasy publishing forever. Although its funny to think about, the Lord of the Rings volumes are only about 350 pages each, which was considered a long novel at the time. Heck, the entire LotR saga has less than half a million words. Even when you add The Hobbit to the count, it's still only 550,147 (according to the internet.) There are single books in Erikson, Jordan, Sanderson or Martin sagas that are nearly as long as the entire LotR. Sometimes truly less is more.

I think, although I wouldn't run the game this way, that it would make the most sense to split the plot points between two groups of characters who are only occasionally in contact with each other. The obvious choices here are one group with Dominic and Kimnor and the second group with Ragnar and Cailin. 

I also, as pointed out in an earlier post, need to tamp down the urgency of the main front so that it doesn't seem "irresponsible" for the characters to spend more time doing other things rather than focusing on it. I think it makes sense for the groups to start out in Barrowmere together, and then travel together towards Burham's Landing. As they pass Rabb's Hill, they'll meet Eoman Gast on the Savages of the Thursewood front, and that will be the impetus that causes them to split up. Ragnar and Cailin will therefore handle the Savages of the Thursewood and then bring Joan Wilmore back to the Northwoods region where they also run into The Tazitta Death Cults front. Dominic and Kimnor will board a ship and immediately start running into The Pirates of Chersky Island problems, and handle the original Chaos in the North front too. Because Ratling Scourge of the North Shore is a natural outgrowth of Chaos in the North, they'll handle it too.

I need to figure out how they can have a meet-up partway through; maybe in Lomar, and then how to get Ragnar and Cailin to Garenport for the big finale. My outline currently doesn't tie up Chaos in the North and the Tazitta Death Cults very well together, because they're independent, but I've got to get Jairan involved in the Chaos in the North somehow, or at least make the way to reach her in Garenport.

Dominic Clevenger. His iconic look is the traveler's leathers and the coonskin cap

Kimnor Rugosa, grayman shadow sword with a pet psueodragon

Ragnar Clevenger also has the leathers, but uses an axe in his left hand, and has "Viking" hair.

Cailin Clevenger, Ragnar's young wife, turned into a dhampyr

Dark Fantasy X and Shadows Over Garenport and Cult of Undeath

OK, I'm done with HOMM3 posts. I'm done with SWTOR posts. I haven't done much of anything else in several months, but it's time to start working again on DFX and the campaigns.

DFX as a game, of course, is done. I'm not doing anything else with it anymore. Here's the link, just for reference:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i6SlE8bF1mmGmgMKtkj2OHoP_-FrtKAo/view?usp=drive_link

And the character sheet:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ols2sEepL5KwkiqoapwgiVYEKMfSymqC/view?usp=drive_link

But I've posted those before, and when I say that I'm working on DFX, I don't mean on the rules, I mean on the setting and campaign discussion.

I think that I've done everything I need to for SHADOWS OVER GARENPORT, and I don't have anything else needed to run. In fact, I've already started running, although for various reasons unrelated to the game itself, I never made it an ongoing thing. I'm actually more interested, in light of my pending relocation, in converting that campaign outline into a novel outline (or more than one, possibly) and start writing it in my spare time rather than imaging TTRPGs that aren't happening.

But what I really want to do is start migrating into working on my revised CULT OF UNDEATH. As a refresher for people who haven't been reading for years, I originally did CULT OF UNDEATH years ago as an attempt to summarize and adapt the Carrion Crown adventure path by Paizo into a game that I could run. That was a fun project to go through, but what I realized fairly quickly was that I couldn't really do it. There were too many ideas and too many concepts that didn't work for me, and while there were certainly some ideas that I could borrow, there were also a great many that would have to change so much that the whole project would be pretty unrecognizable as an adaptation of the original source material in any way whatsoever except maybe the set up of the story. This sat in this state for a long time until I started doing these campaign briefs, and this 5x5 FRONTS exercise, where I thought I'd dust off the idea and rebuild it from the ground up. I think that I'm ready now to talk about how I'd move from SHADOWS OVER GARENPORT to CULT OF UNDEATH, and how they'd differ. (Lets start calling them SOG and COU to avoid me typing that out over and over again.)

First, whereas my original idea was that I'd propose all three campaigns to the players and let them choose which to do, I'm now going to assume that COU will follow SOG and that if I'm running COU that the players playing it will have first already played SOG (this will carry on when I get to MIND-WIZARDS OF THE DAEMON WASTES (MWotDW) too; to play that, you will have needed to already completed COU. But that's not going to be something to talk about for likely months to come.

Before I begin, although you never know until you run it, of course, I have to make some plans, and in order to do so, I have to make some assumptions. I'm going to assume the following about the resolution of SOG:

• The PCs played all five fronts to completion.
• For the Garenport front, the Grand Duke and Duchess as well as their supernatural supporters all ended up dead. This leads to a political vacuum and a great deal of chaos, but that's not the PCs problem, and in fact they probably have plenty of incentive to stay away from Garenport for the short term, hence their decampment to the Northwoodshire countryside, where they pick up the COU thread.
• Since I'm using my sample iconics as stand-ins for the PCs, I am also using the fronts I developed for them. Dominic's is the most developed at this point, having confronted Audrey Hardwicke in Garenport. That was resolved for now, but Hardwicke will have escaped or at least his death can't be verified, so when he eventually comes back again, it won't be shocking. I also believe that Kimnor would have discovered that Bethan is still alive, and while I don't believe that that will have been resolved either, he's not going to be going anywhere near Lomar in the near term, so that will also hibernate. Ragnar and Cailin's story will be the star of the COU portion of the longer meta-campaign. Hardwicke will reappear more in the West, however, and even Bethan will find a reason to eventually leave Lomar. If Kimnor decides to try and find her again, she won't be found until I am ready for her to be found, and she's no longer in town, giving him no reason to stay.
• Joan was rescued. Grym was defeated permanently, and the thurses were pacified one way or another. Southumbria is going to be relatively quiet for the time being.
• The Tazitta threat will have been redirected. The Prophetess was killed and her movement unraveled, but not all of the Tazitta just slunk back into the wilderness; many were stirred up, relocated, and are now running around being a nuisance. The Northwoodshire area was saved, but is still in commotion of sorts, and it is a bit more dangerous now than it was.
• Guarg and Taurek were defeated, but as above; some of the individual pirates now remain on the sea, perhaps more desperate now that they no longer have a haven in Calak or powerful patrons uniting them.
• Burlharrow and the East Marches were rescued, Gothbert has become the new mayor, and if anything he's seeing more influx of homesteaders and settlers who are fed up with what's happened at Garenport.
• There is no chance that the PCs went to the Shadowlands and killed Jairan the Soulless, but whatever machinations she was attempting with the Nyxians and Tazitta cults is done for for now. I do have a thought; what if somehow the PCs were able to redirect Guarg's Ketos to the Shadowlands? Kind of like in Thor: Ragnarok when Thor defeated Hel by siccing Surtur on her, I suppose. I don't think that that means either Ketos of Jairan is defeated for good, but they should be out of the picture for the duration of the meta-camaign, at least, unless I want to have Jairan make a play for revenge later on. I probably won't; I see her as more likely impressed and amused rather than overly put out by their efforts, even if it stalled her plans for the time being. 
• I also believe that the PCs will have strengthened or created relationships with potential patrons that will have them hopping around with stuff to do for a long time to come.

For COU, the PCs will start out in a familiar setting, Cockrill's Hill in the Northwoodshire, but will be inevitably pulled westward towards and eventually in to Timischburg. Timischburg is a kind of Transylvania analog, created by me to take the place of Paizo's own horror subregion, Ustalav, which is also kind of a Transylvania analog. Most of their concerns in the east, in the Hill Country proper, will be left behind except those that specifically pertain to the COU campaign (maybe I should see these campaigns like seasons of a TV show; SOG was the first season, COU would be the second. If it gets that far without being cancelled, then we're on to MWotDW as the third, and I don't have any visibility to what I'd do after that yet. Not only does each season focus more on a different main core area of the Three Realms, but they'll also have different main villains and problems. COU's main front will be undead related and focus heavily on vampires in particular, as is appropriate for something set in Timischburg, the fantasy analog to Transylvania of the movies that I've created.

Anyway, here's the library version of Jairan that I decided replaces my original image. Clearly based on the drow goddess Kiaransalee or however you spell that, which wreaked havoc on the Forgotten Realms many years ago (in actual years I mean, not in setting years)

Relocation

It seems very likely, in the upper 90% likely, that in the next month or so I will change jobs and relocate to a new state, where I'll be in the northern Southeast. Not too far from where my original Colonial ancestors arrived in America in the latest few years of the 1600s or the earliest few years of the 1700s. Although that's neither here nor there, as they didn't stay on the shores of South Carolina for long, and I consider my more immediate ancestors to be backwoods Georgia people, because they moved out west. 

"My people" are therefore pretty solid backwoods Dukes of Hazzard southerners on my father's side, and I tend to favor that culture and personality in my own personality, in other words. My mother's side, on the other hand, were Massachusetts natives who had gone west with the pioneers and grew up as rural farmers in the Rocky Mountain west for generations. My mom still lived in tiny little towns in the countryside of the intermountain West region. I did not grow up rural, although the modest sized town that I grew up in in Texas could probably best be described as suburbia-like, except not attached at the time to any major metropolitan urban area (I think as urban sprawl has grown, that's arguably not true anymore. But I haven't lived in the town I grew up in for ~25 years now. I've felt pretty fish out of water in many ways living in the suburban northern Midwest; this relocation will bring me closer to home in one way; into the South (although I wonder how culturally or even genetically the South still remains the South these days) but farther away from the West, which is my other half of heritage.

I've said before that I feel in many ways more at home culturally in the rural south but more at home geographically in the west. I like the cooler, drier, sunnier weather and the beautiful mountains, valleys, and deserts of the American West. Of course, as noted above, the South isn't necessarily the South anymore as the whole nation has been in commotion and people have moved all over, so I've kind of decided that a solid mostly rural red state like Wyoming or Montana is my preferred place to live, with even western South Dakota or Nebraska or some place like that being an acceptable alternative. But moving someplace like western (but not West) Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, etc. would still be seen as an improvement from my current situation, at least in terms of "feeling at home."

Where am I going with this? My "D&D" game, which only ever had one session before we got too busy and it never seemed to happen again, will be unlikely to have any success in the future. We'll be too dispersed. However, maybe there's an opportunity to find new players in my new location. Regardless, I'm starting to have some new thoughts and stuff going on with regards to DFX, so look for some new content related to that setting later in the summer. 

I'm always hesitant to open up more new areas, but I do kind of like the idea of what's left of abandoned Hyperborea is a Hoth-like mammoth tundra with many glaciers and year-round snow cover.

Hiking » Fantasy

This weekend, my wife and I restarted our hikes in the Midwest. Last year we did a number of them, exploring northern Midwestern areas from the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in northern (lower peninsula) Michigan to the Hocking Hills State Park in southern Ohio, nearly on the Kentucky border. Most of the hikes were, of course, fairly tame. We're in our early 50s, not in great shape, and my wife has an old knee injury and hates being outside after dark in case there's any kind of animal about, or someone suggests that maybe she should camp or build a campfire. She's strictly a day-hiker.

We drove a fair bit up to the so-called "tip of the thumb" of Michigan, near Port Austin. I've been around a fair bit of Michigan and Ohio in particular the last years since living in the northern Midwest, but my exposure to "the thumb" has been nonexistant. I've spent more time in the upper peninsula than in the thumb, in spite of the fact that it's considerably harder to reach. On the way, we also did some listed hikes near Bay City, which is I guess at the point where the thumb and the rest of the "mitten" come together at the bottom of Saginaw Bay. There we hiked the Pinnebog Trail at the Bay City State Park, and up near Port Austin we also did the Port Crescent State Park trail.

Maybe I have a problem psychologically with being satisfied with things as they are, but whenever I drive around in these rural areas, seeing the interesting names of little rivers, tiny little towns, and then walk around in the woods, forests, hills, dunes, cliffs, mountains, or whatever other feature I'm hiking through, it inspires my imagination for fantasy versions of the same. I've spent a lot of the last few months with my imagination in space opera mode, but if there's anything that may tend to bring it back to fantasy, going on hikes out in the natural (naturalish, anyway. I don't really go very deep in the wilderness) world and poking around through sleepy little farming towns will do it. I've always said that if I had to choose, I'd pick fantasy over space opera, but I'm also glad that I don't have to choose.

To be fair, my love of space opera has less to do with the attitude that it originally engendered of futuristic excitement. I like space opera in particular because it's a retro genre, and it reminds me of the 30s-50s and what people thought the future would be like back then. I like the old pulps where people were in the future, but still acted like they were people from our own cultural past. A sense of nostalgia for what has been lost is a part of my love of both fantasy and space opera; sure—they're both genres that are exotic and fantastic, but they are also both genres that are rooted in the past and my sense of nostalgia for a time when things were better than they are now.

As an aside, this nostalgia baiting is big business, it seems. When I was a kid in the 80s, nostalgia baiting for the 50s was big business, and lots of movies and TV shows were set in that era, perhaps most famously Back to the Future... although it was hardly the only one. 50s songs were even released; I bought 7" records of "Yakety-Yak", "Runaway" and a few others. Nowadays, it seems like 80s nostalgia bait is pretty keen; the whole synthwave musical genre is based around it, and stuff like the popularity of Stranger Things and the music used in the show is just one example of it. Nostalgia, even for things that you never actually had (like me having 50s nostalgia, to the extent that I did) is a powerful thing, and Americans in particular, being a new nation split off from an older one but in a new land, seem like we've always been in the search for roots and a past so we don't feel unmoored in the world, tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine, as James says.

Curiously, we seem to have turned our back on formative eras of our own American history; the Old West and the Colonial and Revolutionary period. This is largely because our public square has been taken over by self-hating liberals and foreigners, especially Jews, who have no understanding or appreciation of our founding or what it means... because to them it means very little if anything.

Anyway, what does all of this mean? Am I finally ready to talk about Dark Fantasy X again? I'm not sure. Maybe.

Johhn as the Droidmaster

I've mostly moved my SWTOR discussions to Space Opera X, but here's an interesting screenshot of Johhn using elements that give him lots of floating droids. A Droidmaster, if you will. There's five floating droids here.

New X-files

https://www.cbr.com/x-files-creator-looking-forward-reboot/

Coogler has actually done a decent job with breathing new life into the Rocky franchise via the Creed movies, so there's that. Disney/Fox have been teasing how this will be woke, though, and Coogler is so incredibly pro-black (he's also the director of the Black Panther movies in addition to the Creed movies) that it's hard to see how this isn't Moldy and Scolder haranguing the audience in typical woke fashion. I know that the first Black Panther movie was financially very successful, but I haven't heard anyone other than some black young men who really thought it was all that memorable or was a cultural touchstone; rather it was kind of a perfect storm of a specific kind of demand at exactly the right time to peak. Once it was over, the reaction from most that I've seen was—the movie was actually kind of mediocre and forgettable, and the blackness of it was in the long-run a turnoff, because it wasn't really made to be universal, but to be a black story.

The second Black Panther, of course, was much less successful and was received even more poorly. It wasn't exactly a flop, but it was a financial disappointment vs expectations and hopes, I believe, and I also believe that it killed any interest in another iteration of the franchise. It proved that the Black Panther franchise had nowhere to go, in my opinion. 

Anyway, I was a fan of the X-files in the 90s. The last two revival seasons were pretty pointless, and it's also clear that Chris Carter never had a plan to end the show; he thought he'd just keep going with it forever. But when we thought that maybe it would actually end on a reasonable time and in a satisfying manner; up to and maybe a bit beyond the theatrical movie that came after the 5th season or so, the X-files was amazing, innovative, and fascinating. 

It is, however, a great example of a TV show that's a victim of its own success. Because it was so successful, rather than wrap it up, the producers and the network and even the creator got the idea that they could just keep treading water and making money indefinitely. Carter even specifically thought that he had many more seasons left to go, when the series was already getting tired, the main actors were getting done with the series, and he seemed unwilling to understand that the chemistry and relationship between Scully and Moulder were among the couple of keys to the show's success. Not that the new replacement characters were bad, but people just didn't care about them as much and they didn't grab the audience's attention the same was as Duchovny and Anderson did. 

I've seen both Duchovny and Anderson in various interviews and talk shows, etc. Duchovny actually seems like a reasonably sharp guy for an actor, who got more and more involved in the show as not just its star, but someone really invested in it behind the scenes over time. Kind of the like the Alan Wilder of the X-files, if you will, to make a Depeche Mode reference. Anderson, on the other hand, doesn't strike me as too bright, and most of her interview "performances" make her come across as a bubble-headed bimbo. Kind of the opposite of the character that she most famously played, I suppose.

Not that that's super shocking. The myth of the absolute brilliant STEM woman is largely a myth. They do exist here and there, but in such statistically low numbers as to not really be something worth expecting ever. Most of the so-called "STEM" women I've ever met didn't actually do much science or engineering, or whatever, but gravitated to "soft" elements within a science or engineering organization, related to OB or social stuff or whatever. And the more strident a woman is about trumpeting her STEM credentials, the less likely I am to believe that they really mean much. 

Anyway, all this to say that my expectations for a rebooted X-files show by a pro-black icon (albeit one that's had some success in rebooting franchises to be all black but still being pretty good; I really like the first Creed movie, for instance) and handled by Disney are pretty low. I couldn't get behind the attempts to revive the series with the original cast. I also think the climate is different. What people in Hollywood think are conspiracies among the plebs to be made fun of are actually spoiler alerts, while they have their own bizarre conspiracy theories of their own that they believe whole-heartedly. Nobody trusts the government anymore, but for the exact opposite reasons that liberals don't trust the government, and unless they're talking about government conspiracies to displace, jail or persecute normal Americans and Christians, instead of hiding aliens, it's going to feel like a bizarre artifact of the past rather than a timely social show, like the original X-files was.

Scolds

Edited and shortened from: https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=31806 

[T]he last half century of the internet demonstrates the reality of large societies, whether they are digital or analog. Once a society gets to a certain size factionalism is inevitable. The message board experience is the best example, as these platforms created lots of tools to allow people to exist on the same platform but ignore the people from factions they did not like. It never worked. The only solution was peaceful separation in the form of separate private platforms.

This makes perfect sense when you learn about the Dunbar number. This is the number of stable relationships people are cognitively able to maintain at once. The generally agreed upon number is one-hundred-and-fifty. For many people, the number is much lower, so this means in any large group, the typical person will have a sense of belonging with a minority of the people. Consequently, they will be alienated from the rest and there is a short trip from alienation to hostility.

This explains the general sense of unhappiness in modern America. The mass media age has not brought people together as our politicians endless[ly] blather on about all the time, but rather increased the sense of alienation. The normal person is now bombarded with the presence of alien, perhaps hostile strangers. Every online experience comes with someone trying to scold you, lecture you, harass you or they are simply outside what you consider to be normal and acceptable.

Digital life is making analog life less tolerable. [...] [W]e see the horrors of the virtual world jumping into the analog world, as these people now do to our institutions what they did to the internet. For example, spiteful mutants have taken over the court system in New York. Just as we saw with social media, they are using their power to harass normal people. They have litigated VDare into closure simply because they can. This is not much different from what the scolds did to social media platforms with moderation.

New York is like Twitter before Musk. They have law-fared the NRA into bankruptcy, charged Trump with various invented crimes, levied a fine on Trump for denying he committed a crime that has never been demonstrated, litigated VDare out of existence despite never alleging any wrongdoing and sent a growing number of innocent white men to prison for the crime of being white men. Douglas Mackey is the most famous, but there are others like Maxwell Hare and John Kinsman.

There is another important lesson here, a scary one too. The internet has proven too big to control in this way. The scolds got the upper hand for a while, but the cost of endless policing exceeded the carrying capacity. People forget, but the reason Musk was able to buy Twitter is they were in serious financial trouble. He fired over two-thirds of the staff, the scolds, and harpies, because these people did nothing but immiserate the people who kept the site running.

This will apply even more to a continent sized country. New York can make itself hostile to normal people, but normal people can leave. After what New York has done to VDare, every reformer now knows they have to shop for safe jurisdictions to avoid this sort of problem. The same will be true for industries that know they are threatened by the kook squads. The gun makers are fleeing the Northeast because they know better than anyone that there is no reasoning with fanatics.

The point here is that we will see in the analog world what we have seen in the digital world for the last decades. A great disaggregation is unfolding in which normal people seek refuge from the areas now controlled by the fanatics. Further, the social media experience has shown that you cannot last long when you are overrun by fanatics, even when you are systematically robbing them. Even if peaceful separation is not possible, people will seek it anyway.

In the end, this is the reason to be optimistic. A society in which people like Fani Willis and Letitia James are doing anything more than pulling a cart is a society that will eventually destroy itself. For any human organization to survive it must be run for the interest of [the] normal by the sober minded and talented. This is true for a social media platform, and it is true for a country. Nature cannot long tolerate the unfit and human nature will be compelled to do the same eventually.

This is the only reason we had peace throughout the late 19th and 20th century. Following the scolds declaring war against the South, the men of the South mostly sought peace afterwards by migrating West to the empty frontier, to escape the predatory existence of the scolds. It's only been (relatively) recently that that is no longer possible; that the frontier, and separation by distance and local culture has failed to protect people from their toxic presence. I still remember in the 80s when I was young that different places had different culture, and everyone pretty much understood and accepted that, except for a handful of spiteful busybodies who felt it was their purpose in life to hall monitor the entire world. This has always been the Yankee burden, and the critical flaw in their national? regional? cultural? character. Not sure exactly what a Yankee is in this regard. Are they a nation unto themselves; separate and distinct from the Tidewater gentility or the backwoods borderers, like my own people? Or, to use David Hackett Fisher's term, maybe they're a "folkway", although I'd argue that few people understand what it meant by that word exactly.

The Z-man seems to be pointing towards separation, however, which indicates the eventual disaggregation of what was once "One Nation Under God" into more than one nation, and likely few of them having anything to do with God. Of course, what "nation" is the scold? Sure, they tend to congregate and have a high preponderance amongst the original Yankee population, which is why the Northeast is so toxic. But they have spread all over the country, intermarried and intermingled everywhere. The Left Coast is essentially a Yankee colony, and most large urban areas have their stink on them, even in Red States. Their admission of tens of millions of hostile and culturally incompatible aliens into our country was a deliberate design to weaken the ability of normal people everywhere to easily withstand or separate from them, because the hostile aliens tend to get favored treatment from the scolds. 

But he makes a good point. There's no living with these people, and eventually people will completely run out of options in trying to avoid them. What happens then?

Once again on the road

Traveling for a long weekend for a wedding out of state. I wish that I could spend some time while out West in the Rockies hiking or sightseeing with outdoor sites, but I won't have any time. Friday and Monday will be mostly traveling, Saturday will be the wedding, and Sunday will be Easter Sunday. That's all she wrote. Not exactly the most relaxing long weekend, and as I'm coming off of a several weeks, if not even several months, of absolutely exhausting, tedious, difficult and toxic stuff going on at work, I really need a break... that I seem to never be able to actually get. It's catching up to me, and I'm starting to really be unhappy with work, and to a certain degree, because work takes up so much of my time, with life in general. I need a break pretty desperately, but it's hard to get one at my current job. I'm also interviewing with someone else right now, but because it will require relocation to a place that's more expensive, because I'll lose my employee car lease, and because if I relocate that'll leave my other son and his family who are living with us temporarily (but realistically, for quite a while longer) high and dry, I have to honestly assess that it will be difficult for them to make me an offer that will make the math work out favorably for me. Even if I would love the job—honestly, I doubt that I'd love it. But I hope not to hate it and be constantly frustrated by it like I kind of am lately with my current job. 

The good news for me is that although I'm not actively looking for a job, I pretty routinely get tapped to interview. This hasn't worked out yet, but it takes time to find a really good job, and when I have a job which I don't like, but which does a pretty fair job of paying the bills, I've got time to get it right. I really hope I don't end up retiring from my current job in 15-20 years, because I really don't want to be stuck doing it that long, but we'll see, I suppose. There are worse things than that, if it comes down to it.

Anyway, my fleeting hobby time has been spent lately with SWTOR, as any readers have no doubt noticed, if there were any readers, not Dark Fantasy X, but I'm always keeping both Dark Fantasy X and Space Opera X in the back of my mind, just in case. One thing that I will do on this trip is take my journal with me where I keep notes for potential games and stories. I'm actually kind of excited about this, although it's not something that I spend much time on. But I'd like to, and being away from my computer for four days is a good opportunity to spend some time with my earbuds in, thinking about Dark Fantasy X and Space Opera X and where, if anywhere, I'm going with them.

Anyway, this isn't exactly where I'm going to be out West, but it's close enough, and if I somehow, I dunno, won the lottery or whatever, here's one contender for where I'd end up.

Once again; leftism = mental illness

https://www.psypost.org/study-woke-attitudes-linked-to-anxiety-depression-and-a-lack-of-happiness/

This one was research performed in Finland on Finns, but there's no reason not to believe that it is a similar condition across the West. (To the degree that Finland is part of "the West." Like Ireland and southern "Mediterranean" Europe and western Slavic peoples, a case could be made that they're an outgroup, or other group within Western civilization, or a para-Western civilizational grouping that isn't part of Western Civilization per se, but is closely related to and still travels with Western civilization.)

The curious part is that women are so much more favorable towards wokeness compared to men. Sadly, and I was offended when this was first presented to me but the data is pretty incontrovertible now; the anti-suffragettes seem to be completely and totally vindicated by the data. 

As an aside, remember when Miss Helsinki 2017 went viral on the Right, where an African girl who looked like a somewhat prettier version of Flavor Flav won Miss Helsinki over about a dozen very pretty European women? Yeah. Finnish men weren't in favor of that, I'm sure, even if virtue-signaling Finnish women reluctantly refused to take a stand against it.

Here's the older link to a Danish study that reached similar conclusions; the most mentally ill group is white, woke women, the least mentally ill is based conservative Christian men.

https://vdare.com/articles/it-s-official-again-leftists-particularly-leftist-women-are-nuts

Of course, this doesn't really need to be "proven", although it's nice that it is. But it's pretty obvious and self-evident. Even SNL made a joke about it on the weekend following Donald Trump's election; all of the liberal white folks in the apartment were chewing Xanax like they were Tic-Tacs.

And don't think that this is unique to Scandinavians, of course. All of the West fits this. And Denmark is about as firmly within Western civilization as you can get anyway.

Where Eagles Dare and Star Wars

I've said before that the middle section of Star Wars is very similar, probably on purpose, to the plot and situation of the popular 1968 WW2-spy movie Where Eagles Dare. I've always liked Eagles, but I hadn't watched it in a while. I own it on DVD, so it was just a question of making some time and doing it. My youngest son likes to watch movies with me, and this was one where we were both in alignment that we wanted to see it, so we watched it this weekend. Because the movie is long and we started it late, we actually watched half of it on Saturday (up to the end of the interrogation scene in the Great Hall of the Schloss Adler. Then we watched the second part last night, which is the escape from the castle, and by far the best part of the movie, with the thrilling murder of a gazillion Nazis, as well as the iconic cable car fight scene. This is the part that especially reminds one of Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and the rest of the bunch being stuck on the Death Star. I'm not the only person to have noted this similarity over time; I did a quick search, and found that many other people had remarked on it (some of them also remarked that the part that followed the escape from the castle; the flight to the airport, etc. could easily be a prototype for the truck chase scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I think it's fair to say that Lucas liked Where Eagles Dare. The biggest tell, which I hadn't recognized until now, was the Clint Eastwood's character says to Richard Burton's character, more than once in fact, that "we've got company", a line which Lucas adopts pretty closely when Han shouts to Luke that "we're gonna have company."

He used some other WWII action movies from the 60s; 633 Squadron and The Dam Busters (actually, that one's a little older; from 1955); this is even less secret; he showed this films to his special effects guys saying specifically that that's what he wanted the X-wing fight scene to look like. Of course, the plot and situation is lifted right from those movies, both of which had a very similar scenario.

Dumb virtue-signaling people like to say that Star Wars was a reworking or even a remake of The Hidden Fortress, but in reality, the movie bears very little resemblance to it, in favor of the movies listed above, except for maybe the opening act, and the concept of the bickering droids mirroring the bickering peasants, and some of the other set-up. Where Eagles Dare also doesn't feature the rescue of a princess, which The Hidden Fortress does, but it does feature the rescue of a downed American general who has access to secret plans. Given that princess-rescuing is a pretty time-honored scène à faire, pegging that to A Hidden Fortress is dubious. Certainly, however, the earliest drafts of Star Wars more closely resembled The Hidden Fortress but by the time we get to the movie as filmed, it's at best the source of the first act only, if even that. 

Of course, by saying that Star Wars used these elements, I don't mean to say that they were the Tragedy of Darth Plagiarism the Wise or anything, just that they clearly form the inspiration core that was adapted and adopted to fit into the screenplay as it emerged. There's nothing wrong with doing that, and hardy any writer, even one much better than George Lucas, will fail to honestly admit that writers to that all the time; take an element from some other work, and then adopt and adapt it to fit into their narrative. Assuming that they also adopt and adapt other elements too and mingle them, and twist what's left to be unique somewhat so that it's not an obvious copy-paste routine, then why not?

I always say that writers and game-masters too, for that matter, should be familiar with lots of different fiction traditions and genres, and what makes them work and not work. I've heard of D&D players that not only only read fantasy, but they even only read D&D fiction! I doubt that's true anymore for this guy, since he said that years ago, and I don't think WotC publishes many novels anymore. And even if it was literally true and not some weird exaggerated claim, then that suggests that he probably just doesn't read much at all; I doubt that he doesn't watch TV, movies or play video games of various genres, at the very least.

As Lucas himself proved, his greatest inspiration for the setting of Star Wars was almost certainly stuff like Dune and the Lensman series, and the old Flash Gordon Republic serials, but when it came to plot, his greatest inspiration wasn't science fiction at all, but a Japanese historical swasbuckling film, a WWII spy-thriller, and some WWII war movies.

Switching gears, I watched a YouTube video recently about Star Wars and Dune, and it claims that Brian Herbert called his dad in late May of 1977 telling him that he needed to see Star Wars because it copied so many elements of Dune that it was scary. Then he specifically mentioned the desert planet and the evil empire. If that's really all he could think of, he was really reaching. Evil empires are a stock plot element from all kinds of fiction, and in any case, the most obvious proximal source for the Empire was the caricature of the Nazis that our propagandists have foisted on us to justify our involvement in WW2, not anything out of Dune. It's not clear that the Empire is even necessarily evil in Dune, or if it is, that Paul Atreides and his Fremen jihad aren't even more evil. And a desert planet? That's a little easier sell, but then again, desert planets are hardly unique to Dune, especially given the prolific subgenre of science fiction set on Mars. In fact, Leigh Brackett's Eric John Stark double book The Secret of Sinharat and People of the Talisman offers a more Tatooine-like experience, I think, than Dune does. Dune isn't anything all that interesting or unique without the context of spice, the worms and the Fremen, all of which Tatooine lacks. Although the offhand shot of C-3PO walking by a long giant skeleton is maybe supposed to be a veiled Dune reference, and certainly his fear of being shipped to the spice mines of Kessel is a veiled Dune reference. It's a little unfortunate that Star Wars used the word spice at all in any context other than something you put on your food to make it taste more interesting, although it was just an off-hand reference in the one movie until the EU and then the Disney movies (Solo in particular) made it more mainstream again. Of course, Star Wars spice has developed in ways that bear little resemblance at all to Dune spice.

I don't actually like Dune that much as a novel, which I think I mentioned recently in reference to the new movies. I think the movies are better then the book, but they still aren't great. A lot of people think that Dune is to sci-fi what Lord of the Rings is to fantasy. I completely disagree. It's epic in scope, but lacks epic themes. Dune is A Song of Ice & Fire, a disappointing and nihilistic critique of humanity and Western civilization in particular, a dark and cynical downer where there are no heroes, no good guys even, and no good even at all. Everything is dark, tawdry and cynical. 

Also, Dune hasn't had the effect on the genre that Lord of the Rings has, although there it at least comes closer. Rather, I suspect Star Wars is itself the Lord of the Rings of science fiction, or at least it was when we only had the original trilogy. It's the work that's the most imitated and has done the most to make the genre mainstream. Like Lord of the Rings, it also synthesizes older, familiar tropes and puts them in a new context; in Lord of the Rings case, it hangs mythology and old Germanic sagas on an epic good vs evil struggle, where Star Wars takes an even broader selection of genre tropes and also hangs them on an epic struggle of good vs evil, even going so far as trying to justify its seriousness by appeal to Joseph Campbell's debunked and out of favor "monomyth" theories.

Yes, that's another tell of someone who isn't very educated but is trying to appear so; if you refer to Joseph Campbell without even knowing that his work is largely discounted, discredited and not taken seriously at all by academics, then you're just a parrot trying to appear intelligent by referring to an academic thesis that you've heard about vaguely but don't understand at all. Please just stop. Nobody is impressed by the fact that you've heard the name Joseph Campbell and might even know the name of his most famous book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. The more you try to summarize the Wikipedia summary of it, the deeper the hole you're digging for yourself for anyone who actually knows the status of Joseph Campbell's credibility to see.

Anyway, here's Johnn and his common law wife Raina Temple on Tatooine, which isn't really very much like Arrakis. In fact, here it specifically has a Lovecraftian vibe to it, although I think that was mostly made up for the Old Republic material, rather than something that is otherwise very present in the Star Wars franchise overall.

Here's a better view of the outfit. It's based on the Intelligence Agent's Armor, with a secondary black (IIRC) dye module, and the Crimson Raider helmet.