New Ad Astra star system data sheets incoming

Well, it's been a quiet week or two for me on the blogging front, but I've actually been extremely busy doing other things.  One of those was revisiting my big New Alderamin sector map and adding a bunch more names.  Pretty much the entirety of the systems in the southern half of the map have names now (although considerably less than half of those have data sheets.)

It was never my intention that all of the systems on the map have a data sheet, or even (necessarily) a name, but I did always intend to detail with data sheets, the systems of the major southern colonies—Outremer colonies, Bernese, and Revanchist Republicans alike—as well as their nearest neighbors of independent systems and whatever else happened to be around them.  I'll probably not detail the Reaver worlds or the Altairan Confederacies.  Certainly I won't as part of this wave, although I may end up getting to it later.

Anyway, here's the map again, with the most updated names input.  I'd really like to redo this map in another format, on a black background, etc.  It would be crap for printing out, but it'd make a great digital map. 

Music Mixes

Mateusz Wojtowicz has a YouTube channel where he provides his own mixes of hard trance, hardstyle, early hardstyle, and other mixes on occasion (like hardcore, rawstyle, or subground, etc.)  His numbering system is a little odd; this is Hard Trance vol. 10, but that doesn't mean it's the 10th hard trance mix; it means that it's his 10th mix of any style, and that it's hard trance.  (Vol. 9 is Early Hardstyle, and vol. 11 is Hardstyle, for instance.)  He does occasionally have mixes out of order too, as copyright considerations make him have to take a mix down, correct it and then repost it (eventually).

Anyway, this is the kind of stuff that I'm listening to a lot right now; this one in particular has an early Qlimax vibe to it (some of the exact tracks on this mix, I heard on one or more of the Qlimax setlists first).  I want to work my way through his list one mix at a time until I've heard them all, which is a fairly big task, as he's got nearly 70 of them done now, and they range from just under an hour to the better part of two hours long.

Anyway, I'm a big fan of listening to these prerecorded mixes.  Naturally, it's not the same as actually being at Qlimax back in 2001, or whatever, but I think that EDM and the vinyl obsession don't make a lot of sense.  Digital is where it's at, when the music is digital music to begin with.

One of the things I've always liked about listening to hard trance is that you can really hear it bridge the gap between acid trance and hardstyle quite often.  It's not often that you can have a track with a squelchy 303 bassline right next to one with a pulsing reverse bass bassline and yet they sound like they fit next to each other, but in this mix in particular, hearing "Welcome to Your Nightmare" followed by "Enemies of Earth" shows that it can be done pretty easily.  That's why my favorite EDM is the confluence in the very late 90s and early 00s of those three styles—as they diverged more and more into more crystallized, defined, separate genres, I kind of started liking them a little less.

Not to say that I don't love loads of later, euphoric or whatever hardstyle songs, because I do.  I still get really jazzed when I hear a good Ed E.T. & DTR song, or some of the best of Headhunterz, TNT and Project One—but my favorite stuff is the hardstyle that really sounds like hard trance and hard trance that sounds like hardstyle, and a willingness of both to use plenty of acid.

The sound, not the drug.

That said; not all of this stuff really is that old.  Hard trance kept going too, even though its general popularity has waned since it's peak of the early 00s.  "The Rotten Egg" in that mix, by Dark By Design and Dr. Willis, is from 2008, for instance—well after the peak.  Although ten years ago now, too.  I don't know how much you will find from 2017 or other very recent dates, unless its a rerelease or something like that.  I know A*S*Y*S just put out a new kind of retro acid album called Grand Theft Acid, but that's the exception. Along with that, they released a few new mixes of their classic "Acid Nightmare" while at it.  I have to admit that much of what I'm exploring is already older territory here.

One of the side effects of liking that label confluence is that the comments sections are often filled with arguments about whether or not such and such a track "fits" the mix, or if it belongs to a different label than the mix is supposed to be.  The Activator track listed here is one that Activator himself has called subground, for instance, in his attempt to revive a scene that he thought was tired.  It just sounds like a slightly more relaxed hardstyle track to me, though.  Then again, that's all subground really is.  But neither is really hard trance exactly, is it?

Friday Art Attack

I'm not as much a fan of the waifu warrior as some people, but you've gotta admit, no matter what else you may think, that that's both a good looking elf babe and a compelling image.

Even if she's hard to take seriously as a real warrior.

I'm not sure exactly what's going on here, but I'd like to think that sometimes spells just go really, really badly for the caster, and you get screwed.  Or immolated.

That doesn't seem very sporting to attack a poor, helpless girl (or maybe it's a stripling kid with a "man" bun; can't tell for sure) when you're already riding on a Triceratops.

I'm not really a Japanophile (or other Orientophilia either, for that matter) to nearly the degree that many nerdy people are.  I've never managed to get into anime all that much.  I've never been all that excited by Oriental Adventures.  I don't even like watching Hong Kong theater that much, except for the movies with really good stunts.  This is a pretty cool image, though.

When you really want a cowboy vibe but refuse to have firearms, I guess you come up with some kind of crossbow that looks like a rifle and smaller one that looks like a big pistol and dress up like a cowboy anyway.

Some gamers really decry the whole fantasy Star Wars cantina vibe, while others embrace it.  This image makes it look kinda cool, mostly. And all things considered, it's not as exotic as it could be; those are pretty standard post-D&D fantasy races pictures there.

It's funny, but once upon a time, I thought it would be really cool to have a fantasy setting with therapsids as the main animal life.  This is a pack of Cynognathus having just killed a Kannemeyeria in South Africa's Karoo 245 million years ago; before the rise of the dinosaurs.

Luckily, I realized that indulging my own particular spergy interests was probably a bad idea, so I ditched the idea.  Sigh. I wish I could safari with these bad boys, though.

And these too.  From my own hometown area of Texas and Oklahoma we have Acrocanthosaurus eating a Sauroposeidon.  

That's a weird giant monster, that has almost a science fictional alien vibe to it.  I don't mind the gonzo approach of mixing the aesthetics, if not even more, though.  In fact, I quite like doing so.

Given that that looks like Orcus himself, I think this swashbuckling Phantom of the Opera probably bit off much more than he could chew.  That's an interesting take on the old demon prince, who's name is derived from a Latin god, which is probably ultimately derived from the Greek god or daemon Horkos.  Keep in mind that to the Greeks, daemon doesn't mean anything at all like our demons, because they were a pre-Christian society.  The word originally (also from Greek daimon) was more like a nature spirit or something; the Germanic word we inherited with a similar meaning is wight.

Of course, in English specifically, wight has also picked up another connotation thanks to Tolkien being bastardized by D&D, and Warhammer, and just about everything else.  

I've always liked this image.  When I was a kid, I always liked the concept of knights and whatnot fighting monsters, which my dad thought was kind of weird (when he was a kid, he was more interested in knights fighting each other.)  What can I say?  Even as a child, my tastes ran towards fantasy, whereas he'd always been a specifically historical buff kind of guy.

The Hallstatt and La Tène Celtic cultures of the continent are our heritage, folks, even though much of their culture has been lost in the intervening centuries.  Sigh.  We may yet lose everything else associated with Western civilization, and Mother Europe, and even whiteness altogether if we're not careful.  I don't think we will; but sadly, we'll have to engage in and be subjected to a great deal of unnecessary bloodshed because of the hateful open borders radical Trotskyism that we've been subjected to.

Meanwhile, this can also double as Lexoviian peoples in TIMISCHBURG, or even aristocratic Eriadorians in MIDDLE-EARTH REMIXED.

Hot witches.  What can I say?  They're hot.  But crazy.  Keep away; hot crazy chicks aren't worth the headache.  There's enough pretty girls who are already nice.

"The Big Boys" of Hard Trance

As I've dug deeper and deeper into early Qlimax style music, I've been drawn a bit out of hardstyle and into it's evolutionary "father"—hard trance.  This isn't to say that I don't still love hardstyle, of course; it's kind of an exaggerated version of what I like about hard trance—the ridiculously exaggerated and pitched and distorted heavy kicks, the strange electronic screeches and wails, the heavy, reverberated bass-line (which is so distorted in hardstyle, that it's "reversed"—although hard trance did this first too.)  It is, however, that I really like some of the best of the preceding (and overlapping) scene.  Where hardstyle was (at least for a long time) heavily associated with northern Italy and the Netherlands, hard trance seems to be much more heavily focused on Germany.

Anyway, I'd already been a fan of a lot of the hard trance guys that I got into because they were also associated with acid, and created acid trance; guys like Frank Ellrich and Kai Tracid, who jointly formed A*S*Y*S; a group that I've been following and slowly picking up their tracks for more than five years now (although most of them were old even then.)  That's really my vector into hard dance music; that and the trance that I listened to (but didn't really follow) back in the late 90s and early 00s.  And even then, I didn't realize how much some of my favorite tracks had acid influences heavily built into them—L'Âge Synthétique's "Je Suis Electrique" for instance, is basically an acid trance track, and I loved it before I actually knew that that crazy, squelchy 303 bassline was what defined acid.  So, when I "discovered" acid and realized that I'd been listening to a fair bit of it already anyway, I got a bit deeper into the world of hard trance.  But I still missed most of the big names, I think.

Sure, I was pretty big into Kai Tracid, and I was aware that he was clearly a bit more on the trance side than the acid side, although he dabbled in both and in the concept of mixing the two together.  And the scene is certainly defined by a lot of "one hit wonders"; or rather, by DJs who release a song or two on vinyl, do it again a few more times, but then kind of disappear again.  There aren't a lot of highly prolific artists, sadly.  L'Âge Synthétique, for example, released only 5 vinyl records ever over the course of about five years.  Some of them had a b-side, but often the b-side was just another version of the same track.  The entire output of L'Âge Synthétique (who was really just one guy, and who admittedly released some other tracks under other pseudonyms) would therefore be enough to make up... one LP, maybe?

As I was digging into hard trance, I was finding a similar situation; I've got a few tracks by Derb, or DJ Darkzone, or DJ Combo, or Brooklyn Bounce, or R.B.A. Ohne Ende Geil, or Titchy Bitch and the Fallen Angel, or a few others.

But I started seeing a few names a lot more; either because they were included in lots of set lists, or because they remixed tons of other guys' work, or often both.  I'm still trying to uncover how much of that there is to be had; I've got loads of Cosmic Gate songs, and Hennes & Cold, and I'm starting to explore the Warp Brothers, etc.

One name that I really saw a lot was DJ Scot Project.  Curiously, as I dug into him, though, I find that I don't love very many of his actual tracks a lot.  I've gone ahead and found a few; X and A and Y and O (yes, he did use a strange naming convention) but the majority of his output had a weird housey and funky diva vibe to it that I dislike quite a bit.  But he also seems to have remixed almost everyone.  He remixed a bunch of Arome songs.  In fact, Arome is another one of those guys who I wish would put out an album, like Hennes & Cold's Works, which just collected everything (including their songs as remixed by someone else) on a single collection.  He's got 7 songs released on vinyl, and they all have two versions (with the exception of "Hands Up!" which had a few alternate UK releases, so it actually has four different versions.)  For every single one of them, one version is a DJ Scot Project remix.

Of course, if you dig around a little bit on discogs, you'll find quickly enough that DJ Scot Project is a nom de plume of Frank Zenker.  And... that Arome is another one-man "band" and that the one man of Arome is none other than... Frank Zenker.  So, the Scot Project remix of an Arome song is Frank Zenker remixing one of his own songs using two different pseudonyms.  A little weird?  Maybe.

Anyway, it's funny that I'm not all that into DJ Scot Project, but I think the entire output of Arome is absolutely fantastic—with the exception of one version of one song that I can't find anywhere.  Everything else you can at least hear on YouTube.  But if they're the same person, why does one pseudonym really succeed for me and the other not so much?  I dunno.  It's not like they are really mining different territory, I don't think.  Maybe Scot Project is more eurodancy, a little, with black diva vocals (or at least brief samples thereof) being more prominent, whereas Arome is more pure trance and more actual European (it always seemed odd to me that eurodance by definition tends to feature non-Europeans, but that's the kind of silly virtue-signaling that I've learned to get over over the years.

So, anyway—if you look at my collection (and wishlist) of hard trance, what you'll see is that there's a lot of guys who are just there with a track or two, but then there's big groups of Arome, A*S*Y*S, Cosmic Gate, Hennes & Cold, Kai Tracid, and a growing section of the Warp Brothers.  Not suggesting that these are truly "the big guys" in the industry, but they're the big guys in my growing collection.

Green Ronin's Bleeding Edge #1: Mansion of Shadows

It's hardly new; I believe Green Ronin's Mansion of Shadows was published in 2006.  However, I'm often very slow to get around to reading stuff that I acquire somewhat impulsively.  I have physical books that I've owned longer than that that simply went immediately on my bookshelf with the "I'll be excited to read that—sometime, when I get around to it."  Because reading PDFs is more difficult—usually—than simply picking up a book, I'm even more behind on reading them.  I don't even remember where I got the Bleeding Edge series, although I have the entire run of it.  I often buy PDFs impulsively, especially if there was some sale at DriveThruRPG or something like that; although there may not have been.  I might simply have bought them in a rush of loyalty to Green Ronin during the height of my Freeport fandom, or something like that, for all I know.

Either way, I finally read the durn thing, and thought I'd discuss briefly what works and what doesn't with it.  I've recently just talked about my preferred adventure style; I've been going through a lot of Paizo stuff, and honestly finding it very traditional in format, and not very much to my liking.  I don't care to have a bazillion details on rooms with nonsensical traps and magic and monsters all through them like some kind of sadistic carnival attraction.  I've enjoyed modules like Princes of the Apocalypse or Out of the Abyss that give you plenty of structure to work with, but also plenty of flexibility, and which kind of float over the concept at a relatively high level, leaving you to flesh out the specific interactions of NPCs, and their dialogue, and their set-pieces even, a little bit more on your own.

Into this context, comes the Bleeding Edge series.  Well, not really obviously—they've been around for years, but I find them at an opportune time when a lot of my own reading and thinking and whatnot has converged into a coherent theory of what works well for a gamer like me and adventure design. You can still pick this module up from DriveThruRPG, it looks like, but I can't find any sign that Green Ronin still supports it or sells it from their own store.

So first, the good.  The module is designed specifically to be open format and flexible, with lots of "here's how you could handle this or that if the PCs do this or that," kind of stuff, which allows for the PCs to make all kinds of perhaps unexpected choices and yet still not "throw off" the game.  NPCs that are meant to be saved could die, and that's OK.  NPCs that are meant to be allies could be killed in a fit of pique, and the module still works.  Villains, up to and including the BBEG himself could be killed in advance if the PCs don't like them, and the module still works with you.  If I were to compare it to, say, Out of the Abyss and The Shackled City, both of which I'm in the middle of reading currently, I'd say that it straddles a line between them.  It offers a bit more detail than the former, but doesn't have the mind-numbing tedium of the latter.  Of course, it's a single module, meant for 1st level characters, who are maybe at 3rd level by the end, not an entire campaign, so the comparison isn't entirely fair.

But that brings up another point of what's good about it; although only loosely linked and meant to be stand-alone, the entire Bleeding Edge series can be linked.  The 2nd in the series is meant for a group of PCs level 2-4, while the 3rd is for characters level 3-5; etc.  There are six numbered entries in the series, and then a Freeport Special at the end for characters 8-10.  In total, the page-count (and therefore content) is comparable to a campaign—kinda.  The Mansion of Shadows pdf is 48 pages, but that includes a page for a cover, a page for inside cover/credits, and pages at the back for a back cover and ads, and a page at the back for the OGL.  All of the page counts should be reduced by about 4 each to give you a "true" page count of actual gaming content, and if you take the pdf pagecounts, add them together, and reduce each by four to account for front and back covers, credits and OGL, then you get a total pagecount of 227.  In the same ballpark as Out of the Abyss, which is, if I remember correctly, real close to 250 pages.

Oh, that reminds me of another good point; technically, these are set in the same setting as Freeport, although, with the exception of the last Freeport Special issue, not actually in Freeport itself.  That's probably what prompted me to dig them up; I'm wrapping up soon a re-read of The Pirate's Guide to Freeport which has consistently been one of my favorite RPG products—in spite of my wishes that it were a little more true to concept and less invested in being D&D; but with pirates.  See this old post, as well as this one.  This doesn't actually matter a lot since, they take place in the environments around the Ivory Ports, which are about as close to a generic D&D area as you get in the setting, but it's interesting.  In fact, it probably tells us more about that setting than anything else we've got, with the possible exception of that one chapter in the Freeport book

We're starting to wander into territory that's very subjective, if not neutral, so I guess I should point out a few things that are potentially the bad.  First, the module is very dark and even horror-tinted, involving devil worship, cannibalism, incest, corruption and temptation, fratricide, filicide, patricide, mobs of anarchic villagers, etc.  This isn't necessarily a problem in its own right, and given the flexibility of the module, it doesn't have to turn out this way, but the default resolution is also kind of nihilistic.  This last part bothers me more than the details of the content, and I suspect that even someone like me who openly admits to trying to turn D&D into Call of Cthulhu in terms of its tone, finished reading the module and thinking... huh.

I also wasn't a fan of the art.  It looked—mostly, although with some exceptions—almost cartoonishly bad, and often clashed with the descriptions; dark haired characters shown with very light hair, for example.  Now, I don't mind a garage band publisher vibe, but Green Ronin had been around for quite some time by this point.  To be fair, I've always thought their art direction was hit or miss, and I really liked some of it and wondered what compromising blackmail certain other artists had to have on the company that they continued to get so much work.  With the exception of the cover, I wasn't impressed by much of the art, and would have actively preferred to have seen less of it, to the point of "I don't even need any, if that's what I'm going to get."

However, the art studio who did the art did the maps, and they're good quality, at least in terms of how they look.  That doesn't mean that they make any sense; the Cold Wood, for example, is supposed to be infested with kobolds and haunts, while the Grey Wood has tons of wolves, including some as big as horses.  Given that both of them aren't much bigger than my backyard (I don't live on some gigantic countryside estate either) those are both rather ridiculous; either it's a stupid rumor spread by really stupid villagers, or it's a stupid rumor written in a moment of brain-fartery by the writer, or there was poor coordination between the writer and the map-makers.

The biggest con against it, however, is the unremitting product placement.  Hardly a page goes by that the writer doesn't make some reference to some other Green Ronin product, from including monsters from The Book of Fiends, or templates and character classes from a variety of Green Ronin sources (The Avatar's Handbook, The Cavalier's Handbook, Book of the Righteous, The Advanced Player's Manual, The Advanced Gamemaster's Manual, etc.)  They also make reference to alternate rules systems—that they produce, of course—that you might be using instead of D&D, and the provide almost two whole pages worth of stats for a mass combat minigame that's only present in one of their other books.

Now, they're very careful to have designed the whole thing so that you don't actually need to have any of those books, but only just.  It does manage, especially in the Appendices where most of the stats are, to start to become kind of obnoxious, though, and there is a few pages worth of stuff that you can't actually use—NPCs that you'll have to restat as some other class, pregens that you can use but can't advance, stats that you'll have to do something else with (the mass combat minigame, for instance, which you'll mostly have to handwave away the results of if you don't have access to it.)  It's certainly not enough of a problem to ruin the adventure, but it's—like I said, the best adjective for it is that it's enough to become obnoxious.  It's not a big deal to me personally, because I was almost certainly going to do that if I ever actually use the module anyway; I'd adapt it to FANTASY HACK and have to do all kinds of conversions on my own.

In that sense, then, I can say that it's not a bad way to start a fairly traditional campaign, albeit leaning towards the darker near-horror side of fantasy.  Heck, it'd even have been a decent module for WFRPG for that matter.  They didn't provide any web enhancement for that specific conversion, sadly.

The flaws are fairly minor, and for me personally, kind of not applicable anyway.  I recommend it.  I do have to point out that I got a little bit of a chuckle at a little bit of a superior tone in the description of the series overall, though—if you're a "modern, savvy" gamer, who's tired of nostalgia, giants and drow, etc.  Ouch!

Then again, I was a fan (for quite a while) of The Window, and you don't get more pretentious than the language he used to describe his game.  It was so bad that even in his own revision he had to laugh at himself for his posturing.  I hope the Green Ronin guys are doing the same.  And if not; well, I'm not really an OSRian anyway, so I literally have no reason to take it personal, even if I were inclined to do so, which I'm not.

Out of the Abyss

As I've been reading the Out of the Abyss as well as The Shackled City books, I can't help but compare and contrast them.  Chris Perkins is, probably only coincidentally, heavily involved with both, as a principle architect of the series for both, and the author of five of the twelve adventures of the latter.

I greatly prefer the former, however.  I like the format—a 250 or so page book that describes a campaign, with enough detail to be easily usable, but more focused on bigger picture stuff than on "pixel-bitching" room after room after room.  The latter is how I feel reading The Shackled City, however.  Out of the Abyss feels very high level in some ways.  Sure, there are actual text boxes here and there, and a few location maps, and NPCs with specific conversation details.  But mostly, it describes the campaign at a much more high level, and expects that you as the GM will be filling in more of the details about conversations you have, NPCs you meet, and minor details of places you explore.  It is structured to much more closely resemble a novel when all is said and done than your "typical" D&D adventure which would be incredibly boring as a novel as you explore every square inch of every room of improbably Byzantine locations.

Now, I suppose there are many GMs who, on reading that, would suggest that it seems difficult to run an adventure if you have to fill in many of the details yourself, and figure out exactly how to arrange the elements that it does give you.  I understand that.  I'm the kind of GM who prefers to do that anyway, though, so I find reading someone else's attempt to spell out every detail for me tedious and unhelpful, while an adventure that assumes I'm capable of doing so on my own filling in of details and instead gives me something interesting to work with that's flexible and high level is perfect.  So... good for Wizards of the Coast for designing such a product, I suppose.  Not that it's the first; apparently it's the third, even for 5th edition (in the wake of Princes of the Apocalypse and others, and even Third Edition Return to Castle Ravenloft seems like it has a similar format.  I've flipped through but not read the latter, and I've read a few chapters of the former.)

So, the good news is that I've got plenty of more material to work through besides the more structured and detailed Paizo Adventure Paths, which is good.  For one thing, it's already closer to a format that works for me, but for another, some of those topics are iconic and pretty interesting.

I had earlier said that I thought my own efforts to adapt Out of the Abyss were likely to see it moved to my comatose DREAMLANDS REMIXED setting, but I'm having some second thoughts.  Where I earlier said that TIMISCHBURG probably didn't have a place for something as bizarre as even a heavily modified Underdark is likely to be, I'm now thinking that adopting an old idea from DARK•HERITAGE Mk. III where I had a gigantic Valles Marinaris (as on Mars) that was perpetually shrouded by a lowlying layer of cloud or fog.  Underneath it was a bizarre world that bore only a few correspondences to the rest of the setting, because the environment was so different.  And I think something not terribly unlike the Underdark combined with the Plane of Shadow can exist here, and may in fact be the true origin of the Cursed race (which here would probably take the place of the drow in the module.  Roughly.  Although I'm tempted to go full underground Sea of Omean and First Born here, especially since I'm re-reading The Gods of Mars as we speak.)

Anyway, I'm not going to do it right away, anyway, but it gives me a future project to work on, after I decide which of the two setting assumptions is more interesting to me; a gigantic canyon in the TIMISCHBURG setting (I've attached the old location bubble "map" and drawn in the canyon's probable location as a gigantic squiggly thing) or as it's own setting drawing heavily from Lovecraft's Dreamlands and Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborea.

One obvious side effect of placing that there is that Gunaakt is, to a great degree, cut off from the rest of the continent.  Tesculum is as well, although it can go around through Baal Hamazi and through the Lexoviian mountain ranges.  But there's no denying that placing a gigantic rift valley that drops into the depths of the earth with difficult terrain and a persistent cloud cover is, for all intents and purposes, unpassable unless there are a handful of "passes" that are guarded and maintained as routes through them.

Friday Art Attack

Another episode of Friday Art Attack...

I have a number of pictures by this artist who I believe is Raymond Swanland.  He does Magic cards and book covers.  I don't always know exactly what he's illustrating, but it always looks cool!

The Pathfinder iconics (or at least a subset of them; there are a lot nowadays) look like they're in big trouble.

An illustration for a scene from The Gods of Mars.

I miss this kind of magazine sometimes.  Who'm I kidding?  I miss it a lot.  What's published today is trash.  You have to get stuff online, or from indie guys now.

The more spaceships look like Egyptian pyramids, the better they are.  I think this is a Destiny illustration, though.

More weirdness.  Giant undead gods?  Maybe.  A new Demon Lord?  Maybe

More action on Barsoom.

Not sure why this Deep One is so gigantic.  Maybe it's Mother Hydra or Father Dagon himself?

A few more hard trance songs

A few more discoveries I've made.  Man, I really wish I was in the scene when this stuff was all new.  Then again, I never really wanted to live in Germany or the Netherlands, and I would have had no patience with the rave drug scene.  So I guess I'm saying that I wish I had had these songs to listen to since they were new, instead of just now discovering most of them.  Even the ones that I already had are mostly discoveries from just the last year or two or so.

A friend of mine from Germany gave me a bunch of "Hamburg techno" as he called it; really mostly a bunch of late 90s trance.  Although I liked a bunch of the tracks, I never really got into the music in the sense that I wanted to go find more of it.  The tracks that were really stand-outs from that collection—of somewhere around 50-60 tracks, maybe?—include "Magnetic Love" by Hyper Tension, "In My Dream" by Scoopex, and the so-called original trance song "Age of Love" by Age of Love (although I later found out that the version he gave me wasn't the original version, it was one of the "Jam & Spoon" mixes.  Apparently, that's a common mistake, as the original from 1990 wasn't the one that went on to become a cult classic that spawned an entire genre.

That home-made mix tape given to me in late 1999 or early 2000 while I was in my MBA program, along with the Big Hard Disk compilation were, for many years, my sole exposure to real EDM—even though it didn't even have that name yet.  Meanwhile I spent much of that same time chasing after the then current A Different Drum and others underground synthpop scene and discovering the neo-EBM turning into futurepop scene.  This is when I discovered artists like De/Vision, Mesh, VNV Nation, etc.  EDM was something going on in the background that I didn't pay much attention to, but I knew was out there.  In fact, given that I only had about a 50% like rate for the stuff on the mix tape I was given, and even less for the compilation I bought pretty much guaranteed that I didn't think I had a future in that direction.  How wrong that ended up being!  I just wasn't exposed to enough of the right tracks!

Anyway, here's a few more tracks that I've stumbled across that I really regret not having in my collection for a long time:

• Hennes & Cold - "First Step"—along with its B-side (or alternate version) "Second Step" this 1999 track is usually considered the very first "reverse bass" track, and therefore simultaneously a great example of Millennial hard trance and the very first hardstyle song at the same time.
• Brooklyn Bounce - "Born to Bounce [Warp Brothers Remix]"—this does miss out on the "Music is my destiny" vocals, but it is otherwise a better version than the original.  Sorry, Brooklyn Bounce.  
• The Warp Brothers - "We Will Survive"—still trying to decide if I prefer the Club Mix or the D.O.N.S. Remix, speaking of the Warp Brothers.  Either way, they're both great tracks.  By the way, their remix/rework of the Pump Panel Reconstruction of New Order's "Confusion" as "Blade" is pretty fun too.
• Cosmic Commando - "Heartbreak"—you'd think a duo that goes by, respectively, the names DJ Yanny and DJ Gollum would be too silly to take seriously, but this is a seriously great track.  It's funny to hear the same song sampled that Tuneboy used for "Whackyjackie" too.
• Cosmic Gate - "Human Beings"—Cosmic Gate is something like a superstar in the world of hard trance, as near as I can tell, with loads of hits and actual albums and everything.  "Exploration of Space" or "Fire Wire" might be their "signature" track, but I like this one.  Also, Wikipedia actually uses a portion of it to demonstrate what hard trance is.  Plus, "The Truth" falls victim to the Magic Negro fallacy just a bit; why in the world do we have this guy saying, "Da Troof" over and over again in a track made by two Germans?
• DJ Mirko Milano - "Stopp & Go [DJ Arne L II and Mirko Milano Mix]"—the original is pretty great too, but it seems that Arne and Mirko did their best work when working together.  This is actually a contender to be my new favorite song flavor of the week (or two) currently.

You should be able to find all of those tracks on YouTube, and most of them (although not all) are on Spotify too.

Curiously, since he was such a huge part of the hard trance movement overall, I find that most work by Scot Project is kinda... well, I like it, I suppose, but I rarely love it.  So, I've got some of his tracks and remixes, but few of them make the cut to "best of" status.

Happy Birthday to Me!—and Hard Trance

Well, I had my birthday recently—it wasn't a "big" one in terms of number; I'm comfortably between 40 and 50; not to close to either anymore (or yet.)

Spent a bunch of cash at Cabela's, but mostly just on clothes and some backpacking gear.  I don't normally advocate for getting too much backpacking gear at Cabela's, because they sell relatively little that's optimized for it, being more for hunting, fishing and outfitter or car camping.  But every once in a while, they've got something worth getting—my Sea to Summit inflatable pillow that I picked up was pricey, but very important to have if you want to sleep well in the backcountry.  And it's a lot smaller than what I've been using.

Besides, I had gift cards.  I also got some really nice leather slippers with rabbit fur lining on the inside.  Very comfy.  And we picked up a bunch of beef jerky of various kinds (not at Cabela's, although they do have some, but rather from a store about a block away).  Apparently January is World Carnivore Month, so it's very apropos.  And, I ate out at Mongolian BBQ, and tracked down a bunch of music from the old 2000 and 2001 Qlimax set lists.  Although Qlimax is often seen as a hardstyle scene, these early set lists are mostly hard trance, with loads of acid and only a bit of early hardstyle.  Honestly, this early hardstyle is hard to tell from hard trance; the two were almost the same when they first started.

Besides, in general, I think electronic music is "over-split" in terms of labels.  But if you want to explore some of the labels, here's a good site:  http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/?why_yes,_it

It is the opinionated work of one guy, but hey, it's something.  I happen to agree with him on a lot of stuff, other than I'm much more tolerant of even formulaic trance than he is, and I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in electronic music that's overtly "black" or hip-hoppy.  For him to (essentially) suggest that that's the origin of EDM is... well, I see what he's saying, but it's an overstatement of the case, by a lot.  That's a bit like saying that modern firearms were invented by the Chinese.

In any case, I'm finding all kinds of "new favorite songs" from that scene, and by "new" of course, I mean "over 15 years old, but I hadn't heard them 'til now.  I found a lot of great stuff in the Lady Dana, DJ Pavo, Kai Tracid and Gary D. setlists.  I expected to like the Mauro Picotto setlist more than I did; I didn't find a lot there that inspired me to look it up. He spun a lot of Schranz, which I just think is kind of boring. In any case, you can find some pretty good YouTube videos of the entire sets, recorded live at the event, from the sound of it (because there's an annoying MC who keeps talking over the music when you least want him to).  I recommend listening to them.  I had a fair bit of the tracks already—especially some of the acid trance stuff, which I had discovered quite some time ago by now (and no less than three of those five played, for instance, "Acid Nightmare")—but here's a small selection of my absolute favorite tracks uncovered during this exploration which I didn't already know or have.

• DJ Darkzone - The Human Form [Vocal Club Mix]
• Blutonium Boy vs DJ Neo - Hardstyle Nation [DJ Neo Progressive Mix]—curiously the Blutonium Boy remix seems to be more highly regarded, but maybe it's because this version sounds more like hard trance than hardstyle.  I like the semi-supersaw soaring synthline in the middle of this one a lot.
• DJ Combo - Rock It To The Beat [Gary D. Hardline Mix]
• Tankis & Savietto - Octopus [Lost in Case Remix]
• R.B.A. - No Alternative [Brooklyn Bounce Remix]
• Thomas Trouble - Insane Asylum [SMP Club Mix]
• Hennes & Cold - The Sound of Rock

And, for the heckuvit; some of my favorite hard trance and acid trance that I already had.

• Titchy Bitch and the Fallen Angel - Retribution [Hennes & Cold remix]—I'd actually love to find the original mix, but I can't.
• Ohne Ende Geil - Endless Horny
• Kai Tracid - Destiny's Path [Warmduscher Remix]
• Kai Tracid - Tiefenrausch [ASYS Remix]
• Derb - Derb (Derbus)
• ASYS - Acid Nightmare—to be fair, I can't pick a favorite version of this, and there are a lot of them out there.  The 140 Squadron remix has a hard trance sound to it, while the much more recent Wavetraxx remix treats the original very respectfully while still adding substantially to it as well.  And Pila's 2006 Update also manages to do something quite interesting while not making it unrecognizable.

Still getting on my feet...

Yesterday, I tried all day to write an "extinct animal of the week" post and never got around to it.

Let me summarize, briefly, what I've spent what free time I have (which has been limited since coming back from the Christmas holiday) doing:

• Watching hiking videos on Youtube.  Along with planning both future hiking trips and gear and clothes that I want to get.
• Gathering more music, including a bunch of FM Attack remixes of bands I don't know, and—of course—some more hardstyle.
• This means listening to a lot of it on Youtube or Spotify in the background while doing other things; I can't do the first and the second at the same time very well, unless the hiking videos don't have much of a soundtrack that I need to hear.
• Trying to figure out some reading; I've been trying to finish Out of the Abyss before I have to take it back to the library, as well as read the third book in the Nagash Trilogy by Mike Lee so I can pick up the End Times series.  I also picked up the last three Dresden Files novels, which I hadn't bought in paperback until now.  I'm actually caught up (on buying) except for Side Jobs which is—sadly—only available in trade paperback, so it won't match the rest of the series on the shelf.  Sigh.
• Finished reading a bunch of Kindle books, including The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, Prisoners of Darkness and The Winds of Gath by E. C. Tubb.  I'll finish The Gods of Mars I hope yet this week and The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon will take me longer.  But the latter is non-fiction, so I'll probably start up some more fiction so I can go back and forth between them.
• Also, my birthday is this weekend (technically Monday, but it's a 3-day weekend.)
• I've picked up a bunch of new movies.  Well, they're not new, nor are they, with some notable exceptions, necessarily very good.  I picked them up dirt cheap because I knew that they were (mostly) the kind of trashy movie that I like to watch every so often.  Ivanhoe and Scaramouche are the exceptions here (although honestly; both are disappointing compared to the literary antecedent on which they are based.  Oh, well.)  I'm talking stuff like the Percy Jackson movies, the new Clash of the Titans series, The Seventh Son and Solomon Kane, etc.  I'm not watching them very quickly, because I admit that I don't even think that they're great movies necessarily.  But because they're new (to me) I've been kind of ginning to watch them, at least a little bit at a time (the fact that the DVD player holds my place when I stop it is great.  I can watch this at my own pace.)  
• On the other hand, my watching of Netflix is way down and I'm struggling to be motivated to watch much of anything.  Daredevil dragged and stalled.  Jessica Jones stalled.  I never even started the other Marvel series.  Longmire stalled.  Blacklist stalled.  Hawaii 5-0 stalled.  Magnum P.I. stalled.  About the only thing that I do reliably watch are documentaries
• I've got loads of RPG stuff that I've had kicking around for a long time but either never read, or haven't read in so long that I don't really remember what's in it.  I'm reading, in addition to Out of the Abyss which I mentioned above, The Shackled City, Princes of the Apocalypse and also The Witchfire Trilogy, The Freeport Trilogy, Drow of the Underdark (the official 3.5 WotC book) as well as Advanced Race Codes: Drow (the unofficial Green Ronin book on the same topic.)  Curiously, of course, Green Ronin was contracted to do most of the work on Out of the Abyss, so I presume Wizards of the Coast is happy with their take on the drow.

On top of this, I should point out that my free time is relatively scarce to begin with lately.  I've got a ton of stuff going on that manages to keep it at a minimum.  And I've got new goals and projects that I'm anxious to start on top of all of this.  Sigh.

So, if it seems like the blog is stalling itself in the wake of the holidays—well, it kind of is.  But I'll get back into the swing of things.  Eventually.

(Belated) Friday Art Attack

Although I've been back in town for... almost a week now (a week late tonight, technically) I'm still kind of on the wrong foot with a bunch of stuff going on, and I didn't even realize until today that I missed my Friday Art Attack.  Sigh.

Anyway, here it is.  It's neither the first nor is it likely to be the last time that I've hit it late.

This could be an example of a Shadow Sword, maybe, originally from DARK•HERITAGE but in the Appendix of FANTASY HACK.

A Conan character, from the Mongoose Game.

While I do really like Wayne Reynolds sorta comic book vibe, sometimes I have no idea what his characters are supposed to actually be.  This piece of art was some 4e something or other.  To be fair, I didn't know what was going on with 4e most of the time anyway.

Speaking of 4e, here's some gnoll art.

I believe this giant wall on Mars is a piece of Destiny art, although I might be wrong.

This, on the other hand, is a much more iconic sword & sorcery type of story.  Why don't more people use chariots in their sword & sorcery?  It's supposed to deliberately echo sword & sandal, after all.

Nothing like an alternate Robocop model.

While this was supposed to be some kind of Barsoom piece, Mars (and therefore Barsoom) only has two moons, not three.  That red woman (Thuvia or Dejah Thoris, I think) is a little too white and not red enough, I think, too.  She looks more like a Spaniard or an Italian than a martian.

Let's not forget the space opera and gigantic space stations.

I've deliberately tried to allow a lot more classic influence; i.e. Greek and Roman mythology and culture.  Not so much that I have any overtly Greco-Roman areas (although actually I now do in the TIMISCHBURG setting, at least), but there's loads of room for classicism in any modern fantasy, and there SHOULD be too.

The gratuitous trashiness of the Starman covers always makes me laugh.  This is what happens, I suppose, when 1970s Mexicans make a fake Flash Gordon.

After Star Wars came out, loads of fake Death Stars appeared in science fiction art.  Presumably some even came first.  

Another good piece of Destiny art.  Destiny looks a lot like what I want AD ASTRA to look like.

A totally new design on the owlbear.  Which, let's face it, always was a silly concept to begin with.

There's nothing that says cosmopolitan like the Mayflower in port with a Chinese junk.  Artwork for Paizo's Absalom.

Dreamwave megamixes

While I've had loads of fun whipping up a good 7 hours or so of hardstyle megamixes (in 6 files) I've also considered doing the same for some other types of music that I like.  It's a shortcut, if you will, to exactly the tracks that I most want to hear, most of the time.  Ever since I started making those megamixes, I've found that I listen to them more than anything else in my collection; even though I have lots more stuff than what's in those megamixes.  And that's been true for more than just a flash in the pan; I started making those megamixes in early October, after all.

The next genre I'd like to tackle is Dreamwave.  Now, I didn't coin the term dreamwave, but I've also never really seen it defined, so I've kind of just applied it to stuff that sounds dreamwavy to me.  By this, I mostly mean synthpop and synthwave that is kind of wispy, ethereal, romantic, etc.  Stuff like Electric Youth, Marsheaux, Book of Love, The Midnight, etc.  It's more about tone and mood than about anything concrete.  So I don't know that what I call dreamwave would be the same thing that someone else calls dreamwave (I'm quite sure that nobody else would call Book of Love or OMD dreamwave, for instance.  Although maybe they'd agree that they were an important step on the way towards dreamwave being a reality.)

Of course, megamix may sound weird for a genre that isn't really optimized for dancing, but then again, what else do you call it when people put sets together on YouTube and whatnot?  Anywhere, here's my raw tracklist of material to work with, alphabetical by artist.

You'll notice that FM Attack features prominently both as an artist of several tracks and more importantly as a remixer of a lot of tracks.

Æon Rings—But Not Tonight
Anoraak—Don't Be Afraid [Alternative Version]
Anoraak—Don't Be Afraid [Lost Years Remix]
Avec Sans—Heartbreak Hi
Avec Sans—Perth
Book of Love—Lullaby [Pleasant Dreams Edit]
Book of Love—Book of Love
Book of Love—Boy
Book of Love—Candy Carol
Book of Love—Modigliani (Requiem Mass)
Book of Love—You Make Me Feel So Good [Flutter Edit]
Book of Love—You Make Me Feel So Good [Flutter Mix]
Breakdown Valentine—Wicked Game
Capital Cities—One Minute More [Phantom Ride Remix]
Chris and Cosey—October (Love Song)
Chris and Cosey—October (Love Song) [Dance Mix]
Chris and Cosey—October (Love Song) [Vocal Long Version]
Chromatics—Shadow [Last Dance of the Night Club Edit]
Chromatics—Shadow [Michel's Runway Edit]
College & Electric Youth—A Real Hero
Cosmicity—Egypt
Cosmicity—Still
Dana Jean Phoenix—Le Mirage
Desire—Under Your Spell
Electric Youth—Runaway
Electric Youth—The Best Thing
Electric Youth—Fade Away
Electric Youth—Without You
Empathy Test—Throwing Stones [Black City Lights Remix]
Flamingo Drive—Strange World
Flamingo Drive—Strange World [FM Attack Mix]
FM Attack—Dreamer
FM Attack—Hot Girlz in Love
FM Attack—Mixed Signals
Foretaste—First Symptoms
Fotonovela—But Not Tonight
Hive Riot—Kiss My Lips You Fool
Hive Riot—Hearts
Hive Riot—Sherlock
Kid Moxie—Dirty Air [Marsheaux Remix]
Lifelike—So Electric
Lifelike—So Electric [William Powell Edition]
Marsheaux—Butterflies
Marsheaux—Destroy Me
Marsheaux—Dream of a Disco
Marsheaux—Inhale [Echoes Remix]
Marsheaux—Mediterranean
Marsheaux—Now and Never
Marsheaux—Over and Over
Marsheaux—Secret Place
Marsheaux—Summer [August 15th Remix]
Marsheaux—Wild Heart
Midnight—Kick Drums & Red Wine
Midnight—Los Angeles
Midnight—Sunset
Night Vision—Don't Wait
Night Vision—Keep Moving
Northern Lights—Cruel Summer, ft. Dana Jean Phoenix
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark—Dreaming
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark—If You Leave
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark—Joan of Arc (Maid of Orleans)
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark—Joan of Arc
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark—Messages
Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark—So In Love
Propaganda—The Duel
Rename—Limelight
Rename—You Don't Deserve My Love
Rework—October (Love Song)
Soviet—Ghosts
Soviet—Ghosts [Silent Gloves Remix]
Tesla Boy—Dream Machine [Silent Gloves Remix]
Visitor—Coming Home [FM Attack Remix]
Visitor—Coming Home [Viceroy Remix]
Vitamin C—Voices Carry
Way Out West—We Love Machine
Way Out West—We Love Machine [FM Attack Remix]

Do I want to read the Drizzt books?

As a side effect of the last post, I'm second guessing my resistance to the series and wondering if I want to read them (again) and go further this time.  I dunno.  Just in case, I'm going to go ahead and earmark what the titles are.  I'm pretty sure that they'll all be at my public library.  R. A. Salvatore is a big enough author for that.

Icewind Dale Trilogy
The Crystal Shard
Streams of Silver
The Halfling's Gem

The Dark Elf Trilogy (prequel)
Homeland
Exile
Sojourn

The Legacy of the Drow Series (somewhere in here is where I lost the thread of the books years ago)
The Legacy
Starless Night
Siege of Darkness
Passage to Dawn

The Paths of Darkness Series
The Silent Blade
The Spine of the World
Servant of the Shard
Sea of Swords

The Sellswords
Servant of the Shard (same book as above, which is in both series)
Promise of the Witch King
Road of the Patriarch

The Hunter's Blades
The Thousand Orcs
The Lone Drow
The Two Swords

Transitions
The Orc King
The Pirate King
The Ghost King

Neverwinter
Gauntlgrym
Neverwinter
Charon's Claw
The Last Threshold

The Sundering
The Companions (technically, I'm not sure where the rest of the books in this series fit; they can probably be ignored.  But I'll note them anyway.)
The Godborn
The Adversary
The Reaver
The Sentinel
The Herald

Companions Codex
Night of the Hunter
Rise of the King
Vengeance of the Iron Dwarf

Homecoming
Archmage
Maestro
Hero

Rage of Demons

I'm (quite belatedly) discovering the Rage of Demons storyline that D&D did back in... what; late 2015, I think?  2016 maybe, for the majority of the execution?  There were some Salvatore Drizzt novels (up to... what, 31 titles now?  Holy cow.  I read maybe 7-8 of them years ago, but since have lost track completely.  I don't even particularly like the character anymore.  I did, however, not get rid of my original Icewind Dale trilogy in paperback.)  There was a computer game. And a Neverwinter Nights expansion.  And a big megamodule, Out of the Abyss, which I'm also reading currently.

This last is what is intriguing.  While it's obviously very D&Dish, even specifically Forgotten Realmsish, which is not normally my thing, I also can see converting the Underdark environment into a strange, alien world on the surface, and maybe figuring out some way to adapt this megamodule into something that I might even run.  Chris Perkins, who wrote the forward, said that it deliberately has a Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass vibe.  I came for the demon lords, but I find that the adventure itself is surprisingly intriguing, and that I might want to see what I can do with it.

Now, what I wish Wizards of the Coast had done was chartered some independent novels not set in the Forgotten Realms that were tie-ins with the Rage of Demons theme.  I wonder if I couldn't do my own spin-off of some kind with the theme?  Hmm...   I suppose that had they done this, it would resemble somewhat the Abyssal Plague series.  Now, the Abyssal Plague series isn't really very good, I'm afraid.  I think I got rid of my copies, but I got the two preview novels from the public library, and bought the regular trilogy itself.

Of course, that brings to mind the fact that while I liked very little about 4e (and it marks my separation from D&D per se) I did really like the concept of the "Points of Light" Nentir Vale campaign setting, and I see it as the platonic ideal of what a campaign setting should look like.  Forgotten Realms (Gray Box), and old Mystara before we knew much about it (the Grand Duchy of Karameikos?) or even early work on settings like Eberron or Golarion before they got more "built up" is really where it's at, and Nentir Vale, whatever other faults the 4e era may have had, never fell victim to this (a Gazetteer was scheduled, but never released, but most likely it never would have risen above that of the old Greyhawk Gazetteer or Forgotten Realms Gray Box in terms of detail.  Besides, the setting is observably smaller.)

My own TIMISCHBURG setting is meant to mimic this to some extent, although I have no idea where I could possibly fit something like Out of the Abyss in that setting, unless I decide to get into traveling to parallel worlds or planar adventures or something.  It's simply too alien to fit in a setting that is otherwise deliberately rather traditional in most senses.  On the other hand, maybe the DREAMLANDS REMIXED setting is perfect for exactly this type of adventure.  In fact, I'm more and more convinced that adapting it to DREAMLANDS REMIXED is probably the best thing I can do with the tag in the first place, which has otherwise languished without any development at all other than a list of place names and a small discussion on Lomar.

So... it looks like I have my next project ahead of me after ISLES OF TERROR is done.  I'll have to take a different approach to this one, but still—I think that there's a lot to be said for a rather drastic reworking of this adventure into something workable in my milieu.

Here's the YouTube trailer for the event, in case you didn't see it before.

Hardstyle 5 and 6

For whatever reason, I notice that my hardstyle posts get a lot of views, so I'm a little bit more encouraged to talk about them after all, when I might otherwise let them slide a bit more.  Even someone like me who doesn't really care all that much what other people think and who writes this blog for my own entertainment still reacts somewhat to feedback, I suppose.

Anyway, right before leaving for vacation, I was able to make my Hardstyle megamix 5; but I ended up adding a lot of tracks that weren't on my original list—to be honest, I ended up making a Hardstyle megamix 6 too while I was at it, and I still have a few left over to start with a 7 eventually.

I don't know how many megamixes I want to make; I kind of thought I was pretty much done, but I keep finding more tracks that I like, so my body of work that I want incorporated gets bigger.  Anyway; here's what I put into #5 and #6.  You'll see that I really went a bit crazy with Project One stuff on the first of the two.

• Headhunterz &Wildstylez—Blame it on the Muzic (original mix transitions into D-Block & S-te-Fan RMX for the end)
• Tuneboy ft. E-Life—Devotion
• Project One—Fantasy Or Reality
• Bass Modulators—Anthem of Summer
• Headhunterz—D-Tuned
• Nitro Man—Techno Prime (Psycho Punkz remix)
• Project One—The Story Unfolds
• Mauro Picotto—Komodo (Zatox Hardstyle Mix)
• Project One—Rate Reducer (Headhunterz RMX)
• Donkey Rollers—No One Can Stop Us
• A-lusion—Feeling This (Steady Mix)
• Kujin-Fu & MCP—Binary Wars
• Showtek—The Colour of the Harder Styles
• TNT—First Match (Badmind ft DJ Picci Remix)
• Refuzion—Euphoria

And the next one:

• Headhunterz—Emptiness
• Philippe Rochard meets Nu-Pulse—The Survivors of Hardstyle
• Tuneboy—Whackyjackie (Technoboy Remix)
• Benny Benassi—Back to the Pump (Technoboy Remix)
• Showtek—Black
• Project One—Life Beyond Earth
• Hauyon—T.A.W.F.
• Future Tribes—Deadlock
• Headhunterz—Sacrifice (Brennan Heart RMX)
• Hunter—Beauty and the Beat (Technoboy Remix)
• Project One—Numbers (Wildstylez RMX)
• Pitchers—Black is Back (Synthsoldier 2014 Remix)
• The Prophet—Emergency Call
• Showtek—Dominate

Clearly it's obvious from these two that I really like a lot of the Headhunterz output, especially when he works with Wildstylez (where they're credited together often as Project One), and as always, I love Technoboy's take on other people's stuff (I've had so many Technoboy and TNT songs in the past that I used only one or two here, though.)