Fantasy James Bond

This last week I spent less time reading in the evenings, and I actually watched all four of the Daniel Craig James Bond movies; one each evening Mon-Thur. (I don't count the fifth Daniel Craig movie. Not only do I not own it, but it was an ill-conceived movie to begin with, so I'll probably just ignore it completely.) I like the Daniel Craig movies, and I like the Timothy Dalton movies; I actually quite like the darker, edgier, and more grounded approach of them, compared to the gonzo movies that came earlier. Yes, even the Sean Connery movies are silly compared to those. I often say that if D&D 5e is The Avengers in fantasy, then Dark Fantasy X is the X-Files in fantasy. The reality, of course, is that the X-Files is just a long-running, drawn out thriller/mystery with a UFO and other supernatural stuff twist. Therefore, from a structural standpoint, any good thrillers are great examples of how to structure Dark Fantasy X games, even if the specific details may vary. A lich or corrupt Grand Duke (to use the Chaos in Waychester specific example) is really not much different than a Bond villain. Replace the cyber-attacks, or missing nuclear devices, etc. as plot devices with a supernatural equivalent of sorts, and you're good to go. And maybe limit the globe-trotting scope of many of these thriller stories (unless, of course, you're playing Eberron where that's a given for that setting too). And that isn't really necessary anyway. The Bourne Identity takes place in a fairly constrained part of Central Europe, after all.

Anyway, I've said this before, but I highly recommend watching and reading good thrillers, and paying attention to the structure, the villains, the twists, etc. because they make for good gaming fodder, and are easier to adapt than you'd think, even given the obviously different setting types.

That said... I'm not sure that I thought the Daniel Craig James Bond run was as good as I remembered it being. I've—for whatever reason—watched Casino Royale many times, but I hadn't seen Quantum of Solace, Skyfall or Spectre in a while and only probably once or twice ever. I'd also never watched them in order in a short time, i.e., one each every evening for four nights in a row. So here's where the post pivots to be a review of old movies that everyone's already seen.

First off, a few things. The change of the James Bond setting wasn't always welcomed. The lack of iconic James Bond elements, like Q and his gadgets, was even a part of the also darker and edgier and more grounded Timothy Dalton movies. Not having them here until partway through the third movie was probably a step too far.

The sex-swapped M was a big deal at the time, but Judi Dench was good in the role, and she was more like a "prequel" M with the whole point being to set up the more classic scenario with the new M in the final movie. The race swapped Felix Leiter and Miss Moneypenny was less irritating than I expected it to be, probably because they're such minor characters... although attempting to make Moneypenny a bigger character with a bigger role, and taking away her most iconic characteristic; her hopeless crush on Bond meant that she was essentially a totally different character anyway. These movies got flack from a lot of Bond fans for trying to be a more progressive "for modern audiences" Bond, but that didn't really metastasize into anything truly obnoxious until the fifth movie, which as I said, I'm completely pretending like it doesn't even exist anyway. Bond as the hardened nearly sociopathic alpha stereotype was mostly maintained (except in the fifth movie) and although some of the characters complained about it, whether it was intentional or not, it ended up serving him well. M called him a misogynistic dinosaur in the first movie, but then her own cumulative screw-ups required her to turn to Bond to try and fix her mess by the time Skyfall rolled around, for instance. If you only watch the first four Bond movies of this series, and ignore the fifth, you'll avoid most of the active wokeness. Given that the fourth one has a satisfying end, and the fifth one was an afterthought subversive epilogue feel, it's clear that when the fourth one was made that they considered that the end of the series anyway. Again; the fifth one was just ill-conceived in every way, including the idea that a fifth one should have been even made at all.

That said; how about the plot and structure of the films? Much to borrow here? I actually think that there are a few nearly crippling flaws that are more apparent across the four movies than they were when I just saw them individually separated by however many years it took to make them. First, I feel like a lot of the events that happen seem kind of disconnected, or at best weakly connected to any kind of plot. This is something that I think D&D type games in particular need to be careful about, because it's liable to happen anyway; that the action set-piece, or combats, or whatever it is, is a means unto itself, and it doesn't serve to advance anything, nor is it connected to anything. And don't get me wrong; red herrings and side quests, and asides for the sake of fun aren't wrong. But there should be at least some things that actually advance the plot. Here, I couldn't quite make it out quite often. Bond would be in a car chase or other big action set-piece, and it wasn't always super clear why. Hinting at big connected conspiracies is one thing, but the hints have to eventually pay off. Maybe I was a little too distracted occasionally while watching or something, but felt like the payoff was often too oblique, or out of left field. This is related to the second problem; the build-up was underserved. If, after four movies, you're supposed to be really invested in this conflict with the SPECTRE organization, it would help if you literally weren't hearing about it for the first time halfway through the fourth movie. You can't retroactively connect dots and have that be satisfying. The reveal of Blofeld as the secret mastermind that the audience had literally no idea existed was pretty flat. If you're going to have a big secret reveal, you have to build up to it sufficiently, and this series of movies didn't. Not only that, if Silva, Greene, White, and Le Chiffre were all supposed to be lieutenants or whatnot within his organization, they rarely suggested such. They all seemed to be independent operatives that only after the fact were linked. The hinting of the Syndicate in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and then the playing out of that Bond-type villainous organization in the next two movies seemed to play out better. For that matter, in a shorter format, check out HYDRA in Captain America: Winter Soldier. In the Bond movies, the connections between them felt stretched and reaching, and Blofeld's sudden appearance was... well, sudden. Not just this either; Bond's backstory, his connection to the Skyfall estate, etc. were hinted at, but not really explored enough for the audience to really understand why they were supposed to be important. There was a lot of just-so story to it; it was there because the plot demanded it, not because it felt verisimilitude-engendering.

Thirdly, in particular in Spectre, they tried so hard to make it personal and have the pictures all over the walls of people Bond had killed, etc. This felt really corny. I remember liking this movie when I first saw it, and one of my sons not liking it nearly as much. I wondered why, but watching it again last night, I though it was clearly trying too hard to be emotional and it came across as very silly. Bond movies have always had a bit of silliness to them. Not just the Roger Moore ones either; I mean are we really supposed to take Oddjob seriously as a villain? And not everything needs to be silly. But there's fun silly and roll your eyes silly, and Oddjob is the former; Bond seeing pictures of Silva and Vesper, etc. while running through a building to save someone is the latter.

I still recommend thrillers for DMs to make them better DMs. Not sure that the Bond movies are really the best examples, though.

UPDATE: I really like a good action/thriller with overtones of espionage, skullduggery and maybe a heist plotline. Part of the reason I really liked the new D&D movie, since it was basically a heist movie. Although James Bond ended up disappointing me just a bit, I'm also watching the three newest (and best) Mission Impossible movies now; I watched Ghost Protocol yesterday evening, and I hope to catch Rogue Nation tonight and Fallout on Wednesday. Not only will this prepare me for the release of Dead Reckoning in July, but like I said, I'm trying not to just watch the movies and enjoy them, but also pay attention to how the plots are structured, and why they work.

In addition to watching these movies, I also found a used copy at a great price of the Ludlum Triad, which is a heavy hardbound doorstopper with three novels omnibused into a single volume: The Holcroft Covenant, The Matarese Circle, and The Bourne Identity. All three were published in the years between 1978 and 1980 originally; the last of which was obviously adapted into a successful film franchise starring Matt Damon in the earlier 2000s—although based on the last entry from a few years ago, I'd suspect that that's done now. I've read a copy of this exact same omnibus back in the 90s from a library, but those three novels in particular struck me as particularly well written and well-structured. Two of them have been adapted into very successful movies, or in the case of Bourne, an entire movie franchise, although as my father-in-law bitterly remarked when we saw the first movie, it isn't a super faithful adaptation, really.

In my mind, the prototypical D&D campaign isn't really very much like sword & sorcery literature (ironically) and it differs for the most part in significant ways from your typical high fantasy literature, although it at least attempts to mimic that genre. My games in particular are probably equal parts 1) Robin Hood, 2) westerns, and 3) thriller/horror/crime stories. The first two are more about the setting, but the third is about what the characters do and what kinds of plots I have my villains engaged in (which obviously is a mirror of sorts to what the PCs will do.) People may be surprised to see westerns in there, but I think almost all D&D games that I've ever seen have a lot of the western in the setting. The idea of being on a frontier, of being the rough, nomadic ronin-like heroes who defend small settlements and homesteaders from violent hostile "indigenous" peoples, etc. The micro-setting, i.e., the actual details on the ground right where the game actually takes place, usually resembles the Old West more than it does the Middle Ages, although there's a patina of Middle Ages superficial stuff thrown in over a much more modern society, in most senses. That may sound disparaging, but actually I quite like it. I don't dabble in fantasy because I want historical reenactment; there's historical fiction for that (and sometimes I read that). I actually want a hybrid of our society and a romanticized past, and I think that's the draw of fantasy overall to almost all creators and audience for the genre. As the famous expression goes, "the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." Go too far into the past, and you don't understand what people are doing or why, because the whole structure of their society is based on values that you don't recognize. I can't imagine very many modern fantasy fans really "getting" the whole concept of feudal duties and obligations, or the superstitious nature of Medieval religion and belief, and even basic concepts like hospitality duties and obligations. We want a romanticized version of the past, but a big part of that is projecting our own values and beliefs on to the past. 

As an aside, this is the fundamental disconnect which angers people about the woke and their censorship of the past. They're trying to force their values to be projected onto products like movies, books and games, but we don't share their values. So "sensitivity readers" censoring Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, or even more innocuous writers like Ian Fleming or Roald Dahl kinda pisses people off, as does the rampant race and sex swapping of characters (unless they're villains) away from being white and into being brown, yellow, black, red or whatever. Nobody is enjoying Peter Patel and Blackerbell and black girls as Lost Boys, or Black Little Mermaid, or "strong independent wammen" Tiger Lily, or any of the other projections of woke values into our entertainment. Because people want their entertainment to reflect who they are. Hollywood was at its most successful when it was part of the American mainstream (more or less) in an America that was racially homogenous because minorities (other than blacks, who often had their own entertainment geared specifically towards them anyway) were too small in number to challenge the majority consensus of how society was to be structured. 

Turns out that even though Hollywood was still specifically American, up through the end of last century at least, and even beyond, that it was still universal enough to have mass appeal among other nations anyway. This woke crap, that uses as a shield the idea that everyone needs representation, on the other hand, literally appeals to no one except woke western women and the men who are indistinguishable from them. 

Blogging next steps...

My blogging hasn't been as consistent as it used to be. A few things have changed in my personal life that have made blogging a little more difficult than it used to be.

1) I started a new job about six months ago. It started off slow, but since the beginning of the year, it's been much more busy and stressful. Including a number of night meetings with Japan, right smack in the middle of what would be our evening where I'm doing things like blogging. And even during the day, my time is spent doing more busy work than I was used to in my other job, and the people at my new job are people who run around with their hair on fire all of the time, so it's slightly more stressful environment as I'm still trying to figure out what is really important and urgent, and what just seems like it is but isn't really.

2) My wife has engaged us in a lot more plans than we used to have as we've become facultative empty nesters. My evenings and weekends are also much more busy than they used to be with these personal plans and activities.

Between those two changes, I've not only got less time than I used to do to things like blog, but I've also got less mental energy than I used to, so what free time I do have is often spent on more relaxing "vegetative" things, like reading, watching movies, or watching hiking videos and pop culture commentary on YouTube. I mean, I haven't even attempted to play SWTOR since... well, since pretty much I started my job back in October. I've been reading more. I'm in the middle of that Robert E. Howard horror story compilation that I mentioned a few posts ago. I've watched a number of movies. I just started this week a run on Daniel Craig James Bond movies (ignoring the most recent one, which I've decided that I'm going to pretend doesn't exist.) 

But I believe that it's important to actually have a plan and an idea of what I'm going to do next, so that's what this post is all about. I'll do this in a bullet point format.

• Chaos in Waychester only has one task left to do (other than run it), and that's make a new regional map with new details specific to the campaign. This is not an insignificant task, but it is also not trivial. I've been meaning to do it for weeks, but I have to dedicate a few hours to it, so I haven't yet.
• Cult of Undeath will start as soon as Chaos in Waychester is finished. In fact, I've already kind of started it with some early brainstorming. By the time summer rolls around, I'd like to be hip deep into this project.
• I'd like to maybe talk a bit about some of my reading, especially the genre-specific stuff, like my fantasy reading, my adventure path reading, etc. 
• Speaking of gaming, I stopped halfway through my Paizo Decontructed project on the Strange Aeons adventure path. I really would like to finish it, and then maybe pick another one to do again after that. 
• I want to start up my Friday Art Attack project again. In fact, here's a few samples just to get me back in the mood, with a theme of ratling monsters.

What is "ambient wokeness"?

I've mentioned a few times with regards to the new D&D movie that it isn't woke, but it does suffer from small levels of "ambient wokeness." My wife in particular doesn't like this term, or my focus on it, but to that I suggest that I'm not focusing on it, but I also think that it is wise to not just sweep this stuff under the rug and notice it. If the goalposts are moved subtly and stealthily, at the end of the day, they are still moved.

So, in spite of the woke comments which angered many would-be fans about the D&D movie (the "white men can't leave fast enough" controversy, and the "emasculated leading men" controversy, I would suggest that the first is not related to the movie, it just was an unfortunate bit of timing. The Hasbro corporation is certainly woke and that was a horribly bigoted woke comment, but it came from someone who is not related to the movie at all. The second one is related to the movie, and people sneered at the directors' commentary that it wasn't woke, but in retrospect... it really wasn't all that woke, but it does represent a kind of ambient wokeness, where women are perfect the way that they are and men constantly need to struggle and learn and grow.

And it wasn't just that Chris Pine's character was kind of ridiculous and incapable of accomplishing much in his own right. (Given that he was a bard, that was probably inevitable anyway). Bradley Cooper's cameo, where they thought it would be funny to have him be a little halfling guy who's totally the woman in all of his relationship, with big, burly women who are the men in the relationship was less overtly woke and more a funny joke, but they didn't make it in an environment where men are expected to be manly and therefore a man in the woman's role is funny. Mr. Mom or Mrs. Doubtfire this is not.

There is one man who isn't ridiculous in the movie, Xenk whats-his-name, the Thayan paladin. Not surprisingly, the actor who plays him is a half-white half-black man who father was English and who's mother was African.

Holga was also race and essentially sex-swapped. Nobody really believes (I hope) that a woman who's less than 5½ feet tall would literally be throwing around much larger men en masse who are wearing heavy armor. We can accept that because it's heroic fantasy and heroic fantasy characters are always larger than life anyway, but it's worth pointing out that until just a couple of decades ago, nobody expected women to act like men. Even characters like Red Sonia weren't so overtly masculine. Although, to Michelle Rodriquez's credit, and contra many other girlboss action stars of recent years, she actually did really spend some time in training, and looked pretty buff.

Even in the movie, though, when they had all the flashbacks of her "ancestors" from just a few decades earlier, every single one of them was a Nordic Viking-looking man, with blond or red hair, pale skin, and blue eyes. But for some reason, she's played by a Hispanic woman?

Elminster was played, in magical illusory form, but still, by a black man. Why was he race swapped? For that matter, why was the cast so diverse to begin with? The "PC group" was a ridiculously ineffective middle-aged white man, two half-black half-white men, only one of whom was presented as all that heroic, a little white woman who was super physical and one of the most powerful characters in the group, and a hispanic woman of... well, I guess Michelle Rodriguez is middle-aged now too. I mean, she's in her mid-40s, fer cryin' out loud. Is there no such thing as "these people live in this area" in the new Forgotten Realms? Is every single locality a cosmopolitan multi-ethnic ambient woke utopia?

Even among the villains; Hugh Grant was the kind of silly con man; the real villain was, of course, a powerful woman (who, it's alluded too briefly, has a powerful man boss, at least.)

These tropes have become so commonplace that they are now what I call "ambient wokeness." People don't really think about them, or think of them as woke, but that is exactly where they had their genesis. The D&D movie avoided any overt wokeness, but future Americans, if Americans survive as a people into the future, will look back at it and chuckle at the ambient little details that are unrealistic because they represent woke thinking, but it is, at least, all background stuff. Not enough—even to me—to crock the movie. I still enjoyed it. Would I have liked it better if Holga was Holgar and a white Viking looking man, and he and Edgin had a Bing Crosby and Bob Hope buddy comedy vibe to them? Yeah, probably. Would I have liked it if Edgin's daughter wasn't a mostly white and obviously not entirely? Yeah, probably. Would I have liked it if gratuitous African elves and halflings didn't show up for some odd reason looking exactly like African humans do, except with ears or small? Yeah, probably. And so on and so forth. But none of those was enough to make the movie unlikeable. Ultimately, Michelle Rodriguez's character worked because in spite of her absurd strength and physicality, she was also a rather ridiculous character, who was kinda dumb, did kinda dumb things, and said kinda dumb things, ultimately making her likeable in the dumb jock kind of way. And although it was weird to see a short Hispanic woman playing a dumb jock, it was still mostly funny. 

Only the little girl druid was kind of unlikeable, because she had that kind of Karen attitude to go along with her oh so perfect abilities. Kind of a shame. Under-utilized and mishandled opportunity there.

Honor Among Thieves

I finally watched Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves today. Just got back from the theater, actually. Some brief context: obviously, I'm not thrilled with much of anyone in Hollywood right now, and seeing them all fail—with the exception of the people who seem to go out of their way not to be hateful anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-American malignants. Wizards of the Coast, who presumably would profit from the success of the D&D movie are terrible people, as the OGL controversy, the white men can't leave fast enough, the half-elves are inherently racist controversy, and on the Paramount side, the emasculated leading men controversy. 

That said, I think I'm having my cake and eating it too. Our tickets were free. I don't know how it counts when we cash in free ticket rewards from the theater, but I do know that now, nearly three weeks after it's out, even if it does count our tickets as money, it's too late to do the movie or the studios much good. The story of a movie is told in the opening weekend, and to a lesser extent in its second weekend. After that, it's success or failure is pretty much determined, with the very occasional exception of a handful of sleepers that have legs. 

And maybe D&D has some legs. I haven't seen that in the discussion I've seen about the movie, but realistically, people aren't talking much about the movie. My usual pop culture complainers, like Nerdrotic, or Ryan Kinel, and that whole ecosystem of YouTubers have only briefly mentioned it, and are much more content to dump on Amazon, Netflix, Warner Brothers, and especially Disney (and for some reason G4. As near as I could tell, nobody except them really cared about G4, but they cared a lot.)

That said, the people who would profit from almost any movie are terrible people. Not many posts ago, I showed how George Lucas, Lawrence Kasdan and Stephen Spielberg, while brainstorming back in '78 on what would become the screenplay for Raiders of the Lost Ark had an unironic conversation about how it would be cool and interesting if Indiana Jones had had a sexual affair with Marian when she was twelve years old and he was in his thirties or even forties. This incredibly creepy idea was obviously discarded, and the casting of Marian made it look like she'd have been old enough to have been in college, while Indy was maybe a good ten years older, but honestly... even in the form that it shows up in the movie, where Marian punches him in the face when he first shows up, is still a bit on the creepy side. It'll be hard to watch that movie again without thinking of that now. The old pulp heroes didn't have old flames that they'd taken the virtue of, they had dames that maybe they'd socialized with and who pined for them, but they were too taken with their adventuring lifestyle to settle down with them. Very, very different, but especially so if the girl was supposed to have been literally pre-pubescent. 

Point is, yeah—almost all entertainers and people who work in entertainment industries are terrible people. If that means you won't watch their work, there's literally nothing that's ever come out of Hollywood in it's 100+ year history that you can watch guilt free. At best, you can hope to patronize people who are at least professional enough to keep their toxic ideologies and pathologies to themselves instead of try and rub our noses in it. And that said, I don't think anyone directly involved with this movie really qualifies. Even the "emasculated leading men" controversy didn't quite mean what it sounded like it meant. Although hopefully the backlash against that will scare off others who want to go that direction again. I'm really more concerned at this point about the content of the movie (or other entertainment media of any kind) than I am about the people who make them, who should know better than to open their mouths.

And in that sense, the new D&D movie is not really woke, other than a kind of low-grade ambient wokeness associated with Michelle Rodriquez being a Hispanic woman playing a member of a Nordic tribe and being stronger and more physically capable than anyone else in the movie (with the exception of Rege-Jean Page's character), and the other wildly diverse casting, which I got no sense of when reading R. A. Salvatore's books in the 90s, for instance. In fact, the two main female characters were both considerably more capable then the two main male characters. At this point, even non-woke people are into that. Larry freakin' Correia, who is not at all woke, still has ridiculous pixie-ninja hot girls who can beat up multiple men at once without breaking a sweat. Maybe Larry's never played any co-ed sports. More likely, this kind of ambient wokeness is so prevalent that most people don't even notice anymore. A sad reflection, if so.

Rather, it's fairly fun. I had heard this, or something similar previously, but after it was over, my wife (who liked it much better than she expected to) agreed with my assessment that it was Lord of the Rings meets Guardians of the Galaxy. She also agreed that it probably moved too fast. You couldn't stop and think about what was happening, which is probably a good thing to do if a lot of the details don't really make too much sense. Not that the plot was absurd—although in some ways it was, but not obnoxiously so.

I recommend it. I may see it again in theaters. I've already pre-ordered the blu-ray. It's not a brilliant movie, but it's obviously fun enough. It's at almost $160 million according to Box Office Mojo at the point that I'm writing this. With streaming and media sales, it might yet squeak into profitability. I actually hope that it does. For what it's worth, my theater was much more full than I expected. A movie that's performing mediocre financially, in its third week, on a Wednesday evening... there were at least a dozen small groups and couples in the theater.

A few new Hero Forge images

I'm always playing around with this, so here's a few more images. I might have posted a few of these before, but I don't think so.

A new take on a lich. I didn't actually love some of the liches I had, so I figured I needed more. It's too classic of a recurring villain to not have options.

I've deliberately made the servitor daemons kind of vague, so that many images could be used to represent the same stats.

I'm less inclined to use someone else's monsters these days, but here's my own take on a Deep One, partially influenced by the Creature of the Black Lagoon too.

A wendigo or other large northern monster.

Another mind wizard concept, based specifically on the Kathulos character from Skull Face by Robert E. Howard.

An alternate (and preferred) Jairan the Heresiarch, based on a drow original

Haunter of the Ring & Other Tales by Robert E. Howard

Don't buy this book. I picked it up a month or two ago, and was excited to read it, so I bumped it up somewhat in the list of "books to read" so I'd get to it faster. 

A big part of the reason that I got it was that it contained his novella "Skull Face." I'd read this before as an ebook, but I wanted a real copy of it. It was about half a dozen stories in, and the longest in this collection by far. Because I'd read it as an ebook three or four years or so ago, and because I'd discussed it in relation to my Atlantean homebrew race in my Dark Fantasy X fantasy setting, there were certain details about the story that I remembered in particular. Details that... as I finished the story, I was shocked to find were not present. 

I went and looked at the Amazon reviews and found that indeed, my memory was not faulty. This is very poorly done. If you're going to expurgate the stories, at least say so, so people like me who don't want your chopped up garbage masquerading as the original tales don't throw money after them. For whatever it's worth, I just added my 1-star review on Amazon. But I'll put it here, (where only I'll ever see it, but whatever...)

Do not buy this book. Find another collection instead. The Dell Rey horror story collection is probably better. I was specifically looking for a hard copy of Skull Face, so I'll have to look elsewhere, but not here. Blegh.

If this would come back in print, that'd be fascinating. I'd pick it up in a heartbeat. I've also read Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu, and frankly, I thought it was pretty interesting. I liked REH's fantasy take on the idea, but I had no idea that he'd written several Yellow Peril and Weird Menace.

That said... my disappointment in the book I'm reading right now is almost so great that I feel compelled to stop reading it, and go find the stories that I want to read online somewhere, given their public domain status. But I do want to have hard copies. I don't trust the ephemeral nature of online books, or even Kindle books, where an update you didn't ask for can be pushed to your book at any time. I've never even heard of most of these stories, and nobody in REH retrospectives seems to mention them.

I suspect that "Skull Face" is the best of them, which is why it's actually been reprinted a few times now, and I suspect that a lot of modern people are embarrassed the whole Yellow Peril genre. Ironically, it seems more topical now than it did when it was first popular, although the screeching harpies that make up our elite caste will double down on their hatred of anyone who mentions it, no doubt.

Skull-Face

The Noseless Horror

The Brazen Peacock

Black John’s Vengeance

Talons in the Dark

The Hand of the Black Goddess

Sons of Hate

Moon of Zambebwei

Black Hound of Death

The Devils of Dark Lake

Guests of the Hoodoo Room

Black Wind Blowing

Movies right now

Saw Super Mario Brothers with my wife last night. It was reasonably fun. I didn't love it. But I can see why it's popular, especially since there is so little new good family fare that doesn't subvert your children right in front of your eyes. But the guys who run around saying how great it is; c'mon. No, it isn't. The plot and characters are pretty cardboard, and the charm and humor is low-key, not really hot. I liked it. But I didn't love it. 

I was worried that they were going to turn Mario into a chump and make Princess Peach a girlboss. They didn't, exactly. Mario had an arc; he was a pretty normal guy who's defining feature was that he didn't give up. Peach was mostly likeable, but was a bit too in charge and action-grrl for my taste, given that the whole reason she was invented was to be a damsel in distress. Until the very end when he stepped up, Luigi was the damsel in distress, and Peach was the leader of the team to rescue him. Now, yeah... I know that over the years she's been more of an active participant in a lot of games, especially stuff like the Mario Party and Mario Kart games. And maybe it was easier to write with her being the expert on the mushroom kingdom running around telling Mario (and by extension, the audience) all of the things that he needed to learn about Super Mario World once arriving from Brooklyn.

So, if you have kids, especially Nintendo fans, absolutely take them. If you're an adult, like my wife and I, looking for some entertainment, this probably won't cut it. Last year's Bad Guys was a better surprise in that regard.

What else? We're scheduled to see the new Dungeons & Dragons movie next week on Tuesday, with free tickets. That's the way to do it. If you kinda want to see a movie, but don't really want to contribute to a company that you're not sure deserves it, wait until after opening weekend; maybe even a couple weeks after, get matinee prices or cheaper, and see it then. The opening weekend in particular is the most important weekend for a movie from a buzz and industry metric standpoint, so never see a movie on opening weekend unless you are really quite certain that you will like it and the company isn't Disney, or someone else that you don't want to support. You actually can have your cake and eat it too. I've actually heard that D&D isn't very woke, although it has a kind of low-grade ambient wokeness to it, mostly represented by the diversity in casting, making most of the men kind of silly and useless compared to the girls, and a handful of off-hand remarks in the dialogue about humans being racist against tieflings, which is supposed to be topical or something (to be fair, tieflings are literally the descendants of demons (or devils) and it's frequently noted that they tend all too often to give in to their dark nature. Being racist against tieflings would, in a D&D milieu, be simply "pattern recognition.")

I'm not expecting much, but I've actually raised my expectations for this movie, and I hope to at least by entertained. I don't expect it to be memorable, but I expect it to be better than completely mediocre would-be tentpoles like Jungle Cruise or Black Widow. Hopefully it's as good as Black Adam or Shazam in that regard. Which, I know, I know... weren't particularly successful financially, or particularly great or memorable movies either. But I enjoyed them well enough to recommend them to my kids. They were both marginally better and more charming and less of a problem than Jungle Cruise or Black Widow who's wokeness was a bit more than merely ambient.

The new Raiders of the Lost Ark trailer dropped recently. It looks really terrible. The wokesters in Hollywood may think Phoebe Waller-Bridge is really hot stuff, but to normal people she's absolute poison. Involving her in anything is a terrible idea. Also, is it a coincidence that the super-Hispanic Blue Beetle trailer made a point of having George Lopez throw out that "Batman is a fascist" line, as if it would be funny and charming within weeks of Michael Douglas' character in Antman 3 giving an apologia for socialism and a new Indy trailer that equates theft with capitalism? I doubt it. 

My regard for Indiana Jones has fallen precipitously in recent years. The first movie was one of my favorites for many, many years, and as Star Wars started to fade, I would literally tell people that it was my favorite movie of all time. I still like it, because it's a good movie, but knowing what I do about the creators has made it lose it's shine. To wit; here's the transcript from the script development brainstorming meeting—which was recorded and preserved for us to see it again more recently—from 1978 about the Indy/Marion backstory.

Lawrence Kasdan: I like it if they already had a relationship at one point. Because then you don't have to build it.

George Lucas: I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.

Kasdan: And he was forty-two.

Lucas: He hasn't seen her in twelve years. Now she's twenty-two. It's a real strange relationship.

Spielberg: She had better be older than twenty-two.

Lucas: He's thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve.

Lucas: It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time.

Spielberg: And promiscuous. She came onto him.

Lucas: Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it's an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she's sixteen or seventeen it's not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was madly in love with him and he...

Spielberg: She has pictures of him.

So, this is an early brainstorming activity, so bad ideas are fine, but creepy ideas make you wonder what the devil is wrong with these people. Spielberg was right to say that she better be older than 22, but he seemed to jump right on it after that. Lucas comes across as just a plain creep, even suggesting that Indy had an affair with an 11-year old girl, or that if he pushes it to older than 15, it's not interesting anymore. Interesting? That the hero of your movie is a pedophile? How exactly is that interesting? Neither Kasdan nor Spielberg really is all "WTF, George, no way," which doesn't speak well of them either. 

I know that there's all kinds of chatter about Hollywood Jews molesting under-age American girls. Shirley Temple's biography mentions several incidents, as does Judy Garlands'. More recently, we have people like Bella Thorne admitting that they were basically passed around as sexual party favors as kids and teenagers when they worked in Hollywood, which she attributes (rightly) to her own emotional brokenness. What's her name from iCarly left the industry because of creeps looming over her the entire time she was on that show too. Of course, in all fairness, Lucas was himself the worst part of this conversation, and he's the only one who isn't Jewish. So much for over-generalizations!

Now, I can probably still enjoy Raiders of the Lost Ark on its own merits. Frankly, if I dig too deep into anyone in the entertainment industry, especially acting, you find that they're creeps, narcissists, perverts, and self-loathing haters who project their own hatred on to people around them. Even old fashioned guys that I liked are rather notorious for being philanderers and adulterers. Bing Crosby allegedly have a well-known and long-lived affair with Grace Kelley, who was apparently a bit of a nympho herself. I've come to see the entire Hollywood enterprise as hopelessly corrupt and degenerate, and that it's always been so, even from the Silent Era. It just comes with the territory. Creatives should, if they can't control their behavior, at least control their need to talk about it and make it public

Is there anything else coming out at all that I'm interested in? I'm not sure. I'm a little over the Guardians of the Galaxy series, and I don't really like James Gunn, but that's just about the only thing I can think of in the next few months that looks even remotely entertaining  until the next Mission Impossible movie comes out in the middle summer, maybe Oppenheimer because Nolan usually is OK, and Dune Part 2 in November. Cautiously optimistic about the follow-up to Ghostbusters at the end of the year. There's literally nothing else this entire year that I really care about at all.

Being a movie-fan these days is bleak. Especially because my wife is also a big movie fan, but lives in denial about how bad movies are, and still wants to push to go out and see stuff. Hope springs eternal in her, and criticism is not in her nature unless the flaws are incredibly obnoxious and obvious. I have no doubt that I'll see plenty of movies that I don't want to see between now and the end of the year. Sigh.

Memento Mori show

Although the tour has been expanded to have more shows, including at least one that would have been easier for me to get to, my wife bought tickets for the Memento Mori Depeche Mode concert in Chicago back when there were very few shows. That's OK. Because it was Wednesday of the week of Good Friday, I took a few days of vacation and turned a three day weekend into a five day weekend, and we just spent some time in Chicago doing Chicago things. It was fun for a while, until sleeping in an admittedly pretty bad hotel bed (don't know why it was so hard, and why we ended up on a queen instead of a king... and why they didn't have any extra pillows, or... well, anyway. Big city stuff.)

We both were pretty exhausted by the end of it due to poor sleep. My wife tends to get a migraine when traveling if she's not careful anyway, and it started hitting her on Good Friday. By Saturday, she was pretty much out of luck when it came to having energy to do anything except eventually travel back home. Frankly, I was kind of tired too, but more importantly, I was over being in Chicago, being stuck to places that I could walk to or having to take an Uber, the noise, the smell, the concrete, the crowds, the racist ranting of some black power group on the sidewalk, etc. I am fundamentally not an urban guy.

Anyway, needless to say, the Depeche Mode concert was the night of our first full day in Chicago, so I wasn't tired of being there yet, or tired in any sense. It was kind of exciting still at that stage. The Depeche Mode audience is kinda funny. Although I did see some younger people there, by far the majority of the people with tickets were at least 40 years old, and the average age may well have been around 50. (I just turned 51 a couple of months ago myself, and my wife will turn 50 later this year. Our average age is right there too.) Depeche Mode themselves, now that they're down to officially two members and two live musicians, are both 61, I believe. Christian Eigner (the live drummer) and Peter Gordeno (the live keyboard player) have both been playing with Depeche Mode since the late 90s in their live show (the Ultra era, basically) and are probably about the same age too, give or take a few years. Wikipedia lists Gordeno's age as 59, and doesn't list one for Eigner. 

Anyway, I was concerned that with their age, the show would feel kind of tired and... well, old, quite honestly. Luckily, that wasn't the case. Dave isn't as athletic as he was in the 80s, or even the mid 00s when I saw the Playing the Angel tour, but he's still pretty spry and charismatic on stage. Nobody else has ever had much of a stage presence to speak of anyway. Martin is just kinda there, walking around slowly and singing and playing in the background. When he does his solos, he just stands there and sings them and counts on the merits of the song to carry him through. Fletch never did much on stage either. He played a keyboard, and clapped and did some background dancing a bit and vocals here and there, I guess. Curiously, on stage, he wasn't missed. Nobody replaced him, so either his parts (usually the baseline, I gather) were recorded and played that way, or Gardeno or someone else could play them in addition to what he was playing already. Although it might seem gauche to say it after he passed away unexpectedly last year, but it brings up the specter even more starkly that people had been asking for years; what exactly did he do for the band? It did seem like some of the background vocals were missing, but I think the mixing of Gardeno trying to sing them just wasn't good, and I couldn't hear it very well.

I read a review on Amazon for the book Stripped by Jonathan Miller, which is the definitive history of the band. I read at least part of the book myself a couple of years ago, although as we got past the Violator era, I was much less interested. If I read a blow by blow, as best it could be constructed, of why Alan left in the middle of the 90s, I don't remember any details of it, so I'm left with the stuff that I already knew. In his statement, he mentions working conditions and workload distribution, which is widely seen as a polite yet pointed way of suggesting that he was doing a lot of work, Fletch wasn't pulling his weight, and maybe they just didn't really get along all that well. The review I read, which was written in 2019, before Fletch died, suggested what I've always believed that Fletch was kind of arrogant and dismissive about Alan leaving. Possibly brought on by a kind of insecurity or "imposter syndrome" given that clearly Alan was contributing much more than Fletch was, and I can't believe that Fletch didn't know that. If anything, in the fanbase, that sentiment has reached exaggerated proportions, and Alan's contribution has become this kind of mythical legendary utopia. Depeche Mode fanboys are as likely to be Alan Wilder fanboys as anything else, and frequently suggest that the band is a shell of what it used to be since he left. 

This isn't exactly what I think, but I also think that there's something to it. If you listen to Martin Gore's demo of "Enjoy the Silence", where it's just him singing it like a dirge over a stripped down organ accompaniment, it's not really very interesting. It's the same song as the one we're more familiar with... but also not at all the same song. Martin Gore is a good song-writer, a notable songwriter of his generation, even. But sometimes that isn't sufficient in and of itself. Without Alan Wilder to interpret the songs, they may or may not amount to much. I've said earlier that other producers and partners could also do what Wilder used to do, and do a credible job, but do they have the force of personality to do so, especially when they are hired guns who are not nearly as big a name as Depeche Mode themselves are? That's debatable. Daniel Miller and Gareth Jones could do that, in part because when they worked with them, Depeche Mode were younger and less experienced. Alan could do it. The story of him and Flood convincing Martin to do "Enjoy the Silence" the way that they did is a prime example of it. I think that the role Alan Wilder, Daniel Miller and Gareth Jones played in developing Depeche Mode's sound is understated. Miller in particular was on board from the beginning and didn't step back until Music For the Masses. Gareth Jones rebuilt their sound and technological approach through the trio of Construction Time Again, Some Great Reward and Black Celebration. And Wilder, who came on board during the A Broken Frame period quickly learned and dived heavily into the production and arranging side of things, working very closely with Miller and Jones until he didn't need to anymore because he could do it himself. 

Wilder was still around for Songs of Faith and Devotion, though, where the band transformed itself, or at least picked up a lot of early 90s pop culture detritus, and the band second-guessed who they were, for at least a time. While I'm not a fan of the direction SOFAD went, it does feel that the albums after that were a bit more lifeless, even when they returned (somewhat) to a more familiar sound. But since Wilder left, most of the tracks released sound like filler tracks, honestly. The ratio of good to filler has plummeted. For most albums, Angel admittedly excepted, it's good if there are one or two memorable tracks on the album. I don't know if Gore is phoning it in on the writing, or if he really does need Wilder to interpret his songs into something better than mediocre for most of them. I could imagine both scenarios being true.

Anyway, I'm getting rambly about the history of the band, so I'll cut it short, put an old picture of the band up for visual interest and move on. Basically, I'm just establishing context that I greatly prefer earlier Depeche Mode. Violator was the last Depeche Mode album that I really liked, although I'll admit that there have been some really good top tier songs that have come out since Violator, like "Wrong" and "Precious" and I wasn't unhappy with the fact that they played a few songs from the new album, mostly the better songs like "My Cosmos Is Mine", "Wagging Tongues" and especially "Ghosts Again." Essentially, my ideal setlist wouldn't be all that different from the 101 setlist, except maybe take away "Something to Do", "The Things You Said", "Nothing", and "Pleasure Little Treasure" and replace them with "Enjoy the Silence", "Personal Jesus", "Wrong", "Precious" and "Ghosts Again." Maybe to surprise us, we could get the two Ultra tracks that were played, or if they really wanted to surprise us, I'd love to have heard "The Sun & The Rainfall" or "But Not Tonight." So, I didn't get my ideal setlist, but mostly the setlist wasn't bad.

A Broken Frame, Some Great Reward, Exciter, Delta Machine, and Spirit all had no tracks in the setlist. Honestly, though, only Some Great Reward was kind of surprising there. When I last saw Depeche Mode in 2005, they still played "Somebody", and I thought that they considered that one of their real classics and a must-play.

Playing the Angel was well-represented. Three songs is quite a bit for an album that long ago. There were only five from the new album. This suggests to me that I was right to think that it was a high point in terms of popularity with the audience. In spite of persistent anecdotal evidence that I find to the latter. There were five songs from SOFAD, because for my setlist, they changed "Waiting For the Night To Fall" to "Condemnation." That's a little unfortunate, not only because I don't love that album, but I especially don't like that song. If that's what they think is a good replacement for the classic "Somebody" I'm very disappointed in that decision and whomever made it.

The setlist had a kind of momentum to it. I don't know that my wife was really enjoying it all that much until the second half, honestly, but she's not as big a fan as me, and knows few songs post Violator. But even me, and it feels like the audience energy in general, picked up as the set went on, and certainly peaked with some of the real classics of the 80s and earliest 90s; all Violator or earlier tracks, especially "World In My Eyes" (which benefits from the emotional tug of being dedicated to Fletch and having his image on the big screen), "Enjoy the Silence", "Never Let Me Down Again," "Just Can't Get Enough" and "Personal Jesus." A bit earlier in the show, the energy around "Everything Counts", "Precious," and "Ghosts Again" was pretty high too. Smack in the middle of those tracks was "John the Revelator" which didn't really wind the audience up much, and "Condemnation" which got some cheers, but mostly felt like the audience was enduring rather than enjoying. I really quite enjoyed "Wrong" but the audience reaction was a bit muted. I don't think many people know the lyrics, and it's not really a very danceable tempo is the explanation, though.

Anyway, it was a good show. Expensive as all get-out; our mediocre seats went for something like $200 each. But let's be real. At this point, it's likely that this is the last time I will ever attempt to see them. I'm glad that I did, and I'm glad that I saw Angel some 18 years or so ago too. I don't regret going. What I regret was that I didn't go earlier when I had the chance in the late 80s or early 90s. I was probably too young for the Masses tour for my parents to have let me go in '88, but I could probably have swung the Violator tour if I'd thought that I'd wanted to, and I could certainly have swung the SOFAD tour; heck, my little brother went, and I could have gone with. But the masses tour is the one that I'd most want to have seen.

UPDATE: I've also decided where to place Memento Mori in the forced rankings. Here is the updated chart for that over here on the side too.

Dark Fantasy X Race Deep Dive: Surturs

To the north and west of the mapped out section of the Three Realms is the Empire of Kurushat. Originally founded on a volcanic island (reminiscent of real-life Iceland or Spitzbergen), it was settled by a couple of different northern peoples in small numbers who raised sheep and cattle on the green grass amid the dark volcanic rock, blasted by winds from the sea, and having little in the way of trees because of the subarctic climate, except in some sheltered valleys and gorges. Glaciers top the inactive volcanos and ice floes occasionally pass by near the harbors, but in this land of water and ice, there is also a strong element of fire because of the numerous active volcanos that are building the islands even now. It's not clear exactly how the first surturs came out of this environment. Some legends say that they, or at least their more elemental ancestors, simply walked out of the volcanos themselves, which are gates to the fiery Otherworldly realm of Muspelheim, and that the original Surtur himself, the fire jotunn, is their ancestor. Others suggest that they were normal people cursed or transformed by the malign intent of one of the ancient Heresiarchs, perhaps Esmeraude, She Who Ushers In the Apocalypse, who is known to have an affinity and fascination with fire. Whichever is the truth, the surturs arrived on the mainland, conquering and colonizing; settling and trading. They weren't genocidal, so many of the people who were already there are integrated into their northern Empire, but given the harsher boreal climate, the population was always relatively light anyway. Most of the itinerant hunter-gatherers who lived there saw their standard of living increase tremendously upon the arrival of the surturs, who had a fair bit of noblesse oblige for those who welcomed them—although tremendous belligerence to those who did not. 

Kurushat is largely a coastal empire, and the climate is similar to that of the Alaskan southern coast, or Scandinavia, but once you get inland, you have either tundra and mammoth steppe, or boreal forest (taiga) and wild mountains. Free northerners still live inland from Kurushat, and many have friendly trading relationships with the empire, although raiding, as is common in barbaric societies, is not unknown. Kurushat, at its peak a few generations ago, stretched down deep into the northern Three Realms, although the settlement of Kurushan citizens of any type, surtur or human, was always relatively light. The territory around Dagan Bay was their foothold, and some cities that still stand, such as Sinjagat, Vuukrat, or Volek Szemenok on Palar Lake were founded by Kurushans. Both the kemlings and the surturs look at Glittering Simashki and claim to be responsible for it, and both races still make up notable pluralities in the population. 

Kurushat expanded into the region as the Baal Hamazi empire was fading. The Boneyard gets its name because of the vast armies loyal to the two empires who clashed over the territory, leaving their bleached bones to linger on the sands and among the sagebrush and juniper scrubland, but in reality, few of any people ever lived in the Boneyard, which was called the Indash Desert at the time. As the Indash Sea withdrew, becoming smaller and saltier and more xeric, boats, fleets, and even entire towns were left high and dry, now abandoned and ghostly echoes of Kurushat's expansion into the region. Climate change is only part of what happened to Kurushat, however. As the Empire grew more powerful and more peaceful, its vigor slowly drained, and the concerns of faraway southern colonies surrounded by hostile nations, barbarians and harsh climate seemed much less important to the indolent jeds and jeddak of Kurushat.

Today, the sections of colonial Kurushat that still remain on the map are independent city-states, abandoned by the Empire for the most part, like post-Roman Britain. Some of the surturs and Northerner humans who came during the expansion period remain—or rather, their posterity does. Although never the majority in any of their cities, the Kurushan culture, mostly driven by the surturs themselves who were the carriers of it, are important elements in the cities named above, as well as the surrounding areas, but all of them have also become syncretized and hybridized by exposure to the peoples who were already here, or who have arrived since (such as the area near Bucknerfeld, where Hillman have come right to the edges of the salt flats that ring the Indash Salt Sea.

The surturs of Lower Kurushat, as they still sometimes call the region, are not an overly proud people, seeing the retreat of their empire and the abandonment of their settlements with a mixture of peevishness, but also opportunity to chart their own course in a new land without the oversight of tyrannical jeds and other hetmen. Most have abandoned any notion of attempting to recreate or maintain Kurushan culture, becoming rather fond of the more cosmopolitan syncretic cultures that they live in. Surturs are famously intense in their passions and quick-tempered, but also gregarious and social and more likely to be friendly by nature than most other races (naturally individual personality and situation can cause this to be quite variable.) For those with a darker tendency, this is still true, although their social gregariousness will sometimes manifest as narcissism, degeneracy, and other traits that make them extremely toxic, even if they aren't outright violent and belligerent (although the sharp tempers often make that likely too.) 

Like most demihumans in Dark Fantasy X, there is a curse associated with the surturs, which manifests just barely often enough to rise above the level of urban myth to something that is actually verified.  There is still a lingering connection of some sort between Muspelheim and the surturs.  Every once in a while, a burning flame will find its way from Muspelheim to a surtur person, who will spontaneously combust in a wild conflagration that can consume entire houses, or any nearby people.  Luckily, this is rare, but it has been known to happen, and the surturs themselves have a body of lore and old wives tales about spontaneous combustion, how to avoid it, how to cause it in your rivals, etc.

From a meta perspective, it's easy to see the surturs as a kind of northern race, with some similarities to the Vikings, some to more eastern northern peoples such as the Slavs, Finns, or other Siberian peoples, but also a prominent nod toward the red men of Barsoom, which informs many of their names and titles, as well as their fiery yet usually honorable personalities, or at least a culture which demands such, even if individuals may not be as honorable as their culture expects of them. Their supernatural origin, and their ancient clashes with the kemlings make them different than any human culture, real or imagined, however, and those who remain south of the boreal forest barrier that separates Lower Kurushat from Kurushat proper are more likely to be traders, adventurers, mercenaries, occasionally bandits, and a somewhat arrogant overcaste; confident in their superiority, yet mostly imbued with a noblesse oblige to the peoples who live in their cosmopolitan communities. Many of them still act as if the Imperial weight of Kurushat gives them authority, but the reality is that all of the Lower Kurushat area is now essentially independent city-states who must rule themselves with very little if any contact with Kurushat to the north anymore, which is why the various other peoples who live there have risen in prominence socially as the Kurushat Imperial structure retreated to the north. 

In terms of terminology, Kurushans and surturs are often used interchangeably, but technically a surtur is a member of the race, regardless of cultural or political affiliation, whereas Kurushans are members of the culture of Kurushat, regardless of race. However, in practical terms, that distinction often doesn't mean too much. Physically the surturs are as tall and robust as a hillmen (or typical white guy, for a real life reference), but are notable for their bright (sometimes unnaturally so) reddish or blond hair, brick red skin that sometimes tends towards sooty in the darkest of them, and red, orange or golden eyes. As the Dark Fantasy X rules suggest, the fire strike ability represents their connection to Muspelheim and their ability to call on the fiery elemental heritage that makes them different than humans.

Bahram Khanwar, an anti-PC villain and iconic surtur

His perverse and degenerate twin sister Javaira, also an iconic anti-PC.

Reasonably well-trained and capable swordmaidens often serve as a kind of figurehead or inspiration for bands of surtur mercenaries and warbands, when they form them. In some cases, these are little more than camp whores for the entire company, but in other cases, they are seen as extremely noble and a kind of foreign chivalric tradition of courtly loyalty and love has sprung up around them from the men in their companies.

Notice the unusual hair that is common to many surturs, and which is often believed to imitate the fire which surrounded their more elemental ancestors.

A traditional Larch Grove dancer, a pseudo-religious and cultural tradition that goes back to the ancient island home of the Kurushans.

Exploration of the wilderness is a passion of many surturs, and with the mammoth steppe and boreal forest around them, as well as many craggy and dramatic mountain ranges, there are great opportunities for exploratory teams, outfitted much as this fellow here, to find excitement. Their adventures are recounted to enthralled audiences when they return home, usually for the winter season. A kind of extreme adventurer tourism has sprung up among the wealthier surturs who don't need to work, to strike out and explore the remnants of distant Hyperborea to the east in the brief spring, summer and fall for that area. Although this is dangerous and many fail in this attempt, those who make it to Hyperborea and return with the tales of their journey almost become celebrities in Kurushat. Some of this still remains in Volek Szemenok, although it happens very infrequently there; one expedition a generation being about as good as it gets.

This free trader probably runs back and forth on the Great Northern Road between Vuukrat, Volek Szemenok, Bucknerfeld and Lomar with caravans of goods. His dress and demeanor shows a lot of drylander inspiration, and that he's probably fairly successful and prosperous. 

Not to give the impression that all surturs are happy-go-lucky and friendly swashbucklers. This guy is no doubt a criminal or bandit, who would be extremely dangerous to encounter in a quiet stretch of road or dark alley.

Sometimes the fiery passion that is the inheritance of the surturs turns to a smoldering bitterness and anger. The three mercenaries shown here are frighteningly berserk physical combatants, with a hot rage always just under the surface.

Although the noble titles of old Kurushat are largely irrelevant in Lower Kurushat today, the scions of the old jed's houses still maintain a status not at all unlike nobility in their demesnes.

The Burnt Seers are a kind of weird roving cult of soothsayers and hedge magicians that are part of Kurushan society, notable for their spiraling black tattoos and often socially and politically disruptive actions. When one, or a small company of them, roll into town, the local authorities are reluctant for superstitious reasons to outright run them out, but they keep a very close eye on them and curtail their ability to make trouble as best as they can.

Two typical traveler/adventurer style surturs

I sometimes forget to focus on intrigue as a theme. Here's a surtur spy.

Jann transformation and the D&D movie

For a long time, I've had the jann race as one of my Dark Fantasy X signature races. Like most of the demihumans, they are heavily influenced by the concept of the "planetouched" races from D&D; demihumans being in this case a situation in which humans manifest some traits related to some of the classic Outsiders. My 2002 incipient setting Bloodlines was my first exploration of this idea, where I revised the rules quite a bit, including removing most of the traditional D&D races and replacing them with the six "standard" playable outsider races: the four elemental genasi, the tiefling, and the aasimar. Although they've changed a fair bit since then, as has the setting which gives them context, you can see that of my existing non-human races, three of those go all the way back to that 2002 Bloodlines experiment. The tieflings and aasimars, which in Dark Fantasy X have evolved into the kemlings and seraphs.

The fire genasi may or may not always have been my favorite of the genasi, because I'm not sure that I really thought too much about it, but after reading The Pirates Guide to Freeport for the first time, in 2007 I was convinced. Freeport has—although I didn't know this until this time—a race of Barbary corsairs called the azhar, who are basically fire genasi. Although they were clearly a later add, and not many iconic NPCs belong to the race because the iconic PCs were already in place before they were invented, it was probably that which led me to keep the fire genasi, but none of the other genasi, who gradually evolved into the jann.

But I didn't really do much with them either. This is especially true in Dark•Heritage Mk. V, which directly became Dark Fantasy X. In previous iterations, the jann had a significant kingdom called al-Qazmir based on that jann (influenced by Freeport's Kizmir.) The jann were specifically kind of Barbary corsairs, Ottoman villains, for the most part, with an Arabian Nights like vibe to them. However, in DH5 and Dark Fantasy X, al-Qazmir disappeared and the jann were a little displaced. They still existed in the setting, but they had no proper homeland, and as the geography evolved, they went from being eastern and southern to being northern and western. Their appearance as "Oriental" probably needed to change. At best, they'd end up like pseudo-Turkified or Mongolized Slavic people; northern and exotic, but not really Middle Eastern. Their origin wasn't likely to be from the ifrit anymore or the City of Brass, since both were specifically Arabic (or possibly Persian) in origin. So where do they come from, and what are they going to be?

I'm still kicking it around, but I think that they're going to be somewhat "Icelandic"; their homeland off the map to the north and west will be a volcanic place, and that will be their supernatural origin. Rather than ifrit being the model, Muspelheim and Surtur will be the source. In fact, I'll almost certainly change the name of jann to either surtlings or surturs. And I'll probably update a few of the images that look just a little too Middle Eastern in their clothing, and re-skin the former jann to lose most of their Middle Eastern baggage. This is still a work in progress, and I've really only come around to accepting its need this last weekend, although I've been heading this direction for months.

Viking-like new imagery

Also, the D&D movie came out this last weekend. I haven't seen it yet. My wife bought tickets, but it's a couple of weeks out. I like doing this for several reasons. 1) Opening weekend is usually huge for how successful a movie is judged. I do want to see this movie, especially as the emerging consensus is that it's a pretty harmless "fantasy Guardians of the Galaxy" kind of movie, but I don't want to reward WotC or Paramount for their ridiculous behavior towards the fans, their sexist behavior towards men, or their racist behavior towards white people. Seeing the movie a little over two weeks after its opens, at matinee prices, means that I get to have my cake and eat it too. I can see the movie, in theatres, without actually contributing anything of value to the metrics that studios and box office analysts use to judge the success of a movie. 2) Plus, seeing it on a Tuesday night two weeks after it's released at matinee prices is a better experience anyway. Much lower likelihood of obnoxious fellow movie goers make the experience less. Crowds are low. Average age is up. All that jazz. I'll actually end up seeing Mario Brothers before I see D&D. That said, in spite of my lack of personal experience with the movie, I think that there's some interesting things to be said about it and its performance, and the stories that are out in its wake.

First, stories are mostly talking about how it overperformed studio estimates this weekend, at least by a modest amount. However, that's lacking context; studio expectations were lowered for various reasons from what they would have been a couple of months ago. The controversies by Wizards of the Coast (1. OGL drama, 2. no more white men drama) and Paramount (emasculated men drama) had a very material effect on the movie's performance, but the reasonably good word of mouth had a material effect too. Secondly, the virtue-signaling led many of the potential audience to assume that the movie was going to be woke, but it seems that the only wokeness really is a kind of ambient wokeness associated with the casting (one middle-aged white guy and one young white girl are merely part of an ensemble that includes a burly masculine Mexican girl, a half-black man who will pretend to be black, and a mostly white gay guy who has just enough black in him to claim that identity too.)

The result there; be careful. Studios and corporations seem to be unable to maintain any discipline about insulting their target customers these days, and then acting surprised when their target customers say, "Uh, no" to people who hate them, but want to sell to them. Shut up about controversial stuff, and by controversial I mean "Yeah, everyone in your crazy corporate bubble believes this stuff, but no normal people do at all." Controversy is in the eye of the beholder; what most journalists really mean when they say controversial are opinions that are hateful and nobody really believes them at all. But be that as it may, whomever they're trying to virtue-signal for, it is tanking their audience, and some communication discipline is called for. As much as I don't really think Jeremy Crawford is probably a good person; I'm sure he's as woke as they come, his twitter feed is—with very minor exceptions—pretty professional rather than insulting and political. Is that really so hard to do? To be professional and not say or do stupid things that will seriously turn off your audience right before the launch of your product? That used to be a pretty basic requirement of having a job.

Another interesting thing is the demographics of who saw it. According to the Hollywood Reporter article, the audience skewed young (college student aged, roughly) and male (60%). Not sure what motivated that, but there's some stuff here that is interesting. Older core D&D players seem to have avoided the movie. From what I've seen on YouTube comment sections, these are the guys who are more ticked than average about WotC and Paramount and what they've said and done. Will they be drawn in (like me) for post opening weekend viewings based on decent word of mouth? It's not clear.  In fact, WotC and Paramount both have avoided courting the core D&D market at all. Professor DungeonMaster, for instance, made a big deal out of WotC being AWOL at GenCon and other gaming conventions, and only pushing the movie at ComicCon. I'm not sure how much this matters, (Professor DM also studiously ignored the "white guys" controversy and the "emasculated men" controversy completely, so he's either being deliberately obtuse or otherwise disingenuous.) But given the fandom research that was all the rage a couple of months ago, you'd think that both Paramount and WotC would recognize that in order to snatch a broader catch, you first need to make sure that your core demographic is taken care of. The fandom study suggested strongly that your way to expand beyond the core is that the core itself provides the positive word of mouth. If you don't have the core on your side, then expanding to a more general audience is almost impossible.

So, that's another marketing fail. I saw recently a video where two industry professionals were chatting, and they suggesting that movie marketing is absolutely terrible right now, and hasn't been good since the 70s and early 80s. There's no more key imaging, or at least key imaging went pretty generic and non-informative in the 80s, starting with Flashdance and Beverly Hills Cop and a few other titles. Once that replaced the key imaging that used to precede it, the era of cookie-cutter template marketing which really serves almost no one was upon us, and now we get to the point where marketing is more like a money laundering scheme than it is anything effective.

Anyway, I wonder. It wasn't that long ago that Marvel, for example, could take B-list or C-list characters (in terms of popularity) and make A-list movies out of them, with the launch of Iron Man and Thor and Captain America. Dungeons & Dragons is a long-lived brand with plenty of IP material to draw upon. It shouldn't have been hard for them. But of course, things have changed. Marvel itself can't seem to maintain the momentum it used to have, and is a brand in trouble. Star Wars, which should have been a golden goose that required very little effort to turn in big returns is a brand in trouble, without a loyal core anymore. 

It's rather easy and shallow to say "get woke go broke" and there is at least some truth to that in the entertainment industry, if not necessarily anywhere else. But there's more going on than just that, and there's a lot of nuance involved. Failed marketing, missed opportunities to actually use recognizable IP (Prof. DM suggested that using the Dragonlance main characters like Tanis and Raistlin and Tasslehof, etc. is so obvious a move that it's bone-headed not to have done so) and yes, there was certainly some wokeness involved, even if the movie itself seems to have avoided it. (By report. Again, I haven't seen it yet.) What is going on in the movie industry? Why did movies like Shazam 2 flop so hard, and why did Antman 3 underperform if not outright flop so hard, and why did Cocaine Bear and John Wick 4 overperform, etc.?

I don't have all of the answers, or maybe even any of the answers, but there's an interesting discussion to be had there, and I think D&D is an interesting data point, because it's not a Marvel or DC movie, or part of any existing franchise at all, although it does come from a well-known brand, at least.