Reading and trip progress

I should be cleaning out my email inbox after just getting back in the office, but I've already talked to people, so I know what the priorities are, so it's just a cleanup process. Not super important or at least not super urgent. In the meantime, let me give a quick update!

I was gone for almost two weeks. I left on a Friday evening, and got back on a Tuesday very late evening almost two weeks later. Flew to Seattle, took a day and a half there, too a 7-night Alaskan cruise, and then came back to Seattle for another day and a half. Seattle was unusually nice; sunny and bright the whole time I was there, and mostly pretty clear; I had good views of the Olympic Mountains, Mt. Rainier and even Mt. Baker most of the time, up near the Canadian border. Alaska, on the other hand, was non-stop rainy, and kind of cool. When you're wet, even reasonably nice temperatures feel cold, and that's kind of what ended up happening to us most of the time. We had a lot of fun. It was my wife's first time to both Washington and Alaska, but my third (and fourth, since we came, left and then came back again) to Washington and my second to Alaska. 

Weather was terrible in Alaska; as it often is, but I enjoyed the Tongass National Forest. While I'd never want to live there, the natural surroundings and history of the area were still fascinating to me. If I ever develop the area in the northwest corner of my map; the Kindattu Mountains and the coast from Dagan Bay up to the edge of the map heading towards Kurushat, that's the terrain I'll use. Ironically, the peninsula around Dagan Bay, which would here somewhat resemble the Salish Sea, I guess, is supposed to be pretty dry; the exact opposite of the Olympic Peninsula. Maybe I can have a thin line of temperate rain forest along the coast before high cliffs that act as a rain shadow or something. Or maybe I just make it a little further north that the climate is wet. It's not like a mapped a jet stream, or anything. 

The trip wasn't as relaxing as I would have liked, but that's mostly because my idea of a relaxing vacation is sitting in the sun with mountains in the background, music playing in the background, and a good book and a bottle of Mt. Dew in hand. My wife thinks sleeping in, watching TV and taking a long time to do things like get ready for the day, eat breakfast, etc. is relaxing. It's not completely compatible, so I brought more to read than I needed, and ultimately feel less relaxed and decompressed than I'd have liked. We kind of had two incompatible goals; spend a lot more time with each other, almost intensely, and relax was the second goal. But to relax and decompress, I really need time on my own. So, one necessarily had to give way somewhat to the other goal. I did, however, read a fair bit. I guess that's just down to my personality. I can't relax and decompress very well unless I'm by myself, and I wasn't very much on this trip, so I should have known that that particular goal was going to fall short.

I finished my Horror in the Museum collection; all (or at least most) of the stories that H.P. Lovecraft revised, edited, or flat-out ghost-wrote. Surprisingly, I'd never read some of these, including really iconic ones like... "Horror in the Museum." I'm pretty sure that I've read "The Curse of Yig" before and I know I'd read "The Mound" before, but there were a few gems that I hadn't ever read. Of course, most of the "secondary revisions" in the back 25-30% of the book he spent less effort on, and for the most part, I liked them less. They came across as pretty standard, forgettable, run-of-the-mill pulp ghost stories from the 20s and 30s. Nothing special. But "The Last Test" and "Out of the Aeons" were particularly good, as was, of course, "The Horror in the Museum." "The Mound" is really more of a bunch of name-checking than it is a really good story, but it's got a lot of really good ideas.

After that, I wasn't sure what to read, but I had ended up at, literally the last minute, tossing the three Book of the Damned Pathfinder sourcebooks in my bag, and I finished Princes of Darkness and Lords of Chaos, as well finishing after getting home Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I think I threw these in because I started the 5e expansion of the old 3e book Book of Fiends by Green Ronin (which, in spite of what their founder says, is not pronounced Green Roneen. I'm sorry; ronin is already an established word in the English language with an established pronunciation. You don't get to change it.) That's an excellent book, or at least the 3e version was, and until the official books Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss and Fiendish Codex II: Tyrants of the Nine Hells came out, it was the best work in D&D on the big bad guys. 

Curiously, of course, you'll note that it has devils and demons, but not the "other guys". Because of AD&D's dumb 9-point alignment system, D&D has always made a big deal of the difference between chaotic evil and lawful evil fiends. It's fine to have two "tribes" or "camps" of evil outsiders that work using different methodology, I suppose, but not exactly classic. And the "regular evil" guys have always been an afterthought. Demons and devils were in the AD&D Monster Manual, but the "daemons" were in the Monster Manual II, and just didn't catch on the same way. The fact that they're named daemons is part of it; daemon is exactly the same word as demon and is even pronounced the same way. It would be like saying that Gandalf the Gray is a totally different guy than Gandalf the Grey. Just dumb. Although, kinda like Chris Pramas deliberately mispronounced ronin, a lot of D&D players mispronounce daemon. The oinodamon, for instance. The piscodamon. The Matt Damon. Guess what? That's not how you pronounce daemon. It's just a British spelling for the same word. Gray vs grey. Color vs colour. Traveler vs traveller. You don't pronounce them differently.

Of course, in 2e, they renamed demons and devils (eventually) as tanar'ri and baatezu respectively, and daemons as yugoloths. While demons and devils (mostly) got their names back, the daemons didn't. And in 3e they were also relegated to the Monster Manual II (I believe; maybe it was the Fiend Folio) and they remained an also ran. Some third party supplements added many AD&D daemons back into the game, as 3PP content. But it's worth pointing out that nothing with these guys ever really struck gold and stuck the same way that classic demons and devils did. Book of Fiends took a totally different tack and tried to create daemons that were separated into the Catholic seven deadly sins after some manner. Paizo decided to pattern them after the Four Horsemen, although most people do not do the Four Horsemen correctly; there is no pestilence, there is conquest. I suppose to many, conquest and war seem too similar for them to make a meaningful distinction, but that's because they try to divorce the concept from Christianity, where conquest means the tyranny of antichrist.

Both of these concepts work better, in my opinion, than the AD&D concept (Gandalf the Gray), but I don't know that they manage to rise to the level of really classic demon lords, archdevils, or even just some of the basic demons and devils, for that matter. But it's been fun to see these three very similar but also distinctly different fiendish cosmologies for official D&D 3e (Book of Vile Darkness which I read a few weeks ago), Green Ronin's stuff from Book of Fiends and Paizo's Book of the Damned. I guess if I wanted to have a really comprehensive review, I could also read the 3.5 updates in the Fiendish Codex series (I'm actually planning on doing just that) and maybe even the updated Paizo Book of the Damned book. I think that that's mostly the same as what it was before, with just a few minor changes and updates, but I don't know for sure, because I haven't ever read it.

Oh, one more thing. I also read most of an Eberron novel, Voyage of the Mourning Dawn by Rich Wulf. It's part of a trilogy, and I'll probably read all three of them in relatively short order. Like most game fiction I've read, it's not... great, but it's not bad, just kind of forgettable, albeit entertaining enough. We'll see how well I do with it the next few days. I'm pretty busy through the weekend, and my sleep schedule has been way off due to the four time zones that I crossed. Blegh. I'd really like to finish that book, and my Greek mythology one sooner rather than later, though.