Interview with Corey Reid of DINO PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND

Part 1

Today, I've corralled Corey Reid, a good online friend of mine, and the developer for the DINO PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND setting, to talk about, well, to talk about DINO PIRATES, gaming in general, and anything else that's cool, in an interview type format. So, let's get started! I have some memories of this myself, but for everyone at home, can you give us a quick story of the creation of DINO PIRATES? How the idea got started and what happened to it from that point to today?

First thing to say is I am NOT the creator of DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND. The whole idea was conceived of by a poster on ENWorld known as JPL. JPL posted a comment about the setting search that Wizards of the Coast (WotC) conducted in 2003.

Folks were chatting about their submissions, and JPL chimed in with a "Hey, I didn't submit my idea but here's what I would do:" and posted the original description of DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND:

"A fantasy Asia, filled with warring island nations. Samurai mounted on domesticated raptors. Bigger dinosaurs hunted by quasi-Polynesian tribesmen. Dueling factions of shadow warriors. Privateers and bucaneers battling the servants of the Imperial Navy. Fallen kingdoms deep in forgotten jungles."

Obviously that sparked a wild and hilarious conversation, and a number of threads were spawned to discuss the possibilities of this crazy idea. Dark Jezter started up an "official" setting discussion and lots of folks contributed great ideas. Dragon Magazine printed the setting description in an editorial. There was a lot of enthusiasm for it. I spoke with JPL and asked him if I could run with the setting and try to actually develop it, and he gave his blessing. He keeps tabs on how it's going and I think he's mostly bemused that I'm still so obsessed with this idea he had.

Anyway, there was a short-lived Yahoo! Groups group but after the nine-days-wonder event passed, it became clear I would need to make this thing happen myself if it was going to happen at all.

At that time I was experimenting with a lot of game design. I'd published my Gun-Fu game, which took a lot of liberties with the d20 mechanics and which sold pretty well. I WAS planning to build a custom d20 branch, as it were, for DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND, but then Green Ronin came out with True20 in 2006, and it was pretty much the sort of system I'd wanted to build anyway.

So at that point I felt like I'd found the seed of the game, and I ran a homebrew campaign just to flesh the world out and see what players would want to do with the concepts. After that finished up I went on to develop some one-shot adventures and ran those at various events, especially Gen Con in 2007 and 2008. Developing the system and the adventures for those events really finalised the basic structure of the game and the setting.

So then the question of distribution had to be solved. I needed to make it possible for OTHER people to run this game, but I didn't want to go to the expense of printing a book and distributing it. I have no illusions about making tons of money at this.

I'd already developed an online rules doc for d20 Modern, so it was natural to try and do that for DPoNI. That turned out to be really helpful from a game design perspective, as the True20 forums are a total hotbed of design genius. Having the rules up online where everyone can look at them has made it possible for dozens of great designers to collaborate with me on the ruleset. I certainly couldn't have pulled all the rules together without the help of those folks.

There's still a few tweaks that need to be made to the rules, but they're fully playable now. I am now selling the first DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND adventure, SLAVE QUEEN OF THE RUINED CITY, over at Your Games Now, and there will be more of that sort of thing coming down the pipe this year.

So... obviously DINO PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND features dinosaurs, pirates and ninjas. And an island or two. Digging a little deeper, what do you see as the core conceits of the setting?

JPL, the original creator, summed it up pretty well:

• Dinosaurs

• Ninjas

• Pirates

• Robots

• Monkeys

I've taken it all pretty much at face value and tried to come up with a setting where all those elements can reasonably co-exist.

For pretty broad values of "reasonable", I guess.

But here's the idea:

Imagine a tropical archipelago that ranges across the south-eastern edge of a vast Empire. These islands have been home for many centuries to assorted native nations, but over the past little while, these islands have also become home to more and more pirates. These folks band together in associations much like fraternities. They took names and inspirations for their groups from the great beasts that lurked on the islands. The DINO-PIRATES.

The Empire has always wanted control over the islands, but the natives have always resisted. So there's a lot of bad blood between the Empire and the natives, who are now supported by the pirates.

And just at the moment when the Imperial forces were gathered to strike, the eunuch sorcerers who ran the Imperial bureaucracy revolted. The only significant forces that resisted were the hundreds of ninja clans, whose loyalty to the Emperor could not be suborned.

The ninja may have been loyal, but they didn't have the power to fight -- some made brave last stands, but many fled to the islands to seek shelter. The Grand Masters of the various clans realised that their rivalry with each other had contributed to the disaster and so they agreed to create a neutral space where they could settle disputes peacefully.

Thus was created NINJA ISLAND.

It seems to me that the RPG world is going through a phase where it's re-evaluating a strong pulp aesthetic over the last few years, and publications, game lines, and even entire companies dedicated to producing a pulp-influenced gaming experience have popped up in a number of places. But, you seem to pre-date that fad. Tto what extent and how do the pulps influence you, and DINO PIRATES?

Pulp stories include elements that have become cliched -- like pirates, dinosaurs and ninja -- and expect the audience to treat them straight, without irony. And yeah, I like that.

In my review of Peking Opera Blues I talked about this, and I think the Hong Kong cinema aesthetic still comes closer than anything else to my vision of pulp story-telling. Perhaps Steven Brust, also. I just believe, fundamentally, that your stories can have dinosaurs, pirates and ninja in them and still be GOOD stories. IMPORTANT stories with honest aesthetic value.

I guess that sounds like kind of a challenge, which is part of the attraction for me.

Describe for us, if you will, your gaming background; what kinds of games have you run (or played in) in the past, what kinds of games (or what elements of the RPG experience) do you most prefer, and how have your past gaming experiences led up to what you're doing with gaming today?

I love running games. It's like being the conductor of an orchestra that's improvising its own symphony. It's social and creative and endlessly surprising. My job as a DM to create situations for my players to exercise their creativity and come up with really really cool stuff.

I'm always trying in my games to create truly involving stories, with characters who really go through honest emotional transformations and manage to do extraordinarily cool things at the same time. I'm forever tinkering with rules changes to see if THIS will bring about the kind of feel I'm looking for.

DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND is kind of the culmination of what I've learned about running wildly cool games -- there's a lot of rules in there that in my experience serve to help players come up with cool stuff.

Cryolophosaurus

I just stumbled on this pic, and I like it. Pretty sweet, huh? Early Jurassic Antarctica, with the bizarre dilophosaurid predator with the Flock of Seagulls crest on it's head, Cryolophosaurus ellioti. Just because.

Actually, I say he's a dilophosaurid, but that's a bit of a contentious statement. He was originally described as a very early carnosaur, and its position in the therapod family tree is still a bit unclear.

Geologic time...

I may have mentioned this before, but as I was expanding my geologic ages list, I was struck by it. Again, I think.

Although to the mainstream mind, dinosaurs are synonomous with "really old", I actually think of them as a kind of modern type animal, really. To me, the "really old" faunal assemblages predated the dinosaurs. The first dinosaurs came on the scene at roughly the same time as the first mammals, and I'm firmly in the camp that believes that they had similar physiological advances and were "on the same page", so to speak, as being the two most exciting and happenin' groups of tetrapods on the planet. The dinosaurs took a good 28 million years from their first appearance to their complete domination of the megafaunal assemblages, but once they got there, they didn't let go for another 132 million years. That's a total lifetime of over 160 million years (because I rounded down the fractional million years), and if you count the birds as dinosaurs, as most dinosaur paleontologists are wont to do these days, then they've got 226 million years of seniority, and were running the show for much of that.

So I was a little bit surprised when I put together my timeline, starting in the Devonian when the first tetrapods climbed out of the water and explored, tentatively, the terrestrial world for the first time, and discovered that the pre-dinosaurian "ancient times" passed much more quickly than I thought. Vascular, terrestrial plants barely squeeked in at the end of the Silurian, and didn't really become common or important until during the Devonian. Within 10-15 million years of these first forests, Acanthostega and Ichthyostega, the earliest known tetrapods, are found, a mere 360-370 million years ago. I say mere, because the first dinosaurs and first mammals appeared in the Late Triassic about 228 million years or so ago (well, that's when the earliest ones have been found. They already show some signs of diversity, indicating that they're probably a few million years older, actually). It only took 132-143 million years to get from "the first ever vertebrates made their tentative steps onto land" to "essentially modern faunas dominate the terrestrial ecosystems." And then the dinosaurs stepped in and dominated terrestrial ecosystems for longer than it took to get from "barely more than a fish" to "a dinosaur" in the first place.

For some reason, that realization is both somewhat awe-inspiring and humbling. The staggering age of the world, and the staggering amount of investment in its creation, to get to the point where we could come on the scene, is humbling.

Lamoragate

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch is a highly hyped and critically praised fantasy novel, which I own but haven't yet read more than about 100 pages of (got distracted; I'll start over when I get back to it in my queue) but it recently came to my attention that it's undergone a bit of a controversy, known to some (or at least to one guy) as Lamoragate.

Yeah, see, apparently it got one negative review, and in the course of writing the review, the reviewer made an obviously hyperbolic statement about bribes changing hands to get mediocre books a ton of hype.

And, in an episode that says more about the entitlement felt by a ridiculous people on the internet, all kinds of people were extremely offended by that. Huh? Did anyone seriously think that was serious? I'm struggling to imagine how anyone's capable of percieving that as inappropriate, and coming up blank.

Tastes differ. A reviewer's job is two-fold; one is to describe what's being reviewed so you can make a determination on whether or not you think you'll enjoy it, but the other is to entertain the readers. A bit of exaggeration for comic effect isn't something that anyone should be offended by. The author doesn't particularly seem to be offended (although after going to great pains to say that he's not offended, he does call it rude), the editor who approved the review didn't think twice about it... and yet, all kinds of Joe Blow people (presumably uber-fans of the book itself) were ready to tar and feather this poor reviewer just because she said she didn't like the book, and in fact, found all the hype about it be quite mysterious in origin.

In case you're wondering, yeah---I have little patience for the overly sensitive, and those who feel entitled to some kind of treatment.

New tyrannosaur described

I can't find a good image online (yet) but a new tyrannosaur, Xiongguanlong baimoensis has just recently been described, coming from the Albian/Aptian time frame (border between Early and Late Cretaceous---or, although there's no technical epoch named this for some reason, it's right in the middle of the Cretaceous at roughly 100-125 million years ago) from China.

According to most commonly accepted cladograms today (I think the Thomas Holtz 2004 cladogram of the tyrranosaurs seems to be the one I see touted most frequently) the tyrannosaurids proper are nested within the tyrannosauroids. Xiongguanlong would be a very late tyrannosauroid leading up to becoming a tyrannosaurid; it's growing in size and scope to be less like the small and gracile early forms and becoming more of a large apex killer. It's been compared to both Alioramus and Appalachiosaurus, the former being a late appearing atypical form that's poorly known (from only a single, incomplete and possibly juvenile specimen) and the latter being an early, long-snouted form that's seen as leading up to the rest of the Late Cretaceous tyrannosaur clan, prior to the tyrannosaurine and albertosaurine split.

I don't know yet that this is an exciting find as far as dinosaur specimens go, or one that changes our understanding of anything, like little Tianyulong that I talked about a few weeks ago, but hey, it's a tyrannosaur, and everyone loves a tyrannosaur, right?

I'm actually a bit atypical there. I mean, I like tyrannosaurs well enough, and what red-blooded dinosaur guy doesn't, but my real love amongst the dinosauria belongs to the carnosaurs. There's something about the big guys, following after and chasing down what seems like it should be impossible prey in the form of the sauropods, that really appeals to me. It's the most classic and iconic dinosaur image I can think of (actually, that'd probably be some sauropod rushing off into the water with a carnosaur standing there impotently bellowing its rage at them from the shore---nobody believes that scenario anymore, though) and therefore a staple of why I love dinosaurs so much in the first place.

It used to be that any big, meat-eating dinosaur was called a carnosaur, but it was probably obvious (even to anyone working at the time) that that couldn't possibly be a natural group. When someone says carnosaur today, they really mean Allosaurus and his cousins, the biggest and most advanced of which are the carcharodontosaurs coming out of South America and West African quarries from the middle of the Cretaceous like Carcharodontosaurus, Giganotosaurus, Mapusaurus and Tyrannotitan. North American Acrocanthosaurus may or may not have been a carcharodontosaur (it may also have been a derived allosaur), and is probably also responsible for the famous Paluxy trackway, where it supposedly attacked a sauropod (probably a Pleurocoelus or possibly a Sauroposeidon.)

Coming soon...

I was talking to Corey just a bit recently, and I think we're going to do something related to DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND as a shared-blog project of some kind. I had proposed a simple interview where he talks about the genesis and evolution of the setting for me to post here, but he immediately had slightly grander plans, which sounds really exciting. Not sure what we'll do yet, but it'll be fun. The two of us long ago realized that our tastes in settings (among other things) were remarkably similar, so we're clearly going to produce a few blog posts of unrivaled coolness. Or... at least, a few posts that we think are entertaining.

Stay tuned for further developments.

Most dangerous US cities

According to a new report by Forbes, the Detroit metro area is the most dangerous city in which to live, with a staggering 1,220 violent crimes per year per 100,000 residents, meaning that over 1.2% of residents are the victim of a violent crime on average. Detroit barely squeeked ahead of Memphis, which takes the number two spot at 1,218. Miami takes a slightly more distant third with 998.

Why do I bring this up? Because I live in Metro Detroit, of course! Also because I have immediate family in the Memphis area (brother) and the Miami area (sister-in-law) so to you I say: better luck next time, chumps! We won!

Errr... maybe that's not something we want to win after all.

Formatting

Despite multiple edit attempts, I can't seem to get that previous post to format correctly at the line breaks. Sorry if that comes across as an impenetrable, giant block of text; I actually didn't type if that way.

Warrior of Llarn

This weekend I finished Warrior of Llarn by Gardner F. Fox. It's part of the second wave of planetary romance, written in the 60s (1964 is the print date, if I remember correctly) and as such, has a very definite "Barsoom" flavor to it, including being an ancient, reddish desert world. It's also got a bit of Cold War ethos thrown in for fun---Llarn is a world devastated by a past nuclear holocaust, for instance, which led to some weird mutations amongst some of the inhabitants.

My takeaway from Warrior of Llarn is that, as far as this kind of novel goes, it's not that bad. It hits all the right notes, the plot is pretty good, and some of the characters are even engaging, in particular Tuarra, the princess who plays the role of Dejah Thoris for this book. Rather than being a beautiful cypher, as often happens, she's actually kinda charming. The protagonist, Alan Morgan, on the other hand, comes across as a somewhat bone-headed bad stereotype of a jock who happens to be really lucky.

All in all, not as bad as a few I've read (notably the Mike Resnick's Ganymede series and Michael Moorcock's Mars trilogy; those take the cake as the worst I've read so far) and in fact rather on the good side for the genre, at least on par with some of the lesser Burroughs or Lin Carter's Calliso books. Of course, if you've read my reviews much, you'll notice that that isn't exactly glowing praise. You have to accept a certain degree of poor quality if you read derivative science fiction written in the 1960s, I'm afraid, but this particular subgenre seems to be particularly bad in that regard. Science Fiction of the past often relied on the ideas and "sense of wonder" to sell writers who had a poor understanding of the craft I think, but derivative planetary romance didn't even have that, because they were basically retellings of A Princess of Mars over and over again in very slightly different settings, and with princesses that had different color skin than merely red (the princess here has golden colored skin, for instance.) Still; I continue to suffer for the sake of understanding this particular little subgenre from an academic standpoint, so I press on and continue to read them. Warrior of Llarn wasn't even unpleasant, just merely unremarkable.

The cover art, posted here, is actually a Frank Frazetta piece, although it is certainly one of his lesser works (also, Alan Morgan has blond hair. Whoops. Who's that guy? He doesn't look like anyone in the book, although that horned zebra horse thingy is pretty much as described.) There's also an ink line drawing as a fronts-piece by Frazetta that is slightly better.

There's also a follow-up novel, Thief of Llarn, which I also have and was going to read next. I admit, though, I've been distracted and won't get to it for a couple of weeks minimum now. I went to the library to pick up some stuff that was waiting for me, including the middle discs of season 3 of Supernatural and an interlibrary loan book called Dawn of the Dinosaurs about the Triassic. I actually thought that was going to be a small, children's book (I was getting it for the Doug Henderson illustrations) and instead it turns out to be a very meaty book that's arguably not even targetted towards laymen at all. I'll be busy with it for a long time. It looks good. I also browsed the sci-fi section (something I do very infrequently) and my eye caught the tail end of a Wayne Reynolds cover. I grabbed it, realized that it was part 1 of 4 in an Eberron novel series, and lo and behold: all four of them were there. Now, I have all four of them with me. This five book diversion will put off my Thief of Llarn reading for a while. In fact, I was going to wait and review the Llarn books together, but I decided I didn't want to wait that long while my reading of Warrior was still fresh.

I don't have high hopes for these Eberron books; I've rarely read game-trademarked fiction that was very good, for one thing. Also, I think calling them a series is a bit of a stretch; they all four have different authors, different characters, and are only very, very loosely tied together (if at all.) In any case, I obviously don't mind reading the occasional mental junk food (although my tolerance for it has faded somewhat as I've aged) so I'll blast through these (I hope) like a bad Costco cake with shortening frosting, post some reviews, and then get back to my previously scheduled reading plan.

In some ways, I'm looking forward to reading more of the Triassic book than I am the D&D fiction, though. I've already read a few chapters of that this weekend and am finding it really well done. I may need to update my dinosaur ages spreadsheet with more formations as I'm getting info on the Triassic out of this book.

Depeche Mode

I remember once, almost ten years ago now, asking a group of synthpop fans why there weren't more female vocalists in the genre. After all, classic outfits like Book of Love (with vocalist Susam Ottaviano) did some great work back in the 80s and early 90s. Surely there's room for more here, and yet nearly nine times out of ten, a new synthpop group has a male vocalist.

One guy answered, flippantly, that it's because women don't sound enough like David Gahan. The more I think about this, though, the more I think that flippant or not, he's absolutely right. The long, long shadow that Depeche Mode casts over synthpop as a whole is hard to ignore. Some of the most successful groups of the late 80s, early 90s and even this decade are unabashedly Depeche Mode imitators, even: Red Flag, Cause and Effect, Camouflage, De/Vision and Mesh.

My own musical taste, personally, has also been indelibly stamped by my love affair with Depeche Mode's music as well. Unlike mainstream music listeners, I actually am a pre-Violator Depeche Mode fan, and while Violator, with the hits "Personal Jesus" and "Enjoy the Silence" is the biggest Depeche Mode ever got, I struggled with the CD for a long time, and still don't like it as much as Some Great Reward, Black Celebration or Music For the Masses---my own interpretation of Depeche Mode's greatest era. I've made my peace with post 80s Depeche Mode, and "Enjoy the Silence" is perhaps the most iconic DM song ever written to me (and I love the B-sides from the Violator era: "Sea of Sin" and "Dangerous" are as good as anything that actually appeared on the album, as far as I'm concerned) and was even quite impressed with their offering from a couple of years ago, Playing the Angel, which was a deliberate return to a pre-Exciter sound. Julie took me to go see the Angel concert tour, which was a long-time desire of mine. I'd seen a lot of guys in concert before, but somehow had always missed Depeche Mode, and since Depeche Mode were quite probably my favorite band ever, that was always kinda weird. Great show, by the way. We saw it in The Palace, so I remember we were joking about throwing drinks and chairs at Martin Gore since the concert wasn't too long after the big Detroit/Cleveland basketball game that had the infamous fight with the fans.

Anyway, I'm starting to ramble. The reason I bring up Depeche Mode now is that they just released a new album, Sounds of the Universe last week. Although I haven't had a chance to pick it up yet, I'm going to this week (I hope; busy schedule), load it up on my mp3 player and give it many, many listens as I drive to and from work as well as as I putter around the house. I will, no doubt, post a track by track review after I've had time to do so, here on the blog.

Planetary Romance

Planetary Romance (also called Sword & Planet) is a subgenre of fantasy or science fiction in which an earthman will go to another planet, find the culture there savage and "romantic" in an action adventure kind of way, win the love of a beautiful alien princess, fight crazy monsters and dastardly melodramatic villains, and otherwise have a grand old time. For some reason, he's always the best swordsman around, and may have other advantages due to his earthling nature, too. The genre is mostly full of extremely formulaic and poorly written little mini-novels, but I'm a huge fan of planetary romance nonetheless. I'm not a huge fan of most of the actual books in it, but something about the genre itself speaks to me. I'm currently reading (in fact, I'm almost done, because it's a very short book. I blasted through about 100 pages last night and earlier today, and I've only got about 50 pages left) F. Gardner Fox's Warrior of Llarn which is a pretty standard example of one, coming out of the Second Wave of the genre. Here's how I divide the stuff up historically and thematically:

First Wave: Invention and Golden Age: The genre starts officially in 1911 with the serialization of "Under the Moons of Mars", later novelized as A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Burroughs himself was the most prolific writer of planetary romance, with a dozen Mars books, half a dozen Venus books, a series set on the Moon, and a final series that he died before he could get much work done with (Beyond the Farthest Star). Ralph Milne Farley and Otis Adelbert Kline are amongst the others who are part of this first wave, but even Robert E. Howard joined in (with Almuric) and it crosses over into other media with Flash Gordon. By the end of the first wave, it was merging with space opera, and heroes like Leigh Brackett's Eric John Starke straddle the line between the two similar genres. After the failure of the original pulp mags in the 40s, the genre quietly disappeared for several years.

Second Wave: Imitation and Reprint: In the early 60s, Burroughs, Kline, and others were rediscovered and put back into print, along with a lot of other pulp writers (sword & sorcery took off again big-time at this point as well.) A number of imitators popped up, including (but not limited to) Lin Carter (Callisto and Green Star series), L. Sprague de Camp (Planet Krishna series), Mike Resnick (Ganymede series), the aforementioned F. Gardner Fox (Llarn series), Michael Moorcock (The Kane of Old Mars series) and more. Leigh Brackett also trotted Eric John Starke back out (her older stories, revised and lengthened were put back into print) and wrote the best stories he appeared in; the Skaith trilogy. Other than her input, though, this wave was predominantly characterized more by open imitation and repetition of formula rather than by any innovations so much; many of the authors in fact openly acknowledged the fact that they were pure fantasies completely inconsistent with actual conditions on the planets on which they take place (Calliso and Ganymede, for instance, rather overtly do this.) Many of these writers failed to understand what made the original wave so fun in the first place (the wonder and imagination of it) and so along with formulaically repeating the flaws of writers like Burroughs, they also only weakly reflected his strengths. Few of these books are truly good, but they're interesting to read for a bit of historical perspective, I guess. This wave died out with the introduction of two very, very long-lived series that kept on meandering into print long after the subgenre itself had faded again; namely John Norman's Gor books (which later became more infamous for his "problematic" take on women, but which started out innocently enough as simple Barsoom knock-offs) and Alan Burt Akers' Dray Prescott series (also known as the Scorpio series, or the Kregen series.)

I don't know if there's enough going on today to posit a third wave, but I'm impressed by books like S. M Stirling's Sky People and In The Court of the Crimson Kings which, while not in an of themselves great books, are at least modern novels with more sophisticated storytelling techniques, that openly and overtly are done in homage to the planetary romance of the past. Rather; I think I should say that I'm impressed by the fact that they exist rather than by the books themselves, which are somewhat mediocre.  I would bet that there are some indie Amazon published planetary romance novels of which I have no knowledge; that's probably where the real future lies, if there is a future for the genre.  I think the subgenre could stand this kind of revival; one in which good authors write with interesting characters, less melodramatic plots and a little more attention to verisimilitude.

Predatory Dinosaurs of the World

By Greg Paul, 1988. I got a copy of this (via Interlibrary Loan) recently because I had fond memories of reading it in the early and mid-90s and being blown away by the descriptions of dinosaurs that it offered, to say nothing of Greg Paul's revolutionary dinosaur art. Sadly, only in B&W in this book.

I'm glad that I didn't end up buying it, though, as I almost did. Sadly, the book has not aged well and I was unhappy with the experience of reliving it. Many of the reasons that is true were not unexpected for me, but it was still a minor sad experience nonetheless.

The main reason for it, of course, is everything that has happened to dinosaur science since Paul wrote this. It's so obsolete that it's almost painful at times, especially in the catalog of dinosaurs half of the book, which is the real meat of the book anyway. The book predates the cladistic revolution that overtook dinosaurology in the 90s, and made Paul's classification scheme almost laughably out of date (which isn't really fair, because when he proposed it, it wasn't a bad scheme at all.) It predates a lot of the really big, important and significant discoveries of the 90s and 00s, including the entire line of carcharodontosaurs, abelisaurs, and therizinosaurs, it predates the spectacular feathered Yixian finds, the early tyrannosaurs, and more. He's a notorious lumper (at least in this book) eliminating genera right and left, sometimes quite strangely (he dumped Yangchuanosaurus, a derived carnosaur, into Metriacanthosaurus, a basal tetanurine, for instance.)

Although the 90s weren't exactly my "youth" it was near the begining of my adult, revolutionized dinosaur love, following in the wake of Bakker's Dinosaur Heresies and Crichton's (and Spielberg's, for that matter) Jurassic Park. Dinosaurs were sexy and new in a way that they hadn't been even when I was a kid, and although I never really fell out of love with them, it was so much easier to love them at the time Predatory Dinosaurs of the World came out and slapped me upside the head. Sadly, it now feels like a youthful, childish crush compared to what I know since I first read it. I turned the book back in, only partially re-read (I did flip through it and look at all the pictures again, at least) and probably won't bother with it again.

Scent of Shadows

Well, I wasn't very fair when I said that Scent of Shadows starts off feeling like Twilight. Not exactly unfair either, but it didn't continue. I mean, sure, there was plenty of feminine emotional self-discovery, complete with lots of tears and whatnot, but all in all this is not another Twilight. Instead, it's an unusual take on the superhero genre. Or maybe a blending of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and superheroes, more like. The setting intrigued me. It wasn't something too unusual or innovative, but just enough to be interesting. The characters were a bit overdone, but not too much. A little melodrama never hurt anyone. The plot of the book was rather transparently lifted from the first Matrix movie.

Despite these complaints and/or very hedged and guarded praises, it should be noted that I picked it up yesterday evening while Spencer was at Scouts (about 7:00 PM) and I kept reading nearly straight through until 3:15 AM and the book was finished. Which, in spite of any other problems, is pretty high praise at the end of the day. I've gotten pickier about books I read over the years; if a book can make me do that, and then turn around and have me wondering if I can swing by Borders or Barnes & Noble the next day to pick up the sequel... well, that's a very good thing.

A lot of potential here. It'll never be great literature, but I had fun with it.

The Black Arrow

I just finished Robert Louis Stephenson's The Black Arrow today, during my lunch break. Fun stuff. One of the early historical romance adventure novels, Arrow reminds me strongly of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, which I haven't read in a good twenty years.

I don't know that I'd need to read Arrow frequently, but it's fun to have read once. Stephenson spent a lot of energy on recreating the language and dialogue of his era which was simultaneously kinda fun to read and kind frustrating and dense. As an early example of swashbuckling action, it's not very evolved. Later writers wrote much more gripping action sequences that Stephenson manages. And the characters are charming although often frustrating due to the spontaneous odd choices. Probably meant to be an example of the mindset of the times, it's still difficult to wrap my head around sometimes. The characters were a bit wooden, however, and could have used some more filling out to really jump off the page and come to life. Everything was a little too romantic adventure, and then near the end when Dick Shelton was supposed to be confronted with the hard reality of his reckless decisions, it seems too forced. And, of course, his reaction to that feeling is even more reckless and foolhardy proclamations. For which a few characters quite rightly start calling him a soft-hearted and soft-headed fool.

As an aside, the old Disney live-action Black Arrow, with Oliver Reed as Sir Daniel Brackley (the main villain of the piece) and Donald Pleasance as his main (treacherous) advisor is a fun movie, but bears relatively scant resemblance to the plot of the book. Next up is Vicki Petterssen's (sic?) Scent of Shadows, of which I've read a chapter or two already. I'm not sure it's going to live up to my hopes of being a demonic-themed Buffy meets Harry Dresden, because there was a somewhat... Twilightish vibe in those early chapters, if that makes sense. A kind of feminine wallowing in emotional helplessness that I find unattractive in novel characters and which I only find in certain works that are very specifically targetted towards a female audience. It's only one book; I don't have to continue the series if I don't like it, and I shouldn't judge the entire thing based on the first thirty or so pages, but we'll see. I'll dutifully report my findings here when I'm done, of course.

After that, I might want something lighter and breezier, so I'm thinking of picking up some of my old Sword & Planet quickie novels, like the Leigh Brackett Skaith books or the F. Gardner Fox Llarn books. And then I'll jump into dense, long, fantasy novels again: The Lies of Locke Lamora and Deadhouse Gates. Not necessarily in that order.

"Evil" campaigns

I hear all kinds of stuff about folks who run "evil" campaigns (of Dungeons & Dragons) and really struggle with why their game falls apart. I think the secret is that they're trying to run Evil with a capial "E" when they really need to lower-case it. If all of your characters aspire to be Sauron or Emperor Palpatine, well, yeah, it's going to be difficult.

That said, I've never had a problem with characters who were unwilling to actually play the game just because they wrote "evil" somewhere on their character sheet. In fact, it is my intention to completely minimize if not excise alignment from the game. I never have an alignment requirement, and I rarely even care if the PCs pick an alignment or not. As a result, I've had no shortage of really shady characters over the years.

Some notable evilness from past (and current) campaigns: Fulcrum, the evil gnome sorcerer. At one point, in the city of Greyhawk, when a doppleganger attempted to frame us, he just let loose with a fireball on a crowd of peasants in a tavern. Burned most of them to a crisp. We chased the doppleganger into the street and killed him, then Fulcrum framed him for casting the fireball. Since nobody was really alive to contradict him, and all the goody-goody characters weren't witnesses exactly, he got away with it. Although to mollify the cleric of Heironeous, he did raise some money for the widows and orphans. Although he gambled to win it, and ended up losing it all before he actually gave it to them. Nice PR, Fulcrum.

Eladkot was another gnarly little sorcerer. Human. After fighting off a glimmer imp, a peculiar fey that steals the eyes of innocent victims, Eladkot realized that if the eyes were popped back into the victim's head and a simple remove blindness spell cast on them, they'd not only get their vision back, but have some added benefits as well for the trouble of having your eyes in a fey's sockets for a while. He "heroically" volunteered to take the young victim to a cleric to have her eyes returned to her. Needless to say, the brown-eyed Eladkot came back the next morning with green eyes. He defends his actions as saying that he let the poor girl keep his eyes, so she really doesn't have anything to complain about.

That was merely the preview of his evil, though. When they were in the demon-god worshipping pirate town of Blackport, they were recommended to a diviner to get some more information. When they found out that the diviner used anthropomancy (i.e., reading the future in the entrails of sacrificial victims. Human sacrificial victims. Well, humanoid. This is D&D after all.) most of the rest of the party said they wouldn't have anything to do with it. Eladkot, however, snuck out at night, bought the cheapest slave he could find and visited the diviner while the rest of them slept. The diviner---a possessed little girl---gave him his readings with her hands thrust into the guts of a dying old halfling.

When the rest of the players found out what had happened early the next session... wow, that was one of my favorite DM moments ever. At this point, half of them were convinced that they should head back to the diviner with more questions. And when they were attacked by a press-gang, that is actually what they ended up doing. The peculiar morality of some of the rest of them revolted against slavery, but didn't have any problems with killing honest-to-goodness prisoners.

Corey and Brian, the players of Ricardo and Lash respectively, have commented on the evil with a little "e" vibe in my "Demons in the Mist" game. Which is fun, because they're probably the more overtly evil characters, if you were to try and put a label on it. Ricardo is charming and attractive... until you get to know him a bit. Corey's really nailed it on the head when he made his rake an angry and selfish individual that cares little for his conquests, and quite probably is the way he is as a coping mechanism for being psychotically damaged in some way. Lash has glimmerings of caring about people around him... from time to time... but mostly is content with pursuing, by hook or crook, his own dreams of wealth and leisure regardless of the cost to anyone else. This has been the source of a great deal of comedy, as the two of them "compliment" each other in a lot of ways, by which I mean that their combined weaknesses and tragic flaws ensure that they are pretty much in a state of constant trouble. And, currently, they have the tools to prevent (or cause) the End of the World™ in their hands, but they're not sure they care to do anything about it, because they don't see what's in it for them, and they have just enough hubris to think that they don't need to because it'll never impact them personally.

Pathfinder

One of the interesting things (although not entirely unexpected) to happen in the wake of the release of Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition was that Third Edition didn't actually die. Yeah, the fact that all of the rules were released as Open Content with a license that doesn't expire and can't be revoked means that people who weren't all that interested in the new rules can continue playing the old rules, and most importantly (because they always could do that in the past too) they can continue to have support from third party publishers who create compatible material for their 3.5 games!

One of the prime purveyors of 3.5 material has been Paizo Publishing, the former publishers of Dragon and Dungeon magazines. Their bread and butter has been the Adventure Path modules; six fairly long, interlinked modules that are designed to take a character from 1st to about 15th or so level in a grand story arc. The adventures also come with a lot of other material; setting material, several new monsters, etc. and are a pretty good buy for the money, in my opinion. And I say this even as a guy who rarely (if ever) uses adventures "right out of the box." I've still found plenty of material raid-worthy. Not only that, the setting that's gradually been revealed is very interesting to me. It's got just the right about of references to old pulp and swashbuckling adventure stories, plus just enough new and exciting innovations; just enough tried and true D&Disms and just enough new directions and vistas.

Granted, I'm still going to raid it for inclusion into my own work (mostly) rather than attempt to run anything in the setting as written, but I've got to say that the Pathfinder setting has really won me over. In fact, I think I reviewed it here several months ago and said as much there.

So, in an example of fanboyism, I'm going to list the currently available and upcoming products from the Pathfinder Chronicles and Pathfinder Companion lines that I'm interesting in buying but have not yet done so. I do have a fair amount of the currently available products from both lines already, and I'm not listing those. These are all setting books of moderate length. Actually, the Companion books are fairly small.

Chronicles books:
Into the Darklands
Dark Markets - A Guide to Katapesh
The Great Beyond - A Guide to the Multiverse
Princes of Darkness - Book of the Damned Vol. 1
Cities of Golarion
Guide to the River Kingdoms
Companion books:
Taldor - Echoes of Glory
Qadira, Gateway to the East
Cheliax, Empire of Devils

Pbp gaming challenges

Some things that are easy to do face to face are difficult to do in a play-by-post environment. One thing I've been struggling with is administering combat. In D&D, combat takes place in rounds, and everyone essentially takes turns doing something. There's only so much you can reasonable do in a round (which, technically, is supposed to encompass six seconds). In face to face gaming, it's easy to keep that straight. You roll up Initiative (i.e., turn order), mark it down somewhere and then let everyone do their stuff in order until the next round starts.

In a Pbp, that's more challenging. In theory, you do the same thing, but if you have to call out, "OK, John, now it's your turn," then your combats drag interminably. So, to keep things moving, it's better to have everyone call out their actions at once and then sort them out. Of course, this can, in turn, lead to a confusing situation where it's difficult to keep track of when stuff is happening, have players put forth actions for the current turn, etc.

So, it's a tradeoff. You get very slow, but organized play, or you get very chaotic play that is at least moving forward. In face to face gaming, it's not really an issue, because you get the advantages of both with the disadvantages of neither.

Le sigh. If you couldn't tell, I'm in the midst of a combat right now, and I got a little lazy about keeping it organized. Now we're all confused, though.

Feathered dinos

My friend Stuart made the very nice point that time travelers being chased by a T. rex that looks like Big Bird is kinda lacking in... well, in something. So the popular representation of dinosaurs as feathery probably won't stick, no matter how scientifically accurate it may become.

After I laughed, I thought about that seriously, though... like I said, the big dinosaurs probably were rarely (if ever) feathered as adults. Also, if they did have feathers, it'd more likely be downy fluff, not contour feathers like birds today have. And I disagree that it's necessarily a problem. One of the few scenes from the movie 10,000 B.C. that really worked well was when they were all fleeing and hiding from the terror birds. And anyway, a down-covered T. rex would look kinda wooly and freaky cool, in my opinion.

That said, yeah. Dromeosaurs were almost certainly all feathered (examples of many, many species with feathers have turned up over the last few years) and that annoying kid at the beginning of Jurassic Park himself said it: being chased by a giant turkey isn't very scary.

Feathered heterodontosaur

I'm not always 100% up on my dino-news as it happens, but as I was browsing one of my favorite amateur dino-websites (Thescelosaurus!), I came across a mention of Tianyulong.

So... feathered dinosaurs have been coming out of China for a while now, due in part to the preservational bias and the extremely fine ash-based rock. However, to date they had always been from only one (albeit a very diverse and successful) branch of the therapod group, which is part of the saurischian root amongst dinosaurs. I've said for a while now that all we need to do to strongly suggest (or heck, even prove) that feathers and warm-bloodedness were a pre-dinosaurian (to say nothing of pre-avian) feature would be a feathered dinosaur on the ornithischian side of the fence. That would make it a dinosaur as far away as possible on the dino family tree from the therapods previously discovered with feathers, and one that hadn't shared a common ancestor with therapods since prior to the saurischian/ornithischian split. Which would mean, essentially, the first dinosaur ever, or there-abouts.

The reason this works out that way is because feathers are seen as a synapomorphy, that is, a complex evolutionary development that two species (or groups of species) have that is unlikely to have been convergently evolved more than once, and one that therefore must have been inherited from a common ancestor between the two.

I've long suspected that some kind of ornithischian dinosaur with feathers would turn up. My money was on a "hypsilophodontid", but Tianyulong is even better because it's a heterodontosaur; an even more primitive creature, and one, therefore, that is even more likely to pound away at opposition to the idea of feathered dinosaurs across the board. Suggestive facts that led up to this discovery (and made me believe it was eventually inevitable) were 1) the frill-tailed Psittacosaurus which, sadly, were not definitively proto-feathers, but were highly suggestive of them, 2) using parsimony to link dinosaurs to pterosaurs, a closely related sister group amongst the ornithodirans that also had an obvious warm-blooded nature and a hair or down-like integuement of some kind, 3) lots of evidence of varied nature to suggest that warm-bloodedness came about amongst at least some of the archosaurs quite a while before the dinosaurs actually came on the scene, 4) dinosaurs such as Leaellynasaura who lived close to the poles were too large to dig a burrow and hibernate, but too small to migrate or manage the winters in Dinosaur Cove, where the fossils were found. This suggests warm-bloodedness and some kind of adaptation to deal with the cold (i.e., feathers or down.)

Anyway, this isn't really surprising to me, or to some of the other more bold folks in the dino-biz (Greg Paul's been illustrating feathered ornithischians and proto-dinosaurs for over twenty years in anticipation of this discovery, for instance) but it'll turn the more conservative element amongst dino-guys on their heads. However, one point: if all dinosaurs had a feathered ancestry, why is it that most of the skin impressions we have found are for naked, scaly skin? I think that's an easy one to answer; large-bodied mammals have extremely short hair or no hair as well, unless they live in cold climates where they need it to stay warm. Look at elephants, rhinos, or even horses, zebras and lions. Male lions have a big hairy mane, but that is primarily a display feature and one for protection in fights with other male lions over breeding and territorial rights. Otherwise, they are short-haired animals. Hair (or down, or feathers) is actually maladaptive in warm climates for large-bodied animals. It helps retain heat and in warm climates, large animals are liable to overheat... if they're warm-blooded especially.

I suspect, for future illustrators, that feathers should be put only on smallish dinosaurs and proto-dinosaurs. Guys like the little Tianyulong which was about house-cat sized. Also; it's not unreasonable to assume that hatchlings and other younger dinosaurs may have sported a downy coat that they shed as they matured.

Anyway, here's the illustration of Tianyulong that's been floating around the internet.

Expansion of dinosaur ages spreadsheet

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dresden Files

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

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

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

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

Grognardia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dave Arneson, RIP

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

RIP, Dave! You'll be missed.

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

Black Company... done.

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

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

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

1. The Black Company

2. Shadows Linger

3. The White Rose

4. Shadow Games

5. Dreams of Steel

6. The Silver Spike

7. Bleak Seasons

8. She Is The Darkness

9. Water Sleeps

10. Soldiers Live

Sword & Planet

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

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

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

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

Long time no post

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

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

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

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

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

Black Company

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

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

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

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

Update

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books

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

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

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

Well... nevermind

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

Oh, well.

Update (D&D)

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

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

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

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

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

PCs

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

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

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

Secrets of Sarlona

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

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

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

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

Dice bag

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

Quick snapshots.

Prestige classes

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

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

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

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

That, my friends, is a lot of options.

Birthday update

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

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

RPG Books:

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

Other Books:

Ultimate Dangergirl!
The Scent of Shadows

Movies:

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

All clear

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

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

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

Layoff task

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

Poor lady across the aisle from me got it.

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

Update (D&D)

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

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

Still not laid off

For whatever that's worth.

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

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

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

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

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

I like D&D

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

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

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

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

New links

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

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

Happy Birthday to me!

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

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

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

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

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

Update

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

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

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

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

Update

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

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

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

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

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