Checking in...

As an FYI, this blog has not died.  Neither have I.

I have, on the other hand, spent two weeks out of the state, backpacking in the Rockies.  I also have spent the last several months severely swamped with both work and personal concerns.  I am however, back in town.  My personal concerns have largely been resolved (they weren't problems, they were just things that kept me busy.)  And I can see a light at the end of the tunnel for work craziness as well.

When that happens, I'd like to get back into doing what I do; that is, blogging about gaming, video gaming (on one of my other blogs) and hiking (including detailed trip reports--also on one of my other blogs.)

A few unfinished series linger here--ODD D&D being one that I had a few more thoughts on before I left it, and of course DARK•HERITAGE itself is perpetually unfinished.  As the movies approach, I'd love to continue talking about my 1000 years post Jedi Microlite20 STAR WARS setting, and anything at all I might be able to do with it.

So, again--just I apologize for the long interruption and reassure anyone still looking that I'm not dead.

Cthulhusaurus rex?

I'm not quite sure what to do with this image, but it's so cool, that I oughtta be able to think of something!

The old "pseudonatural template" applied to a T. rex seems a little pedestrian.  Then again, that's pretty much what it is, I suppose.  I've gotten away from the fiddly details of d20 creatures and templates, but mining the data there is probably fruitful even if applied to a stripped down m20 paradigm.

#RPGaDay, cont.

#13: Most Memorable character death.  Lash and Ricardo.  My favorite PCs (in a game that I GMed.)  Both died when they threw a fit around a major daemon lord.  Because it was a scene of significant carnage, their souls were kind of mixed in with a number of other dead--there had recently been a battle (in which the PCs participated) between intelligent gorillas and the amazons of the City of Naked Hotties who Ride Dinosaurs Into Battle.

To be fair, it wasn't so much the death itself that was memorable as the later consequences.  The daemon lord had a certain fondness for Ricardo in particular, so it grabbed the souls of the two PCs and stuffed them back into bodies, however it did so a little bit indiscriminately.  Womanizing playboy Ricardo was stuffed into the body of a Fast Times era Phoebe Cates amazon warrior girl, while Lash was stuck in the body of a gorilla.  That whole body-switching Freaky Friday routine ended up being tons of fun, and we ran with it for quite a while until it got a little played out and I decided to find a way to reverse it for them.  Although the players agreed that he joke was a little played out, I think they also found it just a bit disappointing to have it undone.

#14: Best Convention Purchase.  I don't really go to conventions very often, and I don't buy stuff very often when I do.  I bought the systemless Freeport book when I was at GenCon last though (it was new at the time; that's how long it's been since I've been.)  It's still one of my favorite RPG books even today.

#15: Favorite Convention Game.  That's got to be a toss-up; both were--by coincidence, True20 games, but it was the setting, the GM and the players that made them great.  A planetary romance game set on a space opera version of Saturn with a motley collection of losers as the crew of a crashed space ship, or a DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND game with... again, a motley collection of losers as the main characters.

My favorite games tend to be ensemble pieces that resemble Guardians of the Galaxy in a lot of ways.  Adjusted for genre, of course, but with pretty much the same tone anyway.

#16: Game You Wish You Owned.  There isn't really a game I wish I owned, I don't think.  If I want a game, I usually just go buy it.

That said, there are a few games that have kinda piqued my interest, but which I haven't gotten around to picking up here and there.  These would include Hollow Earth Expedition probably, Totems of the Dead—a Savage Worlds setting/game, and maybe also the new Star Wars game.

#17: Funniest Game You Played.  Had to have been a convention game of Kobolds Ate My Baby.  But it was really late, and a few of the players were kinda drunk, and it was years ago now.  I don't remember a lot of the details other than that one character died due to the amorous attentions of a dog.  Another character was in a church--at the baptism of a baby no less--and tried to swap out the baby in front of everybody with a paper mache baby, sort of like Indiana Jones with the idol at the beginning of Raiders.  Obviously it didn't work, but what a great image.  And it was hilarious.

#18: Favorite Game System.  I'm still always on the look-out for the Holy Grail of game systems that does exactly what I want exactly how I want it.  I haven't found it yet.  Currently, my favorite is Microlite20, and probably will be for some time to come.  Then again, it's a largely theoretical favorite, because I haven't actually been able to use it as much as I'd like either.

More #RPGaDay questions

7th: Most "intellectual" RPG owned.  I'm not even 100% sure what this is meant to mean.  Cerebral in terms of high concept?  If so, that's not a paradigm that I'm interested in.  Or does it, maybe, mean truly innovative in terms of mechanics?  I doubt that's what it means, but that at least gives me somewhere with which to answer the question.  I'm a big fan of the intellectual underpinnings of Dread.  The mechanics and the concept and the match to genre are truly extraordinary and quite brilliant.

8th: Favorite character.  I've answered this before on the 30 Day Challenge.  My answer is still the same: Lash and Ricardo.

9th: Favorite Die/Dice Set.  I don't get overly attached to dice, for the most part, but I do have a non-matching d20 that I bought years ago that I prefer to roll to any other that I have.  It's just a little larger than standard, and has a strange symbol in place of the 20.  It doesn't necessarily give me great results (although it doesn't necessarily give me poor ones either) but I just prefer the heft of it in my hand to slightly smaller, lighter, standard-sized dice.

10th: Favorite Tie-in Novel/Game Fiction.  This is a little hard, because most of it isn't really very good.  I've enjoyed some Black Library fiction, although I have to admit that much of it is kind of forgettable, at least it's not actively bad.  The original Dragonlance series was the proof of concept that made tie-in game fiction viable.  The Arkham Horror fiction is probably the best I've read recently.  But, I'm going to say something just a little unusual and go with the Riftwar Series.  It isn't technically tie-in or game fiction, although it unofficially is; it's kind of the fictional back story to some guy's home game; the author, one Raymond Feist.  It feels very D&D too, in many respects, although it clearly has a different magic system, which plays out significantly during the course of the novels.

11th: Weirdest RPG Owned.  I don't actually enjoy owning weird RPGs.  But, if you consider a number of the free minigames that came in Polyhedron magazine back in the day, then I think Hijinx is definitely the winner.  Playing a 70s groovy band of teenagers a la Josey & the Pussycats, Speed Buggy or Scooby-doo and the gang is as weird as any concept I've played.  Although I don't own them, honorable mention of games I've played have to include Kobolds Ate My Baby and Paranoia.  But like I said; I don't really care for overt weirdness, except for novelty value on one-off conventional style games.

12th: Old RPG you still play/read.  I don't really.  And what does "old" mean?  Does d20 count?  I still play that fairly regularly.  Otherwise, I recently bought and read much of the Moldvay game on pdf.  I still occasionally break out my MegaTraveller sourcebooks.  But in general, I'm not really into older games nearly as much as some, and I don't consider myself an OSR connoisseur by any means.

#RPGaDay

I can't do this.  I'm already four days behind, and I'm going to spend the better part of two and a half weeks away this month, completely inaccessible to any device that would allow me to update my blog.

However, I'm going to do it anyway.  If I straggle in over the finish line sometime in late September, that's OK.  If I end up bundling a bunch of posts together and not necessarily saying a lot about my answers, that's OK too.  After all, some of these questions don't really lend themselves to a lot of discussion; you just answer them and that's that.  And some of them are the same (or at least very similar) to my 30 DAY CHALLENGE questions that I answered a while ago anyway.

Today's the 4th, but I'm going to get a little big ahead and answer the first six questions today.

1st: First RPG Played.  Technically, I have to say brown box OD&D.  However, I was a somewhat unwilling participant in that game, so I often don't count it and instead point to my 5th grade Moldvay BD&D excursions as my first real game.

2nd: First RPG Gamemastered.  Wow, I don't actually remember.  I didn't do a lot of GMing back in the day, so I'm going to say Top Secret S.I. in college was the first one that I did so for a reasonable length of time and actually knew what I was doing.  I doubt it was truly the first I ever game-mastered, but any GMing excursions prior to that were one-offs that I simply don't remember any details of anymore.

3rd: First RPG Purchased.  I'm notoriously cheap, and didn't actually buy a lot of the games that I played in the past.  At one point in middle school, however, I was kind of interested in the TolkienQuest gamebooks, which had conversion notes to MERP.  I think I have to call MERP my first game purchased.  Curiously, I've never played it.

4th: Most recent RPG purchase.  If downloads of freely available online source material counts, I probably have to go with some of that.  If it doesn't--hmm... I haven't bought anything in the last several months.  My last purchase was either a Pathfinder sourcebook or other, or my Moldvay digital purchase from DriveThruRPG.  I don't remember for sure that chronology, but I think the latter is literally my last purchase.  I bought the Basic set, the Expert set, B2 Keep on the Borderlands and X1 Isle of Dread.

5th: Most Old School RPG owned.  I'm not really a fan of old school in general, but clearly the most old school game I own is the Moldvay game, which are not just old school, but actually old.  Other than that, more modern games that have some old school vibe to them include Microlite 74, Labyrinth Lord (a retroclone of Moldvay) and Swords & Wizardry.  I don't actually play much of them, though.

6th: Favorite RPG that you never get to play.  Microlite, naturally.  I love this game and have only ever run a few one-shots and never actually played it myself at all.

Romanticism as an essential element of fantasy

Let me start with a few quotes from Wikipedia:

"Fantasy is a genre of fiction that commonly uses magic and other supernatural phenomena as a primary plot element, theme, or setting. Many works within the genre take place in imaginary worlds where magic and magical creatures are common. Fantasy is generally distinguished from the genres of science fiction and horror by the expectation that it steers clear of scientific and macabre themes, respectively, though there is a great deal of overlap between the three, all of which are subgenres of speculative fiction.

In popular culture, the fantasy genre is predominantly of the medievalist form, especially since the worldwide success of The Lord of the Rings and related books by J. R. R. Tolkien." 

"The identifying traits of fantasy are the inclusion of fantastic elements in a self-coherent (internally consistent) setting, where inspiration from mythology and folklore remains a consistent theme."

Here's something from Andy Greenwald, in reference to The Game of Thrones TV show.  I think it's broader in its scope than just that show, however.

"So I listened closely as Tyrion told his tale of Orson, the simple Lannister cousin who spent his time not planning out wars or paying off debts but sitting in a garden smashing bugs. Day after day, Orson would pick up a stone and settle into his grim task, splattering beetles by the thousand. There appeared to be no rhyme or reason to Orson’s slaughter, no motive or purpose. Just the endless “kung kung kung” of a big man murdering something smaller, again and again and again.

But Tyrion, we learn, wasn’t satisfied. Though he was born to a powerful family, he couldn’t help but empathize with the littler creatures. And so his interest in his cousin morphed from mockery to curiosity to something bordering on obsession. What was the reason for this constant extermination? It was inconceivable to Tyrion that butchery on Orson’s scale could simply be the way of the world. A life was a life, whether it was protected by a suit of armor or a carapace. Surely, it deserved better. If that wasn’t possible, then at least it deserved an explanation. What, after all, was the point?"

Recapping a specific episode, he said the following:

"It was all quite thrilling, for a time, with the Red Viper leaping balletically through the summery air and Alex Graves’s camera swooping vertiginously to catch him. Game of Thrones has often punched me in the heart, but it’s rarely had it fluttering so mightily in my throat. But then, just as Tyrion was getting his hopes up and Cersei was reaching for her Big Gulp of merlot, Oberyn spiked the ball at the 1-yard line. Rather than finish off the Mountain, Oberyn was just getting warmed up, demanding much more than an improbable victory. Instead, like Tyrion in the garden all those years ago, Oberyn demanded logic and an answer. And we all know what happened next. Kung. Kung. Kung.

Actually, the sound of Oberyn’s head exploding was much more terrible than that. The defanging — and defacing — of the Red Viper was among the worst things I’ve ever seen on a screen, but it was definitely the worst thing I’ve ever heard: It somehow managed to remind me both of my own mortality and of Gallagher. (Trust me when I say I’m not sure which was more unbearable.) And in that gruesome, hideous moment I realized that the real takeaway from Tyrion’s story isn’t that he’s a fool for wanting order when there is only chaos. It’s that we just might be for greedily tuning in to the Orson Hour every week and expecting the same thing.

Look, contra Ramsay Snow, I have been paying attention. I harbor no illusions of a happy ending. But even in the midst of an epic, excellent season that has provided more wit, resonance, and emotion than I had previously thought possible, I am growing slightly weary of being taught the same merciless lesson again and again. I’d like to think that Charlie Brown had some grudging respect for Lucy the first time she pulled away the football. But the fifth? What happened to dashing Prince Oberyn was gripping, horrifying television. But, unlike his skull, it was also rather hollow. Few authors could introduce such a fantastic character with such economy and skill (and fewer showrunners could do the same on television, with even more of both). But only George R.R. Martin would so sadistically run that character into the buzz saw of disappointment and plot that is Game of Thrones just to prove a point — and, I suppose, to tighten the noose a bit more around Tyrion’s neck. Like a beetle, Oberyn was born to die, and in the most gruesome, splattery way possible. And to what end? Shocking us isn’t the same thing as challenging us. A simpleton with a rock might not need to explain himself, but a writer usually does. At this point, the most radical thing Game of Thrones could do is to make the audience exhale in relief."

This is in stark contrast to what Tolkien himself felt about fantasy, which was fundamentally—and profoundly—mythic and even romantic (not in the Romance genre sense of the word, however.)

"Eucatastrophe is a term coined by J. R. R. Tolkien which refers to the sudden turn of events at the end of a story which ensures that the protagonist does not meet some terrible, impending, and very plausible doom. As such, it is a kind of deus ex machina common in fantasy literature. Tolkien formed the word by affixing the Greek prefix eu, meaning good, to catastrophe, the word traditionally used in classically inspired literary criticism to refer to the "unraveling" or conclusion of a drama's plot. For Tolkien, the term appears to have had a thematic meaning that went beyond its literal etymological meaning in terms of form.[how?] In his definition as outlined in his 1947 essay "On Fairy-Stories", eucatastrophe is a fundamental part of his conception of mythopoeia. Though Tolkien's interest is in myth, it is also connected to the gospels; Tolkien calls the Incarnation the eucatastrophe of "human history" and the Resurrection the eucatastrophe of the Incarnation."

In this sense, which the more I think about, the more I believe strongly that there's something to this.  The bleak, nihilistic sense of much of the modern fantasy genre is completely opposed to fantasy that I (and many like me) grew up on, and which made us love the genre in the first place.  As John C. Wright said (this is my last quote in this post; I promise!)

"An artist can draw a picture of the rotting skull of a dead dog on a dungheap with maggots and blind worms crawling on its exposed brains with perfect perspective, shading, composition, and balance of light and dark, and yet it is still a picture of a dead dog."

And yes, I'm actually mimicking somebody else's post about a similar topic; quoting some of the same material (and some other material) because he made the point first and he made it well, and well, why not ride his coat-tails in that case?  But if this bleak, nihilistic, "crapsack" world fantasy is in opposition to "real" fantasy as we have known it, as we grew up on, and as we think of the genre, why is it relatively prevalent?  And why is (at least some of) it relatively popular?  And what does that have to do with DARK•HERITAGE anyway?

1) I think it's perceived by some to be more sophisticated, more mature, etc.  I think this perception is false, however.  Bleakness, nihilism, hopelessness, despair—these are not mature emotions.  This is not the perspective of an adult, it's the perspective of a whiny, angsty, bratty adolescent.  It's not sophisticated and deep, it's merely empty and soul-less.  2) Is it really that popular?  Sure, GRRM is a pretty big deal, and guys like Joe Abercrombie and a few others.  But how much room for more is there?  Is there any nihilistic work that is still read 100 years after being written?  And how much of it can you stand, even if you can stand it, without needing to break for something more light, anyway?

Keep in mind, I'm referring specifically to nihilism, not tragedy.  Although they may resemble each other superficially in many respects, they are not the same.  There's no catharsis at the end of a nihilistic work.  The same is also true of most works of horror fiction—they're not nihilistic (well, some of them are) although certainly they are dark and the end is not usually happy for the protagonists.

3)  DARK•HERITAGE is fantasy and horror, not nihilism.  The world is bleak, there are certainly issues that resemble that of a horror fiction story, but characters meet them like horror fiction protagonists. They may not triumph, they certainly don't "win" in a traditional sense, but their heroism can be seen and it has meaning.  Like the bleak fatalism of the Norse sagas, which Tolkien reflected in many ways, it's not purposeless.  It's not senseless.  It's not nihilistic.  This is part of the reason why fantasy is so fundamentally rooted in a romanticized Medievalism.  My own setting has looked in many ways to other romanticized adventurous periods; pirates and Westerns, in particular, but the end result is the same—without that romanticized adventure story baseline, the horror is just bleak nihilism.  It doesn't ring as profound as that of Norse sagas, Shakespearean tragedies, or even more modern works like Dracula or Lord of the Rings.  It would just feel like a tawdry snuff piece.

Anyway, between this and the earlier post on a similar topic, I think I've talked enough about the tone of my setting for the time being.  Unless I run a game or actually write a novel in the setting soon, it doesn't really matter much.

Computer Magic

I don't talk about music much on my blog anymore, but I just discovered this gem of three year old electronica (thank you Lexus commercial!) that I think it absolutely fantastic.

Maybe a touch too long, but I'm not complaining.

Religion in Dark Heritage

Well, the World Cup has come and gone.  The US did relatively well, which was fun to watch.  I'm not a huge fan of Brazil, so I admit to a bit of schadenfreude watching them completely fall apart near the end in a humiliating display of tears and incompetence.  And more tears.

While, of course, I would have loved to see the US win, I never really considered it to be particularly likely, so my favorite to win was Argentina.  I picked them to come in second, which they did.  I picked Brazil to come in first, which they did not.  I picked Germany to come in third, and they did much better than expected (by me, anyway) although I was not at all surprised to see them as extremely competent and dangerous.  Lionel Messi was a bit disappointing.  He played very well, certainly, but he had very little of the type of incredible displays of athleticism that I was hoping to see.  And with Dimaria injured and out, and Higuain and Aguero at less than 100% because of past injuries, the Argentines hopes were a little too dependent on him alone.

I also discovered (yet again) that I can't watch too much soccer at a time (I utterly reject this notion that seems to be gaining some steam that we should call it futbol in America.  That's absurd.  Futbol is obviously not an English word, at least with that spelling.  It's obviously, also, an English word transliterated into Spanish.  The English word is football.  We have another sport here that already bears that name.  So we have a perfectly adequate and appropriate name for the sport already: soccer--and I think it's absurd that we should take an English loanword into Spanish back out of Spanish with the Spanish spelling to replace our own perfectly fine word for the sport.)  It's simply too boring if you watch too much of it.  I mostly only get into the sport during World Cup, and for the same reason I get into the Olympics--i.e., not because I love the actual sport, but because I like the idea of friendly patriotism vis a vis sporting events.  By the time the entire spectacle is over, I've seen enough soccer to last me for quite a long time, and I'm finding that watching games bores me.  They're too long and not enough happens to really keep my interest, in general.  Even in a game like the final, where one of my favorites (arguably, my actual favorite since I never had any hope whatsoever that the US would be in the game) is playing for the biggest prize in the sport.  At least, in a final with Argentina vs. Germany, the instances of drama and flopping were considerably minimized in favor of simply playing the game.  I've got to give both teams credit for that.  Another reason why I wasn't terribly put-out watching Brazil get so dramatically humiliated.

So... I won't say any more about the World Cup, even though a post-game commentary on the final wouldn't be unexpected.  Instead, like I said, it reiterated to me why, exactly, soccer has never really taken off in America and never will unless the demographic changes sufficiently such that socialist soccer fans start to outnumber actual Americans.  Of course, we see the Obama administration doing all that it can on our southern border to facilitate exactly that change, so... I dunno.  Maybe in my lifetime.  I hope not.

Instead, I'll talk a bit more about my long-neglected setting, DARK•HERITAGE, which is putatively the actual purpose of this blog.

For much of its existence, the setting has been, to borrow an overly trite term from TV Tropes (they're all overly trite, but they've created a lot of labels for things that needed labels.  Whatcha gonna do?) basically a crapsack world.  I've gradually, over some time, lost my enthusiasm for that mode of thinking.  I guess I've read a little too much of it, and now find the intellectual underpinnings of the notion unappealing, to say the least.  Or maybe I've just hit a few too many who are a few too free with their crapsackiness.  When Glen Cook pioneered the notion in The Black Company, and with a bit of Lovecraftian flair to it, it sounded attractive.  After reading a bit too much George Martin and Joe Abercrombie (and it's not actually like I read that much of either) I find the crapsack world nihilistic, dreary, and frankly... kinda whiny.

Now granted, horror fiction is still a major influence on DARK•HERITAGE and I suspect always will be.  But the notion that being heroic, of doing what's right is always the wrong choice... I can't support that kind of paradigm anymore.  Not sure that I ever really could, without playing it off for laughs eventually.

This isn't necessarily a major change; more of a minor one that has significant implications.  However... as a very visible symbol of this change, I need to have an element of some hope inherent in the setting itself.  I've decided that the pantheon as a crapsack pantheon with nobody good to look at is, perhaps, problematic.

Rather than change it outright, however, I'm going to posit a religious movement--more grassroots rather than organized--that recognizes a Creator over the pantheon, who recognizes a hope for an afterlife for those who live well.  In addition, I'm going to completely abstain from the temptation to make this religious movement in any way an analog for a corrupt and political Catholic church.  Rather, I'll have it more like Protestantism in the early 1800s in the US... very grassroots, very decentralized, with traveling pastors or teachers who aren't sure exactly of their authority or their doctrine... but who feel called to try and make the world a better place by teaching of the rewards of Heaven.

The Watcher

There is a spirit that comes from before the foundation of the world of DARK•HERITAGE, but which lingers still nonetheless.  This spirit is sometimes called Grigori, the Watcher, and it is primarily known as being a spirit of hunger.  No one knows for sure how Grigori came to be such a near-personification of appetite, but it is so today.

Grigori is often disembodied.  Some ancient rumors amongst the Tarushan gypsies say that Grigori was once a powerful servitor of the Old Ones who rule in Kadath, long before mortal man lived in the area.  He watched and observed the arrival of men, with characteristic lack of emotion, and cataloged their many comings, goings and doings.  For reasons that are unknown, Grigori lost his spiritual, otherworldly disinterested facade and came down among men, passing his time in riotous living with their fair daughters and wives.  For this Grigori was cursed and forever cast out of Kadath.  But also cursed with insubstantiality, so that the appetites and temptations which beset him would be forever denied him as well.  Driven insane by being constantly exposed to mortal temptations and unable to act on them, Grigori gradually devolved into little more than a cannibal spirit.

Now, Grigori comes shrieking and howling from the highlands in the mountains when winter thunderstorms rage throughout the peaks.  If he finds a person, alone and unprotected, he can possess that person, and reshape his body into a fearsome form, full of muscles, sinews, teeth and claws.  He's often been described as centaur-like, and with gigantic antlers, although other descriptions have, at times, been given as well.

When this happens, all who live in the area need beware, for Grigori, now embodied, goes on an orgy of rape, violence and hunger, killing all in the area before his host body dies from the strain (this usually only takes a few days, luckily.)  It is possible, although extremely difficult, to kill Grigori's host body, which expels the spirit and banishes it back to its frozen mountain haunts again for a time, but Grigori is immortal and immune to any weapon or magic that men can wield--only his possessed body is vulnerable, and even then, not very.  While possessed, a mortal body becomes terrifyingly potent--strong, nearly invincible and horrible.  An entire squadron of tough mercenaries was known to have been killed by The Watcher, their desecrated and violated bodies and body parts strewn across a snow-covered landscape to be found several days later by another patrol.  This took place in the Caurs Mountains during the reign of King Guilhem Huc des Peyrasmortas, during one of the interminable border squabbles between nobles in the area.  The incident raised awareness of the Watcher amongst the members of the King's Inquisition--which was a slightly different organization than the one formed later by Huc des Peyrasmortas descendant following the scandal of the only public performance of "The King in Yellow" and the King's only brother revealed as a demoniac heretic.  Secretive scholars have tracked incidents that match the modus operandi of Grigori, and cataloged them, although such records are kept under lock and key at the Academies at Razina and Terassa.  Rumored copies in the hands of private collectors, and floating around somewhere in Porto Liure also abound.

Reports of Grigori's activities range rather widely in the circum-Mezzovian region, but always come from high in the mountains, and fierce thunderstorms and the advent of cold weather seem to be a common correlating theme.   Professor Alfons Gombal of Razina believes that Grigori goes into long periods of torpor where he attempts to rejoin his brothers in the mountains, or at least replicate the conditions that he enjoyed in Kadath before his exile.  He cannot return to Kadath, or even come near it, so he languishes in what mountains he can climb.

Although not meant to be a reflection of such, Grigori can best be represented in d20 by the Lord of the Feast, a creature detailed in Privateer Press's Monsternomicon II.  For other systems, such as m20, you will have to convert as best you can, based on the detail given here--although, of course, one of the main attractions of m20 is that you can use d20 material more or less as is.

World Cup Follow Up

Well, I'm thinking Brazil doesn't look as strong as I had thought.  They are visibly flustered if they don't score quickly, and that can be manipulated against them.  Mexico played fairly well (heck, the goalie needs to be knighted when he gets home, or whatever they do for national heroes in Mexico.  Make a statue of him in his home town?)

They're good still, but the best in the Cup?  I don't think so.  I'm leaning more and more towards Germany now.  Not that I've seen every national side play yet, but still.

Americans are encouraged by the win over Ghana, but we still have Portugal and Germany to deal with.  Let's not get ahead of ourselves.  Of the three, Ghana was the only one we had a good shot at beating.  I agree that Portugal's terrible trashing by Germany makes them look a little weaker than they did previously, but I would be surprised if the USA can eke out a tie against them, much less a win.  Our chances of making second place in the group and advancing are better than they were... but they're still not all that good.  My prediction had Portugal winning the group and Germany in second.  I think I need to reverse that now, but it doesn't really change who advances and who doesn't--just who they will play in the next rounds.

I'd like to see a big upset of the US over Portugal.  I just don't think it's likely.  And almost as much, I'd like to see Portugal and Argentina get matched up against each other later down the line.

Also; did anyone notice this bizarre crowd-shot of the witch doctor?  Right before Ghana's equalizer goal?  It almost looks photoshopped.

Horror themes in gaming

I think I'm going to order up a digital A/V adaptor and another, longer HDMI cable so I can plug the iPad into the big TV.  But in the meantime, I spent a little bit of time the other day playing Slender Rising and Slender Rising 2 on the iPad down in the basement with all of the lights off and a good set of earbuds in.  The experience was... surprisingly kind of creepy.

I don't know that the Slender Rising series is the best iteration of the Slenderman game or not, but I quite like it.  I think it's very atmospheric, I like the controls and the graphics, and the details of what you can do worked better for me than the original Slender: The Eight Pages did on the PC, at least.  More options, more atmosphere, and better playability.

I'm not sure how many readers may be familiar with the Slenderman games and the Slender Rising series in particular.  To start, you pick a landscape (from four).  The "classic" Slenderman landscape is a forest, but there's some great ghost towns, abandoned houses, and others as well.  You pick an ambiance--a really foggy daytime, night, night-vision, and a thunderstorm in the dark (my favorite.)  You might also have the opportunity to pick a type of light (flashlight with unlimited battery; flashlight with a risk of battery loss, or lantern, etc.)  Then you wander around the landscape looking for seven pages with cryptic and sinister clues written on them in blood.  Once you find all seven, you unlock the escape, and--if you can find it--you can escape the level.  The whole time, Slenderman, a teleporting ghost or some other such other supernatural entity, tries to hunt you.

This is where a comparison--or perhaps contrast--to RPGs as they are usually played, came to my mind.  In D&D, for instance, you could have a scenario where you wander around a haunted forest looking for MacGuffins, while pursued by a supernatural creature or creatures.  This could even be a successful D&D scenario, with a real touch-and-go feel to it, and the obvious nods to the horror genre would be evident.  But... you'd be fighting the monsters.  It would be more thrilling rather than terrifying.

In Slender Rising, you can't fight Slenderman.  You don't even have any weapons at all (well in number 2, you might get a shotgun, which you can fire once to chase him off for a moment.  But it's not likely that you will find it, really, anyway.)  You're only recourse when Slenderman appears is to run away as quick as you can in the opposite direction.  If you go into a blind alley and find yourself blocked in, you're screwed.  If you can't run away fast enough, you're screwed.  The game ends, and you die.

Actually, the case of the shotgun in Slender Rising 2 is kind of interesting.  You can get a weapon (that would be deadly in most cases) but it's only effect is to chase Slenderman off for a moment.  You can't actually defeat Slenderman at all.  The only thing you can hope to accomplish is to escape.

While not all horror stories end this way (in Dracula, for instance, Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker and Lucy's three suitors manage to chase the Undead down in the mountains of Transylvannia and kill him.  Sure, Lucy and Quincy pay with their lives, and Mina and Jonathan are scarred as well, but that's not really a bad ending, all things considered.  But in many, there is no real victory, and at best only escape.  In The Ring, for instance, in the end [SPOILER ALERTS] the main characters escape but leaving the menace lurking in the dark for others to find still.  In fact, if anything, the menace is somewhat enhanced by the method that the main actors used to escape.  In the movie from a year or two ago, Woman in Black, the protagonist and his son are killed by the titular ghost.  In The Grudge, similarly, the protagonist makes--maybe--a temporary escape at best, but is left at the end still haunted.

In Slender Rising you can, if you're lucky, escape the ghost (I'll be honest; I've never done so.  It's too hard.  And I don't play all that often to get better at it either.) But you can't defeat it.

Is that an acceptable outcome for RPGs, I wonder?  I think many players would say so, especially if they buy into the concept of playing a horror game in the first place.  But I think many players would feel frustrated by this paradigm, too--the notion that you can only escape, not defeat, the Bad Guys™ or whatever.  As always, knowing your "audience" is key to a successful game experience.  But I'm curious if anyone has adopted this paradigm before; a very overtly horror paradigm, in your gaming?  In my experience, most overtly horror games don't even do so frequently, but sometimes it works out that way.  I've had good experience using this for a Dread game, for instance.  I know it can work with the right players, and it can work very well and be a very powerful experience, even.  But trying to pull it off when the players show up with a typical D&D paradigm in mind is likely to be frustrating for everyone.

I originally included a trailer for Slender Rising, but decided that a slightly longer gameplay video would be better instead.  You don't need to watch the entire thing to see that even in the daylight, the atmosphere is just incredibly creepy and ominous.  The first attempt the player makes is in the Lost Souls mode, where instead of finding seven signs posted on the walls, you need to find seven ghosts and set them free.

World Cup predictions

What the heck.  I'll make some brackets.  There are eight groups of four teams each.  Two from each group advance.

Group A: Brazil and Mexico
Group B: Spain and the Netherlands
Group C: Columbia and... Greece, I guess (this is a tough one to pick a winner)
Group D: Italy and... England or Uruguay?  I'll go with England.
Group E: Switzerland and France
Group F: Argentina and Bosnia-Herzegovina
Group G: Germany and Portugal.  I'd like to see the US advance, but this is a tough bracket.
Group H: Belgium and Russia

I'll go out on a limb and predict the next round too.  The brackets, if I'm correct (and I've put winner first and runner up second in each of these proposals) would be as follows:

• Brazil vs. the Netherlands.  Winner, Brazil.
• Columbia vs. England.  Winner, Columbia
• Switzerland vs. Bosnia-Herzegovina.  Winner Switzerland (because it's easier to keep typing.)
• Germany vs. Russia.  Winner, Germany
• Spain vs. Mexico.  Winner, Spain
• Italy vs. Greece.  Winner, Italy.
• Argentina vs. France.  Winner, Argentina
• Belgium vs. Portugal.  Winner, Portugal

Quarter finals?

• Brazil vs. Columbia.  Winner, Brazil
• Switzerland vs. Germany.  Winner, Germany
• Spain vs. Italy.  Winner, Italy
• Argentina vs. Portugal.  Winner, Argentina

Semi-finals?

• Brazil vs. Germany.  Winner, Brazil.
• Argentina vs. Italy.  Winner, Argentina.

Finals: Brazil vs. Argentina.  Winner, Brazil.

Third place game: Germany vs. Italy, winter Italy.

How's that?

Mile... mile and a half

http://themuirproject.com/

Web page for The Muir Project, a crowd-funded (at least partially) documentary of a few artistic folks who hiked the John Muir trail, and made a documentary about it.  The "core" hiking team were a married couple one of whom is a professional photographer (although she admits that she mostly does portrait work and stuff like that, so this landscape and still life work was a major change of pace), and a videographer/film guy.  Along with another good friend who's also into film and a fourth who's a sound guy, they hit the John Muir trail, moving slowly, and documenting the experience.

It's a fun movie.  In general, I'm always a little skeptical of hiking movies, because they're made by an art-house crowd who tend to focus on the strange, bohemian aspect of the hiking lifestyle rather than something that a regular guy like me who likes backpacking could relate to.  This one--perhaps somewhat surprisingly, given the film-makers--does not do so.  It's just plain old good film-making, part reality show, part documentary, about what it's like to hike in the North American mountains.  (Specifically the Sierra Nevada.  If they'd done it in the Rockies, I think they wouldn't have made such a big deal about the very little rain that they got.)

I saw a trailer for this movie a long time ago; back when it was a recently funded kickstarter, actually, and I've been keeping my eye on it for some time.  I thought about buying the DVD, but never quite got around to it.  Now, it's available to stream on Netflix (in HD, even!) so I suppose I'm glad that I didn't, but it's too bad that I didn't see this a year or two ago when it was newer.  It's a fun movie, and the principles are fun and charismatic, and generally interesting to see.  Plus, they really know their stuff when it comes to highlighting the spectacular scenery, and they do a good job of highlighting some of the experience of a long backpacking trip--the hard days when you climb thousands of feet over a pass only to lose it all again on the other side, blisters, sometimes loneliness (the married couple does mention missing their daughter a few times, who was staying with her grandmother while they were hiking), pack weight issues (granted; exacerbated by the heavy film and sound equipment that they had to bring with them), and a challenge that they may not have anticipated and you won't see every year--hiking the trail on a July on a year when the snowfall was 200% of average.  Kick-stepping, glissading, route-finding, and just the plain extra exertion of walking through snowpack when you expect to be walking on a well-groomed trail, crossing extremely swollen "creeks", etc.  This made it interesting and scenic in a way that it isn't always, by definition.

Here's the trailer that I saw two years or so ago, which piqued my interest, and which I still like.  Love the music, love the movie, highly recommend it for anyone who likes the outdoors at all, and I still recommend it to anyone else who likes a nice, reality-show format movie without all the drama.

Book reviews and The Last Witchking

I haven't reviewed a lot of books lately.  I haven't even put books that I'm reading on my blog very well.  And frankly, I haven't done a great job reading books lately.  I've been way too busy.  I dived into Mistborn and quite enjoyed it so far before getting so bogged down with things to do that I now haven't picked it up in at least a week or two.  I don't intend to abandon it, of course, but it may be another week or two before I can really pick it up.

It may seem odd to readers that someone who claims to be a huge fan of Lovecraft has his collections on my To Read list, and not showing as re-reads.  This is true, but also misleading.  I haven't read those collections.  Each collection has at least one piece that I've never read before.  So, I called the whole thing unread, even though I've read the majority of the pieces in each collection, many of them many times over.  This is kind of a moot point as well, as I'm now also reading a nearly complete collection of Lovecraft stories on my Kindle.  This Kindle collection does not, however, feature any of the collaborations or ghost-written stories.  At some point, when I'm done with the Kindle collection, I'll go through each of the books on my shelf and make sure that nothing is in them that I haven't read, and if it is not, I'll remove them from the to-read list.  I'll probably still have to read the ghost-written collection, or at least parts of it.  I know for a fact that I haven't read all of them, because I haven't even read Horror in the Museum, the story for which the entire collection is named.

However I also won't be reviewing any of this Lovecraft stuff.  Not only is it very old and very familiar. but it's also more difficult to review short-story and novella collections anyway.

I will, however, offer a brief review of a collection of three novellas that I recently read: The Last Witchking.  I got this for free a number of months ago when it went through one of those periodic free giveaway days which Amazon occasionally does with Kindle books (albeit I believe in this case at the behest of the author.)  I didn't read it until very recently however.  Now, reading the book with a completely open mind is a little bit challenging given all the noise surrounding the nomination of the third and final novella in the collection for a Hugo award.

For those not paying attention, the Hugo awards nominations are extremely controversial to a number of people, and a great panoply of authors and writers, industry professionals, and assorted hangers-on have made a great deal of noise--mostly ghastly wailing and gnashing of teeth--at some of the works nominated, including the story included in this collection.  The reason for this is that this collection is written by one Vox Day (which, as you probably can guess, is a pen name and a pun), an individual who has managed to score a fair bit of hate from the self-proclaimed literati of the science fiction and fantasy world, particularly those who belong to the SFWA, or Science Fiction Writers Association.

Of course, if you've been paying any attention to the SFWA lately, you'd also notice that they've made of themselves a laughing stock and an embarrassment repeatedly in the last year or two, which may mean that you'd take the object of their hate with some skepticism.  I certainly did so, but then again, I get most of my news about what's happening in the SF publishing world from the blogs of Larry Correia, John C. Wright, Sarah Hoyt, and yes, that of Vox Day himself.  So it was no surprise that the accusations drummed up against Vox Day and the reason that his nomination for a Hugo is causing so much heartburn amongst the self-proclaimed sci-fi literati is pretty trumped up in most cases, and outright false in others.

That doesn't mean that I think Mr. Day is a nice guy, by any means.  Frankly, I think he's kinda a jerk.  He's arrogant, extremely pedantic, and polemic, which means that he is perfectly happy simply messing with people for no reason other than to mess with them.  The charges of him being a hateful racist, on the other hand, are largely based simply a single comment describing a single person--a person who is a demonstrable racist, by the way--whom he called an "ignorant half-savage."  Because the sci-fi literati don't like him anyway, they've latched on to this, attached to it meaning that is well beyond the intent with which it was delivered, and used it to go for their favorite tactic; outgrouping by calling on a racist.

Of course, that tactic only works on people who desperately want to remain in-grouped, and I don't think he much cares (or at least, I see little evidence that he does on his blog, other than an interest in the decline of the genre overall.)  It also would require that the Left in America had not diluted the value of calling someone a racist.  That boy's called wolf way too many times for anyone of even marginal intelligence to really take it seriously in our society anymore.

And besides, what does that have to do with the quality of his writing anyway?  In a world in which writers can openly proclaim their bigotry and misandry by gloating and crowing that no men won a single Nebula Award this year without censure, then Larry Correia's point has largely been proven--the awards are meaningless.  What they amount to is a bunch of ideological propagandists patting themselves on the back for sticking to the narrative while both their work and the awards that they give have become completely irrelevant to any actual readers of the genre.  Personally, I thought this was so self-evident that there wasn't any need to attempt to prove it, but Larry's "Sad Puppies" campaign to get himself (and some others) nominated has demonstrated it pretty conclusively to all but the predictably obtuse.

And this is why reviewing this work based purely on its own merits is so difficult.  Most people who are aware of the story at all are either following the entire brouhaha because 1) they are appalled that any type of non-Marxist, groupthinking tedious message-fiction writer could possibly have cracked into the hallowed halls of Hugo nomination, or 2) they're on the other team, and are cheerleading the dismantling of the power and influence of the ideological gatekeepers of the industry.

You may probably infer from my tone that I belong to the latter group much moreso than to the former.  You'd be correct.  I not only find the fascist bullies and would be censors that dominate the dialog on the Left today (and in most creative/artistic industries in the West, for that matter) disturbing and even frightening, if they really are able to get their way on pretty much any issue, but I also find their messages tedious in the extreme.  That said, as always, any work, no matter who wrote it, should be judged on its own merits, not on the alleged political or social opinions of the author (unless said opinions are part and parcel of the work--one reason I will never read anything by Samuel Delaney, for instance.)  It may be hard to separate the art from the artist sometimes, but anything else is unfair to the work and frankly, kinda beside the point anyway.

So, that long introduction out of the way, what did I think of The Last Witchking, and in particular, the last story which was nominated for the Hugo?

The first, titular story was a bit of deep backstory to the setting; the Witchkings, I'm to gather, were a force for evil in the distant past, and their defeat was relatively recent in the setting of this story.  The story also offers a magical ethnogenesis story for a race of werewolf-like creatures which (again, I gather--I haven't read any of it myself) feature more prominently in other work by the same author.  As such, it's interesting enough, but it feels like merely a piece of something larger which I lack context to perceive properly, which it is.  I can't say that I loved it.  But I liked it well enough.

"The Hoblets of Wiccam Fensboro" was, by the author's own admission in an author's note, inspired by the treatment of Jews by the Italians during the Nazi invasion of Italy near the end of the Second World War, but told with analogs of what are obviously Warhammer orcs, goblins and hobgoblins (with the orcs in the place of the Nazis, the goblins in the place of the Italians, and the hobgoblins standing in metaphorically for the Jews.)  By his own admission, it's an old piece, and it feels somewhat crude.  I've never been much of a fan of Warhammer's attempt to speak in orkish regional dialects, and this piece does something very similar as well.  Not a bad story, but not a stand-out one either.

The final novella, "Opera Vita Aeterna" is the one nominated for a Hugo.  It's a pretty nifty story, again from a historical perspective, about an elf who comes and lives for many years in a monastery and becomes good friends with the head of the monastery.  There's a coda at the end that refers to the work he did there in near legendary terms.  It's an interesting story that addresses the question of friendship across vast gulfs of culture and xenobiological differences.  It's also somewhat subtle; where I expected a slightly more ham-handed end to the story, it didn't come, and some of the questions broached in the story--do elves have souls as do mortal men, did the elf sorcerer actually come to appreciate the theological implications of the monk's religion, etc. are left somewhat unresolved.  In the end, while I would probably have personally preferred a tighter conclusion that delivered more closure, I appreciate the subtlety of the story all the more for its lack.

The real question is, is the novella worthy of a Hugo?  I dunno.  I don't pay attention to what wins awards in sci-fi literature these days, and I haven't read anything against which its matched up.  Certainly compared to some of the works which have won Nebulas, this story fares very well indeed.  And the ultimate judgement of any work of fiction is, of course, whether it encourages me to seek out other works by the same author, or to check him off as "tried it, whatever" and move on to something else.  In this case, The Last Witchking collection was certainly of sufficient quality to encourage me to look for more.

As it turns out, I don't have far to look, because when I picked that one up for free on my Kindle, there were also in close succession (or maybe even the same day; I don't remember) two other collections available; A Magic Broken and Wardog's Coin, so I have those waiting on my Kindle too.  That leaves me the actual novels (which I would have to buy) A Throne of Bones and Summa Elvetica left.  And I'm tempted to do so, even though my stack of racked up novels that I own but haven't read is fairly daunting.  I suppose at the end, that's the best thing I can say about this story--did it make me want to read more?  The answer is yes.

Z is for Zombie

There isn't a strong tradition of classical zombies in DARK•HERITAGE so I don't expect them to feature much.  Undead in general become much more singular, or at least very rare, in this setting, then they would in, for example, a typical D&D style fantasy setting.  But, I'm a huge fan of the concept of undead in general if done correctly (which usually means sparingly.)  Of course, your typical zombie appearance is anything but sparing; they've become highly correlated with concepts like zombie apocalypses, where zombies are running around all over the place.  Individual zombies are rarely meant to be frightening; it's rather the vast horde of them that leads to the survival horror instinct.

To be perfectly honest with you, I have no use for this type of zombie.  Foot-soldiers of the undead, if you will.  Cannon fodder.  Those are attributes that stand in direct opposition to the notion of zombies that are actually terrifying in any way.

Zombies in DARK•HERITAGE are known from ancient rituals passed down through the Tarushans, where a type of semi-legendary Tarushan wizard or warlock known as a bokor (or boccori in the Terassan tongue) would raise the corpses of the recently dead to be his slaves.  This practice apparently persisted into fairly recent times, and Terassan academy scholars have theorized that these so-called zombies were never truly dead at all, but were instead drugged into a state of near-death, buried alive, and retrieved by the boccori.  The boccori then used a combination of cultural indoctrination and forced drugs to keep them susceptible, paranoid and compliant.  This debunking of the zombie myth by Terassan academics has been touted as triumph of the rational over the superstitious, and most Terassans (at least, if not necessarily Tarushans) believe that the zombie myth is just a myth.

However, less well known is the case of a young Terassan student, a true genius although a psychopathic one who cared only for the advancement of knowledge rather than the moral or ethical ramifications of his experiments, seized upon the data obtained by this study and built upon it.  This fellow, one Heriberto Òvest, believed in the ability to use chemical reagents to bring dead tissue back to functionality.  He seems to have been successful in his experiments to a degree, although all of his reanimated corpses have devolved into a horrific, bestial state, and there has been little of rational ability left to any of them.

Heriberto Òvest is, of course, a play on words of Herbert West, the titular character of Lovecraft's story Herbert West - Reanimator.  This story is itself a pastiche, of sorts, of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein.

Zombies in DARK•HERITAGE are therefore more like flesh golems of D&D lore than the monsters that are called zombies.  If using a d20 variant to represent the setting, that would be your best bet to recreate them.  The m20 rules include both flesh golems and zombies, but those are just (basically) cut and pasted from other sources.  I'm not quite sure what, if anything, the zombie stats would represent other than perhaps the very early boccori type zombie, which should be nonexistent at this point in the setting.

I can't not share this...

I suppose the post title speaks for itself...

http://www.scifiwright.com/2014/05/a-comment-i-had-to-share/#more-10850

Planet Stories

After my unexpected mini-hiatus, I'm trying to get my arms around what to blog about next.  A few things are on my mind, in general.

First, of course, is DARK•HERITAGE, supposedly the main topic for this blog.  At the moment, I don't have anything new for it, however.  I'm working on digitalizing my big poster-board map of the setting, but in the process have decided I'm going to basically redraw the entire thing.  A lot of places need to be renamed, and because I did the posterboard in pen, by hand, I'm going to do the new map completely digitally.  Most likely what I'll do is scan the map by portions, stitch them together digitally, wipe out all of the labels and names, and retype them using a font on the computer, so I can have a consistent look.

Not sure if I'm going to bother coloring it or not.  Color naturally looks nice, but my "gold standard" in fantasy maps remains Christopher Tolkien's black and white ones of Middle-earth, which I first saw on my original copies of Lord of the Rings--y'know, the ones with the Darrel K. Sweet covers that were on sale during the 80s.  This same map, "aged up" in Photoshop or whatever, was used in the Peter Jackson movies during the voice-over intros, and an example of this version of the map can be seen here.  Although, like I said, the original that I saw, in the books, was black and white.  As are most fantasy maps, since many are, of course, published in novels that feature only black ink on white paper.  Only in the realm of Photoshopped fan versions or roleplaying game material are color maps commonplace. 

However, this particular project is not imminent.  My free time at home in the evenings is, if anything, even more scarce than my free time during the day, which is a sad state of affairs, and not likely to change in the immediate future.

I'd also like to make some updates to my ODD D&D series of posts.  Although I've already described the setting in nearly as much detail as I'd like, I'd also like to whip up a quick and dirty map of this, describe a "home base" from which PCs could embark on adventures, and do a few "campaign threads" type examples of what I think a campaign in this setting would look like.

What has been an awful lot on my mind, when I can spare the mental effort, is space opera, however.  The original Barsoom stories of John Carter remain among my favorite books ever (beat out, really, only by The Lord of the Rings itself).  In my lifetime, space opera has been really defined by Star Wars of course, and because the new movie started filming just a few days ago or so, I've had it a lot on my mind.  I'm also playing, of course, in a Star Wars post-Jedi campaign at the moment, which I've discussed here before several times, although our play schedule is extremely sporadic, and I had to miss the last session anyway.  I've also got my own houserules to m20 that specifically cater to my own preferred playstyle.

But Star Wars is only one iteration of the genre.  Another one that I've enjoyed quite a bit over the years is the Marvel version of space opera, which incorporates a fair bit of superheroic action--hardly a surprising development.  But the three "super powers" of the Marvel space universe, the Shi'ar, the Kree and the Skrulls, have universally been interesting stories.  Groups like the Starjammers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and characters like the Silver Surfer, Warlock, Quasar, Ms. Marvel, Nova and others have established quite a lot of interesting super-hero colored space opera for us to digest.  Villains like Blastaar, Thanos, Vulcan, D'Ken, Galactus, the Celestials (who aren't necessarily overtly villainous, but... y'know) add to the mystique. We'll even get big-budget big screen treatment of the so-called "cosmic Marvel" in this summer's imminent Guardians of the Galaxy film, and all indications are that when Avengers 3 hits the big screen, we'll finally have the true debut of Thanos as villain.

Although I've focused my space opera more on my Star Wars "one thousand years after Jedi" setting, I'd like to also try my efforts at an original space opera setting.  Perhaps one that even feels more like a Marvel space opera setting within a setting.  For this setting, I'd also like to use m20, but maybe not the Star Wars m20, since Knights are such a specific Star Warsian application.  Although I haven't yet decided that such is the way I want to go, here's a link to an m20 Superhero ruleset to peruse.  I've only had time to glance through it at the moment, and it's probably not exactly what I want, but there could be stuff in there I can borrow. 

I did find it amusing that the document linked there refers to its obvious Thor analog as Norse Storm Hammer Guy.  Thor is, of course, as a mythological figure, in the public domain. 

And here's another Microlite superhero ruleset. 

As I develop this... yet another... series of blog posts, I'll be using the tagline AD ASTRA, Latin for "to the stars" (and famous as a motto of various organizations, where it was largely cribbed from Virgil).  I don't know that that's what I'll call the setting, but heck; it beats Odd D&D, doesn't it?

Update

Well... I haven't abandoned blogging.  I've just been extremely busy.  Work has been kicking my hiney, and when I go home in the evening, I haven't been any less busy.  Pretty much all of April and May so far has been completely toast for me.  I haven't had any time to read much of anything, watch much of anything, think about much of anything, or otherwise indulge any of my hobbies, other than some minimal planning for my big hike that I'm taking out West later this summer, and sending my oldest son off to South America for a time.

Well, it's not true that I haven't watched anything.  Captain America 2 is, for example, a fantastic movie, that I happen, by sheer coincidence, to have seen twice.  Although I'm not the first to point this out, no doubt, one funny little thing about the teaser at the end (the one with Baron von Strucker--for those who noticed.)  The actors who play brother and sister mutants Quicksilver and the Scarlett Witch (probably not going to call them mutants, because the rights to the mutant movies are not with Marvel Studios, as it turns out.  That's OK, the characters were Avengers for a long time in the comics before they were revealed as Magneto's kids.) play husband and wife in Godzilla.  That might be just a bit awkward...

As a fan of comic books and space opera, I'm excited about the coming few years.  Lots of Marvel stuff, Star Wars moving again, DC finally seems to be lurching to life with a good Batman trilogy behind their belts and an actually good Superman movie (I was sceptical, I admit.  I don't really like the character, and think that it's kinda boring to try and challenge the guy who can do it all while yawning.)  And that's just a couple of franchises!

Anyway, work seems to be calming down at least just a bit.  I hope to be ready to make some DARK•HERITAGE and gaming related posts... as well as some book reviews or something... in the very near future, and make this blog seem less like an afterthought.  As it no doubt has seemed in the last couple of months.

ENTJ or INTJ?

Work and other items have been kicking my butt for some time lately.  That said, I have made some posts on my hiker blog, since I've been in serious planning and gear pick-up mode for my big backpacking trip that I'll take in the High Uintas Wilderness.  Because that's coming up soon, and because I'm really excited for it, I've done a better job updating that particular blog over this one. 

Here's a thought, though.  I don't often "punt" and do random topics (rather than gaming or at least sci-fi/fantasy related ones) but this has been on my mind lately, and frankly, my desire to spend some time alone in the wilderness has contributed to my thoughts on this.

For many years--close to twenty--I've taken off and on Briggs Myers personality tests to determine my personality type.  This isn't, in my opinion, necessarily indicative of anything particularly meaningful, but some people disagree, and at the very least, it's kind of interesting.  A nice conversation piece, if you will.  And like I said, some people swear by it; I first took it in an Organization Behavior class in my MBA program, and I've taken them for work-related workshops and whatnot over time as well.

An interesting effect of this is that I test fairly strongly for the last three (of four) indicators on the Briggs Myers test.  But I always tend to straddle the line betweeen Extrovert/Introvert.  I don't get a "clear reading", if you will, on that particular axis.

I don't think that I'm a complete ambivert, but clearly where I fall depends on a great number of variables, and it can change over time.  I can get energized and greatly enjoy social activities that would tend to put me on the extrovert side of things, but I can also get really tired of doing that and just want to be by myself.  Something my father said to me a few months ago put it in some perspective--I was talking about my own kids and their development, and he mentioned to me that he was somewhat surprised that as a teenager, I won an "air guitar" contest at a dance.  It was a small thing, but to him it was significant, because he never would have thought that just a few years ago, I would have done something like that.  I recall the event, but I didn't attach any special significance to it.  I think that he was able to see a pattern in my behavior that I wasn't, however. My conclusion is that naturally I'm an introvert, but that I learned at a fairly young age how to run a convincing extrovert subroutine.

This has been a good skill to have, but I also kind of devalued my natural introvert tendencies, confusing them with shyness.  It occured to me also that introversion and shyness are not the same thing at all.  I have little to no social anxiety to speak of (i.e., shyness) I just simply don't care to be social sometimes, or to participate in certain types of social events, and sometimes I'm just simply not in the mood at all.  This is actually much more frequent now than it was when I was younger.  I blame my general busy-ness for this, which makes firing up the extrovert subroutine more tedious and cumbersome when I'm already emotionally exhausted from doing so much.  But again, this set of circumstances was instrumental in allowing me to see past the subroutine that I ran, kind of subconsciously, to percieve my native introvert tendecy in sharper focus.

In any case, I'll be essentially on my own, with no social interaction to speak of with anyone at all, for at least a week, hopefully closer to two, as I drive out to the west and hike in the High Uintas Wilderness.  I can't wait to indulge my long-delayed need for solitude!

Y is for Yog-Sothoth

It's been a really long time since I did an A to Z post.  Good thing I didn't try and attempt the challenge over the course of 26 days!  I've been lingering near the end for a long time now, though, and I've had on my list Y is for Yog-Sothoth for a while now.  I've usually steered just a step or two shy of outright pastiche, without at least adding much of my own to it somehow, but in the case of Yog-Sothoth, I think he stands alone as he is quite well.

Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread.

Of course, what exactly in the world is Yog-Sothoth?  Known by various names or nicknames, including The Lurker at the Threshold, The Eater of Souls, 'Umr at-Tawil, and others.  Yog-Sothoth is considered by many to merely be a literary personification of the idea of using sorcery to travel between worlds to the Realms Beyond, both the somewhat more earthlike Near Realms, and the considerably more alien Far Realms.

But others believe Yog-Sothoth to be more than a literary device, and that it is indeed some kind of creature with a bizarre and inhuman perspective on space and time.  Cultists make fiendish sacrifices in the name of Yog-Sothoth, seeking knowledge or power.  And occasionally something answers.

One of the strangest cases, the details of which were purged and surpressed by Terassan authorities, but which are known to a few daring students of black esoterica, is that of the small village of Dunvicus.  The Green Book, which can be found in a few mouldering collections, tells of one Lavinia Vatleigh, a balshatoi woman who lived deep in the marshy hills outside of Dunvicus with her father, Old Man Vatleigh. Officially, her father was accused of incest when Lavinia became pregnant and gave birth to a strange boy, Vilbur, although the Old Man always denied it.  Yog-Sothoth himself was the father.  Vilbur was a strange child, who grew quickly and seemed intelligent after a fashion, but who always inspired loathing and dread where ever he want.  Vilbur disappears from the public record and the Green Book makes no mention of his eventual fate, although whatever sinister design Old Man Vatleigh had planned seems to have been thwarted, at least for the time being.  Shortly after Vilbur's disappearance, the Green Book makes reference to a garbled account of some kind of menace that nearly destroyed the entire village of Dunvicus entirely, and even today, several generations after the event, locals are suspicious and recalcitrant to speak with anyone who mentions the Unpleasantness, as they call it.  The Green Book suggests, horrifyingly, that Vilbur had a twin brother--one who resembled more closely his unearthly father, Yog-Sothoth, rather than his earthly mother Lavinia.

Otherwise, however, references to Yog-Sothoth are vague and sporadic.  The name is known to students of the occult, but much of his or its nature is not, nor is their agreement on who or what it is, if it is indeed a thing at all, and not just a cosmic principle like gravity, for instance.

The Green Book does make reference to Yog-Sothoth as a being of blasphemous glowing orbs and ever-changing shape.  Few take this literally.

Megafauna again

I'm a big fan of paleontology, and while dinosaurs have to be my first true paleontological love (of course) not far behind them are the therapsid and thecodont assemblages of the late Permian and Triassic--prior to the dominance of the dinosaurs--and the late Age of the Mammals: the Pleistocene megafaunas that we mostly just barely missed seeing.  Today, only Africa (and to a slightly lesser extent Asia) contain full, robust mammalian megafaunas.  Those of Europe, North America, South America, and Australia are impoverished.  (And Antarctica hasn't had a robust mammalian megafauna since at least the Grand Coupure, or Eocene-Oligocene Extinction Event of 34 million years ago.)

My initial thought, then, was that the DARK•HERITAGE would feature a North American Pleistocene fauna.  This is pretty much the same as the current fauna, but it adds a number of other players--big lions, sabertooths, mastodons and mammoths (mostly non-woolly, because I'm doing a more temperate climate), giant bears and beavers, giant camels and llama-like creatures, wild horses of various species, etc.

I decided to mix this up just a bit, although the details are somewhat esoteric and probably not of interest to many.  But they were to me.  I decided to use "bone-dogs" instead of dire wolves, because I thought they'd be a little more interesting and exotic.  "Bone-dogs" are what I call Borophagus diversidens, often called "bone-crushing dogs" because of their hyena-like jaw morphology.  These poor guys have unfairly been labeled scavengers, but given the numbers of them, that's seems fairly ridiculous.  Given the fact that hyenas have also been conclusively demonstrated, despite long-held prejudices to the contrary, to be successful active hunters who are often hanging around hoping to scavenge their own kills after lions have bullied them away from it, the idea of bone-dogs being obligate scavengers, or even primarily scavengers, seems intellectually bankrupt.

I also referred to hyenas in Kurushat earlier, when it was more overtly D&D-like, because it included gnolls as well.  This led me to decide that the southern shores of the Mezzovian Sea have a European-Central Asian Pleistocene megafauna, including cave hyenas, Elasmotherium and other hairy rhinos, cave lions, etc.  It isn't really terribly different from that of North America if you pave over minor differences--cave lions vs. American lions, tarpans vs. Equus scotti and other species of American horse, Columbian mammoths vs. steppe mammoths or straight-tusked elephants, ancient bison vs. steppe bison, red deer vs. elk, etc.  There are a few unique indicators, like hyenas and rhinos to Europe, and ground sloths, glyptodonts and various camelids to North America.  And besides, who really cares about the difference between a cave lion and an American cave lion anyway?

But lately, I've been somewhat obsessed with Patagonia.  I'm now putting it high on my list of desirable hikes, and I especially like that their hiking season is directly opposite that of North American mountains (the same is also true of the Southern Alps of New Zealand, by the way.)  It occurs to me, however, that I can get this fairly quickly in DARK•HERITAGE by focusing more on the flora than the fauna.  Lenga and ñirre trees instead of pines--maybe even some monkey puzzle trees instead of stuff like ponderosa or white pines and aspens or junipers.  Most of the animals of Patagonia, actually had close analogs during the Pleistocene in North America; in fact, most of them originally came from North America during the Great American Interchange.  There were some specific Pleistocene South American animals--like toxodons and Macrauchenia.  Gomphotheres and giant sloths are similar enough to mastodons and North American giant sloths.  Tapirs, guanacos and llamas are all animals that had Pleistocene North American counterparts.  A few flightless birds, like rheas, are about the only significant orphans that can be found in Patagonia but don't have analogs in North America, but I can add them if I want them, or not if I don't.

Why bother?  Eh.  It's just a minor detail.  Windswept lenga forests that turn orange and then red in the fall as opposed to conifer clad mountains aren't all that different.  Pampas and Great Plains--well, other than the rheas, what's the difference?  It's a bit of color that most people won't even notice.  But I would.

Clone Wars season six

The Clone Wars finally coming to Netflix, with thirteen all new, never before seen episodes is great news for Star Wars fans (and I certainly count myself as one of those.)  I've had the series on DVD, so this is actually the best I've ever seen them; in HD, on my bigger TV with the better stereo.  And what better way to kick that off than with all new episodes?

Unfortunately, I had a busy weekend, so I only got to see the first story arc--of four episodes.  I think it's probably not much of a spoiler to say that "protocol 66"--the engineered programing in all of the clone's mind that enables Order 66; the Jedi extermination order, remains undiscovered by the Jedi.  Revenge of the Sith would have had a hard time playing out as it did otherwise.

But it's interesting to see how this show has gotten progressively darker as the seasons have progressed.  Sure, there's still some silly Jar Jar episodes, or whimsical droid episodes, but we're also diving into pretty deep stuff, and pretty dark stuff, as the series led up to Revenge of the Sith.  It was originally the intention of the show's creators that the end of the series would dovetail perfectly into that movie, but because of the business reality of Disney's purchase of Lucasfilm, and their not surprising desire to get out of airing shows on a competitor's network (The Cartoon Network, in this case) it's tragic yet unsurprising to see that that goal remains incompletely fulfilled.  A similar thing happened to the great Marvel shows that were on at the time; the Avengers show, the Spectactular Spider-man show, etc. all moving aside to make room for DisneyXD shows with similar characters.

Luckily, however, Disney is fully onboard with the Netflix business model, and is putting stuff on Netflix fairly quickly.  And luckily, some of the replacement shows are pretty good.  I was initially quite sceptical of Spider-man and his Ultimate Friends; my somewhat tongue-in-cheek nostalgic nickname for the current show, but I have to admit that it's grown on me a bit, and it's not a bad show at all.  I have similar hopes that Star Wars Rebels will be as good as The Clone Wars was... but it won't be the Clone Wars, and that's a bit of a shame, really.

Ah... Patagonia!

For the most part, I've moved my hiking discussion to my hiking blog, so I don't clog up this blog with posts that are off topic, but I hope I can be indulged to make a generic one today.  I love hiking.  I love backpacking.  Because I have a typical cubicle job and a family, including older kids who are going to graduate from High School sooner than I'd like to think, I don't get to get out hiking and backpacking as much as I'd like.  My wife tries to be supportive, but since she has no interest in doing this herself, that leaves me on my own, and honestly; there is some psychological toll on leaving the family behind to go indulge a hobby that's exclusively my own for a week or two at a time.  Luckily, my younger boys are expressing a keen interest in the activity.  Although they're not (quite) big enough to carry a serious backpacking backpack into the wilderness yet, they're only a year or two away from it.  In fact, Little DARK•HERITAGE No. 3, who is twelve and about 5' tall right now (although I'd be surprised if he weighs more than 80 lbs.) thinks he's ready this summer, and I'm inclined to agree.  Although he'll have an even easier time of it in the next few years to come.

Luckily for me, I live in the US, which is blessed with some of the most beautiful, scenic, dramatic and amazing terrain to be found in the entire world.  I'm quite patriotic about the landscapes of my homeland, in fact--I've often said that I have no need to go abroad to go backpacking.  With all of the myriad destinations in the Rockies and the deserts of the Southwest, I'm probably good for most of the rest of my life, in fact--and that says nothing of the lands of the Great Lakes, the Sierra Nevadas, the Cascades, the Appalachians, etc.

However, the season in which to enjoy mountains in North America is fairly short.  It varies somewhat based on the depth and lateness of winter-time snow, but it is reliably July, August and September in the high country... and sometimes June and portions of October if you get lucky with your weather, or don't get too high in your elevation.

The southwest deserts, on the contrary, are best avoided during the height of summer; their hiking season is (mostly) the shoulders of that--March, April and May, September, October and November.  They're even doable in the winter sometimes.  And the far southern deserts, as found in places like Saguaro National Park or Big Bend National Park, can even reliably be hiked in December, January and February.

But, let's face it--while I can find options here, what I love the most are the mountains, and the season is too short.  I'm not reliably going to be available every year to hit the kinds of mountains I want to see in the northern hemisphere.  This has got me looking at other potential destinations in the southern hemisphere, where the reliable hiking season is January, February and March.

Thanks in part to the Tolkien movies filmed in New Zealand, the scenic appeal of that country has reached worldwide consciousness, but for my money, I've always been drawn to Patagonia.  I actually lived in Argentina for two years many years ago (over twenty, now) although I was in Buenos Aires province, on the Atlantic side.  Too far north (by a small margin) to be in Patagonia proper, and certainly too far east to benefit from any of the scenic grandeur of the Andes.  I am, however, despite the rustiness of my Spanish (or castellano, maybe I should say) quite comfortable with the notion of traveling in Argentina and Chile, and the Andes portion of them have been a source of backpacking destinations for some time, albeit somewhat quietly.  Patagonia is a wide, wild region--over 400,000 square miles.  Roughly equivalent in size to Ontario, or two and a half times that of California (about half again as large as Texas, although notably smaller than Alaska.) 

There's some great advantages, in fact, to backpacking in the Andes.  There's a notable lack of dangerous wildlife (no grizzlies, or even black bears!) and compared to many of the big destinations in the US, they are fairly undeveloped and still remote and relatively inaccessible... which keeps the crowds down.  Way down.

Here's a few of the destinations I'd like to add to my "to-do" list in the Patagonian Andes:

• Parque Nacional Los Glaciares [The Glaciers National Park] in Argentina.  Famous as the site of Monte FitzRoy and Cerro Torre, this wide, wild open area has relatively well-developed lodges/resorts and a trail system, and is wide open.  You just show up and start hiking in some of the most spectacular, glacially carved mountains in the world.  Then, when you're done with that, you take a bus to the southern portion of the park and watch calving glaciers coming down off of the Southern Patagonian Ice field (the largest continental ice other than the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps) into massive Lake Argentino.
• Future Pagagonia National Park, which is today, Reserva Nacional Jeinimini and Reserva Nacional Tamango, with Estancia Valle Chacabuco in between them, private land that is being developed to be donated to the park service of Chile.  It's open now to the public to enjoy as if it were a Wilderness Area or National Park in the US.  Beautiful scenery, called "The Yellowstone of Patagonia", this is one to watch.  I'd like to see it while it's still on "the ground floor" so to speak.
• Parque Nacional Torres del Paine [Paine Towers National Park] includes some of the most iconic mountainscapes in all of South America, if not the world.  Curiously, however, it's Monte FitzRoy from nearby Glaciares that was used for the old Patagonia clothing label.  But this is one of the best hikes in the world, according to connoisseurs of such things.
• Reserva Nacional Cerro Castillo -- a very lightly traveled, yet stunningly beautiful portion of the Andes.
• Lagos district -- I haven't really nailed down any specifics here, but the Bariloche disctrict was justly famous when I was in Argentina.  I'd love to climb up to Lago Frey, which is a famous rock-climbing destination.  I'm not really a technical rock-climber, but I appreciate the same kinds of formations that rock-climbers do, because they tend to be beautiful and dramatic.
• The Lonquimay and Tolhuaca volcanos--Andean Shastas or Rainiers, draped in monkey-puzzle tree forests.  Tons of other Araucanía volcanic sites, actually.  This is where they love to go to film the landscape portions of CGI dinosaur movies like Walking With Dinosaurs or Chased By Dinosaurs.  The black volcanic soil, dramatic mountains and ridges, and ancient-looking monkey puzzle trees make for a truly unique landscape.
• The Navarino circuit, around Navarino island, with the famous "Dientes" [Teeth of Navarino] mountain range down in the Tierra del Fuego area.