Microlite 20 Dark•Heritage revisions

I've released a new version of the m20 DARK•HERITAGE rules.  You can download the 27 page pdf on the DARK•HERITAGE page of this blog, clicking on the m20 logo on the side (it looks like a d20 landed on 20), or by simply following this link.  I've actually shortened the document slightly (although some of that may be due to formatting.)  The following bullet list summarizes the changes made:

• Sorcerer class was removed entirely.  Instead, I've added the Expert Class (which I already used in my m20 STAR WARS game, with "fantasy-ed up" affinities replacing some of the sci-fi ones.
• Magic is now available to anyone of any class who chooses to learn spells.  This format was borrowed more or less as is from the d20 Call of Cthulhu book, and it works very much the same way, although spells still have levels, because it's easier to do it that way then to customize the Sanity cost of each individual spell.  This means that "eldritch tomes" like The Necronomicon or The Book of Eibon had to be introduced overtly into the game rules.  That's not a bad thing at all.  The game retains it's "swashbuckling horror" vibe.  PCs can, of course, choose to forego magic altogether.  It's a much more cautious and sensible approach, in many ways.
• Fixed the ranges on ranged weapons.  Reading through them, it struck me how ridiculously short the ranges were in the prior version.
• Improved the use of Heroism points.  They were practically useless as they were at lower levels.
• Removed a small handful of spells and monsters that felt "too D&D" to fit the DARK•HERITAGE milieu.

These changes, other than the fairly significant upheaval in how magic works and the class associated with it (or not, as the case now is) don't change the game all that much.  For those who pay attention to that kind of thing, I consider it a revision, not a "new edition."  The previous changes I've made would be considered minor errata, not worth even a full decimal point; this revision would make it m20 DARK•HERITAGE v. 1.1.  I've fixed a few minor typographical errors and other changes, and for version control, I'm adding them as a second decimal point.  As of this typing, we're actually on version 1.1.4.  I don't anticipate that it would ever roll all the way to 2.0, and unless I think of something significant to change, I don't even anticipate a revision to 1.2.

A few developer comments on the changes.

The Heroism point change (and the ranged weapon change) make combat a little bit more effective and swashbuckling in feel.  On the other hand, the elimination of the sorcerer class and the adoption of a Cthulhu-like magic make magic less predictable and therefore a little bit scarier.  That said, for folks who like playing sorcerers, an Expert with a jacked up MND score (therefore, a nephilim would be best from a stat perspective) and the Sorcery affinity (maybe even taken more than once) is arguably actually better at casting spells than the Sorcerer would have been.  However, depending on your GM, you don't know for sure what spells you'll have in your repertoire.  It's not as simple as always counting on having magic missile or whatever, as you would in D&D--you may end up with an odd and eclectic spell list.

Anyway, check it out.  The entire document is only 27 pages (and that includes a page of OGL, a page of character sheet, a table of contents, a title page, and 3-4 pages of "discussion"--the rules themselves are fairly short.)  I'm always curious about feedback.

"Lovecraftian style"

Today, I'm going to "punt" and quote myself from an online discussion.  Of a while ago, sure.  But thematically on topic for this blog, nonetheless.

Originally Posted by pemerton 
I agree with this. I actually think even core D&D sometimes has problems in respect of scale - for instance, many D&D worlds involve maps done on the scale of actual Earth geography. But classic fantasy stories, even ones with mythic or legendary overtones, often do not require a large geographic area, or at least not an area that exists in any sort of actual detail (there can be journeying for many days and nights, but there is no actual concrete reality to those lands journeyed through).

I've been tinkering with a setting for years. Although I sketched out in very vague terms a global geography, I've really only detailed an area about the size and scope of the circum-Mediterranean. There's enough variety and geography there to keep me busy indefinitely.

 Originally Posted by pemertonThis also brings up another difficulty in my personal ability to really be moved by Lovecraft - I don't understand the aesthetics of asserting the impersonality and inhumanity (or perhaps non-humanity) of the cosmos, but then personifying it via all these beings who are in many cases quite anthropomorphic. I think you are right about Odin and Thor, but I think any personification in an anthropomorphic fashion produces that sort of outcome, if only by confining the sphere of perception and the sphere of causal influence. (In other words, for me Cthulhu can have the same problem Odin and Thor have, whom I agree with you are at odds with the Lovecraftian project.)

Well, keep in mind that the so-called "cosmic horror" being strongly attached to Lovecraft was a posthumous development; a work of interpretation by his fans and later scholars. Clearly Lovecraft himself didn't continuously and consistently use it. Although there are common threads through most of his stories, even then he used those same threads to weave all kinds of themes and tones, including Dunsanian fantasy, ("The DreamQuest of Unknown Kadath", for instance), more traditional horror/witchcraft stories ("The Haunter in the Dark" and its sequels, "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," even "The Dunwich Horror," etc.), localized monster stories ("The Shadow Over Innsmouth", "The Colour Out of Space." etc.) and straight up science fiction with only a thin veneer of horror ("At The Mountains of Madness", etc.)

And in most cases, Lovecraft was writing openly imitative works--"Kadath" can almost be considered a pastiche of Vathek, "The Dunwich Horror" can almost be considered a pastiche of "The Great God Pan," etc. So while the notion of cosmic horror crystallized under Lovecraft's watch, and he's rightly given credit for clearly articulating the notion first, not every story that has a mi-go, a Deep One, a vague reference to The Necronomicon, Cthulhu, or the Plateau of Leng is a story of cosmic horror. This is clearly true for even the body of work of Lovecraft himself, and as @fireinthedust pointed out, once you step into fellow writers of the Mythos circle, that is true even more strongly.

 Originally Posted by pemertonFrom memory, this is more-or-less how the option is presented in the "play this with D&D" notes for d20 CoC.

More or less, but the d20 CoC book strongly buys into the concept of the cosmic horror and bleakness side of Lovecraft's writings, and de-emphasizes (or even completely ignores) the many other times when Lovecraft referred to "Yog-Sothothery" as little more than a somewhat whimsical in-joke and reference tagging between him and his friends in the Weird Tales writers circuit. That gives the book a much better sense of thematic unity, and I'm sure it would have been a mistake to do otherwise, but at the same time, it kinda misses the point that to Lovecraft and his friends would have been much more obvious.

Originally Posted by pemerton Of that circle of writers, the only two whose works I know are Lovecraft and REH.

Which, sadly, I don't think are the best writers in the group. Although they are often more remembered because they articulated philosophies, which are often seen as as memorable as their stories. REH actually wrote a whole series of stories that were even more overtly Lovecraftian than his Conan stories (although for some reason, "The Black Stone" is the only one who's title I can think of off the top of my head.) Some writers like Henry Kuttner, E. Hoffmann Price, Frank Belknap Long or especially Robert Bloch went on to bigger and better things after they stopped dabbling in Lovecraftian style horror. August Derleth is nothing but derivative, although he added a number of new elements to the tone of the ouvre.

But the best writer of the group is almost certainly Clark Ashton Smith. He was already a successful and widely renowned poet before the market for his poetry kind of dried up and he turned to pulps to pay the bills. But he could write circles around Lovecraft or REH, easily. 

And he should be familiar to old-timey D&D players, since some of his work was specifically pastiched (if that's a verb) in the X2 - Castle Amber module.

Originally Posted by pemertonThere is the same idea of "a new dark age", a de-intellectualisation, as the way of coping with the knowledge that modernity brings.

Which you could arguably say has happened, although I think it's more fair to say that as our total knowledge base as humanity continues to grow, it just grows beyond the ability of any single person to really follow in all fields very well.

Although the notion that our knowledge of the scope of the cosmos will cause us to retreat in fear to anti-intellectualism seems... quaint, at best.

Originally Posted by pemertonI don't see REH as denying the bleakness so much as putting forward a different response, closer in some ways I think to Bertrand Russell's (and also, I would say moreso, Nietzsche's): that while the cosmos itself is valueless and empty, human self-creation - including moral self-creation - is a self-generating source of value. (I think there are also hints of vitalism in REH - down to his obsession with thews and sinews - so this moral self-creation is seen as part and parcel of the being of living creatures. This is another similarity to Nietzsche.)

Here, I'm talking more about tone than theme. I'd agree that Lovecraftian themes are frequent in Conan stories, but the tone of the stories is totally different, which was really my point in bringing them up in the first place. Fighting Cthulhu as high level D&D characters isn't inherently anti-Lovecraftian, because the themes can certainly be there, if the monsters are. I've also argued that fighting them isn't necessarily anti-Lovecraftian in tone either, but it certainly isn't if you look at REH's Mythos stories, for example. As you say; that's exactly what REH's characters do to them!

 Originally Posted by pemertonIn the first page or two of CoC, Lovecraft makes a passing reference to the vagaries of futurism and cubism. I think that the "cosmic horror/fantasy" of both Lovecraft and REH really is another expression of those sorts of modernist sensibilities that had been building up in the latter part of the nineteenth century but really peaked between the wars. @Celebrim has suggested that I have a failure of imagination, and that may be so: intellectually I can understand what was going on, but I find it hard to be correspondingly shocked or otherwise moved.

Then I don't see how that could be a failure of imagination. I can imagine Lovecraft's point of view. I can understand it. But that doesn't I mean I don't think it's a load of rubbish. Being frightened of non-Euclidean geometry is complete rubbish, unless someone were to put some problems in front of me and demand that I show that I remember how to solve them. If anything, the scope of the cosmos as we now understand it is so much vaster and more complex than even Lovecraft could possibly have imagined.

In fact, it's not too out there to say that the notion of being afraid of the true knowledge of the cosmos is a highly traditionalist, and even unimaginitive point of view--the inability to imagine grappling with knowledge that now, after nearly a century of rapid scientific discovery, seems so routine.

Although that's not really fair to him, because it's much easier to say that with the benefit of decades of hindsight.

 Originally Posted by fireinthedustActually, what I was pointing out is that there are elements of Mythos horror in the fantasy writing of other creators. Howards stories have heroes in them. He doesn't do the frightened, frail intellectual that Lovecraft writes: he did a story for Lovecraft with such a character, but he was the companion of a cowboy-type who save the day.

Right; didn't mean to inadvertenty seem to mischaracterize you. Rather, I meant that there are different approaches in tone to dealing with the Lovecraftian. Even within Lovecraft's own body of work. Once you add to that the other authors in the ouvre, you get significant differences. The approach of a character of REH's or Brian Lumley to a Lovecraftian monster is going to be very different than some fictional tweedy New England intellectual.

 Originally Posted by fireinthedustKeep in mind we're talking post-world war 1 fiction. What you folks are getting at here is NOT the horror of the cosmos or quantum physics. It's the horror of TRAUMA: something happens that you don't have the language for.
This is the horror of shell shock, of being failed by the institutions and leaders that you trusted. That's what the mythos represent.

Considering that neither REH nor Lovecraft served in the military, nor lived in an area that was occupied or otherwise directly influenced by the war, I'd find that interpretation a bit sketchy. If they were utilizing the concept of trauma, it was the kind of everyday exposure to change that has happened to everyone who's ever lived at any point of time in our world, more or less.

One could argue that both of them were ill-equipped personally to deal with trauma, and therefore "everyday" trauma affected them more than most, I suppose (actually, that argument would be quite easy to make for both of them. They both greatly feared and loathed the notion of change, in many ways.) But that interpretation of their writing requires building speculation on assumptions on a foundation of speciousness. It sounds logical, but it's ultimately completely undemonstrateable.

 Originally Posted by fireinthedustGranted, Lovecraft believed that the savage was wrong, that civilization was man's natural state. Howard thought the opposite: barbarism = natural, civilization is corrupting. What Howard was really writing about was how his beautiful Texan wilderness was being taken over by these oil rigs and towns. The language he knew for life was being destroyed.
That's Trauma and that's the stuff of the Mythos.

Howard's approach to barbarism was more complicated than that, especially since the barbarians are probably best represented by exactly those rough and tumble oil field blue collar workers you're referencing. While the Picts are never presented as positive in any sense whatsoever, other barbarians such as the Cimmerians (obviously), the Aesir and the Vanir are portrayed as romanticized noble savages, not unlike the frequent 19th century romanticization of the Gauls, the Goths, and the other noble savages who brought down the corrupt and decadent Roman Empire. 

In any case, I think the trauma of the oil business coming to town is a way too simplistic interpretation of Howard's approach to the Mythos horror. Besides, the oil boom started when he was just an extremely young boy. It's unlikely that he even had any significant memories of a way of life prior to the oil boom. If he'd lived even five years later, he'd have seen the end of the oil boom, and then he might have been able to write about the completely different trauma of work and livelihood drying up for people all around him. But that's neither here nor there.

And I've been to Cross Plains and other areas around Abilene. It ain't no beautiful wilderness! Even back then, it was more empty ranchland and farmland than wilderness anyway.

 Originally Posted by pemerton @fireinthedust, I agree that the Great War is an important factor in the modernist outlook overall. For many, it kills romanticism dead. (Not all, obviously - eg Tolkien.)

Nor REH, for that matter. There's a strong element of romanticism inherent in Howard's work too--especially if you look beyond the Conan stories. Even Lovecraft wasn't immune to it.

 Originally Posted by pemertonNot to mention the death of the narrator's grand-uncle "after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro".

That's a perfect example of the way in which Lovecraft's stories haven't necessarily aged well. While he thought that phrase might have been vaguely threatening or disquieting, "a nautical-looking negro" just makes me want to chuckle.

Lovecraft's philosophy might have been influential in its time, but I think it was more his approach to writing and his introduction of new themes that made him influential in literature. His philosophy is merely a window view into a very odd-sounding and short-lived approach to the world that can't possibly have much currency in a world in which secular humanism is relatively common--and which embraces almost the entirety of Lovecraft's philosophy without being afraid of it.

Rather, his approach to alien life as truly alien was a remarkable insight that has influenced horror and science fiction writers for decades (although it too has its predecessors like Arthur Machen or David Lindsay.) His approach of ancient secret histories of the world has been a lasting influence that has informed all kinds of work and can be seen as the foundation of stuff likeThe X-files and more. His influence was more about what he brought to the genre of horror writing in particular; taking it beyond the Gothic and into the modern, than it was about his philosophy.

Bone desert

Another image that I don't know what to do with, but which is too cool to not do something!  Found it just messing around with Google Image Search.

#RPGaDay concluded

#25: Favorite RPG no one else wants to play.  Hmm... Not sure.  I've trimmed my more esoteric tastes a bit, and with my group, we can usually get people on board for at least an experimental run.  But I'll say Call of Cthulhu even though it's not literally true (three of us in our group love the game) because there is a fair bit of resistance from the other three or four players.  Dread is another one that's too out there to ever be more than an unusual one-shot very rarely, and I'd like to play it more.  I've had a great time with it in the past.

#26: Coolest character sheet.  I don't really care much about character sheets.  If I can't write my character on a piece of notebook paper like I used to in the 80s, then something is wrong.  For most d20 games, which I mostly play, I use the official character sheets printed out blank and hand-written in with pencil.  Any other character sheet (for those games) now feels wrong to me.

#27: Game You'd Like to see a new/improved edition of...  Again; I don't really know.  I think these questions are more geared towards people who play stuff a bit more out of the box without modification than I am wont to do.  I don't really need a new version of anything, and in fact, I tend to dislike new versions for its own sake.  I also tend not to love system for its own sake (although I'm always tinkering with improvements) so if there's something I'd like to play in terms of setting or theme, my favorite approach is to take my already favorite system and modify it.  With the proliferation of d20 and m20 variants, I honestly don't think I ever need a new game ever again.  Most of my "old" favorites that I'd like to revisit for nostalgia's sake (if for nothing else) I can replicate easily with those systems.  Most have, in fact, already been done so (Star Frontiers, Star*Drive and Dark○Matter being replicated explicitly in d20 Modern for instance.)  I suppose if I have to pick something, I'd like to see an explicit Lovecraftian bestiary for m20, at which point I'd have everything I could possibly need to replicate Call of Cthulhu in that system.

#28: Scariest Game you've ever played.  I'm not honestly creeped out by games, the way I'm not really very creeped out by ghost story movies or books either.  I like the genre a lot, but in terms of actually feeling scared enough for it to be memorable... I don't think that's ever happened.  Sorry.

#29: Most memorable encounter.  Lots of memorable encounters over my gaming "career", but I'll pick this one.  I still remember, probably more than most other encounters, one in our Age of Worms game in which some really tough outsider materialized in front of us.  My character, a shifter with the ability to basically "pounce" had the highest initiative, so I jumped in and did a crazy 1/3 of its total hit points in a single round (ah, barbarians!)  The sorcerer in the group then attempted to banish the creature, which was of course statistically very unlikely.  Of course, unlikely doesn't mean impossible.  The big bad evil thing rolled a natural 1 on its saving throw.  Before it even had a chance to act at all in initiative order, it was thoroughly defeated.

I think it took us a good fifteen minutes to calm down and quit high-fiving each other and laughing at that.

#30: Rarest RPG owned.  I don't think much about rarity, and mostly I play well-known and readily available games.  However, given that I tinker with homebrews and independent web-published games, I'd probably have to say something like m20 or DINO PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND or something.  I don't know if it's really rare or not, but its certainly indie.

#31: Favorite RPG of all time.  Tough one.  Based on how much I've played, I'd have to pick D&D 3.5.  Based on how much I'd like to play, I'd have to pick m20.  My favorite game for tone is probably Call of Cthulhu.

#RPGaDay continued

#19: Favorite published adventure.  I don't use a lot of published adventures.  By virtue of having used it the most, I have to pick "Exit 23" for this one, though--the one-shot (and potential campaign kick-off) included in the original DARK°MATTER setting book (for the Alternity system (although I've only ever run it for other systems, mostly d20 Modern.  Now, that makes it sound like I'm somewhat hedging and that I wouldn't necessarily pick it as my favorite.  I think that I have to go and say that yes, it is.

With more exposure to more adventures, it's certainly possible that I'd have picked others, of course.  But like I said, I rarely use published adventures.

#20: Will still play in 20 years time.  I dunno.  Who can say?  Probably some form of D&D, but exactly what form is TBD.

#21: Favorite Licensed RPG.  Some variety of Star Wars no doubt.  At least, that's my favorite setting to adapt from fiction to an RPG.  That said, both the Star Wars game that I'm in now and the Star Wars game I'd like to run myself are both homebrew systems, not one of the (several) official licensed games out there.  Eh.

#22: Best Secondhand RPG Purchase.  I don't buy a lot of second-hand purchases, really.  But I'll say that picking up the original DARK°MATTER campaign setting from a friend probably has to be it.  For a long time, that was my go-to pseudo-X-files setting.  Now, I'd rather just kitbash my own using a mishmash of urban myths, traditional horror mythos and some Yog-Sothothery for good measure.

#23: Coolest looking RPG product/book.  Oh, heck--I dunno.  I suppose I was always a fan of the boxed sets with the Larry Elmore art.  You know; the original BECMI stuff. And I think the Iron Kingdoms products are incredibly attractive; bordering on art books as much as RPG books.  But if I have to pick one product as the coolest looking regardless of content other than cool-looking, I'll probably have to pick The Art of Dragon Magazine.

#24: Most complicated RPG owned.  d20, I'm sure.  I don't often go in for very complicated RPGs, and when I've inadvertently ended up with one, I usually don't keep it.  d20 is clearly the most complicated RPG that I own and intend to continue owning.

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.