DarkDND

I've decided that I'll take up the further adventures of Rodrico and Francesca on the wiki that I designed especially for taking up the further adventures of Rodrico and Francesca.

Link here: http://darkdnd.wikispaces.com/

Sorry for the lame name, DarkDnD. I had to think of something quick and that's what I got. That brings to mind another thought I've had about designing fantasy worlds. Few fantasy worlds lack names; it helps the reader distinguish that world from the real world, or from other fantasy worlds, for that matter. Oddly, the real world doesn't really have a name; it's just "the world" or "earth." I sometimes wonder if Earth is a slight mistranslation of the Latin Terra; if what was actually meant was "land" to distinguish it from the oceans and seas.

In any case, it's not really a name. Even Terra isn't really a name, as some sci-fi writers like to use, it's just an ancient tradition to use the Latin name that has been revived to give a slight ring of authenticity and formality, but once you realize that Terra is just the Latin word for earth (or land) then some of that mystique dries up.

Although I certainly don't claim to have done an exhaustive survey, it strikes me that few cultures on our world (in fact, I can't think of a single one) have actually named the world anything other than variants on "the world." Why would they? As far as most of them knew, it was a singular thing. There's no need to name something if there's just one of them. Likewise, most cultures call the sun simply "the sun" and the moon simply "the moon" when translated out of their native languages; because they're also singular entities. They knew of nothing to which to compare them, so there was no need to name them.

So I've given some thought in fantasy worldbuilding exercises, either for gaming or for fiction, to the question. If the inhabitants of your fantasy world have a name for the world, why do they use that name and what does it mean? It's not enough simply to have a cool sounding name "just because." Well, maybe it is, but at least it makes me sit up and wonder why. If it's just for the reader's convenience, that's one thing, but I like to make at least a brief nod towards an "in setting" reason for the name to exist.

For my Dark•Heritage setting, the world is called Kael. However, in that setting, ancient traditions held forth that humanity originally came from another world, therefore they always were cognizant of the idea that there were other worlds beside their own. Knowing of other worlds meant that they needed to name them to distinguish them; otherwise, "the world" begs the question "which world?" Kael, therefore, is an ancient word from very primitive languages that has survived as a relic and which originally meant "new home".

The other setting I've been tinkering with lately I call Jovis. That's a name that I came up with on the fly, and it's not very clever (Jovis is based on the archaic Latin Iovis. The compound Iovis Pater—Father Jove—is the source of the word Jupiter. I used that because Jovis is a world as large as Jupiter; albeit one with a much lesser density, such that the surface gravity is the same as our world.) That's the whole sordid tale of the origin of the name Jovis, and it's really for reader convenience, and in setting the world is rarely named—except by those who travel beyond it. Which of course are very few people, but the main characters of that setting are some such people. My idea there is that few people on Jovis know or use the name Jovis, and that the characters really only learn the name from those they visit outside of the world, or from other travelers who had to come up with a name for the world.

By the way, I fully admit that DarkDnD is an even worse name than Jovis. At the time I created the wiki I had given absolutely no thought to naming the setting; I just wanted someplace I could doodle with the ideas behind it.

Catalan, Occitan, Galician, etc.

So, I googled up some Catalan placenames, and I ended up finding some website that had place names for minority languages all over the place. I got a great list of Catalan names (side by side with the more well-known Spanish or French ones), Occitan placenames, Galician placenames, Aragonese place names and Asturian (I quit after those, but that barely scratched the surface.) I also got a census of names (in Catalan, mostly) from Valencia in 1510, which I thought was really interesting.

So, after trawling around in these fantastic and relatively unknown (in the Anglophone world, anyway) languages, I've come up with the brother/sister team of daemon hunters, Rodrico d'Arnau Domènechoz and Francesca de Sperança Domènechoz. They're twins; but poor Francesca got the short end of the stick when she was born a tiefling—her twin brother is full human.

Orphaned at a relatively young age, but heirs to a modest property in the idyllic and pastoral provincial upcountry of Calça, they were raised as wards of the Church at a small priory in Baix Colomers by a strict and hard (yet kindly underneath it all) man of the cloth. This man, Pare Bartomeu de Nicolau Fontanills was very conservative in his outlook, very wary of heresy or anything untoward. Of course, raising a tiefling child also made him a bit paranoid, and perhaps he overdid it to some extent. In his attempts to ensure that the children didn't fall into darkness themselves, and simultaneously to protect them from suspicion (mostly by trying to ensure as few people even knew about them as possible) he actually incited their curiousity about daemonology and Francesca's darker heritage, as well as giving them an insatiable desire to travel and see all the things that the poor pare denied them.

Despite these mistakes (or possibly exacerbating them) the pare arranged for the best possible education for his wards; they were trained in languages, art, math, science, geography, and fencing, and learned woodcraft and other more practical skills that would help them eventually manage the estate they were to inherit. That never came to be.

Ironically, it was not Francesca, the overtly daemonic-featured sibling who engaged in questionable behavior, it was her brother Rodrico who tampered with forbidden arts, summoning spirits from beyond the world and binding them to his service. While not an overtly evil thing to do, it is one that is heretical and that people fear greatly, equating it (by definition) with witchcraft.

Word of the twins; who had the appearance of daemons (which would be true for Rodrico too when manifesting the sign of a vestige) caused a riot of the peasantry in peaceful little Baix Colomers in which poor Pare Fontanills was killed and Rodrico and Francesca barely escaped with their lives.

More on the twins soon... I've actually started up a space to talk about this stuff. http://darkdnd.wikispaces.com.

Italo Disco Top 20

I stumbled across a site (http://www.italo-disco.net/) that has a "Top 20" of the genre on it, and I thought I'd do the same just for fun. The author of that site has more exposure to the genre than I do, but I still have enough to narrow down twenty of my favorites and still have lots left over.

These are simply in alphabetical order by artist:

1. Bad Boys Blue "Pretty Young Thing" — This one skirts the edges of the definition of italo-disco somewhat, but since that definition is pretty arbitrary, and this sounds exactly like an italo-disco song, I'm letting it it slide. Plus, it was part of one of the Gapul megamixes I picked up in Argentina, which was so very formative to my awareness of the genre in the first place. Sadly, I just learned that the lead vocalist died (at the age of 50) from a sudden heart attack earlier this year.
2. Baltimora "Tarzan Boy" — For a very long time, this was the only italo-disco song that I knew of, and I wouldn't have called it italo-disco if I hadn't seen it on some Gapul megamixes also and realized that it fit right in. This gets a few bonus points for cracking into the American and British markets; something no other italo-disco song ever did.
3. Brian Ice "Talking to the Night" — I'm leaning heavily on the old Gapul megamixes as source material, because that's where I first heard so many of these songs (and therefore, cemented them as favorites in my mind even after I started branching out beyond them.) This was literally the first song on the first mix I heard, and it's been a favorite ever since.
4. Den Harrow "Future Brain" — Great song, and apparently a real chart-topper on the continent years ago. Sadly, Den Harrow has recently undergone a Milli Vanilli style controversy; apparently the frontman was merely a model lip synching while other people sang the lyrics. Still; good song. Classic of the genre.
5. Fancy "Bolero" — Fancy has the dubious honor of being one of the weirdest looking italo-disco stars. He's also a German and supposedly is a good friend to Siegfried and Roy. Wow. Anyway, I like this song; it's very overblown and overly dramatic, but that's part of the fun. Nobody said these guys took themselves seriously; after all they were disco artists.
6. Fun Fun "Baila Bolero" — unlike the superficially similar synthpop genre, female vocalists were relatively common in italo-disco, and this is a great example of two Italian gals singing about a fling with a Spaniard. Ivana Spagna is also supposedly some of the musical talent behind the two front-girls; she was a notable italo-disco star in her own right (although not one that I'm particularly fond of, as it happens.)
7. Hivoh "To Be Together" — the sappy teen angst in the lyrics here makes it particular fun. He can't go back to class because they're broken up? Haha. The deadly serious and dark nature of the music accompanying these terribly cheesy lyrics is the icing on the cake. A feature of the genre in general is really bad lyrics, though—I mean, these artists obviously didn't really speak English very well, and not only are the lyrics really bad but so is the delivery of them.
8. Hot Cold "Love is Like a Game" — another really fun disco song with female vocals (and another one of my original Gapul favorites.)
9. Ken Laszlo "Tonight" — I've already posted the video here earlier; this is probably my single favorite italo-disco song. It's a close call, though.
10. Miko Mission "Two For Love" — Although "How Old Are You?" is probably (marginally) a bigger hit, this one wins because I heard it first, and asking a girl if she's old enough to date or not is really creepy.
11. Mirage "No More No War" — The sheer chutzpah of recording a song with these lyrics is part of its charm; they're dreadfully sappy and vapid, while giving the superficial appearance of being timely and politically deep. Oh, well. Mostly I just like the beat. Some nice synthlines on this one.
12. P. Lion "Happy Children" — P. Lion did a number of songs which are all pretty good, if a bit disposable, but this one actually stands out from that crowd as a bit more substantive and having a bit more artistic merit. Not too much, mind you, but enough to stand out.
13. R. Bais "Dial My Number" — Great song. Decent lyrics, which is a change.
14. Radiorama "Chance to Desire" — I struggled a bit with which Radiorama song to include, as they actually have a good half dozen or more than are all great songs. Radiorama is another one that wasn't content to be "just" disco music, and they had a number of surprisingly thoughtful and musically deft songs. This one is my favorite of the bunch, though.
15. Raff "Self Control" — Another song that I heard on a Gapul megamix, but it also is one of my favorites overall. It seemed really familiar to me, even though I doubt I could have heard it when it was current, but Laura Branigan remade it and it was a minor hit in the states by her.
16. Sandy Marton "People From Ibiza" — Sandy Marton had a small string of hits, including "Exotic and Erotic", and "Camel By Camel" and a few others. This one is my favorite. I wasn't aware of Ibiza's reputation as a party island until I looked into it after hearing this song, too.
17. Savage "Only You" — I was very tempted to put "Don't Cry Tonight", which is probably a bigger hit for Savage, but I think I like "Only You" a little bit more. They sound very similar anyway; "Don't Cry Tonight" is almost somnambulant it's so slow now. I have to remind myself, but my version is one that I ripped to mp3, opened up in an audio manipulation software, and speeded the tempo up a bit. It's still slowish (and it needs to be) but it's not too slow.
18. Silent Circle "Touch in the Night" — Silent Circle was another hit machine, cranking out several songs that are well remembered today. This is probably their most successful and—you probably guessed it—appeared prominantly in my favorite Gapul megamix.
19. Silver Pozzoli "Around My Dream" — Despite the clunky lyrics, this is a fun song. Relatively chipper, despite it's laid-back tempo, this is one of the great "feel good" songs of the genre.
20. Taffy "I Love My Radio" — A big hit in the UK; unusual for the genre, yet still unknown in the States for the most part. Very nice female vocalist.

If I could admit an even looser definition of "the genre" that included some other club-oriented music from the same time frame, many of it very similar in nature, I'd also add Bobby O's "She Has a Way", Vicious Pink's "Take Me Now", Man 2 Man's "Male Stripper", Paul Lekakkis' "Boom Boom (Let's Go Back to My Room)", Dead or Alive's "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)" and C.C.C.P.'s "American Soviets." But for now, I'm going to be more strict in genre definition and leave them out of the count.

I'll also point out that youtube has most of these songs on it, if you want to hear them, and the link I presented at the very beginning of the post has very low quality mp3 samples of most of them as well.

Latin names

Considering the fact that as a teenager I learned Spanish pretty fluently and have had an abiding interest in Latin languages ever since, it's a little bit odd, if you think about it, that I never thought of using Latin names for fantasy. I don't mean actual, honest-to-goodness Latin; I mean the various descendents of vulgar Latin; i.e., the Romance languages of today.

It took barsoomcore to show me the light; when I first read about his homebrew Barsoom setting (no relation to Edgar Rice Burroughs' world of the same name; except some vague similarities in tone and ecology). And he had a nation that used Spanish sounding names. barsoomcore's Barsoom was already a big "click" for me; which is unsurprising seeing how similar it was in many ways to ideas I had at the time I first read about it, but this idea of using Spanish names, simple as it may have been, was something that had never occured to me and seemed like a great idea.

As I've poked around a bit, I've actually decided to make it a little—but not much—more exotic than that. Rather than using actual Spanish, I've been combing through namelists and dictionaries of Galician, Catalan, Provençal (or Occitan) and Romanian, with occasional Italian as well, and going with that. Other times, I simply take Spanish words and names and subtly alter them manually so that they feel familiar—but not too familiar. One wants to give the impression that ones setting is more exotic than southern California, at least.

This goes back to my theory—which is really the point I was trying to make—that too exotic isn't exactly helpful. I was recently reading a Lin Carter book on the fantasy genre, which I thought was turgid and spectacularly non-academic, despite it's claims to the contrary. Carter himself is no huge name junkie (I still wince at his princess Darloona in his own Barsoom ripoff, the Jandar of Callisto books) and he held out a number of Lord Dunsany's worst names as models to be striven for. H. P. Lovecraft also criticized his friend and fellow pulpster Robert E. Howard for using real-like names instead of bizarro combinations of consonants and vowels that can't even be properly pronounced, thinking that it ruined the verissimilitude of the world as a fantasy construct or something.

I think both of them missed the boat there; people in general, when subjected to really difficult or unusual words and names, tend to gloss over them, forget them and mix them up. There's a time in fantasy when you want to wow your audience with how exotic and fantastic your setting is, and the names is not that time. You want names that are easy for the audience to latch onto, that are familiar (but not too familiar) enough that they can relate to them.

Which is why I've decided that I really like using these slightly off-kilter and unfamiliar Romance languages like Provençal, Catalan, etc. as a source. They sound close enough to Spanish or Italian that nobody gets lost in the names, yet exotic enough that they don't sound like they're actually Spanish or Italian names.

Italo Disco

I can't recall if I've blogged about italo disco in the past or not. I'm a fan of the stuff; but let's face it, in most of the Anglophone world, nobody even recognizes what it is. I only discovered its existance when I lived in Argentina for a couple of years (1991-1993) and by that time, honestly, it was already old news.

Italo disco is basically a linear descendent of actual disco music. By the mid-80s it had developed into something that can be distinguishable as a seperate subgenre all its own. Italo disco is characterized, usually, by having a steady, danceable beat (usually performed by a drum machine), and rather spacey, overtly analog synthesizer based sounds. Its almost all continental European; Italians (not surprisingly) and Spaniards making up a fairly large number of the artists. Although native English speakers rarely dabbled in the genre, most of it features English lyrics, often performed by singers who are clearly barely (if that) proficient in the language. Although some have a bit of a darker sound, mostly the genre is upbeat, peppy and poppy. The best way to describe it is simply that it's fairly cheesy synthpop of mid-80s vintage from non-Anglophone countries.

Only one true italo disco song is well-known to Americans and the British, and that's Baltimora's "Tarzan Boy" although some few sources also list Laura Branigan (of "Gloria" fame) as either italo disco or Hi-NRG, and Taffy's "I Love My Radio" was also popular in the UK, if still unknown in the US. Hi-NRG is a linear descendant of italo disco and it is often difficult to make a meaningful distinction between the two save that Hi-NRG (also known as Eurobeat) usually hasa higher BPM (Beat Per Minute). Hi-NRG has at least one band that was a genuine hit in the US: Dead or Alive of "Brand New Lover" (and others) fame.

I'm certainly not a fan of italo disco because it's serious music, with impressive claims to musicallity and artistic merit; I just think the stuff is fun. Like I said, I encountered it in Argentina, a few years after its heyday, when I found some old cassette tapes by mix artists Gapul, who created a series of "megamixes"—songs that contained fragments of numerous other songs strung together. After trying (with quite a bit of difficulty until recently, when the global internet made such things a little bit easier) to track down the tracks singly, I've managed—slowly—to build up a modest collection of some of the best that the genre has to offer.

To hear some cool italo tracks without going to all the trouble that I did, you could check out Youtube.

Here's Brian Ice's "Talking to the Night"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtQeFshXAxs

Here's Ken Lazlo's "Tonight"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFwjTefo_bg

Here's Den Harrow's "Future Brain"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiABmaH6LLE

Here's Sandy Marton's "People From Ibiza"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrdShjy53Y8

While this can't possibly be the original video, here's Hot Cold's "Love Is Like a Game." Mistitled in this video, sadly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XGhO-jVYmI

Classics

Over the last few days, Julie and I have been watching a bunch of older movies. Classics, really. Stuff that everybody knows of, most people have seen, yet which we haven't seen in so long that our memories of the movies are hazy, or movies that we inexplicably missed over the years.

So far, I watched Casablanca and The Philadelphia Story with Julie, and then I watched High Society on my own. I'm not actually sure that High Society is a classic in the same sense; I don't know if it's well remembered or well-known today. I also don't know how I missed it; it was clearly one of my father's favorite movies ever; he watched it frequently as we grew up, and played the soundtrack (on vinyl!) all the time as well. So I knew all the songs, even though I hadn't ever seen the movie.

For those of you who don't know, it was a musical remake of The Philadelphia Story; which was itself a pretty famous movie starring Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart—in fact, it's Jimmy Stewart's only Best Actor Oscar.

That it's a musical isn't surprising when you notice that they cast Bing Crosby in the Cary Grant role and Frank Sinatra in the Jimmy Stewart role. In fact, it was the first (and one of the very few) times that the two of them were on screen together, singing together. Frank Sinatra was purportedly wooed to the part for the opportunity just to sing that duet ("Well Did You Evah?" being the duet in question.)

It's disappointing to me that neither The Philadelphia Story nor High Society is really the definitive take on the story, though. High Society is more modern, in color, and features that absolutely superb Grace Kelly in the lead femme role—in her last role, as it turns out; she was already married and was Princess Grace of Monaco by the time the movie hit theaters, and the engagement ring "prop" she used in the movie was her actual engagement ring—(Grace Kelly is probably my favorite star of the "Golden Age" of Hollywood, and probably my favorite actress ever; although Ingrid Bergman and Olivia de Havilland give her some stiff competition) and the songs are top-notch, giving this movie an edge over its predecessor in that regard. I did enjoy the cast and chemistry between them more too; particularly between Crosby and Kelly, where I thought Grant and Hepburn strangely enough didn't hit a good chemistry. Considering all the times they played opposite each other, that was kinda bizarre, but maybe I'm biased—I've never really liked Katherine Hepburn that much.

However, the plot and character development is severely truncated (maybe in the interest of adding all the songs without dramatically increasing the running time? Actually the run times are within a minute of each other, which is kinda funny.) Be that as it may, the movie felt rushed and without sufficient motivation and character development, some of the plot developments would have seemed inexplicably dense if I hadn't just seen The Philadelphia Story a few nights earlier so I could fill in the gaps.

Imaro

I've recently got my hands (via Interlibrary Loan) on the reprinted Imaro "novel"; really a collection of short-stories laced together as a pseudo-narrative. This was initially published some twenty-five odd years ago and failed for a variety of reasons (some of them coincidental, some of them due to the poor marketing strategy of the publisher, DAW books—for some reason nobody wants to say that the quality of the books themselves might be a factor.) They've recently been republished in trade paperback form by a small-press company, Night Shade books. http://www.nightshadebooks.com/

Anyway, I'm somewhat amused by the writer, publisher, and friend who wrote the introduction (none other than Charles De Lint) making the claims that Imaro was something really unique and extraordinary, that it specifically was not Tarzan and Conan, but black, because... honestly, that's exactly what it is.

Charles Saunders (the author) does for Africa what Robert E. Howard did for Europe and the Near East with the Hyborian Age, and for pretty much the same reason; so he can get the benefit of alluding (wink, wink) to real life cultures without feeling constrained to get every little detail right, as well as allowing him to freely mix and match cultures that in reality did not coexist at the same time. Sadly, Saunders, convinced he was doing something really unique in doing it for Africa, goes too far; he rather "cleverly" explains that cows are called ngombe, lions are called nganeh, etc. and then proceeds to use the Swahili words throughout. The only thing he's doing that's different from Howard, is that he's showing off the setting he's so proud of, the source material behind it that he's so proud of, and his knowledge of that source material, which he's also so proud of. Imaro reads like a rather self-congratulatory work of fiction. Although I'm sure some fans enjoy being exposed to African tradition (and are unwilling to go directly to the source material themselves for whatever reason) and that interests them, but it really bogs down the narrative and hurts the storytelling badly, in my opinion. Fiction—especially pulp, Sword & Sorcery, which needs to be fast-moving and exciting—is a poor vehicle for the rather ham-fisted polemic and social agenda that Imaro represents.

As well, if one can be allowed to make a genuine complaint about Howard's Conan, it's that he's often portrayed as a rather unflattering Mary Sue; he's too competent, overly idealized, lacks any noticable flaws, and rather obviously stands in for Howard's own wish-fulfilment fantasies of himself. Imaro takes these same flaws and amplifies them; Saunders makes no secret that if somehow Tarzan and Conan (to whom Imaro is often compared) were to appear suddenly in the same story with Imaro, Imaro would outclass them both.

That said, if you can get past these rather tedious flaws, the setting is imaginitive, and worth a read for that alone. But honestly, reading it, it felt constantly like I was being preached to, and that the author was showing off his research into African folklore rather than simply concentrating on telling good, interesting stories. I suspect that the claim that the one-month printing delay on the original printing of the novel (to avert a lawsuit from the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs over a poorly chosen tagline on the original cover) being the main factor in Imaro's less than impressive sales is as much wishful thinking as is Imaro's own super-competence.

Musicality

Well, according to my definitions, anyway, there are about six bands "of some consequence" that count as Depeche Mode imitators. Of course, there's lots more than that, but I'm talking about bands "of some consequence"---meaning bands that either had a few minor hits during the late 80s or early 90s, or went on to become prolific leaders of the synthpop scene after it's nosedive to the underground. Cause & Effect, Camouflage, Red Flag and Seven Red Seven count as the former, and Mesh, De/Vision and also Camouflage and Red Flag count as the latter.

I've got the first CD's of each of those six on my mp3 player right now, and I've gone through them a few times now whilst commuting. Here's a few observations:

• Cause & Effect is the weakest of the bunch. While they have some great songs ("The Echoing Green," "Another Minute," and "You Think You Know Her") the rest of the songs feel like filler, and the schtick of being "the Depeche Mode imitators who were English majors in college and make literary references here and there" is a weak schtick.
• Camouflage and Seven Red Seven both have songs ("They Catch Secrets" and "Everybody Lies" respectively) that sound like they're trying to be their answer to Depeche Mode's "Blasphemous Rumours." They're not as good, of course, but they do well enough at capturing some of the same morose atmosphere.
• Red Flag and Mesh both seem to be more dance oriented than the others. Oh; I didn't use Mesh's actual first CD, which would have been Fragile; I used Original '91-'93 which was released later but which were the first recorded songs. In general, where the groups do straight up club songs, they seem more successful; they're slower songs are not as good. With some few exceptions.
• Camouflage and De/Vision both have pretty thick German accents and occasional bad grammer. Camouflage cleaned that up fairly well in more recent releases, but De/Vision still suffers from that today.
• They all have slightly different twists on the "I sound like Depeche Mode" theme; Red Flag is more hardcore club oriented, Camouflage (at least on their first CD) gets a nice melancholy, dreamlike quality to most of their songs, Seven Red Seven has a trance and house mixture with a lot of vocal samples, etc.

Firstborn

My wife just wrote this tribute to our oldest son, Spencer. Check it out! I like it.

I happened to have "The Luckiest" by Ben Folds (formerly of Ben Folds Five.) Made me cry.

http://juliedyal.blogspot.com/2008/03/tribute-to-my-children-and-my-firstborn.html#links

Lists

Here's a few lists. First, "official" third edition (including 3.5) Dungeons & Dragons products that I own.

Third Edition

• Player's Handbook
• Dungeonmaster's Guide
• Monster Manual
• Monster Manual II
• Fiend Folio
• Tome and Blood
• Sword and Fist
• Defenders of the Faith
• Races of Destiny
• Frostburn
• Draconomicon
• Lords of Madness
• Fiendish Codex I
• Fiendish Codex II
• Elder Evils
• Manual of the Planes
• Deities & Demigods
• Epic Level Handbook
• Book of Vile Darkness
• Savage Species
• Unearthed Arcana
• Dungeonmaster's Guide II
• Psionic Handbook
• Eberron
• Sharn: City of Towers
• Races of Eberron
• Monster Manual 3.5

Wizards of the Coast non-D&D RPG Products

• Star Wars
• Star Wars Revised
• Alien Anthology
• Call of Cthulhu
• d20 Modern
• d20 Past
• Urban Arcana

D&D Products to Buy:

• Complete Warrior
• Complete Arcane
• Complete Divine
• Complete Adventurer
• Complete Psionic
• Complete Mage
• Complete Scoundrel
• Complete Champion
• Races of Stone
• Races of the Wild
• Races of the Dragon
• Sandstorm
• Stormwrack
• Cityscape
• Dungeonscape
• Monster Manual III
• Monster Manual IV
• Monster Manual V
• Libris Mortis
• Drow of the Underdark
• Fane of the Drow
• Hellspike Prison
• Fields of Ruin
• Dragondown Grotto
• The Frostfell Rift
• City of Peril
• Ghostwalk
• Miniatures Handbook
• Book of Exalted Deeds
• Expanded Psionics Handbook
• Planar Handbook
• Heroes of Battle
• Heroes of Horror
• Magic of Incarnum
• Spell Compendium
• Weapons of Legacy
• Tome of Magic
• Player's Handbook II
• Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords
• Dragon Magic
• Magic Item Compenium
• Player's Handbook 3.5
• Dungeonmaster's Guide 3.5

Note: this includes a lot of products which I've prioritized very low.

Forgotten Realms Products to buy:

• Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting
• Player's Guide to Faerûn
• Races of Faerûn
• Power of Faerûn
• Faiths and Pantheons
• City of Splendors: Waterdeep
• Lost Empires of Faerûn
• Mysteries of the Moonsea
• Serpent Kingdoms
• Shining South
• Silver Marches
• Unapproachable East
• Underdark
• Lords of Darkness
• Champions of Valor
• Champions of Ruin
• Magic of Faerûn
• Dragons of Faerûn

Eberron Products to Buy:

• Five Nations
• Explorer's Handbook
• Magic of Eberron
• Player's Guide to Eberron
• Secrets of Xen'drik
• Faiths of Eberron
• Dragonmarked
• The Forge of War
• Secrets of Sarlona
• Dragons of Eberron
• City of Stormreach

Non-D&D WotC products to Buy:

• Star Wars SAGA edition
• d20 Future
• d20 Apocalypse
• d20 Cyberscape
• d20 Menace Manual
• d20 Dark•Matter
• d20 Future Tech

Music and Fantasy

I replaced most of the Depeche Mode that I've had on my mp3 player for the last month or two with some late 80s rather blatant Depeche Mode imitators. Specifically I put the first CD's of Camouflage, Cause & Effect, Red Flag and Seven Red Seven. For Cause & Effect, I even have the older, indie-release original version, not the repackaged and rereleased version that is more common. Woot! Bought that years and years ago at a used CD store in my old college town.

I also left DM's Music for the Masses on my mp3 player, because its interesting to hear it interspersed with the obvious imitators. None of them are as good, which isn't terribly surprising, but they all have their strengths and charms. Camouflage in particular needed some help with their enunciation and English translations, but I like the kinda of slower, wistful dream-like melancholy of the album as a whole (even with dance hit "The Great Commandment" this overall mood isn't broken.) Cause & Effect had a similar mood, although slightly less pervasive. In retrospect, they strike me as the least polished of the bunch. Red Flag cares less for mood and concentrates more on making straight-up club tracks, although they do have a couple of strikingly beautiful piano tracks, including one piano only instrumental. Seven Red Seven phases in some techno influences and has more overt samples.

Once I get past this run, I'll probably pick up my long-deferred De/Vision and Mesh retrospectives, listening to their entire collections. Mesh and De/Vision are interesting in relation to the earlier Depeche Mode imitators as they formed (or at least broke into the industry) just a little bit too late to actually achieve any significant mainstream commercial success with their work, but went on to become long-running stars of the 90s and beyond indie-synthpop movement. Qualitatively, other than their timing, there's not much to distinguish early Mesh and De/Vision from early Red Flag, Cause & Effect, Seven Red Seven or Camouflage; all six groups were more or less successful by imitating the "classic" Depeche Mode sound, with a twist or two of their own.

Now; fantasy. Recently (maybe because of seeing 10,000 B.C.) I've become interested in Sword & Sandal epics and some Greek historical documentaries (including Michael Wood's Trojan War and Alexander the Great themed programmes) and that naturally leads me to Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age. I really like the idea of there being a "lost" age in the prehistory of the world; Howard actually posited two: the Hyborian Age of Conan and the earlier Thurian Age of Kull. Of course, it becomes much more difficult to explain how any such lost age could exist within the parameters of today's science, but you've got to remember that when Howard wrote, the theory of Plate Tectonics was still thirty years or so from being formulated, and Howard blithely speaking of antediluvian ages and cataclysmic re-arranging of the earth's surface. Sadly, in order to do so now, you have to pretend you don't know anything about actual science and utilize some pseudo-science ideas, like Graham Hancock's theories of ice age high civilization, a 12,500 year old sphinx at Giza, and creationist ideas like catastrophic plate tectonics, which are apologia intended to reconcile science with Genesis.

Not that I have any problem with doing so, if I ever want to create such a setting, and honestly, I'm really feeling the attraction of it. Although 10,000 B.C. was otherwise a pretty mediocre movie, I've gotta give it credit for bringing out the desire for some very classic sword & sorcery in me.

RIP EGG

Ernest Gary Gygax, the person most responsible for the creation and disemination of the Dungeons & Dragons game passed away yesterday. He was just shy of 70 years old, had been in poor health for the last few years (especially after suffering a stroke) and is survived by several children and grandchildren.

Although I do take the odd moment to bash the conventions of D&D itself, and I strongly dislike the "Gygaxian" paradigm of how a game should be run, without Gary, there wouldn't even be a hobby at all. I can't fault him for coming up with a game that isn't exactly to my tastes; he came from a wargaming background, and the game did too, and his love of early pulp writers of science fiction and fantasy is very obviously an influence on the game. Gaming as a hobby has evolved---often in many competing directions at once---so that D&D and the D&D ingrained paradigm is never my first choice anymore.

That said, everything I've ever heard about Gary paints him in a good light. He was a nice guy, patient and attentive, well-read and literate, pious and devout, firm and unmoving in his opinions while still respecting those who differed with him... all in all a true gentleman in every sense of the word.

While I did not know him or interact with him personally, I know plenty of people who did and I feel saddened by his passing.

Germany

I just watched Where Eagles Dare in preparation for bringing it up to a friend here at work so he could borrow it. I had the strange thought while watching it that in some ways, I miss that Germany. I mean, in no way am I disputing that the Third Reich was evil, terrible and otherwise extremely undesireable, or that we weren't right to bring the war to them. But since then, Germany has been completely... I mean, it's hard to even respect Germany these days.

So, I went and looked up some Harry Turtledove and other alternate history stuff. One of my favorite alternate history conceits is that there's still a Nazi Reich in Europe in the present day. Harry Turtledove's Southern Victory series may have had an even better idea; in that one, since the CSA managed to not be defeated in the American Civil War, and was traditionally allied with Britain and France, the USA was allied with the "Second Reich", i.e. the Prussian based Kaiser-helmed Germany that fought in WWI. Without the US support, the Etente powers actually didn't defeat Germany in this scenario. The series goes too far, in my opinion, with recreating the Nazi ideology and experience very specifically on CSA soil. That strains credibility. But the idea of Kaiserreich surviving to the present day is intriguing.

The board game Tannhäuser, which I've discussed here before, also has a Reich that is an extension of the Kaiserreich, not a Nazi Third Reich (although the imagery is very Nazi themed regardless.)

One of these days, I'd really like to do something with some of this alternate history. I remember posting a fairly detailed alternate history setting that I had come up with several months ago here, but honestly, I think I now like the idea of an extended Kaiserreich better than an extended Third Reich. It opens up at least a little ambiguity. Nazis are so obviously and culturally ingrained in our culture as evil that it makes the setting simplistic; but if it's the Kaiser's troops... are they the bad guys? Suddenly it's not so clear.

Depeche Mode and Me

For quite a long time, I was content to listen to whatever came on the radio. In the middle to late 1980s, that started changing when I first had a job and it occurred to me that I might want to buy music. I stuck with stuff that was fairly New Romantic/Synthpop sounding stuff---after buying U2's The Joshua Tree and Def Leppard's Hysteria, I quickly found my way to slightly older Duran Duran and a-ha stuff, and I loved it.

We did have one radio station out of Houston that actually played some fairly progressive, New Wave stuff, and I think that's where I first heard "Strangelove" back in 1987. It didn't take me long to track down Depeche Mode's Music for the Masses, "Strangelove"'s home, and pick it up.

That started what has been at times an almost obsessive musical appreciation. I quickly tracked down their backcatalog (which in 1987 wasn't yet that extensive, but which still had five other full CDs as well as two collections), maxi-singles, t-shirts and posters. For a long time, if anyone asked me what my favorite music was, I'd say Depeche Mode (honestly, I might still) with a nod towards their obvious imitators, who were popping up at a dime a dozen (Red Flag, Camouflage, Seven Red Seven, Cause & Effect, etc. to say nothing of later imitators Mesh and De/Vision who sometimes out-Depeche Mode Depeche Mode themselves these days.) The evolution from the Vince Clark-penned days of Speak & Spell to the darker and harsher sounds of songs of Music For the Masses was fascinating to me.

In late 1989 when the first preview hints of Violator started coming out (notably, the "Personal Jesus" CD Single) I was again captivated, although the hoaky guitar sounds surprised me. I didn't expect "Pleasure, Little Treasure" to have been the preview of things to come. When the full CD came out, I was initially quite disappointed; I thought "Enjoy the Silence" was the only truly excellent song on it, and there were better versions on the CD single than on the album! Despite this disappointment, I still didn't hate it, by any means, and I continued as a slightly warier DM fan. Songs of Faith and Devotion further emphasized the things that I didn't like about Violator, and added yet more elements that I didn't like (although it still has a number of very excellent songs) and my regard slipped even more.

When Ultra was poised to come out, I warily picked up the "Barrel of a Gun" single… and didn't like it.

It took me years to buy Ultra. In fact, I didn't get it until after Playing the Angel was out, and after I got it, I still didn't really listen to it for a long time either. I've changed; I don't have time to sit around listening to music, and even when I do, I don't concentrate on it; I'm usually doing something else at the same time.

Now, I've got all the DM albums, and although I'm still not as familiar with Ultra, Exciter or Playing the Angel as I am with the older ones, I can recognize some value in all of them. Ultra in particular I judged unfairly for a long time; I don't think it's any worse than Songs of Faith and Devotion, at least, and my disappointment with that album (and Violator) are much softened by the passing of the years. They've grown on me, perhaps. Exciter is still spectacularly misnamed, as I don't much like it at all---I can tolerate it, and a few songs aren't bad at all---"Shine", "The Dead of Night", "Freelove" and even "Goodnight Lovers" all aren't bad.

I also have an mp3 player; have had for some time now. Granted, mine's old, cheap and small---it barely holds half a gig of songs, which is a little over half Depeche Mode's collection. But, I listen to it pretty extensively while I commute, which means at least a solid hour a day; longer if I take a break during the day out in my car, or if I pull the mp3 player inside to listen to while I'm working or reading or whatever. To revisit some of my CDs, which I was finding I didn't have the opportunity to listen to anymore, I loaded up my favorite era of DM first---Some Great Reward, Black Celebration and Music For the Masses, and listened to them over an over again for several weeks. Because I still had room, I ended up adding the first three CDs as well; Speak & Spell, A Broken Frame and Construction Time Again. I passed on Catching Up With Depeche Mode and People are People because of the high preponderance of repeat tracks. I still had a bit more room, so I added Violator to the tail end of that.

It was particularly interesting to hear all those CDs in order and watch their evolution. It was also particularly interesting to finish Violator and start over with Speak & Spell and hear the rather remarkable contrast between those two CDs which were less than 10 years apart.

After doing that for some time, I wanted to load up the more recent CDs, especially since I honestly wasn't all that familiar with the last three, not having listened to them very often. I had to take albums off to fit, but I currently have Music For the Masses (which, due to it being the first DM album that I "discovered" as well as it's position musically makes a nice hinge-point between "old" and "new" Depeche Mode) through Playing the Angel, with the single version of "Martyr" thrown on at the end for good measure.

There's not as much evolution, in some ways (Playing the Angel kinda brings DM back to where they were in the early 90s after wandering "lost" for a time after Alan Wilder's departure. I still don't think this era is Depeche Mode's strongest, although some darn good songs came out of it, and I've discovered that Ultra and Exciter (particularly Ultra) are actually quite a bit better than I gave them credit for.

Word on the street is that Depeche Mode are returning to the studio in 2008 for a new album. Which means that they'll probably tour again.

Which means I'll be there, wearing my Touring the Angel t-shirt (and no doubt buying another one while I'm at it) and cheering happily away, especially to whatever older songs they throw our way.

Freeport vs Five Fingers

Although Five Fingers: Port of Deceit has been out longer---by quite a long shot---I just got it, while I've had The Pirate's Guide to Freeport for over six months now. The two books are obviously very similar and cover very similar ground, but do it in different ways. The attributes of one that are both a strength and a weakness are reversed in the other, for the most part. Let me be more specific. Both are setting books, based around an urban environment that was founded by---and still largely accomodating to---pirates. Both are like Tortuga in the Caribbean during the late 1600s---tolerant, relatively lawless, and neutral to the pirates prowling the waters around them. Both are based on Dungeons & Dragons. Both feature the same three themes for games set there: 1) organized crime, 2) political intrigue, and 3) dark cults and horror. Both are well written, fun to read, cover the same kinds of ground, have many similar attributes to the settings themselves, etc. Where they differ is where it gets interesting. Freeport, for instance, has a very different history. It initially started out as the implicit setting in some of the very first 3e third party adventure modules published, and developed from there into a "plug and play" mini-setting that was designed to be easily integrated into any existing D&D campaign setting. This means that few aspects of Freeport are intrusive or difficult to work in, and the game can easily be played with standard D&D (which is a little bit ironic, since this newest version of Freeport is systemless, and in theory is designed as much to be used with True20, or any system for that matter as it is with D&D.) However, his also means a lack of strong ties to the setting as a whole, and an inability to leverage the rest of the setting to drive Freeport adventure. The new book actually had the barest sketch of a greater setting as an optional chapter near the end, although it really wasn't a very clever, unique, unusual or interesting one. Five Fingers, on the other hand, has the opposite strengths and weaknesses. It's part of the Iron Kingdoms setting, and it manages to use Iron Kingdoms stuff to really make Five Fingers come alive. As a neutral city between Cygnar and Khador, it has this kind of espionage between rival superpowers vibe. Cryx features prominently in a number of plots, as does the Llaelese Résistance movement. However, it's much more difficult to use outside the Iron Kingdoms setting without making a numbe of changes to accommodate. I still have a chapter or two of Five Fingers left to read, but at the moment, I'm undecided which of the two pirate cities I like better.

Hungry!

I went to Benihana's for lunch today and ate in the sushi bar. They got rid of their hibachi lunches (they now only serve them for dinner) so I had to get a sushi platter. Now, three hours later, I feel extremely snacky. And sad. What a waste of a good lunch opportunity. I should have held out for the Longhorn steakhouse or something.

I also watched the Jet Li and Jason Statham action movie War over the weekend. It's actually a pretty good flick; what seems like a typical revenge flick with gangsters in San Francisco (Yakuza and Triads for some variety) has an interesting twist. I'm not sure how I missed it in theaters, but I've been somewhat less aware of movies in general the last several months to a year or so.

Orders

There are few things more satisfying to me personally than getting new books. I recently found myself in possession of $50 burning a hole in my pocket, and on Amazon that turned into an order for Five Fingers, Frostburn and the DMG2, as well as Steven Erikson's Gardens of the Moon which I've decided that unless I own my own copy, I'll never get around to reading. Sadly.

Frostburn I picked up because it was cheap; I was actually rather more looking forward to Stormwrack or Sandstorm, but there's always time to get those later. Five Fingers on the other hand, I've wanted for a really long time and just haven't quite managed to pick up yet. I'm hoping that there's plenty of stuff in there that's stealable for my upcoming campaign, but even if there wasn't, I wanted it anyway.

I hear it's a great read, too.

More Indo-European discussions

Although the Balkan-Danubian linguistic situation is sticky, the Italian peninsula of pre-history and early history is even worse.

Here's the obvious ones: Latin is an "Italic" language. The Italic family comes in two varieties, the Latino-Faliscan and Osco-Umbrian. Latin, obviously, belongs to the Latino-Faliscan family and eventually pretty much swamped all the other languages on the peninsula and beyond. But before that happened, Latin was isolated to Rome and the surrounding countryside and tons of other languages competed for supremacy.

Etruscan and the related Rhaetic held forth up north. These were non-Indo-European languages belonging to the Tyrsenian or Aegean language family, which is sadly lacking in sufficient evidence to really be more than a hypothesis. North Picene is another non-Indo-European language (in contrast to South Picene, which belongs to the Osco-Umbrian group). Camunic, Sicel, Elymian and Siconian are all of dubious classification; maybe Indo-European (of an undetermined branch) or possibly not even that.

Messapic is actually thought to be an Illyrian language (or close relative) that crossed the Adriatic. Lepontic is believed to be a Celtic language and Ligurian is believed---possibly---to be one as well. Vestinian is believed to be Indo-European, and Venetic is definately Indo-European, although it's affinities are unclear (correspondances with other Italic languages, Illyrian languages and even Germanic languages have all been remarked upon.) Of course, Greek is also attested, since before the rise of the Romans, Greek settlers and colonists on the Italian peninsula are also known.

All this discussion about the diversity and complexity of the linguistic picture in the Balkans and the Italian peninsula on the very early days of writing in Europe lead me to believe that our picture of linguistics in other areas is probably over-simplistic. Why would these areas be so linguistically diverse while to the north, northwest and northeast only a few languages developed (Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic)?

The answer is; they were probably just as diverse too, at one point, but one language achieved some kind of dominance and gradually drove the others to extinction. That's exactly what happened in Italy; it took a few centuries, but gradually Latin and it's descendents and dialects wiped out all of its competitors. Because Italy was literate earlier than, say, Germania or Gaul, who's to say that those territories weren't just as linguistically diverse before proto-Celtic or proto-Germanic swamped them? In fact, some linguists have proposed that there is some circumstantial evidence of a culturo-linguistic entity dubbed "Nordwestblock" that existed between the Celts and the Germans, mostly occupying what are today the Low Countries.

Historically, we also saw the same thing happen in the Balkans; Greece, Phrygian and Armenian left the area to go on to survive (and Anatolian, if that's where that language came from) and although Illyrian, Thracian and Dacian are not well known languages to linguists today, we at least know they existed. Today, the advent of various Slavic languages has almost completely swamped that prior diversity, with the exception of Albanian and the unrelated interloper Hungarian, which also arrived in historical times.

If you look at the Caucasus, we see a similar degree of diversity in a small area, with multiple language families and a few language isolates. Ancient Anatolia also had similar linguistic diversity with several Anatolian Indo-Hittite languages competing with Semitic, Hattic and Hurrian languages, as well as the linguistically obscure Kassites. The Tarim basin at the start of the common era was similarly diverse; two varieties of Iranian language were common (Khotanese Saka and Sogdian) probably three Tocharian languages, Chinese, several Indic languages (Prakrits, and Sanskrit as a religious liturgical language) as well as various other Turkic and/or Siberian languages making inroads from time to time (all of the above were swamped by Uyghur later, and modern Chinese is making serious inroads even into that.) For much of that time, people in the area were multilingual and used different languages every day depending on what social domain they were interacting.

The point is, without the impetus of some kind of linguistic spread (conquest by outsiders, trade pre-eminence, frequent travel contacts, etc.) linguistic diversity is normal. As people settle into their little areas and tend not to leave, they rather quickly "speciate" into a bewildering variety of dialects, which go on to splinter into different languages. Even cultural dominance, as by an empire or something, doesn't last forever. Latin was already breaking up into regional dialects before the Western Roman Empire finished falling; the Eastern Roman Empire adopted Greek, and the vulgar Latin broke down into Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Galician, Aragonese, Catalan, Provençal, Romanian, Moldavan, Occitan, and more in fairly short order, and even today with the advent of more powerful nations and nationwide media, much of that diversity still exists in Europe. Similar linguistic diversity can be seen in the remnants of the old Persian Empire as well. Or China. Or India.

As a person who enjoys developing fantasy settings for writing and for gaming, this is an interesting phenomena. Few such setting creators go for linguistic diversity. It's difficult, for one thing. It creates problems. It's not fun for gamers or readers to have characters unable to communicate. A common solution (if you'll pardon the pun) is the adoption of a "Common" tongue. Tolkien can probably be credited with this idea; his Westron (more commonly known as "Common) was the language du jour for almost the entire region in which Lord of the Rings takes place. Even in places where relict languages still existed, enough bilingual people existed to facilitate communication, i.e. with the dwarves or the elves. D&D has a similar conceit; Common also being the name of their lingua franca, which is the native tongue of all humans in most settings.

Despite its ease, it's also unrealistic and unsatisfying to someone like me to whom linguistics is a bit of a hobby. I'm not sure I understand or have decided exactly where the dividing line is between "enough" and "too much" linguistics in my fantasy, though.

Any comments from the peanut gallery?

Southern European Indo-European languages

I've been fascinated by the mysteries surrounding the spread and relationship of various Indo-European languages, particularly those that seem to have sprung from the Balkans. The topic is not helped by the extreme paucity of linguistic data on which to draw conclusions, but that has rarely stopped linguists from speculating anyway.

The situation is fairly complex. A number of languages clearly were in the Balkans at one point or another, and a number of other languages probably originated there as well. Here's what we know.

Greek moved into Greece from the north. It therefore must have originally been a Balkan language. Greek seems to be most closely related (although that's relative) to Armenian. According to early historians (Herodotus, mostly) the Armenians did come from the Balkans and migrated across the face of Asia minor. Herodotus also called them "a tribe of Phrygians." Phrygian is another language that is poorly known, but which is attested in Asia minor a few hundred years after the fall of the Hittites. If Phrygian was a sister language to ancient Armenian, then Phrygian was also probably related to Greek and part of the same Balkan complex of languages.

We also know that Albanian is a Balkan language today, and stands alone as a separate branch of Indo-european. It was almost certainly related to languages coming out of the Balkan complex, but close relationships with Greek and/or Armenian are not to be found. Some linguists say Albanian must have been an Illyrian language, since the Illyrian tribes were found in modern day Albania. Others say that they were a Thracian or a Dacian people. Some linguists say that Thracian and Dacian were closely related languages, others that they were not. Some link Illyrian with Thracian, Dacian or both; others with neither.

Some say that Thracian was the language of the Kimmerians, up north of the Black Sea and was therefore broader in scope that simply the Balkans, where they were intrusive. This group also posits a Thracian/Iranian link of some kind---but whether a contact relationship or genetic relationship is impossible to tell given the lack of good Thracian texts of any kind.

To further complicate things, several languages of Italy, particularly the east coast of Italy, are not closely related to the Italic branch that gave us Latin, and are proposed to have come from across the Adriatic. Messapic and Venetic in particular occupy our attention, and both have been claimed by some to be Illyrian in nature.

Cutting across all of this complicated Balkan linguistic picture is the original Anatolian language family, which---by all accounts---came out of the Balkans into Asia minor before any of the languages referenced so far came about. The Anatolian languages are not believed by anyone to be closely related to later Indo-European languages; in fact, the Indo-Hittite hypothesis posits that technically the Anatolian languages aren't even Indo-European; they're a closely related sister group to Indo-European, not Indo-European itself, since Indo-European went subsequent further development before dispersing after the Anatolian languages split off.

This is somewhat consistent with Marija Gimbutas' wave model, where "kurgan" tribes moved out from the Pontic-Caspian steppes (the IE homeland) in a series of waves; Anatolian being the first to come through, and the languages that developed into the Balkan-Danubian complex being a subsequent wave or waves.

Some things to keep in mind; we don't know enough about any of these early Balkan-Danubian languages to clearly propose genetic linkages between them, except to say that Anatolian was not related to the rest of them and Greek and Armenian seem to have split from each other at some point subsequent to their dispersal from Proto-Indo-European as a whole. However, it's also not stricly necessary for any of these languages to be closely genetically related to still maintain a fair amount of similarity. The concept of a Sprachbund comes to mind; where languages in close geographical proximity for a long time gradually converge towards each other could be operating in the Balkan-Danubian region.

My personal uneducated speculative model calls for a Balkan complex that includes proto-Greek, proto-Armenian (which was a dialect or branch of proto-Phrygian) as well as proto-Illyrian as being genetically related, and overlaid on a substrate that may have included elements of proto-Anatolian. This group gradually spread out, into Greece, into Anatolia, and across the Adriatic into what is today Italy. I believe that they construed a spectrum of dialects and languages of increasingly distant similarity all the way across the steppes, gradually turning into very primitive proto-Indo-Iranian. Some of these languages on the western fringe of the spectrum could today be part of the Thracian-Dacian complex, and although they were not as closely related to the original Balkan-Danubian complex, close and prolonged contacts gradually churned all of these languages together to a certain extent.

The mysterious Sea Peoples, of the famous Great Karnak inscription probably are one example of unrest amongst this Balkan-Danubian complex, and the destruction of Mycenean greek palace society and the Hittite Empire probably have something to do with their migrations. The Dorians, who later populate Greece, appear to have come from the north bringing with them their own languages (or at least different Greek dialects than the prior Myceneans spoke) and the Phrygians and Armenian migrations into and across Asia Minor were probably also part of this same mass folk migration. This of course further entangled the various branches of languages, exposing people to other language groups and contact relationships that shaped their languages. Perhaps even pressure from the steppes themselves related to the advent of Thracians and/or Dacians into the area prompted the Sea Peoples' migrations.

Anyway... just noodling around with ideas. The probably permanent tangle of these languages is unlikely to be resolved any time soon unless some prior unknown archive with texts in these various languages comes to light. But I've always loved a good mystery.

Toolz that rool

Maybe I took Wizards of the Coast more at their word than many back in the halcyon days of early third edition, when they said that the design goals for D&D were "tools, not rules."

It's always been my style to turn rules into tools anyway. I'm a bit of a free-wheeling type of GM; I like a robust system, but I refuse to allow myself to get bogged down my minutiae. In addition, I recognize two types of robustness; robust character definition and robust action resolution.

I actually prefer the former to the latter. I like having clearly defined rules defining my characters, including things like feats, skill points, etc. that help me get a handle on what my character is like and what he's good at, poor at, and generally capable of.

I don't mind a robust action resolution system, but d20 goes too far with detail, IMO. I tend to ignore a lot of the detail about how to, say, figure a DC for an activity and just wing a DC that seems appropriate for the challenge at hand. I don't worry too much about what the skill descriptions say so much as what makes sense. I worry about keeping people inside the box on actions, and rather wish my players would describe what they want to do (preferably something much cooler than "I move up and attack with my sword!") and I like to adjudicate what kinds of checks would be necessary to accomplish that.

Maybe that's a hallmark of "old skool" gaming, where DM adjudication was an expected part of the game, but that's still my expectation. I like a game that gives me robust tools to accomplish that, not necessary rules that imply that I have to do things a certain way. d20 works that way, but honestly, the books seem to imply (contrary to the statement circulated around back in the day) that they are in fact full of rules not tools and the books that say otherwise are few and far between. This has fostered a culture amongst players that these are rules not tools when I think the opposite is a very desirable situation.

What sparked this line of thought in me was my review of the Hot Pursuit! rules by Corey Reid. These most definately are tools---a modular add-on that enables classic chase scenes to be modeled pretty well in d20 (in my opinion, a rather egregious gaping hole in the current ruleset.) Corey is an online friend of mine from way back, and I actually looked at an early review copy of the rules and gave some minor feedback before they were officially published, so I feel at least some sense of (misplaced, no doubt) ownership over the way they work, and I've been anxious to implement them for some time, but haven't been running in quite a while either.

In my review of the rules, I noticed that they---like d20 in general---is a bit more robust than I need them to be. The basic concept of how chases work is brilliant. I really like it. The list of specific actions I don't need, and in fact I think actively detracts from the fast-and-loose way that I prefer running the game. Rather than utilize them (other than as examples to get my imagination working) I'm going to integrate the basic concept of the chase scene and it's basic mechanic, and then just... again... adjudicate the actions the PCs describe to me using existing skill checks and other tools in the d20 system.

In any case, if you like action-oriented games at all, I highly recommend you pick up the Hot Pursuit! pdf from whatever rpg-related pdf vendor you prefer; I know rpgnow.com has it, as well as the correllary Hot Pursuit: On Foot. Not only does it support a writer who I like and think is quite talented, but it's a nice little modular subsystem that really does plug a gaping hole in the rules and allows for chase scenes; one of the most iconic of action set-pieces in the fiction that d20 is supposedly designed to emulate.