If you had asked me if I thought The Legend of Korra or Avatar: the Last Airbender needed an origin story for the Avatar, I would have said no…but now that we’ve gotten one, I’m really into it. Telling the story of “the first Avatar” is intrinsically risky, as it threatens to undermine the structure of the whole story, but Wan’s tale is the story of a trickster turned hero. Wan is the Monkey King, complete with flying cloud; he is Prometheus the stealer of fire, he is Pandora, whose impulsive act threatens the world. I’m a big fan of the subversive mythology we see; the Avatar isn’t the ur-king—that’d be the oppressive Chous—he is instead the rebel. Besides, I’m just in general a backer of the Monomyth. You descend into the spirit world, Wan! The fact that he skips the most boring step, the refusal of the call, is an added bonus.

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This has got to be one of the most Miyazaki-like episodes, hasn’t it? From the big strokes of mankind versus spirits, to the tiny little details, like Wan putting Raava in a tea kettle. Also in terms of dang this was pretty; the lush and saturated artwork of the episode was really stunning. Or as my notes say here “art = sweeeeeet.” (When Vaatu turns spirits dark, they look sort of like…the Oogie Boogie blacklight scene from Nightmare Before Christmas.) A while back I read Legend of the Five Rings: Imperial Histories, a role-playing game book that posits a number of alternate quasi-Japanese settings, including an almost pre-Edenic time where spirits and humans and demigods lived together. This reminded me of that, as well; it had the ambiance of an Aesop fable while having the narrative complexity you’d expect from a first person story. It isn’t just the rough hewn strokes of legend; it really does feel like Korra’s memories, the Avatar’s past.

So here is a thing about me. You can’t just say “oh, there are probably a dozen lion-turtle cities” and then turn around and only show me four. Fire, air, water and earth but…what about the others? Some repeats of those four? Other bending arts, now lost? A “new world” on the other hemisphere of the globe? Spelljammer? Okay, I am probably reading into it, but a mythology episode begs cosmological questions, like: what about the stories of the first benders, of Oma and Shu, learning from badger-moles? Is the dragon we see tutoring Wan meant to be the root of the Sun Warrior’s legends? (Frankly, I just enjoyed the fanservice in having the dragon dance show up again.) How much cultural distortion has occurred over the past thousand years? After all, no legend can stay the same for that long.

A few miscellaneous questions I’ve still got kicking around—or general observations, or what have you—continue to ferment in the back of my mind. Like, hey, did we just see what the solar system of the planet the Avatar cycle happens on? That kind of background worldbuilding really wets my whistle for more. The big strokes of Wan’s story, like dragon-turtle cities, are all obvious “heck yeah!” awesome moments, but the small moments of wonder, that is what I’m a sucker for. I remember hearing an anecdote about Tolkien when I was in elementary school, that he’d figured out the cycles of the moon in order to have the Fellowship see the proper moons at the proper time; that seemingly insignificant details that are in fact hints of an underlying machinery of consistency in storytelling are the underpinnings of verisimilitude, if you ask me.

The biggest unanswered question, the obvious dangling thread, is: what is the deal with spirit possession? We see it physically deforming Yao and the man that the aye-aye spirit jumps inside of. One part of me just says that it is to show that there are dire consequences for when humans and spirits merge, to foreshadow the ramifications of Raava and Wan merging together—but another part of me just thinks it is very curious. First, we see all the chimeric creatures of the Avatar-verse, and I wonder if an even earlier mingling of spirits was behind that. Second, it makes me aware that a profoundly different world could spool out of this story. It is entirely possible that rather than just “reset” the world by saving the day, Korra will start a new world, that she might…I don’t know, merge with Vaatu, balancing the spirits in her, and allowing the portals to remain open, and incarnate spirits to become common again. (I mean, Wan’s statue at the Air Temple has both Raava and Vaatu’s markings, when it lights up, doesn’t it?)

How about Wan’s final battle? He dies—complete with Doctor Who regeneration sparkles—amidst those giant stone coins, which as folks on Tumblr noticed, look to be pretty much the same place as where Zuko goes off to in his lone wanderings. See, little background elements, that is what ties a world together. The big things, like the not-too-subtle yin and yang art direction, are great, but I want to know…how do the black and white fish at the Northern Water Tribe link to Vaatu and Raava? Why is there a Little Prince-style baobab as the only notable feature in the Spirit World between the two gates? Or, when is the next convergence? Astrology has always been important to these stories; the sun, the moon, the comet—what other surprises do the stars hold? Was it just my imagination, or did it look like Vaatu was bound to the moon when Wan was imprisoning him?

I was really excited that this episode didn’t fool around, didn’t waste time. Amnesiac Korra, here, meet a fire witch and then get dipped into a crystal cave’s lake, obviously. Here, talk to Aang real quick, Roku, Kiyoshi—Kiyoshi, you are the best—and then boom, Wan. No “go find the MacGuffin” or “but who am I?” wheel-spinning. Just an economy of storytelling. Wan starts right off with his Aladdin-esque street-rat shenanigans, and Steven Yeun does a great job. We meet Mula, giving the first Avatar a suitably weird animal companion in a cat-deer (complete with more shades of Miyazaki; or at least, it made me think of the elk from Princess Mononoke). We don’t have the answers we need to solve the riddle of the season—why would dark spirits be fighting the Avatar when she tries to open the portal, if Raava is behind everything? Raava should want to open the portals!—but we have a lot more to go on.

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Mordicai Knode sort of wants the spirits to come back to the rest of the episodes can have the great abstracted art style of “Beginnings.” He also wonders: did Raava & Vaatu remind anyone else of the game Journey? Find Mordicai on Tumblr and Twitter.

I could talk about my life - but whatever, livejournal, there are more perplexing things going on right now.

Last night around midnight Edbury and I were gchatting about an interview I have coming up. Even though we're roommates we probably talk more often over gchat than in person - but also I'm not home. I'm house- and dog-sitting for a friend in Sausalito, across the bay from San Francisco.

I've gone through my texts and gchats with Edbury and put the events together in the following narrative:

It's midnight and I'm talking to Edbury about, I don't know, TV or the internet or something. While we're chatting, Edbury receives a weird text. It was from 972 676 9168, but according to the metadata appended to the SMS that's a proxy for 931 338 XXXX. The message reads:

half hour, union square

Now, we live just a few blocks from Union Square. Eddie and I were intrigued of course. Mysteries! I was kinda nervous about him being all alone, and thought he shouldn't bring his wallet or phone, and wished I was there to safety-wingman him for ... whatever it was. But: Sausalito. Mostly I was thinking it was some weird OKCupid person. While I don't think he's all Eyes Wide Shut in his personal life, he has had what I would consider to be very mildly unusual assignations through OKC, so maybe it was just a weird hookup thing. Weird, but just you know, lower case w.

We debate whether he should go at all, and he decides he will. And at the required time, Edbury leaves the house and starts walking over there. He responds to the text with

I'm ready.

and receives the response

Donations?



Weird. Five minutes later Edbury messages me

There are like. Cops everywhere in the park and a guy on the corner clearly waiting with a briefcase.

The cop part isn't too weird. The Nike Women's Marathon is on Sunday, and the park is mostly taken up with the marathon's pavilion and registration tent, and is well covered by the fuzz for civic safety purposes, presumably.

But that guy. Just standing there. Briefcase. Edbury's description:

brown blazer and slacks
chin length hair, but clean cut
glasses

Edbury starts kind of circling around him, walking past and trying to surreptitiously take a picture. He definitely doesn't know the guy and definitely has never seen him before.



But also like, that could just be a guy who's standing near the park. At 12.30 at night. In empty San Francisco. Coincidence, right? Then the guy takes out his phone and dials a number and EDBURY'S PHONE RINGS.

The guy is calling me. It's def him.

Edbury is standing too close to him to answer the phone without the guy realizing Edbury is standing kind of near him (though Edbury has walked within a few feet of him several times at this point, and there's no one on the street). Edbury doesn't answer.

Also: the phone call? FROM A DIFFERENT NUMBER THAN THE TEXTS. The caller ID on the phone call reads 415 399 1613.

Yeah no idea who this guy is.
Okay what if I text him "just leave the case." ?
I'm kind of just waiting and watching from behind.



Edbury and I spend a few minutes gchatting and trying to figure out what to do next. Edbury is finally like, fuck it, and texts him

Just leave the case

The guy checks his phone, sees the text, looks at it for a second, then starts SPRINTING.

HES RUNNING
What do I do he's running down post and I'm like semi chasing

Then

Nm I stopped wtf I can't chase some stranger

And that was the end of the night. Edbury watches the dude recede into the distance. It was like 1.30am at that point. Edbury went home and I got set up in the guest room here and we both went to bed. Sorta. Both of us sat up all night thinking about that shit.

This weirdness was the first thing on my mind when I woke up today. I was still inside this weird dream. And I immediately messaged Edbury and started trying to research the numbers on the internet. There are a bunch of boards where people talk about the robonumbers they get calls from. Mostly it's just like "Candidate for U.S. House of Representatives, left message in Spanish", but for the first number Edbury got the text from - 972 676 9168 - there are these two notes on 800notes.com, left on Mar 3, 2011:

I keep getting a text from this number with a +17864437089. The text goes on about us being friends and I need to let him know what's up. He adds little smiley faces and says his name is Guille...

and

Just got a text from this number followed by the word "Diamond"

The other, second number is registered to a Jeffrey Cox, age 59, 895 Chamberlain Ct Mill Valley, CA 94941.

A bunch of us who are fascinated by this started calling. The first number, 972 676 9168, just yields the message "Could not complete your call, please try again".

Will called the second one, 931 338 XXXX, the "Jeffrey Cox" number.

well I got through to the second number
and I said
diamond.
and a male answered
sounded mid 20s/30s
and he was like
what? hello?
and then was like
you have the wrong number
and hung up

I called the 931 338 XXXX number myself an hour later and talked to the guy for a (very) little while. He seemed slightly older to me definitely more 50s/60s than 20s/30s. But he spoke with a distinct Hindi accent. Will thought it was Spanish-sounding, but I think he's wrong. The guy admitted he lived in California but refused to answer any of my other questions, and legitimately didn't seem to know wtf I was talking about. He said he didn't know anything about Union Square. A little while later he called me back wanting to know who I was. I didn't tell him anything.

James/Jim called the third number, 415 399 1613, the one Edbury supposedly received the phone call from. It's weird computer noise and James hangs up, frightened. I call it and record the sound:



Now I'm trying to find a program that can turn audio data streams into something more useful. Though Jim is probably right that it's just some handshake protocol, not actual data.

I try calling the 786 443 7089 number from the "Guille" comment, in case that's not a red herring or coincidence. Not in service.

Then: Edbury deduces the Indian guy is "uninvolved."

she* is like 90% sure the second number is spoofed
his number is just text content sent from google voice
but whoever owns that number could just set that
*[Edbury's computer-engineer co-worker, who is also investigating]

Edbury's Jim's theories:

some weird misguided silk road FBI thing
a viral marketing scam
and actual awkward and maybe shady wrong number

My theory in the comments. Right now I've been at this for like twelve hours straight and no matter how fascinated I am, I haven't had anything to eat or drink, and I need to put this computer down and go to the bathroom. And maybe try to get some work done today. But damn. It'll be hard to pull my brain out of this.

UPDATE 1.56pm PST The "Jeffrey Cox" number, 931 338 XXXX, at the end of which I spoke to a Hindi-sounding man, texts me asking what is going on, and saying "My phone was not with me". I reply asking if he is saying his phone has been out of his possession in the last 24 hours. Awaiting reply.

UPDATE 3.36pm PST Jeffrey Cox number redacted because it is in fact the number of a real person.

UPDATE 3.42pm PST Jeffrey Cox number texts me to say his phone was out of his possession yesterday at "orientation", and his friends - who wanted to play with his 41 megapixel camera - sent out texts as a joke, asking random numbers to meet them at Union Square. This would have been early in the day though, not at midnight. He apologizes profusely. But if that is true ... who was Briefcase Guy? Jeffrey Cox number doesn't seem to be able to check his phone to ascertain whether those texts were or were not sent from his phone. I wonder if he isn't just assembling fiction from the fact that I asked him about Union Square when we spoke earlier, and questioned him about whether texts had been sent from his phone. He says "if you say it was from my number its impossible to say or prove that it was not me".

It is hard to put into words just what Superman means; he’s meant so much to so many people for so long. Superman is an organic, evolving symbol of heroism and ethics, but because he’s a character with seventy-five years of history behind him—happy aniversary, Man of Tomorrow!—expressing just who he is can be tricky. Grant Morrison famously and brilliantly reduced his origin story to four panels; here, Bruce Timm and Zack Snyder (and a small army of annotators) transform three-quarters of a century of publishing across genre and media into a two-minute short that will make you believe a man can fly.

[Superman over 75 years]

In “Advanced Readings in D&D,” Tor.com writers Tim Callahan and Mordicai Knode take a look at Gary Gygax’s favorite authors and reread one per week, in an effort to explore the origins of Dungeons and Dragons and see which of these sometimes-famous, sometimes-obscure authors are worth rereading today. Sometimes the posts will be conversations, while other times they will be solo reflections, but one thing is guaranteed: Appendix N will be written about, along with dungeons, and maybe dragons, and probably wizards, and sometimes robots, and, if you’re up for it, even more.

Welcome to the next post in the series, featuring a look at A Martian Odyssey by Stanley G. Weinbaum!

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As the poets say, oops, I did it again. Another science fiction collection that doesn’t have any obvious bearing on the history of the hobby, though I will argue a bit further on that it does have elements that a good Dungeon Master could learn from, and if those sorts of things are consistent across Weinbaum’s oeuvre, I can see why Mister Gygax picked Weinbaum. I bet they are!

First though, I want to talk about why I keep ending up here. There are a lot of factors feeding into it; notable among them is the fact that back in the days of the pulps, the division between science fiction and fantasy was much more fluid then it is today (though I think they are starting to bleed across again). You could say that it isn’t that rigid these days, for that matter: Star Wars is just spaceships and wizards, laser swords and riding fantasy critters, right?

I haven’t discounted titles from Appendix N authors just because the book appears to be science fiction, because for every Humanoids story that doesn’t quite fit, there is a Forerunner or Warrior of World’s End, or heck, Jack Vance or John Carter of Mars. The history of the game does stem from plenty of science fiction stuff; in a real way, the combined “Science-Fiction and Fantasy” tag really does apply to the books of Appendix N.

A Martian Odyssey is a collection of an eponymous novella and a few short stories. I picked it because it came up near the top of the results when I searched for Stanley G. Weinbaum’s name on the internet. You know, I don’t regret that at all, because while “A Martian Odyssey” isn’t particularly “DnD” on the face of it, I think it actually does show how a good worldbuilder or Dungeon Master should think. Oh, also it is phenomenal.

The story essentially details a stranded astronaut’s exploration of Mars…but it is the life-forms he meets along the way that really make this story a gem. Oh, did I mention that “A Martian Odyssey” is in fact a really delightful read? Humorous and interesting in equal parts. Tweel, the first alien the narrator meets, seems at first like a clever avian analogue but as the story wears on you start to realize that it is Tweel who is patronizing the astronaut; to the xenobird he’s a very clever ape analogue! Then there is the strange nautilus-like creature; not that it was a “tentacles” alien but rather that it was a silicon-based form of life extruding a shell and living in it until it outgrew it…on a geological, rather than biological, time scale. A pyramid building “hermit crab.”

The mimic, the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing, makes an appearance next, using telepathy and hypnotic suggestion rather than shapeshifting or camouflage, and then a drum-shaped, xorn-like hive-mind creature enters the picture. The thing about all of the xenobiology here is that…well, it is plausible. It holds up, eighty years later, because it is well considered. So besides the fact that there are creatures who superficially resemble a couple of Monster Manual beasties, that is the lesson I think we should take away.

When you build a world, or a dungeon, or anything, really, you should take a moment to think about the psychology and the ecology of the stuff you put into it. What is that manticore eating (goblins?) and how do the goblins and the manticore interact (the manticore eats goblins who don’t bring him a new riddle, like a backwards sphinx, but will aid those goblins with good riddles against the mindflayer) and think about how alien minds would approach the world (the mindflayer is a super genius, so you cheat and let him “metagame” information that he wouldn’t normally know, because he figured it out).

That last bit, about how a Dungeon Master—who I’m sure has an 18 Int, all of us DMs do—can portray a monster or alien with a far greater intelligence than them, also informs the Weinbaum story in this collection called “The Lotus Eaters,” which is Venusian, rather than Martian. Let me say this about the gender relations in the story: yes, it falls prey to the “damsel in distress” problem, but it also has a female protagonist who is an explorer and a scientist. And between she and her husband, she’s the one in charge. I take what I can get when it comes to stories written in the 1930s.

The tale—which involves three-eyed vampiric gargoyles and scuttling upside-down basket aliens—poses a question as to the ultimate value of sentience, and the ultimate ramifications of omniscience. Not just philosophical musings, but rather a thought experiment predicated on axioms (sort of like The Carnellian Cube, except I liked it). That is to say, the sort of thing that would be helpful for a DM to think through, when they add strange beings to their game. “The Adaptive Ultimate” provides another such conundrum on morality and…well, the alignment system, on law and order, good and chaos. Not phrased as such, but that is what it is, if you think of it that way.

So that is the story here; perhaps this doesn’t superficially resemble what you expect when you think of D&D, with astronauts and aliens instead of wizards and monsters. But at a deep core level, the stories contained in A Martian Odyssey are about exploring weird places—even a weird dungeon—and meeting weird creatures and occasionally stealing incredible magic items. That sure sounds “DnD” to me.

Of course, I fully expect wise grognards in the comments to say “you should have read The Black Flame!”

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Mordicai Knode just realized Tim Callahan isn’t here today. I haven’t seen him since that ooze dropped on us from the ceiling. Did he “Scooby Doo” accidentally into a secret passage?

I’m going to throw caution to the wind and just start out of the gate with spoilers for The Legend of Korra’s “The Sting.” Heck, you’ve already seen it and nothing I’m going to say is going to shock you, though it sure was an eventful episode. Okay, so, here goes. Well, well, well; a heel turn from Varrick. I can’t say I didn’t see it coming, but then, I could have seen him staying strictly patriotic, as well.

The Legend of Korra seems to be getting very soap operatic, which I don’t mind…but it does bear keeping in mind. It colors expectations, so that when Asami goes in for a kiss, well, of course she did; and when Korra wakes up with amnesia, of course she does. For those of us keeping track for Team Asami—which I’m pretty sure means everyone—she at least waits till Mako is clear and free, which you can’t say for Korra last season.

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Let’s talk big picture. We see Unalaq step out of the Spirit Portal, right? My first thought was “uh-oh, looks like the transporter to the Northern Water Tribe is working…” but on second thought, maybe he was just in there getting his marching orders? I know people have guessed that Koh is behind everything—I was bitten by that bug first season—but we’ve got other options besides Koh. We know Wan Shi Tong is in The Legend of Korra, so just by dint of appearing in a trailer, he’s in the running. The first Avatar, Wan, is too, for the same reason. While we’re there at the Portal, Eska, and Desna do seem to suggest that their father is in—was in—control of the spirits, so maybe he was just rallying troops, but I sense a chain of command…

…But how far does it go? Is Varrick just another arrow in the arsenal, or is Varrick an opportunist who sees a chance to make a move on Future Industries while stealing some mecha and selling some movies, as icing on the cake? To get conspiratorial for a second, what do all the villains from Legend of Korra have in common? Well, they’re all Water Tribe. Northern Water Tribe. You know, where the portal to the Spirit World is still open. It would be a big retcon, and maybe I’ve just been watching too much Scandal, but I’d even be open to flashbacks showing Noatak and Tarrlock being moved like pieces on a Pai Sho board by some nefarious spirit, just like Varrick and Unalaq.

The elephant in the room is: this was a pretty good episode—a pretty good episode without Korra. I think a lot of viewers feel the same way I do, which is to say, tired of seeing Korra make the same mistakes again and again. It has been a bit relentless, and I’m ready for the worm to turn. Korra’s character conflict first season was a combination of trust and peace, of knowing who to believe and who to doubt, of knowing herself and being able to let go and “be the leaf.” I’m not saying this second season is as bad at hitting the “reset” button as say, second season of Veronica Mars, but I’m ready for the heroic turnabout, please. This amnesia thing? I’m dubious.

We get more Triad here, which is interesting, very interesting. Did you know Shady Shin is voiced by Fisher Stevens? Hack the planet! Which answers one question—did Korra restore everybody’s bending? Nope; at least some people, like Shady Shin, who had their bending taken away, still don’t have it back. It is no surprise that the Triple Threats betray everyone, seeing as how they are gangsters, but I almost hoped we would get more history on Mako and Bolin. Seems like a missed opportunity. I am always wondering who is the new “Jet’s gang” or “Foggy Swamp tribe” and maybe the Triads will continue to be reoccurring?

Bolin, of course, remains strictly comedic relief. You’d think his association with the “movers” would mean he was ideally positioned, from a narrative viewpoint, to be the one who figures out the use of theater pyrotechnical devices in the arson, but nope, Mako gets it. To be fair; Mako has been much more likable this season, hasn’t he? He was a little vapid first season. Still, I feel like he’s grown at Bolin’s expense.

What do we have instead? Bolin failing to understand the “pretending” part of acting, fails to understand that he isn’t really Nuktuk. He is a good “movie star” but this “rube we’re gonna make a star” plot needs to subvert my expectations, soon, please. Bolin going off book, improvising a kiss. I’ve seen discussion on the kiss with Ginger, and on consent, and I’m curious to here what others have to say.

So; the villain, the amnesia, the kiss. Personally, I’m ready for the dramatic turn. I’m ready for Team Avatar to kick butt. Soon, please.

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Mordicai Knode also wants to see Zuko and Azula, please. Old retired avuncular Zuko and wicked old witch Azula, preferably. You can find Mordicai on Tumblr and Twitter.

Even the music was on point; Godspeed You! Black Emperor's F♯ A♯ ∞ & Yanqui U.X.O. where synched up to the moods of the room; the music was sinister when it was meant to be & swelled to a crescendo when it ought to. A really big gang at the game table last night: Nicole road the train with me, eager to play her cunning & cold Zaibatsu agent, Mukade Keku Kin. Luke or Mollie was next, the watchful Kuge noble Haru o-Kitsune & his loyal yojimbo, the warrior monk Mio Yudai. Silissa was next, with baby Indigo in tow, ready to play Kemushi Moe no-Cho, the Zaibatsu pharmacopia researcher. fatbutts was one the scene, with Amina o-Kitsune, the noble Bushi with dark interests. Eric was last but not least, ready to play the hoodlum turned Taikomochi courtesan, Ren Joko Izumi. Last session saw them all going to the strange arboretum; the Shogun's cousin, Iroha o-Lung-- a woman with a cannon instead of an arm-- elected to accompany them. I had a really good game; a pterodactyl, mummy mythology, & a samurai showdown? That is a recipe for success.

The greenhouse is a strange place; Mio, Moe & Haru have all been to the Toxic Jungle, which is truly weird & horrifying, & this isn't that but there is something about the plants inside of the place, strange cycads, ginkos & ferns. The sounds of fauna are just a little bit off, & it is Ren who places it-- he's seen these on old scrolls! These plants are extinct. The group elects to enter a sort of gatehouse first; there is a frenzied business-- the proper collective noun!-- of frolicking ferrets, but Mio's pet wolf, Toto, clears them out. Aw, & I have so many cool "rat swarm" minis! It is noted that the ferrets, when they flee, don't flee by the most direct route, into the arboretum, but instead scramble elsewhere. The Players note that the doors are wood; old but not ancient; the pyramid of Kakusui-en is incredibly ancient, & the arboretum seems to date to the historical but now ruined Empire whose death throes spawned the Shogunate. Haru, versed in some of the occult secrets of the world, & Amina, who traveled with a weird circus, recognize the symbol of the peacock vulture; it belongs to the Royal Physician, an ancient Al-Kem figure, a sort of cross between Galen & Imhotep, who achieved alchemical enlightenment & remembered his past lives in detail every time he was reincarnated. When he would die, his cult & companions would preserve his old body, & the mummy would be an undead vizier, a council fit to advise the new Royal Physician from their tombs.



What is it that spurs the attack? After all, Haru has calmly been gathering samples, with Moe & her research assistant Gale's help. Maybe it is Amina trying to kick down one of the sturdy doors. Maybe it is Ren, shouldering down the crumbling door into the tower inside the arboretum that they find right past the gates. Could just have been bad luck...but the thing itself is no joker. Like a giant plucked bird, or a strange bat with a bird skull for a head, a strange creature from yesteryear. A pterodactyl with a twenty, thirty foot wing span. It buffets Amina about with its wings, hooking her with a claw on its wing, slashing her & knocking her down, while then hovering away out of reach. The party scrambles, against the wall of the tower, into it. The insides are filled with guano (of which Moe grabs some); the first floor has two other doors, leading back out, the second is also stuffed with pterosaur poop but has a skeleton embedded in it; Ren searches it but finds nothing. On the roof is the nest, part constructed from sticks & logs, part from paper, almost wasp-like. There seems to be a magpie tendency in the creature, because besides the three soccer ball sized eggs, there is also a bunch of sparkly stuff, & a long black shiny scroll case.

Keku, up on the roof with the nest now, is attacked again, this time the pterrordactyl's mouth swelling like a pelican, ready to engulf her, to swallow her whole-- but Keku's familiar, a snake named Nagini, blessed by the naga Hebi-no-Hime darts out, biting it inside it's mouth, causing it to swerve off, making a noise like a cross between a squawk & a wookie. Keku grabs an egg & bolts! Down the stairs during the following hubbub & confusion, & out! Up on the roof, Ren grabs some gold & the Black Scroll case & darts back down, unharmed. Mio tries to keep it at bay with her naginata while Moe tries to get an egg...& she butterfingers it, dropping it, & it cracks, red blood oozing out instead of white albumin. While Moe is fumbling with the egg...the fell beast, which had disappeared for a round, game back carrying a giant stone...which is dropped on her head with a sickening crack that mirrored the humpty-dumptying of the egg. I roll pretty well for damage, & decide to make some of it aggravated, rather than tons of lethal, to knock her unconcious & to give her the new character trait, "Drain Bamage."



Haru & Iroha are talking about the eggs when everyone comes down to the second floor-- he wants to destroy them so the strange dinosaur breeding old man from the auction, Toshi Kyoryu, can't give them to the Meikyu Zaibatsu to breed. Iroha is more ambitious; think what we could do, if we bred them! Iroha heads up, as does Amina, to the rooftop, while Mio carried Moe down. Not wanting to kill the mother, Iroha holds a lit fuse-- she lights it with her teeth-- & waits, while...well, while Amina dons the mask of a demon, a mempo contorted into rictus, & tears open the bloody egg from the pterodactyl. It gushes all over her, & the embryo plops out...then Amina bends, & it seems as if her mask laps up the blood. Only Iroha sees this, as the rest of the party is downstairs. Eric says "Ren has the Character Trait of 'Scrounger' so can I spend Willpower to have grabbed something from the nest that could help Moe?" It is a perfect use of the Character Trait system-- which Lilly also says she "gets" after this session-- & actually, there is totally something on the "dungeon" map that could help, so I just let his invoking of his trait guide the story, as it is meant to. Yes! The gold he grabbed...among it is something that isn't a coin, but is instead a golden pill, the size of a horse tranquilizer. Liquid gold! She swallows & sees a vision, understanding the story of the Royal Physician in a flash.

...but meanwhile something insidious has taken hold of Mio Yudai, the sohei yojimbo. You see, when the naga blessed some of the members of the group, only Mio fully refused, & the so naga gave Ren his forked tongue, Keku her serpent, Haru his tsuba...& Moe poison blood. Which Mio has all over her, now. I ask Moe what kind of poison it is & she says "hallucinatory," so I go to work on Mollie. The whole group has been hallucinating on spores from the weird plants since they walked in here; only now did Mio suddenly sober up, breaking the enchantment. Moe is dead-- not just hurt, dead-- & that is where those bones in the middle of the room came from. Haru killed her! So begins one of my favorite Oubliette scenes: the Reservoir Dogs-esque stand-off. Mio, with one of the eggs in her kit, whips her naginata around to point it at Haru. Haru is speaking softly but Amina whips out her katana & puts it to Mio's throat. Mio's wolf, Toto, starts to growl & slavery, & so Amina draws her wakizashi, pointing it at the canine. Having distracted everyone, Haru sleight of hands a random packet of powder from Moe's herbal kit. I ask Silissa to make up a random chart is in there, so she gives me: "1, cure; 2, poison; 3, burn; 4, hallucination; 5, freeze; 6, put to sleep; 7, choke; 8, bleed uncontrollably; 9, extract poison; 10, scratch skin like meth." Haru rolls a 10, & we leave off there, on a cliffhanger.

For me, Unearthed Arcana is where it all started. Not playing Dungeons and Dragons, or roleplaying games in general—the classic “red box” and Palladium’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness took care of that—but really understanding the game, really deciding to run a game: that starts here.

The three core books of D&D are the Player’s Handbook, that has the stuff on being a half-orc and a paladin and what have you, the Dungeon Master’s Guide, which gives you the rules for traps, advice on how to pretend to be fifty townsfolk or build a continent, and magic items, and Monster Manual which as you may have surmised contains rules for monsters. What Unearthed Arcana did was…well, break the rules. Break the mold.

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I had one of those childhoods where I had to keep my Dungeons and Dragons playing on the sly. The moral panic of the 80s was in full swing, and anything with a picture of a monster on it was just one more shred of evidence that I was doomed to…I don’t know, become a Russian spy and live in steam tunnels as part of a cult? “It’s my fault Black Leaf died!” The fabricated “controversy” over the game obviously doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it meant there was no way for me to get ahold of Dragon magazine, which meant that the first time I read an old Unearthed Arcana was the first time I saw, well, really any new rules.

It was more than that though; it was the first time I really grokked the nature of the game. “Wait a minute,” said little Mordicai, “I can just make up new rules?” So yeah, obviously I then became addicted to tinkering, to house rules, to re-inventing the wheel and fiddling with the game in fundamental ways. I follow pretty weird ideologies as a Dungeon Master, and ultimately I credit a dog-eared library copy of Unearthed Arcana with opening my eyes; well, that and the AD&D Tome of Magic, both of which I discovered around the same time. Wild Magic? Cavaliers? Heck yes.

So what do we get, here? Well, right off the bat, Comeliness, the “seventh” attribute, a measure of…physical attraction. Lots of information on playing subraces and cross-indexing them with better rules for class level limits. Cavaliers (I really like the percentile attribute increase mechanics), Barbarians (the magic-hating kind), Thief-Acrobats (and new retconned falling rules) and a bunch of new mechanics for some traditional classes, like double-specialization for Fighters. Subdivided items to the N^th degree including infamous rants about polearms, spells and spells, magic items, non-human gods, and optional rules that herald the mass confusion spell of grappling rules. A lot of stuff is in here.

Going over it again in the pretty premium edition, I find my feelings about the reprints of the core books confirmed. There is a lot of stuff to get inspired by here. Strip it down to system neutral and just look at the ideas. Turn over the rock and look at the roots to find…well, really good ideas. I’ve always had a thing for the belt of dwarvenkind. You know, the cloak of elvenkind rules, obviously, and my last character had one, but they’re just cribbed from Lord of the Rings. Homage, that’s the word for it. It makes me want to look at the belt of dwarvenkind as a kind of parallel reality, where The Fellowship rest and recuperate at the Lonely Mountain instead of Lothlórien. Or the cloak of arachnidia, the slippers of spiderclimb, what about a drow Galadriel? The Robe of Vermin; I used one in a game actually based on this; it was a cursed item but it was worn by a cultist of a god of filth, so they were immune to the curse and got the pluses—I always thought most cursed items were implausible, so I really liked my backstory.

I’m a sucker for non-human pantheons; I like the idea that there are these other cosmologies, that the traditional paradigm of human gods don’t know anything about. If you asked me, I’d make the Seldarine deities their own faerie powers, not just defined by being the gods of the elves; while dwarven gods are maybe a secret, hoarded by the devout race of dwarves who honor them by growing their beards, or whatever. Specific gods are…well, specifically cool. I like fourth edition’s Moradin a lot—half Hephestus, half Thor—but there are guys like Vergadain, the dwarven god of poetry and non-evil thievery, who vibe Viking dualism, or the creepy hairless mole rat Urdlen who embodies gnomish malice and greed; hook that guy up with some Derro cultists and you are in business.

Oh and orcs! Gruumsh mythology is in here—after being cheated by the gods, he stabbed the mountains, and the orcs grew in the caves, he pierced the hills and the meadows and from those gouges, his people came. Bahgtru, the Brute, like Kalibak, defeater of Godzilla. Shargaas, the Night Lord, the skulking Grendel, assassin. Ilneval, the Champion, lieutenant of Gruumsh, representing the rise of militarized civilization among the orcs. Yurtrus White Handed, who is death and disease, Luthic who is fertility, caves and medicine…just look, all of that is gold, you could build a whole orcish civilization based on those domains, and it would feel organic, it would feel detailed and real.

The third edition of Unearthed Arcana really blew the lid off of the Open Game License and gave people like me—and maybe you, if you like tinkering under the hood as well—a host of tools and parts to mess with the Dungeons and Dragons engine. That wouldn’t have happened without the AD&D Unearthed Arcana, and besides that, the book planted the seeds for much of what Dungeons and Dragons has become over the years. Owning this as a piece of history is all well and good, but the thing that clinches it is…well, the fundamentals are still sound. The ideas in here are still ripe, still solid points of inspiration for your next magic item or weird dungeons; even if you don’t play an old school edition.

Remember; part of the proceeds go to the Gygax Memorial Fund!

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Mordicai Knode has said it before, but he’s Team Spider and Team Galadriel…making Team Drow Galadriel really appealing. You can find him on Twitter or Tumblr.

This clock may not be exactly “steampunk”, but it certainly tickles the dials-and-knobs delight! Made by Roger Wood of Klockwerks (a purveyor of some lovely retro-futurist timepieces), the detailed whimsy makes me grin perhaps a little too widely.

[Via Boing Boing]

You know things are going to get real when you see Lin Beifong waiting at the docks of Republic City. Then a Sokka statue? With a boomerang? Well, I guess a boomerang does always come back! After “Civil Wars,” which was all about set-up, I was eager to see something, well, happen. It did! Now the ball is really rolling. Rolling where I can’t quite say, but we’ve got plots, we’ve got agendas, we’ve got pursuit and enemies and dark spirits. Politicians and crooks, as if that wasn’t the same thing, and the things a Jedi doesn’t crave: Adventure! Excitement! Romance! Lemur training! Well, okay, Yoda didn’t say anything about romance or lemurs but we’ve got it here…or you know, in romance’s case, the lacuna where it should go, anyhow…

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What is going on with Bolin? He says he is going to “figure something out,” and yes, please, Bolin, please, figure something out. Bolin is adored by Republic City; he’s genuinely good at playing to them, and maybe that will be the direction he goes…but currently he’s being co-opted by Varrick in a “racebending” metastory. Light skinned guy from a different cultural background dressing up in a mockery of the local fashions? I can’t tell if this is a spoof of Nanook of the North or of Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender. Eska, meanwhile, is now a “crazy ex” which continues to play the problematic aspects of their relationship for laughs. I do like her messed up eye make-up look, though. Maybe Bolin will have a “thing” with Ginger? Ginger’s only been treated as a prop by the story so far—quite literally objectifying—so it would be cool to see some character there.

Korra and Mako’s breakup is something I’m actually really into. Say what you will about romantic plots and subplots, but at least the friction here isn’t irrational. Since “stop acting irrationally” is what I always find myself saying to fictional characters of all stripes, I’m into it. The tension is real: Mako is pledged to and loyal to Republic City, and Korra is the Avatar. I don’t think she was wrong to circumvent President Raiko or to take sides in the Water Tribe dispute; she’s in a unique position of singular responsibility. She is an outside authority, that is one of the roles of the Avatar.

The conflict between Mako and Korra is the same conflict Korra and General Iroh have, but Korra’s feelings for Mako prevent her from dealing with it as graciously as she did with Iroh II. (The breakup is also explicitly paralleled to Lin and Tenzin’s split, for even more mirroring.) Both have personal and ideological conflicts with Korra’s actions; in the Gaang, everyone was loyal to Aang and each other. Sokka came closest to having outside allegiances, through his father, but those were never at odds with helping the Avatar. Instead, Avatar: the Last Airbender deals explicitly with the Avatar being above and beyond traditional avenues of governance; the battle against Bumi, the trial of Kiyoshi, and fundamentally, the rebellion against the colonialist Fire Nation.

I’ve become increasingly interested in the pacing of The Legend of Korra. By way of comparison to Avatar: the Last Airbender, “Peacekeepers” would still be in the first season. What does that mean to me? Well, a couple of things. We’ve talked about Korra having “cinematic” pacing, with more things left to the audience to fill in the gaps. Rather than show you every answer, they let the viewer piece it together. This can aid in the kinetic storytelling; for instance, the use of viewer assumptions about freedom fighters, protesters, and injustice in order to shorthand a lot of development for the Equalists, really quickly.

Another thing on my mind is Korra’s journey. Aang had a “big bad” during his incarnation; the Fire Nation had put the world out of balance, there was a hundred years of imperialism and war, and Sozin’s Comet was inbound, making the situation with the Fire Lord one of paramount importance. And for villains: Zuko, a proxy of the Fire Lord; Zhao, a proxy of the Fire Lord; Azula, a proxy of the Fire Lord; and eventually, Fire Lord Ozai himself. Korra doesn’t have this “World War” or even a “Cold War” situation; it is as if every one of her fights is with Long Feng and the Dai Lee. Her incarnation seems marked more by individual conflicts, with each conflict having two facets to it. Equalists and bloodbenders, Northern aggression and dark spirits. Is there a broader pattern at work?

Lastly I can’t help but think about parallels; when the Northern Water Tribe armed forces occupied the Southern Water Tribe, I think the first thing that leapt to most people’s minds was the similar animation to the Fire Nation’s invasion and the “then, everything changed…” intro monologue. If I was a Northern Water Tribe navy, trying to conquer the Avatar’s homeland, I would be really paranoid of giant Miyazaki Godzilla, wouldn’t you? Aang already demonstrated that the Avatar can single-handedly wipe out a naval blockade, in the North. The fact that “The Seige of the North” covered episodes 19 and 20 make me wonder if in a few episodes Korra will mirror that display of the Avatar State’s power?

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Mordicai Knode thinks that Sokka’s space sword should remain lost until the third series in the Avatar cycle, where it should act as a kind of “sword in the stone.” Find Mordicai on Twitter and Tumblr.

What if your mother and father were superheros created by Jack Kirby? That is, what if your dad was sort of a cross between Marvel Comic’s Thor—complete with lightning powers—and DC Comic’s New God, Orion? Your mom, she’s sort of a cross between Sif and Wonder Woman, and your family lives in a celestial city—half spaceship and half castle—that floats in the infinite void? That’d be a pretty great life, wouldn’t it? Sort of a shame to have to leave it, but then…it is your thirteenth birthday. Time for a Ramble, time for you to leave the technomagical paradise of your home and go down among the mortals to earn your stripes as a hero.

This is the story of Paul Pope’s Battling Boy; a godling, sent off to find his way with just his natural talents and a suitcase full of magical t-shirts.

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Of course, our demigod protagonist isn’t alone on his quest—not entirely. Earth has a hero. Haggard West: part Silver Age Batman, part steampunk Tony Stark, part Mitchell Hundred as the Great Machine. Or rather, the operative word in that sentence should be “Earth had a hero…” because Haggard West is dead. The question that everyone asks: is his daughter Aurora ready to step into his shoes? Aurora was her father’s Robin, his Speedy, his sidekick in waiting—but she’s a bit young to move from understudy to a starring role. Then again, so is our eponymous hero Battling Boy…

I know I’m getting a little bit out of hand with constantly comparing everything here to six or seven other things, but you really get a sense of the scope of Pope’s influences. He’s drawing from a deep well; heck, he’s drawing from an ocean. Do I even detect a hint of Fletcher Hanks? There is a lot of a little bit of everything in here, but it isn’t a kitchen sink approach; Paul Pope might be an incredible interdisciplinary talent, but it isn’t a hodgepodge of seemingly contradictory ideas. Rather, Pope sifts down to find the core thread of these ideas and weaves them together towards a greater whole. (It sort of reminds me of the mythopoeia of Broxo but, if anything, even more so.)

Is it Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age? Well…yes? Yes to all those things. What are we calling the Modern Age at the moment? The Renaissance? Well, much the same way that Grant Morrison weaves Renaissance narratives by just accepting that a comic character’s backstory is entirely canon—Silver Age shenanigans especially, even if the modern incarnation is relentlessly banal and gritty—we get Pope doing a similar thing, both in terms of story and visually. The saturated colour panels really just are so…well, so Jack Kirby that I had to mention it in the first line of the review.

The richness of detail in Battling Boy allows Pope to be referential without needing to slow down. Actually, referential is the wrong word, as is homage or parody. Battling Boy isn’t a collection of tropes or clichés, or a stitched together Frankenstein’s monster of allusions to other works. I said Renaissance and I stick by it; this is influenced by a range of sources, and those influences are laid bare, because Paul Pope stands on the shoulders of giants—and he stands tall on those shoulders. He can evoke the Blackhawks or the Howling Commandos by having the science soldiers of the 145^th go out to go kaiju hunting without that needing to be a 1:1 association with them. Nor is this Astro City, which is built on being a pastiche, on being meta-textual and says something about the comics it emulates. Battling Boy is its own thing, a world tree with roots that go deep into the history of the medium

The one downside of Battling Boy is actually an upside in disguise: this is just volume one. On one hand, that keeps us away from the epic confrontations and narratively fulfilling conclusions that you can feel coming down the pike. On the other…well, it means more Battling Boy. I am really into Battling Boy—did I already mention that it is like Walt Simonson decided to do indie comics, or like Moebius decided to pick up the adrenaline of manga?—so I am anxious and eager for more. Getting to the end and seeing the big bad of the book meet a Bigger Bad just means that the scope of the story is going to be bigger, which means a larger canvas for Battling Boy. Which is good news, because I don’t doubt for a moment that he can fill it.

Battling Boy is available October 8th from First Second.
Read an excerpt of the comic here on Tor.com

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Mordicai Knode thinks the best compliment you could give anybody working with words and pictures is probably a favorable comparison to Jack Kirby. You can find Mordicai on Tumblr or Twitter.

So we left two The Legend of Korra storylines unfinished with “Civil Wars: Part One”: Korra’s parents about to be arrested and Tenzin’s daughter Ikki missing. When we pick back up with Korra…she’s letting her parents be arrested? Really Korra, you are still messing around with Unalaq on his terms? “Alright,” I say with a slump of my shoulders, “at least this means this is the last episode where she falls for it.” And it was. Thank heavens. As someone pointed out, Korra does have a “type,” doesn’t she? Mentoring Sinister Water Tribe guys, she is always a sucker for them. They are her kryptonite.

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So Korra goes to the trumped up trial, watches Unalaq farcically plead for clemency, and she…okay, at last she’s starting to put her foot down. Gosh, enough is enough already! At last it is enough—she’s confronted by Unalaq’s not-inconsiderable list of lies, and finally now that there is action, Korra knows what to do. Knowing what to do, who to trust, that is her struggle. So Unalaq sure seems pretty wicked, huh? I’m still not convinced that the season won’t end in reconciliation between Unalaq and Tonraq, but it does suddenly appear far less grey and a lot more black and white. Oh hey, is it just me—it probably isn’t me, I’m probably late to this party, given the known proclivities of Tumblr—or do their names sort of sound like “Loki” and “Thor”? Una-LOK? THOR-raq? Huh? HUH?

The missing Ikki storyline jumps ahead to Tenzin finding his missing daughter, with thankfully no forced fanfare. Oh no, something all together better: a tea party with sky bison calves! Juniper Lightningbug, Blueberry Spicehead, Princess Rainbow, Twinkle Starchild, a full My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic panoply. As predicted, Ikki and Tenzin bond over sibling torment and use their perspective as outsiders to point out some of the virtues of each other’s pair of brother and sister. Meanwhile Bumi’s ruminating with his father’s statues; if Tenzin got his father’s airbending and Kya got her mother’s waterbending, Bumi apparently inherited both parents’ tendency to want to try to save the world. I like that.

I wouldn’t quite go so far as to say that the theme of this episode was “true colors” but I would say instead that it is like peeling a layer off an onion. Yep, Unalaq certainly got painted with the villain brush, but I’m still not convinced his character development will stop there. Similarly, we see Varrick’s intentions towards the revolution are sincere—at least so far. Putting him in the stuffed platypus bear is a bit of inspired physical comedy; the “style” of humor on The Legend of Korra has included low humor like farts and puns, surprise humor like the more Looney Tunes facial expressions, but Taxidermy Varrick feels very Old Timey Gaang style funny. ’course, I sort of think Varrick’s parallel is to the original Bumi, anyway.

We also see that Eska is…well, saying she is sincere in her affections is immaterial and putting the cart before the horse, at this point. Bolin tries to break up with her, in a spectacularly unsuccessful fashion; he doesn’t stand up for himself, but he’s pretty clearly being bullied by Eska, down to literal tears—again, played for laughs—but I’m still heartily icked out. Their story can be fixed, or “saved,” or she could become a straight up bad guy, but it can’t stay like it is. I hear people compare Eska to Mai and I can’t tell you how wrong that is. For one thing, Mai is presented as a villain and then gets character growth and development; and for another, her relationship with Zuko is clearly consensual and non-coercive. No, “Boleska” isn’t Zuko and Mai. If anything it is Ty Lee and Azula. So when we see her in pursuit, mascara running, is it any wonder that her water jets evoke Azula’s blue fire?

Actually, speaking of the original Avatar: the Last Airbender series, this story has really mirrored the first arc of that series; the Northern Water Tribe ships pull in just like the imperial Fire Nation, and this aerial engagement and escape reminded me of the sky bison fueled escape from the south that Aang, Sokka and Katara made. I liked a lot about this episode—the background art on the frozen water fountain and the pentagonal prison were really gorgeous—and I am glad we’re seeing momentum. After the first three episodes, it felt like it was all build up; now things are getting in gear. No Dark Spirits this episode, which I thought was an interesting lacuna.

My prediction was that Tonraq was going to make a break for the North, try to start an insurrection there, assert his claim as chief, split Unalaq’s attention but I can’t tell if the end of this episode left room for that. What do you think is the show’s next move?

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Mordicai Knode can’t remember if we’ve ever seen the Avatar bend two elements at the same time without being in the Avatar state. Find him on Tumblr and Twitter.

Make-up arstream starts in a few minutes! If you've got something you want me to crit, get it ready!

So I did this colour test & I stared at it pretty hard & this is what I came up with. A 12. All my problems are in secondary colours, too; yellow-green, blue-green, indigo. Probably just one tile off. That doesn't seem very bad, especially not when viewed in a graphic format; I would really like to see the broader statistical analysis. xkcd has looked at it before & sort of backed up the whole cultural bias by gender trope; you know, men only having a category for "red" but women having magenta, cranberry, salmon, etc. Of course, there actually is a sex based bias, too, with males having more chances in the genetic lottery to wind up with legitimate colour blindness. I really liked Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher, & while this only tangentially makes me think of it, well...here we are. Not to mention I wanted something to post in Livejournal; this is a personal result, after all. My Tumblr is great for resharing stuff-- my Tumblr is pretty badass, I'm into it now-- but it is a terrible blogging platform, you know? Who cares if I got a twelve on some test! I'll probably share it on there anyhow, but it makes more sense here, because as goofy as it is-- it makes me feel like this is 2001 & we're still embedding quiz results in our diaries-- it is an interesting snapshot of the intersection of biological context with online blogging. Here is some medical history, future digital archeologists!

Oh Korra, poor, poor, foolish Korra. Or I should say naïve Korra; either way, she certainly isn’t the Sokka of the bunch. I guess Asami is the brains of this operation. (Though did you see Korra fight this episode? Wowie-zowie; she’s a badass.) While I still think the season will resolve with Unalaq being proven to have been “right” about the spirit stuff and Tonraq “right” about politics, with Korra uniting the two tribes by mediating between the brothers, it sure hasn’t happened. We get Korra siding unilaterally with Unalaq, and in fact “tattling” to Unalaq about people unhappy with…being invaded. Which…you know, getting invaded is a pretty good reason to be unhappy and start planning a resistance, if you ask me.

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Listen, it is entirely possible that the Dark Spirits are not spirits out of balance, but are in fact Spirits who are trying (clumsily) to fight Unalaq, to prevent him from catastrophically tearing down the borders between the Spirit World and the Mortal World. I mean, we walk in on him brooding on a shadowed throne, after all.

You know, Werewolf: The Forsaken is an RPG, where you play a werewolf, that leans heavily on shamanic traditions. Two of the antagonists in the game present a similar dilemma; the Beshilu—rat spirits—and Azlu—spider spirits—who also interact with the veil between the Spirit and the Real. The rat spirits want to gnaw through the barrier, while the spider spirits want to weave an impenetrable wall. A happy medium—see what I did there, medium?—is what is needed.

Frankly, I find Varrick’s turn as a freedom fighter to be…well, actually pretty plausible, profit motive and all. I mean, his rotting fish problem isn’t all that different from a bunch of guys who don’t want to pay import tariffs for tea. Is he a corrupt lobbyist or is he the Ben Franklin of the Southern Water Tribe? I guess that remains to be seen; whatever it is, Bolin and Asami are obviously going to be caught up in it. Like I said, I think Unalaq is probably sincere an probably genuinely wants to unite the Water Tribe via the Spirit Portal but…that doesn’t mean his methods are just or that the South isn’t right to resist occupation and, well, you know which road they say is lined with good intentions….

“This storyline makes me uncomfortable,” was how my wife described Bolin and Eska, and I’m starting to agree with her. Originally played for laughs, things have rather rapidly taken the turn into “emotionally abusive,” depending on your reading of the situation. It isn’t too late for the show to twist it into something more complex, but now it has a sort of “ha ha, dangerous relationship!” element to it that I find distasteful. The fact that Eska is an aristocrat of a regime that is currently occupying another country just makes the power dynamic that much worse.

Now, it could be that this is The Legend of Korra trying to show how bad it is to be invaded, as military forces occupying a nation is a pretty standard trope…well, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. Googling “comfort women” or “Recreation and Amusement Association” gives us a taste of how incredibly dark it gets in reality, and while this is an all-ages show, we know that Avatar: The Last Airbender used Lake Laogai to talk about “mature” issues like torture and concentration camps. I'm probably over thinking it—Bolin and Eska may very well be a “light” romantic b-plot—but the possibility remains that Bolin’s fear of Eska may not be Bolin being a wimp about breaking up with his girlfriend, but emblematic of something deeper. Don’t discount your friends and family when they try to talk to you about their domestic issues, don’t brush them off, is what I’m saying; there may very well be something bad going on.

…and of course there is…Eska’s laugh….

Again, the gem of the story are Aang and Katara’s family; Tenzin, Bumi, Kya in particular, off to look for a missing Ikki, driven off by Jinora and Meelo teaming up to tease her. Tenzin is also teased by his siblings, and teases them back, and fault lines start showing. Bumi, the non-bender, is teased by his bending sister and brother, and it is easy to guess that even as adults that is a sore spot, especially given the political tensions of the world these days.

The parallels between Ikki and Tenzin become pretty unsubtle once the conversation turns and Bumi and Kya start teasing Tenzin. It has a different tone then the “Vacation Tenzin” jokes because there is something there. See, Aang’s family trips were…well, just Tenzin. Kya and Bumi felt abandoned by their father, and for my money that is a really interesting choice for the story to make. Aang as a less-than-perfect father is humanizing; we the viewers have beatified Aang and so have the people of the Avatar-verse...but Aang wasn’t perfect; he had struggles and failures too, in case you forgot. Just like Korra.

I’m guessing we’ll get a more nuanced picture of those childhood events; Kya and Bumi are coming from a place of hurt, Tenzin from a place of nostalgia, but I would bet that the truth is a little of column A, a little of column B…and a heaping helping of column C. Maybe we’ll get it from Katara, maybe we’ll get it through flashbacks, or Jinora bonding with Grandpa Aang in the spirit world, maybe we’ll get it through the three siblings talking it out, but we’ll see it.

I know I’ve been very “wait and see!” about this season, but I’m interested to see how the events set up in The Legend of Korra do end up wrapping up; right now we’re in the part of the story where we see Chekhov’s Gun; it won’t be till later that they pull the trigger…

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Mordicai Knode thinks they should have gone all out & aired “Civil Wars: Parts 1 and 2” simultaneously, but he’s just greedy. You can follow him on Tumblr and Twitter.

In “Advanced Readings in D&D,” Tor.com writers Tim Callahan and Mordicai Knode take a look at Gary Gygax’s favorite authors and reread one per week, in an effort to explore the origins of Dungeons and Dragons and see which of these sometimes-famous, sometimes-obscure authors are worth rereading today. Sometimes the posts will be conversations, while other times they will be solo reflections, but one thing is guaranteed: Appendix N will be written about, along with dungeons, and maybe dragons, and probably wizards, and sometimes robots, and, if you’re up for it, even more.

Welcome to the fifteenth post in the series, featuring a look at The Warrior of World’s End by Lin Carter!

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Tim Callahan: I don’t know that I’d say that Lin Carter hammered a home run with the ending of The Warrior of World’s End—if you will allow me a baseball metaphor for no good reason—but this was a jam-packed book, even at only 150 pages.

I fell in love with the insanity of this book pretty early on, and my enthusiasm rarely waned, even with its relatively abrupt climax-and-conclusion. Many of the books we’ve been reading for this Gygax project have sequels or are part of multi-book series, and though I haven’t rushed out for more Lin Carter and World’s End yet, I’m tempted to in a way that I haven’t been tempted by anything else recently.

This “First Book of the Gondwain Epic,” or so it says in my copy, which I believe is the first (and only?) edition from 1974, tells the story of the rise and super-crazy-rise and super-super-wonderfully-mad-action-packed-rise-even-higher-on-a-flying-metal-bird of Ganelon Silvermane, who is kind of like a...how do I put this...advanced clone of Jesus and He-Man or something? His name is Ganelon Silvermane, and he’s all-around awesome.

And then there’s the writing.

Sometimes this book reads like a barely-controlled stream of fake science and unrestrained fantasy, and other times it reads like Lin Carter was using William Burrough’s cut-up technique on a bunch of old pulps and science textbooks he had floating around his office. The prose features sentences like this:

“The Tigermen fiercely resented this form of blackmail, and soon found means of rejecting the demands of the so-called Airmasters (as the Sky Islanders had taken to calling themselves). For the comet’s head, a giant mass of frozen oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and helium, was buried beneath the roots of the Thazarian Mountains...”

And it goes on, and that’s no early-story exposition, that’s two-thirds of the way through the book, because Lin Carter does not establish a world and then set his plot in motion. He constantly builds this world as he goes, amplifying the strange landscape and weird cultures and alien races and setting Ganelon Silvermane to work as the one who will unite them all, mostly with his rad fighting skills.

Mordicai Knode: I’m so glad this book came around when it did; I was starting to sour on the Appendices but then, BAM! Like lightning, Warrior of World’s End started laying down the sick beats. It reads sort of...well, to use the lingo of the Appendices, it reads like one of Jack Vance’s wizards is in a tutelary role like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser’s patrons, Ningauble of the Seven Eyes and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face to a John Carter-esque protagonist. There are a lot of influences going into this, is what I’m saying, making a rich stew. Hearty fare for a weary traveller!

As Tim mentions, this book just immediately goes madcap, and for the best. The crazyquilt of ideas actually gets stitched into a rather cohesive—if surreal—whole. At this risk of bringing up another comparison, it sort of reminds me of Jack Kirby, where each crazy thing thrown into the mix stays in the mix; it isn’t scrubbed out or forgotten but rather lingers, remaining a vibrant part of the story. A lot of fiction throws in big ideas and then walks away from them without exploring their ramifications, but if Warrior of World’s End says there is a giant metal flying robot-bird then doggone it, that robot-bird is going to stick around and become a major character!

And there certainly are a lot of big ideas, just scattered around, helter-skelter. Heck, things kick off with a “godmaker” and a “pseudowoman” as the Joseph and Mary of the story, and that is in the comparatively tame establishing bits. Some of the rest of the trivia you get in exposition, but some of it is happily and lovingly rendered in footnotes. “The zodiacal signs recognized in this era..” starts one, going on to list things like Manticore, Bazonga, Minimal, Merwoman, and Spurge. I have mentioned on numerous occasions that I’m a sucker for worldbuilding, so tiny asides like that really get to me, you know?

TC: Yeah, the kind of worldbuilding I love isn’t in the pseudo-historical details and lengthy chronicles of lands that never were (I’m looking at you Silmarillion), but in the evocative names tossed around and the implied depth of the world. I like the suggestion of the enormity, and weirdness, of a fantasy world, but I don’t like to know all of the scientific and economic details about it. Lin Carter doesn’t give us that stuff. He jumps right into the madness and explains just enough to give us a foundation to make some kind of sense out of everything. But it’s not the explanations that matter—it’s the non-stop acceleration through increasingly epic events.

It’s absolutely Jack Kirbyish, and I love it for that.

MK: Well, I am a Silmarillion nerd— I know it is basically just “biblical begats” but it is my jam— but I don’t want to go off-topic here on that rant. You’re right though, “evocative” is the term: The Warrior of World’s End tosses out entire ideas, just a kernel that your imagination waters and tends to till it sprouts into something personal and unique, filling in the corners of the world off the map. At the same time, what gets me is that, after dangling all these story hooks around, Carter actually grabs some of them, and takes the story off in that direction. We both mentioned the giant robotic bird—well, whatever you want to call a magical superscience automaton, maybe robot is the wrong word for it—but the multi-dimension, soul-eating lobster demon who speaks in a charming pidgin is pretty great, too. Not to mention that the novel remembers that a multi-dimensional demon and a metal bird exists outside of the scenes establishing them. It is Chekhov’s Gun—a simple narrative tool, but in the gonzo context, it really shines.

TC: Oh yeah, I totally agree. This is a book that builds its mythology as it goes, like some kind of genius tesseract of narrative. I don’t even know what that means, but it sounds like it would fit The Warrior of World’s End.

And, in the larger context of this Gary Gygax Appendix N stuff, this Lin Carter novel reminds us of the unrestrained promise of early D&D. As the game evolved and kind of solidified into what most people play as a relatively traditional fantasy setting, D&D lost some of the anything-goes bravado of its early incarnations. Gygax’s Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books had pages devoted to converting characters from D&D to the western rules of Boot Hill or the post-apocalypse of Gamma World. Reports of the adventures he used to run—as evidenced by modules like Dungeonland—show that Gygax’s game wasn’t a straightforward dudes-in-armor-exploring-ruins kind of thing. He had his characters teleported to insane worlds where parodies of Alice in Wonderland characters appeared. He wasn’t afraid to amplify the mythology-building in his games.

The Warrior of World’s End reminds me of that. Anything can happen, but in the end it makes sense in its own way. And that’s only after reading one book in the series. I have no idea how much more madness Lin Carter packs in to Ganelon Silvermane’s story in later volumes.

MN: That is a really smart point. Gygax’s games had people transported to other planets where their primary class didn’t work, or sent mysteriously into the Wild West. Where, you know, they would pick up stuff that would not only stay with them (Muryland’s “magic wands” which are just six-shooters) but bleed over into the game (Melf’s planetary adventures are the reason that AD&D’s multi-classing rules—or is it dual classing?—are so bizarre). Heck, you can still see those wacky ideas enshrined in the magic items; Vance’s IOUN stones, the Apparatus of Kwalish, Elric’s Stormbri... I mean, Blackrazor, just these little snake-hands, artifacts of a wilder, untamed D&D.

You’re right that the assumptions of the game have condensed into a sort of high fantasy setting, but that is the genius of campaign settings. Spelljammer may not be supported these days, but it remains one of my fondest Dungeons & Dragons milieus. Travelling through the Ptolemaic heavens in spaceships designed to look like nautiluses and manta rays, encountering squidheaded aliens and hippo-headed aliens...that attitude of pushing the envelope shows up time & again. If reading Lin Carter inspires anything, it should be to steal from the odder corners of the game, and to turn the Weird Dial up to 11 for a session or two.

TC: To the Phlogiston, and beyond!

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Tim Callahan usually writes about comics and Mordicai Knode usually writes about games. They both play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons.

There are some feelings that can only be described in acronyms that have been run through the hard decay of slang. “ZOMG” expresses how I feel about the start of the new season of The Legend of Korra. I’ve missed doing these Korra discussion posts almost as much as I’ve missed watching the show! The new season, “Book Two: Spirits” started off with a bang, with an explosion of Dark Spirits and religious tensions in the Water Tribe, with a host of new characters and new directions for the story—and I’m eager to follow the yellow brick road to see where it goes. We got to see two episodes, “Rebel Spirit” and “Southern Lights,” in the hour long premiere, and the dominoes have already started to topple.

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So I’ve been thinking about Korra a lot since last summer, and I’ve decided to just ignore the haters. You know how many episodes The Legend of Korra had in the first season? Twelve. Yet people keep trying to judge it by the yardstick of the full three seasons—sixty-one episodes—of Avatar: the Last Airbender. That isn’t fair; a far better comparison would be to the first dozen Last Airbender episodes, which is to say we’d just have gotten past “The Great Divide.” We would have just gotten Zuko’s backstory, but not seen his behavior change, because “The Blue Spirit” hasn’t aired yet. We wouldn’t have seen romance start to bloom, because “The Fortuneteller” or “The Cave of Two Lovers” haven’t happened.

You think Korra’s stubborn tendency towards aggression is a character flaw? How about that time Aang stole the letter from Katara and Sokka’s long lost father? Well, that would still be in the future, in “Bato of the Water Tribe.” What I’m saying is, people need to take a chill pill. Especially people hating on Korra and Mako as a couple; let’s see what happens? I didn’t watch Avatar: the Last Airbender till after it had aired, so I missed the wars between the “Zutara” and “Kataang” ’shippers, but let’s not have a redux of that. Just sit back and enjoy the show. Let’s give them a chance to convince us…or not. Anyhow, that’s my philosophy. But enough of that, let’s talk about the two new episodes!

First off, let’s talk about big political arc, let’s talk about Unalaq and Tonraq. Here is my prediction for the season: Unalaq is not wrong. Or to put it another way, Unalaq is not Amon or Tarrlok. I don’t think Unalaq is secretly summoning the Dark Spirits in order to inflate his influence; I think he appears so sinister to disguise the fact that he has a point. That said, rolling into the South with a fleet of warships definitely points to him not being “good.” Like everything in the world of Avatar, it is organic, a mixed bag of virtues and vices, flaws and strengths. My long-term guess? Unalaq’s spiritual side is stronger than his real world side, and Tonraq’s real world side is stronger than his spiritual side; Korra will have to bring the brothers into balance to save them and the Water Tribe, to prevent them from being Tarrlok and Noatak.

Okay, I’ve waited long enough; I wanna squee about the characters. First off, Katara and Aang’s kids, eeeee, they are the best. Tenzin was probably my favorite character from the first season, and to see him whipping out that goofy map of his boring dad vacation is like, my favorite. Then to see him interact with goofy big brother Bumi and sly big sister Kya? Really great; they are a pleasure whenever they are on screen. and did I say Tenzin was my favorite? I misspoke; Jinora is my actual favorite. The bookish fantasy nerd, who could’ve guessed; seeing her sleepwalk up to (presumably) the First Avatar’s statue in the Air Temple gave me goose bumps; I’m eager for her to have an expanded role and I’m still hoping that—much like Toph invented “advanced earthbending” in the form of metalbending, and firebending has lightning while waterbending has blood- and plant-bending—Jinora will invent a new kind of advanced airbending. Also, the Air Acolytes falling all over themselves for the airbenders? Cracking up about it still.

Desna and Eska are, of course, the new darlings, and not just because they give ’shippers all kinds of new combinations to throw into the mix. Aubrey Plaza! When that was announced I definitely had a picture in my head of how Eska would roll, when the show came back, and now that we’ve seen it, I’m not disappointed. The verdict is still out on Desna, but I sort of expect the twins to be split up, to choose opposite sides in the coming conflict; sibling rivalry seems to be a theme for The Legend of Korra—well, for the whole Avatar setting, what with Zuko and Azula, Sokka and Katara—and this seems like another future hot spot to me. Mai is one of my favorite characters from the last series, and I would like to see Eska expand into a similar position, or a bigger one, though I also wonder if Bolin and Asami might become a “thing.”

Speaking of Asami and Bolin, I find Korra to be increasingly Ghibli-esque. The tensions between a modernizing world and a strange spirit world, I mean. How Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away can you get? In fact, you’ve got Korra to do the Mononoke storyline and Jinora to do the Spirited Away one! And Varrick seems to me to be one of the Miyazaki clowns, like Jigo from Princess Mononoke or Donald Curtis from Porco Rosso—characters that have a buffoonish side but aren’t simply one dimensional. I’ve got my eye on him. Not to mention that I find the references to Sallie Gardner at a Gallop and Le Coucher de la Mariée to be really interesting; I wonder if we’ll meet a counterpart to The Mechanist in the form of a Legend of Korra-fied Georges Méliès.

I’m really excited The Legend of Korra is back. What was one thing we were hoping for? A chance to see more of the world, how it has changed since the last series? Well, we’ve seen the Southern Water Tribe, we’ve seen the Everstorm, we’ve seen people and troops from the Northern Water Tribe, we’ve seen the refurbished Southern Air Temple…I’m really excited to see what else the show has in store, both in the mortal world and the spirit world. I know last season I guessed that Koh the Face Stealer was behind everything, and I was wrong, so in that same “fat chance” vein, I’ll make a prediction: Korra will bring Koh back “into balance,” making him less of a Dark Spirit. I’m probably just whistling in the dark, here, but I might as well take a swing at it. My backup theory is that Wan Shi Tong is the final antagonist, that he’s gone Dark since his library sunk. Just wild guesses; what are yours?

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Mordicai Knode was super happy to see the cosplayers show up again but his favorite line from both episodes was Bumi saying “Mom already invited me!” to Tenzin. Find more Mordicai on Twitter and Tumblr.

In “Advanced Readings in D&D,” Tor.com writers Tim Callahan and Mordicai Knode take a look at Gary Gygax’s favorite authors and reread one per week, in an effort to explore the origins of Dungeons and Dragons and see which of these sometimes-famous, sometimes-obscure authors are worth rereading today. Sometimes the posts will be conversations, while other times they will be solo reflections, but one thing is guaranteed: Appendix N will be written about, along with dungeons, and maybe dragons, and probably wizards, and sometimes robots, and, if you’re up for it, even more.

Welcome to the fourteenth post in the series, featuring a look at The Humanoids by Jack Williamson.

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Tim Callahan: Well here’s a sci-fi novel in a classic mold. And yet another author I hadn’t read before. Jack Williamson apparently started his career by mashing up The Three Musketeers with Falstaff in the distant future and launching the crew as The Legion of Space. If you start your writing career that way, I will pay attention to you. (Or, I will once I find out that’s how you started your writing career, anyway.) But we didn’t choose The Legion of Space for our Williamson selection. We chose The Humanoids. I don’t remember why—it was probably one of the first books that popped up under his name when I started looking around for Jack Williamson reading material. But The Humanoids is pretty good—unsettling, ambitious, and maybe a bit messy in the end—and though it suffers from some of the sterility of prose that many Golden Age of Sci-Fi novels suffer from, I found it compulsively readable. It has a paranoid cinematic quality to it. Like a Twilight Zone episode blown out to feature-length and blasted onto the big screen.

Unfortunately, the version of The Humanoids I read also contains the 1947 Jack Williamson short story “With Folded Hands,” which is a thematic precursor to The Humanoids and—this is where the problem comes in—it reads like a really good, tightly-focused, panicked episode of The Twilight Zone, so it makes Williamson’s follow-up in The Humanoids seem bloated and digressive in comparison.

I still enjoyed The Humanoids, but I wonder how I would have felt about it if I didn’t begin by reading “With Folded Hands.” Did you read that Williamson story, or did you just jump right into The Humanoids novel itself?

Mordicai Knode: Honestly I just started and I decided to skip right to The Humanoids. I am so far...well, I’d honestly forgotten that we’d picked it! I am in the middle of reading it, all “wait, so...what, Gary?” Honestly though, I think this goes to the point of what we were saying about Carnellian Cube, doesn’t it? Another “high concept” idea, which is the sort of thing that does successfully translate into an adventure or campaign. I will tell you what though; my overwhelming thought while I read through this is just that it reads like a really long, belabored, maybe paid-by-the-word episode of the Outer Limits or Twilight Zone. That, I think, is probably us being spoiled by living in the future! There wasn’t a Twilight Zone when The Humanoids was written, you know?

Alright, thanks to the miracle of “the way writing works,” I’ve finished! You know what, I actually really like the ending. That is a sort of voice that I imagine existing in a lot of science fiction; the “dissenting opinion.” You know, these days you really only get two straw men fighting over each other: consider Avatar, where you have the magical Dances With Wolves guy being like “no, we should be respectful of others and nature” versus a “no, racism is awesome and I love destroying the environment!” argument. Blah. As a sidebar, while watching Avatar I kept pretending that the Na’vi were actually Xenomorphs; it really made the Bad Military Haircut Guy’s opinions make a lot more sense. In a way, Humanoids is like that. It has layers; maybe the bad guys are right, no the bad guys are the worst, no maybe the bad guys are right, repeat until you reach the end.

TC: This novel does delve into the stuff of Philosophy 101, like those at-the-coffee-house post-seminar conversations where you debate what happiness is, and some guy is all like, “yeah, but what if you could achieve perfect happiness but the cost was being hooked up to a machine pumping happy juice into your brain and you could never leave that room? But you were totally happy, you know?”

That’s what The Humanoids essentially asks—only with robots and freedom fighters and a plot that isn’t as strong as its central conceit.

It really does suffer compared to “With Folded Hands,” which turns the concept into a slow unfolding of terror as the super-helpful, humanity-serving robots methodically force a kind of happy contentment on everyone. Told that way, it’s not really about a “dissenting opinion,” since there’s no one rooting for happiness at the expense of personal freedom in the short story, but Williamson does allow his characters to wrestle with their own issues about what it means to be human.

In The Humanoids they wrestle with that, and with the notion of liberty, and with the threat of the inhumanity of the machine (even if the machine will do what is in the best interest of humanity, coldly speaking).

It’s a classic sci-fi concept. It’s a classic literary concept. My son is in middle school and he’s just starting to get to the point where his English teacher will expect some kind of literary analysis (even if its relatively simplistic) as they read books, and I clued him in on the secret of literature: it’s almost always about the individual trying to break away from some kind of system. He laughed when I told him that and said, “I’m not a part of your system!” in reference to the Lonely Islands song “Threw it on the Ground.” But it’s true. That’s what that song’s about. That’s what The Humanoids is about. That’s what life’s about.

MK: That video cracks me up, the one for “Threw It On the Ground.” Good times. Anyhow, I’ve heard it said that there are two different dystopias that the world needs to worry about: the 1984 dystopia where you need to worry about things being taken away from you, and the Brave New World dystopia where you need to worry about things being given to you. Which is a fine moral to a story, an interesting observation that says a lot about, you know, consumerism and advertising or whatever—sure—I’m just unclear on how it relates to Dungeons and Dragons. I mean, you could have a whole campaign about golems or Inevitables or Modrons and co-opt the plot from this book, but I think that is a stretch.

Maybe the lesson you could learn from this book is that making hugely flawed characters is more interesting than making banal superhuman heroes who laugh in the face of danger and never give into the temptation to pry the ruby eyes out of the idol of Fraz-Urb’luu?

TC: Yeah, I don’t see the Dungeons and Dragons link at all, and I am pretty darn sure Gary Gygax didn’t have any Modrons in mind when he generated his list of fave books. The Modrons are wonderful and all—who doesn’t like Rubik the Amazing Cube mashed up with Mr. Spock—but they aren’t central to early D&D. Or any D&D. Ever.

But, to be fair, Appendix N doesn’t specifically name The Humanoids as an influence, but mentions Jack Williamson in general. Probably his pulpier early stuff was what Gygax had had in mind. In retrospect, we should have read the Legion of Musketeers in Space with Falstaff and Friends book. But something called The Humanoids sounds like D&D from a distance. If you squint. And don’t read the back of the book.

MK: Oh man, now I am sort of thinking about the parallel universe where we read Legion of Musketeers in Space with Falstaff and Friends because dang, that is a hell of a title. Still, we picked this up because it seemed like the most germane Williamson, and that says something about the state of pulps, fantasy, and science fiction at the time. People like Williamson were jumping between genre helter-skelter; is it any wonder so much of the early Dungeons and Dragons stuff was similarly all over the map, in terms of tone and material? Spaceships, cowboys, Alice in Wonderland, whatever! Everything was coming from a contextual smorgasbord.

TC: And yet Dungeons and Dragons, devouring that smorgasbord, ended up inspiring countless bland, sterile high-fantasy worlds. Somewhere along the way, everything just became codified into a too-familiar system of signs and signifiers. But we can’t blame Jack Williamson for that. He was warning us about the perils of...the machine!

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Tim Callahan usually writes about comics and Mordicai Knode usually writes about games. They both play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons.

Mordicai Knode Interviews Dave Gross, Part 1

Thursday, September 5, 2013

In honor of the newly released Pathfinder Tales novel King of Chaos, we've pulled out all the stops and asked noted reviewer Mordicai Knode to do a new interview with Dave Gross, the author behind Count Jeggare and Radovan, two of the most beloved characters in the Pathfinder universe!

In 2010, Mordicai Knode was the first person to post a review of Prince of Wolves after galleys went out at the American Book Association in New York. Since then he has written a comprehensive review of the first three Radovan and the Count novels as well as the very first review of King of Chaos at tor.com.

Despite Dave trotting across North America in order to sign books and speak on panels at shows like Gen Con and Worldcon, Mordicai managed to track him down via email. Here's what they had to say...

Let's get this started with a chicken or the egg question: Who came first in your imagination, Radovan or Varian?

Yes.

The story sketch that became "Hell's Pawns," a serial novella originally appearing in the Council of Thieves Adventure Path, was based on a pitch I'd previously sent another editor a few years earlier. He took eight months to respond and then quietly vanished from said publisher, so the story sketch lingered in my ideas folder. Since that pitch centered on a noble figure that later became Varian, you could argue that he came first.

However, for Pathfinder I reworked the outline both to set it in Golarion and to freshen it up. At that stage I'd decided to tell the story from two alternating points of view, but when I began outlining I realized I had room enough for only one. Taking the Holmes and Watson stories as a model, I decided it was more interesting to tell the tale from the POV of the assistant rather than the detective.

And then, because I'd been watching a lot of film noir the previous month and felt a tough-guy sensibility worked well in the capital city of Cheliax, I adopted the attitude of a hard-boiled antihero for Radovan.

Thus, the existence of a character like Varian came first (and in fact, Varian might have been his name in the previous incarnation), but the tone and personality of Radovan came together before I fleshed out the count.

Were there any interesting variations in the characters as you shaped them? Was Radovan always part-devil, was Varian always a half-elf who threw up when he tried to cast a spell? Did they go through versions and drafts where they were profoundly different, or did they step fully formed onto the page, like Howard and Conan?

Varian was always an armchair wizard, although the exact nature of his disability evolved after "Hell's Pawns" when I first started conceiving Prince of Wolves. Other details, like Varian's and Radovan's mutual worship of Desna, or Lady Luck, were seeds I planted toward a vague end that started taking shape when I outlined the first novel.

From the start, I wanted both Varian and Radovan to be of mixed parentage. In pitch stage, Radovan was a half-orc with a vaguely East Asian name. James Sutter told me there was another half-orc in the works for Pathfinder fiction and suggested I make my character what we now call a hellspawn. Hell-wrought half-breeds are more common in Cheliax, where devils have supplemented the human legions for the past few generations. Of course, being perverse, I decided that, while Radovan was hellspawn, he wasn't descended from a devil in Cheliax.

When it came to the name, when James suggested a Tian (Pathfinder's equivalent of Asian) name was a bit too unusual for Cheliax, I went to one of my other favorite cultural analogs: the Ustalavs, similar to Eastern Europeans. Radovan was not the first name I considered, but the moment I typed it, I knew it was right for the character.

The secret of Radovan's ancestry was just a vague idea when I was writing "Hell's Pawns," but by the time I was outlining Prince of Wolves, I had generated a few pages of notes about the centuries preceding his birth. His secrets have been coming out one big blossom at a time in these four novels. I keep a growing secret timeline and notes for future revelations. With what's revealed in Queen of Thorns and King of Chaos, Varian is starting to catch up with Radovan in terms of learning, "What is wrong with me?!"

There is sometimes a sort of anachronistic sense of humor in your work, along with fairly contemporary attitudes among your characters. To me it seems like you excel at being inspired by things outside the usual fantasy tropes of elves and knights—things like grindhouse wuxia movies or Universal horror films—and translating them plausibly into your ostensibly fantasy stories. Do you see yourself writing in a very narrow subgenre of your own creation? Who else do you think hits the same sweet spot? (I have in mind Alex Bledsoe's Eddie LaCrosse series, personally.)

"Anachronistic" always strikes me as a funny word to apply to an alternate world. Sure, there are some striking similarities between many of Golarion's cultures and those of the real world, but the stories aren't taking place in our past.

Still, I get what you mean. Some readers think fantasy occurs only in Middle-Ages or Renaissance Britain. I like to choose dialect and tone to suit a character or a region of the setting. For instance, Radovan, as a lower-class Chelaxian, speaks with a kind of low-class, pulp-era attitude, while Varian wouldn't seem out of place if he walked onto the set of Downton Abbey. I try to make the elves look and sound different from the crusaders without making them all sound like some near-variation of Tolkien's creations.

As for bringing in non-standard-fantasy influences, I'm not anywhere close to the first writer to do that. I think it's been in fantasy since the beginning, but the popularity of the Tolkienesque model makes us forget they exist. The writer who first opened my eyes to a different model for fantasy was Roger Zelazny, whose Corwin of Amber was, I believe, partly inspired by the Travis McGee novels of John D. McDonald.

Also, I just like to write about the stuff I love, which in addition to fantasy adventure includes things like classic horror films, wuxia movies, and detective fiction. I like dogs, so there's a dog. I like jokes, so there are jokes. And while I'm not a violent person, I enjoy action scenes, both the swashbuckling ones and the gritty ones that make you sick of fighting.

Once on a convention panel, one of my colleagues suggested that blending genres—like humor and horror in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series—was a recent trend. I noted Abbot and Costello meet Frankenstein, as well as Bob Hope in Ghost Breakers, and that was enough to persuade him that we've been crossing the streams for ages in film, but it's been with us in all art forever. This idea of keeping a genre "pure" seems like a recent invention of booksellers who want to keep the shelves organized, made worse by sales and marketing people who want to focus on narrow categories to make their jobs easier and maximize sales.

Part of the reason I love Asian movies, and many other movies made outside of Hollywood, is that they so often don't obey the one-genre rule. The closest I've come to a "regular" fantasy novel is probably Queen of Thorns, although King of Chaos is also not as noticeably stream-crossing as the first two books.

You write about Varian and Radovan in a number of different formats—serialized in printed adventures, ebook novellas, online serials, and plain old-fashioned novels—and they are all fully integrated into your stories. Kasiya, the mummified vampire antagonist of King of Chaos, originally appeared in "A Lesson in Taxonomy" online, for instance. How do you approach the different formats, and how do you see your writing evolving in response to it?

Foremost in my mind is the importance of keeping the stories independent of each other. It might be fun to read them chronologically (except "A Lesson in Taxonomy"—don't read that one first), but the scheme is that you can come into the setting and the characters from any one of those doors. Frankly, I think some are more successful at that than others. To new readers I tend to recommend Prince of Wolves, since it's a solid foundation for both the characters and the setting. Still, although you'd be coming in on the fourth "season," you should be able to start with any of the short fiction or novellas, and now especially King of Chaos, and not feel lost.

The short stories are the most difficult and in some ways the most rewarding of the stories. I always find myself stripping away subplots and details I wanted to include but couldn't without muddling a short piece with too much incident.

I much prefer the room allowed in a novella or novel, in part because I love subplots and small character moments that don't at first seem relevant to the story, but when you look back at them, you go, "Oh!"

After writing a short story, I always feel energized to write a better single chapter in the next novel. While the novels aren't a series of short stories, I admire the way George R.R. Martin makes so many of the chapters in his Song of Ice and Fire such strong, stand-alone stories, even when he leaves them on a cliffhanger. I am certainly moving toward emulating that structure as I go forward.

Have you decided what posterity should call the series? "Radovan and the Count"? "Varian and Radovan?"

While I prefer "Radovan and the Count" for I don't know why, I also use R&J or R&V for shorthand. My editor, James Sutter, tends to use Varian and Radovan or vice versa. I don't know that it's important, but I tend to leave off Radovan's surname because it's a plot point in Prince of Wolves.

If you could send Radovan and the Count to any non-Pathfinder setting, what would you pick? Extra points for increasing specificity!

Now there's a question I've never considered before. Let's immediately disqualify any of the nascent settings I've been sketching out for original work.

The boys would fit in very well to Leiber's Nehwon or Zelazny's Amber, I bet. And they wouldn't be entirely out of place in the Forgotten Realms. Now I wonder whether they'd be a natural fit for the Iron Kingdoms.

Because I've chosen areas in Golarion in part because of their resemblance to real-world locations (Ustalav as Eastern Europe, Tian Xia as Asia, Cheliax as imperial/infernal Rome), a very loose historical setting might work, although for some reason that one seems weirder than the near-fits of other fantasy worlds. Maybe it's because of the high level of magic the boys have encountered in Golarion.

So, Dave, what is the craziest thing you've ever done as "research" for a book?

While it doesn't seem crazy to me, my wife's eyes still bulge when I mention the 140 kung fu movies I watched or re-watched before, during, and long after writing Master of Devils. Fortunately, a surprising number of them are good, and an even larger number were cheap.

From another angle, the craziest thing I've done is learning a 10-year-old setting over a period of just a few months. Granted, I had a lot of help and handholding, but that's the one that felt like walking a high wire over a pit of fast-zombie tigers.

Do you consider Radovan and the Count to be "gaining levels" as the books progress? It's a very high-level world, but as they go along in their stories—learning more about their abilities, and picking up new tricks—it seems that they are getting more capable, and more organic. Does that meta-fiction constraint, of experience and levels, factor in to your mental calculus for the characters?

The short answer to your question is "yes."

But remember that they're both gaining and losing levels, learning new abilities and losing some because of "reasons." You're right to call that an instance of meta-fiction, but it's not always a constraint. Sometimes the Paizo developers and editors let me explore new directions with the rules, as long as there's a story reason for it that still connects to the magic "physics" by story logic.

For instance, the whole business of Radovan's journey in Master of Devils brings him to a truly frightening level of physical threat, but all he wants is to be free of the thing that gives him that power. The outcome of that journey haunts him in Queen of Thorns and makes him look back on his brutal upbringing. Sometimes the thing he hates the most is what he's been taught to be, what he's "built for."

Likewise with Count Jeggare's magical "disability." In game terms, there's no reason he shouldn't be able to cast spells, but I proposed a reason for his problem to James Sutter very early on. In King of Chaos, I finally get to reveal why he's been handicapped all these decades. But if you know the character, you can already imagine some of the psychological obstacles he'll to continue to face even though he seems at last to understand the true nature of his magical ability.

If I can use the game mechanics to reflect a character's internal conflict, that's what I try to do.

Conan winds up on the throne. We all know that; we know that even when we read Conan stories from when he was a pirate or a thief or a mercenary. Do you know the eventual fate of the Count and Radovan?

No.

That said, I have a ridiculous number of story ideas cluttering my head, some of them focusing on the boys, but others featuring some of the secondary characters from their novels. There are experiences I want each of them to have, tests I'd like to see them face, losses they need to suffer... and, to be perfectly honest, also some Golarion-shaking events I'd like them to be a part of if and when the time comes that the shepherds of the world are ready to release that particular catastrophe and will invite me to put the boys into play.

I've shared a short wish list of these events with James Sutter, James Jacobs, and Wes Schneider. One day maybe I'll get an email that begins, "You know how you said you'd like to write something involving the return of REDACTED or a war between REDACTED and REDACTED? That time is nigh!"

Dave Gross recently launched a new website at www.bydavegross.com. There you can read the second part of this interview as well as the beginning of a Radovan & the Count retrospective. Don't forget to sign up for the free newsletter and a chance to receive free books.

Mordicai Knode lives in Brooklyn, where he runs campaigns involving generation ships haunted by vampires, samurai addicted to the spice mélange, and Neanderthals instead of orcs. He writes for Tor.com, most in a series exploring Appendix N, Advanced Readings in DandD. You can find him on Twitter and Tumblr.

Tags: Dave Gross, Pathfinder Tales

Nothing can put me to bed quite like a beach day. A little bit of exercise, a little bit of sunburn & I'm out like a candle. Went to bed at like, nine o' clock, woke up at like, nine-thirty. So that was a nice bit of dreamland under my belt, & not a single bad dream that I remember. So yesterday; roll out of bed, pick up some bagels for breakfast & then Jennifer & I piled into James & fatbutts' station wagon with fordmadoxfraud & Libby & set off for Jacob Riis beach. The water was dirty-- both with sand & with litter-- & stinky, but still! Beach day! There are storms around Metropolis, which is kicking up the stuff that normally lurks at the bottom of the ocean, rotting stuff, garbage, dirt. Oh well; we played Yahtzee & I got some decent bodysurfing in...until I bodysurfed too good of a wave. It carried me in all the way to the beach. You know how the beach is sand, broken shells, rocks, sand? Because of the way the surf kicks stuff up? Well, I just got scraped off the wave by the layer of jagged shells. Tore up my chest & poor little nipple. Just scrapes but you know, in salt water, so ouch. We left there for a local seafood joint, in FMF's old neighborhood, & we all ordered a pound & a half of lobster, every last one of us. It was murder in the first degree! Willful & premeditatedly delicious. Then home where I more or less collapsed into a puddle of playing Skyrim in a half-awake haze. Mauga gro-Dovah is level 95, after re-setting all my skills, & now I'm Thane of Falkreath & Hjaalmarch. I'm building houses & hoping that my steward-- I promoted my housecarl Rayya-- finishes furnishing it so I can adopt this little orphan who sells flowers, in honor of Aeris, from Final Fantasy VII. I changed Mauga's make-up again; I like having the option! Okay; now I have to go get ready for a picnic.

In “Advanced Readings in D&D,” Tor.com writers Tim Callahan and Mordicai Knode take a look at Gygax’s favorite authors and reread one per week, in an effort to explore the origins of Dungeons & Dragons and see which of these sometimes-famous, sometimes-obscure authors are worth rereading today. Sometimes the posts will be conversations, while other times they will be solo reflections, but one thing is guaranteed: Appendix N will be written about, along with dungeons, and maybe dragons, and probably wizards, and sometimes robots, and, if you’re up for it, even more.

Welcome to the thirteenth post in the series, Where Mordicai and Tim dig into Michael Moorcock’s Elric series.

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Tim Callahan: Other than J. R. R. Tolkien, who we haven’t yet talked about—but, oh yes, we will—I don’t have a lot of nostalgia for the writers in this Gygaxian Appendix N project. I have read many of them for the first time doing this series of conversations, and most of the ones I had read before were authors I came to late in my reading career. Although I ran into Dungeons and Dragons at a young age, and my role-playing game interests led me to some fantasy fiction, it wasn’t this stuff. It was the “Endless Quest” series or the Prydain chronicles of Lloyd Alexander or the Narnia books or Frank Herbert’s Dune or whatever was on the shelf of the nearest Waldenbooks that had “Dragon” somewhere in the title.

The big exception was Michael Moorcock. I read The Swords Trilogy and The Chronicles of Corum early, and they made an impact. They exploded inside my mind in a way I have never forgotten, even if I can’t remember many of the story details from any particular chapter.

But I somehow missed the Elric books entirely. Elric is clearly the most famous of the Moorcock characters, right? The albino champion with the black sword? He’s a big deal in the world of fantasy fiction. But I never read a single page of an Elric story in my youth, even though the Corum books were some of the most imaginative and terrifyingly evocative fantasy books I’d ever read.

I didn’t pick up any of the Elric books until a few years ago, with the Del Ray chronological reprints, a series that provides the stories in the order they were published along with some Moorcock letters and non-fiction to provide context on the development of the world of Melniboné. I appreciate the comprehensiveness of that approach to the Elric texts, but I didn’t really feel like I tuned into Elric until halfway through the first reprint volume, when we get the four novellas of Stormbringer. That’s the stuff that was first published in America, from what I understand, and I can see why.

It’s classic Moorcock, in that imaginative and terrifyingly evocative way that I loved all those years ago when I first picked up The Swords Trilogy off a spinner rack in my hometown general store. Stormbringer begins with agents of chaos abducting Elric’s wife, and it takes off into the realm of mass warfare and conflicts with not-quite-dead-gods soon enough.

Moorcock aims for the mythic.

Mordicai Knode: Elric is definitely the most famous Moorcock character, yeah, and I think easily the one most “archetypal”—I mean, I talked about God of Blades as a good example, but you can just as easily cite a big name like Raistlin Majere—but that is part of the charm, isn’t it? The idea of the Eternal Champion, that Elric and Hawkmoon and Corum and whoever else are all just different manifestations of a pan-dimensional hero, appearing in every parallel world. That idea is both central to Moorcock’s fantasy work, but paradoxically totally beside the point; you don’t need to know that all of the icons of Moorcock are all different expressions of the same meta-textual being. Until he goes into other dimensions to deal with demon princes and the cities of the undying, at least.

So we’ve been starting these reads off with your confessions lately, so here is a confession of mine: I don’t really like Elric! I get that Elric sort of defined the reaction against Tolkien, and that the grim anti-hero trope was really crystallized for fantasy as a genre by Elric—but because of that he just reads so...juvenile to me. Like what is being done with the New 52 in comics, it just seems like the Grim n’ Gritty comics of the 80s and 90s. I know that Elric predates that, but I’m still unable to separate the concepts, in my head. Other, later works have retroactively tainted it. No, for my money the best Eternal Champion is Hawkmoon.

Of course, I say all of that, but I had a nation in my last role-playing campaign that I went so far as to name “Arioch,” which was a mash-up between a lot of pulp sources, from Moorcock to Burroughs. I sort of summed it up as “Flash Gordon in Carcosa, Miskatonic Lankhmar, John Carter of Melniboné.” So yeah, it isn’t like I don’t actually find it inspiring; I obviously do.

TC: Would you say that you don’t like Elric, as a character? Or is it that you don’t like the Elric books and stories?

Because as much as I love this era of Moorcock—though I never could appreciate the Jerry Cornelius tales in practice, no matter how great they sounded in theory—I wouldn’t say I actually like Elric himself. Whenever he says or does anything, I can’t help but hear Kenneth Branagh in my mind, talking about the “delicate and tender prince” of Norway. (I taught Hamlet for a dozen years in a row, so those kinds of things pop up from time to time, I’m afraid.) He’s not a great character. His sword is way more interesting than he is, which is never a good sign.

Then again, the black blade Stormbringer is cooler than many characters in fantasy literature, so I can’t fault Moorcock for that.

But as melancholy and impetuous and kind-of-inconsistent and not-all-that-substantial as Elric can be as a character, the stories he takes part in are brimming with crazy images and feats of imaginative power. When Moorcock has a fleet of ships on the horizon, it’s not just a fleet of ships, its 40,000 undead magic-imbued ships. When Elric finally rescues his beloved, it’s not a mere victim of kidnapping he finds, but rather his wife as a bloated demonic worm monster who throws herself on his sword so as not to live such a tortured existence. When Elric dies—well, he doesn’t really, as the struggle for Eternal Balance never ends.

It’s big stuff. Massive. Expansive. And that’s what I love most about it, even if it does center around an albino guy who makes every statement a blandly bold declaration and every question a cry against the mighty forces of the universe.

MK: I would say I don’t like Elric stories, but not liking Elric is part of that. He just needs like...one more dimension. You can’t just be brooding and periodically violent, you gotta have some kind of twist, or angle, or character. That said, again, I know I’m retroactively biased; at the time Elric came out, I’m sure that whole anti-hero thing was fresh, but growing up reading about Liefeldian comic book dudes really takes the wind out of those sails. Though I will say that I really, really like Branagh’s Hamlet; I was in high school when that movie came out and we used to go to the tiny little indie theater and watch Hamlet after school pretty regularly, like a half dozen times. And not for nothing, but Hamlet is a good name to bring up, as is Macbeth; Elric is pretty rife with that tragic Shakespearean pathos. Maybe just a little over rife.

You’re right to say that Stormbringer is cooler than Elric. Stormbringer is the real star, and the part that sticks with me as a reader. Heck, that sticks with me as a Dungeon Master. I’m not alone in that—the magic sword Blackrazor in the White Plume Mountain adventure is a clear homage—but it really is just a great template for a magic item. It even has a sibling sword, Mournblade, so you can give Stormbringer to your PCs and Mournblade to their most hated NPC rival. Perfect! And you know, is the solidified will of a demon prince. As I mentioned in my Planes of 5e pitch I think that pseudo-divine evil is some of the most well developed mythology in D&D, so that fits, too.

And sure it is big, but the size of Elric’s stories just make it seem sort of un-anchored to plausibility. It is just too epic, too consistently. Oh, more demon boats made from fingernails, crewed by the dead, and everyone has guns that shoot lightning...again. I guess that might be part of why I like Hawkmoon more: the worldbuilding is more precise, and the villains are more of a problem. Conquering entire continents isn’t nearly as impressive as conquering this continent, where the story is actually happening.

TC: I absolutely agree that Moorcock’s writing overall can be so big that it becomes, as you say, “un-anchored to plausibility.” It’s not just the Elric stories that end up that way, and though that vast imaginative scope is what draws me to Moorcock, it also repels me in the end. I can only take so much of it. I love the collection of stories that was published as Stormbringer, but that’s really all I need.

And I’m glad you mentioned White Plume Mountain, because it’s a classic D&D adventure and though it doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the Elric mythos, specifically, the sword Blackrazor is clearly plucked from Moorcock’s works. Module writer Lawrence Schick even admitted that it was written as a kind of calling card to TSR to get hired as a game designer, and it worked, but he never would have included such an obvious Elric homage if he thought the module were going to see print as written. It’s pretty blatant.

Then again, the gang at TSR statted up Elric and his friends for the first printing of Deities and Demigods, so they didn’t hide their Moorcock affection from the public. Until legal matters forced them into retreat and Elric was removed from their official mythology almost immediately.

As a closing note, I think it’s worth looking at what Moorcock himself has said about his writing from the Elric era. In a letter from 1963, Moorcock wrote, “I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I’d rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas.”

I would too. And that’s what we get with Elric and Stormbringer: big ideas, maybe not so gracefully executed every time.

Note: For more on Moorcock and Elric, you can check out the Karin L. Kross’s ongoing Elric Reread here on Tor.com!

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Tim Callahan usually writes about comics and Mordicai Knode usually writes about games. They both play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons.

Let’s say you made a bet. “Gene Wolfe can’t write a creepy story about...” you search and flail, hoping to come up with the most absurd thing you can think of, something nobody would be able to write a spooky story about. “...a refrigerator!” you shout, in a moment of inspiration. There, you think. That has to stump him. Alas, friend, no, Gene Wolfe can’t be caged by any force known to humankind, past, present or future. Witness “Frostfree,” a story about a time-traveling appliance sent into the past to help break curses(?!), and is in part a thoughtful Wolfean exploration of gender roles(?!).

It’s a fitting way to kick off Shadows of the New Sun, a collection of short stories edited by J.E. Mooney and Bill Fawcett honoring the Wolfe himself, from a list of luminaries like Neil Gaiman, David Brin and Nancy Kress. The stories themselves dance around Wolfe’s themes and narratives in a fitting homage. My admiration for Gene Wolfe is no secret, and I’m far from alone— some of the genre’s best writers are here; they’ve eaten the analeptic alzabo and the Wolfe is in them now.

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I’d never read Michael Swanwick before, but I’ve got to tell you, after reading “The She-Wolf’s Hidden Grin,” I am certain going to read more of him. “She-Wolf” is a contender for my favorite story in collection, in part because it is set in the world of Wolfe’s Fifth Head of Cerberus. If The Book of the New Sun is Wolfe’s Shadow of the Colossus, then Fifth Head is his ICO: a more personal story, and a spiritual predecessor. Swanwick manages to find a tone that evokes Wolfe without mimicking him (Veil’s Hypothesis joke intended) and incorporated the questions of identity at the core of The Fifth Head of Cerberus with panache. Awfully impressive. Fifth Head of Cerberus is made up of three novellas, and “She Wolf” mostly puts me in mind of the first, eponymous part; I’d really like to see Swanwick tackle the other two, create a trilogy of linked short stories the same way Wolfe braided the three novellas together— I’m just curious to see more of the worlds of Sainte Croix and Sainte Anne, and Swanwick really adds to the universe Wolfe first showed us.

I say “The She-Wolf’s Hidden Grin” is my favorite in the collection, but there is really an embarrassment of riches. David Brin writes a short story called “The Log” about a dark future where a slave caste of gulag laborers live along side genetically modified elephants and wooly mammoths, creatures adapted to live in deep space, to chew up space rocks and harvest the crystalline trees that condense sunlight into readily available energy. Come on, what, that is great, but in the true spirit of Wolfe, it isn’t the big ideas or weird setting that are the focus; it is the personal element, it is the spirit of Russian endurance, it is the universal language of human suffering and ultimately the triumph of hope.

Or oh, Aaron Allston’s “Epistoleros,” too—I’m just leafing through the book and everywhere I open, there is another gem. A pun on gun-fighters and letter-writers? Right there, you’re speaking my language; that kind of pun is Wolfe up and down. The fact that it is an alternate Wild West story where the immortal paladins of Charlemagne are the vanguard of the expanding French forces in America is just gravy. Delicious gravy.

I really enjoyed Songs of the Dying Earth, a similar collection of stories in honor of Jack Vance, so I had high hopes for this as a Wolfe fan. Wolfe has such a distinctive voice— I should say, he has several distinct voices, as the man is an accomplished ventriloquist— but simply aping his style would leave the stories ultimately hollow. Fortunately, that isn’t what we get here; instead, as I mentioned, we have people deftly working with his themes and subjects, writers who focus on the subtle craft of capturing the heart of Wolfe’s writing. Or not capturing it; setting it free.

Sorry for all the double negatives and contradictions in the previous paragraph; reading Wolfe and reading about Wolfe put me in mind of labyrinths, crooked sentences, twisting winding mazes made of words. Which, ultimately, is the conundrum at the heart of things; Wolfe is an Apollonian figure, a sun god, but he is hidden Chthonic, hidden in the labyrinth. Odin, lover of poems and gallows. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king…and Wolfe does rule. He even has two eyes. It was nice to read a collection in honor of him, and it was even nicer that it was a fantastic collection.

Shadows of the New Sun is available now from Tor Books

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Mordicai Knode really likes the naming conventions of the Shadow Children in the Fifth Head of Cerberus. The identity politics of the Other! You can talk about more Wolfe with Mordicai on Twitter or Tumblr.

In “Advanced Readings in D&D,” Tor.com writers Tim Callahan and Mordicai Knode take a look at Gary Gygax’s favorite authors and reread one per week, in an effort to explore the origins of Dungeons & Dragons and see which of these sometimes-famous, sometimes-obscure authors are worth rereading today. Sometimes the posts will be conversations, while other times they will be solo reflections, but one thing is guaranteed: Appendix N will be written about, along with dungeons, and maybe dragons, and probably wizards, and sometimes robots, and, if you’re up for it, even more.

Welcome to the tenth post in the series, featuring a look at Forerunner by Andre Norton.

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Just looking at the cover art to Andre Norton’s Forerunner will start you thinking about Dungeons and Dragons, as the pitch black skin and pale white hair of the elfin figure immediately makes your thoughts go to the dark elves, the drow. Here are two things that I’m into: spiders and elves. That ought to give you an idea of where I fall on drow; at least, once you get past the tired clichés. The first thing I did, then, upon seeing the cover for this, was flip to the copyright page—1981—and then look up the drow on Wikipedia. The drow’s first official mention is in the AD&D Monster Manual, 1977, with their first appearance in Hall of the Fire Giant King (G3) in 1978, which really nailed down their signature “look.”

Just an odd coincidence? Perhaps not, since Norton definitely was affiliated with Gary Gygax and Dungeons and Dragons. She wrote Quag Keep in 1979, the first official D&D tie-in novel, about a group of people from the “real world.” How did she know so much about the hobby? Well, because she played in Gary Gygax’s Greyhawk game in 1976, of course. Which means…well, what does it mean? I guess it probably means that either Norton thought Gygax’s dark elves looked cool, and cribbed it, or that they put their heads together and cooked that look up together, and that Norton repurposed it for Forerunner. An ancient race of ur-aliens, a pre-human proto-culture that explored the stars before the human species left their home world for the first time? Yes please!

Of the books we’re read, this is the one that most resembles the campaign I actually run. Jack Vance’s Dying Earth is at the root here, but Vance’s world is much more “high fantasy” than my usual game. What we get from Norton, however, something altogether more…granular. I don’t want to say “gritty,” since that brings up bad feelings of “extreme!” antiheroes with lots of pouches or a casual and cavalier attitude about life and death. The “science fantasy” of Forerunner doesn’t have the same feel as the surreal and madcap twists and turns of Vance. Rather, Norton presents us with a plausible world, a city with webs (drow pun unintentional) of guild politics and economic classes so rigid it might as well be a caste system. She delivers us a low magic setting, with one essential twist; one of the reasons the city exists and is prosperous is because of the spaceship landing grid just outside of town.

The fusion of elements is at the root of the story, and ultimately at the root of the main character. The lower tech level of the city of Kuxortal is where Simsa is from; she is a street urchin with some levels of thief who makes her living digging in the forgotten depths of the city for ancient archeological treasures. She meets Thom Chan-li Yun, a star-traveller, a man from another world who has been genetically engineered to, among other things, resist radiation sickness. Together, low and high tech, they explore ruins from the past. From before X-Arth, even—by the way, a great way to refer to the semi-mythological birthplace of humanity— a series of crumbling towers that themselves are built around an even more venerable secret. There is a whole series of these Forerunner books (and another Tor.com reviewer suggests that these elements are consistent across Norton’s work), and I’ve got to say, my interest is piqued!

DnD-isms? There are plenty. The flying cats, for instance; Simsa’s pet flying cat Zass is a good example of a familiar, and the “broken wing that is mended by magic later in the story”—oops, spoilers—is a clever device for a Dungeon Master who has a player that really wants an imp or pseudodragon at first level. I’ll keep that in my back pocket. So too are her “magic” ring and “magic” bracelet a good example of using the logic of Chekhov’s Gun for magic items; you can give out a ring and not reveal the magical properties until later. Note that “magic” is in quotes; there are “magic items” in the form of anti-gravity devices, gas grenades, and laser pistols—high tech items from the stars. But there is also a deeper, older “technology,” the Forerunner sciences, which adhere pretty tightly to Clarke’s Third Law. And to a deconstructed view of Dungeons and Dragon’s Positive and Negative energies, for that matter.

All in all I’m really impressed; this is my favorite new book I've encountered so far in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons series, I think, because it exposed me to Andre Norton. She sure can write, and she does an excellent job with both the story in front of the reader—like the guild lords of Koxortal and the tribes within and without the city—as well as the parts of the story that go off into the “here there be dragons” nooks and crannies. The mentions of a race of librarian aliens, or little linguistic flourishes like “gentlehomo”—there are worlds within worlds, layers of historical occupation, layers of prehistoric occupation. It creates a textured tapestry, the verisimilitude makes me think that if I followed any strand of the narrative out into the broader context of the setting, I would find a whole new story behind that. You know what? I think I’ll have to read more to find out if that’s true.

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Mordicai Knode can’t help but see the name “Norton” and think about Emperor Norton. That is just the way he’s wired. He and Tim Callahan have been delving the dungeons of DMs past for Advanced Readings in D&D for a while now. You can find Mordicai on Twitter or Tumblr.

I flew across the country the other day, and decided to spend most of the flight watching movies. There was a pretty good selection of science fiction and action-adventure on the in-flight television menu, all just a little bit out of date, and I hadn’t seen most of them, so I said “why not?” Which is how I watched the last three quarters of Oblivion, then bits of Iron Man 3, followed by the last half of the remake of Death Race and the first quarter of The A-Team. I hadn’t seen any of them besides Iron Man 3 but I had sort of wanted to see all of them, and then decided not to when the scuttlebutt was that the others weren’t very good. Given the opportunity, I wanted to give them a second chance. Maybe you heard the same things, or maybe you thought a film was under-appreciated or really a disappointment. Here is what I thought of them.

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I really liked Oblivion! I don’t know what all the hate was for; I think it was a solid little B+ of a science-fiction movie. I know people were turned off by the plot twists, but I thought the plot twists were actually pretty neat little “big ideas.” I won’t go into it, and audience members can easily see the stress fractures in the lie, so it isn’t hard to figure out what is going to give, but I don’t think that is the point. The point is that it all hangs together. Oh and it looks very pretty, both the clean and polished sterile future that Tom Cruise starts out in, and the dark and industrial “Tusken raiders” dystopia that Morgan Freeman represents. Oh, and post-apocalyptic Jaime Lannister! The big problem here is that nobody actually has a conversation; this is the kind of movie where if the characters all sat down and talked for twenty minutes, they could sort the whole thing out with less drama. That’s alright with me; I think there is enough psychological trauma to go around for all the characters, which makes me tolerant of otherwise irrational behavior. And it is so pretty. So pretty.

I mean, it is Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark, right? That is what we are all here for. This movie I muted and read during, for a few bits…like, the actual plot. Okay, Guy Pierce is evil, got it, the mystery is dudes blowing up, okay. I don’t actually care about that: I turned it back on for the vignettes, like the Mechanic and the kid, or Iron Man meeting the Mandarin, and for the big fight sequences—though the final climax I found pretty boring on the second viewing. If you haven’t seen Iron Man 3, see it! If you have though, I think the first viewing is probably the freshest; looking too closely will only make the warts and blemishes stand out.

The original cult classic, Death Race 2000, is pretty right on. A protagonist named Frankenstein, played by David Carradine and driving an alligator car, an evil Nazi driver named Matilda the Hun, cat cars, cow cars, an exploding prosthetic arm called a “hand grenade”—it is just full of goofy grindhouse jokes. The newer Death Race is undercut by the machismo of the film, which takes itself a little too serious, but “Jason Statham drives fast and shoots guns” and things like Even Faster More Furiouser (or whatever) is the modern equivalent of the genre, so I think it was pretty faithful; plus it has the mask swap at the end. I wouldn’t rush out and see it but if you were worried it was a betrayal, I don’t think it is.

When I was a little kid, The A-Team was the show that came on right at my bedtime, that I would try to argue my way into watching every time. I was pretty successful, so I have a soft spot for those soldiers of fortune. I am bummed I only got to see the very beginning, but at least I got to meet the cast. Speaking of things I’m bummed about, I really, really wanted Katee Sackhoff to play Face. I wanted that to happen pretty badly, but Bradley Cooper fills the role out well; I’d say he’s the best-cast of the bunch. Joe Carnahan made Smokin’ Aces which is a glorious mess; that movie is too weird for me to be able to say it is good or bad. Kind of reminds me of Death Race 2000, actually, with the gimmicks and weaving plot. Really, the mixed response from the original group was why I didn’t see this in theaters; if it is on Netflix I’ll probably watch the rest of it, though.

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Mordicai Knode knows there is a parallel reality out there where Katee Sackhoff played Face in the remake of The A-Team. It is a better world. Find Mordicai on Twitter or Tumblr, if you want to talk about your dream casting.

Our barbecue came off really well. It was Jennifer's idea to begin with, & a genius one. We didn't know how much free time we'd have during the trip, & so rather than pull our hair out running all over town trying to meet everyone, why not make the mountain come to us? I mean, where we are staying is so nice, it would be a shame to waste the little balcony & grill. So, after we went to Google to hang out with Reigh for lunch, we went shopping. In the aisles, just as I was (sort of obnoxiously) telling Jenny not to be suckered in by impulse buys, we rounded the corner into those spongies. You know, those little multicoloured pills of plastic that expand into fuzzy dinosaurs in hot water? Back in ancient days, Reigh & I were rock climbing in the Wasteland & when we came back to her car it was surrounded by cops & park rangers. What the heck? It was because they thought the sponge capsules scatteded on the dashboard were drugs. Sorry to disappoint, officers. So anyhow, of course we bought them. The group started rolling in around seven; fordmadoxfraud & Bernie were first up, followed by Esmé & Chris, then Reigh & Andrew, then the vegans Edbury & Kevin-- who I failed to grab a snapshot of-- & then when we thought all hope was lost, Zach! There were propane adventures, Reigh brought ring pops, rubber ducks & robots, Bernie invented putting grilled asparagus on your hot dog, FMF's "piercing blue eyes" & "strong workman's hands" comments, it was a pretty fun night & we didn't break anything, phew, knock on wood, throw salt over your shoulder, etc.

Imagine if, just north of Toronto, there was a wasteland empire filled with the worst beings imaginable. The forests of Canada, dripping with blood and pus, the hills crawling with fauna that make giant acid spewing termites and poisonous land sharks look like Bambi and Thumper. Imagine that, in the center of this blight, there was a portal open to Hell.

No wait, picture the one place worse than Hell. Hell at least has rules—you go there if you’ve been bad, the wicked punish the wicked, contracts with Mephistopheles—and this place isn’t nearly so comprehensible. This is the Abyss, home of demons and butchery, of insanity and Evil. Capital-E Evil. Now imagine that it is growing, little by little, and no matter how many soldiers you send into it, the demon horde just keeps coming because they are, quite literally, infinite. This is the Worldwound, in the northern part of the continent of Avistan on the planet Golarion in the Pathfinder universe. And it’s the setting of the newest Radovan and the Count novel, King of Chaos, by Dave Gross.

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When I reviewed Gross’ last novel, Queen of Thorns, I said Varian and Radovan were the new Fafhrd and Gray Mouser. Maybe you think that sounds hyperbolic, but after reading King of Chaos, I stand by it; heck I’d double down on it if I could. The academic Count and scoundrel Radovan both have plenty of reason to go to the worst places in the world—maybe the worst place in the world—because they are adventurers. That is what they do. In fact, Varian has nearly half a dozen letters asking him to go to the Worldwound and find the Necronomicon Lexicon of Paradox. Radovan, his compatriot and bodyguard, naturally follows, as does their loyal hound, Arnisant.

They aren’t alone: the female voice of Oparal the elven paladin is great to have and she’s a fully vested deuteragonist here, bringing welcome diversity to the usual boy’s club. The paladin is in the Worldwound for her own purposes (a crusade, and she has the troops to prove it), but she too seeks the MacGuffin—as does Varian’s frustratingly and wonderfully incompetent nemesis, the half-mummy, half-vampire Kasiya. Think “evil Inspector Clouseau” and you’ll just about have it.

The most memorable part of the book, for me, was the all-out battle to the death between the paladin Oparal and Xagren the antipaladin. Antipaladins are my jam. This isn’t one of those anti-hero or anti-villain Lawful Evil antipaladins, like the Hellknights—which is my preferred flavor, making Cheliax my favorite nation in Pathfinder—but something all the worse: a Chaotic Evil antipaladin. He appears in mismatched armor culled from presumably hundreds of murders: the Andoren eagle on one shoulder, leering Abyssal face on the other, blasphemous runes on the holy symbol of the fallen paladin’s former god, a locust made of knives welded to his shield. Gross describes the cultists urging him on to greater acts of terror as dressed in “the colors of filth and violence” which makes the whole fight bring up the scary feeling of the moment in Resident Evil 4 when you hear a chainsaw start up. The fun really gets going here when this Mad Max monster of an antipaladin draws his profane blade and it starts bleeding out Kirby dots, and then those motes swell to become locusts, a plague of locusts, streaming out of the blade, swarming across his armor, obscuring the sight of Oparal the paladin…who is the flip side of things, the full-on white knight riding a unicorn. It rules.

At the end of last year and the beginning of this year, Dave Gross had a contest, asking people to build Pathfinder characters for Varian and Radovan. There were a number of interesting results, and the question isn’t entirely theoretical; one of the things that makes Gross’ tie-in novels interesting is that they address the mechanical elements of the game universe—a place with Vancian magic, hit points and levels—while approaching it on his own terms, forcing them to serve the story. In Queen of Thorns, there is a subplot about Oparal gaining the unicorn Bastiel as a companion, which is exactly what I mean. A paladin gaining a mount is a class feature, a “new power” that your character gets. Rather than a video game-like sudden appearance, Dave Gross uses it as a hook to tell a story. Count Jeggare’s indigestion when casting spells—he gets vertigo and vomits—is a more complicated example, as is Radovan’s various diabolical transformations.

King of Chaos continues Gross’ tradition of looking at how the rules of the game work, and extrapolating an organic narrative out of it. A wizard, a sorcerer and a summoner, three arcane talents, all get cracking on an ancient tome of evil, and they get to talking, both about theory and about more pragmatic issues: to wit, Varian’s unique handicap and Radovan being “ridden” by devils (or vice-versa, if you prefer). Events in King of Chaos might spur people to reconsider their character builds for the protagonist, but me, I’ll go ahead and posit a radical theory—what if Radovan and Varian are just using house rules for generic characters? Selecting, grabbag-style, from a laundry list of class features? Or what if Radovan is something like Dungeons and Dragons Third Edition’s Savage Species? A guy with levels of…well, of Devil?

Let’s not get too far afield musing on that cross over, for while King of Chaos and the other Radovan and the Count novels are unmistakably set in Golarion, and the canny reader can see the Pathfinders bells and whistles hidden behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain, the books stand completely on their own merits. You don’t need to think “huh, she killed those zombies with turn undead” when Oparal calls on the miracles of her god, because Dave Gross doesn’t tell, he shows. You’ll see Oparal calling on Iomedae, you’ll read about how it feels when her god fills her up with divine wrath. It isn’t a roll of the dice or a press of a button; it is a novel, a story. So when a character dies and then later a person—a wholly different person—claims to be that person, brought back to life in a stranger’s body? It is body horror, it is suspicion and confusion, it is mysterious…not just a reincarnation spell.

This book also had a chapter called “Prince of Bats,” which was the first of my (incorrect) guesses as to what the next Radovan and the Count novel would be called...this time I’ll guess...Emperor of the Dark Tapestry? I still want to see Varian and Radovan in spaaaaace, and the royal titles keep escalating. God of...something or other, I guess could be next; I speculate that the ultimate fate of either Radovan, Varian or Arnisant is to touch the Starstone and ascend to someplace above Hell but below Heaven, to paraphrase Marlowe.

King of Chaos is available from Paizo.

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Mordicai Knode would probably just say Arnisant is a riding dog with the celestial template, post-Master of Devils. You can tell him all your hopes and dreams on Twitter or see pictures of monsters and supervillains on Tumblr.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the paradox of “kill your darlings” given form. Oh sure, in the true meaning of the phrase he falls short, which is the part that makes it cognitively dissonant. He loves the same handful of words, the same few tricks, and he uses them liberally. Heck, he’s probably single handedly responsible for the word “eldritch” not becoming extinct in the English language. So in that sense, the true and accurate sense, sure, no, Lovecraft didn’t heed Faulkner’s advice—and maybe that is a good thing. He sure has a distinctive flavor.

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But “Kill your darlings,” as in, “come on Howard Phillips, you’ve got to do something terrible to your protagonist, conflict drives narratives!”—or something like that? Well, our buddy Lovecraft is great at that. In fact, through the second-hand influence of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, that is how I learned that sometimes the most interesting thing about a character is that they don’t win. From a literary standpoint, writing and reading, that is a lesson worth learning. Of course, what really makes it all the more bleak is the fact that H.P. Lovecraft also ironically embodies the Mary Sue. How many of his protagonists are just idealized versions of a autodidactic, letter-writing New Englander whose previously wealthy family has fallen on hard times? Well, Howard Phillip, you sound like you are wrestling with some dark stuff, there.

Of course, the measure of the man is his contributions to the genre of horror. His horror is of two kinds, two hands reaching across the aisle to shake: external and internal. One of the cruxes of Lovecraft’s writing is that there are things far, far worse than evil. Evil, with its quaint little cackling red horned men, pitchforks and brimstone, how adorable. No, Lovecraft knows far darker things are out there, because ultimately, the universe doesn’t care that you exist. There is no war for the human spirit, because humans are an insignificant bunch of squabbling apes on an insignificant ball of mud that whirls around an insignificant nuclear furnace. No one cares, nothing cares—and there are things.

It’s a big universe, it is only reasonable to suppose that there are aliens out there—creatures who can travel the stars and might as well be gods when compared to the muck covered primates on this rock. Aliens who are truly alien, who aren’t forehead of the week little green men, but instead creatures fundamentally unknowable. They aren’t evil, they are indifferent; if they seem malevolent, well, that is just because it is the only use they have for mankind (gender relations not being something H.P. Lovecraft is good at).

Is it any wonder, then, that psychological conflict is the other major theme that feeds into his work? “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents,” and all that. Oh sure, Lovecraft’s work is full up with tentacled monsters, piscine horrors, time-traveling body-swappers, brain-stealing mushrooms and radioactive colors. But it isn’t like your biggest concern for the hero of the tale is that he’s going to be scooped up by a lobster claw and deposited into some kind of digestive pouch. No, no, that might be the fate of the stevedores that went along with the protagonist—another thing Lovecraft is not good at is race relations—but the main character, no, we don’t expect that they’ll be picked up by a horse-bat and dropped from a great height.

Rather, we know that their mind is going to shatter. Which isn’t to say that the monsters that will make you crazy. No, you could read the wrong book, or have the wrong parents. Or you could buy a haunted house. Sanity is a fragile thing! At first the cracks will spider-web out, like tendrils spider-webbing across fine china, little by little, but by the end, the whole thing will be in pieces. “At last, I can live the rest of my life as a horrifying incestuous fish-ape, hooray!”

So thanks, H.P. Lovecraft. Thanks for the purple prose, because it gave us the Mythos. Thanks for the author insertion, because it gave us a glimpse of real horror. Edgar Allen Poe would be proud. So long, and thanks for all the fish monsters.

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Mordicai Knode is more of a Kadath and Leng kind of guy, when you get down to it, and his favorite little side-reference in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was when Moore explicitly linked Randolph Carter and John Carter of Mars.

This is how I became a Dungeon Master. You start out life and the first thing you remember is that you are waiting for a bus, it’s going to take you to school. You stand at the end of your street and the older kids are there and they have a fistfight, you are young and don’t know what a fistfight is. I was, they fight and a girl cries and I sat by the brick sign that named the development and waited for the bus, I wasn’t thinking about what was going on around me. And on the bus you have a notebook and you take your notes and have ideas. You get to the school and you waste time and ignore the teacher and work on your schemes.

And before you know it you’ve been at this for 30 years with a stack of notebooks cluttering your house. You, I, MeMyselfandI – things have gone down, truth, actions and happenings, life has changed. But then, I go and wait for a bus in the morning, insensible, I shirk my day-to-day to work on the things that are of interest to me&myself&I and that’s the source of all my problems and the nascence of all my joys.

But here, and I’ll tell you – here is where I learned to balance the Platonist and the Taoist in me. You know – it’s true that we can all idealize a better world, we all can because that’s the gift of consciousness. Some of us can choose to go and live there instead of here, take the trip and avoid, avoid – allow the flow of nature and events to circumscribe your own innate realities. There’s that too.

Then you’re the island, an island a bore – you’re in isolation and your only validation is yourself- you could, I could become Rather Unseemly – so what’s the cure? You ask, I answer.

You start to remember that the give and take between people- that there are desires and that we are in the state of balanced desires and conflicting purposes – that’s the world, so shouldn’t the fake-mind-world have something of that in it? And where do you get it? You can fashion your bauble universe and then… and then… Why, you really should do something with it.

So I came to a conclusion and I found the answer- you know there are others, the trusted associates, the suspicious misanthropes, the charming psychotics- the nerds, the gamers – dreamers like you/me and they want to throw down, they want a moment in your crazy imagination and they want to try and break it.

And that’s the cure – that’s the synthesis of the worldviews, make a thing with accommodations for everyone, and then? Make them fight, make the world quake and shake and see, really see what the handmade universe can bear – simulate before you call down wrath against the terrestrial deities – there’s not finer worlds but different, and every one fails and falls in its turn. Did you think it was otherwise? Did you think that the pantocrator doesn’t wait for a bus and dream the making dream?

This is my favorite piece of this guy's, here: a slice of log that he put molten glass on, let is burn a divot, took the glass out when it cooled, & then put more molten glass into it; lather, rinse, repeat. A study in variations, complexity, lacunae, & entropy. I'm feeling it! I just hope I don't accidentally knock it over when I go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. So this apartment has a garden, a balcony, a workshop, & four floor, or three floors & a loft, or whatever you want to call it. It is stuffed full of our host's artwork, mostly in glass & wood & stone. A lot of his stuff is about using chaos-- waves, wind, fire-- to create meta-art, like a windmill that writes or falling grains of sand that creates patterns. Remember Diana from college? I think he'd have liked that tooth sculpture she did. Anyhow, this place is super lavish, it is neat. We're having a barbecue here later today, but first we are going to go see Reigh at Google for lunch. What did we do the other days? We walked all over San Francisco with fordmadoxfraud, basically. Chinatown to North Beach, Chinatown to The Mission, Mission to Castro, Castro to Haight-Ashbury, yeah, we've climbed all over & we got a burrito at that place that you want to tell us to make sure we eat at. Lower Haight is maybe my favorite spot so far; we did an art crawl which is a fancy way of saying a nicer pub crawl, basically. We started out at Nikki's, which...was a really nice pub? Then to some shops where we drank beer & bought some knick-knacks. Oh & Jennifer got a tattoo of a diamond to remember the thieves' motto: Don't Forget the Jewels.

You are all at a tavern. It’s a sentence with which the curtain has raised on untold thousands of adventures involving dungeons, or dragons, or both. If you count yourself a fellow traveler—if you’ve ever sat with a twenty-sided die in one hand and a character sheet in the other—it is a collection of sounds probably as familiar to you as a key turning in its lock. And even if you are not the dice rolling sort, we may consider it to be part of our shared cultural heritage and collective unconscious.

Call me Ishmael.

Happy families are all alike.

It was a dark and stormy night.

[You are all at a tavern.]

It is thus that David M. Ewalt begins his history and memoir of Dungeons & Dragons, the first, most popular, largest, and most well-known of all table top role playing games—and the entry point for generations of kids and adults who, having been given fire, carried the torch onwards to support an entire industry of D&D’s direct descendants. Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons and Dragons and the People Who Play It opens with a gentle introduction to what D&D is and how it’s played, and to what David Ewalt is when he’s playing it: a twelfth level cleric named Weslocke.

This book twines together two popular strands of nonfiction: the serious history of what was previously low culture—as applied to such formerly ludicrous diversions as comic books and heavy metal—and the tale of the demimonde-joiner—as we’ve seen writers steep themselves in subcultures as fringe as Scrabble and competitive memorization, first on the margins and then more and more intimately, until the outsider becomes the insider, gaining entrance to the holiest of holies and laying eyes upon the relics of the sect.

In this case, the sacred relic we’re talking about is a forty-five year old ping pong table that used to occupy the game room of student and part-time security guard Dave Arneson, who in the early 1970s—along with Gary Gygax, a Wisconsin insurance underwriter turned game developer—built a shared passion for board wargaming into a set of rules and conventions that went on to become the cultural phenomenon known as Dungeons & Dragons.

There are other players in the drama, but the history is really Dave and Gary’s story, as it should be, and it’s the historical parts of the book that shine brightest. While some of Ewalt’s more personal and anecdotal passages feel a little mealy, he writes a business and cultural history as deftly as you would expect from a lauded journalist at Forbes—which, it turns out, he is. The story moves briskly from the game’s prehistory and conceptualization, to its publishing boom and salad days, to its legal troubles and the Satanic panic of the 1980s, through Arneson’s departure and the ultimate downfall of Gary Gygax, and the passing of the game from his control.

The story is easily accessible to the novice, but still carries enough crunch to be engaging to the more familiar reader. I was tickled to find out that the concept of psionics—a kind of psychic wizardry—was added to the game with 1976’s Eldritch Wizardry as a sop to players who hated D&D’s “Vancian” approach to magic—a sort of magic rationing wherein a wizard must prepare spells in advance—and who were more comfortable with a points-based “magic” system like psionics, where the caster could do what they wanted when they wanted, so long as they had enough points to do so. And although reporting that Brian Blume created the Monk character class because he was enamored of the Carl Douglas disco novelty “Kung Fu Fighting” seems a little credulous, the origins of the game are so humble and so deeply personal to a small number of people, that I wouldn’t be surprised if it was true.

Well-written as it is, the history basically ends around 1997 and only briefly resumes with a bit of marketing for D&D Next in 2012. Large chunks of time—specifically the Lorraine Williams and Wizards of the Coast years—are almost entirely omitted. Of Dice and Men is a terrific history of how D&D came to exist, and how it took root and blossomed in its early years. It is not, however, a comprehensive history of the game.

This omission is strange—Ewalt himself notes it at the back of the book—especially in light of how much of the rest of the book, the stuff bracketing the history, feels like filler. Much space is given to in-universe accounts of game sessions Ewalt has played, and I can only imagine these were included to bring unfamiliar readers not just into an abstract game system, but into the game itself, as it is played and experienced. If so, it doesn’t hit the mark quite as it should. In most D&D books, this stuff is referred to as “flavor text,” and even innocent readers know it can be skipped without penalty.

The remainder—Ewalt’s D&D autobiography and his personal musings on the game, his pilgrimage to Gary Con after Gygax’s death—is sprinkled with moments that are well observed and obviously heartfelt, but the balance of it feels unfocused and unfinished, and it is sometimes difficult to tell what it is he is trying to offer a “mainstream audience” (as he describes his ideal reader). The closest he brings you to the thrill of a good game, oddly enough, is in an extended chapter about a definitely-not-Dungeons-&-Dragons LARP weekend he participated in.

The live-action role playing here is doubly interesting because it’s about the only time a woman shows up in the book as an enthusiastic participant, and not a mildly disapproving girlfriend or politely uninterested business acquaintance. I do think that Ewalt believes, as I do, that D&D is for everybody, and that he wrote this book as an honest attempt to bring to everybody what D&D is, and what D&D can be in their lives. But virtually everyone you meet in the book is a white, male, and presumably straight grognard, and while he is conscious enough to take the time to point this imbalance out, he doesn’t explore or even really acknowledge that there might be lots of D&D players who are women, or queer, or not white. A quick glance through the acknowledgments shows that Ewalt talked to an awful lot of people about Dungeons & Dragons, from historical figures to random players at conventions, but female D&D players show up just once, seemingly by coincidence, and he seems to have been content to pursue the matter no further than to express a pleasant surprise at their interest.

But I am, in all fairness, a bit of a grognard myself (French for “grumbler” or “old complaining soldier”), and while Ewalt does entreat such readers to understand the book is aimed at a general audience of nonplayers, he had to know what a hopeless request that was. Grumblers will grumble. It’s not exaggeration or faint praise to say this is the second book I’d reach for if I wanted to expose someone new to the game I love (the first, of course, being the 2nd Edition Player’s Handbook), and I do in fact feel highly motivated to find someone to give this book to. Dungeons & Dragons is about nothing if not being giving of yourself, sharing something exciting with someone across the table, gathering over beer and pretzels and character sheets and opening a book to a page and saying, “Here, look at this.”

We are all at a tavern.

Of Dice and Men is available on August 20 from Scribner.

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David Moran knows every dungeon master is only as good as his players. Luckily he’s had some amazing players, and has personally witnessed someone roll a natural 100 with a Rod of Wonder while fighting Zuggtmoy and crowd-surfing on a thousand demons. That really happened.