Mordicai

(The Gates of Yomi; Nick Gindraux.)

The pacing has been off on Oubliette. I'm letting things sprawl all over the place, & could use a little focus. It's something I'm very aware of, & stuff that I've plotted out for a single session can just slime out everywhere. That's fun though, sometimes, even if all that happens in a session is a rising sense of Hitchcockian suspense. Raise the violins! Which is what last Thursday's session became; I think people had fun-- I know Lilly did at least-- so I'm not sweating it, but it is a skill I need to work on, especially after having seen Ken run a slew of hour long one-shots on Sunday...but more about that later. We're talking about my game for now. I had to ask for a confirmation of the last scene from the previous session, if they had concluded with Iroha leading them to the Gates of Yomi, the abandoned fortress that Goro & his bride-to-be Amina o-Kitsune, Lilly's character, are going to live in. Which reminds me, I didn't ask the players for a recap & I didn't go through to confirm their Experience & see if they wanted to spend any. Several of them increased Attributes in the year long gap between the auction & this wedding, so I guess it is probably fine! But, the point being! The session starts with the party, led by Iroha o-Lung, agent (& cousin) of the Shogun as well as Luke's character Haru o-Kitsune betrothed, heading into the higher altitudes & longitudes, seeing the rather rare occurrence of snow. See where the two Watchtowers are on the map? They are equatorial. Then, looming in the cliff walls-- the giant skeleton castle-statues of the Gates of Yomi!

Trying to summarize the session would be tricky, as like I said, it was very fluid, as the characters explored using all of their senses: in the case of the two blood magic using Kitsune, that makes occult visions & the ominous appearance of Mysterious Hints, Allegations & Temptations. Rather than try to lay it all out in a linear fashion, I'll just sort of spill my thoughts out like a dumped over cauldron. Oh & will you look at that; I started writing this right after game, but then life got in the way-- read: laziness, forgetfulness-- & I let this drop. That means it will be even more scattershot, but that's life, bub. So the players are approaching the skeletal statues, the spooky Argonath, & Haru decides to do a little blood magic divination, see what he can find out wearing the creepy mask that he borrowed & has not yet returned from the cult of Yama-of-Many-Faces. Yes, by the way, Yama & Yomi are related figures; Kamido, the religion of the Shogunate, has many gods & subgods, explicitly heterodox. Linguistic drift? Make it a new god, or an aspect, or an avatar, easy peasy. Or was it always really just an aspect or avatar or new god to begin with?


(Iroha o-Lung; "Infestation" by Jed Henry.)

Haru...well, he & the Butcher's Mask are getting along famously. He's not just putting it on & walking around like a cross between a cenobite & Darth Vader, no sir! He's not creeping up on people while having visions of dozens of people being tortured & executed. He doesn't menace Eric's character Ren Joko Izumi hardly at all! That would be too creepy. & what about these "DANGER SPORES" glyphs on the door? Wait, spores? Taking off the mask & coming to his senses, Haru-- who went on an expedition into the Toxic Jungle when he was an older teen (along with the Royal Physician before she re-discovered her supernatural birthright)-- warns Iroha & the rest that there might need to be quarantine protocols up ahead. Taking a handful of Kitsune ashigaru soldiers & Ren with him-- Amina will later catch up with them after some divinations of her own-- Haru rides ahead. Iroha gives him a flare-- forbidden, since he is not Lung, but the rules are bent since he's betrothed to be-- to fire when they want to give the "all clear."

Ren is in the middle of all of these maniacs. Actually, scratch that, Ren has made out with a mummy & a naga, I think he's lost the right to get up on his high horse. He's a weirdo, same as anyone. Everyone got their rewards for their role in the weapons dealing auction except him, since he & Silissa alternate. He was there at Goro's behest, serving as a social lubricant, a fancy Geiko-- Oubliette's "not-Geisha"-- to make everyone's time pass smoothly. Sure, he spent most of his time exploring a haunted pyramid, but he played his part in the vignettes & off screen, he filled his role with aplomb. In return he gets Resources O, as he is paid a fractional share of the profits, per his contract, but his real gift is more sentimental. Goro & Ren grew up in the same small "flower town," & they met the other players at the same time. Goro got drunk, drugged, broke the shochu bottle & ran away; Ren joined the others & became a PC. He gives Ren a kintsugi artifact: kintsugi is the art of repairing a broken thing with precious metals, such as gold, so that the flaws are replaced with strength & character. It is the same shochu bottle, now repaired with gold, that they broke as kids; if Ren uses it in a small meditative ceremony, whomever he shares a libation with regains a point of Willpower.



The bulk of the session is the group exploring the non-spore tainted skull-tower...which is pretty dang creepy all on it's own as it turns out. Just what kind of place are the Lung pawning off on this poor, innocent...peasant warlord? The first "room" is the hollow wall of the gates, of the eponymous Gate. The right hand floor has gone to rubble, & precarious & clumsily hewn wooden planks lay over it as a kind of bridge. There are piston-like spears in the ceiling, seemingly ready to stab upwards if anyone surmounts the walls. Next is a six-story tall circular "tower" inside the cliff face; in the middle a huge iron cage hangs, big enough for a half dozen people if they squeeze in. Butcher hooks hang willy-nilly throughout, & a spiral staircase proceeds up the walls. The chain keeps going up, but eventually the floor widens & the walls...curve, horizontally buttressed with beams like massive ribs. The actual interior of the castle; a barracks for communal living...with blood. What fray was here? Up from there, the "rib-like" walls continue...into a dining hall, with kitchens at each end, & the walls...lined with iron maidens? What is up with this place! Another spiral staircase up-- the "spine" of the structure, with the chain still running through it-- leads to a map room, stained with brackish & rusty water. The chain stops there, & going up the staircases split into two, & come out into the "skull" visible from below. Each "eye" is fitted with a heavy ballista, & a waterfall in the center of the room should crank the gears to wind the ballista, if it was working...& hey, probably powers the chain on that cage! It's an elevator.

Up from there are the makings of a small aristocrat's quarters, with a statue on a rotating pedestal & fireplaces at each end. Above that is...a greenhouse, with all the windows painted black with tar, filled with bones. Human bones, from a fresh kill but disguised as ancient, broken up with rusty weapons. Haru & Amina, the blood magicians, go on quite the tear, licking & touching all of the blood & the gore. Cracking open the rusted-shut iron maidens. Haru mollifies the troops-- he's good for morale-- & Ren investigates practically, but there are visions, visions. The Butcher. A female ghost with a samurai's paired swords through her abdomen. Dark forces are gathered here, tempting Amina with power & somewhere to belong, Haru dancing along the edges. It all seems...almost contrived, put together. Ritualized. It all seems...set up for the Royal Physician? Flirting with the powers of blood & night, that's what they are able to glean, along with hints, so many, many hints. We closed up the session there, with only the right-side of the Gates of Yomi explored, & Amina's wedding due to start in a week!


(A ghost; Peter Mohrbacher.)

sekigan:

Zaldy Serrano さんの Vizjhanti: Inspirations for Character Concepts ボードの…

Pathfinder’s The Emerald Spire is a true megadungeon. Rise of the Runelords was a campaign, but Emerald Spire is an big old fashioned dungeon that just keeps on going and going. I like boutique, meticulously DM-crafted worldbuilding. I like open, sandbox games in unique homebrew settings. I also really like giant, out of the box, hardcore superdungeons. There is no need to be forced into some “new school versus old school” rivalry here. Have some cake. Eat it, too! Then throw it at opponents for d3 non-lethal damage in a giant food fight, that’s what I’m saying.

If you have talked to me at any length in the past year, you’ve probably heard me go off on a rant about defeating The Temple of Elemental Evil; one of the perks of playing one of the great classic dungeons is that you can brag about it, as well as share war stories with other survivors. The Emerald Spire belongs up there with your Tombs of Horrors and Castle Ravenlofts; PCs are going to be delving into the Spire for a long time, and I’ve no doubt it will generate its same share of shaggy dog stories.

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The first thing your superdungeon needs, and the first thing the Players are going to encounter, is the town just outside the dungeon—the respite, the urban environment where you can withdraw to spend your gold. Maybe there’s a Thieves’ Guild there, or if you’re in a high magic setting, a magic item shop. I can pretty much promise you’ll stop by the Adjective Noun, the local watering hole. The great thing about “Fort Inevitable,” the town outside of the Emerald Spire? It’s a Lawful Evil outpost of the Hellknights of Chelliax. Lawful Evil is the best NPC alignment. “Oh, we’re a necessary evil, here, have some ethical conflicts to struggle with, PCs!” Now the town isn’t just a place of refuge but a place of careful danger, as you tiptoe around the dark paladins or side with the secret society of rebels...

Two levels of the Spire really stand out for me and made me want to slice them out of the megadungeon and run them back to back as a one-shot or mini-campaign. Which, it bears mentioning, is another reason I like megadungeons. You can break this thing into spare parts. Need a dungeon level in a pinch? Just pick one of the ones out of here and you are good to go. You aren’t contractually obligated to run the whole thing. These are the two that I most want to run and suffice to say, some spoilers follow. I can’t discuss the dungeon without going into a little bit of detail, but skip the next two paragraphs if you think you’d be a Player rather than a GM for The Emerald Spire. You’ll thank me later, trust me, okay? Alright, are they gone?

“Godhome” is designed by Frank Mentzer and it is exactly the sort of stuff I like to see in my dungeons: lots of grey. Ethical grey, I’m talking about! I know I already said how happy making the town LE made me, but this level is even better because it has the flip-side: monsters going about their day to day lives without malice. A bunch of troglodytes and their weird cult worshiping what is basically the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Oh, sure, the otherworldly space-probe is mysterious, but it is also highly magnetic— enough to suck up folks in chainmail, or rip the gold from your pockets, sword from your hands—and it’s standing in the way of you going any lower.

This is my meat and drink. Roleplay with the troglodytes, get angry and massacre them, suss out the mystery of the sufficiently-advanced-technology; this is a nice sandbox level with story-hooks and conflicts primed and ready. While I’m at it, this is the first time I have taken note of Pathfinder’s troglodytes; their design is really gorgeous. Count me in as a fan.

Richard Baker’s “The Clockwork Maze” has a techno-magic angle that makes it natural bedfellows with “Godhome.” I want to run them back-to-back, but the appeal is entirely different: Godhome has the “roleplaying conflict” angle down, but “The Clockwork Maze” doesn’t share such melodrama and instead focuses on traps and monsters. What takes Baker’s slice of the dungeon to the next level is that the entire area is one giant puzzle. It’s an interactive section of the dungeon and once you wrap your brain around it, it’s beautiful.

There are half a dozen rotating sections of the level; three coded “black,” three coded “red.” There are also red and black levers scattered through the dungeon. Switch the black lever up, all of the black sections rotate one way, connecting certain areas. Push it down and they rotate another way, connecting to other areas. Same with the red. The fact that there is a cyborg wizard running the joint is just gravy, if you ask me.

Okay, spoilers over. Suffice to say, there are great ideas in this book. This is a Pathfinder book, which means the rules are ostensibly “3.75,” but you hardly need me to tell you how easy it is to file off the serial numbers and make it system neutral, do you? The maps, the encounters, even the abstract concepts—there is plenty for everyone here. There are unexpected antagonists, unlikely allies, and unearthly places to explore... and really, that’s what the game is about. Explore strange new places and meet new people to kill or befriend. Some “new old school” books focus solely on the hack and slash, and while that is fine if it’s what you want, I vastly prefer the more nuanced style The Emerald Spire espouses.

Oh, sure, you could go through it like a bunch of genocidal adventurers, but there are weirder, more interesting options for those willing to embrace them. Then, when you’re all finished, you can climb out of it and swap takes around the inn’s hearth with other adventurers who played the same dungeon, hear how they zigged where you zagged, how your paths diverged and converged again. After all, grognards exchanging tales of epic weal and woe over ale is how most adventuring parties first hear about a new dungeon, isn’t it? Its the circle of life.

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Mordicai Knode can tell you all about how his Barovian elf thief stole the mantle of Saint of Slimes and Fungi from Zuggtmoy, if you let him. Or you could just find him on Twitter or Tumblr.

So you want a big, two-part, smash ’em up finale? The Legend of Korra delivers and still leaves enough room for a bittersweet not-with-a-bang-but-with-a-whimper capstone. I’m left thoughtful in the wake of everything that happens; in a lot of ways, this feels like the spiritual sequel to the end of Book Two in Avatar: the Last Airbender, and the preponderance of crystal and gurus makes me think that’s quite intentional. As the same time, these episodes intensely channel the series finale of “Sozin’s Comet,” but with the clever conceit of a role reversal. Here the nimble, evasive airbender is the villain, and the one soaring around on jets of flame is the Avatar.

Book Three of The Legend of Korra has been great, not just in comparison to the first two seasons but on its own, and it concludes here. It’ll all end in tears, but what kind of tears?

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All I pick up from the radio recap are the words “injured in battle” and that settles it for me. Tenzin is alive. My first guess is that he’ll be paralyzed, the airbending master having to learn his life in a wheelchair, which we’ve seen Teo already laying the ground work for. My guess is close, as you no doubt have seen by now— Korra’s in a wheelchair, at least— but no cigar. All of Aang and Katara’s kids are beat up pretty badly as it turns out, but they made it out alive. I was on the edge of my seat through both episodes, because it could be anyone next, and if it wasn’t Tenzin, who will it be? Surprisingly the answer to that is...no one? Or at least, none of the “good guys.” Zaheer’s loved ones don’t fare so well.

I feel like I did pretty well with predictions this season, having restrained myself from going too far overboard, and a large part of that is because of conversations in the comments section at the bottom of these post; thanks everyone! We’ve built a great community here, and we’ve gotten little things like Bolin lavabending and Zaheer flying right, as well as big picture observations, like the how Zaheer seems like another facet of the same gemstone Amon and Unalaq and Vaatu were all cut from. Poisoned, Korra sees just that, though see how that points to my tendency to over think things? I thought the “Venom of the Red Lotus” was going to be metaphorical. Nope. Evil mercury. Literal poison.

I’m so glad we get to see Jinora shine. I’m not surprised— I’m very glad the show has devoted so much attention to her— but I am very happy with how it all came off. Astral projection, check. Telling everyone useful facts, like that the poison was metallic, check. I was expecting that. Derring-do and shenanigans, check. But again, I was expecting that, though I thought Kai would be involved; I think having him bring the other characters and call them out on ignoring him was a more elegant story. What I didn’t see coming was all of the airbenders working together while she conducts them, to create a massive tornado— shades of Echopraxia— or for the Air Nomads to decide to roam the Earth like Caine from Kung Fu. (Can I say “Earth”?)

We don’t get Zaheer’s backstory. I’m okay with that, honestly, but I still have questions. I mean, I really like this school of storytelling, where you leave negative space and let the audience fill it in. Where you show that characters have unseen depths even if the story doesn’t get to explore them. Bolin’s comments about mutual unrequited love, seeing P’Li being rescued from a “warlord,” leave us to our headcanons, fine, be that way. Or maybe Kuvira, who came out of nowhere and suddenly got a name, will be a big feature of Book Four, and will continue the Red Lotus’ plot. Or I’m just being paranoid. Who can say at this point. I mean, I’m sure we’ll see her again, and I’d guess we might get another Red Lotus episode, but so far each season has been largely self contained, in terms of plot, if not consequences and worldbuilding.

In a lot of ways, this story felt to me like it embodied a lot of the—ugh, I’ll say it—the changes in bending. Lightningbending, lavabending (“You’re a lavabender!” “I know, I just found out!” made me pause the episode to take a break for laughter), metalbending, platinum you can’t metal bend, the rediscovery of flight... we’ve been seeing a bending arms race. Is it more like how the Cold War drove space innovation, or is it more like how Batman’s presence is alleged to have upped the ante for crime in Gotham? Is that one of the things Korra is struggling with? And it’s more than just an escalation in bending “technology.” Look at the body count. Aang converted his first season villain, Zuko, and they even managed to subdue Azula and Ozai without killing them. The Legend of Korra, however, is a blood bath.

Does the world need the Avatar? I imagine that’s the question at the crux of Korra’s melancholy. Every villain in this series has been someone striking at the Avatar because of what she means as a symbol, as a singularly powerful bender, and as a spiritual being. Does she cause more problems than she fixes? For me, Tenzin answers that question, when he points to Korra’s actions during Harmonic Convergence. She was more than just reactive, did more than just “save” a city; she allowed spirits into the world and started a chain reaction that has led to the return of the Air Nomads. I think Korra, as usual, needs to learn the same thing, but the hard way.

Then again, she could just be hurt; television tropes aside, if she’s injured enough to need a wheel chair, there are plausible physiological reasons she might feel sad or depressed. I learned recently just how much surgery, even minor surgery, can mess you up. Or she could be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, heck they could be genuine tears of joy for Jinora, any number of things—but I personally think an existential crisis is the most likely. I hope it isn’t a bummer for too long; I almost wanted Korra to joke about how her difficulties in entering the Avatar State in the first place helped keep her safe from the Red Lotus. Korra keeps having this revelation, that she’s important and unique because she’s Korra as much as because she’s the Avatar. I just feel like we’ve been down this road before.

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Mordicai Knode knows we have one more Book to go. He says “Balance,” and he still predicts she’ll merge with Raava and Vaatu. He finds talking in the third person confusing; find him on Twitter or Tumblr.

Jared Zichek decided to make his own, and says you can, too. Read the rest

This episode of The Legend of Korra gives us what we’ve been waiting for—a glimpse into the inner workings of Zaheer and his “Red Lotus” gang. I’m going to unpack that and sort through what we learn about our antagonists a-plenty, but that isn’t all we get, not by a long shot.

Last week I’d said we’d seen almost every kind of specialized bending, except the plantbending of the swamp folk. Well, now we’ve seen the Mos Eisley of the sandbenders, so check one more off the list. The desert seems “painted,” more brightly colored than the one where Sokka went cactus-juice crazy, but it still vibes Tattooine, right down to spirits being denied access to a saloon the way droids might be kicked out of a cantina. All this casual discrimination and political oppression! Almost makes you wish someone would do something about it, doesn’t it?

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So I can stop calling it the “Red Lotus Society” now—no need for equivocating quotes! Zaheer and his crew of benders call themselves the Red Lotus Society, and the reason there’s an advanced bender of each element is because they were supposed to be Korra’s teachers, if their plan to kidnap her had worked. She accuses them of planning to brainwash her. I hope she at least stops to ask herself just what she thinks the White Lotus Society was doing, keeping her locked up and cut off from the outside while they raised her; ultimately, that shaped her beliefs about the world just as much. It also deepens the question of Zaheer’s personal background; presumably, he was meant to be her non-bending airbender instructor, but where did he learn his then-theoretical arts?

So this is Zaheer’s secret. He’s what I wish Amon had been from the beginning, a true believer...excelsior! The series has been about failed messiahs so far, in contrast to Korra as the genuine article. In Book One: Air, we had Amon. Amon’s iconography is unequaled, if you ask me—the mask, the self-possessed and minimalist body language, an organization of Equalists... Amon might have been “anti-bending,” but fundamentally his message was one of upsetting a broken social hierarchy. The problem was that his movement was betrayed. There was no Amon, no spirit-touched prophet, just Noatak, a bloodbender with a penchant for theatrics. Maybe Zaheer could take up the mask, or maybe Amon’s revolution will start again in another Avatar cycle, but to really be effective it needs to be more than an illusion.

Then there was Unalaq, another would-be chosen one, for the villain of Book Two: Spirits. Unalaq is the tempter, rather than the ringleader, but his ambition is ultimately the same as Noatak’s: power. Oh, sure, Unalaq has a better claim on being the “messiah,” since the dark spirit Vaatu did bond with him, which did give Unalaq the powers of a Dark Avatar. In this episode we even find out that Unalaq was part of Zaheer’s Red Lotus society, before his pride and hubris betrayed them. It makes sense and is just good storytelling—all of the cosmic exposition from the previous story arc is back on the table. Unalaq is, ultimately, petty, and Korra defeats the merged Anti-Avatar on her own, even without her Avatar powers. (I still think that Korra will ultimately repair her link to her past lives by combining and balancing Raava and Vaatu inside of herself: Book Four: Balance?)

Korra is defined by—exonerated by—the failures of her enemies. Noatak was insincere, and believed that his secret skill of bloodbending could be used to bring the world under his control—he and Tarrlock both living in the shadow of their father Yakone—but Korra learned her secret skill of airbending. Rather than using it to dominate the world, she’s spreading it, teaching what she learned.

Unalaq wanted to set up a power system with himself on top and everyone—even his children—below him as second class citizens. He was Korra’s dark mentor, but he failed. Look at her and Tenzin; rather than a hierarchy, they’ve become each other’s peers. Unalaq embraced the power of the spirits; Korra embraces the enlightenment of the self. Noatak creates the false symbol of Amon; Korra embodies the true symbol of the Avatar. She learns from other’s mistakes.

Zaheer seems to be at peace with himself. He has conviction, and that is one thing I think Korra can learn from him. I think she will pick up a belief in a cause. Her cause. What that cause is could be anything, but I’m betting that she ultimately defeats Zaheer and then pursues a similar agenda though non-subversive means, or with the authority of the Avatar. You have to admit, it is hard to argue that the Earth Queen should not be taken down. A tyrant doesn’t deserve to rule just because her father happened to be king, and let’s not forget what a useless leader he was in the first place. Heck, not to “Godwin the thread,” but Fire Lord Sozin and Ozai make pretty good arguments against aristocracy, too...

This episode also brings us some unexpected twists. Korra finally gets fed up with being patient and kicks in the front door... then lo and behold, she was right! They never would have discovered that the Red Lotus communicated by using the spirit world, otherwise. Mako and Bolin as Breaking Bad refugees is cute, but for me, you know what I really like—seeing their past actions inform their current behavior, or as experts call it, “character growth.” Mako knows how to be a cop, Bolin was a “mover” star, and both matter to the story. We get to hear more from Asami this episode than we’ve been getting—watching her dominate at Pai Sho made me a very happy Mordicai, and finding clues is always good—but I’m getting tired of crumbs. Pair her with Varrick if you have to, but give her a storyline!

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Mordicai Knode knows the specific agony of having victory snatched from your claws by an upended game board and the subtle ecstacy of arguing about standardized rules. Find him at Tumblr or at Twitter.

Let’s not everyone freak out at once. Just last episode we talked about the knife edge of doubt that an “all-ages” show like The Legend of Korra has been able to walk when it comes to violence. The Earth Queen’s demise could have been the Earth Queen’s defeat until the burden of context clues pushed it over. Heck, this episode we see a number of seemingly fatal falls turn out to be misdirection, on all sides, so I guess my point is: all we can do is speculate about the ultimate fate of one of our favorite characters.

One thing I’ve said this entire season is that the stakes and the tension are high; it feels like anything can happen. I’m hoping the fallout from this recent turn of events is more of a melancholy sad, with more of an “Appa’s Lost Days” feel to the consequences than what the worst case scenario could be. Enough of all of this vague spoiler-free mummery; let’s talk brass tacks, below the cut.

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I had said Zaheer was due to do something to put him squarely in the “villain” camp for us viewers, something less ambiguous than, you know, assassinating a slave-taking unjust tyrant. Oh, the Red Lotus can pull all the “hey, it is his fault, we tried to force him to surrender” garbage, but then, they also could have not terrorized a group of people who are famous for having already been targeted for genocide once before. Zaheer, buddy, you’ve gone and Godwin’d yourself. I’m on record as saying Tenzin is my second favorite—Jinora, obvious number one slot, though all she does this week is gasp at Kai’s bravery in the face of danger—so if Katara doesn’t show up to clean Zaheer and the Lotus’ clock, I’m next in line.

Is Tenzin dead? I don’t know. I don’t think so, because you could still squeeze blood from that stone. If Tenzin was in a coma, Korra could quest for him in the spirit world, for instance. Or if the Red Lotus just beat him until he could resist no more...well, that wouldn’t be surprising either, actually. Wasn’t that what was done to them, presumably? Captured and locked up; maybe they’ve taken an injured Tenzin as a hostage. Then again, maybe this is all foolish optimism. Tenzin’s comment about fighting as long as he can still breathe is darkly ominous in light of “Long Live the Queen.” You can milk a lot of pathos from a funeral, too, I guess. I’m trying to brace for the worst.

There are two more episodes of The Legend of Korra left after this week’s “The Ultimatum.” The series so far has shown a marked tendency to escalate the action in the finale of each season, and Korra wrapped up Amon and Unalaq after just one Book each, but I’m not sure they’re ready to move on past Zaheer and the Red Lotus. Book Four is still happening, to the best of my knowledge; it will conclude the series and isn’t just going to be shelved, as I’d half worried. There’s an upside to this digital model right there; you might as well put them on the internet if you’ve already paid for them, and once you realize that you’ve made a mistake pulling it, like with Firefly, at least you have a chance to keep some distribution streams open.

My point is: there is a season left, and the Red Lotus could continue to be the villains for a whole ’nother book. Or they could become something more complicated, the way Zuko, Azula and her gang ended up being fleshed out with unexpected depths. Then again, there are still two episodes left; you can get a lot done in two episodes. So far, the characterization of the Red Lotus has been sparse, hinted at rather than shown: Bolin’s crack about unresolved romantic tension between Ghazan and Ming-Hua is just the sort of thing I mean. You know what I want. I hinted at it in my bio line last week. I want to see an equivalent to “The Beach” for the Red Lotus.

What’s Zaheer’s deal, for instance? How did he know enough airbending theory to be this good, right out of the gate? I suppose we could just assume he’s a prodigy but I think there is a more interesting answer. I want to know about his relationship with P’Li and how the Red Lotus formed. Maybe a flashback is in order? I want to know what their plans are for Korra; trying to brainwash her as a kid is plausible, but again, I wonder if there isn’t something deeper behind their motives.

I don’t do “spoilers” but I couldn’t help but notice that the last episode of the season is called “Venom of the Red Lotus.” I wonder if it isn’t the metaphorical venom of their dogma; they might “convert” Korra, though I’d suspect covert motives on her part rather than her knuckling to coercion. I’m thinking “The Crossroads of Destiny” from Avatar: the Last Airbender, the cliff-hanger ending of Book Two, for comparison.

Team Avatar just can’t catch a break with airships, can they? Should’ve gone with a sky bison; Appa was much more reliable. I’m a Dungeon Master, so I get it; if you give your PCs a shiny brand new airship, you run the risk that suddenly they’ll just take it and go anywhere! Inconvenient if they want to say, use the radio to call ahead to warn Tenzin long before Zaheer can be a problem. That’s something I’ve often thought about actually: the Hitchcockian tension of the radio or telephone. It’s just not something you can really duplicate in a low-tech setting. It makes me really glad, in a “big picture” sense, that The Legend of Korra was brave enough to change the setting of Avatar: the Last Airbender, to evolve it’s history and technology by a generation.

I remain quite impressed with the worldbuilding, both large scale and small scale. From technology and spirits to little stuff like the show continues to remember that Mako is a detective now, and that he and Bolin have extended family in Ba Sing Se. Details create verisimilitude but sticking to the details takes it to the next level. Like Zuko’s continuing hunched posture and stroking his chin in his “thinking face”—you know I like the use of body language on this show. To say nothing of the fight choreography this episode; I think I don’t need to. It speaks for itself. Bravo.

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Mordicai Knode admits he was worried that seeing Iroh this episode meant Tenzin was going to be the leaf and that we were going to get another rendition of “Leaves from the Vine” for his death scene. It could still happen; Zuko could still sing it at his funeral. It is a concern. Find Mordicai on Tumblr and Twitter.

It’s sad that we have to wait to discuss “The Terror Within”—one of the tensest episodes to date, bringing back the sense of real menace that Amon had—in order to talk about how the sausage gets made, but we should. There is an elephant koi in the room: Nickelodeon has decided not to air the rest of The Legend of Korra and instead will make the remaining episodes available online. I know, I’d rather talk about how we finally get to see an all-out battle between Zaheer and his team of what fans are calling the “Red Lotus Society” versus Team Avatar and the Metal Clan, but we need to discuss the nuts and bolts of how we’re going to be able to see the stories, while we’re at it. I mentioned I was worried last week, but it was too little, too late. At least the episode we actually did get was excellent, right?

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We live in a post-Arrested Development world, where a show that had been off the air for years experienced an unlikely return to the small screen in the form of a Netflix show. Since then, the formula has been refined; shows like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black are huge successes and critical darlings and they’ve never even hit the airwaves. Community has been “rescued” from being canceled by Yahoo. This is a digital age. I personally watched the first two books of The Legend of Korra on my DVR, but I’ve since cancelled cable and have already been watching this season digitally. What I’m saying is that this could actually be a good thing. I have a much higher rate of convincing people to watch a show that they can easily watch online at their leisure than I do convincing someone to...what, wait by the television on Friday nights? By that logic, it’s great that it is going digital! Heck, maybe Book Four could have a big debut on Hulu or something; this could be the opportunity the show needs to grow.

That being said, this says a lot about how Nickelodeon has treated the property. We’ve all heard stories from the beginning about Nickelodeon executives pushing back against having a female lead, and the show’s creators mollifying them by showing testing groups who didn’t conform to their expectations—my ultimate point being that there have always been tensions between the show and the network, or at least, that is how it seems to me.

Everyone is too professional to point fingers, but it’s hard not to look at how the show has been plagued by leaks, doesn’t seem to have been aggressively marketed or advertised, was saddled with start dates that announced last minute, and then was pushed out two episodes at a time, etc., and not raise an eyebrow. I don’t think this season of Korra got the attention or the chance it deserved, and the fact that this season is so gosh darn good just makes it worse.

Enough with that; let’s talk about “The Terror Within.” The plot is very simple. First, giant brawl between firebenders, psychic firebenders, earthbenders, metalbenders, waterbenders, lavabenders, airbenders...just about the only kind of bending we didn’t see on display was plantbending. (Well, and bloodbending, but I think we’ve gotten our quota of bloodbending for a while.)

I found the first half of the episode so suspenseful. Last week I mentioned how exciting it is to not be able to predict what will happen next...and this episode was the pay off for that. I had my heart in my throat: would they succeed in kidnapping Korra? It seemed completely plausible—these are the same guys who vanished Appa for how many episodes?—and so there was actual catharsis when Korra was saved. The threat sure was credible enough to convince me to take it seriously. Thank heavens for Bolin Time!

The second half is a more cerebral investigation. Oh, hey! Remember how Mako is a cop? Yeah, well the show remembers too. I don’t want to take things like that for granted; forgetting about character growth is a problem a lot of television shows struggle with, but not The Legend of Korra. Though I will say there is one small, crucial detail that I’m missing—where is the Beifont flying pig? And can Asami have more than one or two lines in the next episode, please? We do get the return of the “echolocation stomp” from Lin, though, and that’s enough for me for now.

Figuring out who the guilty culprit is doesn’t take a rocket scientist. Well, it doesn’t help that Varrick the crazy inventor has some helpful insights in that regard...and he did have that rocket jetpack, didn’t he? So alright, having a rocket scientist doesn’t hurt. Still, a good ethical lesson from the show: people in positions of authority need independent oversight. More tension here, as they sip tea and try to avoid giving direct answers...suspense that pays off with a bomb!

We’re left with questions. What is the “Red Lotus Society” up to? Did they teleport away? Their agenda remains opaque; it’s like we’re on the wrong side of a heist movie. Why was Aiwei helping them? Is there a network of agents? Is he perhaps loyal to the Earth Queen? A member of the Dai Li, or even it’s new Long Feng? I know people still suspect Su Yin, analyzing her facial expressions to look for guilt, but wasn’t she the one who came up with the idea to rescue Korra with cables? She could have sabotaged the whole process to let Zaheer and his crew get away with Korra—or heck, simply not doing anything was an option—but she didn’t, so I’m inclined to trust her.

Yes, I think she’s genuine, right down to her rebellious streak causing her to enable Korra’s own rebellious streak...not that I think Korra has to listen to Lin in the first place, but I do wish she’d tackled the confrontation like a grown-up. It is the Avatar’s job to take care of threats like this, and if Korra wasn’t safe in Zaofu, I don’t see how she’d be safe anywhere else until the problem is taken care of...but I wish Lin was going with her.

 

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Mordicai Knode doesn’t really care where he gets his Legend of Korra from, as long as he gets it. Find him on Tumblr and Twitter.

Twenty years ago, William Barker's Schwa artwork revealed a world of alien abductions, stick figure insanity, conspiratorial crazy, and a hyper-branded surveillance state. It's now more relevant than ever. Read the rest

I’m incredibly impressed with this season of The Legend of Korra. No more shaky footing, no more “well, lets see how it plays out,” none of that, no doubt, no wait-and-see, just constant high-quality action. If you have friends who drifted away from the show, or if you are that friend? Grab them (or yourself) by the scruff of the neck and drag them back. I admit, I’m a little worried about Nickelodeon’s commitment; this “let’s air two episodes at a time” doesn’t strike me as a good sign. The show is firing on all cylinders, but I’m worried it will be too late for some of the fans... so trust me, Book Three: Change is pure perfection. “Old Wounds” and “Original Airbenders” really continue the tradition at the heart of what made Avatar: The Last Airbender so great: focusing on character conflict and growth.

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The last two episodes were about “family” generally, but these two drill down to focusing on siblings. “Old Wounds” is spun around the axis of Toph’s daughters, Lin and Su Yin; “Original Airbenders” is centered on Aang and Katara’s sons, Tenzin and Bumi. It is a pair of character portraits that showcase the similarities and differences between the two; they may both be the strict and straight-laced type on the surface, but those exteriors arise from entirely different places and motives.

We see, in a nutshell, why Lin and Tenzin wouldn’t work; their baggage looks similar, but they just don’t match. Both are trying to live up to what they think their parents would have wanted, but Lin is doing it in isolation while Tenzin is creating his own conflicts. Or well, they were; thanks to the miracles of flashback acupuncture and long distance radio, they’re working on it. (On a personal note, I’ve been struggling with insomnia since I had shoulder surgery, and watching Lin suffer when she left acupuncture “halfway” really hit me with it’s portrayal of dissociative suffering.)

Those are by no means the only relationships on display. Bolin gets richly deserved screen time— I assume I will get Asami next, right?— and it illustrates something I’m really enjoying about this season: the commitment to the idea of change. Bolin is afraid of failing to metalbend, but he gets over it. Bolin has a history of being involved with emotionally unavailable women, now he actually tries being in a healthy, communicative relationship. Still, it is the part with Korra giving Tenzin good advice that really gets me. Oh my gosh, Korra, you learned to be wise! Tenzin taught you to be wise and now you are giving him good advice—this really matters to me. Their relationship was the core of the first season of the show, ever since “A Voice in the Night.” Watching it develop and deepen is viscerally pleasing.

Sometimes I think Tenzin might be my favorite character, but then I remember Jinora. She’s up there with Azula for me, now. Oh Jinora, lashing out with her completely reasonable teenage rebellion. That’s what really sold “Original Airbenders” for me; it hearkened back to Avatar: The Last Airbender’s episodic nature, in which sometimes you meet villains and then you just deal with the bad guys. No over-wrought “oh no, and Jinora is gone and everyone hates Kai!” manufactured melodrama. The dramatic instincts of this season are really on point; they hurdle pitfalls and push the narrative in interesting directions. Will Su Yin and the Metal Clan have a heel turn? At this point I’m honestly not sure, and that is exciting!

Speaking of Jinora, we see Zaheer deep in meditation, before finally announcing that he knows where the Avatar is. You know what that means: that guy can astral project. And you know what that means, maybe, if we’re lucky? That he’ll have a fight with Jinora in the spirit world. Which I would dearly like to see, because I imagine it going something like this: “You think I’m afraid of you, Zaheer? Just because you are a dangerous criminal? Zaheer, that’s back in the physical world. We are on my turf, where I’ve struggled with the spirits of darkness and memory, where I’ve walked among heroes and gods. You should be running.” Otherwise, the villains motives or agenda are still opaque. They want to assassinate the president (actually I think the term they use is “take out,” there could still be ambiguity), but that’s such a “big idea” that it hardly reveals anything about their intentions.

We also see Ghazan doing more lavabending. I just like keeping track of the evolving science of bending...like for instance, metalbending. Korra picks it up in a snap. That was interesting to me; I almost thought that the show might go with “well, the Avatar can bend all the elements, but only members of the four nations can master the esoteric disciplines.“ Oh, wait, but we see Aang lightningbend, don’t we? Well, that answers that. I wonder if there really are four elements, or if that is just the paradigm— in the truest sense of the word, for you philosophy nerds, both Kuhn’s paradigm and Lakatos’ “research program”— being used by the people of the world? I mentioned in the comments last week that if there we get a show about the next Avatar cycle I half-expect them to switch to a Wu Xing five elements system, especially as metalbending becomes more prominent with the rise of industry.

Did someone say industry? Varrick’s magnet suit was wonderful. There are a lot of other little jokes that really tickled me. Pabu being venomous. Bolin’s rant about ”future mustaches.“ Having the former Air Acolyte turned Air Nomad be named Otaku is a fun piece of word play, and so is the Konietzko smoothie. Excuse me, sorry, I mean kale-nuts-co. The guy with the shaved head going Neo on the net? I clapped with glee. There is a cameo by “young old Toph,” adult Toph; that and Su Yin’s use of the present tense make me think she’s alive and Lin is going to go find her, and then we’ll see...old old Toph. The American Ninja Gladiator obstacle course, the little fur of the bison rustler’s cape; these episodes are dense with detail, and they don’t need to wave their arms around to call your attention to it. That’s just plain old good storytelling.

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Mordicai Knode is feeling the vibe of these Hayao-Miyazaki-by-way-of-Lisa-Frank so hard. You can find him on Twitter and Tumblr.

This season of The Legend of Korra is really sticking to its eponymous theme of Change. At the end of “In Harm’s Way,” Team Avatar acknowledges that they’ve made new enemies, but they’ve also made new friends. In the most basic way, the story is about the way the Avatar is changing the world—just this time at a political level. The characters embrace the changes, following the path they think is best, and because of that they succeed. This is true both for our heroes and for our erstwhile villains, as each group pulls off a massive escape.

“The Metal Clan” shows the opposite: what happens when change is resisted, when the chi is blocked, so to speak. I suspect Lin’s grievances with her sister are more legitimate than they seem at first—there’s always a worm in the apple when it comes to cutting-edge utopias—but either way, the conflict is clearly tearing her apart. The Legend of Korra doesn’t give us the expected emotional beats, opting for realism and character development over tropes and trite moralizing. Finally, everyone please take note. It is an abstraction of the Harmonic Convergence.

[It is not a banana.]

So far The Legend of Korra has been really knocking it out of the park with Big Visuals—from glowing astral Godzillas to stadium Spider-Man brawls—and these episodes keep up that tradition. The ice prison, fire-breathing dragons, astral SCUBA, huge scrums and intense duels... the ticket buys the whole seat, but you’ll only need the edge. I’ve talked a lot about how this show uses subtle-and-not-so-subtle cues in the animation to good effect, from Aang and Korra sharing body language to things like this week’s Ringu style flickering as Jinora astral projects, or when Kya is fighting Zaheer—she whips out two spirally currents of water, crisscrossing them like an old school atomic symbol. Yep, that’s Aang’s daughter alright!

Speaking of Jinora astral projecting... first off, obviously Jinora is the best. I’m a known Jinora sympathizer from way back. The fact that she’s turning into an enlightened Nancy Drew is a-okay with me. What I took particular note of was that she said astral projecting was an “airbender move.” We’ve talked about how earthbenders have sandbenders, and how waterbenders have healing and spirit calming, as well as bloodbending and plantbending. We’ve seem some “advanced techniques,” like the firebender’s lightning, go from being rare talents to developed skills as bending techniques improved. “The Metal Clan” is all about the legacy of Toph’s invention of metalbending. Is astral projection the airbender advanced technique?

There is a whole host of characters dumped into our lap in this episode. So far, Change has been about families as much as anything else; heck, even the criminals are a tight knit family. The anti-Scoobies, something the Avatar hasn’t faced. We’ve seen the benefits of trust and teamwork for Team Avatar (and the Gaang before them), now we’re going to see the villains exploit those same advantages. Beyond that, Korra’s father and twin cousins didn’t just fade away into the background, and Mako and Bolin’s family are still making appearances. Obviously one of the two new episodes is just straight up about Lin’s family. These are the ties that will drive the coming conflicts, if we could just unravel them. We haven’t touched on Asami’s lack of family; we see her and Korra sparring, but after that she doesn’t get a lot of spotlight. More Asami!

Which characters will be important moving forward? We know that Avatar stories don’t just discard characters—even seemingly cameo ones—and we’ve been introduced to several families' worth. Maybe they won’t return. Maybe they’ll stay in Zao Fu as set dressing. Maybe someone will become a recurring, Suki-like character, or heck, maybe someone will join full time, like Zuko or Toph did. That would sort of be fitting, and we’re in Toph city.

Speaking of Toph, The Legend of Korra is showing us that the cast of Avatar: the Last Airbender were imperfect, that their lives didn’t become “happily ever after” fairytales when the show ended. That’s not what life is like, so the show isn’t like that, either. That doesn’t mean seeing just the flaws is the whole picture, either. Toph might still be alive, so maybe she’ll provide more context (...but I doubt she’ll mention who either of their fathers are).

Let’s talk about Zaheer and company. So they were imprisoned for trying to kidnap Korra. Got it. In the past, I have developed my own little pet theories and clung to them beyond all reason and sense. I’m not going to do that, this time. Not that I’ll entirely take any of the characters at their word—there is obviously going to be some kind of Shocking Reveal, right?—but I’m not going to create my own maze of smoke and mirrors. Henry Rollins is doing a great job, bringing a sense of menace to his infiltration of the Air Nomads that gave his scenes a Hitchcockian air. I’m wondering if a close betrayal is at hand: Su Yin seems too good to be true. Or of course, there’s the ever-likely knife in the back from Varrick to suspect...

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Mordicai Knode can’t be the only one who heard “rare meteorites” and thought “...spacesword!?” can he? Let him know on Twitter or look for him on Tumblr.

When they announced that The Legend of Korra was coming back in just a few weeks, I was surprised; now that they’ve aired, I’m ecstatic. The fact that the debut of the new season was three episodes long means I’m going to leave my excitement at the door, put it aside and jump right into the thick of it, because Book Three: Change starts off strong with big ideas, nostalgia, momentum, new characters and multiple plotlines. I quite liked last season, but that doesn’t mean I can’t admit that there weren’t mistakes made. But three episodes into this newest arc, I think I can say with some authority that it seems this new story doesn’t share the same problems. Plus new airbenders, an evil airbender, and Zuko!

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First off, let’s talk about airbenders! Interesting choice to make Bumi one; I think it is a more interesting direction than leaving him as the Sokka, the Xander, the Zeppo. An old dog learning new tricks, learning to bend for the first time, that’s new ground for the series. It also makes me think the gift of airbending wasn’t as random as it later seems to be. I am wondering if Tenzin will go back to the people who didn’t want to move and ask if the other Air Nomads can travel on a route to visit them during their migration, making them part of the new, “changed” nation that has flexed its traditions.

I really want to talk about where the show has finally started “clicking”—in the relationships. The universal demand for this season was for Korra and Asami’s relationship to move more to the front, and boom, there it is, just like I wanted. Their triangle with Mako remains but has completely moved into comedy, as he acts appropriately awkward around the both of them (and Tenzin exits, stage left).

Mediating the whole thing is Bolin, and this season looks to be featuring their dynamic as brothers and as members of various extended families. Favorite single moment? Bolin does his hair up like Mako’s at one point to make fun of him, and it was an Orphan Black worthy performance from P.J. Byrne and the animators.

Relationships are the backbone to these three episodes, and that’s why they work: because relationships provided the skeleton for all of the best stories in Avatar: the Last Airbender. Relationships aren’t static—this is the book of “Change” after all—so we get to see here how they’ve evolved. Tenzin and Korra are a team now, actually listening to each other; his gratitude that Korra’s actions during the Solstice has caused airbending to return is a truly wise piece of counsel for her to hear while she is stressing about other people being endangered or inconvenienced by the choice she made. (What is the deal with that, anyhow—only Republic City seems to have the vines and the spirits? Are we waiting for them to travel south from the poles?) Then of course, he does a spot-on impression of Fullmetal Alchemist’s Louis Armstrong, too…

Even the villains are defined by their relationships, though we don’t know what they all are yet. Plus Henry Rollins! I didn’t expect that but I’m all in; this “supervillain jailbreak” plot is working for me. Next is…wait, wait, does that guy have the Glaive from Krull when it is still in the lava as his “power?” A magmabender? Then there is tentacle arms…voiced by Grey DeLisle?! That can’t be good. The last one is Sparky Sparky Boom Woman: she had to be.

Details like the return of the “combustion” school of firebending add a sense of continuity to the series without being too on the nose. (Still waiting on more Kyoshi Warriors, now that you mention it. You can almost pretend that the Kyoshi Warriors in Avatar: the Last Airbender were a callback to the hypothetical series before that, Avatar: The Unconquered, which was all about Avatar Kyoshi.) I wonder if the criminals have ties to Noatak? They sure seem to hate the Avatar, and if they are as dangerous as it seems, why wouldn’t Aang strip them of their bending? My theory is rather dark; I think these are the ones who killed Aang, and that Aang’s peaceful death is a White Lotus fiction, propaganda to continue the myth that the Avatar is invincible.

Kai is the big wrinkle in the group dynamic, but you know, Toph and Asami were both late additions to Team Avatar, so I’m pretty optimistic that he won’t be the Cousin Oliver. More to the point, I think he’s got a lot of characters to bounce off of in interesting ways: he does mirror Bolin and Mako’s background, and their relationship to him in equal parts over-protectiveness and suspicion are well done, more of a light touch than exaggerated for comedy. Jinora’s flirtation with him is my favorite because as you might remember, anything Jinora is involved with is my favorite because Jinora is the best. Kai’s attitude is going to give us our requested quota of Tenzin bluster and sputtering, and the pre-requisite “why, your Aladdin-esque ways are just like the true spirit of freedom, only upside-down!” scene. Then I’m thinking he’ll betray the group, apprentice under Zaheer, and either be the one that saves Team Avatar in the end or that he’ll then go on to be the next troubled anti-hero.

One of the things previous seasons The Legend of Korra did well was show the growing class struggles of the world. Avatar: the Last Airbender had less ambiguous setting, with the colonialist Fire Nation being led by a dangerous psychopath as a clear-cut menace, but even that show dealt with a more nuanced grey in Ba Sing Se. “Tales of Ba Sing Se” is one of my favorite episodes after “The Beach” (up there with “The Ember Island Players,”) so I really hope the series revisits that format, and that if they do one that the 5-7-5 Society show up again. I mean, we’re already re-visiting some of the central themes of Ba Sing Se; plutocracy has segregated the city into levels, and aristocracy has gone ahead and made it official.

I have to say, I don’t know why anyone let the useless Earth King retake his throne in the first place, but then, I’m an American. I don’t “get” aristocracy, so it’s no surprise that I think we’ll see the Queen deposed this season. Speaking of royals, we see Old Zuko, complete with an Uncle Iroh beard, hanging out with other monarchs, the twins Desna and Eska from last season. As I said earlier, I’m always happy for unexpected story continuity; the show could have safely ignored them forever, their story “complete,” but instead we see that the world exists even when the focus of the protagonists is elsewhere. The actions Korra took have consequences, on every level from the spiritual to the emotional to the political.

I’m really looking forward to this season. The cosmic scope of last season is going to pay off here: Korra changed the world in a meaningful way. The return of airbending is one major facet of it—for good or ill, as in Bumi or Zaheer, each returning balance to the world immaterial of their villainous or heroic intentions—but others like the vines and spirits and economic inequalities remain as well.

We have concrete villains, we have concrete goals, we have vibrant characters bouncing off each other in rhythm, all set in a complicated and reactive world…it’s the recipe for a hat trick of top notch episodes. Each of them were lean, mean entertaining machines; I want more of this. I keep saying that the rule of verisimilitude is details, and The Legend of Korra is nailing those; Mako giving his scarf away even continues the great tradition of having a character’s stylebook evolve with their personality, much as the Gaang’s look did when they went to the Fire Nation. Fine work. It really feels like with these three episodes the series is hitting its stride.

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Mordicai Knode still thinks the series should end with Korra re-uniting with the Avatar memories from Raava in the final book. Tell him whether he’s right on or crazy on Twitter or Tumblr.

Zeroville by Steve Erickson.

Left, HAL 9000.
Monolith on the right side.
Logic & magic.

This was Jennifer's pick for Eleven-Books Club-- I think this is her third pick, after Art Girls Are Easy & This Dark Endeavor-- but it was Rasheem who summed it up by saying "it's Forrest Gump. Yeah, yes it is; it is a story of a man with a fictionalized mental disability who just happens to fall ass over tea kettle into celebrity cameos & wink-to-the-camera adventures. Hits the nail pretty well on the head. It's also part of the macho cult of middlebrow litsnob fiction-- which does feel to me very West Coast, with your Bret Easton Ellises & Chuck Palahniuks, Beats on 'roids-- with a "he just gets these violent rages, it's not his fault!" protagonist who is a non-sexual creature & thus has to talk about masturbation & blow jobs & obsessing about trans people's genitalia for page after page. The novel acknowledges it at the end, with Zazi eviscerating Rio Bravo for the same reasons as a "pointless exercise in guyness." Good for her, & for her calling out Casablanca's mansplaining. I don't mean to sound so hard; I think the book is knowingly what it is...I just don't like it, self-aware or not. Still, it was an easy read, & entertaining enough to keep my occupied in Matt's lobby for a half an hour the other day.

My opinion I think was contrary to a lot of folks; particularly, with the screwball third act. See, for the reasons mentioned above, I didn't like the first two acts much; Rainman & then, like Scorsese's Hugo, it just became a self-important "dreamers who dream the dream" indulgence (& frankly that part bothered me least, because I don't mind pretension). That's why, when the curveball at the end started coming, I jumped on board. I thought that the focus on Judeo-Christian mythology's obsession with fathers killing sons was a really effective Sword of Damocles hanging over the novel, from the beginning, & bringing it back around to that is better than your average "religious" element in most stories. & for all that I might have derided the machismo, I think it got the "male relationship" between Vikar & Viking Man right on; they reminded me at times of me & kingtycoon. Toward the end of the discussion, I asked everyone who they would have tattooed on their shaved head; my answer was HAL 9000 & the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, & I stand by that. fatbutts hit it out of the park with Miss Piggy & Kermit, but I forget what everyone said-- if you remember, leave it in the comments!

Liz was in first, so we tried to talk about The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but like everyone else, she didn't really have a lot to say about it. Yep, sad that it almost willfully passed up any chance to have a female character, wasn't the worst otherwise, but wasn't so great, either. carmyarmyofme's husband works in film, so she had a close relationship to the behind the scenes elements of the book, & found that frustrating; she felt like she knew too much to suspend disbelief in those sections. fordmadoxfraud & Rasheem have a serious amount of celluloid under their belts, & they both liked it & engaged with it on a level that I don't think I was able to: I compared it to Among Others which really hit me because I had a personal relationship with a lot of the old school fantasy referenced in the book. I did take a few film classes in college with Ryan, so I picked up on a decent amount of the unspoken context. littlewashu & I hung out in Spare Oom, looking at some of my notes for the next Oubliette story arc, & gossiping about D&D 5e. I don't remember Beatrice's opinions on the book-- she came in at the end-- but we closed out the night talking about Black Twitter, which I always find fascinating.

Bummer acht, everything is going to be alright, Guido van der Werve.


Still Alive, Kris Martin.


James #2, Pewee #5, Galen #3, James #5, Spring Hurlbut.


Papeles, Teresa Margolles.


Web, Vija Celmins.


The Sky, Once Choked with Stars, Will Slowly Darken, Dario Robleto.


Half Moon, Black Earth Slab, Sara VanDerBeek.


Rust, Setting Sky, Sara VanDerBeek


Steggie II, Paul Jonas.

Ron's bachelor party was, quite ingeniously, a Legend of the Five Rings one-shot. The best kind, too: romance! kingtycoon & JR had characters that they have famously played before-- Kingtycoon's Crane iaijutsu duelist Kakita Endo & JR's tattooed monk Hansboro-- & the rest of us got loose avatar characters. Jon was Isawa Jonji, the Phoenix Void caster, Tim was Tsuruchi Timke the Wasp clan archer & Jason was an Emerald Magistrate. Me? I was a liar! So here is the thing: obviously Spider is for me. I don't actually like L5R's Spider Clan that much; a little bit of libertarianism & a little bit of splatterpunk blood magic? It's not quite there for me, but that is beside the point. I am Spider. Like it or not, that's for me! I sort of think the Spider should become the clan where all the weird stuff gets pushed off to-- like sure, a blood magic family, but then a gaijin fire-pepper family, an Ivory Kingdoms family, & whatever other big ideas could go. Something. I'm drifting; my point is Spider! We were playing in a historical setting where the Spider are sort of okay-- the Colonies exist-- but I thought it was better safe than sorry, so I kept it secret. Chuda Morkao pretended to be an Usagi ronin with "weird stuff" going on; that way when I used Maho I could just pretend it was a strange Kiho power or Courtier ability. I did have Courtier ranks; more than Shugenja actually, & since blood magic goes off your total ranks, that was fine, just fine. My school power was to be able to conceal my blood magic casting with raises; Kingtycoon said he thought I was raising a lot, since I'm unfamiliar with the rules, but really I was raising to keep all my stuff under wraps.

The plot of the story was thus: Matsu Ino, a high-ranking Lion clan official, announced his wedding to Kakita Aniko, a Crane artisan. We were invited to the wedding...& it was quickly revealed that we had been invited by Shosuro Ryohei, Ron's Scorpion shugenja. Both Endo & Ryohei were former Topas champions. I knew a little bit more of what was going on; I knew Ryohei & Aniko were in love, for instance. My plan was fairly simple: I was going to use black magic to drive the governor insane, then use my courtier skills to turn his court & his subjects against him, then either push him into seppuku or a fatal duel. The session itself was fun; we had social maneuvering in the court, which was the high point of the game for me, then detective challenges in Aniko & Ryohei's room, then spiritual challenges at an abandoned shrine, & then fighting challenges against weird demons who wanted to eat Ryohei (who was hidden, "buried alive.") In the end, as I sort of thought might happen, Kakita Endo cut down Matsu Ino, who I had started a vicious taunt in the court, calling him Matsu Inu. The Lion Dog, may he be remembered with shame. On the mechanics: I like the roll & keep, but I don't like raises. Much the same way I don't really like taking dice out for difficulty up front in World of Darkness. I think I might just house rule difficulty to require extra successes. In the end, Aniko & Ryohei were re-united & married & they all lived happily ever after...except for the rank of Taint Ryohei gained...

After A Hero for WondLa, I was excited to see how everything in this series crashed together. The alien storylines, the clone storylines, the personal storylines; the stage was set for the final volume in the trilogy to pay off, big time. Yes, The Battle for WondLa concludes in a satisfying and epic fashion...but the single element that made me happiest about the finale of the WondLa series is the staggered series of codas, moving briskly through the centuries. It’s a fake out at first and it pays off; author Tony DiTerlizzi starts a chapter titled “Several Years Later” and I found myself thinking “alright, that’s a bit of a rough jump cut, but I’ve enjoyed the book so far, so I don’t mind.” Ah, but then! The next chapter is “100 Years Later,” then “200,” then “300”! The 80s montage “where are they now” was a false tell, lulling the reader into complacency, into thinking they know how this is all going to play out, and then suddenly hitting the zoom button till the fame is widened to the scope of history. It gives the series a sense of scope, of real impact, and I had to pause for a moment to give it a mental Orson Welles slow clap.

[Read more]

One of the things that can most easily turn me off of a book for young readers—heck, or any novel, for that matter—is the cheap and ham-fisted insertion of a moral. DiTerlizzi is too clever by half to fall into that trap; in fact, he takes the far more interesting route of asking questions about ethics, and then not having the authorial voice answer them. He relies on the characters to tell the story and he relies on the dialogue—dialogue, not dialectic—to lay out the questions, and then let’s the characters actions ultimately speak for themselves. Conundrums that are universal like, do you trust someone who has betrayed you before? Can you forgive someone for doing terrible things while they themselves were under false pretenses? Who is responsible for war? If you can speak to animals, can you ethically be a carnivore? Well, alright, perhaps that is a little out there, but then again, isn’t that one of the things science fiction does best? Address seemingly absurd premises that actually speak to a more subversive perspective on reality? Above all, I can’t stress enough how dealing with real ethical questions without being preachy or trite is the opposite of a heavy-handed moral; one asks the reader a complex question with no easy answer while the other just spoon-feeds you the answer to straw man argument.

The art in this final volume of the WondLa saga seems very “next level.” I was just comparing it to the illustrations in the first two novels and I can’t quite put my finger on it; they each use black and another kind of ink, green for the first, blue for the second and now orange for this volume. I thought at first there might be three colours but nope, somehow the art just seems even more vivid. It could be a production change, or maybe it is a more anatomical approach? The details here seem more fully fleshed out—an unintended pun, if you can believe it—and more mindful. We get a really good look at turnfins, the six-limbed flying pelican xenofauna, and then a chapter later we get a clear view of a knifejack, a sharp-beaked creature that is half mantis shrimp and half giant dragonfly. The thing is, I can’t see the juxtaposition as accidental; as different from each other as they are, they seem to be part of a single evolutionary context, a pinhole peak at a flourishing alien ecology. Like Evolution, but for another planet...and not just bones.

I can’t help but want to give some of the credit for WondLa’s success to DiTerlizzi’s past connections to roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons. If you are a gamer, you probably know what I mean; sometimes when you read a book you encounter enough circumstantial evidence to make you go “hm.” As in “hm, I wonder if Tony DiTerlizzi developed his skill in creating diverse creatures that remain visually linked goes back to his work illustrating Monster Manuals.” Or “hm, I wonder if creating otherworldly dimensions in Planescape—from the odd to the mechanical to the infernal or fae—is what sharpened DiTerlizzi’s ability to evoke the uncanny while staying plausible?” I don’t mean to imply that it is just limited to the visual art, either; the writing feels much the same. Notable NPCs turn up and offer Eva Nine choices; it feels like she could have chosen differently at any number of branching pathways.

I want a Middle Grade RPG spin-off. Doesn’t it seem like it demands one? Between the ethical questions, the coda-nestled-in-coda ending, the zoological illustration and speculative biology, the alien cultures and technology, the various MacGuffins like the cloning labs or the sentient terraforming machine? The layers of history, from our world to the future, to the apocalypse...and beyond, to the alien re-colonization and the re-introduction of the human species? DiTerlizzi has given us history; he’s given us Eva Nina as the hero of a new world, a world built by hand...and then after the last domino in the plot finishes falling, he hits fast forward to let it evolve into something new.

Players could choose to play a reboot, a human clone, or one of the native humans that have found a place in the new world, or any one of the numerous aliens DiTerlizzi introduced, or heck, they could make their own alien up. If you want to have classes, anything from Retriever to Airship Pilot could work. Magic items like clothes that heal your wounds, or a boomrod weapon, or even the a coveted ancient omnipod. Orbona is a perfect pitch for a campaign setting, even more so if it is generations removed from the WondLa series, and I think the hobby is hungry for more all-ages material.

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Mordicai Knodewould probably want to play a Dorcean Vitae Virus Shaman, because he likes cheesy accents and turning people into toads. Or toadoids, as the case may be. You can follow him on Tumblr or Twitter.

Guess who's back? The triumphant crew of Tor DnD strike back, that's who! Dungeon Master Tim said the word & after a lot of back & forth on scheduling-- of which I was one of the roadbumps-- we landed a session. I'm playing Pantalone the clown wizard, tiefling jester & enchanter; Bridget is Columbine, my adopted tiefling daughter, the light-fingered rogue to compliment my loud con job. We're joined by Wren, Irene's hummingbird accompanied ranger, Sir Aegwyn, half elf paladin of the elven god of trickery-- which explains why he suffers fools like Pantalone-- & Sam plays Kit, the friendly cleric, caretaker of orphans. We'd previously busted down part of a kidnapping-&-cultist ring, rescuing folks & killing a mid-level capo, but the lieutenant had a boss out there somewhere...so it wasn't much of a surprise when Il Capitano-- the town's captain of the guard who has a name which of course Pantalone ignores-- asks for Kit & Pantalone to come speak to him. Everyone else tags along, of course. Detect magic, Identify-- the captain has a crystal, a dark crystal, a scrying crystal with a more than a hint of necromancy to boot. Why of course, it is the tool that the bigger fish sent to the little fish we'd already caught. We'd intercepted it from the orphans, & one of them filled us in-- the drop-off was made at an abandoned mausoleum, one of those strange half-graveyards that exist contextless as the city grows around them. & so of course, we knew where we had to go...all we had to do was dicker over the fee.



Right up front, there is the usual trepidation. You guys go check it out while the wizard hides behind a wall, okay? Sleuthing is getting us nowhere, so we try the direct approach. A botched roll & a failed save later & Columbine is cursed. Uh, sorry kids, hold on for a moment, we've got to run to a temple really quick & get a remove curse spell. 200 gold? Ever since we dithered with the captain for our fee the joke has been about the greed of clerics...but you know, there's more than a kernel of truth under the teasing. Clerics, the insurance companies of fantasy gaming. "I mean, I'd love to help remove blindness from you, old man, but that's a whole spell slot, & if I cast it now I'd have to memorize it again tomorrow so I'm going to need a usurious amount of gold that no serf could possibly afford, okay?" So we return, crack the seal & wouldn't you know it-- the pit goes down. To a dungeon. I for one am simply shocked! Ropes out, lights up & down we go!

Two brawls ensue. The first: a pack of ghouls & a swarm of giant centipedes! I'm vaguely not useless, but the paladin gets in the middle, takes the beating, while Wren & Columbine's arrows deal with the rest. A colour spray helps a bit...but just a bit. What really does the trick is turn undead. Every time I ask Tim what I know about a monster-- like do I know that ghouls cause paralysis, or about troll regeneration-- he says everyone knows that, which makes it easy to not "metagame." Which comes in handy in the next room: as the man says, they have a cave troll. & a wizard, best of both worlds; a regenerating brute & someone to conjure more minions while providing artillery support. The wizards tosses bones from his pockets on the ground & voila, skeletons! & then again, giant skeleton!



Hey, I know what he's wearing, he's wearing a robe of bones, the necromantic variant of the robe of useful items. Big fan of both. Eventually, between Aegwyn dishing out & taking a beating & Kit's healing him, the troll goes down. In the same round, the wizard finally bites it, Wren & Columbine finally finishing chipping away. Pantalone? No luck with his higher level spells & while colour spray is not useless, I need to spice it up. I was looking at the rules with Sam; we'd been doing spells wrong, & I've been wasting slots memorizing things I should have been casting as rituals. Fiddling with that, & gaining a level or two, should help. I forgot my miniature & the group treasure list, & since I volunteered as treasurer, that's no good! I'm going to record it here for posterity just in case such a tragedy should ever befall the group again.

464 GP (includes the minus 200 GP from remove curse)
482 SP, 15 CP
2 diamonds worth around 50 GP each
Pearl necklace worth around 100 GP
3 Books of Kord
2 Scrolls of Kord
Potion of climbing
Scroll of Bless (used by Kit this session)
Broaches of McDolan's.

(Mori-kun of the Cult of Yama; Geiko Era Kayo.)

Thursday I ran my Oubliette campaign. It was a pretty unfocused session, but luckily we all realized it right off the bat; just work frazzled, kid distracted, sleep deprived, that sort of thing. That actually worked out just fine, ultimately: last session we'd been talking about Virtues & Vices, & I had be promising them a chance to re-spec their character traits, which we'd discussed a little over email, so we just started there. Actually, I take that back: before that, we started dealing with the dribbles of the Supernatural that have started coming through the cracks! When the group encountered a naga as children, I gave them all rewards befitting their actions. Some of them choose treasure & some of them had blessings bestowed on them. In the latter case, I had them add a Character Trait to their sheet, like "Poison Blood" or "Naga Kissed." After last session, the Player Characters started developing other "powers"-- or developed them to the point where I thought they should go on their character sheet-- & this time I had them write it under the "Special" section of their sheet.

I mention that because we're circling in on how Traits will work & how to pick "good" ones, which is to say, actionable ones. The core mechanics are to provide an organic way to specialize, diversify & empower characters & to reward players for having their characters make suboptimal in-game decisions. Some of them are big, some of them are little; some of the rewards are big & some are little. Roleplaying games have referees in the form of the Dungeon Master; seems like you should take advantage of that. That's why I like robust & elegant core system paired with a flexible & abstract interpretive mechanic. The foundation is strong & it combines in complex ways. I expect to continue in this direction in subsequent campaigns, with further tweaking. Maybe I'll collapse Character Traits, Backgrounds & Equipment into one framework, with Special Traits purposefully ad hoc?

So we cleaned up the character clutter; got rid of some Traits that never came up, took some off that made sense in the original character pitch but not in what actually was played at the table. Virtues & Vices were included; much like I'm wondering what separates Character Traits from "Special" & wonder what separates Virtue & Vice from other Character Traits. Maybe there should be more than one "Trait" category? I don't want to completely devolve into lists of traits, though; I need to come up with a mechanic that encourages a degree of minimalism. Maybe instead of giving everyone free traits-- "you met a god, here, have this!"-- I should be offering them the chance to swap? It could indicate an epiphany, in that example: "I get rid of my Trait of Alcoholism & I take Naga Kissed as a result of theophany." Just continuing to think about Traits; the concept has proven itself, so it is a pleasure to refine it. I know that was a lot of esoteric musing-- I'd like to think some other gamers beside me & my group might find it at least interesting-- so let's talk about brass tacks.

Lilly's bushi, Amina o-Kitsune, went through the most changes & is still in flux...but I don't have her character sheet in front of me. Lilly likes to hang on to it, which I get, because I'm the same way. She's got three Traits we need to renegotiate, though her Virtue & Vice were decided at least. For Ren Jokoizumi, Eric didn't make any changes, but...well. The camera faded out on Ren & the mummy of the Royal Physician kissing, the way cinema telegraphs a sexual interlude, but we brought the curtain up a little over email. As things got hot & heavy, Ren saw, like John Webster, the skull beneath the skin. Not that the illusion vanished, but that he became aware of embracing a thousand year old corpse whose withered skin was plumped up by swarms of scuttling scarabs. Ren, geiko trained, doesn't flinch, & so he's down a point of Humanity but gains the Special trait, "Lich-loved." Which, if you are keeping track, is sort of a thematic feat in Oubliette. Keku no-Kin, Nicole's character, asked the undead Physician for help integrating her cybernetic implants; since Nicole couldn't make it, I just had her break into a fever & faint as her metabolism goes nuts.

Silissa's character used to be called "Moe no-Cho," but she has accepted her role as the reincarnation of the Royal Physician-- the same Ka, reborn, her Ba & the Ba of the mummy linked by a shared soul-- had some shuffling to do, as well. She added "Past Lives" to her Special Traits, to represent her burgeoning connection to her previous incarnations, & "Healing Heka," to stand-in for how her already copious knowledge of medicine & herbalism starts to combine with her metaphysical insights. That's right-- I think this marks the very first time I've let someone have any healing magic in Oubliette. No wait; there's been other high level healing magic. That's the crux of the matter here: she has potent but high cost healing magic, not cure light wounds. Silissa changed her character's Virtue from "Determined" to "Sacrifice" & specified her Vice from "Reckless" to "Reckless (Self)" which reflects her willingness to, say, cut off & eat her toes or accept her doom as a living lich's phylactery. Haru o-Kitsune, Luke samurai, changed his Virtue, but not as a retcon; he changed it to "Voracious Mind" to reflect his loss of Humanity.


(Nana of the Cult of Yama; Hansel & Gretel concept art by Ulrich Zeidler.)

The session itself was short, for a couple or three reasons. One, as mentioned, unfocused. Two, I want to move things along to the auction-- the frame story around the Pyramid delve & the whole reason they are here-- but didn't really want to kick into it without full attendance. Which, actually is a small issue, now that I think of it: Eric & Silissa have been bringing their baby, Indigo, to game, but she's gotten old enough to get out of "the baby is a lump" & into a more active age. Which make her cuter, sure, but more distracting, so they're going to switch into an alternating attendance schedule. We'll see how that evolves. The third reason is...well, I guessed wrong & prepped stuff that the party decided to skip. You know how players are, there is an Inverse Law of Preparation. The more time you spend on an adventure or a dungeon, the greater the chance the PCs will decide to just burn it down or ignore it.

When they first encountered the Cult of Yama-of-Many-Faces, the group all seemed really into it! I mean, we've got two blood magicians, one of whom already has a "mask" thing going on, yeah? Plus a lich-loved entertainer & a reincarnated mummy (well, technically mummies, since she has had many mummified incarnations)? I figured they'd all jump at the chance to get in with the old goth ladies who run the joint! I predicted wrong; I think "horror fatigue" from the Pyramidal Tomb was a factor, but besides that, everyone is sort of full to the brim with loyalties. I'm not cranky that they skipped it-- maybe they'll revisit, maybe I'll repurpose some of the material-- but it cut into my options. Frankly I probably should have just run the game later, cut them loose & improvised; that can end up being the most fun part of a campaign.

What actually ended up happening is this: we started with the Players exiting the Pyramid, into the central shrine of the Skull Pagoda. The idol & the entrance into the Pyramid is there, & Haru has noted that a powerful ley line runs right through it. He calls to the little boy who lives in the temple, Mor-kun, he he brings the two old women who are all that is left of the order. The skeletal woman they've already met, Osamu, who is very "there, there dear" in tone; with her is Nana, a larger woman who smells like formaldehyde & the cushions of a couch abandoned curbside. She's more paranoid, less friendly. Roleplaying ensues. Haru barters-- the urban Houses are so...mercantile-- to "borrow" a mask from them in return for a sizable donation. He's already promised to send them an acolyte, so he can send it all back together. Amina, on the other hand, gets yelled at for asking similar questions, & she can't figure out why. Still, the more she talks the more they seem to warm to her, whereas with Haru they seem to have plateaued.

The Royal Physician-- it will get less confusing to call Silissa's character that the further out from the Pyramid & the mummy that they get-- is concerned for Mori-kun, seeing herself being taken from her parent's herbalism shop to be raised by the Cho Zaibatsu in his apprenticeship to the death cult. She speaks to him but he is shy so she...hypnotizes him. In a "mundane" way, that is, in the same way that hypnosis is a thing people in the real world are able to do. The kid seems to be struggling with her questions-- why would he leave, where would he go?-- & the Royal Physician, in essence, is asking the child if he wants to come with her, if he wants to be her son. It is a touching moment, but then, since he isn't very deeply under hypnosis, she decides to drug him. What! Under the effects of mesmerism & narcotics...a deep, strange, rattling voice comes out of the child's throat. "CHOOSE. THIS ONE OR THE MAN GORO. ONE WILL BE DEATH." (Hey, didn't the sand golem of the Royal Physician say something very similar to that?) With that, the group pulls itself together, says their goodbyes, & leaves.

Game day writeup! Mordicai encouraged me to write up the game session, I am always interested to read his. I also find that since we usually have a month between sessions, a writeup would be helpful since we keep forgetting important details (who kidnapped the person we're searching for? What dungeon entrance are we supposed to avoid again?)

So. Saturday was game day! Game day is exciting for multiple reasons, not least of which being is that it's a party and so I clean the house, which makes my soul feel shiny. Game day is also when I bake brownies, and we served pulled pork sliders (last time was frito pie!). Usually everyone arrives at 2pm starved and we go until 9 or so (though today we ended early) so we need something better than chips and salsa. My big idea was to put a giant bowl of clementines on the gaming table so keep myself from downing chips. (It worked!) okay enough about food.

Here are the adventurers:
Scott & Rochelle: retired teachers, parents of Kirk's BFF Eric R., Scott is an amateur painter and Rochelle is a WOW (and other things) gamer par extraordinaire. Scott is playing Silverhammer, a halfling Bard, Rochelle a half-Orc fighter named Twila, the resident tank. Twila is very deliberate and strategic, always wanting to ask around in towns a lot before we set off, and always thinking ahead to party formation to protect the weak and position the cleric and ranged-weapon folks best.
Eric M., Kirk's friend from high school who drives here from Dallas once a month, playing Yingling the Human Monk, a selfless lady who is always trying to help us out and has a reputation for botching stealth missions in occasionally deadly ways.
David, one of our bestest friends and at whose house we spend many of our weekends, is playing Marvin (Gaye) the Sexual Healing Dwarf Cleric, who likes to drink and cure his own hangovers and cast them onto others, because that's just the kind of person he is.
I'm playing Marika the gnome sorceress, who is quite charming but a bit jumpy and impatient.
None of us have ever played DND before.

When we started on Saturday, we were just recovering from an epic battle in the woods outside the village of Zelkors Ferry. We'd had to flee for our lives dragging two mostly-dead companions and zero loot with us. Luckily (and tellingly), Zelkors Ferry has a resident necromancer, who cut us a deal but still charged an arm and a leg (not literally) to reanimate our friends Twila and Yingling. Quite happily, despite nearly killing the party, we had all leveled almost twice, and felt pretty badass.

We decided to ask around in case there was any more news about this horrible Rappan Athuk dungeon we're heading to, in hopes of finding our mentor Tattersall, who was kidnapped by some ominous seeming devotees of a nasty doomsday cult. We got some helpful intel, mainly about avoiding the black skeletons (hey that's racist, which has been the joke, every time we ask about the skeletons we tell the NPCs "and by the way, that's racist"), and to definitely avoid The Well in the dungeon. Which of course means we'll be going into the well at some point. We met up with a human sorceror nicknamed Bottle (hereafter known as Bubbles) who was also looking for Tattersall, and joined our party. He's been to this dungeon before so that's pretty awesome. We also ran into a dwarf smithy who demanded that Marvin bless his hammer ("bless" his "hammer" -- he demanded intel in trade but we didn't watch the "blessing").

Unfortunately, we also ran into some mercenaries strutting around town also headed to Rappan Athuk and we decided to high-tail it to our destination, the cabin in the woods near the dungeon entrance, so they wouldn't beat us there and possibly steal the loot we'd heard Tattersall might have left behind from a previous adventure. Before we left, we did pool most of our money to buy 6 cure light wounds potions, though there was some disagreement about whether we were being upsold by the necromancer, or whether we should save our money for possible resurrections; we hoped to find good loot in the dungeon that will refill our purses. Everyone tells us we are crazy to go there, but we don't have a choice. Also, we might be the prophesied Five who can destroy the dungeon? Or its temple? Or something? That will probably be relevant later.

When we found the cabin, it was enchanted, and looking quite lovely despite knowing it was home base for a ridiculously deathly adventure and yet more evidence of our missing mentor. Our buddy Bubbles was able to open the enchanted lock (so maybe we didn't have to beat the mercenaries there?) and inside we found a chest with...more cure potions! Okay then. We took those along. The one thing to mar our visit there was a warg who burst up through the floorboards. We got all situated for a lengthy battle, remembering how we couldn't kill one without NPC help a couple sessions ago...and then whoops, Twila and Bubbles killed him in two strikes! Wow. So I guess we are all quite a bit stronger now than we realized. Heartened by our easy victory (and by the 400 gold we found in a corpse in the Warg's den under the house), we set off to enter Rappan Athuk at last.

Nearby to our cottage home base, we found the ruined tower, supposed to be the best (least-deadly) entrance to the (deadly) dungeon. The entrance was fashioned like a massive half-destroyed mouth, cobbled together of metal struts and with tin bits nailed on slapdash. We descended a long, dark, difficult staircase that didn't seem to be quite designed for normal humanoid feet and legs. Our bard played Pharell's "Happy" for us on his lute as we descended. He's such a helpful guy. Eventually we made it down to a room with little niches all around the walls, and the more canny among us sidled up to them to check for traps. Four of our party accidentally fell into a pit trap, which was no big deal since we had ropes to pull them out, but some of the niches we couldn't even enter due to the traps. They each had something carved above them -- ram's head, skull, pyramid, hand, goat's head. One had a magical mouth that spoke and warned us off. Despite misgivings, we decided to head through the skull door (don't you think it was a warning?) since it seemed the least...trappy. We sent the stealthy monk ahead to open the door...which was spoiled by its rusted hinges which squeaked hideously loudly, echoing off the stone walls. Immediately we heard scrabbling noises coming down the stairs, and hurried through the door to avoid whatever it was (it was dire rats!) and slammed it closed, finding ourselves in a dark, long corridor. We discovered this dungeon (which is known for morphing on every visit, so a map made in the past will be useless on your next visit) had so many branching and twisting passageways that we sent the monk and Twila to scout around while some of us stayed by the door, listening to the dire rats throw themselves at it, over and over again. It was not my favorite moment.

After finding some more dead-end traps, we found a cunningly hidden door opened via a secret brick (which unfortunately had a serious constitution-sapping poison in it that got our lady friend Yingling), and we went through and then found ourselves quite unluckily in the underground cantina of the bad guys. Seriously, it was like a bad guy cafeteria, they were all eating at tables and listening to a speech from this big bad goblin (?) dude, and there we were derping in the back door like a bunch of freshman aching for wedgies. Hi guys! Oh okay, let's fight. But we'll get there next weekend, because some folks had to leave early yesterday, but we have a lucky confluence of schedules allowing us to meet up two Saturdays in a row, instead of waiting a whole month again. Yay! Looking forward to getting our asses beat and our lunch money stolen next Saturday.

Did you know Gene Wolfe, who turns 83 years old today, invented Pringles? Well, okay, okay, that is a smidge hyperbolic, but he did develop the machine that makes them. I like to imagine that their famously mustachioed logo is an homage to Wolfe—look at that twinkle in his eye—but that is strictly head canon.

That is just the sort of person Gene Wolfe is though; he’s not content with writing a science fiction epic, or revolutionizing the fantasy epic, or creating a science fantasy epic that bridges the subgenres. Or that Neil Gaiman called him “...possibly the finest living American writer.” Or that Michael Swanwick called him the “...greatest writer in the English language alive today[,]” or that the Washington Post called The Book of the New Sun “[t]he greatest fantasy novel written by an American.” Oh no. He has to take a detour and help invent a new kind of potato chip. Even his life has secret nooks and crannies for the wary reader.

[Gene Wolfe: Unreliable narrator?]

If I had to use two words to describe Gene Wolfe’s writing—say it was my one chance to avoid the fate of being given to the apprentice torturer who is the protagonist of The Book of the New Sun—those words would be “unreliable” and “narrator.” If I had to compare him to a couple of writers—if, say, the mercenary Latro, suffering from amnesia ever since he took a knock on his head fighting at the Battle of Thermopylae, needed it in short-hand—I would invoke Jack Vance and Jorge Luis Borges. Gene Wolfe paints lush worlds with a sense of history, vivid worlds that convince you they exist even after you close the covers of the book. Mythgarthr, the fantasy setting of The Wizard Knight, must be just next door to Earth, and the Urth of the Solar Cycle certainly is the far future fate of our world, isn’t it?

If you were ever going to take my word for something, take it for this: you should read Gene Wolfe. I’ll help you pick something out. If you like “Dying Earth” science fiction or fantasy—they blur together, as I’m sure you know, and Wolfe can be the blurriest—you should start with Shadow of the Torturer, book one of The Book of the New Sun, collected in an omnibus called Shadow and Claw. If you like high concept science fiction, try out Nightside the Long Sun, the first book in The Book of the Long Sun, collected in Litany of the Long Sun. If historical fantasy is more your speed, Soldier of the Mist, in the omnibus Latro in the Mist, is where you should start. If high fantasy is what you crave, The Knight is the book for you; its companion, The Wizard, concludes The Wizard Knight. Short stories, you ask? Wow, there are a lot of collections, but I guess The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (yes, sic) is my favorite, but then I’m a sucker for “The Hero as Werwolf” (again, sic). In the mood for something less fantastic? Try Peace, or read my review of it if you aren’t convinced.

I’ll leave you with a few words from Neil Gaiman on “How to read Gene Wolfe”:

There are wolves in there, prowling behind the words. Sometimes they come out in the pages. Sometimes they wait until you close the book. The musky wolf-smell can sometimes be masked by the aromatic scent of rosemary. Understand, these are not today-wolves, slinking grayly in packs through deserted places. These are the dire-wolves of old, huge and solitary wolves that could stand their ground against grizzlies.

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Mordicai Knode thinks Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix are Blue and Green; if not on a literal level than on a spiritual one. You can argue about with him about it on Twitter or see pretty pictures on Tumblr.

(Goro Tako; Thor 2 concept art by Justin Sweet.)

My Oubliette campaign is right on track. Full attendance at game, for a nice chapter end to the Story of the Tomb of the Royal Physician. Last session ended with the players awakening the Royal Physician's Ba & adorning her with a Scarab Amulet that contained her Ib, her Heart, upon which she clothed herself in flesh, scarabs scuttling onto her body, & she sent the players in search of her Shadow, below. In between sessions, Nicole's character, the cyborg zaibatsu agent Keku Kin bought another dot of Melee; "you are pretty stabby," I agree. Ren Jokoizumi, Eric's character, the former urchin, now taikomochi, spent to get another dot of Larceny; between the two of them, the "rogue" role-- assassin for Keku & thief for Ren?-- of a traditional D&D party is filled. Haru o-Kitsune & Amina o-Kitsune, Luke & Lilly's noble cousins, the courtier & the bushi, have both embarked on the path of Blood Magic. I have them both write "Bloodspeaker" on their sheet (& as a little acknowledgement to Legend of the Five Rings) because well-- that's what they've done, they've talked to corpses & golems & demon gods with blood magic. Haru, who has lost two Humanity, to Amina's one, you'll note, also gets "Woundstealer," for transferring Amina's wounds to his own body. Congratulation, now that is a thing you know how to do, Haru. Our "antipaladin" & "cleric." & of course, Moe no-Cho (for now), Silissa's herbalist gone corporate, was the cleric for a while but leans toward "wizard" now. She believes she is the reincarnation of the Royal Physician. The others believe she is possessed.

They swam for it, under a door ajar, & came up to...Keku saying that her cyber-eye was picking up something ahead. Down the hall, slick & wet from the flooding? Goro! Goro Tako, the whole reason they are here, the coward bully from their childhood encounter with the Naga, who ran away rather than go with them. The boy who grew up to be the warlord whose arms deal brought the party to Kakusui-en, & to the Pyramid of the Royal Physician in the first place. "It's the Shogun's Birthday!" Every Shogun's birthday becomes a holiday, the sweets & gifts holiday, sacred to Tajimamori, the Confectioner, the kami consort of Jorogumo, the spider queen goddess, who wooed her with sweet words & sweeter candies. & thanks to Carmen's gifts of Japanese candy for Eleven-Books Club, I can bust out props! The small celebration heals all of the party's bashing damage, & Goro wants in on this whole "kill the monsters, loot the dungeon" action; he's taken somewhat aback when the party is like "actually, we've sworn an oath & are on a quest for the mummy," but Goro just decides to tag along, either way.


(The Tomb of the Royal Physician: map of the Pyramid of Cheops at Giza.)

On the way up to the Physician, Ren pried an metal bar out of the wall, part of the circuit of a lightning trap. Now, with the trickling water at their feet, they make sure it is still disabled, then disable its counterpart: going down there was a negative energy black Kirby crackle, & Haru remembers that & Keku dismantles it with her wrist tools. Look at those smartypants! Above, the walls were covered in bas relief, faded colours that brightened, with a gold gilded figure central. Here, the backrounds were golden, & the figure black. It leads to a frosted glass door. The party pushes it &...gas! Blisters, gross fluid-filled pustules, start forming on their lips, their eyes, their throats, their lungs, as a yellow gas jets into the room. Haru grabs Amina & bolts, saving her from the worst but keeping him from avoiding it entirely, & so everyone-- except Keku with ther cyber-throat!-- gets attribute damage. It stays until all of their damage is healed, penalizing their physical attributes pretty heavily.


(The Demon in the Dark; Concept art by David Heidhoff.)

The Demon in the Dark doesn't want to die! I'm getting ahead of myself. See, once they enter the room, they see a dull, lusterless golden glow. Nearer, it looks like a pile of those golden pills, like what Ren used to heal Moe, like what Amina pulled out of Moe's research assistant & fed to her. That treasure horde, however, is an illusion! A monster on the ceiling is deep sea angling with a bioluminescent tongue! & the fight is joined. It didn't get to drop on someone's head & decapitate them-- I think I need more potential one-hit kill threats, right?-- but it globs Keku with adhesive spittle & gets a corrosive tongue around Goro's arm, though his armor protects him for the moment as it sizzles on the metal. Things turn against it from there; Keku nails it with a molotov cocktail, the nobles are all drawn swords-- only aristocracy carries swords, of course-- & worst of all, it claws up Moe...& gets her poison blood all over it. It is keening & weeping & backing away & in broken language begs for its life. "please, no no hurt, i help, come with, no, noooo..." beyond it is the Palette, which they take (it grants +1 to all Social Attributes), & the broken weeping demon is so moving that...Amina lets it crawl inside of her pet fox with a slurp, forever, becoming her familiar.


(The Sheut Palatte; Palette of Narmer.)

The bring the Palette to the mummified Royal Physician, cracking wise about her "Shadow" & "eye shadow." Given the dollop of kohl she puts on first thing, they were right on the nose. Her Vice is Vanity, after all. Read the following aloud to the players: I have but a little strength, gathered like dew in my blue pyramid. I burn brightly...but for just a little while. Some of us choose to be dusty hags, lurking in their crypts; some to be forces of nature that rise when the stars are right, some just whispers, forever. Some retreat to the Land of the Dead, one even went Mad. Moe is her Ka, or rather, her Ka is Moe, or rather, when Moe forsakes her name, she will be unfettered, free to become the Royal Physician. The Royal Physician explains that the Wheel has turned; at this crucial time in history, the gods will be incarnate. The party, having met a naga as children, find this plausible. This is the era for that! She wants them to paint her pyramid blue again; they demure but Goro is happy to do her that favour. He's got the manpower, for one thing. The Physician adds that when she called Amina the Devil's Bride...perhaps she should have said "Devil's Mother." The mark on the child will show the way! She kisses Haru & Amina on the brow, healing them with some of her own hoarded Sekhem. Keku asks, instead, for help understanding her Al-Kem cyborg implants. Ren, with his Eshu-like sense of timing, wait for the others to finish & then moves in for the seduction; he's hooked up with a snake goddess & now with a mummy!


(The Royal Physician; Isabella Rossellini from Death Becomes Her.)

Mechanics theorizing: think of Virtue & Vice & how you could use them in combat. This is a good benchmark for understanding I think. Say, Sloth. You are in a fight, strapped for Willpower. What do you do? Take a turn off, resting, catching your breath. There. You've done a suboptimal thing for your character, because of your character's traits, so get a point of Willpower back. Or if you had Cruelty & mocked your opponent, or if your Virtue was Honor & you let the villain you've just unhorsed & disarmed collect her weapon while you dismount. Basically, rewarding you for interjecting roleplaying into the combat system. Being in combat is one of those moments where making suboptimal choices is most easily made manifest, & it is also a time when you might really, really need more Willpower. I've been working with the group on Traits; some of them have been working well but without the "negative" side surfacing, some of them worked well in different contexts-- like Amina's drinking problem is usually in full swing when she's being social, since they were exploring a tomb she's been sober-- & that is okay, because that is how faceted characters work. I don't know if there are too many or if I've done a "suboptimal" job of explaining it-- har har-- or what, but it is very close. I think it is starting to really click with Nicole now, which spurred me further into thought. I'm going to have a follow-up with each of the players & I think we'll renegotiate some of them now that we've all seen how they play. & oh! Rachel won an award for her Standpoint Theory, & she listed Oubliette as an inspiration, so that is pretty cool!

life is good

gotta give some props to mordicaifeed for shaping a lot of my current viewpoints in life. if it wasn’t for his badass oubliette campaign that he runs i would be giving zero fucks about GoT. thank you sincerely for always keeping shit real

My Real Children by Jo Walton.

Walking on the moon:
bristling with missiles or elms?
I can't remember.

I can be accused of calling anything Wolfeian. If I order a salad that comes with tomatoes when the menus didn't say tomatoes I'm all, "unreliable narrator!" A the drop of a hat. I gotta tell you though, this has all the elements of the ambiguity of memory that Wolfe always flirts with, most manifestly in Latro. It's the sci-fi equivalent of Peace, if you know what I mean-- if not, I you should read Peace; heck, I should re-read it-- & that's wonderful. Here's the thing though: even more than that, My Real Children is Jo Waltonian. She brings the same sense of the big three, pathos, ethos, & logos, that she brought to Among Others. She makes you care about the characters, the story culminates in an open-ended ethical question & she writes the crap out of it. There were a few spooky sad bits at the end, pow, right in the ticker. Yikes. Remember how Among Others messed me up? This had a couple of those bits. Walton explores the constraints & consequences of women's choices in the last century in terse detail. Their problems are plausible, even though their worlds are not our own. I say "they" because there is one character, Patricia, but she has two lives. Pat & Trish. One who married unhappily in an ever more utopian world, & one who lived happily ever after in a deteriorating Cold War...until both end up losing their memories in a nursing home, relieving their lives, in these two parallel worlds. & that's not a spoiler, that's the premise; like the best sci-fi, the premise isn't the story. The story is the characters, & how they play the cards they're dealt. You should read it & you should read Among Others if you haven't yet. Jo Walton is a stone cold badass.

We sought adventure, & we found it! Last session, our heroes found work investigating a kidnapping, & we descended into a sewer-dungeon of Tim, the DM's, creation. Whenever I share a picture of this campaign, someone invariably-- & rightly!-- asks me about the furnishings. All the pillars & decor are made by Tim. The rest of the group is: me, as Don Pantalone, tiefling jester-wizard, Bridget as my adopted daughter Columbine the tiefling rogue; we're joined by Scaramouche, my chickken familiar, Jonathan as Aegwyn the half-elf paladin of Erevan Ilesere, Sam as Kit the human cleric of Ehlonna & Irene as Wren, the human ranger with a hummingbird companion. The five of us-- seven if you count fowl-- explored an abandoned warehouse & after defeating the foes we found there, thanks to Pantalone taking a tragicomic tumble down the stairs & alerting them, we questioned our prisoner & climbed down the pit we discovered..& into the sewers proper. Poo water & all.

Exploring the sewers was fun. I have a saying-- "every stone golem or gargoyle is a potential statue!"-- by which I mean, I will play stuff on the map that would otherwise be suspicious, & then...nope. Players can meta-game by whether you are using the battle mat & they will always stay well clear of a statue in the middle of the room...just in case it is animated. Being a DM involves chicanery, & Tim is great at it. Was the little alcove we discovered just a red herring, or did we fail to discover what it did? Either way, it provided enough room for us to fight the....AHHH! Otyugh! Garbage eating horrors of tentacles-- two tentacles have teeth, one has eyes-- they are a classic monster. I don't think I ever fought one! But I did have the toy growing up, which is odd considering I wasn't allowed to own D&D books because Satan. The fight was hard: Aegwyn was grappled & dunked in the sludge, Wren & Columbine peppered it with arrows & I think both were at one point grappled, Pantalone failed to distract it but did at least colour spray the thing & magic weapon Wren's bow...but Kit was the most valuable player, pulling belts to give grappled characters Advantage, healing, just all around. When we slit open its gullet? A pearl necklace!



Down to the crypt & then further down again? Takes us to our final confrontation! We see the hairy, oily warrior & I think hey-- this would be a great opportunity to use my chicken familiar to draw him over so I can cast charm person! A chicken could find its way into the sewer, that would be odd but not implausible. Tim plays his NPCs smartly-- if outnumbered, they will bolt, if confronted with a con, they might suss it out-- so here it was mostly a matter of hoping the guy came close enough. He didn't-- almost-- but he did get his friends to come look too. When I say "friends" I mean, ogre! Fray! We charged in. In the room were cages with three kidnapping victims, & more foes. I was able to get the ogre with hold person which was a nice coup-- thanks, low Wisdom monsters-- that allowed us to take control of the fight early. A dark priest appeared, joining the conflict with his blasphemous blessings & negative energy attacks, & things got harder. The drow hiding on top of a broken plinth taking pot shots didn't help either.

Then, the man of the unholy cloth-- he worshipped...Kord? Which is unusual, don't you think?-- pulled a lever & dropped dire rats into the cages with the prisoners. A fight clock, hey, fun! Less fun? When the ogre goes down, the priest shouts "get your ass in here!" & ogre two comes lumbering out of the back quarters. Well, I'm mostly out of spells, so hello invisibility. Kit has sanctuary on, & he's a lean mean healing machine. Aegwyn get smashed by the fighter-- a critical hit on a great axe will do that to you-- but thanks to those spells he's back up. Columbine is a nimble little Muhammad Ali; she gets in there, stabs, & gets out again. It's racking up! Wren engages the drow, eventually toppling from his sniper spot up high-- not before he gets off a globe of darkness-- & then she takes the spot, raining down arrows. Pantalone, invisible, picks the priest's pocket, steals the keys & starts opening cages. I make it through the fight unharmed, though the second ogre's sensitive nose-- fee, fie, foe, fum!-- lets him take two really scary swings with his huge great club at me. Eventually, we win, free the hostages, loot the place, & return to the surface for our just rewards...of all you can eat at McArdy's golden arches! & one of the perks of playing with the guy who draws the Game of Thrones maps (#humblebrag) is that he can sketch this:


("Sewers & Otyughs" by Jonathan Roberts.)

Did you ever form your adventuring group into an organization: a secret society, a gang, a guild? Not just random folks who met at a bar and decided to rob and murder a dragon, but a group with an identity?

We did in Earthdawn; our group was called “LOOK BEHIND YOU!” because we would shout it and then try to run away, and our battle cry was “WHISTLE!” because we famously all blew our skill checks to make and discern the code of chirps and hoots we planned out in advance. We weren’t scoundrels per se... well, okay, our Illusionist made copper coins seem like gold so we could afford inns, but we were broke! And sure, maybe my character was hiding from the police, but he was a freedom fighter! You know how it goes.

The Rat Queens know how it goes, too; they put the “party” in “adventuring party.” Kurtis J. Weibe and Roc Upchurch’s first trade paperback, Rat Queens: Sass and Sorcery, is out now, and quite frankly, it’s a blast.

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There is a point at which we all become too familiar with “generic fantasy” tropes. The “default” Dungeons and Dragons setting can become all too banal; what’s the difference between Greyhawk and Forgotten Realm, when they’ve both got forest elves, dwarves under hills and mountains, orc hordes and wizards in towers? Oh, don’t get me wrong: a good Dungeon Master can spice that up— in fact, that is the whole point— but the settings that stand out to me are the settings that twist the tropes themselves.

Things like Eberron, Spelljammer, Dark Sun, and Planescape are all what I’d call “post-Dungeons and Dragons,” by which I mean that they start with all of the clichés of the game as a given, and then keep going. “What if we take reliable, repeatable magic to its eventual conclusion?” says Eberron, using Vancian magic to lay down a dungeonpunk setting. “What if epic characters still go to inns and raid dungeons, but the dungeon is Hell and the inn is in a hollow doughnut at the center of the multiverse?” gets you Planescape.

Another option is to make the characters the fulcrum that makes everything old new again, and that’s what Rat Queens does. Weibe and Upchurch have created a punk-rock adventuring party that actually reflects the kind of adventurers people play far more than most fantasy protagonists—foul mouthed, inclined towards bloody brawls, dangerous and with enough gold to destabilize the economy.

This isn’t brand new territory— people like Order of the Stick have been following in Snarf Quest’s shoes for ages— but unlike a lot of other stories, it isn’t really a loving parody so much as a story about charmingly terrible people. You know who they remind me of most? The “adventurers” in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station; the wandering murderers who will do anything for gold and the “experience” of it. It also reminds me of Kyle Hunter’s Downer, from the old Dungeon magazine... hopefully I’m not the only one who remembers that super fondly!

The Rat Queens are one of the adventuring parties in the city of Palisade, along with the Peaches, the Four Daves, the Brother Ponies and the Obsidian Darkness. Betty, the halfling— well, “smidgen”— thief, is into hallucinogenic potions and mushrooms. Dee’s the human cleric from one of those strict religious families—Cthulhu cultists, basically. Hannah is the elf magic-user, the rockabilly leader and the starter of fights. Violet the hipster dwarf fighter is probably my favorite; she was shaving her beard before it was cool. Or well, maybe Dee is my favorite; the Mythos cultist parents is a brilliant backstory. Or Hannah, especially when she goes all “Willow eyes.” No wait, Betty, especially when she collects the troll’s eyeballs as spell components; now that is friendship. Alright, alright, Violent Violet, then Dee, if I’m being honest, but the fact of the matter is, you could pick any one of them as your favorite and I wouldn’t quibble. They are all pretty great.

Rat Queens takes the logic of the game table and commits to it. What that means is, hey, maybe to the player “you take 2d6 points of damage” and then getting healed up a few rounds later is just moving around numbers on a piece of scrap paper, but for Hannah is means having her arm shattered, almost severed, and then forced back together again by healing magic. It ain’t pretty but it is exciting, and that sure sounds like the life of an adventurer to me.

There is a joie de vivre to Rat Queens; this is light-hearted fun, with buckets of gore that wavers smartly on the line between cartoonish and appalling. An army of orcs outside the city gates? Well, a group of adventurers versus an army of orcs sounds about right! I think most gamers have found themselves in that situation before. Or you know, against skeletons. Or goblins. You know how it goes. So do the Rat Queens, like I said. You don’t have to take my word for it: take a look at the free preview.

 

Rat Queens: Sass and Sorcery is available now from Image Comics.

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Mordicai Knode’s most foul-mouthed character, a tiefling psion, would sure like to hang with the Rat Queens. You can hang with Mordicai on Tumblr and Twitter.

(The Tomb of the Royal Physician; art by Daren Bader.)

Last session, so many moons ago, our intrepid Kitsune nobles & their Zaibatsu allies passed through the Shrine of Yama-of-Many-Faces & into the Pyramid of the Royal Physician, & we rejoin them there. We've established that Ren Jokoizumi, Eric's urchin-turned-taikomochi, is constantly coming & going, appearing & disappearing. He's like the Emcee from Cabaret, so it doesn't really matter that he's going to be late; I'll just have him pop off & then pop back in when he gets here. Silissa & Nicole were the first to arrive-- it's not a race, & if it was, they'd have an unfair advantage, since we work together & left all at once-- & they are the Zaibatsu agents I mentioned. Moe no-Cho, alchemical researcher for the Butterfly Corporation & Keku no-Kin, the cyborg fixer working for the Gold Corporation. Luke & fatbutts are next, as our aristocrats, Haru o-Kitsune-- bureaucrat, spy & occultist-- & Amina o-Kitsune, the oni-worshipping bushi. Music was Fantômas' Delìrium Còrdia & I think it was Luke who noticed that Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra's "13 Angels Standing Guard 'round the Side of Your Bed" has been the leitmotif for the dramatic bits of the campaign so far. Good catch, because I've totally been doing that on purpose. Pizza, beer & sake round out the evening.

The game was heavy with player-driven drama, which you know is my sweet spot. Before we get too deep into it; first, they are pretty beat up. There hasn't been a chance to rest, & since the World of Darkness is pretty brutal with damage & doesn't have clerics, it sticks. I should probably do a tutorial on damage, actually. The group gets it, but the bashing, lethal & aggravated damage isn't entirely clear in their minds. Also, Willpower is pretty scarce in the group these days. I think the Character Trait system is working well, but I wonder if five plus the Virtue & Vice is too many? That is, it might dilute focus & overwhelm players? While I'm talking about mechanics, I accidentally spilled the beans about a mechanical "trick" that I had up my sleeve. See, I wasn't going to make Blood Magic a big part of this campaign, since I'm already ripping off Legend of the Five Rings enough for inspiration, but Amina & Haru have stumbled into it of their own accord, & last night I made the "mistake"-- not actually a big deal-- of saying that Blood Magic is an auto-success. I forgot I'd been keeping that under my hat. Like a lot of rules, though, it is probably best that it is out there in the open. It might be time to actually talk about putting a more formal "Blood Magic" system in place for them.

Having escaped a room filling up with scarabs & scarab larvae by using fire, & accidentally triggering a sand-powered mechanism that slammed the door shut-- but only after robbing the tomb of a heavy golden scarab amulet-- the party debated going down or up. When they entered, they had seen a path tilted downward, mirroring the upward slant they took; further up the slope, however, the hall widened into a gallery the size of a football field. As I said, this was a very role-play heavy session, with a lot of quick "asides," so events are somewhat difficult to discuss coherently. Keku, holding the amulet, feels the pull of an additional set of Virtues & Vices-- Vanity & Memory-- & Nicole uses that to good effect. I was really happy to see a player run with that. Moe decides to snatch the necklace from her-- she's no pickpocket, so she relies upon surprise & force-- & yanks it over her head. We go aside & she's once more speaking to the Royal Physician. What they discuss I will leave private, for now, even in this recap (where I generally speak fairly freely, because I trust my players to keep "out of game" knowledge separate from "in character" knowledge.


(The Royal Physician & his companions; photo by me.)

The walls of the place are carves with faded bas-relief glyphs & pictures. Steeped in the artistic styles of the Shogunate-- & failing at their Academics & Expression rolls-- the party has a hard time making them out at first, but Keku makes out that the door that slammed shut, the secret door into the scarab hall, has a group of magicians removing the heard of a woman. Amina & Haru, meanwhile wander into the gallery above, where the carvings on the wall are bright, almost glowing with paint-- or well, glamour-- with vivid scenes of the Pyramid & a city around it, a city that in one picture shows the people starving while frogs & toads devour the crops, in another a black vortex, like a tornado of hail & lightning, storms. Haru cuts his hand & invokes the Dark Arts, & Amina cuts hers & his & lays her hand overtop in a gesture of family solidarity. A failed & a successful Humanity check later (respectively) & there is a moment of vertigo, as the walls of the bas-relief dilate like a pupil, their blood spreading & pouring off the edge in a waterfall of blood, a torrent of red. They are looking down, now, on the Pyramid from a great height, & it is a deluge of blood, pouring from the sky, drowning the city around the Pyramid...which slowly starts to open like a flower blossom, growing impossibly golden bright & then--

They are back, & Moe's eyes are golden. Not just gold pupils, as seen when Ren fed her the gold pill & when Amina gave her the golden dribble from the corpse of Gale; now the irises are golden, as well. There is some disagreement & a clicking sound that only Keku hears, accompanied by the sound of rushing water. The party debates whether to go up-- which Moe is for, & Keku too-- or down, which Haru advocated for, backed by Amina. Ren shows up, with more torches, & just as he does-- good timing, Eric-- the door to the gallery they came in comes crashing down, clearly water-driven much as the last door was sand powered. & yes, of course, the room is flooding. Up it is; Keku is there with her clockwork expertise to keep that door from sliding shut! Up! Or it would be if, possessed of some unknown impulse, Moe mixes all the poisons, toxins & dangerous herbs in her satchel together at once & swallowing it down. She falls over in a seizure, frothing at the mouth, blood from her nose & then...still. The party freak, trying to resuscitate her with CPR-- which seems anachronistic but there was a pseudo-CPR in 18th century Japan, so I think it's actually in-genre!-- & every trick at their disposal. Eventually she sits up...but her heart isn't beating. They follow her upwards, into a room crawling with roots, vines & skeletons in wall sconces.

Finally, they are face to face with the giant mummified corpse of the Royal Physician. It speaks, mouth unmoving, in unison with Moe who echoes its words...& when Silissa speaks as Moe, the Royal Physician parrots what she says, as well. The conversation is, like any conversation with a millennia-old undead, enigmatic. They've spoken to the Royal Physician before, or anyhow it's proxies & avatars, like the sand golem, but this time they seem to be speaking to...more of a "person." They put the golden scarab chestpiece on the mummy, &...scarabs swarm into the room from the niches holding the decayed bodies, scuttling across the floor, into the giant skeleton & then...they seem to compact, to smooth, to settle into the shape of a nude woman wearing the necklace. She's still cold, undead, but there is more passion to her now. The Royal Physician, a lady as it turns out! She calls Haru the "Black Fox" & Amina the "Devil's Bride," & she says that she has no power over the Pyramid; they must bring her Shadow to her, from below. & so they go to do so...with Keku showing Moe how to use her tools & passes on her observations from keeping the door open...& still not-breathing Moe walks into the water. Minutes later, there is a tug at their ankles as the water starts to drain...


(The Royal Physician clothed in flesh; Isabella Rossellini from Death Becomes Her.)

My travels through Dark Souls II have come to an end... and a beginning, but before we dive in to that, let me spin my mythos theories. In Dark Souls, the final “big bosses” are the keepers of the Lord Souls, the divinities of the game like Gravelord Nito, a shambling horror of hundreds of skeletons or the Witch of Izalith, the mother of witches consumed by fire and chaos. Actually, you fight the Bed of Chaos, not the Witch of Izalith; the witch was destroyed, or transformed, and her Lord Soul birthed demons into the world. Similarly, Gwyn, the emperor of sun and lightning, split off pieces of his Lord Soul, giving it to kings and knights, making them into demigods which, of course, you have to fight.

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DSII on the other hand starts with four big enemies you need to kill, but those four have a lot of links to the other game’s four. I don’t think they are the exact same—instead, I think they are other creatures who seized the Lord Souls, after the hero of the last game collected them. The pile of zombie bodies that is the Rot is something made or corrupted by Nito’s soul; the Old Iron King is the keeper of Gwyn’s soul, twisted beyond recognition into a balrog-thing; the Duke’s Dear Freya—a giant spider—is the scaleless dragon Seath’s familiar, perhaps? And, lastly, the bug inside The Lost Sinner’s mask may actually be the Witch of Izalith, and the bug inside the Bed of Chaos in DSI was maybe her, too.

Anyway, when I say my travels have come to a new beginning, I mean “New Game Plus.” See, Dark Souls I and II are all about being trapped in cycles of death and rebirth, starting the core mechanic of the game: dying in-game is dying: not video game logic where you start over from your last save, but the in-game logic of you being cursed with Undeath. Then of course, there is the plot of the first game: the primal Fire is guttering out, the age of castles and kings and gods is over, has been over for centuries, but the god-emperor Gwyn has done everything in his power to extend the dwindling half-life... until you get there. To rekindle the Age of Fire, starting the cycle anew, or to chose to be the Dark Lord, bringing about the Age of Dark. Is King Vendrick the “ur-PC” who chose the Age of Fire? Nashandra, the Queen, seems clearly to be a sliver of Manus, a Humanity sprite, that grew bigger and bigger, yes? The Giants, of course, come from the broken arch in Demon’s Souls...

In Dark Souls II, the choice between Fire and Darkness is hidden, the Throne of Want like a Schrödinger’s Box obscuring it from view, even from the player. Once you beat the game? You start all over again, but this time it’s harder. That’s what New Game Plus (NG+) is, and DSII shines here. Dark Souls got “harder” the way most video games get harder: by just giving the enemies more hit points and making them do more damage. It works, sure, but Dark Souls II is much more involved and elegant, because while yes, the monsters get “harder,” there are also new critters, more enemies and more aggressive opponents. And new rewards for killing them, as well. You might be surprised by how much a boss fight changes when the boss gets a couple of minions. Remember how hard I had it with the Royal Rat Authority just because he had minions that would poison me? Well, he’s not the only one, anymore...

A new game also means that I finally changed my look. Wandering Merchant Hat, I’ll rep your beret and monocle forever, the same way that the Balder Side Sword from DSI will always have a place in my heart, but now that I’m in my NG+, I think I have to celebrate it with a fashion show. Straid’s headpiece, the Black Hood, has a sweet little cowl. Pair that up with my Throne Defender armor’s fluttery cape, and I cut a very dashing profile. I AM THE NIGHT. I use Dark Gauntlets and Dark Leggings and even they give a very “you know under the theatrical cape Batman has experimental military grade body armor on” look to the outfit. I mean, okay, really I look Hourman, if you are a JSA aficionado. Another big perk? When I’m an Heir of Sunlight, a Sunbro, and I’m summoned as a golden Phantom? The whole thing looks really... Apollonian.

All of this talk about armor combinations, to me, just points to one of the reasons of the game’s replay value: customization matters. A character who focuses on light armor and dual wielding greatswords plays very differently from a tank with a greatshield and ultra-heavy armor, who plays differently from a magic user, or a faith build, or any combination of any number of builds. That layer is further complicated by magic items, but since the game has a good degree of balance it isn’t a question of “did you do the ’right’ thing to optimize your build.” Explore your options, find what suits you, and you ought to be okay. The best advice I can give any player is: pick the weapon you use based on it’s move set. You can play with the stats and bonuses from there.

Comparing Dark Souls II to Dark Souls on quality is a sucker’s game. Dark Souls is a game that instantly became my favorite of this generation of console games, for one thing; for another, comparing a sequel to the flagship of a franchise of course doesn’t work out. Bringing Demon’s Souls into the picture helps provide perspective, but here is my confession: I never finished Demon’s Souls. I got it last winter, along with Dark Souls, and after beating Dark Souls I thought I’d give it a spin, but I never finished it. I just ended up back in Dark Souls, beating NG+, and then Dark Souls II came out.

Still, I played it enough to see how much it influenced Dark Souls II; while Dark Souls is the source of the lion’s share of references, the mechanics of Demon’s Souls—leveling up via a mysterious lady back at home base, instant warping either via arch or bonfire, for instance—loom overhead as well. The interface, too; I personally prefer the brutalist user interface of the first Dark Souls over the filagreed bars and menus of DSII but that’s a very minor and subjective thing. What I’m getting at is...well, I don’t think Dark Souls II is better than Dark Souls, but I think that is a wild thing to expect; I do, however, think it is better than Demon’s Souls. More importantly, I think it is a good game, period.

The best news about Dark Souls II is not sexy, not a headline grabber, but bodes well in the long term: the math is better. Not across the board (the mechanics of Poise need fiddled with, I think) and not always conceptually (you should get Humanity back for helping to kill a boss), but overall the skeleton of the game seems to be improving. There’s no junk stat, like Resistance, and the derived bonuses from the various attributes make them all enticing. And Adaptability, the replacement for Resistance that increases your response speed along with defenses and Poise, is maybe my favorite one, or up there with Int and Vitality, anyhow. Splitting out Stamina and Equip Load is another piece of smart game design—and ultimately, that is the triumph of Dark Souls II. It shows the Souls games on an upward trend, and hints that the future of the franchise is more great games.

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Mordicai Knode thinks the first DLC will start at those doors in Heide’s Tower that don’t go anywhere. You can find him on Tumblr and Twitter.

While playing and writing about Dark Souls II, I’ve been thinking a lot about a disagreement I had with a friend of mine who I was trying to get to play the game despite the fact that he had no interest in doing so. He said “I watched someone’s speedrun on Youtube, so I’ve got the gist.” Which... nope! The Souls series is about exploring and about problem solving. Watching someone who knows where everything is, how to fight all of the enemies, avoid all the traps and where to go next? That is the opposite of Dark Souls, I or II (or Demon Souls, for that matter).

I’ve been lost and rudderless for most of this game—in the best way—constantly seeking clues on where to go next. When I find out what to do, then I go in like a wrecking ball, as the bard said. Even then, it is a thinking person’s game; you can’t find your way through a level without looking in the nooks and crannies for treasure or secret doors, without figuring out the tactics to beat the enemies in it and the strategy needed to take out the boss. That is the game.

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I’ve been using a few “exploits” in this playthrough, which is not normally my style. Or at least...most “exploits” are little more than finding oversights in game balance, essentially finding ways to break the game or make over-powered characters or not-technically-cheat using glitches. As a tabletop DM who kicked too many of those types out of his games when he was younger, I don’t really have a yen for “min-maxing” or finding ways around the games’ mechanics. I’m not saying they all are, though, and case in point: in Dark Souls II I’ve really taken a shine to using the Binoculars as a “scope” for my spellcasting. It doesn’t really add any more power, but it saves me from the pain in the neck that equipping a bow, putting my shield away, and sniping with arrows is. It just lets me shoot without locking on, which I really appreciate, especially when I’m just trying to lay down suppressing fire through a doorway or aggro an enemy without being noticed by his friend.

As for the other, well, I keep on the Ring of Life Protection all the time, and just pay the 3000 souls to repair it every time it breaks. Easy mode engaged. I sort of think of it like Havel’s Ring or Homing Soul Mass; the fact that it almost universally and naturally becomes the prime characteristic of a huge swath of builds hints to me that it is slightly over powered, but I mean, it doesn’t break the game or anything. It might make it easier but then, so does using a sword instead of your bare hands. It is right there in the game, and can’t be accidental. A “No Ring of Life Protection” rule of bragging rights seems inevitable, but then, since the Onebros—people who played Dark Souls without ever increasing their level—are such an integral part of the culture, I think self-regulation is something the community ought to be able to manage.

 

To Castle Drangleic I go! After killing all of the Big Bosses of the outer world that I could find, I was aimless, again. Maybe that is another downside of the horizontal layout, along with the loss of the interconnectivity being vertical gave Dark Souls. You know what else really destroys that feeling of unity in this game? Instantaneous warping from bonfire to bonfire, right at the beginning. I get it, with such a spread out game you want to be able to jump all the “grinding,” but I much preferred the unlockable shortcuts and cunning elevators of Dark Souls. I miss seeing the skyline of Anor Londo...and then later on realize I am climbing on the exact towers and rooftops that I saw on my approach. I will say that the layout does give Dark Souls II room to have greater diversity of vistas. The Dragon’s Aerie gave me the heebie-jeebies; I hate those Corrosive Zombies or whatever they are called but really it was being suspended in the sky that made the level so tense. I hate those zombies twice as much as any Bonewheel, though. Bonewheels just kill you; acid zombies ruin your armor and your rings, like a Rust Monster. Eventually I just stripped down naked and ran through there as fast as I could.

Still, I was lost. I’d killed everything, and all I could find were these locked King’s Door, which I clearly needed a MacGuffin to get past. But where was it? Eventually, with some hints from friends—Playground Rules, remember!—I returned to the roundabout in the misty woods, found the Shrine of Winter and... oh hey, the Mad Scientist’s laboratory, the Castle of Doctor Moreau! Hit up that place, and meet the madman imprisoned there. Lever: unpulled. I learned a thing or two from Lautrec. When I find a madman locked in a cage, I think twice about letting him out. So we talked and he asked me to assassinate people for him and I thought, “why not?” After all, how is that any different from what my main quest is? Some lady in green tells me to kill a demigod, and I go kill it. Same thing. There were a few I was able to skip—lucky them—and then, to Drangleic, and beyond. Into the dreams of sleeping giants, seeking a way to kill an invincible, mindless, undead god-king.

I’m exploring the higher level places now, and I’ve finally switched my look...except my signature beret and monocle. I think the Chaos Hood probably boosts my magic, and I’ve always said that the reason I wear the Wandering Merchant Hat is that it has a special power, and I can always just increase the weight on the rest of my body, so there was no point in switching. Well, now I guess there is a point, but I’m not going to, either out of sentimentality or sense of fashion. I’ve started wearing the Throne Defender Armor with Dark Gauntlets and Dark Leggings. I have no complaints about the scarcity of Twinkling Titanite; I had to burn Bonfire Ascetics and raid the nests of dragons to get enough to level everything up, but there was enough and I like having to scramble for my elite stuff. I want to feel like I’ve earned it.

With any luck, by next week I’ll have finished & started on the extra-hard New Game Plus. Tune in!

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Mordicai Knode’s next character might be built around the idea of using the Disc Chime as shield & talisman for a Faith build. You can find more of his ranting on Twitter and Tumblr.

Bridget: "Did you let your beard get long just so you could stroke it like a wizard?"
Mordicai: "What, that's ridiculous, but of course, absolutely, yes. Meh!"

I managed to fall backwards into a Dungeons & Dragons game! I ran into, I think Bridget & Irene in the elevator, & they were like "so we were talking about that game & we really want to do it!" & I was like what are they talking about whatever it is I want in, "yeah, sure, start an email thread!" Only later were they like, "hey, that time we all were at that party & decided to have a DnD game, were you even there?" & I was like "nope!" Even better, Tim agreed to run the game. It is great getting to be a player for a change, & it is cool to see another ply their craft; I'm always looking at play style, & Tim rolls on the table, in front of everyone. One of those "you get what you see." I hedge my bets-- I fudge, but I fudge both less & more than I pretend, I fudge when it doesn't look like I did, & I didn't when it looked like I did. You don't know me, man. Anyhow, Tim's style has a brutal elegance to it.

I talked myself into playing the Wizard-- quite happily!-- & while my original character idea was going to be a gnome wizard, & then I thought "wait, that's Encre Panache! I can't play him!" & then I thought, wait, I certainly could, David as could as said he might have been resurrected by Liam, & I asked David & he said "sure." So then I thought, wait, what if I play a like, weird Gepetto gnome with a puppet son? & then I was like, wait I've got it, sorry gnomes-- I still think Encre is out there...-- & I went with Tiefling & I went with the Jester background & I was going to be like, a fake powdered wig barrister yes-man bantam. Until. I realize the best jester wizards in the world belong to the ancient & inscrutable, possible fey or possibly fiend, urges, Demiurges, Passions, the college of the Commedia Dell'Arte. & so my jester wizard was born, Don Pantalone, the fool who say the things man was not meant to say, who knows the things man was not meant to know.

Even better, Bridget & I this whole time have been planning on playing father & adopted daughter, & her rogue would parter up with my jester. A wandering duo. & when we walk in to play, Bridget says, "I still need a name," & I say "Oh, Colombine!" & so we are, Pantalone & Colombine! Or at least, that's who we are in my wizard's over-taxed mind, at the very least. I'm quite pleased. & our companions are Jonathan, the half-elf paladin Aegwyn who is much more...morally flexible than you'd expect, Irene as Wren, the human ranger constantly accompanied by k'Arl, her hummingbird, "played" by Carl who was sitting in, & Sam as Kit, the human cleric of Ehlonna. & of course don't forget Scaramouche, my chicken familiar!

Our first session starts with our characters broke, an intolerable situation for Don Pantalone, & the others too I suppose-- & in search of trouble what should we come across but "Reward: 500 GP." That's a lot of chickens. The deed? The city has been plagued by kidnappings-- ten all told, three nobles, two of whom from a house of ill repute, & worst of all, one found dead in the river-- & we convince the Captain of the Guard-- Il Capitano-- that we're the group for the job. Jonathan's paladin has a background as a soldier, & Pantalone is a officially licensed fool! I really like the Jester background, by the way, for making the role of the fool a legitimate way to play. I am to do so without being too disruptive. A fine line to walk, but I think I'm doing okay; at least half the time I try to use it to shift focus to another PC.

The first thing we do is question the urchins-- or Sam's cleric does, anyway-- but they are no help. They do, notably, smell bad. No really: our next stop is at one of the nobles, the ones who de facto rule the market place, & the son-- kidnapped & returned-- tells us his captors stunk. The mother also intimates that there might be an additional reward, but to discuss it would be...too bourgeois. "Is there anyone...more bourgeois in your household we could speak with?" says Pantalone, & then he & the butler go off to have an aside that rings, to me, like Shakespearian clowning, Malvolio & & his stockings. All of the clues we get point to this abandoned warehouse as central to the crimes, & so that's our next stop, when night falls, & of course we find...danger! The scouts do wonderfully, Wren & Columbine, the infiltration is going great, until...I botch a roll & tumble down the stairs like a buffoon. I warned everyone that the dice hate me, & this session is no exception. Maybe it is time for me to buy a new set of dice.

On the plus side, traditionally Panalone falls over backwards like a turtle & can't get up...so I'm really hitting my archetype. Down the stairs is a witch doctor, a berserker, & a trio of fighters. I burn though a bunch of spells, but in this iteration of DnD Next, instead of having infinite uses of cantrips, mages can regain spell levels with a short rest. Irene's ranger is all arrows, arrows, arrows; the paladin smites & tanks, getting the lion's share of attacks. Columbine flanks, Sam heals, & Panalone...well, I have Acrobatics & it would be cool if I could kip up off the floor, but remember my luck with dice? My hold person spell is useful, but cause fear & colour spray aren't. Still, we win the day, capture the last enemy alive & question him. I'm forced to cut off a thumb, for what it's worth. Panalone is shaken but his bluff was called & it turns out...he wasn't bluffing!

Shackleton by Nick Bertozzi.

"Hvem er du," huh?
Oh, I'll tell you who I am:
I AM SHACKLETON!

I mean, I really like Antarctica, I really like comics, & I sort of like history; what's not to like here? The Kate Beaton quote on the back should be all the urging you need. What can I really add, except perhaps to say that the heart of Antarctic exploration is the almost extra-terrestrial nature of it, which Bertozzi captures, & the sheer bloody Lovecraftian absurdity of it. You could be playing soccer on an ice flow & suddenly have to worry that you are being hunted by orcas; nature is red in tooth & claw & so are you: like space rockets discard their fuel tanks as they climb into the heavens, you will ride your dog sled & kill & eat the dogs along the way. Cold & brutal. Recently Alexander Skarsgard & Harry Wales were racing to the South Pole & they had to call it off; the race part, I mean. They still made it, but their press release charmed me a lot, they were like "due to the fact that this is way more brutal than we could have imagined, even with the full force of infinite money & technology, we still can't afford to screw around playing games." Cracked me up, anyhow, but then, I'm also the kind of guy who follows current events in Antarctica. Anyhow, I really liked this book & it is great as a visual reference, as I'll show you below. Makes me think this would be a good teaching aid.