#StayAtHome: "Outlaws of the Marsh, Vol. 3"

 

We're now past page 1,603 in this Chinese epic martial novel. In Vol. 3 of Outlaws of the Marsh, the scope of the action broadens significantly, from the individual and small scale melee clashes of Volumes 1 and 2, to predominantly large scale battles involving fortified villages, towns, and cities. Similarly, the targets of the outlaws' covert operations also shift toward larger targets, including the Eastern Capital of Kaifeng.

It took me slightly longer to read this volume (close to 40 days), as I had a few other books I was reading at the same time. The story continues to engage and entertain however.

A few things stand out in this volume:

• Chivalrous values continue to trump realpolitik: when extremely competent enemy commanders (officials of the Chinese state) surrender, their respectful treatment by Song Jiang, the supreme chieftain of the outlaws, often compels them to join the outlaws' cause. Virtue wins out.
• Song Jiang has a propensity to offer the supreme role to conquered commanders who join the outlaws. He does this repeatedly. Eventually, his veteran chieftains get really irritated by this, and threaten to quit if Song Jiang doesn't cease and desist from trying to yield the supreme role to others. [Incidentally, if I were to run my own martial arts campaign based on Outlaws, which I am tempted to do, I might begin it with an "Empty Fortress" scenario, in which the outlaw chieftains all quit, and everyone leaves in frustration with Song Jiang. It is up to the PCs to rebuild the grand rebel alliance, or do something new and different.]
• The outlaws' opposition are an interesting bunch and include a commander who is a fire specialist, another who is a water specialist, another who is a master of the devastating (and perhaps legendary and impractical) chained cavalry tactic, as well as a master of the twin iron rod combat technique, and yet another who is an expert at throwing stones (!). [I actually checked my copy of Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades to see if that RPG has a stone throwing martial arts technique, but it doesn't. We'll probably be eventually creating one.]
• The number of female combatants increases from two to three, as Sun Erniang, the Witch, joins Hu Sanniang, Ten Feet of Steel, and Mistress Gu, the Tigress. There is at least one battle in which they team up as a unit, and Mistress Gu also takes part in covert action inside a city under siege by the outlaws.
• Chapter 71 comes very late in the volume (and around p. 1500 in the novel), but feels very much like a formalization of everything that has happened previously. After a major victory, Song Jiang convenes his chieftains for a supernatural ritual in their fortress on Mt. Liang, formalizing membership and governance among the outlaw chieftains, and assigning military and other duties to the heroes. The outlaws essentially instantiate a rebel government in a liberated zone. The narration lists the 36 stars of the Heavenly Spirts and 72 stars of the Earthly Fiends, which roughly sorts the heroes by status. During the ritual, the actual "list" falls from heaven inscribed on a stone, so the heroes and their government are divinely ordained to restore dignity, order, and justice to the imperial government. 

We'll end with a quote from Chapter 72, when Song Jiang and close associates go undercover to see the lantern festival in the Eastern Capital (Kaifeng). They visit the home of one of the Emperor's favorite concubines. She serves our heroes tea, and the narrative describes the tea leaves as: 

"finer than bird's tongues, [and] the brew was as fragrant as dragon's saliva."

#StayAtHome: Michael Moorcock's "Daughter of Dreams"

 

This weekend, I finished the third of the later Elric novels, Daughter of Dreams (2001), published in the  U.S. as the Dreamthief's Daughter. I took turns reading the novel in the bulky-but-lovely Gollancz omnibus, The Moonbeam Roads, shown above, as well as in a U.S. paperback edition with a cover by Robert Gould. Part of that cover is shown in the leftmost of the three miniatures up above.

The primary point of view character is Ulric von Bek, and as the story opens, Hitler is consolidating power in Germany. The novel may have reflected the times in which it was published (the early years of Bush's post-9/11 power grab), but it certainly felt relevant to the swift decline our democracy is experiencing in the Trump era. We no longer have to read fiction to imagine tyranny or how to oppose it.

The von Bek family of Germany have been the custodians of the Grail since the Thirty Year's War, when Ulric's ancient namesake encountered Lucifer and the Grail. The Nazi's want the Grail, but that isn't the sole reason they appear at von Bek's castle: their initial demand is for a black sword of great mythic resonance, Ravenbrand, another heirloom of the von Bek family.

Ravenbrand is indeed a sister-sword of Elric's Stormbringer, and soon enough Oona, the daughter of Oone (the Dreamthief from The Fortress of the Pearl) and Elric arrives, and later Elric himself. Jerry Cornelius makes an appearance, as does Oswald Bastable. Quite a chunk of the novel takes place in the bizarre cave-world of Mittelmarch. Later, there are even Melnibonean dragons, and it turns out these played a role in the Battle of Britain!

It's an extraordinarily good novel, combining historical fiction and fantasy, the myth of the Eternal Champion and the madness of Nazism. The novel will be less rewarding for readers seeking adventures in the Young Kingdoms, but it isn't far from here to something like Inglourious Basterds. 

And then there's the Runestaff...

#StayAtHome: Michael Moorcock's The Fortress of the Pearl

"An All-New Novel of Elric" is the comic book-like subtitle for Michael Moorcock's The Fortress of the Pearl (1989). This was the first Elric novel after the original series of books that culminates (in Elric's lifeline) with Stormbringer. It is set earlier in Elric's wanderings around the Young Kingdoms, with his cousin Yyrkoon sitting on the Ruby Throne as regent while Elric learns about the world outside Melnibone.

The action is in the deserts of the northeast, in and around a city-state called Quarzhasaat, which was the capital of an empire that was an early rival of Melnibone. The Bright Empire defeated the Empire of Quarzhasaat, which was swallowed by the desert, with the exception of this wicked, insular city-state.

Which makes it a rather intriguing mirror image of Melnibone, in some ways.

This will give you a clue what happens to the city. 

Elric spends most of the novel on a quest in a layered "Dreamlands" of sorts. He discovers a new magical discipline, that of the Dreamthieves. Elric seeks to free himself of an addiction he acquired through Quarzhasaati treachery, but even more to free a boy from physical captivity in Quarzhasaat, and a girl from spiritual captivity within the titular Fortress of the Pearl.

This first of the "late" Elric novels is much more focused than the second of the "late" Elric novels, The Revenge of the Rose. I started the third of the "late" novels, Daughter of Dreams (aka The Dreamthief's Daughter) last night, and am really impressed by that one as well. 

#StayAtHome: Secret Murder

 

Ellen Kuhfeld's Secret Murder: Who Shall Judge? was the August 2020 selection for the North Country Gaylaxians' Book Club. It is an alternate history novel set in a 14th Century Minnesota which has been settled by Norsemen in the north, English in the south, with an ongoing presence of indigenous people elsewhere. Technology is Dark Ages. 

Not surprisingly perhaps, where Minneapolis is in our world, is where the English host trade fairs. This short novel features the murder of a Norse trader, the suspicions directed against a rival Northman, and the investigation of the murder by the English bailiff.

It's a really fun story, very immersive, written in a terse style similar to Eleanor Arnason's (her own style based on the Icelandic epics). Candidly, I am quite tired of "Viking" roleplaying games, but this short novel made me think it might be quite fun to run something like Kevin Crawford's Wolves of God: Adventures in Dark Ages England.

Ellen is a local author, and she was able to join us for the book discussion, which was as delightful as always. 

#StayAtHome: Unjust Cause

Today I finished Tate Hallaway's second Alex Connor novel, Unjust Cause. Tate Hallaway is the paranormal romance/urban fantasy persona of Minnesota SF author Lyda Morehouse. An LGBTQ author, anime and manga enthusiast, gamer, fanfic writer, and frequent panelist and reader at Twin Cities conventions, Lyda really has it all!

Alex Connor is coroner for the city of Pierre (pronounced "Peer"), South Dakota. Coroner is an elected position, so no worries that she's had little to no professional training for the role. She can talk to the dead, as well as curse people, so Alex has other skills.

She also has a steady boyfriend, Valentine, who is a dragon, and another who is a witch of sorts. The fact that this book is published by a small press means that Lyda was free to explore this poly triplet a bit more than she might have been able to with a major NY publishing house. Did I mention that Alex also has a gay roomate? And knows gay werewolf bikers? There are apparently a LOT of gay people in South Dakota. Who knew?

Lyda presents a mystery, occult antagonists, the protagonist's gradual self discovery about who she really is (or might be). Alex has a few more things to discover before she can really "come out" as precisely this, and not that - but no worries, she is on the path to figuring things out.

This was a fun story but it shouldn't be lost on the reader that it also dealt with a mystery related to a form of historical racism in the U.S.A. There are lots of fun supernatural elements at play in this semi-urban, often rural fantasy, but also a serious crime to uncover.

There is a possible GM tidbit in this novel too, just one of the best "dragon traps" that I have seen to date. Alurax, beware.

#StayAtHome: Gardens of the Moon

This morning I finished Steven Erickson's Gardens of the Moon. This book begins the seemingly endless series of huge novels by Steven Erickson and/or Ian C. Esselmont about the Malazan Empire. Erickson describes this series as heroic fantasy, and at the same time claims that the book is in the vein of Leiber, Howard, and Cook. He sees heroic fantasy of the kind he writes as an entirely separate fantasy tradition, rather than a response to J.R.R. Tolkien.

I kind of buy that argument and would probably label this as a military fantasy a la Cook, since not too many of the characters are actually heroic in the traditional sense. The Leiber element is the view of the dirty urban streets below where the noble classes live (and the city as character), and the scoundrels who live there. But the novel certainly compares with Tolkien in terms of the epic battles that occur. There's just a lot more grey, and a lot more hearts of darkness than in Tolkien. There's also plenty of elder races, so not entirely outside the tradition of fantasy that Tolkien helped to establish.

This novel took me two weeks to read. Or nearly twenty years, as I have made many attempts to read it in the past, and never gotten much beyond page 125 before. It was a 657 page novel, so considerably shorter than Deadhouse Gates, the next book in the series. That one is 836 pages long.

I have it, so let's see how I do.

#StayAtHome: Seven More Books

My Memorial Day Weekend Reading

Minnesota has transitioned to #StaySafeMN, which shifts the burden of responsibility for protecting citizen's health and safety from the state, back to individuals, with all of their individual variations in risk tolerance, carelessness, and community mindedness.

We're mainly still in #StayAtHome mode in this household, and I applaud Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey's executive order requiring masks in all indoor public venues including stores, schools, and government facilities. The only issue is that his order includes all children above age two. I wonder if the Mayor talked to any early childhood advocates, or to MDH or to MN DHS before making this decree? It goes against MDH and MN DHS recommendations to require very young children, for example in childcare settings, to wear masks. Not to mention the relative unavailability of such masks, and the lack of adequate notice.

At any rate, what I have read since my last post is detailed just below:

Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang is just as Orientalist and racist as you remember, if you watched the Fourth Doctor episodes. The book does have some good characters though, and some interesting worldbuilding in the form of future Earth "Time Cabinets" that are very dangerous to the users, indeed.

Last week, I made my first character for the Electric Bastionland RPG, which took about 5 minutes. I like the Failed Career mechanics, which differentiate characters by the connections and equipment they acquired in the career they most recently exited - their exit due to an urgent need to reduce their debts. The debt source and amount listed for the youngest player becomes the source of obligation for the entire PC group, giving the players a built in reason to adventure together. Each Failed Career gets a two-page spread. There are 100 Failed Careers (more than you can roll on the character generation table), so plenty to choose from, and for the GM to also generate NPC adversaries. I am prepping an Electric Bastionland game as a Plan B game for our regular Thursday night group. This rules light game should be perfect for online play.

Sarah Gailey's American Hippo brings together two of her alternate history novellas and a couple short stories set in the 19th C. Mississippi Delta (with both ride-able and feral hippos!). The book has great LGBTQ characters, and one hell of a civil engineering setting error: one you could drive a steamship through. The error ruined my immersion in the story. I am not sure why the editor did not send the author back to the drawing board to fix this issue. Perhaps TOR doesn't think science consistently across its SF brands? Technically this is science fiction, and the book fails in the department of plausible science (we can't even say plausible extrapolation, because the engineering/science that the author screwed up has been understood for thousands of years).

McKenzie Wark's Capital is Dead is a great read, particularly the bits about the "social relations of science" Marxist school in the early postwar UK. Wark makes the case that the dominant mode of production is no longer capitalist, but vectoralist. What is a vectoralism? The term refers to the elements of the economy in which the dominant activity is the production of knowledge (such as the commodifiable information produced in fun, app-based quizzes people take on Facebook) and on other information flows and logistics organized to produce value (i.e., Amazon, Walmart). The vectoralists dominate the world economy and are therefore the dominant mode of production. We are longer "in" capitalism, but in case you didn't feel the change, the various capitalist elements of the economy still exist but are now subsumed under vectoralism. (Insert modes of production debates but now with vectoralists replacing capitalists. and capitalists as the new peasants or small producers. Hmm, maybe it is the same capitalist system, after all?)

The book is presented as a critique of the dominant perspective on the left, which tends to see capitalism as eternal and unchanging. And even conceptually insurmountable, as in modes of production with labels such as "post-capitalist". Wark's critique is certainly fresh and has some validity, but isn't supported by any of the kind of empirical data that serious political economists use. It is materialist, but theoretical.

Wark's approach is also limited by the fact that they seem to assume (something they have in common with orthodox Marxists) that "capitalism" is only about 200 years old, and that it was birthed with the factory. World-systems analysis isn't addressed at all in Wark's argument, which gives it a lot in common with Mike Davis' Old Gods, New Enigmas, a very traditional look at the Socialist/Marxist tradition in the 19th and early 20th century. Davis' work has a very long and rather inspiring first chapter on the socialist tradition and the building blocks of socialist agency, followed by a lackluster chapter on the "problem" of nationalism (without considering other identity categories), a rather interesting chapter on Kropotkin and 19th C. dissident thinking on rapid climate change, and a final, and again somewhat lackluster chapter on the climate crisis - overall a less than satisfying read.

The Uncomfortable Dead by Subcomandante Marcos and Paco Ignacio Taibo II is the second work I have read by Taibo. Subcomandante Marcos and Taibo took turns writing alternating chapters, each with a different viewpoint character: in Marcos' case, a rural, crafty peasant/working class Zapatista cadre, and in Taibo's case, a Mexico city detective that he uses as a protagonist in many different detective novels. This is a surreal story of detection - Marcos' character is already dead, but somehow present and real to everyone he meets - and like Taibo's novel Calling All Heroes, this one also deals with the aftermath of the Tlatelolco Massacre of 1968, and of the rise of ultraright movements and conspiracies since that terrible event. It was a great book, and inspired me to order Taibo's huge biography of Che Guevara, titled Guevara, Also Known As Che.

Oh, and I also finished The Chinese Bell Murders, a Judge Dee novel by Robert van Gulik. I had stalled out on finishing this a year ago (at least), after binge buying numerous books in the series. While van Gulik makes some intentional use of anachronism in his Judge Dee novels (a Tang dynasty hero and setting, with some Ming dynasty borrowings in the material culture and customs) these are a great resource for people considering GMing games set in classical China.

I last read this novel for a senior level anthropology/history class on China; that was 37 years ago. Upon rereading the book, I was struck by how much of the martial arts elements I had missed. Plus the maps are just great. Many of the books in the series start with a keyed map of the Chinese city in which Judge Dee happens to be assigned at that moment; you could easily steal these maps to build a campaign setting. I'll be reading more books in the series in the coming months.

#StayAtHome: Auschwitz Report

The Auschwitz Report is a brief report prepared at the request of Soviet authorities after the liberation of the concentration camps that made up the Auschwitz complex. The authors are two Jewish concentration camp survivors, the young chemist and former anti-fascist partisan, Primo Levi, and a doctor, Leonardo De Benedetti. The original title of the report was "Report On The Sanitary and Medical Organization Of The Monowitz Concentration Camp For Jews (Auschwitz - Upper Silesia)".

Monowitz was a labor camp, not an extermination camp like Auschwitz proper, but conditions were nevertheless as brutal as you might expect. The tone of the report is clinical, as one might expect of a chemist and a doctor, but does a good job in its details of showing how cruel, hypocritical, and murderous the Nazi regime really was.

This was the first book in Primo Levi's literary career, and fragments of this text can be found within Levi's other texts on the Holocaust and the resistance to the Nazis.

A friend asked me if this wasn't the wrong thing to read right now. I disagree. As miserable as things are right now, they have frequently been worse for people. The Auschwitz Report is also a potent reminder of the need to act against evil in all its forms.

Troika

Erik creates a character

Troika is an unpredictable, fast paced, rules-light, multiplanar RPG inspired by old-school British fantasy. Think Warhammer (FRP and 40K), Fighting Fantasy, and Dragon Warriors. Think Moorcock, not Tolkien. New Crobuzon, not King's Landing. It's the brainchild of Daniel Sell and Jeremy Duncan.

I just finished running a two session game of Troika. It was a lot of fun, especially the second session, when I got a better sense of how to handle NPCs. Small differences in Skill level can be quite significant in combat.

Character generation is quick. There are three stats: (general) Skill, Stamina (which functions as hit points), and Luck (which decrements). There are also Advanced (i.e., specific) Skills and Spells, which function similarly to Skills in terms of  dice rolls.

The game uses a 2D6 die roll mechanic. You try to roll equal to or under the sum of your Skill + Advanced Skill (or Spell) when you are not in combat or direct competition with someone else. During combat and competition, Skills (and targeted Spells) are successful when you roll higher than your opponent.  Casting reduces Stamina, as does damage from weapons, which can also be quite variable.

The system has two killer apps. One is character generation. After generating your three core stats, you roll a D66 (i.e., two D6's, with the first die representing the 10-60, and the second die representing 1-6). The number you roll specifies your character Background, which can be anything from Cacogen (a "hideous" alien, a la Gene Wolfe's Shadow of the Torturer series), to a Chaos Champion, to a Gremlin Catcher, to a Golden Barge Pilot (think baroque 40K starships, or the starships with solar sails in Wolfe's Urth of the New Sun) - and many other Backgrounds.

The Backgrounds are evocative, and help define and give directionality to the setting and the activities of the player characters. As well as the evocative descriptions, Backgrounds also provide Advanced Skills and possessions/equipment. For instance, the Gremlin Catcher gets a "small but vicious dog".

Here's a sample character:

Jay's Cacogen

The other killer app is the game's unique approach to initiative. Each PC puts two dice of the same color in the GM's dice bag. (You need a pair of D6's of a unique color for each PC at the table.) Each NPC has an Initiative score, and the GM puts that many dice in the bag to represent each NPC. Initiative is determined by pulling dice from the bag. One additional die of a unique color is also placed in the bag as a turn-end counter. If your die is pulled, you have initiative. Most rolls are contested, and if the defender has the higher roll, then the "defender" can deal damage, even when they don't have initiative. A round ends as soon as the turn-end counter is pulled, which can happen at any time. The initiative system is therefore quite unpredictable, since adversaries (or PCs) may keep initiative for a few successive die pulls , and a round may end at any time with a pull of the turn-end die.

In tonight's two-hour session, players encountered and healed a fungal space-narwhal that had been wounded by an adamantine space-harpoon; the Chaos Champion faced off against a Mind Sloth inside a secret Chaos shrine hidden within a golden barge - shown here using a paper miniature created by Evlyn Moreau:

Paper miniature by Evlyn Moreau

 And, the Golden Barge Pilot faced off against a fearsome Mumbling Bird who was trying to steal the dead-captain's portolan; the creature is shown below:

This was a really fun, trippy game!  I look forward to running Troika again at a convention or at our game table in the near future. Be sure to check out the Troika Kickstarter if this kind of old-new weird sounds like your cuppa java!

Ou Lu Khen and the Beautiful Madwoman

A couple of months ago, I found a copy of Ou Lu Khen and the Beautiful Madwoman (1985) by Jessica Amanda Salmonson. I missed out on reading this work in the 1980s. Now, I've been fond of Jessica's other works from back then for decades: especially the Tomoe Gozen trilogy, the singleton novel, The Swordswoman, as well as her two Amazons anthologies. Each of these for me served as a companion piece to Lee Gold's classic and magnificent samurai RPG Land of the Rising Sun - but the value goes even deeper.

With its overtly LGBTQ characters, Tomoe Gozen was also a kindred spirit to the classic RPG works Deeds of the Ever-Glorious and the Tekumel Sourcebook by M.A.R. Barker. It might be an exaggeration to say that these works are the reason I am alive today. All I can say with any certainty is that they were among the very few things that sustained me in the days when I was struggling to come out. Back then positive representations of LGBTQ persons were few and far between - in both SF&F and gaming.

But Ou Lu Khen and the Beautiful Madwoman (there, I typed the title for the first time without writing "Beautiful Swordswoman"!) is very different from the other Salmonson novels that I'very read. The other novels are written in the terse style familiar to readers of swords & sorcery. Ou Lu Khen's style is more meditative, reflective, lyrical, and descriptive.

It takes its time going places.

But it does go places, and that's not always something that happens (for me) in stories about unrequited (or almost-unrequited) love. The novel is very intentionally an exploration of human suffering. It takes the form of a quest - really, five different characters' quests - or three journeys along the same path.

On these journeys, we encounter a river serpent, a giant frog monster, a winged demon that calls itself Garuda, a weretiger, a Naga, and an incarnation of Ganesh. We wander inside a vast, iconic ancient-ruined-city-as-dungeon. In a moment of transformation, we meet a bodhisattva, a place in which the novel reminded me of another enlightenment occurring long after (and long before) the novel was written.

People interested in Buddhism and fans of Hmong forest tales are in for a treat.

La Compania for Free RPG Day

I ran two games for Free RPG Day. The first was "Slugfest," using Lamentations of the Flame Princess. This was my first time running Lamentations, which is a pretty crisp little retroclone. The PCs were members of La Compania, a private mercenary company in the pay of the Viceroy of New Spain.

I was pretty proud of the PCs that I created for the game (eight created, five used), which included one based on Lance Hendrickson's "Bishop", another based on the notorious historical figure Malinche (didn't get played), and another a member of the von Bek family (I often have a von Bek or another of the Moorcockian-Hal Duncanian lines of Champions in my games).

They PCs entered a Smoking Mirror Engine beneath an ancient shrine to an ur-Lord Tezcatlipoca in the long-abandoned city of Teotihuacan, and proceeded though a series of Engine gate links to alien worlds. First they were surprised coming out of a gate by Octovoidal Transvectors, and later had an encounter with some Achernarians investigating a crashed starship module.

The mood shifted from grim SF to goofy Slugfest shortly thereafter. The slug minis up above are Garganta-Slugs from the Hereticwerks blog, as were the Octovoidal Transvectors and the Achernarians, who have been recurrent characters in a number of my Fate, Dr Who, and old school SF games.

The Slugs sourcebook for Free RPG Day has great illustration (with typical, not-for-children LoTFP flourishes). But I don't really see the "gaming revolution" promised in its introduction and the re-release hype. There's a difference between revolution and revolt, which is why both punk and metal were ultimately dead ends, but persist as simulacra. I'll leave it there.

More on Tomoe Gozen

I am not sure whether it was Lee Gold's Land of the Rising Sun RPG, or Jessica Amanda Salmonson's novel Tomoe Gozen where I first learned of the rapid draw-strike-sheathe sword art of iaijutsu, but the novel ends with a moving dueling scene as ably depicted above by Wendy Adrian Shultz. (I love her illustration, and I believe she also illustrated Phyllis Ann Karr's Wildwraith's Last Battle).

It's a moving scene - particularly the aftermath of the duel.

Prior to the Epilog, which is where the duel occurs, the third part of the book deals with a mishap at sea, and adventures on a mysterious island. There is a memorable sex scene (among many other things). So I am not sure how I had forgotten this part of the book entirely.

Or had I?

You see, in our recent Ryuutama RPG games, I had created a setting called The Sinking Lands, which served as an alternate setting which allowed Rachel to play from time-to-time rather than GM. I had thought that this setting was more influenced (if anything) by the swampy landscape in C.J. Cherryh's Gate of Ivrel but now that I have re-read the third part of Tomoe Gozen, I notice a couple of supernatural similarities (for clues, seek the Labels to this post).

There's no failed marriage though.

Tomoe Gozen

Jessica Amanda Salmonson is our Guest of Honor at this year's Diversicon 24, July 29-31. Right now I am re-reading her first novel, Tomoe Gozen, for the first time since I read it the year of its publication in 1981. It tells the story of Tomoe Gozen, a female samurai who is mentioned in the Tale of the Heike, the epic poem of the struggle between the Taira and Minamoto clans in 12th Century Japan.

This may have been the first novel I read that had openly LGBTQ characters, but at any rate it was definitely the first novel (for me) that did not make a "big deal" out of same sex attraction. This was just a few short years before I came out. My first reading of Tomoe Gozen was at roughly the same time that I was reading Death's Master and Night's Master by Tanith Lee, as well as Runequest 2nd edition.

The early 1980s was a good time for fantasy.

I'm about two thirds of the way through Tomoe Gozen, the first novel of a trilogy about the character. The novel has held up very well in the 35 years since its original publication. One of the things that is very striking upon re-reading it is how much the novel also touches on the hero's sense of her own madness/sanity as she has terrible and wonderful experiences across the landscape of fantastic medieval Japan.

After I finish Tomoe Gozen, I am going to read for the first time Salmonson's novel set in fantastic China, Ou Lu Khen and the Beautiful Madwoman (1985). My goal is to complete reading that novel before the Second Foundation reading group meeting on June 12, 2-4 PM at Parkway Pizza in South Minneapolis. Our topic will be the works of Jessica Amanda Salmonson - advance reading for the convention.

My itinerary after the reading group meeting will be to complete Tomoe Gozen trilogy, re-read The Swordswoman (Jessica's only ostensibly SFnal novel), and then read Anthony Shriek (her horror novel). I'll also be preparing a Ryuutama game for the convention, taking at least a little inspiration from her novels.

"I am a petty god at the moment."

"You will find me more lordly and benign when I achieve the position of a greater god."

Those are the words of the immortal sorcerer, Prince Shool. Today I noticed that the phrase "petty god" was used in Michael Moorcock's first Corum novel, The Knight of the Swords. The term is deployed in both senses of the term, designating both a lesser god and a god with a propensity for pettiness. The novel is filled with petty gods in fact: Pilproth, the Gorged God; inadvertent organ donor deities, Kwll and Rhynn; and the sad deity who accompanies Serwde, the Brown Man of Laahr; perhaps the Dog and the Bear as well.

There's also just a suggestion of an association between giants and gods, which reminds me of another blogger's recent question of why there wasn't more interest in giants as a monster type...

Over the last week, petty gods have come up in a couple of other ways too. At last weekend's Fate of Tekumel game at Con of the North, I had a chance to use the Tzitzimine Star Demons minions and the non-canonical Eyes that I wrote for Petty Gods.

In fact, the Eye a player selected for her character was none other than the Eye of Petty Theogony! An ordinary sellsword was elevated for a good chunk of the session into a petty god in his own right, taking on the mien of a minor god of war. When I wrote up that Eye, I never dreamed that anyone would use it on anyone other than their own character! Players do find ways to do things with our creations that surprise us.

Co-creation makes us all petty gods.

Sword & Soul

I first learned about Charles R. Saunders back in the 80s, when DAW published his first sword and sorcery novel, Imaro. Saunders is a U.S.-born African American journalist who has written a number of novels, as well as numerous essays and short stories. Today he lives in Canada.

Since the republication of Imaro several years ago by Night Shade Books, Saunders has helped give birth to a new genre, Sword & Soul, which takes what it needs from swords & sorcery, but is based in African and African American culture and themes.

Recently, I discovered that Charles Saunders had a new novel out, Abengoni (2014). I asked one of our two local SF&F stores to order a copy for me. Their buyer noticed a few related titles and ordered those as well for the store's new shelf: the anthologies Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology (2011), edited by Milton J. Davis and Charles R. Saunders, and Griots: Sisters of the Spear (2013) by the same editorial pair.

Fans of RPGs like Nyambe and Spears of the Dawn will want to check these out.

Sertorius

Thursday night I picked up a copy of Sertorius at our FLGS.  Sertorius is an East Asian flavored fantasy RPG that has rather unique interpretations of a number of standard fantasy races. You play powerful spellcasters whose godlike abilities draw followers, introducing (rather quickly I gather) the elements of domain level play. However, magical power can also be corrupting, and you can easily end up as a cursed feature of the landscape called a Grim.

These are very much my first impressions of Sertorius, but I think the result here is something like a cross between Exalted and the Adventurer Conqueror King System. The book is a brick with some 465 pages of content on character generation, spells, monsters, and the world before you get to the character sheets at the back of the book. It is a skills-based fantasy RPG system that uses d10 dice pools against a target number to determine outcomes.

I Knew There Was Something Good About Slumbering Ursine Dunes

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The Hydra Collective's Slumbering Ursine Dunes mythic Russia-inspired sandbox adventure setting has a golden barge in it. The intro to the current draft of the product points out that the Dunes takes some inspiration from Michael Moorcock's Eric saga, which has the mother of all battle barges, the giant golden zigguratic Melnibonean kind.

The Dunes have bear warriors, and a King who appears to have at least two things in common with me. (I might reveal those given a rich enough bribe.) The Dunes also has one of the most surreal rumors tables that I have ever seen. I want all the rumors on this table to be true.

There's only a few days left for the Kickstarter for Chris Kutalik's project. If what I've mentioned above is of any interest, check it out while there is still time!

I can't imagine where this Hydra Collective gets the inspiration. Well, maybe I do:

The reference makes me even more eager to see the final product.

*The miniatures pictured above aren't part of the KS but they sure are cool. Call 'em Reptilian but they sure look Melnibonean.

The Bandit Map

The Bandit Map is here: the first supplement for Rachel Kronick's Blade & Crown RPG. The adventure begins with the discovery of a scrap of an old map, and leads to a bandit-hunting adventure in lands shunned by peasants and burghers alike.

Our gaming group playtested the scenario in the Spring/Winter of 2014. We had a blast with it, and together created one of the best adventuring parties with whom I've had the pleasure of gaming. Each member of the party - including my youthful and violent fire mage (based on the Fullmetal Alchemist) - was part of the entourage of a noble (also a PC) who had fallen on hard times. We were bound to each other by oaths of fealty, as well as a desire for gold.

Now, as a game inspired by Swordbearer, Blade & Crown lends itself to gritty, A Game of Thronesy/Abercrombsie-style adventure, There's magic, but most of it is subtle. But in this adventure my fire mage encountered something that quite literally blew his mind.

The Bandit Map is available in print in both full color and in B&W editions, as well as in PDF, All the details, and a free preview can be found right here.

While the scenario could readily be adapted for almost any fantasy RPG with little difficulty, the time is right to check out Blade & Crown if you're not familiar with the game or are sitting in the fence at the moment. It's 25% off right now (regardless of format) until September 30! Find print here and PDF here.

"Miyazaki on Mushrooms"

Thursday night saw my fourth game of The Quiet Year (I think). I love this storygame more than any other. Way more than any other, in fact. One of our players described this session as "Miyazaki on Mushrooms" due to the strange aggregation of whimsy, folly, and failure that transpired.

The game had:

• Ampicyons (the bear-dog critters on the right side of the map)
• Bacigalupi-style clipper ships
• Amphicyon riders
• Rival Bear-Dog cults
• A Stone Bear-Dog temple
• A wooden "Trojan Horse" Bear-Dog temple
• A bear-dog charm-witch
• Runaway teens
• A charismatic hedge wizard
• Zeroids
• Bjorner colonists from across the sea
• Eels
• A huge waterfall
• A cave behind the waterfall

And much, much more. Not so much a chaotic mishmosh;  the varied strange parts kind of fit together.

The Frost Shepards were the very last card in the deck. We decided that the Frost Shepards were just that - a Winter frost.

Very Miyazaki.

Reading Ehdrigohr

I've been reading Ehdrigohr, Allen Turner's fantasy RPG for Fate Core. I read about 130 pages of this full-sized book over the Memorial Day weekend, and about 100 pages this weekend. I still have another 100 or so to go. Today's post isn't a full review, but more of a progress report.

Many Fate fans gained access to this game through a recent Fate-themed Bundle of Holding. The game has a blog, Council of Fools, and a G+ Community. If you haven't heard of the game, you will probably want to check out one or both of those resources before pulling the trigger on a purchase. The author didn't market the game very intensely with the Fate community, so it is less well known than other early offerings for Fate Core such as ADX and Jadepunk. My impression is that the author saw Fate as a vehicle for portraying his world, rather than Fate as a game system that needed new worlds to explore.

And quite a world Ehdrigohr is!

Author Allen Turner has created a multicultural world that is presented from a Lakota cultural standpoint. So this is a game set on a past or future Turtle Island, and the general metaphysics of the world are based on the Four Directions or Medicine Wheel. While not all native peoples of the Americas use the Medicine Wheel concept, it's cultural currency is widespread in North America. It's a model for the universe, for the cycle of life, the social world,  spirituality, science, and an understanding of physical and mental health. It's also a zone for physical and spiritual conflicts, and plays many of these different roles simultaneously in Ehdrigohr.

At the center of the world are peoples like the Lakota and Ojibway. To the East are people of the Longhouse. To the South East are mound building city-dwellers. In the oceans to the Southeast are Aztec-influenced folk who build their cities on the backs of sea monsters. To the far South, across a narrow sea, are Bedouin-like peoples as well as a city-dwelling Empire of artificers. To the far West are people who live in a vast marsh on the backs of giant turtles, and folks who live as island cliff dwellers. There are also northern peoples who live in the ice and cold.

This creates a bit of a cultural melange. It may not appeal to people who want a historically purist or very unified cultural vision. For instance, the New Fire RPG has a much more narrow focus on the cultures of Mesoamerica and appears much more unified and less of a gathering of scattered influences as a result. Similarly, Heirs to the Lost World RPG deals with significant cultural diversity but in a narrower geographic space than Ehdrigohr (and also as an alternate history game is a very recognizable 17th C. Mesoamerican and Caribbean setting). Nevertheless, Ehdrigohr is, like the other games above, a labor of love devoted to something of deep personal and cultural importance to the author. It is likely to appeal to the sorts of gamers who want something different than traditional fantasy.

Just as importantly, this isn't the erasure of Gene Wolfe's Urth of the New Sun either, where the peoples north of Patagonia are basically faceless monstrous communististic adversaries. The cultures of Ehdrigohr feel real-enough, tribe like groupings that could share some cultural commonalities as well as have significant differences from each other that make the individual cultures distinct. Along these lines, the juxtaposition of recognizably North American native peoples with Bedouin-type tribal peoples isn't that jarring to me. In fact, right here in Minneapolis, Somali and Native American people have been meeting together to promote intercultural and intergenerational peacemaking. They are discovering many commonalities they share as tribe and clan based peoples.

The setting is shared through both stories and exposition. The stories - often myths - are very good. The setting exposition and rules, however, are very poorly edited. The book has grammatical errors on almost every page with the exception of the stories. It really could have used a few more editorial passes. (I also have some reservations about the implementation of Fate Core here, although I think there's a playable game here.) Yet the vision of the world of Ehdrigohr is worth the reading. Like Tekumel or Everway, it borrows from real world non-European cultures, and does something new with them. I could see running this with my gaming group. Hell, you could probably run something like Fate Everway with it right out of the box!

We'll have a full review up on FATE SF when we have read the entire book.