Elizabeth Bear’s RANGE OF GHOSTS

On a more cheerful note: today is the release date for Range of Ghosts, by Elizabeth Bear (matociquala).

She had me at “Central Asian epic fantasy.” I have been eagerly awaiting this book since I first saw her mentioning it on LJ, oh, more than a year ago — maybe two. THERE IS A SHORTAGE OF MONGOLIAN FANTASY IN THE WORLD, Y’ALL. Fortunately, this is the first book in a series, and so that means the lack is being addressed, at least in small part.

The most succinct thing I can say about this book is that it’s rich, to a degree I haven’t seen in . . . ever? Rich in culture, rich in fantasy, rich in politics. I don’t know enough about the Mongols to tell where Bear diverges from their real society into her own invention, but her Qersnyk tribesmen are not Standard Fantasy Nomads, and the care and detail devoted to the horses in the story is both beautiful and necessary. Without that, I wouldn’t believe in the culture. The political complexity laid out in this first book bears no resemblance to the “good guys vs. black-armored masses” dichotomy of older epic fantasy, and promises to bear interesting fruit as the story goes along. And then there are the touches that are just pure wonder: the sky above your head depends on who controls the territory you’re in, and in Qersnyk lands, there is a moon in the sky for each member of the ruling family. Temur, the Qersnyk protagonist, looks up each night to see which of his cousins are still alive.

This is very much the first book in a series. The necessity of setting things up means the story is less plotty than I was expecting; Bear can’t just wave vaguely in the direction of the usual epic fantasy tropes, but has to spend time developing her world and the societies Temur and Samarkar (a female wizard from Tsarepheth, and the other main protagonist) come from. There’s a lot of foundation-laying going on, and the climax of this book doesn’t particularly wrap anything up, even in the short term. (There is no blowing up of the Death Star 1.0 here.) But the richness is pretty entrancing all on its own, and I’m very eager to see what grows out of it in the later books.

(And I want to see more of Bansh. Because Temur’s horse is the best horse ever.)

As I said, this is the release date — yeah, I got an advance review copy; envy me! — so hie thee to a bookstore and see if they have it in. Between the familiarly Europeanish tone of most epic fantasy and the real-world setting of urban fantasy, the difference of Bear’s world is like a breath of fresh (and magical) air.

Staring it in the eye

Every time I try to start drafting a post about Trayvon Martin, I run up against the impossible reach of the issue.

There’s enough to say about the kid to fill an entire post, about the injustice of what happened to him. But I can’t tease those things out from all the other things: Zimmerman and his history of neighborhood vigilantism; Geraldo Rivera and the bullshit about hoodies; the appalling failure to investigate this crime as it should have been, when it should have been; the Sanford Police Department and their previous failures to deal appropriately with this kind of thing; the Stand Your Ground law in Florida and elsewhere (which I had not heard of before, and which makes my blood run cold); all the way out to parenting black children in this country, or ALEC and its influence on the legislative agenda of many states. It’s some kind of monster out of Lovecraft, with tentacles reaching everywhere — and I don’t mean that metaphor in a trivializing fashion. I look at this, and feel my sanity die a little. Along with my hope for humanity.

It’s too much to take in, let alone talk about coherently.

Especially when my thoughts sweep outward to take in Shaima Alawadi, or the people whose names no one asks about. And skimming through my browser window to find where those tabs had got to, I passed a bunch I’m keeping for a later post, about capitalism and economic inequality and I’m fooling myself if I pretend these things don’t tie together down at the root.

Fred Clark at Slacktivist was talking the other day about how depressing The Wire is, not despite of but because of its brilliance: it shows you how deeply ingrained these issues are in the institutions that make up our society, and how near to impossible change is. I haven’t watched more than maybe half a dozen episodes of the show because I can’t deal with looking that sort of thing in the eye; I need to stay away in order to preserve my belief that we can improve things. But the problem isn’t in the TV show — it’s in the real world. And sometimes you can’t avoid staring it in the eye.

The Sanford Police Department will likely face some consequences. Maybe we’ll get the Stand Your Ground laws struck down in a few places. But hacking out those roots and digging the whole mess out of the soil of our country . . . I don’t know how you do that. Days like this one, I wonder if you can.

The DWJ Project: Earwig and the Witch

With this, we reach the end.

Earwig and the Witch is an illustrated children’s book (aimed at ages 8-12) published this year, though it was prepared before Jones passed away. It tells the story of a girl called Earwig, who lives quite happily at an orphanage, where she’s able to make everyone do what she wants. But then a very peculiar couple comes along and adopts her, and for the first time in her life, Earwig finds herself facing a challenge.

It’s a short book, of course, and (perhaps because of Paul O. Zelinsky’s illustrations) has a distinctly Roald Dahl vibe about it. If I find myself wanting more — more about Earwig’s friend Custard, and more about the circumstances that led to her being left on the orphanage doorstep, years ago — that’s par for the course, rather than any particular flaw in the story itself.

***

And of course, I do want more. I saved reading this book until today, and knew that sitting down with it would make me sad, because it’s the last one. There’s a collection of Jones’ essays underway, and I’m looking forward to that; there may be unpublished manuscripts or half-finished books that will yet find their way out into the world. If any such things appear, I’ll read them, because I want to soak up any last drop that I can. But in essence, there will be no more fiction from Diana Wynne Jones.

She was, as I said before, the reason I became a writer. Her books have been with me for more than two-thirds of my life. I don’t love all of them; this re-read has uncovered a number that don’t click with me for some reason, and a few that aren’t very good at all. But her body of work is amazing.

Requiescas in pace, Diana Wynne Jones. And thank you.

The DWJ Project: Changeover

Today is the anniversary of Diana Wynne Jones’ death. In memory of that, I bring you the final two posts of my re-read, which — through design on my part — will cover her first and last published novels.

This, of course, is the first one. It isn’t fantasy (or science fiction), and it was written for adults; as such, it definitely feels different from the bulk of her work. (There are not usually any strip-teases in her books.) And yet — as you would expect — there are touches that come across as familiar, a voice that will show up again and again in later stories.

The plot is (deliberately) farcical. The British government is preparing to hand over the reins of their soon-to-be-former colony, a fictional African country called Nmkwami. One of the governor’s aides, reading out his notes about suggestions to “mark change-over” (that is, to commemorate the handover of power), is misheard; the governor thinks he’s said something about a man named Mark Changeover. The “who’s on first” conversation that ensues leaves the governor with the distinct impression that some kind of rabble-rouser or terrorist is on the loose in Nmkwami. And, because nobody in the bureaucracy wants to admit they haven’t heard anything about such an important problem, the confusion snowballs, until all of Nmwkami, British and local alike, is turned out to hunt the Anarchist-Communist-Imperialist revolutionary Mark Changeover.

I’ll go ahead and put the rest behind a cut, though given how difficult it is to find this book, you guys may or may not care about spoilers. (Many thanks to katfeete for loaning me her copy, thus saving me about ninety dollars buying a used copy online.)

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The DWJ Project: “A Slice of Life” (poem)

Endless thanks to carbonel, who saved me from my own obsessive-compulsiveness and sent me the text of this poem in time for the grand finale of this project tomorrow.

. . . of course, there isn’t a lot to say about it. “A Slice of Life” is a forty-line poem (forty-five if you count the days) from the viewpoint of a schoolchild who’s convinced the headmaster has been killed and is being served up piecemeal for lunch throughout the week. It made me think of Shel Silverstein, and also of “Sideways Stories from Wayside School” — does anybody else remember that series?

(Edited to add: I googled to find out why I had the name “Solomon Grundy” in my head — the headmaster is Mr. Grundy — and discovered the poem was clearly inspired by this nursery rhyme.)

It was published in the poetry anthology Now We Are Sick, edited by Neil Gaiman and Stephen Jones. I look forward to seeing what else is in there, once my copy arrives.

The DWJ Project: scattered short stories and The Skiver’s Guide

I noticed, when I made my post for Unexpected Magic, that there were (as near as I could tell) three short stories not collected elsewhere, plus a nonfiction humour book, and one poem. (Info taken from here.) That last will, dammit, not be arriving at my house in time to meet my self-imposed deadline of tomorrow — which is the anniversary of her death — but I’ve managed to get all the others.

(Confidential to the Internet: if you have a copy of Now We Are Sick, and the poem is short enough for you to type it up and send it to me, please do. Just so I can finish everything in time.)

The first short story, “Mela Worms,” made me nervous. It’s contained in Arrows of Eros, which is an anthology of erotic science fiction. When you have been reading a certain author since you were nine, and that author writes almost exclusively for children and young adults, it is kind of brain-breaking to contemplate her writing anything in that vein. Fortunately for my sanity, her story is much more on the “speculative” side rather than the “erotic” one, as the titular mela worms, which are necessary for the reproduction of an alien species, get loose on an overcrowded spaceship and wreak havoc. It isn’t the most memorable story of hers ever, but it’s also far from the worst.

The second (and I’m putting these in the order I read them) was “Samantha’s Diary,” in Stories: All New Tales (which may hold the record for most utterly bland anthology title ever). This one is definitely on the weak side; it’s near-future science fiction in which somebody begins sending the narrator Samantha gifts, which the reader will quickly figure out are the gifts named in the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Too much of the story, alas, is spent on Samantha being surprised by the day’s deliveries, and trying to figure out where to put all the birds. It eventually diverges from that path, and gets better when it does, but on the whole, this one is skippable. (Unless you’re being ridiculously completist. Not that we know anybody like that.)

The third story, “I’ll Give You My Word,” is probably the best of the lot. It takes place in a version of this world where magic is common, and concerns a pair of children, the younger of whom mostly speaks in nonsensical combinations of SAT-type words. Exactly how his ability ties in with a certain magical threat isn’t as well-established as I’d like, but it’s a very DWJ-ish story, and reasonably fun.

Finally, The Skiver’s Guide is a humorous how-to book on the topic of skiving (or “slacking off,” if you’re not familiar with that word). It wasn’t as funny as I’d been hoping, but that’s largely because it’s a very good anatomy of a personality type I kind of want to punch in the face. So, y’know, props to it for that.

Two more books and posts to go — but if you can get me the poem in time, please do . . . .

two pieces of anthology news

Clockwork Phoenix 2! Is now available as an e-book (like the first one a while ago). You can buy it from Weightless Books, or from Amazon US or UK. (More information here.)

For those who may not recall, this one has my short story “Once a Goddess.”

***

InterGalactic Awards Anthology Vol. I! Will be FREE this weekend on Amazon, from Saturday through Monday. Apart from some seriously awesome people like Peter Beagle and Aliette de Bodard (aliettedb), it also includes stories from me and a personal friend, Von Carr. Mine is “A Heretic by Degrees” (which is a Driftwood story), and hers has the fabulous title of “Sister Jasmine Brings the Pain” — the best post-apocalypses story about a combat nun I’ve ever read. ^_^

It can be yours this weekend!

Writing Fight Scenes: Beats

[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

One thing you may not know, if all your experience of fights comes from reading books and watching movies: they are short.

The SCA fencing practice I used to attend would sometimes stage melees, where everybody would get divided up into groups and set against each other en masse. One time they arranged two tables with a gap in between, and declared the gap to be a doorway, that one group (consisting of about five people) was defending. The goal of the other group (equal in numbers) was to get past them to the back wall.

From start to finish, how long do you think it took?

Less than twenty seconds.

(And that’s counting the time the attackers spent advancing, before they closed with their opponents.)

Fighting is kind of like being a soccer/football goalie guarding against a penalty kick. Do you leap left or right? There are physical clues that will tell you which way to go, but you have only a fraction of a second in which to spot and analyze them, before you have to choose. Left or right? If you’re good, your odds of choosing correctly are better than 50% . . . but sooner or later, they’ll slip one past you.

Sooner or later, a decisive blow will get past somebody’s defense. And it’s probably going to be sooner.

There are times when you want to replicate this in your story. Near the beginning of The Bourne Identity (film, not book), Jason Bourne takes down a pair of cops in less time than it took me to type this sentence. Because the usual convention of fiction is that combat lasts a long time, the effect of a quick takedown is to say, this guy is really badass. Mind you, in prose, the duration of the actual moment and the length of its description aren’t correlated much at all; you could gloss over a knock-down drag-out match in half a sentence, or spend a whole paragraph detailing the three lightning-fast moves that lay the opponent out. But if you want badass points, make it short. (There’s a non-combat-related bit in The Ringed Castle, one of the later books in Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, where she spends maybe two or three sentences telling us that what with one thing and another, a handful of characters got themselves from England to Russia. Her not telling us how they managed that — in the sixteenth century, when that journey was not what you’d call easy — makes them seem 300% more awesome than if she’d spent a chapter on it.)

But it’s a convention of fiction that important, set-piece fights can last a really long time. Fair enough; our purpose is to be dramatic, not realistic. So how do you make a fight scene long, without boring the reader?

The answer lies within!

The DWJ project: The Time of the Ghost

From my edition’s cover copy:

She doesn’t know who she is or what she is, let alone why she finds herself flitting invisibly through the half-remembered halls and grounds of a boarding school. Can it have something to do with the ancient evil that four sisters unwittingly awoke?

I remember finding this one of the harder DWJ books to read when I picked it up; I think I’d only read it once. Not because it’s impenetrable or anything (though the protagonist’s confusion as to who she is and what’s happened to her do make it harder for me to attach as a reader), but because of the subject matter.

And that was before I found out the horrible parents were based on Jones’ own upbringing.

This book is, I think, the closest thing to horror Jones ever wrote. Apart from the supernatural aspect (the “ancient evil” mentioned in the cover copy), the daily existence of the sisters is far worse than any of them seem to consciously realize. Their neglectful parents are so busy running the boarding school, they can’t be bothered to make sure their daughters get fed. The girls have to go beg dinner from the school cook, who then blames them for not being responsible enough to fend for themselves. I spend large amounts of the book wanting to scream at the top of my lungs at these people.

I appreciate the fact that the sisters are not, in the face of this treatment, perfectly supportive of and caring toward one another; it wouldn’t be realistic if they were. But I kind of want to scream at them, too, and that’s another thing that makes the book hard to read. The extent to which you like it, I suspect, correlates strongly with how able you are to like Cart, Imogen, and Fenella, despite their individual and collective weirdnesses.

And now for the spoilers.

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three links on gender in fandom

Dear Wizards: Why Failing Less at Gender in 5E Would Be Good For Your Bottom Line

The Girl Geek Community is Hidden, Ever Wondered Why?

“Geek girls” and the problem of self-objectification

And for a bonus, the tumblr Escher Girls, which I may or may not have linked to before, but is a brain-liquefying collection of everything that is horribly, horribly wrong with the visual depiction of women in comics/anime/gaming art/etc.

It isn’t on par with the political issues we’re facing right now, but I see no reason why I can’t decry sexism in multiple forms at once.

Rurouni Kenshin as a Post-Superheroic World

Since multiple people have expressed interest in something I said in the comments of the last post, I figure I’ll blow off actual productivity for a while and make a post about how I think the anime Rurouni Kenshin takes place in a post-superheroic world.

Background, for those not familiar: the Meiji Restoration of 1868 ended the long rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and “restored” the Japanese emperor to power (hence the English name, though it was more of a revolution, setting the stage for a period of massive modernization and westernization). It also gets called the Bakumatsu, the “end of the shogunate,” and since that’s the name that gets used a lot in the series, that’s the name I tend to use.

The main character, Himura Kenshin (who is very loosely based on a real person), was one of the top assassins on the side of the “imperialists,” the guys overthrowing the shogunate. To the extent that you can break the Bakumatsu down to a binary, that means he was on the side of the good guys; the series makes no bones, though, about the fact that the Meiji side is not wonderful and pure, and there were good people on the Tokugawa side, too. Kenshin believes in what he fought for, but since then he’s forsworn his old identity as the “Hitokiri Battousai”*: he’s taken a vow not to kill, and instead of a katana, he carries a sakaba-tou (rendered in English as “reverse-blade sword” — what would normally be the cutting edge is dull, and the blade is sharpened on the inside curve). He’s a rurouni, a wandering swordsman, and still fights to protect people, but he does so without killing.

*(Side note on language: I wish the official English release didn’t try to translate this. “Hitokiri” can most literally be rendered in English as “manslayer,” but that sounds stupid. And they don’t bother translating “Battousai,” which refers to the fact that Kenshin’s fighting technique includes elements of battoujutsu. Leave the whole phrase in Japanese: the audience will pick it up quickly enough. Here endeth the rant.)

A large number of the plots in the series are some variant on “random guy shows up, tries to get Kenshin to be his old self again.” Usually these guys have scores to settle with him, dating back to the Bakumatsu, and/or are trying to prove they’re the badassest badass ever to walk Japan. To do that, they need to not just defeat Himura Kenshin the pacificistic rurouni; they need to defeat the Hitokiri Battousai. Every so often, for a change of pace, it’s somebody from the Meiji government instead; they have somebody who needs killing, and they think Kenshin’s the only guy who can do it for them. But one of the central themes in the series is the tension between Kenshin’s vow and the need for his abilities: the harder he fights, the more he has to call on his skill and speed and strength to defeat somebody, the more his mind falls into the pattern of the killer he used to be.

So there’s your framework. Where does the superhero bit come in?

Mostly spoiler-free, though I talk a lot about Kyoto-season characters.

Pick-a-mix

I had a bunch of things I meant to post yesterday, but ended up getting all political instead. (I am heartened, though, by the news that at least some organizations are seeing a funding surge. And there’s at least one doctor advocating for civil disobedience when the law would threaten the rights and well-being of patients.)

But! The point of this is to post the other stuff!

I neglected to mention this on the 16th, but I have my usual post up at SF Novelists, talking about audience expectations, and whether it’s better to be wrong or right about where the story is going.

Next, I’d like to point you at a friend’s Kickstarter project, for The Urban Tarot Deck. The existing art for this is pretty awesome; I own a print of the Princess of Swords, and kniedzw has the Magician. I’ve been hoping for years that he’d be able to finish the deck (and must confess to a hope that if this project is a success, he’ll finish his Silhouette Tarot, which I like even more). So mosey on over to take a look, and if you like what you see, send a few bucks his way.

(Okay, full truth? I am sorely tempted to shell out silly amounts of money to be on one of the remaining cards. A bunch of the models for the existing cards are friends of ours, and I love what Rob did with them; it would be nifty to see what he’d do with me. But, um. Kind of silly amounts of money, for something I cannot even pretend is a business expense.)

Third, cogent analysis of why John Carter tanked. I confess that if anybody ever makes a movie of my books, I would love to have control over various aspects . . . but then I see what happens when somebody with no distance from the subject gets to run the show, and I reconsider. I’d like to believe I would be sensible enough to listen to other people’s advice, but who knows? I might be just as short-sighted and detrimental as Stanton was.

Fourth, fellow geeks of a certain stripe may be interested in the trailer for a live-action Rurouni Kenshin movie. I have to admit, watching it breaks my brain a little; I’ve been a fan of the anime for (ye gods) nearly half my life, and Suzukaze Mayo is the voice of Himura Kenshin. The guy in the trailer . . . is a guy. (When a friend told me they were filming a live-action movie, I asked, only half-joking, whether they were going to cast a woman as Kenshin.) But there are things flashing by in the trailer that have me bouncing in my seat; does that gatling gun mean we’re going to get Aoshi and the Oniwabanshu stuff? I must watch and see. 🙂

And, to make five (non-political) things, I leave you with The 25 Most Awkward Cat Sleeping Positions.

Your one-stop shop for SCREAMING RAGE

So I’ve been mentioning lately the situation surrounding women’s rights in the United States (and sometimes elsewhere) — a situation so appalling, that word is utterly inadequate for describing how I feel about it. The best I can do is to point you at Soraya Chemaly’s “Legislators: Women Are Not Cows and Pigs,” which contains a handy run-down of the various pieces of jaw-droppingly retrograde legislation being pushed by conservative extremists. It’s all there, from the suggestion that we should put a woman’s life at risk rather than remove a dead fetus from inside her, to the idea that an employer should be allowed to ask why his female employee wants birth control pills, and then fire her if she says it’s to prevent pregnancy.

I wish I were making this shit up.

I am not as good at eloquent rage as Cat Valente is. (Go read that post for a fairly accurate picture of my current internal state.) But I wanted to say, that fundraiser I’m doing? I attached it to the WoT blogging because I thought, this stuff usually has more success when it’s got some kind of result attached to it, even a silly one. But really, the point isn’t for me to eviscerate WoT merchandising. The point is to raise money for the people fighting back against these attacks. The point is to help Planned Parenthood provide health care to low-income women (though that doesn’t help much when the state of Texas knowingly chucks those services out the window), or to make sure battered women have a safe place to go.

If you can spare any money for a cause like that, please do. And do the things that don’t require money, too: contact your legislators. Speak out. Make it clear that women are not farm animals, that we have a right to privacy and control of our own bodies, that our sexual behavior is no business of the state’s. Fight back.

I want to believe these are the death throes of an old way, and we’ll break through into something better. But that won’t happen if we don’t fight.

Books read, February 2012

Only, um, a lot late.

Something interesting I’ve noticed: so far this year, every bit of fiction I’ve read has been by a female writer. (There’s been some male-authored nonfiction and gaming material.) Granted, partly that’s because of the disproportionate weight carried by Diana Wynne Jones. But given that I’ve been working entirely from my own bookshelf in choosing what to read, that actually makes me kind of happy; it means I am not, as many people do, skewing unconsciously toward men in terms of what books I read and talk about.

On the other hand, there’s this bit of number-crunching, which shows to the extent that we’re approaching parity on book reviews, a lot of that is driven by women reviewing women, counterbalancing the men who who mostly review men. And even then, we’re not at equal numbers yet.

Anyway, last month’s books — before we get any further into this month.

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Planning for Sirens

I intend to go to the Sirens Conference again this fall, where Nalo Hopkinson, Malinda Lo, and folklorist Kate Bernheimer will be Guests of Honor. I wasn’t sure I’d be back for a third year . . . but then a) they moved the location to far-south Washington (just outside of Portland, OR), which is a lot more accessible to me, and b) they made the theme “retellings.” And, um. I sort of have a thing for that.

Planning for the program has already begun, and starlady38 is looking into doing a panel on fanfiction. Like her, I hope to see the programming be about more than just the obvious folkloric angle, so here’s my own proposal: I’d like to talk about historical fiction.

The starting point would probably be books that interact directly with real historical events, like Kara Dalkey’s Genpei. From there, you can expand to things like Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, which doesn’t follow the actual trajectory of the Napoleonic Wars, but is still recognizably a retelling of that large-scale event. I’m particularly interested in the question of how the writer relates to historical people as characters, and what obligations, if any, she has regarding their representation.

So, three questions for the audience:

1) Do you think you’ll be coming to Sirens?

2) If so, would you want to be on this panel?

3) Whether you are or not, what kinds of things would you want to see the panel discuss?

I knew him when . . . .

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in a hearty round of applause for ninja_turbo, who has just sold his first novel(s):

Michael Underwood’s GEEKOMANCY, discovered at the Book Country website and pitched as Buffy The Vampire Slayer meets Clerks, to Adam Wilson at Pocket Star, in a two-book deal, in a nice deal, for publication in 2012, by Sara Megibow of Nelson Literary Agency (World).

He was a member of my crit group way back when he was an undergrad, so pardon me while I have a bit of a “he’s all growed up!” reaction over here. 🙂

(Not too growed up to do a public Kermit flail, though.)

fundraising reminder

In the wake of Rush Limbaugh’s disgusting attacks on Sandra Fluke — and when I’ve been reading articles like this one on funding cuts in the UK for domestic violence shelters — it seems an opportune time to remind everybody about the random little fundraiser I’m doing.

More details at that link, but the short form is that, as a part of my ongoing analysis, if you donate to a women’s charity — you choose which one; it could be a shelter or rape counseling or pro-choice or anti-discrimination or whatever — and send me the info, I will buy used copies of various bits of Wheel of Time merchandise, and blog about them for your entertainment.

Because I’m really tired of feeling like we’re backsliding on women’s rights, like the Overton window has shifted to the point where we’ve got a major presidential candidate speaking out against all forms of birth control, and people cheering him for it. So I hope this encourages some of you to donate to a worthy cause.

Proud to be a Dragon

Warning: the following post will not make the blindest bit of sense unless you’re familiar with Legend of the Five Rings. If you aren’t, please continue on to the next blog post. Thank you for your time.

***

So in our session tonight, one of the PCs — a Shosuro trained in the Bayushi courtier school — goes with our NPC companion to hunt down this Yogo who’s wanted for a crime. In the course of questioning the peasant innkeeper, she realizes he’s lying. And, being a Shosuro, she opts to subtly intimidate him into telling the truth, rather than backhanding him across the face for lying to a samurai.

A Crane in the common room of the inn overhears this. He’s a Doji trained in the Kakita dueling academy, and is trying to make a name for himself as a duelist, so he comes over and starts blustering to the Shosuro about the way she’s treating this innkeeper — basically ginning things up into an offense so that he can challenge her to a duel. She (very rightly) calls him out for eavesdropping on somebody else’s conversation and butting into business that isn’t his, and so thoroughly upsets him that he tries to slap her. Whereupon the NPC companion — a Mirumoto bushi from the Iron Mountain school — steps up and rams the butt of his katana into the Doji’s ribs.

Stuff and things, we run and get a magistrate to okay the duel (to first blood only), the two guys face off. This could go badly, because the Mirumoto is a great skirmisher, but is much less experienced at dueling. The Shosuro, however, has told him that his opponent has the Brash disadvantage, so the PCs and their NPC companion are doing all kinds of little things to needle the Doji and put him off his game. Which we succeed at well enough that a) he basically false-starts, gets bashed in the ribs again, and has to be ordered back into position by the magistrate, and then b) he continues with his strike even though the Mirumoto went first, and the duel is therefore supposed to be over. But he misses — not because he meant to, but because of the damage he took from a certain now-broken rib and the first cut — and so it’s an all-round disgrace for the Doji.

And this is where things start to get fun.

homebrew system for Dragon Age

Tossing this out there for the gaming geeks to play with: I think you could run a Dragon Age tabletop using the Pathfinder system.

(I know there’s a DA-specific system out there. I haven’t heard very good things about it, and particularly object to the way each book only covers five levels, requiring you to buy four books to have a “complete” game. True, Scion did something similar — but they also did a remarkably good job of putting other worthwhile content in all of their books. Very few companies pull that off.)

I figure that, at its core, you make warriors into fighters, rogues into . . . uh, rogues, and mages into sorcerers. A spells-per-day system is rather different from the mana-based system of the video game, but on the other hand, the video game is wall-to-wall combat, which a tabletop game wouldn’t be. (And this opens up the potential for mages to have spells useful for any purpose other than nuking people. Seriously, one of the great flaws in DA worldbuilding is that as near as I can tell, mages are only good at killing and destruction — there’s no peacetime use for their magic, with the lone exception of healing, that would allow them to be anything other than a threat to society. And how often do you see them out in public, healing people?)

The nice thing about Pathfinder is its (relative) adaptability: if somebody wants to play a Dalish hunter, say, they could play a skirmisher — a ranger without the spellcasting abilities. You can customize the differences between a Dalish Keeper and a Circle mage by using the sorcerer mechanics, but letting them pick from different spell lists (like druid and cleric), and also by picking different bloodlines. You can toss in some Traits to vary things a bit more, too. And then specializations you model with prestige classes: borrow the barbarian rage mechanic for berserkers, maybe some paladin mechanics for templars, cook up something for blood mages, and so on.

You’d have to tack on a few additional rules, like something to handle demonic possession or action in the Fade. But I think this would strike a decent balance between accuracy and simplicity: it comes vaguely close to the feel of the actual game (with level-based advancement, feats as talent equivalents, etc), while not requiring vast amounts of untested modding to make work. (I originally thought of modding it a lot further — replace Charisma, Intelligence, and Wisdom with Magic, Cunning, and Willpower; make d20-style mechanics for the talents in the game — but that rapidly became a nightmare of effort.)

I haven’t played Pathfinder very much yet, though, so I don’t know if there are improvements or problems I ought to think about. Any thoughts from the peanut gallery?

The DWJ Project: Unexpected Magic

Last of the collections, both in terms of my (totally random) reading order, and publication date. It’s also the largest, and contains a number of stories not found in the others; on the other hand, it reprints a lot of the weakest stories from Warlock at the Wheel, and I have no idea why.

Things that are new:

“The Girl Jones” — non-fantasy story about a girl who ends up looking after a bunch of younger children, and screws it up in a way that ensures nobody will ask her to do that again. Not much to this one, and I’m really not sure why it was chosen to open the collection.

“The Green Stone” — sort of proto-Derkholm, from the perspective of the “recording cleric” for a Quest that’s about to begin. Unfortunately, because the cleric doesn’t know much about what’s going on, the plot kind of comes out of nowhere, and doesn’t get fleshed out very well.

“The Fat Wizard” — an iteration of the “unpleasant person gets their just desserts” trope. Better-written than most of the iterations in Warlock at the Wheel or Stopping for a Spell, but still not all that great, and (as the title suggests) it’s likely to bother people offended by her treatment of weight issues.

“Little Dot” — this, however, is fabulous. (And I don’t just say that because it involves cats.) I want, as I usually do, more background for the threat, but this story excellently displays one of Jones’ great talents, which is characterization. Henry’s six cats — sorry, let me correct that; the six cats that own Henry — all have highly vivid personalities, from the brave and resourceful Dot to the gorgeous and deeply stupid Madame Dalrymple. Watching them go to town on the woman who invades Henry’s house is a thing of horrifying beauty. 🙂

The main reason to own this book, though, is for Everard’s Ride, which was published by NESFA Press in 1995, but is almost impossible to find for a reasonable price.

The thing that fascinates me about it that to the best of my knowledge, it’s actually the earliest thing of Jones’ that has been published. Changeover came out in 1970, but the publication notes at the end of this collection say that Everard’s Ride was written in 1966. fjm said in the comments on Witch’s Business that her first couple of novels were meddled with by editorial influence, and reading this makes that quite apparent. Granted, I don’t know how much (if at all) Jones revised Everard’s Ride before its publication, but this feels far more like her style than her first couple of published fantasy novels do.

And there’s enough meat to it that I need a spoiler-cut.

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