Orcs, and Hordes of the things

Although the dictionary definition of orc is merely “monster,” modern authors universally follow the lead of Tolkien in using the term as a synonym for a large goblin.  These have not had a fair press. They are fanatically brave in spite of being weaker and less practiced than most other humanoids, and must be kind to animals, since they train them so well.  It is interesting that Tolkien’s characters describe them in terms very similar to those used by medieval chroniclers to describe Mongols, who in our day are considered a nice friendly people of slightly eccentric lifestyle.  We might instead think of such goblins as a fantasy counterpart of the apocryphal northerner: clannish, rough spoken, given to imbibing of strong but peculiar liquor, keeping analogues of whippets and pidgeons, prone to mob violence at away fixtures and perhaps too easily influenced by radical politicians of other races. –Phil Barker, Sue Laflin Barker & Richard Bodley Scott, Hordes of the things

The paragraph above is the caption for the orc & goblin army list in Hordes of the things (or HOTT).  I love this “defense” of orcs.  The write-ups in the army lists are not all as good, but here’s my other favorite, for the “Generic barbarians” list:

Humans lacking in non-oral culture and fond of old fashioned sports like head-hunting, cattle raiding, or world conquest.

What else do you really need to know?

HOTT is a fantasy wargame that was first released in 1991 and which uses fairly simple principles found in De Bellis Antiquitatus (DBA).  It uses the same standard unit size (an ‘element’ or base of several miniatures, usually three or four but as many as 8 or as few as one miniature might be used, depending on the troop type), but whereas DBA uses 12 elements for every army, HOTT has a ‘points’ system allowing armies of varying sizes depending on the troops bought.  The rule book includes a large number of army lists, altohugh in principle there are relatively few restrictions on what kind of army you could field.  The list of armies is helpful because it gives examples of what the authors intend by some of the very generic troop types, and also as sort of bibliography for some classic sources for fantasy gaming. The “generics” are elf or fairy, dwarf, goblin or orc, gnome, undead, reptillian, ratmen, medieval, barbarian, nomad, pirate, evil humans, chaos, good kung-fu, and evil kung-fu (the last two based on 70′s and 80′s movies).

Here’s the rest, the parenthetical entries being separate lists:

• Summerian myth (human, good demonic, evil demonic, hosts of the dead, Asag and the stone allies)
• Homeric myth (Greek, Trojan)
• Greek myth
• Amazon
• Arthurian epic
• Carolingian epic
• Irish epic (Ulster, Irish)
• Norse myth (Aesir, giants)
• Arabian myth
• Persian epic
• Japanese myth (Imperial descent, Kumaso)
• Indian myth (Rama, Lanka)

Those were the armies of myth & legend; there are also some semi-historical types that would incorporate mostly historical forces, but which are highly speculative and include fantasy elements.  These are inspired by films, period legends, and popular culture.

• Semi-historical Egyptian
• Kyropaedia (Persians, Lydians) — Xenophon
• Arthurian semi-historical (Arthur, Saxons)
• Chinese semi-historical
• Da Vinci Italian [renaissance Italy + Da Vinci's drawings of war marchines!)
• Japanese epic [including legends as well as Kurosawa films]
• Aztec semi-historical
• Conquistador semi-historical
• Munchausen 18th century (Russians, Ottoman Turks)
• Napoleonic semi-historical
• Victorian science ficiton
• Boxer Rebellion (Boxer, Foreign devils)
• Alien invasion (Aliens, Humans)

Various fantasy books and stories:

• Hyborian (Northern barbarians, Picts, medieval states, Shem, Stygia, Black nations, near eastern nations, Vendhya, Khitai) — R.E. Howard
• Barsoom (Red men, green men) — E.R. Burroughs
• Fairie queen (Gloriana’s knights, League of enchanters) — Spencer
• De Camp Novarian (Othomae, Shvenite, Fedirun, Mulvanian, Paaluan) –L. Sprague DeCamp
• Well of the Unicorn (Vulking, Salmonessan, Dalarnan) — Fletcher Pratt
• Kregen (Pre-Prescott Vallia, Imperial Vallia, Loh, Clansmen, Radvakkas, Pandahem, Hamal, Moorcrim, Shanks)– the Scorpio/Kregen/Antares series by Alan Burt Akers/Dray Prescot
• Deryni (Army of ex-queen Ariella, army of grand-master Jebediah, amry of King Nelson, army of Archbishop Loris) — Katherine Kurtz
• Tekumel (this one does not list separate nations but just gives a list of possible troops) — M.A.R. Barker
• Dragaeran (Dragaeran, Easterners) — Steven Brust
• Black Company (Plain of Fear army, army of The Lady, army of The Limper, Shadowmaster’s army) — Glen Cook
• Dracula (Dracula, Dracula’s foes) — Stoker
• Discworld (Ahnk-Morpork, Seriphate of Klatch, D’regs, Agatean Empire, Agatean insurgents, Lancre) — Terry Pratchett
• Atlantis — H.Rider Haggard etc.

and lastly pure fun

• Christmas wars (Santa Claus, The anti-claus)
• Garden wars (Garden gnomes, Ants, Wasps)

The army lists are NOT in the free pdf that HOTT’s publishers have kindly provided while HOTT remains out of print. (N.B. this pdf is for personal use only!)  However using the rules and some imagination, you should be able to make up whatever army you want.  HOTT is designed with large scale battles in mind, but as you might have inferred from the inclusion of lists like “Dracula’s foes,” scale really doesn’t matter.   A wild range of armies were on display on the Stronghold, a web site that for years provided resources for HOTT players including house rules, variant armies, galleries of armies, and so on.  The site has been down for a few years but you can still see the front page and many of the pages archived here.  The mythological and literary lists are generally well-researched (as you might expect a community of wargamers to do; after all considerable number of ancients wargamers have learned ancient Greek and Latin just to research the armies and battles of the period).

One of my favorite variants was called “D20 HOTT,” which attempts to create a point of conversion for D&D games to HOTT, so that your character can participate in mass battles.  The only problem with such a scheme though is that players who expect the battle to ‘feel’ like a D&D combat will certainly be disappointed, and this might go even more so for spell-casters who will find their powers reduced to artillery or counterspells (if mages or clerics, respectively).

Book score, spring 2013

Got these at my local library’s book sale; they always have one the first weekend of May.  Not bad for $7.  mostly in pretty good shape.

Swords of Mars / Edgar Rice Burroughs. Ballantine, 1963 (1979 printing)

The land of Oz / L. Frank Baum. Watermill Classic, 1983.

The fabulous riverboat /Philip Jose Farmer. Granada Pub., 1975.

The magic labyrinth / Philip Jose Farmer. Berkely Books, 1980.

Voyagers in time : twelve science fiction stories / ed. by Robert Silverberg.  Tempo Books, 1967.

Dead & buried / a novel by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. Warner Books, 1980. Novelization of the horror movie.

Sword and sorceress X : an anthology of heroic fantasy. Daw books, 1993. Marion Zimmer Bradley, ed.

Sword and sorceress XII : an anthology of heroic fantasy. Daw books, 1995. Marion Zimmer Bradley, ed.

Ancient images / Ramsey Campbell. Tor Horror, 1990.

The early Del Rey. Volume 2 / Lester Del Rey.  Ballantine, 1975.

Day of the giants / Lester Del Rey. Airmont, 1964.

Mention my name in Atlantis / John Jakes. Daw Books, 1972.

Bloodstone / Karl Edward Wagner. Baen, 1991.

The fellowship of the talisman / Clifford D. Simak. Ballantine, 1979.

The wall around the world / Theodore R. Cogswell. Pyramid, 1962.

In the flesh / Clive Barker.  Pocket Books, 1988.

The lost valley of Iskander / Robert E. Howard. Zebra Books, 1974. Special illustrated ed.*

Feat of fear / edited by Vic Ghidalia. Manor Books, 1977.

Ghost stories of an antiquary / M.R. James. Dover, 1971.

King Arthur and his knights : selected tales / by Sir Thomas Malory; ed. by Eugene Vinaver. Oxford University Press, 1975.

Two non-fiction books:

A field guide to the little people / Nancy Arrowsmith & George Moorse. Quality Books, 1977.

The druids /Peter Berresford Ellis. Eerdmans, 1995.

*The one thing I hate about these book sales is all the rare/used book dealers who rummage through everything with their ipads etc. checking values and trying to get anything valuable for resale.  Heard two dealers discuss and reject this one because only the Conan stories sell.   Philistines.

Your swords library!

I just read The book of swords — not the Fred Saberhagen series (the first three of which were pretty good but not strong enough to make me really want to read the many sequels) — but a nonfiction book by the late Hank Reinhardt.   (Link goes to memorial page; it turns out his personal collection of weapons is being sold off, in part, and there are some articles by him, including some cringe-worthy stuff on politics that I’ll pretend I didn’t see!) Mr. Reinhardt is best known for his tireless promotion of medieval weapons, as the founder of the HACA and sword designer/consultant/co-owner for Museum Replicas.  This book was unfinished at the time of his death but so far it’s a pretty good read.  The style is extremely conversational, and that is not necessarily a bad thing.  The illustrations are photos (selected by the editor, his widow) and line drawings made by his friend Peter Fuller.  They don’t always have much to do with the text they accompany, at least in the first few chapters, and frustratingly there are several passages that really scream for an illustration but have none.  His widow owns Baen Books and the book was published under that imprint, so perhaps the editor/publisher could not be objective in deciding whether the book was ready to go into print.  I’d still place the quality of the proofreading above many self-published books, but what this book probably needed was someone who would be willing to make cuts and changes.  I suspect that conversational tone was something his widow and friends were unwilling or unable to fix, since that would mean removing some of his personality from the book, and the preface admits that his death was sudden and left them all in a bit of shock.  As it is there are some distracting goofs here and there, a bit of rambling which the author acknowledges, and some lack of organization as points are raised, forgotten, picked up again, and in some cases left completely unexplained.

Reinhardt mentions that Arab swords are among his favorites and they deserve their own chapter, but sadly he never wrote that chapter.  I am reminded of Sir Richard Burton’s Book of the sword, which similarly promises a section on Japanese swords which he never got around to writing.  I suppose you could use these two books together then, although Reinhardt is rather less enthusiastic about katanas than Burton is about scimitars…

Reinhardt concludes his survey of swords with a couple of chapters on playing and fighting with swords.  He has some suggestions for making practice targets for cutting, and also gives his advice for those entering contests and sparring.  He has a great deal of skepticism about the fechtbuchs that have recently been garnering attention (authentic manuals written by duelists).   I skimmed these chapters.  He also talks a bit about his field tests of various swords on an armored pork roast, which is interesting, but we’ve all seen that sort of thing on the History Channel and You Tube (search: “Cold Steel” or “Arms in Action” for some entertainment!  The Deadliest Warrior series had a few good sequences too but they always used very inferior butted mail rather than the riveted mail actually used by knights. )

The editors made a good effort at adding some bibliographical references to supplement his writing, but it’s not clear that they necessarily represent the sources of his ideas or facts; it is more of a selected bibliography of his personal library. (The introduction promises to eventually release a list of his personal books but that effort seems to have been abandoned.)  A few chapters have Reinhardt’s own suggestions for further reading and I’ve added a few to my to-read list.  The point of this post was actually not to review Reinhardt’s book so much as to mention a few books on weapons that I think are worth checking out.  I have a small collection of books on arms and armor that I draw on for reference now and again and Reinhardt’s book will certainly join them.  I’ve weeded my own collection a few times, and I think the ones I still have are all useful although not all of them are reliable.  But they are some of the more widely available books on weapons so I thought it might be worthwhile to give my own little bibliography of books on weapons.  I’ve noticed that although there are many, many books on swords, there are few if any books devoted just to hafted weapons like axes and maces.  At best you’ll find a chapter or two devoted to ‘other weapons’ in a swords book, with perhaps a dedicated chapter on polearms in some books too.  Granted there would be less romance and folklore to collect, but surely there is room for a book on maces?  Maybe it’s just me, but I find hafted weapons just as interesting as swords.  Anyway, here goes a list, more or less in chronological order:

Burton, Richard F. The book of the sword. Originally published in 1884, there have been many affordable reprints including a Dover edition which I have and, since it is now in the public domain, you can find scans and other digital copies pretty easily.  There is a terrible scan in Google books and very good one here at Archive.org  (as Google is listed as the digitizing partner at archive.org, I’m not sure why the two scans are so different…).  some of this is outdated, obviously, but Burton is one of the few modern writers on swords who actually used swords in combat and I understand he was a pretty good swordsman.  (Most books by fencers, duelists, and martial artists are more focused on technique and mental preparation, so it’s cool to see Burton’s views of the sword as an artifact.)

Ashdown, Charles Henry.  British & foreign arms and armour.  This book (originally published in 1909) has appeared under several different titles and in various sizes.  I have a large (folio) sized edition put out by Wordsworth Editions as An illustrated history of arms & armour, but it has also been published as: European arms and armour and Weapons and armour in the Middle Ages.  I was fooled by all these title changes and had two different editions for a while.  Again a digital scan is available at archive.org.  I have a theory that some of the confusion about the different armors (“banded mail,” “splint mail,” “ring mail”) might be due to the taxonomy of mail in this book, which seems to take every different depictions in Medieval art (especially funerary brasses of armored knights) to be different kinds of armor, rather than different ways of representing mail.  Probably someone else has already thought this, and I just forget where the idea was first put forward.  Still, it has great pictures and anecdotes.

Oakshott, Ewart. The archaeology of weapons.  1960.  A true classic, and given it’s early date it’s surprising how much craziness made it into RPG books and popular culture regarding the weight and lengths of weapons and so forth.  I remember my brother repeating the story his teacher told him around 1980 that Viking swords weighed 10 or 20 pounds.  Sigh.  Oakshott has a few other books on weapons I haven’t read, but which are more technical and narrower in focus.

Norman, A.V.B., & Pottinger, Don.  English weapons and warfare, 449-1660. 1966.  Also published under the title Warrior to soldier, 449 to 1660.  This book reminds me a lot of Ashdown’s.  The illustrations though are mostly original line drawings that look good.

Halbritter, Kurt. Waffenarsenal. 1977.  Translated as Halbritter’s armoury and Halbritter’s arms and armor through the ages. (I have the second version.)  This is a purely satirical book on weapons, armor, and fortifications that is very amusing and may provide some ideas for the sorts of innovations humanoids might come up with in your D&D games.  Some illustrations are reproduced in low resolution here.

Balent, Matthew. Palladium Books presents– the compendium of weapons, armour & castles. 1989.  This is a monster compilation of the old Palladium weapons & armor books from the 1980s, complete with the statistics for an unspecified system (which is not quite compatible with Palladium’s FRPG, either!).  The art is pretty good, and the listing of weapons is about as close to exhaustive as you will get. I’m not sure all the terminology is as precise as the book  suggests, but in terms of giving pretty much every weapon a name, it serves its purpose.  I owned the original Palladium books on Exotic weapons and Weapons & assassins; I think my brother ‘inherited’ them when I inherited all his minis; he had the Weapons & castles and Weapons & armor books too anyway.  (He’s the only person I know as interested in weapons as I am, apart from our nephew Quinn!)  I’m not sure the assassins book material is reproduced but everything I recall from the other books seems to be there, some with new or enlarged illustrations.

Diagram Group. Weapons: an international encyclopedia from 5000 BC to 2000 AD.  This book was originally published in 1980, then again with updates in 1991, and in 2007 under the title The new weapons of the world encyclopedia : an international encyclopedia from 5000 B.C. to the 21st century.  (Yes, the 1980 and 1991 editions both say “to 2000 AD”.  I only have the 1991 edition, and it is very good and fairly comprehensive, with a number of unusual weapons alongside all the familiar ones, and simple diagrams to explain how they work.   The book moves progressively from the simplest hand weapons to guided missiles and nuclear weapons, grouping them by types (all the knives in one section, all the spears in another, etc.)  I also liked the appendix which groups weapons by time period rather than types.

Paul, E. Jaiwant. “By my sword and shield” : traditional weapons of the Indian warrior. 1995.  A slim book that just focuses on India, which has an astonishing range of unusual and crazy-looking weapons.  I like kukris and katars quite a bit, and while I think the Viking sword is probably my favorite kind of sword, Indian swords look really scary.  This book gives a fair amount of detail on the construction and history of various weapons and is worth having.

Amberger, J. Christoph. The secret history of the sword : adventures in ancient martial arts. 1998.  (An earlier edition has less than half as many pages, but I haven’t seen it). This is a fairly entertaining read, and is more of a history of dueling and fencing than of swords or swordplay generally, but there are lots of great anecdotes and ideas sprinkled throughout.  The author is a little too in love with himself IMO but it doesn’t quite spoil the book.

Withers, Harvet J. S. The world encyclopedia of swords and sabres. 2008.  Also published as The illustrated encyclopedia of swords and sabres.  The illustrations here are all photographs of often gorgeous museum pieces and despite the title it also covers other bladed weapons like knives and bayonets, as well as a very few axes and hafted weapons.  The historical notes are solid and this is fun book to flip through if you like swords.  The same author is credited with several other similar titles that might be different versions of the same work. (It’s funny how  specialist books get re-published over and over with new titles.  I see this a lot at work as a catalog librarian and I’m pretty sure it has a lot to do with marketing — they will always appear as “new” books, right?  Cookbooks are also very guilty of this.

Honorable mention to several books I do not own:

Wagner, Eduard. Cut and thrust weapons. 1967.  A very comprehensive book focusing more on later period swords but also including a lot of information on the design and construction of swords. Very pricey on the used book market.

Wilkinson, Frederick. Antique arms & armor. 1972.  Also his Swords and daggers. 1968.  Two good books with photographs of museum pieces.

Sharpe, Mike. Swords and hilt weapons. 2012.  A nice coffee-table type book with photographs mostly of reproductions of the sort sold by Museum Replicas, Inc., Cold Steel, etc.  The big format gives plenty of space of reproducing the photos, which is almost all the book consists of.  There are several other books with the same title out there and they are more like the Withers book, showing photos of museum pieces.

The OTHER Fantasy Wargaming — not an Obscure FRPG Appreciation Day post

This was going to be saved for the May 30th “Obscure FRPG Appreciation Day” suggested at the blog Mesmerized by sirens.  But the cutoff for that blog circus is games from 1989 or earlier, and this is bit too new.

A good while back I wrote a series of posts on Bruce Galloway’s Fantasy Wargaming.  (A compilation is in my “Pages” area but lacking the comments that you have to search the blog posts for!)  That was published in 1981 by Patrick Stephens Limited (PSL), a publisher that also published a number of wargaming books by Bruce Quarrie (one of the contributors to the first FW and an editor at PSL before the firm was bought by Rupert Murdoch and dissolved).

In 1990 they published a new book with the title Fantasy Wargaming; this time by Martin Hackett.  The credits indicate he mainly thanks his parents for helping with photography and typing, and his gaming buddies for playtesting etc.  I’m not familiar with anything else he’s written apart from the revision/sequel, Fantasy Gaming, which came out in 2007.

But Fantasy Wargaming is an awesome mess.  There are copious illustrations, both line drawings (sketches of figures — a real joy to identify) and photographs of figures and set-ups.  There is also a set of maps.  There is a plain “outline” map, a copy of it overlaid with hexes (“players map”) and a second hex map with a simple key indicated the dominant terrain of a hex (for setting up battles, etc.).  Very cool.

The photos of figures show a nice overview of the state of the art of fantasy miniatures.  I think the golden age of fantasy miniatures ended in the early 1990′s, when the lead scare, changes in the RPG and gaming industry, etc. changed the field immensely.  A lot of companies went under or floundered about.   Styles and fashions changed.  New sculptors entered the field.  Execution and mold-making evolved enough to attain a new look, and the use of more tin and even zinc alloys increased the strength of the castings, making more delicate poses and features possible.  The stuff that followed was not necessarily bad, but it was different and more standardized and more conscious of belonging to ‘product line’ with a uniform look.

But Fantasy Wargaming shows a great survey of everything from the golden age:  early Minifigs (who have character but must be admitted to be very crude in same cases) to Citadel slotta-based minis, as well as scratch-builds and a few conversions, and even plastic toys suitable for use in wargames.  There is a lot of terrain pictured.  And even period RPG books.  It’s quite a visual feast.  The only thing I complain about is the poor quality of the black and white photos, and small size of all images.  I wish this were a folio rather than an octavo.  The later book has better photography and better reproductions in the book, but far fewer and not many are old figures.  It really documents the changes in the state of fantasy minis — not something the author necessarily intended, but fascinating.  You can see some more details about the book (and images) here.  The reviewer there is not as enthusiastic as I am!

As to the game, the rules are spread across a number of chapters that also provide some background information on the hobby.  It suffers the same problems of presentation that the first FW had, although the two books are hard to compare really.  In all honesty I have not tried the rules out.  Hackett says that the later book presents an improved version of the game and I’d be inclined to try that first. But FW has some interesting ideas for inspiration.

There is d100 table of ‘campaign events’ for a fantasy wargame campaign.  Things like:

• 5 trolls from the nearest hill attack each hex until killed.
• Horses struck by mystery illness. No movement for this move.
• New mine discovered, produces 50 credits for three years.

Sure they are kind of generic but there are 100 of them.  Likewise there are brief guidelines and tables for creating regions, filling a hex map with terrain types, settlements, and monsters, and generating the rulers of areas.  There are simple army lists for various cultures and monstrous races.  There is also a gazetteer for a fantasy land, with random encounter tables and so forth for hex-crawling with an army.  That sounds like a hoot. He has a bestiary of traditional and original monsters, but their descriptions, game stats, and other factors like move rates are dispersed through the book.  Some of the new creatures are interesting, for example the “Lubin” (a wolf-goblin were-creature); but all are very loosely defined.  There are 100 magic items (some apparently cursed) that are mostly original (e.g. the Staff of the earth that lets you talk to plants, a magical talking wolf, and similar) and many are clearly designed to be of use in a wargame rather than RPG campaign (for example a magic mirror that reveals enemies in neighboring hexes).  There are some simple economics guidelines with costs for supplies, construction, and recruitment in “credits”.     

The RPG part of FW looks very simple and appealing.  There are five primary abilities (Power, Fitness, Agility, Luck, and Learning) and three secondary abilities (F.A., M.A., and Stealth).  There are three “Fighting Ability” categories: Piercing, Staff, and Missile.  Then there are six skills: Craft, Fauna, Flora, Languages, Literacy, and Perception.  The sample character is an elf and has a list of ten spells (there are many later in the rules) and two languages (elven not included; presumably you don’t need to list your PC’s native tongue).  The primary abilities and skills look like they are 1-100; the others are mostly single digits, and all under 20.  But the actual rules are not given; we are left to infer the game from the character sheet.  (The “sequel” does indeed provide the missing rules, and we learn that “F.A.” is fighting ability and M.A. is “magic ability,” as well as being treated to details on the races, classes, and even level, er, rank titles.  I love that the various different races have different titles for the same rank in a class.)

There is a concise review of Fantasy Gaming over here for the interested.  It made me rather interested in trying the RPG rules out.

As an RPG, you really need the second book to flesh out the game, and the wargaming rules are much more coherently presented in the second book as well.  I suppose the first volume is obsolete as a game manual, but it is certainly the more interesting of the two to skim for ideas and pictures of old miniatures.

The first book reminds me of a number of old RPG books — Arneson’s First fantasy campaign (because it is disorganized but filled with wonderful little ideas here and there); Bruce Galloway’s Fantasy Wargaming (because it attempts to survey the hobby and then offers disorganized rules); Dicing with dragons and Holme’s Fantasy Roleplaying Games (because of the glimpses of one man’s journey in the hobby, and the discussion of moral and educational aspects of gaming).  Like all of these, it is clearly a labor of love. And like the first two, despite it’s obscurity it has some detractors.  Still, as an artifact of a bygone era in gaming, and a reminder of what might have been had the industry not consolidated so much in the 1990′s, it is a joy to read.  For a miniatures lover like me, it is worth owning just for the pictures; for a role-player, it is possibly less useful now unless you plan to run a ‘domain management and war’ endgame.  It also makes me think of the original Warhammer rules — the first edition battle rules that were also a simple RPG.  But what I know of WFB 1st edition is mostly just gleaned from the Citadel Compedium and a few White Dwarf ads; I’ve never seen the original.  I discovered Warhammer when the second edition came out, and although it provided a bit for skirmishes the RPG side was gone.

Copies of both of Hackett’s books turn up fairly regularly in the used book market, and both are for sale on Amazon through ‘Amazon partners,’ so you can find them pretty cheaply if your curiosity is piqued!

Fairy tales on the big screen: The magic sword

I’ve got a nice copy of English Fairy Tales, retold by Flora Annie Steel & illustrated by Arthur Rackham.  I picked it up at a library book sale for the Rackham illos but I’ve also been reading the stories to my daughters.  Some of them are deeply disturbing, naturally, but all of them are pretty good.  I’ve read most of them a several times but somehow kept skipping the very first one, which is about St. George.  The story of St. George is retold here at Project Gutenburg (the rest of the book is here too, with the pictures!).

What jumped out at me (apart from the fact he St. George killed way more pagans than I would have guessed; I only knew about the dragon) is that this story is actually the basis of the 1962 movie The Magic Sword!  Seriously.  Things get sanitized a bit (instead of sacrificing babies, the witch-mom is pretty nice in the movie, etc.) and naturally a lot got dropped (the crusades mainly) but the broad strokes are all there — raised by a witch, the six international knights who join him, the ogre/giant, dragon, and magic sword, horse, and armor; notice too that our hero is Sir George in the film.  Lodac is new, and kind of replaces Almidor, the Moorish villain from the story, but for a movie that is so seriously bizarre, I was surprised to realize just how much of this acid trip movie was folkloric.  (OK, there are many versions of this tale, so F.A. Steel’s specific version may not be the basis of the movie per se; still I never realized how much of it was from ‘real’ legends.)

You can see the whole film here.  I think that, like Night of the living dead, this movie must be one of the casualties of copyright law and somehow got tossed into the public domain, based on the number of cheapo DVD releases it has had.

Also, both the film and the Steel book are veritable gold mines of D&D ideas.  What game would not benefit from chimpanzees in clothes, two-headed and/or pin-headed magicians’ servants, boiling pools of death, two-headed dragons, and that ape-ogre, or the orange tree and the magical falchion Ascalon?

Digging deeper into the Steel collection of fairy tales, the version of “Jack the Giant Killer” here is quite good and a reminder that the upcoming movie is really not an adaptation of that story at all, but of “Jack and the beanstalk” (which is also in this collection).  “The bogey beast,” “The golden ball,” “The three heads of the well,” “Child Rowland,” “Molly Whuppie and the double-faced giant,” and “The red ettin” all have some interesting monsters or encounters.

Rackham illustration for “The true history of Sir Thomas Thumb.” Looks like a scene from the Hobbit to me.

Three good reads

Now that Amazon has just bought out Goodreads.com, I’m not sure if I’ll stick with it.  Is there anything left online that isn’t owned by Amazon, Facebook, or Google?  But the past couple of weeks I’ve managed to get to a few really good books.

E pluribus unicorn by Theodore Sturgeon

Sturgeon was a very well-regarded writer of sci-fi and fantasy, as well as mysteries and “literary” fiction.  E pluribus unicorn was the second collection of his stories to be published and the stories are uniformly excellent.  Most in this collection have some element of the fantastic, and all have great characters.   “The silken-swift” and “A saucerful of loneliness” are the most memorable, but “The professor’s teddy” and “Cellmate” are great too.  Very worth reading.

Painted devils by Robert Aickman

Subtitled “strange stories,” the stories collected here all use a creeping sense of horror and doom, and Aickman apparently considered them to be “ghost stories” although not all actually have obviously paranormal events in them.  In some cases the suspense is slowly built and becomes quite disturbing, only to peter out with a dry, quick resolution that only suggests what the fuss might have been about.  These types of stories work because Aickman is a really good writer and his dialogue and characters “make sense” even when it is hard to tell exactly happened.  I have enjoyed the stories so far but it’s not a something I’m going to tear through and I’m just reading one or two selections at a time between other books.

I picked up this collection at a library book sale, sadly without the dust jacket with I understand was done by Edward Gorey, and I understand Aickman’s books are not terribly common on the used book market for some reason.

Gods & golems by Lester Del Rey

I just started this collection of five novellas by Lester Del Rey.  Del Rey is a very recognizable name because of his editing and publishing but I’d been reading raves about him by Avram Davidson and other writers and finally found a collection of Del Rey’s own work.  So far it is staggeringly good.  I’m partway through the first, “Vengeance is mine,” which began as a fairly tender story about an intelligent if naive robot on the Moon who is awaiting the return of his human masters, who have apparently been destroyed by war.

The stone god awakens

The stone god awakens, by Philip Jose Farmer.  That’s one hell of a book jacket.

Anyway I can’t say I’m a big Farmer fan.  I haven’t really read enough of his work to form a general opinion.  In fact this is the first novel of his I’ve read, and I’m not sure if I’ve ready stories by him in anthologies.

The premise of the book is that a physicist is frozen in time for millions year by some largely unexplained experiment, and emerges into a world populated by primitive humanoids that seem both human and animal.  He takes up with some cat-people who have been worshiping his frozen form as a god, and introduces bows, horse riding, and gun powder to them, and then gets increasingly involved in the various races and begins a search for other humans as well as battling another ‘god’ — a vast banyan tree system that threatens to consume the entire land mass.

The tree is huge — miles and miles across; thousands and thousands of feet tall; with thousands of branches.  Forests, rivers, and lakes form within the branches, and many strange animals and humanoids populate it.  It is fairly inspiring as a strange environment to explore: rivers course along some branches, to fall precipitously into waterfalls thousands of feet down; the ground beneath the tree is a perpetually dark, swampy mire, where bits of the tree occasionally crash down, and various vermin inhabit the decaying branches.  The tree itself may in fact be intelligent (why spoil the book?)

The other thing I liked about this book was that it provided a fairly a somewhat consistent world for Gamma World type adventures.  The world as we knew is long gone, and the flora and fauna are all unrecognizable.  It also suggests what is probably the most logical way to run GW: the PCs, like the protagonist, are from the past (or another world) and are discovering the mysterious environment.  Other have suggested running mutant PCs in the GW as tokens of  species, and this world would at least make mutated animals viable species.

Apart from using the book as inspiration for gaming, though, I would not really recommend it as literature.  The hero is never all that interesting, and his main conflict is whether or not he’s attracted to a cat-woman (I’m guessing Farmer is).  The book is not broken into chapters but is more like a really long short story, which gets kind of tedious.  The bad guys are obviously bad from the get-go, but no one has very clear or realistic motivations. The book also fails to end with any real sense of resolution, and it seems like Farmer may have wanted to leave opening for a sequel.  If not, he actually made a fairly bold and original choice, to leave the villain undefeated and hero wondering if it is worth fighting.  I guess I should give him the benefit of the doubt and say he breaks conventions a little; still, I had a lot of trouble caring about the characters or even telling most of them apart except by species.

Free clysters and pottage!

That’s right, Burgs & Bailiffs is now available for free download! (Click here)

Book porn

There’s another meme about posting you gaming books shelves. In!

These are the two book shelves behind my D&D table. The tall one is sort of customized from a cast-off store fixture. The short one I had in my play room as a kid.

Top shelves of the tall one. RPG and warfare references on the very top mostly. “Halbritter’s Arms through the ages” is a very funny picture book of silly medieval weapons systems. Below that, some boxed sets (my Grindhouse boxed set, which I won!, and S&W white box, which I traded for…can’t convince my brother to try either) and lots of reference stuff.

This shelf is my real gaming collection. AD&D, B/X, and some supplements get the most use. The big binder is my home campaign notes. The box next to it has my main wargames of choise — DBA, HoTT, and a few other WRG books. The two things on the far right are ‘pamphlet binders’ I sewed my “Best of Dragon” vols. one and two inside of.

Next shelf down are some less-used RPG books and general references. The black box is OD&D and supplements. Printed from pdfs, not originals.  I have Barlowe’s Extraterrestrials and Fantasy, each snatched for a $1 at a book sale.  A lot of my reference books come from library book sales.

Wargaming (mostly old Warhammer) and some other things. The blue binder is stuff from my old campaigns in college, old characters, and such.

The top shelf of the little bookshelf is mostly occultism.

The middle shelf is some history (mostly American/Native American). And my note cards, I always need them while DMing. The swami is an incense burner but I no longer burn incense while gaming. The bookmark is made of bark and was brought back from Russia by an inlaw.

Confirmation

Here’s a little nugget I stumbled across in a book on wargames. Georg Leopold von Reiswitz, the man who made the original wargame table for Friedrich Wilhelm III, and who also developed the rules in concert with other military staff.  He committed suicide for professional reasons* and his son later developed the rules further.  Anyway the interesting thing is:

A year after his death [i.e., 1828], a supplement** appeared that built on Reiswitz’s war game instruction manual without a single mention of it or him. Among the innovations of the supplement were the exceptional roll of the dice and an emergency die. If an improbable exceptional roll succeeded, the emergency die decided whether the exception took effect.  Because if the point was “not to exclude any case that is possible in war, even so improbable a case, the game must also permit exceptions to the rule that must, however, have their own rules in turn.”–War games : a history of war on paper / Philipp von Hilgers; translated by Ross Benjamin.  MIT Press, c2012.

So as early as 1828 game designers had the idea of ‘confirming’ improbable events.  This reminded me of ‘confirming’ criticals in WotC D&D.  I had no idea this rule had such a long pedigree.

Actually, the talk of “exceptions to the rule” “hav[ing] their own rules in turn” is pretty much a thumbnail sketch of 3rd edition as I understand it.  I’m beginning to wonder: is the divide between ‘old school’ and ‘new school’ D&D really a divide between which of the roots of D&D is more important (old school perhaps preferring the free-form Braunstein and new school hearkening back more towards the Prussian Kriegspiel)?  Maybe the influence of MMOs and collectible card games that old school edition warriors bemoan is less essnetial to WotC D&D than the echoes of Kriegspielers…

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*That is, not over the game, but because his superiors passed him for promotion and gave him crummy assignments.  I will try to use the phrase “committed suicide for professional reasons” more though, it makes me smile.

**The anonymous supplement mentioned is cited as: “Supplement zu den bisherigen Kriegspiel-Regeln.” Zeitschrift für Kunst, Wissenschaft, und Geschichte des Krieges 13(4): 68-105. 1828.