Of Dwarves and Jews

“Daddy Grognard” recently posted a nice dwarf figure and added an intriguing excerpt from a letter by Tolkien mentioning that he thought of dwarves as being more like Jews than tiny Vikings or Scots.

I’ve seen some mention else where that the dwarvish language in Tolkien is very Semitic, despite their Scandinavian personal names (and the dwarves apparently don’t use their true names among outsiders anyway…), and also that dwarvish architecture, being huge and monolithic and with massive columns seems Assyrian or Semitic too.

Could the “model” for the dwarves be Jewish or Semitic? (as the model for the Rohirrim, say, was the Anglo-Saxons?) This puts quite a different, and offensive, spin on dwarvish tropes of beards, large noses, famous craftsmanship, secretiveness about their women, ancestral grudges, and love of battle and gold, doesn’t it?

Might the dwarf-elf enmity be a sign of elvish antisemitism?

Well, there is this quote from an interview, and this academic paper on Dwarves in The Hobbit and LOTR. The paper is actually very good, although the author does stretch things a little. The thesis is that the dwarves of The Hobbit are very different from the the dwarves of LOTR, and that to some extent JRRT was “correcting” his unconsciously antisemitic depiction of dwarves. Very interesting reading.

Thirty-odd odd Norse magic items

Back in high school, or possibly junior high, I started compiling a list of Norse mythology’s people, places, & things as I found them referred to in various books.  Sadly I stopped before I began reading Norse sagas and romances off and on a few years later, so the list is mostly what I found in a few encyclopedias (I think — I may have ripped off other sources, my notes are sketchy and filled with misspellings!)

The following is a list of magic items I thought I might incorporate into a Norse campaign using the much-maligned and possibly unplayable Fantasy Wargaming rules.

Lovecraft, Swords & Sorcery, & D&D

In college I stumbled across a book of letters between Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft.  I’d heard, I think, that Howard’s Hyboria was connected to the “Cthulhu mythos” (if that term is legitimate) but had no idea the two had so much in common, despite their fierce differences.  Anyway I was often puzzled about the inclusion of the Cthulhu mythos in the first printings of the AD&D Deities & Demigods, and the blanket endorsement of Lovecraft’s work  in the Dungeon Masters Guide.  What does D&D have to do with HPL?  How do a bunch of adventurers (usually loosely modeled on the Fellowship of the Ring) going into dungeons for gold and glory have anything to do with the eldritch terror, cosmic horrors, and existential angst of HPL?  The various monsters that owe something to the aliens of HPL are obvious enough.

Some more on worldbuilding

Poul Anderson rocked.  The broken sword, which was published just before Lord of the Rings, is, in my opinion, terribly underappreciated.  It’s a fairly short book, and certainly the most brutal of his works that I’ve read, and you should go read read it right away.

I saw this cover in a book of Boris Vallejo’s paintings long before I ever read the book and honestly I probably wouldn’t have read it based on the cover. I’m guessing Boris didn’t actually read it either. Although the cover does depict something that happens in the book, this really doesn’t capture the feel of the book at all. 

This week I stumbled onto an essay Anderson wrote in the 1970s, and hosted here. It’s called “On thud and blunder” and it is partly a critique of the laziness of many fantasy/ swords& sorcery writers, and partly some basic information you should consider when creating a fantastic world grounded in some reality.  A similar article at sci-fi/fantasy writing site asks a bunch of questions a budding fantasy author should consider when building a world.  I think either is great fodder for a DM too.  Good stuff.

Christmas update

Despite having some kind of rotavirus/stomach flu ye olde flux & emesis* pass from my daughter, to my wife, to me in succession, we all managed to be healthy on Christmas Day, which was great. We alternate between my side and my wife’s side each year, and this year was with my side, so the first of the games I made went to my niece.  She is “that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys’ games and books” (to use H.G. Wells‘ memorable phrase). Actually she has long been interesting all things fantastic and fantasy-oriented, but I was afraid I may have gotten to her a bit to late, as she is just now approaching her teen years and, I feared, was ready to put away childish things. I turns out, not so much.

A couple of updates

I added my revised rules for the Heritage dungeon crawls to the Rules page, and the rules & maps for the dungeons to the mythology page.

If I should make any new maps, I will, based on my experiences, do the originals on 8×10″ panels to be assembled later!  Actually I have some ideas about creating sections that can be assembled in multiple configurations, like the old D&D “Dungeon Geomorphs.”

Oh, and the most awesome thing to report is that my 4-year old decided to make her own “D&D map”:

She saved a piece of cardboard (“Daddy, if you don’t recycle this I can make a D&D map”) and needed a little help painting it (“What color does black and red and yellow make? What color does green and blue and red make?”), and admitted “I don’t know how to play D&D” when she was done, but I’m encouraging her to make it up as she goes.  She said the unpainted square on the upper left is the start, so she has some idea it is like a board game, and put one of her toys on it.  We’ll see.  It will be nice if she has something to do with all of the dice she’s stolen from me!

Finally finished the “gift” games!

As I mentioned last time, the boards were all finally in a finished state:

But noone can actually scan a board that big, so, although it killed me to do it…

Cut into scannable chunks, scanned, reassembled as the pdfs I put on Scribd, printed, touched up, laminated.

Happily I was able to salvage the originals into a usable form too, as I’d hoped.  I covered each section with clear shelf paper and then reassembled them with more shelf paper so that fold like game boards.  Unfortunately I’d cut one so assymetrically that it looks really bad folded up but all are serviceable. Edge on:

3/4 opened:Completely opened up:

And completely folded up again:

So anyway here is what a completed gift game is looking like:

That is the “Hall of the Frost Giant.”  Map, booklet (general rules and the specifics for this dungeon), two laminated sheets of tables, and two record sheets, each usable to keep track for at least two adventures, and case for the figures (they’re on the map in this shot).  The monsters are in the large oval feating hall room and the adventurers are in the hall to the left.

Focus!

And lastly here is a shot of the figures in their boxes:

And the figures for the other three games:

Now that I’m ready to wrap them up, I’m a little excited that I can get back to painting figures for myself again….

OfficeMax, you’re dead to me

I could have sworn I called OfficeMax’s copy center about making copies of my map boards.  But when I strolled in Saturday morning to have the rules books printed up and copies of maps made an laminated, they said no can do.  They have a flat bed scanner that can only handle 11×17 and even then with some loss on the edges.  WTF? How did I not realize copy places can’t make copies of anything bigger than 11×17?  Technically you could find a scanner for something on paper that is bigger, but I used foam core to reduce warping from the paint.  In the end I couldn’t bring myself to start all over, so I cut the boards up into 8×10 or so sections and scanned them on my computer, then got my brother to reassemble them as printable pdfs.  They are not perfect, due to my cutting more than Tom’s reassembly.  Oh well.  The prints look decent and I will touch them up with a Sharpie, have them laminated, and the project is finally done!  In time for Xmas too!  Woot!

I’ll take pics and post them later.  For now I went ahead an uploaded the the files to scribd.com, for the curious.   Here is one, for example.  The scenarios, and my version of the basic rules, are there too if you poke around.

OK, maybe I never did call OfficeMax before … it is kind of a blur now.  Still, I coulda punched someone when that happened.

Mythology maps progress

Been super busy lately getting ready to insulate my attic (there’s a lot of prep work, and the access hatch is about exactly as wide as my ass, so not a lot of fun getting in & out of there with tools).

Anyway I managed to at least draw the three maps for the mythology themed dungeons, below:The tomb of the forgotten pharaoh.  Very heavily influenced by other Egyptian map, and more authentic in that it is smaller and follows the plan of a real royal tomb.

The lair of the frost giant.  That’s a trophy room in the lower left corner, with heads of various animals (and adventurers!) on plaques on the wall, and the big room with a giant table is the throne room/feasting hall.

The ruins of Minos.  There is a labyrinth in the upper right and large round chamber is collapsed section where the Hydra will lurk.

All need to have traps and numbers added to some squares (I’ll write much smaller on these), and will also get some marginalia (hieroglyphs/runes/Greek writing, encounter and treasure tables, and so on).  I still need to find out how expensive getting these puppies photocopied will be too… all that will have to wait until I finish with the insulation project though.

Mythology maps

All the figures for the mythology sets are done.  I decide to do just one of each and the fourth gift set will be a modified Caverns of Doom.  The figures for that will be larger 28mm plastics from a few different sets I’ll detail later.  The Caverns retread will basically use the same map as original CoD but the mytohlogy maps are giving me a little more trouble.  I decide to make them all a little smaller than CoD, but after drawing them I realized my halls were all very short compared to CoD/CoS, and I’m tihnking that could have adverse effects on the mechanics, because a party would move through a given hall much faster than is possible in the original games and that probably means fewer wandering monsters.  So I’ve redrawn them.  I’ll also need to hammer out how the monsters will work.  No more pics yet but some of theo ther pages are being slowly updated.  I had no idea how many pages and pictures were on my old web site, and I’m more motivated now to post other things I’ve made over the years.