In a high minaret in one of the largest palaces of the Yellow City sits Xíklí Gá, child of one of the richest of the city's merchants. Grown fat now, and old, she can only move with the aid of her human slaves, who bear her great molluscoid body around on an ebony palanquin. But her ambition knows no bounds. From her vantage point in her palace she can gaze out over the entire city, which she dreams she will one day own.
Xíklí Gá has fingers in many different pies. Organised crime, legitimate trade, gambling, politics and opium dens, she is a powerful player in all of those worlds. Many adventurers and mercenaries find employment in her amorphous organisation - so much so that "taking Xíklí's silver" has become a byword in the slums for turning to the life of a sellsword.
Xíklí Gá
Chaotic 8th Level Slugperson (Mage)
STR - 9
INT - 18
WIS - 17
DEX - 4
CON - 16
CHR - 10
Equipment: The Ring of Li Hiaqiu [Ring of Protection +5], Vinegarroon Claw Amulet [Amulet of Immunity to Poison]
Bodyguards: Four 4th level human fighters. [Sword, spear, shield, scale mail.]
Back in the land of the living, and more China Mieville. (I'm not a stalker, honest. He's been guest blogger all this week on another blog I occasionally read, so he's looming large in my google reader tray. This will be my last Mievillian post for a while.)
But anyway, there's a good interview here, in which he and Jeff VanderMeer bat various issues back and forth in an entertaining if slightly smart-alecky way. Especially good near the beginning, where he talks about "the Weird" and the sublime - high-falutin' English-literature-undergrad nomenclature aside, it's rather nice. Quote of the interview:
I think a lot of what we admire in Weird Fictioneers is not that they see, but that they make a decent fist of expressing.
We all see weirdness, awe, beauty, the sublime, whatever, in our lives; the talent is in putting it into words. Or, I suppose, pictures.
The whole thing is well worth reading, though, and there are some good comments underneath it, too.
I'm writing this from a roadside internet cafe somewhere in the depths of Iwate prefecture - I wouldn't normally have bothered spending the extra 200 yen, but I just spotted something in my google reader feed that I had to link to: China Mieville saying nice things about Tolkien. (Regular readers will know why this is of extra special interest.) It seems China has had a change of heart, and it's a welcome one. Three quotes I picked out on a cursory reading:
Whatever we see as the drive behind Tolkien's tragic vision, and however we relate to its politics and aesthetics, the tragedy of the creeping tawdry quotidian gives Middle Earth a powerful melancholia lamentably missing from too much of what followed. It deserves celebrating and reclaiming.
...
[S]ay what you like about him, Tolk gives good monster. Shelob, Smaug, the Balrog...in their astounding names, the fearful verve of their descriptions, their various undomesticated malevolence, these creatures are utterly embedded in our world-view. No one can write giant spiders except through Shelob: all dragons are sidekicks now.
...
In his abjuring of allegory, Tolkien refuses the notion that a work of fiction is, in some reductive way, primarily, solely, or really 'about' something else, narrowly and precisely. That the work of the reader is one of code-breaking, that if we find the right key we can perform a hermeneutic algorithm and 'solve' the book. Tolkien knows that that makes for both clumsy fiction and clunky code. His dissatisfaction with the Narnia books was in part precisely because they veered too close to allegory, and therefore did not believe in their own landscape. A similar problem is visible now, in the various tentative ventures into u- or dystopia by writers uncomfortable with the genre they find themselves in and therefore the worlds they create, eager to stress that these worlds are 'about' real and serious things--and thereby bleeding them of the specificity they need to be worth inhabiting, or capable of 'meaning', at all. [Emphasis added.]
I find China's comments about 'Oedipal Resentment' on the part of young writers towards Tolkien pretty funny, because he's obviously speaking from experience but isn't honest enough to say so. I also think his own fiction has strayed into the territory he rejects in the third quoted section above. But this is the best piece I've read on Tolkien in some time, and it's nice to see that China's grown up quite a bit. I was going to buy his latest book anyway, but I think I might get it even sooner than I was going to.
I'll be away from teh interwebs for the next few days. Unforeseen circumstances and all that. Should be back to regular posting and comments answering from Thursday or Friday.
We all know hirelings are a cornerstone of D&D and other dungeon-delving type fantasy games. Cross their palms with silver and they'll follow you to any dragon's den. But what's really in it for them? What's all that silver for? Roll a d12 and find out.
1. The hireling is an opiate addict and needs money for his fix.
2. The hireling's sister was abducted by bandits and he needs ransom money.
3. The hireling is on the run from the law and being a hireling is just a cover.
4. Money makes the world go round and this hireling is just a greedy bastard who wants more of it.
5. The hireling spends all together too much on whores.
6. Gambling debts and loan sharks makes earning money a matter of life and death.
7. The hireling is a lothario and bon viveur and needs silver to maintain the lifestyle "to which he has become accustomed."
8. The hireling is an ascetic who wants to earn money so he can give it to his religious order/the poor.
9. There are a dozen children for the poor sap to support.
10. The hireling is saving money so that he can buy a boat and head off to the New World.
11. The hireling is an ex-military man and the only skill he has is with a sword.
12. The hireling wants to pay a cleric to heal his wife of a debilitating disease.
I have now entered the 21st Century and joined this twitter thing everybody is talking about. I won't talk about RPGs much but you're welcome to follow my ramblings about law, academia, booze and girls there if you like; this is the place.
Also, I feel like I should update on Yoon-suin, in case anybody is still interested. Work continues apace (i.e. aslowpace, aha ha ha). I've been methodically jotting down ideas as they come to me and writing up some travelogues that I'll put up on the blog at some point. I'm not sure whether to "do a Scott" and just create a wiki, or compile a pdf and release that.
Finally, I notice that the inestimable taichara has decided to put some entries together into a document for release, for which she [I'm pretty sure she's a she; correct me if I'm wrong] should be applauded to the heavens.
Saw Terminator: Salvation over the weekend and mostly hated it (though there's no denying the brilliance of the effects and some great explosions and crunching action scenes). But it has me in a post-apocalyptic frame of mind.
I was 10 years old when the Iron Curtain fell and therefore of that last generation who knew at least something of the Cold War. (I remember being told by a primary school teacher what to do in the event of a nuclear attack - I think it boiled down to getting into a bath and covering it with a mattress, or if not, hiding under something slanted like a conveniently placed door taken off its hinges and leant against a wall. Even at the age of 9 these methods struck me as somewhat unlikely. If only I'd seen the fourth Indiana Jones film - I would have known to just get in the fridge.) I even participated in a debate on the merits of Britain maintaining its nuclear deterrent at the age of 10 or so; as a young boy who liked drawing pictures of stuff blowing up, I was naturally in favour.
So although nostalgia is perhaps the wrong word, nuclear war does have something of an old-fashioned, almost retro feel to it that I oddly appreciate. It is as associated with my childhood as is Mr. Whippy ice cream, summertime ant plagues, football in the park after school, and fights with my sister. Something that was in the background and which we didn't think much about, but lurked there all the same. A very distant and very vague threat that manifested itself in news stories about the Berlin Wall, Ceausescu, Trident and Letters of Last Resort.
I've thought about post-apocalyptic gaming many times before, but never really played it - unless Cyberpunk 2020 counts, which I suppose it might. Perhaps another idea for GURPS. Ah, the possibilities, the possibilities:
- What would have happened if the Cuba Missile Crisis had kicked off?
- What would have happened if the Nazis had won the race to nuclear power?
- Some unlikely future scenario?
- The invention of time travel sees a temporal cold war a la Star Trek: Enterprise except good, finally resulting in nuclear apocalypse in the Age of Sail?
The last is my favourite.
[Credit to Big Fella for the idea.]
The Men at the Last are an order of clerics, executioners, surgeons and mystics, who have accompanied the armies of Cournouaille since before the establishment of the Duchy. Usually not more than 100 in number, they tend to those wounded in battle or diseased - and are there to kill with mercy those who are beyond their help. They always do this with a misericorde - a long, very thin knife which they insert into the heart by plunging it down behind the collar bone or through the ribs. For heavily armoured men the blade is sometimes pushed in through the eye to the brain.
If they can, The Men at the Last attempt to capture the last breath of each patient in a glass jar - just before or after administering the coup de grace. A huge collection of these jars can be found in the order's headquarters, the monastery at Douamenez. Arranged in rows on shelves in a vast, domed hall, on hot days the sun streams in through the windows and makes the jars glow with astonishing clarity. On such days the men of the order gather in the chamber, imagining that they can see the very souls of the men they have slain, trapped within the jars.
Legend has it that when if ever Douamenez should be in peril, the jars can be shattered and the dead of Cournouaille will go to its rescue, whereafter they will achieve their final release.
When I'm not the DM in a game of D&D (which isn't often), I usually play fighters. I like not having to think about magic, psionics and what-have-you, and just get on with killing things with extreme prejudice. (The fact that this playstyle is no longer supported by D&D - all the classes are now all about resource management - is one of 4e's big turn-offs.)
One thing I've noticed over the years is that people who play fighters tend to choose the same weapons - longsword, battle axe, maybe the occasional spear or two-handed sword. (I believe one of those idiotic min/maxing stalwarts from the 3.X days was a fighter with a chain.) This has always been boring to me and I've always tried to equip my fighters with signature weapons that not many other people use. These have included, over the years, the khopesh, the glaive, the morning star and the quarter-staff.
Of course, if you really want to go to town, there are weapons like the misericorde, macuahuitl, or bich'hwa that would do the trick. Sure, they might not do a lot of damage in D&D terms, but they really make a fighter stand out from the crowd...
After I badmouthed David Eddings only a week ago, the man has now passed away and made me feel bad. I didn't really like his books - though I did enjoy The Mallorean series for what it was - and thought that they were a very cynical marketing ploy. Still, he was one of those writers who popularised the genre, bringing it out of its 1970s/80s funk and transforming it into the mighty behemoth it is today; for that reason I think all fantasy fans should be at least respectful of him.
He also wrote one of the most memorable scenes in fantasy (for me), which occurred in I think the second book of The Mallorean. In it, Garion and chums are set upon in a forest by zombie-like attackers, reminiscent of the creatures in the 28 [weeks, days] Later films, and have to resort to creating a kind of forcefield around themselves which the enemies fling themselves at. It's a very exciting scene and one that's stuck in my mind for the 13 years or so since I read it.
