Even if you don’t play the game, you can still flip through it and think chimeras and hook horrors and mindflayers are awesome. Which follows through; even if you aren’t going to use any given monster, you can still find them interesting, and who knows, maybe flipping through you’ll find something that inspires you. I’ve built entire adventures, campaign tent poles, around a monster that tickled my fancy… I was very impressed with how closely the 1e Monster Manual adhered to my monster design philosophy: make every monster a mini-game.

Yes — exactly that. Even today, virtually every new adventure I design begins with flipping through MM (or MM II) until I see something that inspires me. These are books I’ve used more or less continuously for three decades. That’s my definition of a classic.

Here’s Mordicai on the Dungeon Masters Guide:

The items, frankly, are neat as all get out. There is a good reason that all of the items here have been re-imagined in every subsequent edition — they are fantastic… The section on artifacts is…a mixed bag. First off, the Hand of Vecna! We all agree that the Hand and Eye of Vecna are the best artifacts, right?… While the backstories are wonderful, and I appreciate the impulse to leave artifacts open for DMs to tweak…a blank list of powers is just not helpful. Which is what you get, literal blank lines printed in the book. Come on, at least give a default suggestion!

What he said. Read the complete review here.

Like some of the other stuff I’ve been talking about, I don’t think this concept is something that’s just shown up recently. In Don Quijote – widely considered to be the first novel, though you won’t get many who’ll agree on what genre it is – we have the titular Don himself, but we also have his travelling companion and side-kick, Sancho Panza.

But, you might argue, Sancho is a side-kick, and not an adventurer in and of himself – though again, you’ll find those who’ll dispute that, and maybe even convince you that, title aside, the book really belongs to Sancho. But let’s think about the implications here for genre heroes. When is a character a side-kick (pray note that I don’t qualify that by saying “just”) and when is the character a co-hero?

Let’s think about it. What about Batman and Robin? Batman existed first, Robin is younger, and at least starts off as inexperienced. That seems to argue for side-kick. But is Robin more an apprentice who eventually becomes a partner? Whatever we might ultimately decide about the Dynamic Duo, is there another pairing that comes even this close?

The Green Hornet and Kato? The Lone Ranger and Tonto? Kirk and Spock? And I know that some of you are going to bring up heroic groups, like the Fantastic Four, or X-Men. But the group dynamic isn’t something I want to address – though I think someone should.

There’s a famous pairing I’ve already talked about elsewhere, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Traditionally, it’s been pretty clear that Watson is the sidekick – he certainly always saw himself in that light. In the two most recent versions of their characters, however, it’s been equally clear that Watson is moving up to co-hero status. In the recent season finale of Elementary, for example [SPOILER ALERT] it’s Watson who saves Holmes.

Of course, there have been some very successful and popular single heroes. In comics, the obvious ones are Superman and Wonder Woman (the lone female, in all senses of the word). In fantasy, Conan comes immediately to mind, along with Elric, and even Dilvish the Damned (sorry, I think the horse is a side-kick). But then dual heroes began to appear, starting with Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser (you knew I was going to find a way to mention them, didn’t you?). So that begs another question: Why have dual heroes in the first place? Well, there used to be an old commercial about doubling your pleasure and doubling your fun that might apply here, but it’s really more than that, isn’t it?

As I’ve said before, Watson’s ordinary Victorian gentleman (or modern equivalent) gives us access to Holmes’ genius, makes him tolerable for us, in a way that the solo character wouldn’t be (think Leonard and Sheldon). An heroic pair could have the same effect; one could be more sympathetic than the other, giving readers emotional access to both characters. But, again I think there’s more.

Let’s go back to the city/country tension I was talking about earlier. With the dual hero trope, we can use this tension in an entirely new way. We can have both the urbane character and the barbarian. Both the city mouse and the country mouse. And, the perfect example of this is (ahem) Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. One is literally a (northern) barbarian and one a child of the city streets. Leiber uses and deconstructs the dichotomy at the same time. Fulfils and confounds our expectations of both stereotypes. And do note that at the time of the first F&GM story, these were already stereotypes. Okay, maybe archetypes is a nicer word. Each complains about the other, each affects to disparage the other’s background But in fact each brings his own level of knowledge and sophistication to the problem at hand. And, perhaps most important, they have essentially the same values, which is what makes them both heroes, and what holds them together.

Lately we’ve been getting some very interesting hero pairs that build on both the country/city dichotomy, and the Fafhrd/Grey Mouser partnership. In Howard Andrew Jones’ books, The Desert of Souls and The Bones of the Old Ones, we’re introduced to Dabir and Asim. One is a scholar, and the other a soldier, but even though their story is told, Watson-fashion, by Asim, it’s clear that these two are both heroes. And, in case you’re not familiar with these books (you should be), it’s the soldier who narrates, not the scholar. Once more, we’re given the more accessible everyman point of view.

In Dave Gross’s Pathfinder books, notably Queen of Thorns, or Master of Devils, we can follow the adventures of Varian Jeggare and Radovan. Even though Radovan is billed as “the bodyguard”, dual streams of first-person narrative make it clear that we’re dealing with co-heroes – and we’re also seeing some nice, subtle revelations of character, as we’re occasionally shown the same scene from different points of view. As in Jones’s work, differing social status – and species status for that matter – don’t interfere in the heroes’ partnership, and their fundamental loyalty to one another.

But, I hear many of my friends saying, these are all men. What about women?

Well, I have to leave something for next week, don’t I?

Violette Malan is the author of the Dhulyn and Parno series of sword and sorcery adventures, as well as the Mirror Lands series of primary world fantasies. As VM Escalada, she writes the soon-to-be released Halls of Law series. Visit her website www.violettemalan.com.

“Yeti” was serialized by King Features Syndicate from July 21 to November 17, 1963. Raboy’s artwork was not as strong by this point as it had been earlier, but having succeeded Don Moore in writing his own scripts, it is clear that Raboy was taking a cue from Dan Barry’s concurrent daily strip in moving the series away from Alex Raymond’s original template.

The story begins with explorer Bill Penrose paying a visit to a Himalayan lamasery where the Lama shows him the skull of a yeti, but warns him that those who seek to solve the mystery are never seen again. Penrose decides to press on and find the truth about the Abominable Snowman legend at long last. The intrepid explorer finds his quarry soon enough, but the Neanderthal tribe quickly overpower him. This is a surprising start that owes more to Nigel Kneale than Alex Raymond. The decision to open on a secondary character is also a unique one.

When Flash and Dale realize their friend Bill has disappeared, they set off with their Tibetan guide, Tingzen, to retrace his steps. Soon enough they find the footprints of the Abominable Snowmen where Penrose’s footprints end. Continuing on in spite of Tingzen’s warnings, the party is overtaken by the Yeti tribe, only to discover the creatures are not the missing link between man and ape, but instead fur-covered robots.

They are taken inside a hidden cave fortress where Bill and other explorers are imprisoned. The trio is brought before a wizened alien being called Dacat who tells them his peaceful telepathic race are mining Earth for copper and are using the Yeti robots to shield their activities. Assuring them they will be released from captivity after the mining operation concludes, Dacat places them in a cell with Penrose and the others.

Bill reveals the truth to Flash and Dale that Dacat is not mining copper, but uranium. Realizing Interpol has to be informed, Flash and Tingzen work to break out of the cell. The others are soon recaptured by the Yeti robots, but Flash escapes and makes his way down the mountain. A pursuing Yeti plunges with Flash off the edge of a precipice. Flash recovers consciousness to find he has been discovered by a rescue team in a helicopter.

Displaying uncharacteristic scientific genius, Flash reprograms the Yeti to return to the lair and release the prisoners. Dale, Bill, and Tingzen are recovered, but Dacat begins firing a laser at them and destroys their helicopter. Flash responds by tossing a hand grenade into the mouth of the cave in an act of sheer stupidity since he knows Dacat is mining uranium. The resulting atomic explosion sends them skidding down the mountain.

As the atomic chain reaction continues to decimate the Himalayas, Dacat flees in his flying saucer, but is caught in the blast and destroyed. The Himalayas are left in rubble, but the others escape with only cuts and bruises, with Flash assuring them that the strong winds will protect them from the radioactive fallout.

Despite the scientific implausibility, this is a tightly plotted story that ignores the formulaic femme fatales, conniving traitors, and usurping regents that had grown stale in the three decades since Alex Raymond created the characters. Mac Raboy’s twenty-year run on the strip offered readers excellent artwork and strong stories to match. He proved a worthy heir and did his part in keeping Flash and company alive in the Cold War years.

William Patrick Maynard was authorized to continue Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu thrillers beginning with The Terror of Fu Manchu (2009; Black Coat Press) and The Destiny of Fu Manchu (2012; Black Coat Press). Next up is a collection of short stories featuring an original Edwardian detective, The Occult Case Book of Shankar Hardwicke, The Triumph of Fu Manchu, and a hardboiled detective novel, Lawhead. To see additional articles by William, visit his blog at SetiSays.blogspot.com

New Line Cinema released the trilogy of Blade movies between 1998 and 2004. They were based on the half-breed vampire slayer character created for Marvel Comics by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan debuting in 1973′s The Tomb of Dracula #10.

Granted, not all three movies were created equal, but I thought the first one was solid and though by the third installment, Blade Trinity, fans of the comic might not have recognized much, the snappy dialog written for Ryan Reynolds and the overall eye-candy made it at least entertaining, if not wildly successful.

In fact, at this year’s C2E2 I overheard an interesting bit of Blade Trinity trivia which maybe helps explain why.

Actor and comedian Patton Oswalt — who played weapons expert Hedges in the third Blade movie – was signing autographs.  He told a fan that all those Ryan Reynolds’ sophomoric one-liners followed by Wesley Snipes’ dead pan stares were largely the result of Snipes not speaking to screenwriter / director David Goyer.

Apparently Snipes would only communicate to Goyer via post-it notes and generally refused to cooperate during the production, causing the rest of the cast to take up the uncomfortable slack in an attempt to save the film. Oswalt explained:

We would all just think of things for him (Reynolds) to say and then cut to Wesley’s face not doing anything because that’s all we could get from him (Snipes).  That was an example of a very troubled shoot that we made fun. You have to find a way to make it fun.

Interesting.

Even more so when you consider that the entire franchise might be getting a chance at a Snipes-free redemption.

Patton Oswalt

A while ago, it was confirmed that the intellectual property rights for Daredevil had indeed returned to the hands of Marvel (Disney), due to 20th Century Fox not being able to keep the property in production long enough to retain the rights.

This week, we learned about three additional properties being returned to Marvel. According to an article in the most recent Entertainment Weekly magazine, Ghost Rider, The Punisher, and Blade have all reverted back to their parent company as well.

Though studio President Kevin Feige indicates Marvel is in no rush to put the properties into development, a new report may suggest otherwise.

In its story about Robert Downey Jr.’s contract negotiations, The Hollywood Reporter contends Marvel already has a script for a Blade reboot.

Now, just because there’s a Blade script is still no indication the project will move into production any time soon. Beyond the mere calendar constraints — the studio’s dance card is already filled through 2015, with additional releases penciled in afterward — Marvel’s writing program has frequently served as a concept generator, producing sometimes well-regarded scripts (a Black Widow solo film, for example) that never go forward.

Idris Elba

So sometimes a script is just a script.

However, in the case of Blade, David Goyer has said he firmly believes Marvel Studios will reboot the vampire movie series.

Now that Marvel/Disney has recaptured the rights, I’m sure it (Blade) will be [remade]. They made too much money on that character to not reboot him at some point. I mean, look, between merchandise and whatnot, that little character generated almost a billion dollars.

Late-breaking news from the underground Hollywood grapevine indicates actor Idris Elba (Prometheus, Thor) has signed a four-picture commitment with Marvel Studios, but Marvel has not signed Elba on to any particular character. Speculation is rampant that the sword Elba is meant to wield belongs to none other than our beloved Blade.

Game on…

For his part, Wesley Snipes was released from Federal prison on April 4^th of this year, following a three-year term for tax evasion.  Poor box-office returns and erratic behavior aside, Snipes, now 50, is likely utterly absent from any short-list of actors to reprise the role of Blade. However, word is that Sylvester Stallone has tapped Snipes for the Expendables 3 movie set to begin filming this fall.

Good luck with that, both of you.

What do you think of Marvel taking another run at Blade?  Who do you think should be cast?  Post a comment or drop a line to Sue@blackgate.com.

The cover looked intriguing, in a spooky, gas-lit London sort of way. But was it fantasy? I don’t want to get stuck with another Da Vinci Code clone.

The Booklist quote on the cover called it “A seductive cosmic thriller.” What the heck did that mean? Cosmic, like Elder Gods cosmic? Thanos versus The Avengers cosmic? Or 700-pages-that-feel-like-they’ll-never-end cosmic?

The back cover text wasn’t much help:

Every hour, childlike Marc Rochat circles the Lausanne cathedral as the watchmen have done for centuries. Then one day a beautiful woman draws him out of the shadows — the angel his mother once promised him would come.

But Katherine Taylor is no angel. She’s one of the toughest and most resourceful call girls in Lausanne. Until something unnatural seething beneath a new client’s request sends her fleeing to the sanctuary of an unlikely protector.

Into their refuge comes Jay Harper. The private detective has awakened in Lausanne with no memory of how he got there — and only one thing driving him forward: a series of unsettling murders he feels compelled to solve.

That doesn’t even tell me what era it is. Present day? 1880s? Were there private eyes in 1880s London? Look, is this a fantasy or not? All these books I’m holding are getting heavy.

Fortunately, you can flip through the review quotes on the first few pages while holding a book one-handed. Here’s what I glimpsed:

“An imaginatively metaphysical thriller… [cast] with fey characters and skillfully concealing until the climax whether apparent weird events haven’t been manipulated to make them seem so. This solidly plotted tale… will appeal to readers who like a hint of uncanny in their fiction.”
— Publishers Weekly

Wait, fey characters? Like, fairy fey? Or fay as in “crazy and wild-acting?” You’re not helping, Publishers Weekly.

A quick author check told me nothing. Jon Steele? Never heard of him. And that has to be a pseudonym, right? I know I’m right. Jon Steele. Come on.

Most of the other quotes I scanned were no more specific on the question of whether this was a supernatural mystery, or just an attempt to do The Bourne Ultimatum on the Thames.

“[An] atmospheric, witty, bloody, and swashbuckling tale of age-old struggles for dominion between angels and demons.”
— Booklist (starred review)

“Swashbuckling” — that’s promising. Plus, angels and demons. Could be fantasy.

“So phenomenally deep and complex. Jon Steele has written a modern thriller masterpiece, pulling from medieval Gothic myths and religious mysticism in a very unexpected way.”
—Pop Corn Reads

Pop Corn Reads? Seriously? We’re jumping straight from Publishers Weekly and Booklist to blog reviews now? That ain’t a good sign. Didn’t any newspapers review this thing?

“Faith, love, lust, murder, innocence, dangerous demons, fallen angels… meld together in to one glorious, spellbinding, addicting story.”
— Luxury Reading

Luxury Reading. Sounds like another blog. Still, we’re back to demons and fallen angels again. I’m definitely getting a fantasy vibe here.

“There’s plenty of diabolical fun to be had here.” — Kirkus Reviews

Useless.

“A carefully constructed puzzle… [an] intriguing story of fallen angels and haunting visions.” — Warpcore SF

Back to blogs again. At least this one has SF in the title. And more references to fallen angels. I don’t know if I’m up for a fantasy about angels. I adjusted my pile of books and made one last attempt.

“A wholly original thriller that seamlessly melds suspense, history, fantasy, and mysticism. Steele deftly blends elements of many literary genres into this inventive work of fiction. A tour de force — and the first in a projected trilogy.”
— BookTrib

There you go. First in a projected trilogy? That’s practically the modern definition of fantasy. I added The Watchers to my teetering stack, and made my way to the cash register.

The Watchers was published by Signet on April 2. It is 768 pages in paperback, priced at $9.99. The digital edition is the same price. It is the first volume of The Angelus Trilogy; the second, Angel City, is scheduled to be released June 4.

Read all of our recent New Treasures articles here.

In part one of this series we looked at the Alcázar in Segovia. Now we’re going to look at another Spanish castle that makes for an easy day trip from Madrid. This one is one of my favorites. It’s in Chinchón, about 50km from the Spanish capital on a a regular bus route.

This castle is a replacement for one destroyed by an artillery bombardment in 1521. The designers of this new castle, built between 1590 and 1598, kept the artillery threat in mind. Note that the bottom part of the wall is sloped with a glacis and the towers are rounded to deflect cannonballs. There’s also a drawbridge to stop people from charging inside. If the drawbridge is up, attackers are forced to go through crossfire in this killing zone.

The escudo of the builder, Conde Diego Fernández de Cabrera y Bobadilla.

The castle was damaged again at the beginning of the 18th century, during the War of Spanish Succession, and again in 1808 during the Napoleonic Wars. In the latter incident, the townspeople ambushed the occupying French forces and killed four soldiers. Two days later, the French came back with reinforcements, including a Polish Brigade that set off a giant explosion inside the castle. They also destroyed much of the village and killed 86 villagers.

Stayed tuned for more Spanish castles! You’ll have to wait a couple of weeks, though. I’m off to present at a history festival in Gorizia, Italy, and then I’ll be spending a week traveling around Slovenia. You’ll be getting some photos of those trips too.

All photos copyright Sean McLachlan.

Sean McLachlan worked for ten years as an archaeologist in Israel, Cyprus, Bulgaria, and the U.S before becoming a full-time writer specializing in history and travel. He’s the author of numerous history books on the Middle Ages, the Civil War, and the Wild West. He is also the author of A Fine Likeness, a horror novel set in Civil War Missouri; and The Night the Nazis Came to Dinner and other dark tales.

When my parents realized I knew nothing whatever about the Bible — I was ten — they rectified my cultural illiteracy with Pearl Buck’s two-volume The Story Bible. Of all those beginner versions of classics, only Buck’s biblical books kept all the sex and violence in. Imagine my shock when my mother handed me Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Mandelbaum’s complete and very faithful translation. I was twelve. What was she thinking? If the Metamorphoses were a blog, every post would have cut text with PTSD trigger warnings.

Mark Rigney’s post on how old a kid should be before reading or watching The Hunger Games touched on a problem I face often as a teacher of teenagers, some as young as 13. Since I’m a freelance teacher, making house calls, my students’ parents are sometimes directly involved in the question of how old is old enough for which book. Other times, especially when the parents don’t speak much English, I actually wish I could involve them more directly than the language barrier allows.

I’ll face the age question all over again, differently, when my own kids can read on their own. Inevitably, I come at the predicament through my own history as a reader — which stories I was denied too long or permitted too early. As a maker of stories, I’m fascinated also with seeing what of a story can survive the translation into the consciousness of the young, either through the efforts of adult writers who reinterpret the stories, or through the efforts of kids themselves when they try to make sense of them.

Some children’s versions of adult classics become classics in their own right, like Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, which is still the go-to Shakespeare book for elementary-age kids, though it first appeared in print in 1807. Take a look at the classics-for-kids books on offer in your local library or bookstore and ask yourself whether they’re likely to hold their appeal for two centuries.

My fancy education trained me to look down my nose at popularizations or bowdlerizations of any kind, but even in my snobbiest moments, I would have to admit that the Lambs have an impressive track record. They do make some weird choices about which things to leave in and which to take out, though. Their version of King Lear discusses the evil sisters’ marital infidelity, but omits the torture of the elder Earl of Gloucester, which is one of the most powerful scenes in the play.

I can see why authors writing for children would hesitate to mention that one of the good guys gets his eyes plucked out. On the other hand, the evil sisters’ infidelity happens off-stage, so that only its consequences play out right in front of a live audience.

I look back on the first time I saw a live production of King Lear–I hadn’t read the play in advance, and nobody had warned me about the eyeball scene. It was a great performance. A really compelling, visceral performance. In case you, too, have never been warned, I don’t think it would be a spoiler to tell you, considering that Lear was first staged in 1606, that the Earl of Gloucester loses his eyes to torture in Act III, scene 7. The Lambs could have performed a great public service by bracing generations of people for that spectacle. The way they decided to protect their readers from having to imagine it too vividly was by eliminating the good Earl of Gloucester almost completely from their tale, while far less important characters (with less visually disturbing fates) stay in the story.

It’s tempting to pass judgment on whether this is a valid way to present Lear to an audience that’s not ready for the real thing. Assuming that Shakespeare is so central to our culture that some adaptation for children is going to be out there for every generation, it might as well be the Lambs’.

For a text like Lear, adaptation is at once impossible and inevitable. By contrast, Machiavelli’s The Prince turns out to be all too easy to translate into terms children could easily understand. Claudia Hart’s A Child’s Machiavelli: A Primer on Power was clearly not written for real children — it’s a hilarious send-up of adaptations for kids, written for an adult audience.

What makes Hart’s book work so well as satire is that it really does communicate Machiavelli’s core ideas at a level that a kindergartner could grasp and apply. The book could work on the level of what it appears to be, and for precisely that reason, no responsible adult would ever want a real child to get his or her hands on a copy. In Hart’s illustrations, pastel puppies plot military occupations, and figures from earnest classics of children’s literature appear in apt yet horrifying reconfigurations. After you’ve seen A Child’s Machiavelli, all moral primers for children look at least a little sinister.

In the tradition of fantasy literature, there are plenty of works that probably could be adapted for children, yet probably shouldn’t. H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos has been an irresistible target for parodists. Is it possible to pull off a straightfaced version of any original Lovecraft Cthulhu story, one intended to communicate the moods Lovecraft created, in terms a child could follow? I’m not sure it is. Yet I’ve met elementary-school-aged children who could give a pretty detailed and accurate account of Cthulhu and his lore, gathered mostly from parodies they didn’t quite get. Hollywood merchandising will not spare us Conan for kindergartners, but at least I think we will be spared a kindergarten Silmarillion.

Twenty Palaces

This seems as good a time and place as any to say a word about the tragic fate of the Twenty Palaces series. The books gathered critical accolades, high Amazon.com rankings, and a blurb from the prince of urban fantasy, Jim Butcher himself. However, after the third novel in the series, Circle of Enemies, the series was cancelled by Del Rey due to underperforming sales. Harry Connolly had a fourth novel — a prequel exploring Ray Lily’s introduction to the bloody world of the Twenty Palaces society — already written. Rather than allowing it to be consigned to the bottom drawer of his dresser, the deepest recesses of his hard drive, or the bottom of the Hudson River, Connolly did the world a favor and produced it as a self-published e-book.

I’ll be writing reviews of the second and third volumes in the series (watch this space!); but for this week, I wanted to look at that prequel, Twenty Palaces, for three reasons. First, sales of this book will put more money in the author’s pocket than sales of remaining copies of the other books, and I’m a big enough Connolly fan to think his labors deserve it. Second, if you’d like to give the books a shot, but are too profoundly avaricious to lay down $7.99 for Child of Fire, you’ll be delighted to learn that Twenty Palaces is available on Kindle and Nook for the fantastically low price of $2.99, payable in one easy installment. Third, it’s a good book.

Twenty Palaces opens with Ray fresh out of a three-year stay in prison, coming to Seattle by bus to live with his Uncle Charlie and Aunt Theresa.  They’re no Ben and May Parker — Charlie, a Seattle cop, is particularly hostile to his deadbeat nephew — but they’re the only people Ray has left, and his only real chance to reform himself and leave his days as a car thief and thug in his past.

There’s another familiar face there to welcome him back: John, his boyhood best friend. When they were kids, Ray found a gun hidden in John’s home, and accidentally fired it, putting John in a wheel-chair and ending their friendship. But John is out of his wheelchair now, in what the local media have crowned a miracle cure, and Ray has to fight his way through a barricade of news vans and television anchors just to make it to his door.

John holds no grudge.  In fact, he’s eager to renew his childhood friendship with Ray. But he has new friends, now, and Ray immediately notices that all of them, John included, have a ravenous hunger that no amount of pizza and burgers seems to satisfy, combined with the strength to shatter a baseball against the bars of a batting cage. He begins to suspect that something is wrong with John’s new circle even before Annalise Powliss, peer of the Twenty Palaces society, arrives on the scene in a wave of sorcery and extracts a coiled monster from one of their skulls.

Ray successfully steals a spellbook from one of Annalise’s associates, and makes three photocopies before they’re able to recover it. That stolen spellbook becomes his only weapon in a race to save John from his own cure, before the Twenty Palaces sorcerers catch up to him and execute him.  Matters become more complex when Ray realizes the full price John has paid to recover the use of his legs — a price which makes him a threat to all humanity.

Much of the joy and tension of Twenty Palaces comes from Ray’s status as an utter newcomer to the world of magic and monsters. He’s not particularly imaginative, probably isn’t the kind of guy who had a shelf full of Dragonlance novels as a kid, and so has no background to prepare him for a clash between sorcerers and monsters. His reactions are a convincing mix of horror and pragmatism.  His reluctance to accept the grotesque reality about John’s condition is persuasive, and his guilt over John’s original injury is the fuel that drives his increasingly desperate quest to save his old friend.

For readers familiar with the other Twenty Palaces novels, it’s also a pleasure to see a couple other members of the society with their unique sets of spells.  Connolly’s portrayal of magic — and the hints he drops about the larger supernatural world—are as exciting as ever.  My favorite detail is that every spell inscribed in a Twenty Palaces spellbook consists simply of two abstract designs, one labeled “For the hand,” the other “For the mind.” We also get a battle between sorcerers every bit as exciting as the fight against Wally King in Circle of Enemies.

If I have one complaint, it’s that, at a critical juncture, Annalise is ludicrously quick to trust Ray, even to the point of taking his word over that of one of her peers on a matter of life-and-death. It’s uncharacteristic for Annalise, who normally seems to have nothing but cold contempt for Ray, and who has previously been on the verge of executing him outright. Her attitudes towards Ray seem to change as the plot requires them to. It’s a problem which I thought weakened both Game of Cages and Circle of Enemies, and it’s annoying here as well.

Despite that, Twenty Palaces is a great read. Ray isn’t a nice guy, but he’s trying to do the right thing, to correct the sins of his past by helping John. His struggles are thrilling and heart-breaking reading, right down to a climax that will force Ray to confront head-on the monster which has possessed his best friend.

There’s magic afoot – of course the world operates differently. The author paints the fantastical milieu and we enter it primed to believe, donning those 4-D glasses that let us accept strangeness. It’s a more-than-willing suspension of disbelief.

We don’t ask for justifications, as long as the fantastic elements of the world are internally consistent. It’s in the tradition.

But with fantasy as re-imagined history or a re-imagined place, we enter a slightly different relationship with the story. Now we’re in a realm that is accessed, not through a portal or straight immersion in a new world, but through a delicate balance of writer allusions and reader indulgence. Readers know they’re being seriously mucked with. And the author must go the extra mile to pull it off.

There’s something logically different about creating an imagined world — like Middle Earth — versus fiddling with the actual world and its history. After all, it already happened the way it did. So the reader must swim against the mental tide of a different narrative, that of history.

Depending on your preferences for justification, you may want an explanation of how it all came to be, or you may wish the author would just get on with it.

One way to coax the reader into abandoning “real” history is with parallel worlds. Michael Moorcock uses this framing device in Gloriana, the Unfulfill’d Queen, set in a twisted Elizabethan-style court and a very changed history.

The world of Albion is not only a parallel world to our own, but one in which they are actively investigating other parallel worlds, or “spheres” (in which our doppelgangers exist).

This is a minor thread in the story, despite the added detail that Albion has had visits from people from other spheres. The tidbits are wonderfully salted in to keep us from wandering back to our version of history.

In the Alvin Maker series, beginning with Seventh Son, Orson Scott Card uses a number of devices to strengthen his altered American West.

Using a technique that’s almost mandatory for science fiction alternate histories, Card posits what’s called a point of divergence in history that helps justify his world. (Cromwell banning people with psi powers from England, causing them to converge on America’s old west.)

Further, throughout the story, he makes strategic note of anomalies. It’s as though when the author notes the differences, the reader more readily believes.

Card goes on to lace the stories with anchoring details that bring the milieu into focus, such as the “Tom” Jefferson being president of the colony of “Appalachee,” and George Washington having been executed by the British. Verisimilitude is helped along by making references to historical figures who aren’t part of the plot but who seem to lend it validity.

If you’re in the less-is-more camp, you may prefer a bold move where the writer offers a completely unapologetic twist on the world. This is just how it is, the author seems to be saying, as Naomi Novik does with the Temeraire series, where dragons comprise a Napoleonic-era air force.

This strategy works not only because of the mastery of the storytelling, but also because detailed back story explanations sometimes seem to “protest too much” and bring attention to the fact that the author is mucking about in what’s so, or what used to be so. An air force of dragons? Yes, quite.

Further down the scale toward “just get on with it,” are novels that make a virtue out of not telling. These novels achieve a lovely extra strain of mystery by keeping us guessing.

(I want to point to Felix Gilman’s Half-Made World, here, but I’ll leave it to others to ferret out whether that one is fantasy or science fiction.)

In stories like this, the author purposefully limits explanations in order to deepen our curiosity. It has the added attraction of freeing the story from information dumps. A more psychological way of looking at these omissions is that it may have the effect of seducing the reader into filling in the blanks with his or her imagination.

I heard Terry Brooks’s advice on this approach once. It avoids goose-feeding the reader who in any case wants to believe and isn’t in a mood to argue. It doesn’t excuse laziness or bad writing, of course. The story must still succeed as a whole and in each of its fantastical parts.

Still, most alternate histories will need to round out the story with some clues and guideposts that help the reader over the hurdle of it already happened the other way.

A case in point is Jeffrey E. Barlough’s Western Lights series. I haven’t yet read Barlough (in my pile), but Jackson Kuhl’s interview with the author reveals how Barlough made changed history credible in What I Found at Houle. He uses small but critical details, such as the plausible absence of gunpowder in the world, thus helping to bolster how gigantic mammoths might have survived.

At the same time, there is so much that Barlough “purposely kept rather vague” in his mash-up of mystery and fantasy. I’m really looking forward to reading the first in the series to see how he pulls it all off.

I’m particularly fascinated by this weaving of “what if” history with fantasia. My first fantasy, A Thousand Perfect Things asks the reader to believe that a place that seems very much like 19th century England has developed a rigidly scientific viewpoint — and furthermore, that a place that might be India is the land of magic.

Magic is savage and vulgar, anathema to the men of science who dominate England. These viewpoints are so rigid that in fact there are no other continents, just these two, incompatible, inimical… and now joined by a great bridge.

And, then, since there was no Rome — or Europe — the scientific use of Latin comes from a long buried culture of ancient England. We note how the predations of kraken limit England’s ambitions to a navy, thus making a Great Bridge essential for trade — and off we go, starting to believe it a little more with every page.

Or so I hope! In fantasy, the justifications for re-imagined histories and twisted geographies range from elaborate world back-stories to the simple, bold twist.

It’s amazing to me how flexible and inventive our genre and its readers are. Some people have trouble enough with magic, much less fiddling with actual history; to us fans, it’s just part of the fun.

After ten science fiction novels, Kay Kenyon’s first fantasy novel, A Thousand Perfect Things, is forthcoming in August as an eBook and in print from Premier Digital Publishing. The book is an epic tale of magic in a re-imagined England and India, when a Victorian woman takes on the scientific establishment, palace intrigues, ghosts and a great mutiny — by marshaling the powers of magic. She talks about books and writing on her blog, at www.kaykenyon.com.

Now, “great” is a relative term. The elements that make a typical fantasy board game great — things like style, richness of setting, and diversity of play — don’t apply to microgames. The things that make a pocket game great are inventiveness, fast play, and simplicity.

Although a great setting and a little style don’t hurt, either.

Task Force Games was the king of pocket games in the early 1980s. Much of that was by virtue of its one runaway success, Star Fleet Battles; but it had an impressive line of other fantasy and SF titles, including Swordquest (which I discussed last June); Starfire (which eventually inspired a series of science fiction novels from David Weber and Steve White); Intruder, which pits a desperate crew against a lethal alien in deep space (clearly inspired by the movie Alien); Spellbinder; City States of Arklyrell; and over a dozen more (there’s a nice survey here and a complete list here).

But Valkenburg Castle was the first, and it’s still my favorite. It was almost completely unique in 1980 — a board game that captured the essential gestalt of fantasy role playing, although in a slightly abstracted fashion: penetrating a dark and foreboding stronghold, confronting the unwholesome creatures within, and winning glory through cleverness and force of arms.

The premise of Valkenburg Castle was simple. You play as the young Lord Hobart van Valkenburg, rightful heir, returning at last to the place where his grandfather was murdered and his family first driven into exile. The castle is now monster-infested, home to sinister and powerful beasts who lurk somewhere in its depths.

To win back his ancestral home, Lord Hobart must explore the twisting ruins of a castle he has never before seen and drive out the dark forces who have made it their home — including the powerful creatures who lair at the deepest dungeons levels.

It was an appealing variation on the classic loot-and-scoot dungeon mechanic, with the added bonus of a compelling backstory, a loyal army, and a chance to win back a crown. What’s not to like?

The Jack Kirby-inspired cover art perfectly captures the theme and raw energy of the game. Guys with swords, in a uphill battle. That’s the concept right there.

Here’s the back-cover text:

Forty-three years had passed since Lord Keven Van Valkenburg had been murdered and his family driven into exile. During that time a succession of evil Overlords, Sorcerers and Dragons had occupied Valkenburg Castle. These tyrants terrorized and plundered the surrounding countryside. The peasants had little choice but to tolerate these abuses, while silently praying for the return of the gentler rule of the Van Valkenburgs. Then, on a bright spring day in 575 A.H., Lord Hobart Van Valkenburg, Keven’s grandson, returned and staked his claim.

Valkenburg Castle is a fantasy game of adventure and combat in the depths of an ancient dungeon. Players may use heroic leaders, fighting men, clever burglars, staunch dwarves and mysterious magic users to explore, and eventually to capture the castle from evil orcs, trolls, ogres, sorcerers, banshees and drogs. Players may use swords, bows, enchanted weapons, and (for those with a more modern interest) machine guns and hand grenades to fight their way into – and out of – Valkenburg Castle.

One, two, or more players explore the depths of Valkenburg Castle in this exciting game of fantasy adventure.

The game components are at right, including a portion of the dungeon map. The castle is vast, and includes an impressive dungeon level. Not bad at all for a pocket game.

I found the addition of an army — small, but loyal — nicely enhanced the basic RPG formula. Controlling your forces while you clear out the castle, discover treasure and magic, and seek the dark heart of the opposition is the core of the game, and it certainly keeps you occupied.

The variety of monsters you face off against isn’t quite as rich as the back text implies, but that’s a minor quibble. The game is easy enough to expand on as you grow more familiar with it.

Like most games, adding more players results in some much-needed depth and complexity. It is suitable for 1 to 5 players, with an average playing time of two hours.

Copies of the original can be tough to find, but if you don’t mind digital conversions, you’re in luck. Battlegrounds Games has done a complete conversion of the original game, for use with their Battlegrounds: RPG Edition virtual tabletop software. You can see the first six pages of the rulebook here.

There is a real Valkenburg Castle, incidentally, in Valkenburg aan de Geul, Netherlands. Originally constructed in 1115, Holy Roman Emperor Henry V destroyed it by siege in 1122. The current ruins are those of the rebuilt 14th century structure. There are some nice pics here that help capture the atmosphere of the game.

Valkenburg Castle was designed by Stephen V. Cole (of Star Fleet Battles fame). It was originally released in 1980 by Task Force games, with a cover price of $3.95. Copies sell today between $6 – $20.

See all of our recent Vintage Treasures here.