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Author: Bob Byrne

Modular: Conan’s Adventuring in an Age Undreamed of

Modular: Conan’s Adventuring in an Age Undreamed of

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Conan Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of-smallAnd so begins a Play by Post in the world of Conan!

OPENING SCENE

Vultures spiral above the battlefield. Blood soaks into the rocky ground from hundreds of dying men and their horses, a grim reminder from the desperate hours prior.

For those who fought and died, the battle was as purposeless as any. Prince Satabus of Khoraja was tricked into bringing an army to aid King Ulam-Khala of Akbitana in a war against his cousin, King Nezurab of Shumir, another of Shem’s eastern city-states. So confident of the outcome was Satabus that… he brought with him his bride-to-be, a Stygian noblewoman named Neferet, along with her closest handmaiden.

With them also was a small delegation — envoys and court officials. They bore princely gifts to cement the deep and everlasting friendship with Khoraja and Akbitana: a chest containing fistfuls of gems; urns of precious oil; bolts of Turanian and Khitan silks and other fine cloth; ingots of precious metal; and measures of rare and fragrant wood… a sumptuous collection of finery befitting a royal visit.

The battle was over before it could even begin. In the days prior to Satabus’s arrival, Ulam-Khala and Nezurab had made peace with one another, messages traveling via messenger bird. The two Shemitish kings agreed to unite and destroy Satabus’s army as a show of solidarity, an act of betrayal that would serve to weaken Khorajan resolve against further incursions into Shem.

Seeing that the day was lost, Satabus sounded the order to flee, and as horns echoed across the desert, his mercenary army scattered across the dry plains and into the nearby foothills and hard-baked gullies. They were pursued by the asshuri, picked off one-by-one. Satabus and his cadre of knights fought valiantly to protect his beloved Neferet, but the caravan with her litter was cut off in the retreat. Their fates are unknown.

Each of you was part of Satabus’s army. You’re here now. Somehow, the last wave of Asshuri and footmen missed you. Everyone else is dead.

WHAT ROLE DID YOU PLAY IN THE BATTLE, AND WHAT ARE YOU DOING NOW?

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Modular: Pathfinder 2nd Edition Announced – Never Say Never

Modular: Pathfinder 2nd Edition Announced – Never Say Never

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Pathfinder_PlaytestrulebookYesterday, Paizo announced an upcoming playtest for a 2nd Edition of Pathfinder. Wow.

For years, Paizo officials have said that there would never be a second edition. I suspect that all evidence of those statements have been scoured from the Internet. A quick search didn’t find any. There might have been qualifiers along the way, such as ‘unless the demand is too great’ or some such. But I remember the message as ‘We won’t do a 2nd Edition.” With the inference, ‘Making you buy all of your stuff over again.’

I thought that they might be adhering to that pledge when they put out Starfinder, a science fiction RPG. That seemed like a smart approach if they couldn’t update the original Pathfinder.

But I believe that events conspired against them. The best thing that ever happened to Pathfinder was 4th Edition D&D (granted – it was the impetus for Pathfinder). The worst thing that ever happened to Pathfinder was 5th Edition D&D.

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By Crom: Some Conans are More Equal Than Others…

By Crom: Some Conans are More Equal Than Others…

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Conan and the Emerald LotusI’ve been in a bit of a Robert. E. Howard mood lately, so I re-read some of his Solomon Kane stories (fine stuff). But, as always, I gravitated back to Conan. And that inevitably led me to the pastiches. A quick count of the shelves produced 42 non-Howard Conan tales, excluding the de Camp/Carter books, of which I’m missing two or three, I think.

I’ve read at least a third of those pastiches, I’d say, maybe close to half. Except for a few, they are part of the Tor line I wrote about here. And as I mentioned, they’re a mixed bag. I also wrote a post regarding how official those pastiches are considered, which generated a lot of good commentary.

The Tor line came to a halt in 1997, with one additional book in 2003 (I wouldn’t have minded if they’d skipped that last one). There have been no official Conan pastiches in fifteen years, though that’s going to change shortly.

Howard Andrew Jones, fantasy author and Black Gate‘s Managing Editor, had some thoughts similar to mine over at his blog a few years ago. Ryan Harvey’s Pastiches R Us looked at about a dozen of the Tor books: you can search Black Gate for them, but here’s one and here’s another. He also had Charles Saunders do a guest post for him.

A multitude of writers have penned a plethora of words about the Conan pastiches, but I’m keeping this post ‘in-house’ and will focus on musings from Howard, Ryan and myself.

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A Day at Black Gate World Headquarters: What’s Coming in 2018

A Day at Black Gate World Headquarters: What’s Coming in 2018

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Hudsucker_MailHere’s a look behind the curtain at the Black Gate World Headquarters in the Windy City:

I walked into the opulent penthouse office of Black Gate Global Headquarters. It was the first time I had been higher than the second floor mail room, where I mopped the floors every Thursday evening. I felt like Conan traversing the savannahs as I waded through the plush carpet.

I imagined myself as the mighty-thewed Cimmerian, searching for lions as I…

“BRYNE! Quit your daydreaming. I didn’t pull you out of the basement… errr…the journalist’s suite, to mash down the carpet in my office.”

“Yes sir, Mister O’Neill, sir!” I managed to reach his desk, where I silently waited for his shoe shine to finish.

“Have a seat, Bryne.”

I looked around, confused by the fact that there were no chairs. And the carpet was so thick that if I sat down I might be smothered. Short on options, I remained standing. He didn’t notice.

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By Crom! New Robert E. Howard Pastiches Coming in 2018!

By Crom! New Robert E. Howard Pastiches Coming in 2018!

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Conan_FrazettaFrostgiantsOf course, you saw yesterday’s Black Gate post on Heroic Signatures, the new digital/gaming partnership, which includes the rights to about two dozen Robert E. Howard characters and stories. With the recent releases of Modiphius’ Robert E Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of RPG, Monolith’s Conan board game and Funcom’s in-beta Conan: Exiles video game, Conan is a very viable gaming brand these days. And Funcom’s Age of Conan MMO (which I play) is still going strong as it approaches the decade mark.

But fans of Conan’s creator, such as the contributors and readers of our recent Discovering Robert E. Howard series, are yearning for new pastiches featuring Howard’s characters. And not just Conan, but Solomon Kane, El Borak, Breckenridge Elkins and Steve Harrison, to name a few. Aside from some Age of Conan tie-in novels, the Conan pastiche market dried up when Tor finished its series in 2003 with Harry Turtledove’s Conan of Venarium.

The Tor novels were a mix of varying quality, as I wrote about here. I quite enjoyed some, such as John Maddox Roberts’ Conan the Rogue (an homage to Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest), Chris Hocking’s The Emerald Lotus and Leonard Carpenter’s Conan the Raider. But unfortunately, some were just simply bad fantasy books.

So, while we have been treated to quality reprints of Howards’ works from Del Rey and the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press, new tales have not been forthcoming. Behold: that is about to change!

In 2018, new pastiches featuring Robert E. Howard characters will be forthcoming!!!!  

Cabinet Group LLC, the REH rights holders and 50% of Heroic Signatures (with Funcom) “have decided to curate a line of carefully picked novels and start a publishing program next year.” This will not just be Conan but other Howard works as well.

Black Gate will have a Q&A post with Cabinet Group head Fredrik Malmberg shortly. Updates coming from Cabinet Group with more information.

But to the many fans of Robert E. Howard, this is exciting news. Could we even see a new Steve Harrison tale? Asks the in-house mystery guy who writes Sherlock Holmes stories? (Hint, hint, hint, Cabinet…)

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Heroic Signatures: REH Digital Rights Part of $10 Million Deal

Heroic Signatures: REH Digital Rights Part of $10 Million Deal

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Conan_HeroicSignatures-small

Funcom is the developer of the Age of Conan (AoC) MMORPG. They’ve currently got a resource/action RPG, Conan: Exiles, in beta, scheduled for a May, 2018 release. I’ve played quite a few hours of AoC and think it’s a very good MMO, mixing elements from Robert E. Howard’s original stories and some of the pastiches. I haven’t tried Exiles yet.

Cabinet Group LLC owns the rights to Robert E. Howard’s non-public domain works. Cabinet Group and Funcom each will own 50% of a new venture entitled Heroic Signatures. Heroic Signatures will control the interactive (gaming) rights to 29 properties — most of them based on the works of Robert E. Howard. REH characters and stories included are:

Conan, Solomon Kane, El Borak,  Dark Agnes, “Children of the Night,” Bran Mark (yes, they spelled it incorrectly!) Morn, James Allison, Cormac Mac Art, Black Turlogh, Kirby O’Donnell, Cormac Fitzgeoffrey, Steve Harrison, “Black Canaan,” Almuric, Steve Costigan, “The Black Stone,” “The Fire of Asshurbanipal,” “The Cairn of the Headland,” “The Horror from the Mound,” “The Dead Remember” and “Pigeons from Hell.”

The announcement said that Funcom will be focusing on partnerships and third party developers, indicating they want to license the properties to get games made. Funcom isn’t a mass-producer, so this may well be a way to leverage the REH property. As part of this move, Funcom got a $10.6 million investment from a Swedish company.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Cthulhu Casebooks (Vol 2) & The Thinking Engine

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Cthulhu Casebooks (Vol 2) & The Thinking Engine

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Lovegrove_MiskatonicLast December I wrote about Sherlock Holmes & the Shadwell Shadows, volume one of James Lovegrove’s Cthulhu Casebooks trilogy. And this December, it’s on to book two, Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities. I wasn’t quite as fond of the second installment, though not because it’s a bad book.

As I wrote in that first review:

The basic premise of the… trilogy is that Watson made up the sixty stories in the Canon. He did so to cover up the real truth behind Holmes’ work. And that’s because the truth is too horrible to reveal. In a nutshell, Watson has written three journals, each covering events fifteen years apart, to try and get some of the darkness out of his soul.

The darkness exists because Holmes, with Watsons’s assistance, waged a career-long war with the otherworld beings of the Cthulhu mythos.

Somewhere in another Black Gate post, I calculated the percentage that Holmes is absent in each of the four novellas which Doyle wrote featuring the great detective. Lovegrove chose to use that novella model and it’s my biggest complaint about the book. Holmes and Watson find a journal and read it. It reminds me of the Mormon interlude in A Study in Scarlet and it takes up thirty-five percent of the book.

Fully one-third of this novel has nothing to do with Holmes or Watson. It provides background to the mystery, but it could be a standalone story and it would have no more tie-in to Holmes than an account of my going out to lunch yesterday.

The flashback takes place in Arkham and it is essentially a Cthulhu short novella. Lovegrove got to write a Lovecraft pastiche within a Holmes pastiche. Of course, these three books are aimed at fans of the Cthulhu stories, so it’s not totally out there. I’ve read stories by Lovecraft, Derleth and others. I don’t mind them, but I’m not a particularly big fan. So, I’m not the target audience for the trilogy.

Those who are avid Holmes and Cthulhu fans are likely to enjoy this second book more than I did. But the fact is that this was a third of the book with no Holmes and/or Watson.

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Simulations Publications Inc: The TSR Incursion

Simulations Publications Inc: The TSR Incursion

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Around the end of 1981, brothers Kevin and Brian Blume wrested control of TSR away from founder Gary Gygax. The company would change dramatically under their leadership, until Gygax returned from his west coast exile in 1984 and (briefly) reclaimed his company. One ‘Blume Incident’ from 1982 is a pretty good example of the way they did things.

In 1958, Avalon Hill was formed, creating the modern wargaming industry, out of which role playing games grew. In 1969, James Dunnigan created Simulations Publications, Inc. — to be known as SPI — with Redmond Simenson as co-founder. He started the company to save an existing wargaming fanzine, Chris Wagner’s Strategy & Tactics, which was in a precarious financial state. Simenson was the graphic designer for the magazine and a huge part of its success. For the princely sum of $1 (yes, you read that right), SPI took on Strategy and Tactics and made it the industry’s leading newsletter, starting with the September, 1969 issue.

Strategy & Tactics would include a new wargame in every single issue from then through the current one, which is remarkable. With the popularity of the magazine, SPI also became Avalon Hill’s major competitor in the wargaming market and enjoyed great success in the seventies. Things were good. Then, as for JFK, came Dallas. Okay, not quite.

Dunnigan’s Dallas: The Television Roleplaying Game, was a licensed product, intended to cash in on the massively successful show. My first thought is to wonder how many Dallas fans wanted to play an RPG — apparently not many. It was a disaster. Simonsen commented that they produced “80,000 copies and that was 79,999 too many.”

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Murder on the Orient Express

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Murder on the Orient Express

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OrientExpressTrainWhile I have read a lot of mysteries by a lot of different authors, I’d never cared for Agatha Christie. When I began watching David Suchet’s masterful performance as Hercule Poirot (which I’m SURE you read about here at Black Gate), I had never finished a Christie novel. I just didn’t like her stories and there was way too much out there that I’d rather read. However, because Suchet was simply amazing, I became a Poirot fan and I read all of the short stories. By picturing the actors and settings from the television show while I read, it worked for me.

My frame of reference for Poirot is episodes of the Suchet television show, not Christie’s original stories. Unlike Doyle, Stout, James Lee Burke, Tony Hillerman, Frederic Nebel and many others whose work I admire, I still am not interested in Christie’s writings. So, I like Poirot, but not Christie.

I wasn’t sure what to think of the new big screen Murder on the Orient Express, which I saw at 10:50 AM on opening day. On the one hand, I thought that Kenneth Branagh’s moustache was completely ludicrous and a huge strike against the move right out of the gate (I mean, who in the world thought that was a good move? Did Mark Gatiss have a hand in this?). On the other hand, it was Branagh’s amazing Shakespeare films that made me a fan of the Bard. He is a wonderfully talented actor. And this film, which he produced, directed and starred in, was his labor of love.

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Modular: Fox Trot Plays Dungeons & Dragons

Modular: Fox Trot Plays Dungeons & Dragons

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FoxTrot_OrlandoBill Amend’s Fox Trot is a comic strip that ran daily from 1988 into 2006, then switched to a Sunday-only format. Still around today, it tells the story of the Fox family. Dad Roger is a loveable goober who wishes he was better at golf and chess. Mom Andy is the common sense core of the family unit. Sixteen year old Peter is a wannabe athlete, with fourteen year old Paige a typical teenage girl. And ten year old Jason lives to torment Paige and is a school geek. He’s got a pet iguana named Quincy who acts like, well, an iguana, but can really be the center of a strip.

The dynamics and shifting alliances of the three kids are instantly relatable to anyone who grew up with at least one sibling. as Calvin and Hobbes’ creator Bill Watterson wrote in the introduction to the first collection:

Fox Trot particularly captures the Machiavellian nature of adolescents. The balance of power between Peter, 16, Page, 14 and Jason 10, is a constantly bartered commodity, and alliances are fragile and short-lived. No collusion will survive an opportunity to get a sibling in trouble, and hesitant parents are goaded with the cry of, ‘Punish him! Punish him! Ground him! Ground him!’

Meanwhile, the challenges of parenting and marriage are amply represented by Roger and Andy. It’s one of my all-time favorite strips and with my nine year old son going through all my collections, I’m enjoying the Fox family all over again.

Jason is a Black Gate kid. His interests are all over pop culture: Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, horror (he loves Halloween, to his family’s pain), Christmas lists, Indiana Jones (even Young Indiana Jones) and cultural tropes such as westerns and Sherlock Holmes. Naturally, being a brainy geek, he’s into Dungeons and Dragons, usually playing with his best friend, Marcus. One rainy spring break, Paige found herself lured into playing D&D with Jason.

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