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Author: Ryan Harvey

Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight

Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight

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dragonlanceDragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight
Directed by Will Meugniot. Featuring the Voices of Keifer Sutherland, Lucy Lawless, Michael Rosenbaum, Michelle Trachtenberg, Jason Marsden, Rino Romano.

During one of the classic episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, while Mike and the ‘Bots are watching the conclusion of the delightfully weird and wretched 1960’s Coleman Francis masterpiece The Skydivers, Mike abruptly remarks: “I don’t know guys. I still like this movie better than Top Gun. A lot better.”

So I will say this about the recent animated film adaptation of Dragons of Autumn Twilight: “I still like this movie better than the 2000 Dungeons & Dragons movie. A lot better.”

Be warned: these will be the last friendly words you are likely to hear in this review.

If Wizards of the Coast, the current owners of the Dungeons & Dragons media franchise, had serious intentions of starting a successful line of direct-to-video animated films based on the Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms novels, they couldn’t have done a finer job of slicing themselves off at the knees with a broadsword than this disaster of a movie. The DVD came out in January, and the reason you probably haven’t heard much about it until now is because so many people are trying to abide by “If you can’t say anything nice…” Or else the film immediately slipped their memory after seeing it. Both concepts make sense.

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A Fine and Private Place after almost 50 years

A Fine and Private Place after almost 50 years

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a-fine-and-private-place1A Fine and Private Place
Peter S. Beagle (Viking, 1960)

Peter S. Beagle wrote his first novel, A Fine and Private Place, fifty years ago at the age of nineteen. Which really annoys me because the book is so blasted good, making me aware that, although I was a skilled nineteen-year-old in my day, there was no conceivable way I could have crafted at that age a work as beautiful and knowledgeable about life, death, and love as A Fine and Private Place.

And Beagle’s greatest work, the traditional fantasy classic The Last Unicorn, still lay ahead of him.

I’ll try not to take this all personally and just feel glad we have A Fine and Private Place around… and still in-print, a minor miracle considering how fast our culture embraces new and tosses everything else into the dustbin.

A Fine and Private Place is one of the masterpieces of contemporary fantasy, and only the long shadow cast by The Last Unicorn keeps it from getting more notice. The tale occurs almost exclusively within an enormous graveyard, features ghosts and a talking raven, but it isn’t a horror story or even a dark fantasy, but a gentle and often sorrowful look at the difficulties of love and the realities of death, neither of which work out the way any person living or dead might expect.

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Kelly’s Coffee & Fudge & Overdue Fees

Kelly’s Coffee & Fudge & Overdue Fees

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nuhead0_r1_c1Bill Ward has done some exploring in the library recently, inspiring me to drop in my own thoughts about some changes I’ve noticed recently in the public book-lending sphere.

I hadn’t taken a trip to the Beverly Hills Library for a few months. When I walked in last time I made an immediate turn to the right to head into the Periodicals Room and check on the latest issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction…

Except the Periodicals Room no longer perched next to the front entrance of the faux-Moorish main library building. Instead there was a Kelly’s Coffee & Fudge, looking as if someone had lifted it off the airport concourse and dropped it next to the Reference Desk. For a moment, I wondered if I had gone into Barnes & Noble by mistake, instead of the public library.

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Seventh Sanctum and Randomness

Seventh Sanctum and Randomness

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Normally, I get verbose on my posts here at Black Gate. But I’ve had a busy week, the crunch comes down on the last day, and I don’t have time for a long amble through my usual obscura. So today I’ll dash through with a link to one of my favorite “writing experiment” sites.

Seventh Sanctum is a website of randomness. It contains an array of “generators” that can create instant character names, evil organizations, magic weapons, and super-powers. The bulk of the site consists of anime- and RPG-slanted generators, most of which were coded as a “lark,” in the words of the site’s creator. “Roll up a bunch of results. Use them. Make a ton of money. Or use them in a fanfic or an RPG.”

However, I’ve gotten a lot of writing practice ideas from the category of generators under the heading “Writing.” A general heading that covers a number of great randomizers that can hatch up story settings, themes, and “what-if” scenarios. For example, today on Writing Challenges (my favorite of the generators), I pulled out this confluences of different elements for a strange tale: “The story ends during a war. During the story, an organization begins recruiting. The story must have a lost soul in it. The story must involve some oil at the end.” That was enough to keep me scribbling in my composition notebook for at least an hour; and even if I develop a story that doesn’t contain any of those elements, battering the ideas about always develops something of interest I can use later. One of my favorite short stories I wrote in the last year emerged from using Seventh Sanctum’s What-if-Inator. The finished work had almost nothing to do with the original “what-if” from the site, but I probably wouldn’t have started the journey without the push.

Any writer could get a few decent exercises from Seventh Sanctum—maybe even a the start of something more serious—and you can always waste some time with the Humorous Fantasy Classes generator. (I like the “Stripper-Lancer” and “Valkyrie Salesman.” Both might work in a Risus campaign.)

The People That Time Forgot: The Movie

The People That Time Forgot: The Movie

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The People That Time Forgot (1977)
Directed by Kevin Connor. Starring Patrick Wayne, Doug McClure, Sarah Douglas, Dana Gillespie, Thorley Walters, Shane Rimmer, David Prowse, Milton Reid.

Amicus Productions waited two years to release a sequel to their hit The Land That Time Forgot, stopping along the way to do another Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation, At the Earth’s Core. The People That Time Forgot marks the last gasp for its brand of low-budget fantasy/adventure film, since another film that came out that same summer of ‘77, set in a galaxy far, far away, caused a shift in genre-movie expectations when it turned into the highest-grossing film in history.

But The People That Time Forgot still brings handmade thrills and an old-fashioned attitude that adheres to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s style—if not to the letter of his writing. Unlike The Land That Time Forgot, which stays close to the first third of ERB’s novel in its script from Michael Moorcock and James Cawthorn, the script for the sequel from Patrick Tilley charts its own direction rapidly and leaves the original plot of the middle novella of the collective novel behind. Since the third novella, “Out of Time’s Abyss,” was apparently never slated for film adaptation, Amicus had to create a sense of completion with The People That Time Forgot that required dumping much of Burroughs’s material.

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Risus: Rules-Lite to the Min

Risus: Rules-Lite to the Min

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rlogoRisus: The Anything RPG
By S. John Ross

I seem to have gotten into a Rules-Lite RPG series here at Black Gate. Not sure how that happened. I didn’t plan it, I know that for certain…

A few weeks ago, I reviewed one of the classics of “beer-and-pretzels” role-playing games, Kobolds Ate My Baby! Although a great game, KAMB! uses a specific (comically specific) setting with rigid character types. If you want to unleash a beer-and-pretzels RPG night without any limitations, you will want to turn to Risus, a generic system perfect for the slam-bang quick gag game.

Risus takes the term “rules-lite” and goes to the minimum with it: the whole system fits comfortably onto six PDF pages you can download here. I have to take caution with this review, because I might risk writing one that’s longer than the review subject. But those six pages provide only a blueprint for endless parody-RPG weirdness; I’m reviewing the experience you might get from putting Risus into practice.

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Plums deify a Mercedes-Benz

Plums deify a Mercedes-Benz

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I made a fascinating discovery today. I was reading one of the books by the dead George Carlin (if I called him ‘the late’ or ‘the lamented’ George Carlin, he would rise from the dead and crush my skull), enjoying some great laughs from his satirical observations about people and government. I then put down that book and picked up a collection of essay by the equally dead philosopher Bertrand Russell. And I found that his opinions, tone, and attitudes were exactly the same as Carlin’s. Not only that, they were just as funny. “Another way in which good men can be useful is by getting themselves murdered.” That’s brilliant. I realized at that instant that George Carlin is Bertrand Russell as a stand-up act.

I’m telling you all this to fill up space on this post. I’ve had a busy weekend, most of it a highly positive busy, but nonetheless busy. So I haven’t had the opportunity to carefully craft one of my more ponderous reviews. So instead I’ll sling at you a writing exercise that I did a few weeks ago. Writers looking for an engaging experiment might want to try it.

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The Future Is Now

The Future Is Now

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trekfinal2Star Trek (2009)
Directed by J. J. Abrams. Starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Leonard Nimoy, Eric Bana, Bruce Greenwood, Karl Urban, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, John Cho, Anton Yelchin, Ben Cross, Winona Ryder.

I wrote a review of the new movie Star Trek for my own blog within a few hours of seeing the film on Friday morning. I have nothing against that review, but it’s definitely the sort of free-form exercise I do on my personal blog, and it goes deep into the story and specific details for general readers. I never intended to put such a review on my Black Gate blog.

But Star Trek deserves it’s own take on Black Gate, one geared toward the specific audience. This isn’t truly a review, but an essay analysis of a cultural phenomenon that takes into account the many other reviews I’ve now read of the movie since I saw it (I purposely avoided reading others reviews before seeing the film) and the reaction of people I know who have seen it so I can paint a canvas of the sort of zeitgeist we’re experiencing.

Although Black Gate takes heroic fantasy as its theme, while the Star Trek franchise is science fiction, the people who read this magazine and its website belong to a genre community of which Star Trek forms one of the cornerstones. It doesn’t matter if you like Star Trek or not… if you count yourself a fan of anything that is “genre,” Star Trek has a place in your universe. Star Trek is the personification of “fandom.”

A few days before the new movie hit theaters, I wrote a short essay examining my own relation to Trek fandom. You can read that if you want to know where on the “Trekker” scale I stand, if that’s of interest to you regarding reading the rest of this essay.

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Kobolds Ate My Baby! Super Deluxx Edition

Kobolds Ate My Baby! Super Deluxx Edition

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Kobolds Ate My Baby! Super Deluxx Edition
By Chris O’Neill and Dan Landis. Illustrated by John Kovalic. (Dork Storm Press, 2005; $14.99)

I’ve previously mentioned in a comment thread that when it comes to tabletop role-playing games, I lean toward the rules-lite side of the equation. I’d rather have a system that allows flexible play, with minimal die-rolls and looking up charts, and greater focus on the “role-playing” instead of the “game.” Given a good Game Master, rules-lite games can feel as close to realistic as any of the more simulationist systems. My favorite RPG of all time, Fudge, has managed to adapt and handle any other game system, setting, or style I’ve thrown at it. In fact, it’s almost the only system I use. Any RPG that comes out I translate into Fudge…

…with the exception of “Beer and Pretzels” RPGs, in which sheer simplicity and ludicrousness are the norm.

Most rules-lite systems are geared toward the Beer and Pretzels genre: RPGs that are played for comedy and speed and with minimum planning and plenty of bad bad bad beer. Risus is the Beer and Pretzels equivalent of Fudge, a complete generic system (six pages long!) usable for quick ‘n’ silly RPGs late at night. I might discuss Risus in another post—it’s interesting both as a rules-lite system and as a purposeful parody of all other early RPGs. Fudge also deserves a long review, because it’s so wonderful that it’s a shame it isn’t spread like a beautiful pandemic to every corner of the hobby.

But today I bring you the most popular setting-specific Beer and Pretzels game, a funny and witty spoof on the concept of “cannon fodder” in Dungeons & Dragons: Dork Storm Press’ Kobolds Ate My Baby! Super Deluxx Edition, written by Chris O’Neil and Dan Landis—and hereafter abbreviated KAMB! (The manual loves exclamation marks! With a passion! See!)

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Memories of Ultima IV

Memories of Ultima IV

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If a single positive resulted from the work of that woefully misinformed but correctly acronymed organization BADD (Bothered about Dungeons & Dragons), a group that waged a crusade to stop children from jumping into the Bags of Holding that they learned to construct from an $11.99 hardcover rulebook purchased at a hobby store, it was the computer RPG Ultima IV: The Quest of the Avatar. To this day, it’s only video RPG I’ve ever loved. And I’m not the only one who got sucked into this fantasy computer game when it was first published by Origin Systems in 1985 for a variety of platforms. (This was also the year of The Bard’s Tale from Electronic Arts; a major time for computer RPGs.)

By the middle of the decade, Richard Garriott, who programs under the pseudonym “Lord British,” had completed the first three of the Ultima games, featuring standard RPG plots where heroes had to vanquish a series of Dark Lords and their descendants. He had received complaints from parents about the demonic nature of these games—and the cover of Ultima III: Exodus in particular—and certainly knew about BADD’s anti-fantasy game campaign. But Garriott did something interesting instead of shrugging off the complaints. He used them to see if he could devise a new challenge for a computer game that wouldn’t use the standard “defeat the Big Bad Guy” of fantasy RPGs. What if the players had to actually live up to the extraordinary standards of acting as great, chivalric heroes? In fact, what if that was the whole point of the game: achieve the highest level of moral heroism so the players turned into ethical cynosures for the whole world? What was called, in game terms, an “Avatar”?

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