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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: RPGing is Story Telling

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: RPGing is Story Telling

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inspiration_tomblizardAs I recall, I began playing Dungeons and Dragons at the very end of 1st Edition. Most of my early memories are of playing AD&D and that’s still my favorite Role Playing Game (RPG) system. My buddy Chris and I used to ride our bikes to Hobbyland and he would get a shiny new TSR module, while I grabbed a color-bled, paper-bound supplement from Judges Guild.

I had read Moorcock and Lieber by then (though I didn’t get to Tolkien until early high school). I had acquired a love of Greek mythology (and to a lesser extent, Norse) earlier, and The Trojan War was probably my favorite subject matter (I rooted for Troy: that was disappointing: I mean, c’mon, tear apart the walls to drag in a giant horse your enemy left you???).

You know, The Iliad is like a game of Chainmail: a mass combat wargame with the fantasy supplement for individual heroes. Then  you’ve got The Odyssey, which is an overland (over-the-sea, mostly) D&D campaign. After you’ve played that one a time or two, you could switch to The Aeneid and you’ve got an overland campaign with a kingdom building mechanic. Huh – there’s fodder for another post…

My earliest fantasy gaming memories are of playing Adventure on an Atari 2600. That led to Temple of Apshai on an Atari 1200XL computer. I mapped out every room of that game (and The Upper Reaches sequel) on graph paper. Eventually I got an IBM-compatible PC and tore through the gold box games from SSI. I made the graphical leap to Dungeon Master from FTL (this preceded the more successful but derivative Eye of the Beholder by a few years). Even when I stopped playing pen and paper D&D, I continued on through Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Morrowwind and right up to Age of Conan.

Though I stopped playing, I still read a lot of 3rd Edition D&D stuff and began playing once again with Pathfinder. And as I wrote here at Black Gate just a few weeks ago, I’ve begun running a Swords & Wizardry game for some non-pen and paper fantasy players (it’s a good post. Really. You should go read it!).

And from Dungeon! to Wrath of Ashardalon to the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, I’ve played fantasy board games for decades.

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Much of a Muchness: Phyllis Eisenstein’s Born to Exile

Much of a Muchness: Phyllis Eisenstein’s Born to Exile

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fabian-born_to_exile
First edition of Eisenstein’s Born to Exile
Fantasy Fiction, editorial, detail
Why was the editor of Fantasy Fiction getting stories full of mystical strangeness? We cannot tell.

Recently I was reading an editorial in Fantasy Fiction, an old magazine from near the end of the pulp era. This is the kind of thing I’m apt to do, especially when I should be getting some work done, but in this case I was hooked by the title, which was one of Latin’s greatest hits about reading: NON MULTA, SED MULTUM (“not many things, but much of a thing”).

The message of the editorial was that the editor was seeing too many stories that overdid the number of fantastic elements: “Recently a story came in which had everything — ghosts were making a compact with a group of trolls to defeat the Greek gods, now about to retake the world with a bunch of Hebraic letter incantations.”

The editor felt this was bad and stopped reading on the third page. I say it sounds awesome and the editor should have been banished to the outer darkness where there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. But I’m of the opposite school of fantasy — the “more cowbell” school, you might call it (to allude to another classic). Some people will try to tell you that less is more, but “more cowbell” people insist that only more is more: more miracles, more fireballs, more talking squids in space.

The truth is that neither school is right or wrong; it’s just a question of what works in a given story. The advantage of the non multa, sed multum approach is that it allows the writer to explore the ramifications of a fantastic concept, and maybe work in a character or two, not to mention a more carefully detailed world.

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Can-Con: The Conference on Canadian Content in Speculative Arts and Literature

Can-Con: The Conference on Canadian Content in Speculative Arts and Literature

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covergame-badgeLast weekend I attended Can-Con as a Special Guest. The Guests of Honour were Eric Choi (Science), Tanya Huff (Author), Sam Morgan (Agent, JABberwocky Literary Agency), and Sheila Williams (Editor, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine).

It’s a small con, as these things go, and as the full name of it indicates, its mandate limits it to speculative arts and literature in Canada – though I don’t think the attendees felt much in the way of limitation. There were workshops, and panels, and publishers and parties. The workshops covered building (both worlds and plots), researching the science, and  using mythic worlds. The organizers cleverly scheduled the workshops outside of the regular programming, so attendees didn’t have to choose between workshopping or panelling.
They also did something I’ve never seen before, they turned the entire con into an adventure game, where attendees who wished to could create characters, gain points by attending panels, book launches, getting autographs, etc, and then, with sufficient points, challenge monsters.

There were four tracks of panels, plus two extra tracks that covered readings, interviews, agent pitches, etc. The panels themselves covered topics as diverse as building a reading list to cultural barriers to translation, to Earth as a terraforming project, to superhero TV, to Lovecraft and Race – you know what? Check the website and go over the schedule yourself. I defy you to find an hour where there wasn’t something you would have liked to attend.

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Art of the Genre: Top 10 ‘Orange Spine’ AD&D Hardcovers by Jeff Easley

Art of the Genre: Top 10 ‘Orange Spine’ AD&D Hardcovers by Jeff Easley

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Did The Wilderness Survival Guide make the list?
Did The Wilderness Survival Guide make the list?

Now you might be thinking, ‘Top 10, really? How many did he do?‘

Well, the answer to that is 12. And, considering how iconic each one is, how much they meant to D&D players in the 1980s, and how many folks still use these books 30 years later, it is little wonder that this was a much harder list to trim down than one might think. But, I’m going to give it a shot nonetheless!

So I essentially started with the concept that I’d fold in overall book importance to game play, but then decided against it, instead relying on nostalgia for the cover alone. This would be tempered by the fact that the three most beloved and used books in the AD&D series are the Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, and the Monster Manual, which were all re-released with different covers in the late 1970s, so a lot of players prefer those versions to the more uniform Easley editions produced in the 80s.

Still, TSR sold a boat load of these books during the initial days of the 80s, so I know Easley’s covers did introduce a good deal of players to the hobby (and likely more in the 2nd Edition cover he also did). My first DMG and PHB were Easley covers, so he was my ‘gateway drug’ so to speak and all his ‘orange spine’ hardcovers still sit proudly behind my desk for easy access since I use them almost daily.

I hope those reading this will remember these books as fondly as I do, and perhaps, want to see another one produced to make it thirteen ‘orange spines’ in total, but I’ll talk about that later. Until then, enjoy this beautiful fantasy art Top 10.

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The Religion by Tim Willocks

The Religion by Tim Willocks

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oie_1331351pip0pgfdOne of sword & sorcery’s primary inspirations is historical adventure, like that of writers Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy. That noble genre continues today in Tim Willocks’ insanely violent The Religion: Vol 1 of the Tannhauser Trilogy (2006), for one, set in the cauldron of the Great Siege of Malta. Into it, Willocks introduces the rogue Mattias Tannhauser, son of a Saxon blacksmith from Transylvania. At the age of 12, Mattias’ mother and sister are killed by Ottoman militia and he is taken captive. Every five years, the Turks would take Christian boys, convert them, and raise them up to be ferocious, elite soldiers, known as the Janissaries.

For thirteen years, Tannhauser served as a true and loyal soldier of the sultan, but eventually he leaves and returns to the West. A dozen of so years later, Tannhauser and a pair of friends, English soldier Bors of Carlisle and Sabato Svi, Jewish trader, have established themselves as important arms and opium dealers in Messina, Sicily.

Now, as the Ottoman tide is ready to break on Malta, Jean de Valette, Grand Master of the Knights of St. John, lures Tannhauser to Malta. The great powers, Spain and France, embroiled in their own internal problems, have lent only token aid to the island’s defense. De Valette wants every resource he can lay his hands on, and what better than Tannhauser’s intimate knowledge of the Turks he once served with?

In the 16th century, the centuries long struggle between Christendom and the Moslem world seemed to be coming to a conclusion. In the century following the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the Christian West seemed headed for ultimate defeat. Under the brilliant Suleiman the Magnificent, the Knights of St. John, one of the last remaining military orders, had been driven out of the Eastern Mediterranean when Rhodes was captured in 1522. The knights, also known by their nickname the Religion, had been established in in 1099 to escort pilgrims to the Holy Land.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Back to Otto Penzler’s SH Library

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Back to Otto Penzler’s SH Library

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holroyd_byways(Second in a series of posts about the nine-volume Otto Penzler’s Sherlock Holmes Library)

A couple of weeks ago, The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes looked at Vincent Starrett’s two entries in Otto Penzler’s Sherlock Holmes Library series. Another author provided two entries for the series: James Edward Holroyd.

Holroyd helped establish the Sherlock Holmes Society of London in 1951, the original London Sherlock Holmes Society having been disbanded some years earlier. He was also the first editor of the Society’s Sherlock Holmes Journal. This collection of essays reads as a combination of personal reminiscences and musings about a topic that was certainly dear to his heart.

Baker Street Byways

“Where it All Began” gives us a picture of how Holroyd came to become a Sherlockian and also states his claim that he provided the genesis for the popular Sherlock Holmes Exhibition of 1951. The Westminster Library has a page dedicated to the Exhibition on Sherlock Holmes.

Two essays discuss Sidney Paget, Frederic Dorr Steele and other illustrators of the Canon. It is easy to forget in this internet age that the average individual did not have access to thousands of pictures and nearly unlimited information with the click of a button. Holroyd helped provide illumination in a darker time. And may I recommend my own “The Illustrated Holmes” regarding this subject.

There is the seemingly obligatory pondering about the actual location of 221B Baker Street, a topic that most Sherlockians never seem to tire of (I exclude myself from this category and skip over such articles). “Fanciful Furnishings” includes some humorous asides indicating that Holroyd’s wife was less than supportive of his dream to someday construct a version of Holmes’ sitting room within his own establishment. The man who believes that he is king of his own castle should try telling the queen that he is going to build a Victorian-era sitting room, based on some fictional stories, in the basement.

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Cugel in Golarion: Song of the Serpent by Hugh Matthews

Cugel in Golarion: Song of the Serpent by Hugh Matthews

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oie_51136go15qtEM

The woman looked over at Krunzle, who was making sure no morsel of the meal escaped his needs. “What of you, errand-runner? Do you know much of where we are heading? Or anything, for that matter?”

The thief returned her a level gaze. “I know who I am and what I can do,” he said. “I find that usually suffices.” He arranged a piece of fish on a crumb of bread and popped both into his mouth.

                                                                                                                                                                                                       from Song of the Serpent

I have read only a tiny fraction of Matthew Hughes’ prodigious output. What I have read, his Jack Vance-inspired stories of the Purloiner Raffalon, I like very much (see my reviews here, here, here, and here). Those four stories, plus five others, will be collected and released next year. I can safely write that that will be an immediate purchase for me.

A few weeks ago, when he posted about a novel he wrote back in 2012 for Paizo’s Pathfinder Tales, I was intrigued.

Back in 2008 at World Fantasy Convention in Calgary, I was in the bar when Erik Mona, publisher of Paizo Books, told me he was a great Jack Vance fan and that he liked my work. He asked me if I had a book for him. As it turned out, I was looking for a publisher for Template, my stand-alone Archonate space opera that had been brought out as limited collector’s editions by PS Publishing.

I sent it to him and he brought it out as part of the series, Planet Stories, which (like Template) were decidedly retro science fiction.

Later, Erik told me that he also published novels set in the Pathfinder RPG universe’s world of Golarion, and asked me if I would be interested in doing one. He also said he would really like it if I would do a Cugel the Clever story. I love the Cugel stories and said I’d be delighted.

So we made a deal and I wrote a novel originally called Out of the Blue that was retitled Song of the Serpent before publication in 2012. It told the tale of a thief named Krunzle the Quick who, like Cugel, is fast on his feet – he has to be because, again like Cugel, he’s not as smart as he thinks he is.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Master Plot Formula (per Lester Dent)

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Master Plot Formula (per Lester Dent)

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Dent1Lester Dent was a prolific pulp author, best remembered for creating the adventure hero, Doc Savage.

And speaking of Doc Savage, there is currently a Shane Black film project to star Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson as The Man of Bronze. Hopefully it will introduce Savage and Dent to a new generation.

The Doc Savage stories were published under the house name of Kenneth Robeson, which is a reason Dent’s name isn’t as well-remembered as it should be.

Dent cranked out 159 Doc Savage novels, but he also wrote hundreds of short stories for the pulps across several genres, including war, westerns and mysteries. The John D. MacDonald fan (which should be everyone!) might want to check out his two Oscar Sail stories for a little hint of Travis McGee. “Sail” is included in the massive (over a thousand pages!) anthology from Otto Penzler, The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories.

Will Murray (whose name you’re going to be seeing again here at Black Mask very soon) compiled a thorough bibliography, and it includes a very nice intro about Dent.

Dent, who died in 1959, a few weeks after suffering a heart attack, left behind a master plot formula for generating 6,000 word short stories. I’m going to let you read it below, in full, then give you some comments related to it from one of the top fantasy authors of all time.

This is a formula, a master plot, for any 6000 word pulp story. It has worked on adventure, detective, western and war-air. It tells exactly where to put everything. It shows definitely just what must happen in each successive thousand words. No yarn of mine written to the formula has yet failed to sell. The business of building stories seems not much different from the business of building anything else.

Here’s how it starts:

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Self-published Book Review: Valley of Embers by Steven Kelliher

Self-published Book Review: Valley of Embers by Steven Kelliher

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If you have a book you’d like me to review, please see this post for instructions to submit. I’ve received very few submissions recently, and I’d like to get more.

Valley of Embers by Steven KelliherValley of Embers by Steven Kelliher is primarily the story of Kole Reyna and Linn Ve’Ran. Although Linn Ve’Ran is a skilled and dedicated hunter and warrior, she is not an Ember like Kole, a Landkist given power to control flame by the land. But the land from which Kole’s power comes is not the titular valley where Kole’s and Linn’s people live, but the desert from which their ancestors fled from the war between the Sages. Before he fell in battle, the King of Ember struck a bargain with the Sage White Crest to shelter his people in the valley. Separated from the desert for decades, those born as Embers are fewer and weaker each generation. Instead, some are gifted with the native Landkist power of the valley, the healing and dreaming of the Faeykin. But it is the Embers who are especially valued, to fight the Dark Kind who have returned, bearing the corruption of the Eastern Dark from whom the Emberkin fled years before.

Everyone wonders what had become of the White Crest, who was to be their protector. Some think that he fell shortly after the King of Ember, when he shattered the land to turn back the Eastern Dark. Others think that in his isolation, he is unaware of their plight, or thinks that they can handle things themselves, or is too busy fighting the far greater threat of the Eastern Dark. Since the night of his mother’s death while seeking out the White Crest and the dream he had of her fall, Kole has believed that the White Crest has turned against them, and it is he who sends the Dark Kind.

But while Kole is given permission to seek out the White Crest and get some answers, he is delayed when he suffers a grievous injury by a Sentinel, one of the Dark Kind’s lieutenants, who can convert humans to their cause. While he fights the darkness that seeks to turn him, Linn Ve’Ran gathers some friends and strikes out without him. Her party quickly runs into trouble when they encounter an army of Dark Kind besieging the Valley’s largest city, Hearth, and only half of them make it to the mountains where the White Crest dwells.

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Blogging Marvel’s Master of Kung-Fu, Part Three

Blogging Marvel’s Master of Kung-Fu, Part Three

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Master_of_Kung_Fu_Vol_1_22Giant-Size_Master_of_Kung_Fu_Vol_1_2Master of Kung Fu #22 sees the welcome return of artist Paul Gulacy who came and went a bit in these early issues. The first half of the story sees Shang-Chi set upon by Si-Fan assassins at a Chinese restaurant in New York before infiltrating his father’s skyscraper base of operations. Fu Manchu has captured both Sir Denis Nayland Smith and Black Jack Tarr. Shang-Chi stows away aboard Fu Manchu’s private jet unaware of their destination. Once on the ground, he follows as his father’s minions lead their captives to a cave in the side of a mountain which has been filled with dynamite. Shang-Chi rescues the two Englishmen and prevents the detonation which would have seen Fu Manchu kill his archenemy in the same instant he destroyed Mount Rushmore. Doug Moench, like Steve Englehart before him, has an embarrassment of riches that are largely squandered with insufficient page count to fully develop his narrative. This would soon change, however, and make the series one of the finest published in the 1970s.

Most of Marvel’s Giant-Size quarterly titles were throwaways, much like too many of their special Annual editions, but Giant-Size Master of Kung Fu #2 was a 40-page epic designed to showcase both the character of Shang-Chi and the talents of the series’ writer and artist, respectively. Doug Moench had been harboring a desire to address racism and bigotry directly and a series with an Asian protagonist gave him the perfect forum to do so. Paul Gulacy now had the freedom to display martial arts fighting as well as moving displays of romance and longing relying solely on the power of his images in a string of panels that conveyed storytelling free of words. Even more significant is the fact that Gulacy’s depictions of lust and attraction never pandered to titillation as the artist evinced a mature understanding of the art form’s possibility. The fact that he was strongly influenced by cinema and Steranko’s pop art work of the 1960s take nothing away from the fact that Gulacy was coming into his own as an artist with this title.

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