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Belfort Board Game and Kickstarter Expansion

Belfort Board Game and Kickstarter Expansion

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belfort-componentsIn the board game Belfort (Amazon), you are trying to complete the building of a city before the snow season arrives, along with the accompanying yeti attacks. This gives you seven months (or rounds) to prove your mettle by completing more of the project than your rival architects.

Toward this end, you carry out the following activities:

  • Recruit a team of elves and dwarves to gather wood, stone, and metal resources, as well as gold coins
  • Buy and sell resources at the trading post
  • Buy property cards, representing new properties you can build
  • Earn income from your properties and pay taxes
  • Use wood, stone, and metal resources to build new properties within the town, which provide various benefits
  • Hire gnomes to work at your properties to gain the benefits from them
  • Send your elves or dwarves to guilds (randomly determined each game) to gain benefits

To get a sense for the flow of the game, you may also check out this YouTube video. The graphics of the game are fun and engaging, giving it a lot of personality compared to other games of this type and even inspiring a charming comic book (read the digital version here) that brings the dwarf/elf rivalry to life.

The creators of Belfort are now releasing an expansion – currently funding on Kickstarter until May 9 – which will allow you to hire Assistants that provide special benefits. Or you can forego the Assistant benefit to get an expansion permit which augments an existing property, such as adding a Pool to the Inn or an Archives onto the Library. These property expansions provide scoring bonuses for those who have them, giving the potential edge you need to win the game.

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The Scariest Hour in TV History: Space 1999: “Dragon’s Domain”

The Scariest Hour in TV History: Space 1999: “Dragon’s Domain”

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What IS the scariest single hour of TV ever? Something out of Night Gallery, perhaps, or one of the space1999-07more high octane Twilight Zone episodes? Star Trek’s “The Devil in the Dark?” What about recent vintages like True Blood, or some modern-day zombie flick? Salem’s Lot was made for TV and that has chills aplenty, but it’s far longer than an hour.

What’s left?

Space 1999. That’s right. Not usually a rock ‘em-sock ‘em sort of program, and definitely relegated now to the “dated” category, but still… for one awful hour in 1975, Space 1999 changed my life.

Let me admit up front that I was a scaredy-cat kid. If a more frightened child ever existed, I have yet to meet him, her, or it. I was scared of the dark, terrified of the basement, and petrified of being alone: demonstrating fear of abandonment in all its forms, from sensorial to parental. For years, in watching TV broadcasts of The Wizard of Oz, I never once saw the Wicked Witch; at the least hint that she was to make an appearance, I’d flee the room.

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Some Thoughts on Grimus

Some Thoughts on Grimus

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GrimusBrian Aldiss has told a story (and I have no reason to doubt it) in which he, Arthur C. Clarke, and Kingsley Amis were the jury for a 1975 Sunday Times science fiction award. One of the books they were strongly considering for first prize was a novel called Grimus, by a 25-year-old first-time writer who worked in advertising. But as they deliberated, the publisher pulled the book from the competition, evidently because said publisher didn’t want the book given the label of ‘science fiction.’ Odd to think of the impact on the writer’s career: “Had it won,” Aldiss has been quoted as observing, “he would have been labelled a science-fiction writer, and nobody would have heard of him again.” As it happened, Salman Rushdie’s second novel, 1981’s equally-fantastic Midnight’s Children, won the Booker Prize (as well as both the 25th anniversary and the 40th anniversary “Booker of Bookers” prize, which pitted all the books that had won the prize up to those points against each other); he’s gone on to have a distinguished and controversial career, though one famously marked by the outrage his writing provoked in certain quarters.

Reading Grimus, I find that, whatever his publisher might have wanted, it’s easiest to define it as that subset of fantasy called science fiction. At times, and perhaps by the end of the book, that’s even the best way in which to read it. But the novel’s so strange and supple it moves quickly and effortlessly from one genre to another, one narrative approach to the next. It reinvents its form as it goes, incorporating what came before while opening up new ways for its tale to proceed. You can see why a jury of writers would look at it as a potential prize-winner; it’s remarkable, and if I found it only sporadically involving on a human level, its fluidity of prose and image still made it work — there’s a pleasure in storytelling, here, and in the plasticity of story, in story that refuses to be bounded by any descriptor and so spills out to embrace all genres.

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Set Sail on the Waters of Darkness

Set Sail on the Waters of Darkness

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waters darknessfrazetta pirate-smallWaters of Darkness is the new novel from David C. Smith and Joe Bonadonna, published by Damnation Books. Longtime readers of my column will recognize Bonadonna as the author of the well-received sword & sorcery title, Mad Shadows and the recent space fantasy, Three Against the Stars. David C. Smith will be familiar to Robert E. Howard fans for his series of Red Sonja novels in the 1980s.

The shade of Robert E. Howard lingers over every page of Waters of Darkness, the first collaboration by these two talented authors to see print.

The principal characters, Crimson Kate O’Toole and Bloody Red Buchanan, would have fit in nicely had this 17th Century swashbuckler first seen print in the pages of Weird Tales in the 1930s. A quest for fabled treasure sets these two buccaneers sailing for the Isle of Shadow in the far distant Eastern Seas.

They find themselves combating an evil priest of Dagon and the sorcerer in his thrall along the way and most of the crew of the Raven pays the cost for their having crossed paths.

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Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews The Black Prism

Sean T. M. Stiennon reviews The Black Prism

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How could I have ever doubted this cover, this beard?
How could I have ever doubted this cover, this beard?

The Black Prism
Brent Weeks
Orbit Books (640 pages, hardcover first edition August 2010, $25.99)

I’ll admit that, if I hadn’t already devoured Brent Weeks’s Night Angel novels, I probably wouldn’t have picked up The Black Prism (despite the cool, shadowy cover of a man in a magnificent goatee brandishing a mirror-polished blade).  The reason for that is a shallow one: The magic system sounded stupid. It is, in short, rainbow magic, sorcery based on splitting white light into one or more of its component colors to create a magical effect. But the Night Angel books were awesome, and I gave Weeks a chance to impress me again.  It took me ten pages to be thoroughly hooked on his story, and another hundred pages to be sold on his unique approach to magic.

In the world of the Seven Satrapies, trained drafters can draw color out of appropriately shaded objects (or white light viewed through a tinted lens) and draw it into their bodies to create a substance called luxin.  The properties of luxin differ dramatically based on its color: Red luxin is a hyper-flammable jelly, while super-violet luxin (just above the visible spectrum for most people) is as light and strong as spider-silk.  Each color also carries with it a particular emotional state that overtakes the person drafting it.  Green is wild and impetuous, orange slick and dissimulating.  It’s a simple idea with complex uses, both for war and for technology, and the applications Weeks finds for various kinds of luxin are a big part of the The Black Prism’s unique appeal.

Monochromes draft one color, and represent the majority.  Bichromes, the elite among drafters, have access to two, usually contiguous on the color spectrum (i.e., red and orange), and a small handful are polychromes, commanding three or four.  Only one man — the Prism — can split light into all seven stable colors, and he is regarded as high priest of the one god Orholam, the source of all light.  When there is imbalance in the world caused by one color being drafted more than another, it is his vocation to correct it.

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Romance and Revisions: The Outlaw of Torn by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Romance and Revisions: The Outlaw of Torn by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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Outlaw of Torn 1st ed“Not since Arthur of Silures kept his round table hath ridden forth upon English soil so true a knight as Norman of Torn.” –Joan de Tany

“I am very doubtful about the story. The plot is excellent, but I think you worked it out all together too hurriedly.” –Thomas Newell Metcalf, letter to Edgar Rice Burroughs, 19 December 1911

“I am not prone to be prejudiced in favor of my own stuff, in fact it all sounds like rot to me…” –Edgar Rice Burroughs, letter to Metcalf, 14 March 2012

In Irwin Porges’s groundbreaking and Chartres Cathedral-sized biography, Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan (Brigham Young University Press, 1975), only two of ERB’s books have solo chapters dedicated to them: Tarzan of the Apes, of course — and The Outlaw of Torn.

Unless you are a hardheaded Burroughs devotee, I’ll wager a ducat you have never crossed paths with the title The Outlaw of Torn. Considering that chronologically it is squashed between his two most famous books, A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes, it makes sense that The Outlaw of Torn gets overlooked. That it belongs to the genre of Medieval Romance, a mite mustier than high Martian adventure or swinging times in the African rainforest, compounds the issue.

But this Middle Ages adventure deserves the primacy that Porges awarded it. Burroughs’s second novel taught him hard truths about the business of writing and what he was capable of. ERB was one of the first writer-businessmen; the long labor getting his second book to work and sell schooled him in the reality of making a living as an author of popular adventure.

The Outlaw of Torn also turned out, after all the toil put into it, a flat work manufactured too obviously as a copy of earlier romances. Burroughs thought highly of the book, and in 1927 wrote to his publisher: “I think it is the best thing I ever wrote, with the possible exception of Tarzan of the Apes, and next to it, I believe will rank The War Chief of the Apaches.” But instead of embracing further stories in this style, Burroughs turned and ran for the jungle with his next outing. A lesson learned, even if he could not admit it years later.

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Blue Sonja: The Last Red Sonja Post

Blue Sonja: The Last Red Sonja Post

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Unchained 1 BlueI started this series of posts with the intention of only writing one. “In Defense of Red Sonja” was meant to be a stand-alone post about how the character was more than just a female version of Conan the Barbarian, more than just a fan-service redhead in a chain mail bikini, more than a misogynist rape-challenge. I’ve been collecting comics from the “Bronze Age” (approximately 1970 through 1985) for years and Red Sonja wasn’t the only female character to pop up. There was Spider-Woman, She-Hulk, Ms. Marvel … all clearly starting as female versions of established male heroes and all eventually transcending those limits to become their own concepts.

That first post quickly grew in size, reaching over three-thousand words before even going into her appearances in Marvel Feature or her self-titled book. As it covered three distinct themes (how she differed from Conan, where the bikini came from, what the vow meant), I thought it would be better to break it into three separate articles. By the time the third post came out, I’d gotten enough positive reaction that I thought it might be nice to keep exploring how the character grew over the course of her own title. It was at this point that I realized just how much humor got slipped in to various panels of the title, which got me in the habit of highlighting a couple images each week. The novels and film were good ways to show how the character translated into other media, as well as how she was still evolving. And it was all a lot of fun.

So why is this the end? There were two more Marvel Comics series in the early eighties, as well as two Dynamite Entertainment series (Red Sonja and Queen Sonja) currently running. Not to mention a slew of one-shots and mini-series. I’ve got enough material to easily keep this column running at least another three years. And it is tempting to try.

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The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1961: A Retro-Review

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1961: A Retro-Review

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Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction July 1961Now to an early ’60s issue of F&SF. This one has an Ed Emshwiller cover, illustrating Brian Aldiss’s “Undergrowth.” It is billed as an “All-Star Issue,” which I find curious, as several of the writers are what I would call “Little-Known.”  I’ll get into that a bit later.

The features: No interior illustrations, of course. There is of course Isaac Asimov’s Science article, “Recipe for a Planet,” which goes into great detail on the components of the Earth.

There is a Books column by Alfred Bester. He discusses a couple of Dover editions of Jules Verne, as well as a film about him (The Fabulous World of Jules Verne). He treats Kingsley Amis’s New Maps of Hell (with approval, expressed in no detail, and accompanied by a recommendation for Lucky Jim, “the funniest first novel since Pickwick Papers” [(Which later first novel might be added? A Confederacy of Dunces?]). He follows with three reviews of short story collections, by Knight, Nourse, and Pohl.

That tells us something, doesn’t it? How likely would  a review column today be to cover not a single current novel, but three collections?

And I suppose Feghoots can be called a feature, too. This issue features number XLI in “Grendel Briarton’s” series. I have enjoyed my share of Feghoots over time, but this one is awful, and not in a good way, concerning intelligent gnus. Really, one thinks, surely Mills (or whoever was editing F&SF at any particular time) could have rejected the really bad Feghoots. Bretnor had to know better. (“Grendel Briarton” was a pseudonym, and an acronym, for Reginald Bretnor.)

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Vintage Treasures: Chaosium’s Thieves’ World

Vintage Treasures: Chaosium’s Thieves’ World

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Thieve's World Chaosium-smallThere was a time when shared-world fantasy was brand new, and taking the genre by storm. That time was 1979, and the man at the helm was Robert Lynn Asprin, a midlist novelist who had never edited anything before in his life.

Robert Lynn Asprin was the guest of honor at one of the first science fiction conventions I ever attended, Maplecon 2 in Ottawa in 1979. He was a spirited and self-deprecating guest, telling stories of Joe Haldeman and Poul Anderson gently correcting his spelling and grammar (“These are the people I’m supposed to be editing?!”) as he midwifed the birth of what would become one of the most successful fantasy franchises of the 20th Century: Thieves’ World, the Ace paperback anthology that triggered an explosion in shared world fantasy over the next two decades. Thieves’ World eventually encompassed thirteen collections and over half a dozen original novels, published between 1979 and 2004.

It wasn’t the only new trend to emerge at the end of the 70s in fantasy fiction — in fact, it wasn’t even the biggest. The influence of Dungeons and Dragons was cresting at the same time, and with the publication of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the first DragonLance novel, in 1984, the two genres finally collided, and neither would ever be the same again.

As fantasy fiction and gaming gradually blended throughout the 80s, it didn’t just mean that bookstores were flooded with gaming novels. Gaming stores likewise were invaded with a new generation of book-inspired titles, from Iron Crown’s Middle Earth Role Playing to Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu, and TSR’s Conan and Lankhmar properties, just to name a few.

These two juggernauts of 20th Century fantasy, Thieves World and role playing, came together in 1981 with the release of the Thieves’ World boxed set from Chaosium, a singular accomplishment that has been called the “Rosetta Stone of early roleplaying.”

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Michael Moorcock’s Von Bek: A Review

Michael Moorcock’s Von Bek: A Review

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Von BekNo matter what your opinion of Michael Moorcock, you can’t deny that he’s a versatile writer; from the pulpy adventures of Dorian Hawkmoon to the sophisticated high literature of Mother London, this man seems capable of writing anything, and Von Bek, a collection of three stories that focus around the family of the same name and their quest for the Grail, is proof.

This is especially true of the first book: The Warhound and the World’s Pain, which focuses on Ulrich Von-Bek. Here you’ll encounter the same Gothic tones and deep melancholy of the Elric books, the gung-ho adventure of Hawkmoon alongside another healthy dose of Moorcock’s boundless imagination. It is at once questioning and original, daring and clever; unafraid to show the ravages of war, but still enjoyable as simple, leave-your-brain-at-the-door adventure.

A hard to attain but perfect combination. In this tale Lucifer, wanting to redeem himself in the eyes of God, enlists Ulrich Von Bek to retrieve the Holy Grail, or, as he calls it, the ’cure to the worlds pain.’

All throughout this venture, he is hindered by Klosterheim, who has been ordered to prevent him from finding the Grail. Klosterheim’s arrogant nature, intolerable ignorance, and prejudice make him an apt and contemptible rival for our charismatic anti-hero.

I say anti-hero because Von Bek, much like Elric, is a far-cry from Conan or Aragorn in that, rather than having an immovable viewpoint on morals, Von Bek, at least at the beginning, has none. The fact that he only accepts the tangible and takes destruction in his stride makes him a compelling companion, and makes his quest — which surrounds religion and metaphysics — all the more apt, and therefore all the more interesting.

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