Black Gate – Page 1079 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Win One of Four New Copies of The Unearthed Arcana 1st Edition Premium Reprint!

Sunday, February 24, 2013 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Wizards of the Coast has offered us four new copies of The Unearthed Arcana 1st Edition Premium Reprint as giveaways. Is this a great country or what?

Until last week, Gary Gygax’s seminal Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rule book Unearthed Arcana — which introduced the Cavalier, Barbarian, and Thief-Acrobat classes, among many other earth-shaking changes — had never been reprinted. This premium reprint incorporates the many corrections and updates published in Dragon magazine, making it the definitive edition. We first covered the release on Thursday and the excited discussion still continues in the Comments. Here’s what Seven Kings author John R. Fultz has to say:

The release of Unearthed Arcana changed everything. Suddenly we had new spells! Weapon Specialization! Barbarians and Cavaliers! One of the greatest long-term campaigns I ever ran centered around two players that exemplified the classic “buddy-cop” paradigm, although they were opposites: Lystoke the Cavalier and Braigore the Barbarian. One was all about civility and the martial code of honor, the other was a Chaotic Neutral ass-kicker who took no prisoners. Together they made a legendary team… at one point they kicked Mammon’s ass, drove him back to Hell, and plundered his treasure room. Ah, memories.

Oh, I almost forgot one of the other major game-changers from Arcana: Tons of new Magic Items!!! First Edition just isn’t the same without this book.

How do you win a copy? Easy! Just follow in John’s footsteps and send an e-mail to john@blackgate.com with a one-paragraph summary of your most memorable D&D or AD&D characters. Points will be awarded for conciseness and originality. We’ll publish the best here at Black Gate, and the Top Ten as decided by our judges will be included in a draw for one of four copies of the new Unearthed Arcana 1st Edition Premium Reprint, compliments of Wizards of the Coast.

All entries become the property of New Epoch Press. No purchase necessary. Must be 12 or older. Decisions of the judges (capricious as they may be) are final. Sorry, US entrants only. Not valid where prohibited by law. Eat your vegetables.

How to Put the Sword in Sword and Sorcery

Saturday, February 23, 2013 Violette Malan Comments 13 comments

I love sword fighting. All of my favourite movies involve sword fights, and most of my favourite books. I love the Star Trek TOS episode where Sulu runs around with a sword, so it should come as no surprise that I primarily write sword and sorcery novels.

The sorcery part’s easy – pretty well everyone knows I’m making that up, and so long as I keep things internally consistent, I’m in the clear.

But what about the sword part? I can’t just make that up, can I? Viz. this exchange, which took place on a martial arts panel at Ad Astra back in the 90’s:

Panellist: “You know in the movie when Wesley and Iñigo are fighting? Well, they’re not really using the moves they say they’re using.”

Called out by a wit from the back of the room: “Gee, they are in the book.”

And there’s at least part of your answer. You can write whatever you like, but, like William Goldman in The Princess Bride, it behoves you to do some research.

There are some great books that explain all kinds of things about swords and swordplay. There’s Captain Sir Richard Burton’s The Book of the Sword. There’s By the Sword, Richard Cohen’s excellent book on the history of duelling and fencing from ancient into modern times. And there’s also John Clements’s Renaissance Swordsmanship, which has illustrations showing fighting with different kinds of swords, against different kinds of weapons. It also describes fighting moves in such a way that you can put together a fight — so long as it’s not too complicated.

But is book learning enough? I don’t think so.

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Kickstarter Alert: Up Your Game with Realm Works

Friday, February 22, 2013 Andrew Zimmerman Jones Comments 0 Comment

I’m in the midst of starting up a Pathfinder RPG, the first game that I’ve run in several years. As always, the planning and character creation is half the fun. The setting, especially as outlined in the Inner Sea World Guide, contains a lot of opportunities for diverse storylines, from traditional fantasy to sword and sorcery to pirate adventures to planetary romance.

But all of these opportunities also create difficulties. I have the backstories that my characters have come up with, the mysterious things about their past that I have come up with, the skeletons in their various family and friend’s closet, plot hooks and story arcs that I’ve got to seed which will likely take months to bear fruit, if they ever do.

Unfortunately, I’ve got enough demands on my time that I know I’m not as focused as I once was, and I’m concerned about keeping it all straight. I’m starting a binder and notebook to track the events in, and have typed some up in Google Docs so that I can share the background information they know with my players. I’m thinking of keeping a blog, so that we all can reference back to figure out what events have taken place, as I anticipate this will be a fairly long-lived campaign if all goes well. There’s a lot to potentially keep track of …

Which brings me to the Kickstarter for Realm Works, which has 49 hours to go as I write this. Realm Works is a RPG campaign management engine that is being designed by Lone Wolf Development, with the goal of streamlining exactly the sort of things that I’m currently in the process of meticulously tracking. I’ve heard good things about Lone Wolf’s Hero Lab software, though I’ve never used it, but Realm Works looks like it’ll really be useful.

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Kirkus Looks at Astounding Science Fiction

Friday, February 22, 2013 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

Andrew Liptak at Kirkus Reviews has posted a nice retrospective of one of the most influential figures in the history of our genre: John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction and the short-lived Unknown magazine. Here’s a snippet:

In 1938, science fiction would run into another personality who would change science fiction again: When 28-year-old author John Campbell Jr. was hired to edit Astounding Magazine. Campbell’s influence in the magazine market is commonly cited as the beginning of the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction, and represented a major shift away from the conventions of Gernsback’s pulp era…

With the release of the July 1939 issue of Astounding, the gloves came off. The issue’s table of contents contained a number of high quality stories from new and regular Astounding writers: “The Black Destroyer,” the first published story by A.E. van Vogt; “Trends,” Isaac Asimov’s first sale to the publication; “City of the Cosmic Rays,” by Nat Schachner; “Lightship, Ho!,” by Nelson S. Bond; “The Moth,” by Ross Rocklynne; Amelia Reynold’s “When the Half-Gods Go;” and “Greater than Gods,” by C.L. Moore.

Subsequent issues of Astounding featured a regular stable of authors who have become household names: Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard and Isaac Asimov, amongst many others. The magazine had changed the landscape…

The complete article is here. Thanks to John DeNardo at SF Signal for the tip.

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Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Bride of Fu Manchu, Part Three

Friday, February 22, 2013 William Patrick Maynard Comments 1 comment

Sax Rohmer’s The Bride of Fu Manchu was originally serialized in Collier’s from May 6 to July 8, 1933 under the variant title, Fu Manchu’s Bride. It was published in book form later that year by Cassell in the UK and Doubleday in the US. The US edition retained the original magazine title until the 1960s when the UK book title was adopted for the paperback edition published by Pyramid Books.

Our narrator and hero, botanist Alan Sterling has found himself a Companion of the Si-Fan along with numerous other scientific geniuses conscripted into their service after falling victim to the catalepsy-inducing drug that leads the outside world to believe them dead. Fah lo Suee, the daughter of Fu Manchu, has conspired to prevent Sterling from being subjected to her father’s mind control drug in order to use him as a pawn to remove Fleurette, raised since childhood to bear Fu Manchu a son, from the household.

Attempting to escape, Sterling stumbles upon Fu Manchu in an opium trance. He considers murdering him to avenge Dr. Petrie’s death, but finds he is unable to lift a hand against him for some unknown reason. Retracing his steps, Sterling works to find an escape route through the elaborate cave system that leads from Mahdi Bey’s estate down to the beach at Ste. Claire. Rohmer builds suspense well as Sterling’s path through the dark is made more dramatic as he becomes aware someone is stalking him. Both Sterling and the reader are startled to learn the pursuer is none other than Nayland Smith.

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Goth Chick News: Amazon Studios Scores Zombie Invasion

Thursday, February 21, 2013 Sue Granquist Comments 0 Comment

Further proof — assuming you needed it after New York Fashion Week — that zombies are mainstreaming.

Amazon Studios, the offshoot of online retailer Amazon.com whose purpose is to source scripts and test movies to eventually air on the Amazon Instant Video service, is heading into original content production with a pretty intriguing announcement.

Zombieland the TV series, which has been in discussions for some time, is no longer going to air on a regular broadcast network. Instead, Amazon has snapped it up and is developing the series for their own use.

30-minute episodes, produced by Sony Pictures Television, will appear on Amazon as original programming and the show will continue to center around the original Zombieland group of post-apocalyptic survivors. Amazon will be replacing the all-star 2009 lineup of Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, Jesse Eisenberg and Abigail Breslin with a more budget-friendly group, but things are getting interesting now that the larger-than-life character “Tallahassee” has finally been cast.

Invasion Iowa star Kirk Ward has been tasked with filling Harrelson’s snakeskin boots as the iconic, Twinkie-seeking, zombie-slaying hero.

The interesting bit is that rumors indicate Ward might have been the first choice for the role, from back in the day before Zombieland became a feature film.

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Nebula Award Nominations Announced

Thursday, February 21, 2013 John ONeill Comments 19 comments

The Nebula is one of the most prestigious awards our genre has to offer. Indeed, since the winners are chosen by science fiction and fantasy writers rather than a popular vote, many people consider it the most prestigious genre award.

The 2012 Nebula Awards Nominees were announced yesterday by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the voting body that grants the awards. The nominees are:

Novel

Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed (DAW)
Ironskin, Tina Connolly (Tor)
The Killing Moon, N.K. Jemisin (OrbitUK)
The Drowning Girl, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Roc)
Glamour in Glass, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
2312, Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)

Novella

On a Red Station, Drifting, Aliette de Bodard (Immersion Press)
After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, Nancy Kress (Tachyon)
“The Stars Do Not Lie,” Jay Lake (Asimov’s SF)
“All the Flavors,” Ken Liu (GigaNotoSaurus)
“Katabasis,” Robert Reed (F&SF)
“Barry’s Tale,” Lawrence M. Schoen (Buffalito Buffet)

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New Treasures: The Unearthed Arcana 1st Edition Premium Reprint

Thursday, February 21, 2013 John ONeill Comments 26 comments

The Premium 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons reprint series is one of the best ideas Wizards of the Coast has ever had.

By bringing Gary Gygax’s original AD&D rulebooks back into print in deluxe editions, Wizards is making the groundbreaking work of the father of role playing available to a modern audience. More than that, it’s a tacit acknowledgement of the growing popularity of retro-gaming, a nod to those players who still enjoy playing first edition (or OE, Original Edition) D&D and AD&D.

I’m one of them. My most recent game of D&D was last Sunday, and one of the books we reached for during play — as a troop of goblins chased my player characters through a dark wood — was the first edition AD&D volume Unearthed Arcana.

Unlike the Players Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Masters Guide, Gygax’s Unearthed Arcana — which, among many other innovations, introduced the Cavalier, Barbarian, and Thief-Acrobat classes — had never been reprinted, and the copy we used to quickly check the effects of my daughter’s druid’s “Goodberry” spell was the original TSR printing from 1985. That’s a hard book to come across these days, as one of my young players lamented.

But no longer. Wizards of the Coast released the Unearthed Arcana 1st Edition Premium Reprint on Tuesday of this week. Best of all, this edition incorporates the corrections and updates published under Gygax’s supervision in Dragon magazine, making this the definitive edition of the text. At long last, players can assemble a complete collection of the most essential rule books for the greatest role playing game ever written, without having to pay collector’s prices for long out-of-print volumes.

The Unearthed Arcana 1st Edition Premium Reprint was published by Wizards of the Coast on February 19, 2013. It is 128 pages in hardcover, priced at $49.95. There is no digital or softcover edition.

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Babe the Barbarian (Ruth, That Is)

Thursday, February 21, 2013 Sarah Avery Comments 7 comments

My newest students beg for sports writing, and cannot abide either dragons or spaceships. They’re good kids, 8th graders who used to read voluminously for pleasure until junior high. Their parents are desperate to get them reading again. The boys are desperate to read freely again. So now I get to be desperate to learn about sports writing.

Meet the students where they are. They can’t very well meet you where they’re not.

Fortunately, I had just started reading, on my own time, The Sword and Sorcery Anthology, edited by David Hartwell and Jacob Weisman. At first, as I pulled likely prospects from the sports shelves at Barnes & Noble, I grumbled quietly to myself about how I was going to have to set The Sword and Sorcery Anthology aside, perhaps for weeks, and for what? For Babe Bleeping Ruth and Joe Bleeping DiMaggio. I settled in at the cafe to cull the candidate books in my pile and tried to find a bright side. Some of the masters of the golden age of pulp also wrote boxing stories, or stories that happened to be about boxers. For people who see athletes as heroes, sports writing might hit the same sweet spot as heroic fiction. If I had to sink my time into this stuff, I would find some way to make it serve my writing.

Something David Drake said in his introduction to The Sword and Sorcery Anthology helped me cull that pile of books, and has been with me as I’ve started picking my way through the essays.

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“Reminiscent of the Old Sword & Sorcery Classics”: Tangent Online on “The Find” by Mark Rigney

Wednesday, February 20, 2013 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Louis West at Tangent Online reviews “The Find,” Part II of The Tales of Gemen, published here on Sunday, February 17th:

In Mark Rigney’s “The Find” we meet the young Gemen and learn his terrible secret: at age ten, Gemen followed his sister through an arcane portal and lost everything – sister, family, seven years of life and his entire world line. For decades he has crisscrossed this world, recovering the scattered portal stones to rebuild the gateway and return home…

Gemen… acquires Velori, sharp-tongued warrior priestess of Dominion, from the Courtyard of Trials where she deigns to kill her four attackers because her hidden weavers (giant spider friends) counseled “mercy.” The massive, bear-like Dorvic joins the pair by happenstance, an encounter that leads to a fight for their lives against several dozen Corvaen soldiers…

An enjoyable, often boisterous tale, reminiscent of the old sword & sorcery classics. I can’t wait to see what fate awaits Gemen. A must read.

“The Find” is the sequel to “The Trade,” Part I of The Tales of Gemen the Antiques Dealer, which Tangent Online called a “Marvelous tale. Can’t wait for the next part.”

Read Louis West’s review at Tangent Online, and read “The Find,” a 14,000-word novelette of weird fantasy, completely free here.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by C.S.E. Cooney, Vaughn Heppner, E.E. Knight, Jason E. Thummel, Gregory Bierly, Judith Berman, Howard Andrew Jones, Dave Gross, Harry Connolly, and others, is here.