Howard Andrew Jones's Blog, page 26

Shandakor

I rose bleary a little too early this morning and read the sad and somber story of “The Last Days of Shandakor” by the incomparable Leigh Brackett. Shortly Bill Ward and Fletcher Vrendenburgh and I will be discussing it on the site, so if you have a copy of the tale I hope you’ll join us. It’s found in several Brackett collections, among them the nearly perfect “best-of” paperback Sea-Kings of Mars and the absurdly affordable Martian Quest e-book.

I say nearly perfect because A.) It contains NEARLY all of my very favorite Brackett short stories. I’d take out one or two and replace them with others, but it’s a great one-stop if you’ve liked Brackett and want to get a better sense of her before plunging into buying the expensive Haffner Press hardbacks. I own them, but I might not have if I hadn’t been familiar with this volume already.

B.) The darned thing has irritating typographical errors, the kind that crop up when the original  manuscripts have been scanned and then not proofread carefully enough.

As for Martian Quest, from Baen, it’s part of a series of e-book reprints that gather almost all of Brackett’s speculative fiction. If you’re a fan it will save you having to haunt old bookstores the way I’ve done to pick up battered paperbacks. Although if you’re like me you might still prefer battered paperbacks to electronic copies.

And if you love this stuff as much as I do, you’ll probably want the Haffner Press volumes that collect ALL her speculative fiction between beautiful covers.

Anyway, Bill and Fletcher and I will be putting the article together over the course of the week and should have it ready for discussion by next week.

Icicles

‘Tis the first day of winter. We should be seeing some icicles any day, if we haven’t already…

 

Winter Gaming PLUS Brackett

With the cold snap in full swing I’ve been looking into my game closet at the increasingly large stack of games-to-be-played. It’s not nearly as high as my books-to-be-read pile, but it’s starting to get embarrassing. Some of these games are pricey and took a lot of effort to track down (they were out of print) or to get trade deals for. And yet many are unplayed or even in shrink wrap, on the off chance I decide I want to trade them away for something else.

I’d been thinking that my collection was starting to get out of hand, but after I poked around a bit I realized that I’ve got nothing on the real game aficionados. I have a few dozen — some friends, acquaintances, and like-minded folks have HUNDREDS. But then maybe they collect those rather than cats or porcelain figurines, and maybe they don’t have other hobbies.

So, while I admit I have an addiction, I’m telling myself it’s under control. We’ll go with that.

Much as I’m wanting to try some of the new games, last night I pulled down Hornet Leader. It comes with so many different scenarios that I decided I’d play it some more before attempting any of the other Leader games from DVG, many of which I own, unplayed. While writing an article about B-17 Leader I provided info on how Hornet Leader plays and a little about why I like it. The curious can refer there.

Speaking of Leader games, a Kickstarter has just launched for Sherman Leader, and it looks like it might be pretty swell, if you feel like getting yourself a special gift.

On an unrelated note, Bill Ward, Fletcher Vredenburgh and I will be reading a Leigh Brackett adventure over the holiday break. I think we’re settling on “Last Days of Shandakor.” It’s a good one that we all have a copy of.

Flakes with Special Syndrome

Pardon me while I slip on my ranting hat. This may start like it’s going to be a post just for gamers, but it really isn’t. Bear with me.

I’m putting finishing touches on a review of a new Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons product titled Volo’s Guide to Monsters. I happen to think it’s pretty swell, but I thought it would be a good idea to see what other reviewers have written about the text, to make sure there’s not some glaring problem I missed.

It turns out that no, there isn’t, unless I’m a special snowflake. Hence the ranting hat. While there were a number of intelligent, rational reviews that seemed to have found what I did, there were also several that called it out for perceived weaknesses — i.e. the book didn’t address their special field of interest. While the monster guide has a big selection of new player classes, someone faulted it because it didn’t have another, different kind.  While it had hundreds of monsters, someone else faulted it because it didn’t have a certain KIND of monster.

I’m reminded of those Conan fans who complained so mightily about the art in the Roy Thomas run on the new Dark Horse comics that they didn’t happen to notice how good the STORY was — how clever Conan was and how much he was acting, you know, like Conan would in a Robert E. Howard story.

I get incredibly frustrated sometimes by people who either can’t appreciate the worth of what they’re holding or don’t understand its purpose. I know I’ve ranted before about people who complain that there’s not enough focus on environmental plight in the spy novel, or that gender politics aren’t the focus of an adventure story, and this kind of thing offends me in a similar way. If those issues are what you’re looking for, go somewhere else and read about them there, okay? But don’t judge this work faulty because it doesn’t have the features it wasn’t really designed to hold.

Likewise, a comment John C. Hocking made has been percolating regarding elves in special hats. I’ll paraphrase. There’s a certain kind of reader who is only there to make sure the elf is wearing the right hat. You could write the grandest damned adventure story in the world, stuffed with nothing but action, adventure, deep characters, and surprising twists, but there’s a contingent out there who won’t notice ANY of that. Instead they’ll write paragraphs or pages or posts in ALL CAPS  when they see that your elf is wearing a green hat and is supposed to be wearing a blue one. For shame!

Speaking of hats, I’m going to take mine off and get to work.

Thinking of Pete

The late, great Pete Ham died in 1975 by his own hand one night after drinking an absurd amount of scotch, crushed by the bankruptcy engendered upon him by a crooked business manager. His best friend, the talented Tom Evans, always thought that Ham must have changed his mind at the last minute owing to the way he found the body, but we’ll never know, and we’ll never know what the two might have gone on to write together if Pete hadn’t killed himself. Their band, Badfinger, had gotten royally screwed by their business manager but it’s possible that they could have recovered had they turned to the right people for help.

Depression in combination with alcohol is a deadly mix, and it unfortunately led to the death of Tom Evans eight years later. Sometimes, in fits of despair, he would tell his wife or his friends that he wanted to be where Pete was.

Tom Evans and Pete Ham

It’s a terrible story, made even more terrible once you start learning about what a great guy Pete Ham seems to have been. In the extensive interviews Dan Mantovina conducted for his band bio, Without You, he found no one who had anything bad to say about Ham, who appears to have been sensitive, supportive, and loyal. And universally liked.

The reason I became fascinated with him had nothing to do with the tragedy of his life, but because I find him a phenomenal pop songwriter. His words seldom work any particular magic, but the melodies are McCartney-in-his-prime worthy and his song arrangements are inspired. He (and occasionally Evans, though usually in concert with Ham) is the only songwriter I know whose songs are so Beatle-like that casual fans with musical training have thought them the work of Lennon and McCartney. That’s saying something. Almost all Beatle imitators are patently obvious about their influence but unable to carry the weight — they don’t quite understand how to write a genius level song, not being, you know, geniuses. Ham was, and he wasn’t just trying to copy the Beatles, he was of the era and from the same places, with similar melodic gifts, albeit filtered through Welsh melancholy.

He wasn’t just Badfinger’s lead songwriter, either, he was their lead singer and their lead guitarist, a Clapton level talent. He was a phenom.

By the time I was old enough to care about any of this Ham was long dead. I never met the man, but I love his music and when I was a teenager I used to imagine what it would have been like to jam with him, or somehow to be there at that right moment to stay his hand.

I’ve long since stopped gigging around in rock bands and I almost never pick up a guitar anymore, and I really haven’t been on any kind of major Badfinger kick in years. I long since absorbed all the info I wanted to know, collected the music, and moved on. So it’s kind of surprising that from time to time I still have vivid dreams that I’m hanging out with Pete Ham. There was that once where we wrote a song together, which was danged cool. There have been plenty of times that we just kicked back with guitars and played together. And — what inspired this entire post — last night I dreamt I was reading a book he’d written about his years in the band, full of photos that don’t exist of them in concert, or backstage talking with other rock stars.

I meet many people in my dreams, and some of them are famous, but the one who pops up most often, for some reason, is Ham. Maybe I’m just catching glimpses of an alternate reality when things turned out better for him and his friends. I’d like to think that.

Here, in honor of a great songwriter, is a link to my favorite power pop gem, “No Matter What.” It starts so simply, with just a guitar chord sequence. And then, bit by bit, more details are added to the framework. Each time through the verse or the middle eight, he adds a little more, whether it be a lead guitar line or falling backing vocals, or a third harmony part. It hooks you in, builds, then pulls out before you get tired of it. Of course it also works on the much more basic level in that it’s a catchy tune. That’s where Ham always started.

 

Joyous Gifts

As I bring the family gift shopping to a close this season I’m finding presents on my mind. My children are teenagers now and just aren’t as easily excited by gifts as they used to be, and I suppose the same thing is true of me. It’s been a long time since I’ve been so thrilled by a gift that I grinned from ear to ear and ran off to enjoy it for hours at a time.

(I mean gifts in the traditional sense, not “oh, the love of my child” or “the gift of life” or some permutation thereof.)

I wonder if that change in joy level is because as we age we’re less surprised even by the things we like. I mean, even when I received a copy of a rare pulp collection it still wasn’t like discovering that toy I was mad for when I was five actually under the Christmas tree. On the other hand, that pulp still brings a smile to me whenever I pick it up, so it’s not as though the joy has gone. It’s just not as intense.

Anyway, I got to thinking about what the most exciting traditional presents I ever received and gave were. In the case of “gave” there’s no contest, but it’s a little bit of a story, so bear with me. Before my son was even born my wife and I were in a department store after Christmas and an awesome Lego adventure set was remaindered for less than half price. It was Indiana Jones-like before Lego actually had the Indiana Jones license, so it had a hot air balloon and an Egyptian temple and mummy and treasure and all that — basically it was the set I would have loved to have had when I was a kid, one of those big ones I dreamed of that my parents couldn’t have afforded. I picked that thing up and kept it in a sack in the basement for YEARS. Finally, when my son was five or six, old enough to play with all those tiny pieces, he received it for Christmas.

Well, he did love it, as you’d probably expect, but THAT wasn’t the present that most thrilled him. Included in the box was a catalog of other Lego sets, and there was this big Mars explorer set that just enthralled him. He wanted that thing — the only problem, of course, was that the catalog was six or seven years old at that point and the set out of print. He said that was the gift he most wanted, though. I warned him it might be very hard to get because the company had stopped making it, but that I’d try. He said he understood. Well, I bought it on Ebay for a reasonable price, unopened. When he unwrapped that gift on his birthday he stared at the sealed box for a few seconds then ran across the room and gave me a big hug. THAT was the best. It was a thanks hug and a “Dad came through” hug and it was full of gratitude and love.

As for the gift I received that brought me the most joy, I’d probably have to go back to my childhood. Boy, was I excited by the Fisher-Price castle and remember staring at it in the Sears catalog for weeks, hoping I could play with it. When I did, I had tons of fun. And there were scads of Legos I played with, and the Star Trek action figures, and, later, Six Million Dollar Man toys. But all of those might be beaten by the PlaySkool rescue center.

I can’t tell you how young I was — probably 5 or less — but I do know I hadn’t asked for the present. I wasn’t even aware it existed. But boy, did I love that thing. It came with a helicopter and a fire-truck — with a ladder! And it had a ramp down which a rescue car could zoom, an elevator that could be carried BY the helicopter (which had a hook that lowered), and an emergency slide down which the ambulance drivers and doctors could board the rescue car. And it had all sorts of other little sound makers and details. I was so captivated playing with that set that my mom got worried because she hadn’t seen me in hours. When she came to check up on me she found me in my bedroom STILL playing with the same toy hours after we’d opened presents. She chuckled about that years later. She probably knew then that she’d picked out a good one.

Do any of you have good stories about best gifts given and received? (Appropriate for general audience gifts, if you please…)

Last Stop for Ki-Gor

Over the last few days I finally finished the last unread Ki-Gor novella in my possession, Slave-Caverns of Molundu, and after setting it down I think I’m done reading jungle man adventures for a while. It wasn’t quite as good as the first three, and, as I’ve mentioned, too many jungle stories in a row kind of wear on me/emphasize the ridiculousness of the whole genre. This adventure started strong, but didn’t have as much variety or out-and-out weirdness as the best ones. There were also occasional signs of hasty composition, like a word repeated too many times in a row.

On the other hand, it did have a great, driving pace, the characters were suitably heroic, and there were strong action scenes. And as a final reward, there were occasionally paragraphs of great descriptive power. Like the following:

“All afternoon a rising wind had blown from the south, driving with it writhing cloud masses that struck and fought with each other in their dark anger. Now like some wounded and weary leviathan the mammoth sun turned form its day-long losing battle and bleeding red light over the depths of the sky, dove down through the attacking clouds towards the edge of the world and safety.”

I’m sorry, but that’s just pretty cool. Owing to the strengths, I think I’d grade it as a C+, with likely inclusion on my “best-of” list, just barely.

If any of this Ki-Gor talk has people curious about this stuff, here’s a link to a text version of one of the very best Ki-Gor stories, Beast-Gods of Atlantis. If you like it, then you’ll know that you probably ought to check out some more. And if it’s not your cup of tea, then you’ll know you’ve looked at the best of what Ki-Gor can offer and know that you’ve tried it at it’s best.

For previous Ki-Gor discussions on the blog, you can visit here or here.

Story Play or Game Piece Play?

The Old School Renaissance is immensely appealing to me. I like a lot of the “simpler is better” philosophy behind the design of adventures and rulesets, and the emphasis on creativity. But I keep bumping my head on one of the common conceits. I think it’s best summed up by this line from the famed module Anomalous Subsurface Environment 1, in which the writer Patrick Wetmore declares, in an advice section for players, “You will probably die at some point. Possibly  repeatedly. That’s okay, rolling up a new character is quick and easy. Don’t take it to heart.”

The thrust of this kind of gaming is centered on problem solving and discovery, and I believe — I can’t be sure — character development and narrative must be de-emphasized. I’ve seen some people playing this way, and the characters are only loosely role-played and the players don’t really speak with their voice at the table. If one is removed from the board, they just drop in a replacement character and keep going.

Reading Wetmore’s module, and a favorite of mine, Barrowmaze, as well as countless others that I find appealing, I’ve come to understand my fundamental disconnect with a good chunk of the gaming community. I, and the people I play with, prefer the feel of a TV series, where they develop characters, discover the world, and uncover mysteries and defeat problems. Each episode builds upon the last. I seed events and encounters that lead to new ones. If their characters were constantly dying, they’d lose all the great interaction that depends upon characters referring to past history and growing to depend upon one another — it’s improvisational theatre, and it only gets better the more they play their characters. If one of them were to die it would be like Captain Kirk getting vaporized and being replaced with some new character dropped in from Star Fleet. That death would have an immense impact upon the story, and probably not in a good way.

That’s not to say that characters are never hurt, and sail through without challenge — because overcoming the challenges and succeeding is a real pleasure of the game — but characters don’t usually walk the plank.

I think the players must like our play style, because they seem to have limited toleration for descending into the stereotypical dungeon. They get bored with lockpicking and random monsters and death traps — they want a story. And not just different people in the dungeon to speak with, or a back story about how the dungeon came to be, but actual story with arcs and climaxes and things that involve them and things that their characters would care about. As a result, if I’m running a game I almost never send my players into the famed dungeons half of Dungeons & Dragons — or at least not a very long one. They might be attracted at first to seeing what’s around the next corner, but eventually they always seem to be wondering (you can see it in their faces) “what’s the point?” In other words, where are the story arcs?

I think I must be in the minority. Most of the products out there aren’t really aimed at me and my players. They come from a friendly neighbor from whom I can borrow ingredients, but never an entire meal. Much as I loved reading Barrowmaze, my players were bored after the first few sessions. They told me it began to feel the same, no matter that it was completely different around every corner. It was just the wrong product for them. They couldn’t be compelled to keep poking the stone to check for traps and search for treasure and fight whatever monster popped up. They wanted to role-play.

How do the rest of you play?  I wonder what the percentage is between story based players and, for lack of a better word, game piece players? I’d be curious about your thoughts. Do some of you play both ways? I find myself kind of wanting to try, as a player, the other style. I bet it would feel more like an improvisational board game in some ways.

Return to the Jungle, Ki-Gor Style

If your to-be-read pile is anything like mine, sometimes stuff leaps ahead for no good reason. For instance, I have a score of books I’ve actually been looking forward to for years and have never gotten to. Sometimes it’s a matter of taste (maybe I’m not feeling like a pulp adventure) and sometimes its just timing, or that I’m saving THAT book for a long airplane trip because I’m positive I’ll like it (such is the fate of Nathan Long’s third Ulrika book, and Tim Powers’ The Drawing of the Dark).

But sometimes it’s just a whim. I drop by James Reasoner’s excellent blog from time to time, and on November 18th he posted a review of a Ki-Gor story. He kind of liked it, and I dropped in to say that if you like THAT one, just wait, because they get weird and wild and far stronger pretty soon… and that got me and my pal John Chris Hocking talking about Ki-Gor again. He decided he’d finally get around to reading one of my favorites, “The Silver Witch” and I decided to heck with my TBR pile, that I’d tackle a handful of Ki-Gor stories I’d never gotten around to.

I wrote about the glories and pitfalls of the Ki-Gor jungle man stories back in August of 2014. I’m still sort of surprised by how much I liked them, because it didn’t seem to be in my wheel house — except that the best are pretty grand pulp adventure with elements of the fantastic, the tale of “The Silver Witch” being a perfect example. Back then I wrote:

I wasn’t quite sure what I’d get, but what I didn’t expect was an action-packed adventure with glowing zombie-men who disintegrated into ash when slain, or the machinations of an ageless sorceress intent on… well, I don’t remember what she was intent on, really, but she wanted to conquer something, and she fell for Ki-Gor, hard, as scheming villainesses do. It was ridiculous and over-the-top and certainly not politically correct, but at the same time it was thrilling and firing on all cylinders. I had the inescapable sense while reading it that the writer had said to himself, “Well, if I’m being hired to write a cliched jungle adventure I’m going to make it the best cliched jungle adventure I possibly can.” And so he had. It was a blast, cliches and all.”

Altus Press has now reprinted three collections of Ki-Gor stories, and the third volume happens to contain the first two that make my best of list. I even got to write the introduction to that one.

But there are approximately 59 Ki-Gor stories, which is a lot, and even I haven’t read them all. (Why approximate, you ask? Well, during the initial magazine run, some were reprinted with a different title, some were reprinted as is, and sometimes other stories were printed using an old cover with a pre-existing title emblazoned on it. It gets confusing.) I mean, there are only so many jungle man stories I can personally read in a row because the elements tend to repeat. It’s something to dip into now and again, not constantly.

In any case, purely by chance, the four I had left all turned out to be good entries. They were (and you’ll love these titles) “Cobra Queen of the Congo Legions,” “Mad Monster of Mu-Ungu,” “Safari of the Serpent Slaves,” and then one I’ve not quite finished, “Slave-Caverns of Molundu.”

The first three I can grade as B level Ki-Gor stories. Maybe not stirring examples of the genre at its best, but good reads. “Cobra Queen” may even rate a B+ because it has a great villain, and the entire opening segment is him making a pretty nifty escape from imprisonment so he can visit vengeance against Ki-Gor. In “Mad Monster” it seemed like we readers might finally meet a noble Arab who wasn’t just a slaver but… no. In these tales the Arabs are always bad guys. Still, it’s a pretty nifty “Ki-Gor gets framed” plot that would have held up a lot better if I hadn’t just accidentally read one with a similar set-up. In “Serpent Slaves” not only did Ki-Gor face off against some trained killer vultures and some drug induced zombies, his wife Helene punched a guy right in the snout, and sent arrow after arrow winging into the bad guys.

It’s weird how unPC these things are at the same time that they’re also egalitarian. I’ve mentioned before how close Ki-Gor and his two black friends are to one another (Tembu George and N’Geeso). They even refer to each other as “brother” sometimes. It was really striking in these tales.

Not that anyone is reading these because of racial harmony — they’re reading it for the straight-up, no-holds barred adventure — but it’s still pretty cool.

Raging Swan Rocks

Gamers, have you ever looked over the products from Raging Swan? I should probably highlight them over at Black Gate to draw even more attention to them. I can’t speak to the adventures they publish — I haven’t read any yet — but the game master material is top notch.

I get notified by RPGNow about their “daily deal” (one of the few marketing lists I’m deliberately on) and some months back learned that a little book called “Wilderness Encounters” was on sale for less than half price. What the heck, sez I, and bought a copy. What turned up was a whole host of lists with interesting, creative, evocative possibilities. Different bandit encounters, different minor events that could happen on the road, different weather events, and on and on. Ideas just flowed out of that book. I was immediately taken with it, and am slowly acquiring other holdings from Raging Swan’s stable.

You don’t have to take my word for it, though. If you want to see the quality and variety, click here for NUMEROUS free samples. Even if you’re not a gamer and are a world builder, I think it’s easy to find inspiration here.

Incidentally, they bill themselves as a Pathfinder producer, and while they started that way, a lot of the stuff is either system neutral or available that way, and from what I gather a lot of their catalog also is available for 5th edition D&D.