K is also for Kobold

Of course, all this discourse on fantasy game campaigns gets in the way of the normal broadcasts, which consist of local politics, collectible quarters, and shame huckstering for personal projects and those of friends.

Case in point, two new projects which have shipped out from Kobold Press, headed up by Wolf and Shelly Baur.

First up is the Kobold Guide to Magic, the latest in their award-winning series of collected essays on gaming topics. Your humble author has a small sojourn in the book, along with a few friends and colleagues (No, seriously, check out the author list - a veritable Algonquin Roundtable with d20s).

Also, the truly massive, kickstarted Deep Magic hardcover is now being distributed to backers, and it is a monstrous tome, filled to the brim with roleplayerly goodness. Here's a sample.

Both are worth checking out. And now we return you to your regularly scheduled worlds.

K is for Krynn

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K could be for Kara-Tur, but instead I'm going to do a short one on Krynn. Much is written on Dragonlance, so I'm just going to do briefly, the origin of the name of the world.

All the Krynn most folk need.

Krynn is not Tracy's name for the campaign - he has tended to use the name Ansalon when talking about the location, which is the continent that contained the epic. And given the traverse of the original trilogy, its a perfect and applicable name and I use it myself but early on there was no name for the world itself.

The idea of having a planetary name and then a continental name probably goes back to Greyhawk (campaign) which was set in the Flaeness (continent) which is on Oerth (world). That would drive the Dragonlance (campaign)/Ansalon (continent)/Krynn (world) trichotomy, and later the Forgotten Realms (campaign)/Faerun (continent) /Abeir-Toril (world) arrangement.

But for the name itself? Well, my younger brother married a young woman named Corinne. Playing around with the word, changing the C to a K, collapsing it into one word, and swapping out a vowel, double a consonent, I get Krynn.

So that's the secret origin of Krynn. My sister-in-law. Heck of an anniversary gift.

More later,

J is for Jakandor

Ah, Jakandor, a small world which hoped to be so much more.

Jakandor was conceived before I left TSR, well before the Wizards of the Coast buyout, and saw final publication by WotC in that period when they were gunning up for Third Edition. It was, in part, an attempt to deal with the "too many worlds that were too deep" problem that others have mentioned when talking about that era. In short, the problem was that we had succeeded too well, and created too many IPs, too many campaigns, and therefore split the market. In addition, we created worlds with long publishing histories in multiple projects, so to create a good new project, you had to have a voluminous knowledge of the past.

Jakandor was supposed to address that: Four products, consisting of a trilogy of sourcebooks and a novel, which would be a campaign that could be run over a summer break. It was not intended to be the next great Realms which could sustain campaigns forever, or an epic like Dragonlance that involved a lot of travel and adventrue. It was supposed to be a small thing, easily installable in other peoples' campaigns, lootable for cool stuff, but still capable of holding its own.

Looking back, it was definitely my White Bear & Red Moon. I conceived of two opposing cultures, each convinced they were the heroes, On one side was the Knorr - savage barbarians with giant wicker battle-robot - young, passionate and bloody. On the other was the Charonti - an ancient civilization living in the shadow of past glories, utilizing necromancy as a we would use technology - Wise, old, and magical. Each believed they were the epitome of humanity. Each believed the others were abominations.

It tells you something when this is the only Jakandor map I
could find online, and it comes from the first release.

The plan, well, my plan, was to release both original sourcebooks at the same time, and let the players choose which side they were going to favor. If we released one before the other, that would show favoritism and skew the players one way or the other. Then we would do the final adventure book as we brought these factions together from opposite ends of their large island.

In reality, we released it like we released all things - one at a time. We did the Knorr book, then the Charonti book, then finally the total Jakandor book. And while the Knorr book won an award (from Inquest, but still, award, with a plaque and everything), they were dropped into the abyss and were never really seen again.

Oh yeah, the novel. Yes, I wrote one. Yes, we edited it. But the company decided not to go forward with the book. And while I had no advance when I wrote it, there was a clause that paid me if they cancelled it. And later the book was returned to me, with the note that if I wanted to sell it elsewhere, I could, once I changed any proper names. Since then it has been my "trunk book", the book that exists, but hasn't even made the rounds for publishers. I suppose in this self-published world, I could exhume it, but even filing off the serial numbers and changing the names to protect the guilty would still leave it a relic of another era of publishing.

Alas, Jakandor. It had so much promise, but sailed into the teeth of a less-welcoming age, and as such reduced to a footnote in gaming history. But it is my footnote, at least.

More later,

I is for Imperium(s)

Space, as someone wise once said, is big. Really, really big. And so space empires are sprawling masses that challenge both the sense of space and of time itself. And the gaming universes provide us with not one, but two Imperiums.

And it makes sense - both showed up post-Star Wars, and despite differences from the Empire presented there, both have an Emperor. Neither could really use the term Empire itself, so we have a related term, Imperium. One campaign comes from England as the setting of its Warhammer 40k universe, and the other from America as the setting for its Traveller game.

Warhammer's Imperium first. The Imperium, also called the Imperium of Man or the Imperium of Mankind is a sprawling mass that occupies (but does not dominate) most of the Galaxy. It is ruled with an iron first by the Emperor who is based at Old Terra, or rather by his ministers, since the Emperor is hors de combat from a rebellion some 10,000 years previous, and currently exists on cosmic life support, used to maintain the ability to move through space for the humans and as a buwark against the darkness of chaos, which are the main baddies in the universe. He's a god-sized nightlight.

The Warhammer Imperium

And this is an interesting thing - Warhammer's Imperium is a frozen universe. The Imperium hasn't changed much since the Emperor was first put in deep freeze. The wars continue and conflict between a conservative, controlling empire and everyone else is eternal. Most of the empire pretty much sucks, and it sucks under the watchful eye of the Imperium's masters, who are willing to declare heresy and dispatch the heavily-armed space marines at the drop of a gauntlet.

The result is pretty much a monoculture. Yeah, the Elf/Eldar are out there, and the forces of chaos, and there are a couple of nonhuman races, but everything is pretty much similar turf for the space marines and their opponents (often other space marines) to pound the ground. But in general, the planets might as well just be one, and exist solely as terrain for Games Workshop miniatures.

The other Imperium is the Third Imperium, though it is also called the Imperium, from GDW's Traveller. It instead occupies a more modest potion of our galactic arm, but its maps are extensively detailed, creating a universe so large that one small segment, usually the Spinward Marches, is enough for an extensive campaign. The Third Imperium has an Emperor, or had one, or has many, as they launched an event where they broke up the empire into smaller but still massive pieces. The center of the Third Imperium was not Earth, but rather Capital (originally Sylea), one of many planets where humans were relocated to by the Ancients, a predecessor race. In fact the Terrans and the Solomani Confederation are considered barbaric latecomers in this universe. Another subgroup of humans are the Zhodani, who are psychic, and, like in the Warhammer Universe, therefore suspect.

The Traveller Imperium

The planets of the Third Imperium are more diverse, but they tend to have that Star Wars diversity where the ten-square mile patch of ground is the area is represented. (Hoth, by the way, had some pristine tropical beachfront property, by the way, but the Rebels didn't set up there and so you never saw it). Though for a lot of travelers in Traveller, there is a McDonaldization of space, where the up (orbital) and down (ground) stations are pretty much what people see.

Interstellar history is a challenge for the Third Imperium, but they handle it not by freezing time, but rather by engaging in long, looping cycles of empire and collapse, usually in the 16-1800 year range. Given that it was only in the 1200s when the game launched, I had thought of it as an empire past its prime but not falling apart yet. However, more recent product stage a number of Galaxy-shattering events have upended that applecart into smaller groups. Still more recent product then goes back to the glory years of the original.

Of the two, I think I like GDW's Imperium3 over GW's Imperium of Monstrous Men. There is more variety and spaces where the Imperium is not that allows you to set up a campaign, most of them based around taking missions to pay off your ship. Less military, nor merchantile. But both attempt to show worldbuilding at its ultimate ends of taking on the galaxy.

More later,

H is for the Hyborian Age

I was really going to do Harn, but you know, I've already DONE Harn the last-time through, and it remains a nice, detailed, well-mapped, low-wonder, low-magic world. More power to it.

Instead I will go for the Hyborian Age, home to the well-known barbarian, Conan. It is not Hyboria or Hyborea, for though I see those notes elsewhere in referring to this as a place, the name instead refers to the people who survived the earlier cataclysms that claimed Lemuria and Atlantis, who were followers of the god Bori. Oh, and it is not Hyperborea, which is located in the far north of the Hyborian Age, but which was an old Greek tale (Herodotus)  of the lands of the ultimate north.

The Hyborian Age, though spawned from Howard's work in pulps, comes down to me primarily through the Marvel comics of Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith/John Buscema/Ernie Chan. I didn't engage with Howard's original material, though it saw wide distribution in the fantasy boom of the late 60s, the way swept clear by Tolkien, as I would not engage with the later material, nor with the later books by Robert Jordan and others in the 80s.

But the comics! The comics were probably the entry level drug of fantasy in comics. Conan himself was part-superhero, with his own iconic look - bare-chested, muscled, square jawed (often square-mouthed), stripped to a bear-skinned waist and occasionally a helmet with tiny horns. His foes were mighty, but he overcame them with cunning and most importantly manpower. Later fantasy characters, such as Elric or Cudgel the Clever, were defined in part of how much they were not like Conan.

Conan's world defined generic fantasy as well. In the Hyborian Age, civilization was always decadent, either in ruins from a previous age or teetering on the edge of a new collapse. Knowledge was suspect, and magic was only to be trafficked in by dark wizards. Women were young, shapely odalisques dressed in veils or, at best chain-mail bikinis that were impossibly sheer. Monsters were always monstrous. It was a man's age. Yes, Red Sonja showed up in the comic continuity, folded in from another Howard story, but all of the above still applied.

The Hyborian Age also had a map where proto-typical Europeans lived in the spaces and lifestyles of later descendants. Viking types up in Hyberborea, Picts in the NE, Germanic tribes through the center, more decadent ruins and indolent empires in the south. I've seen two different attempts to map the modern world upon the Hyborian Kingdoms. The most traditional map puts Zingara at the location of Spain, and the cultures map out fairly nice. The other connects the lump of Zingara with Senegal in Africa, creating a larger world, but that lacks as much of the societal shorthand Howard seems to use.

In game terms, Conan has been oddly less-successful. A couple AD&D modules, its own game from TSR, a GURPS supplement, a recent Mongoose game, an MMO. It is possible that the reason is that stories (print or comics or even movies) are about the man, not the world. It really doesn't matter if the evil prince Conan overthrows is in Ophir or Nemedia, or if the Monster of A Thousand Eyes is beneath Tarantia or Makkalet. Further, most RPGs and MMOs are about acquisition of stuff - armor for protection, weapons for damage, raw gold for keeping score. Conan, the best of his breed, the master of his universe, was often broke without armor, and needed few things in his life. To do a Conan game would be to change the traditional goals to something else, and in a D&D-dominated universe, is rather difficult (note of self-defense - the most recent Mongoose RPG may have dealt with this - I do not have it at hand).

So it is the man, not the map, which makes The Hyborian Age resonate, and causes it to be remembered. But, we still have the maps, anyway.

More later,

G is for Glorantha

Yes, it could be Golarion (to which I have contributed a wafer-thin slice - Chelish Opera, anyone?) or Greyhawk (which, according to the Internets, I hate, but more on that story later), but instead I'm going with a wondrous classic that I bounced off a couple times in my game-playing career - Glorantha.


I first encountered Glorantha with Greg Stafford's game White Bear and Red Moon, one of the early projects from Chaosium. I came from a wargaming background, and had just gotten into fantasy RPGs, and this was the first and most perfect merger of the two streams. Set in Dragon Pass in the world of Glorantha, it was a simulation of an asymmetric battle between the native Sartar Tribes and the magical Lunar Empire. Both sides had epic heroes (Harrek the Berserk, JarEel the Razoress, Beatpot Aelwrin) and unique units (The Crimson Bat, Egglord Warlocks), and recruitment of powerful neutrals (Ironhoof, the Dwarf) was as important as individual battles.

It was not your traditional western fantasy as embraced by D&D, skewing instead more to a unique mythology (or conflict of unique mythologies), and I loved it. I picked up the Nomad Gods (which was a little more traditional in that it dealt with competing tribes of herder/grazers), and waited in vain for Masters of Luck and Death (which never showed up as a boardgame - by that point, RPGs had replaced wargames as the center of the hobby). I kept in touch with the various Runequest projects over the years, but did not engage deeply until Glorantha in general, and Dragon Pass in particular, made a comeback in HeroQuest from Issaries.

There are a lot of good things in HeroQuest, but the piece that really kept with me was the perfect distillation of the two sides from White Bear and Red Moon. For the Lunars - magical, oppressive, monolithic but with ties to chaos monsters, their unifying ethos was "We are all us". For the savage, less-primitive-than-they-looked Sartar tribes, their battle cry was "No one can tell you what to do".

I love these statements, because both of them are incredibly positive, made each side the heroes of their own legends, and obviously set the two sides at each other's throats. The Lunar Empire's cry of unity is free of moral baggage, and allows all sorts of magic and monsters within its ranks, while defining "other" simply as those who would not join them. The Sartar side was completely independent, such that subjucating themselves to another force is anathema to them. It is, quite simply, a brilliant foundation for explaining the conflict in that part of the world.

Part of the original Dragon Pass map, showing its
wargaming roots.

I still pay attention to Glorantha, and have a copy of Kings of Dragon Pass waiting on my iPad for my eventual attention. It is, quite frankly, one of the most alien worlds of the fantastic campaigns laid out, because it gets down to the basic ethos of its inhabitants, in a fashion that is strange and frightening to your standard inhabitant of Waterdeep or Gondor.

There's more on Glorantha on creator Greg Stafford's web site, from which I have snurched these images. For the A to Z of the fantasy worlds, tune in here for More Later.

F is for Faerûn

Of course, I'm going to do Faerûn. I'm even going to hunt down that little caret over the u.

I've talked about Faerûn and the Forgotten Realms before, since I have been two parts midwife and two parts sidekick in bringing Ed Greenwood's original campaign to the greater world. I think I mentioned before that the planet the world is Abeir-Toril, which is a combination of my own home campaign's name (Toril) and the word "Abeir", which has no history before its creation but served only to put the definition of the world at the front of the Cyclopedia of the Realms. I'd like to say that it was named on a Friday, and I was thinking about getting "A beer" after work, but that would be growing the story more than it deserves. It was plucked from the air.

And it is interesting that years later, the company decided that there were TWO worlds, Abeir and Toril, which they then merged back together to form the 4E version of the world. There are parts of that particular campaign that I thought were smartly done, and parts that made me roll my eyes. The former I will gladly share with you, while for the latter I require that you buy me a beer (see where my mind is going, here?).

The original Realms map, taken from Anthony Larme's website.
Yes, that's me without a beard. And with a thin white tie. It was the 80s.

But I digress. Where did the other names come from? Forgotten Realms is our name for the land, since its inhabitants have clearly not forgotten about it. And indeed, in the "real" world of the 70s and 80s, the idea of a land where monsters battled, heroes lived, and magic was commonplace would seem a little forgotten (In the modern age, where we have Harry Potter movies and former Magic: The Gathering players are bitcoin billionaires, not so much). But to the inhabitants, the largest unit the natives thought of was continental, and that continent was Faerûn.

I had no idea where Ed got the name so I asked him. He in turn replied "I just liked the sound of the word as it came into my head (as a fantasy equivalent of "Home"); "Fair-OON") and then I made the spelling more Celtic and less Disney and there I was:} ). A lot of names come to me that way. Nowadays, with the Net, I've learned to type them in so as to discover if they mean "naughty thing" in some language unfamiliar to me, or are already the name of a district in New Delhi (or just Delhi, or something)." 

And there you have it. The origin of Faerûn. And you think you don't get anything out of this blog. 

More later, 

The Political Desk Takes the Bus

So, this A to Z challenge thing takes a break on Sunday, so I can take the day off and not upda... what's this in my mailbox? A ballot? In freaking April? Really? How do they expect me to be a good civic citizen in bloody APRIL?

OK, everyone who doesn't live in King County can leave the room (everyone except like five people shuffle out). For the rest of us, here's the deal - King County Proposition No. 1, Sales and Use Tax and Vehicle Fee for Transportation Improvements authorizes an increase of 0.1% sales and use tax, and hiking our vehicle tabs to $60 bucks per year.

The cash raised would be used to fund the Metro and Mass Transit, with about 40% of the cash used for road improvements (as anyone who drives in the area can attest, a needed thing). And the car tabs go up to 60 bucks from a temporary 40 buck price tag that now has to be rolled back due to the bill that created IT is sunsetting.

Still, that's pretty steep, and you may wonder where the state is with all this. Unfortunately, the State Senate is in the hands of a "Coalition Majority" of every Republican and a couple no-longer-really Democrats who have managed to stall any developments (as well as funding for K-12 Education) in the name of saving cash. Part of this is typical Republican parsimony, but another factor is that the hinterlands see any spending in the cities as a threat to the largess that rains down upon their agrarian districts from Olympia, funding improvements that benefit fives if not tens of rural voters. Despite this lack of legislative progress, I got a Facebook post from a Republican State Rep about how proud they were to have wrapped up the session without having to go to a special session, which akin to an MMO publisher being proud of their game going live with half the features still uninstalled.

And its not like public transportation hasn't worked to avoid this stage of things, raising fares (done), cutting service (done), maximizing existing routes (done), freezing wages (done), and reducing overhead (done). They have not cut to the bone, but pretty soon they are going to have to start throwing away tibias.

Let me be honest with you - I'm not a bus user. The nearest bus stop is about three-quarters of a mile away over a rough country populated by wolves and ravens. I wouldn't know an ORCA card if it bit me on the back bumper. And in the month of April, as the Lovely Bride works through the tax forms, the LAST thing that is on my mind is giving the Gummint any more money, regardless of situation. But I'm supporting this for one good reason.

My commute is fairly crappy.

And it is only FAIRLY crappy. The end of the Great Recession has put a lot of people back to work, and King County is recovering better than most (actually, we're kinda booming). Which means people are getting jobs. Which means they are driving to work. And for some reason, whenever I leave the house to go to the office (and, working for a computer game company, this is NOT at the crack of dawn), it seems that EVERYONE ELSE is also trying to get to work at the same time. And I'm not even heading for Seattle. The 405 is clotted, and all the arterial routes have also coagulated. When you have lake on one side and mountains on the other, your options are pretty limited.

So the one thing I DON'T want to see is some 30,000 more users trying to crowd onto my broadband. At that point the traffic moves to regularly paralyzed and I'm listening to a lot more lectures on tape (right now, it's A Culinary History of Food). Mass transit works well for centralized areas (like, say downtown Kent), and if I can make it easier for others to use the bus, I think that's a win for me. So, for purely personal reasons, I'm going to say YES on this matter, to encourage you to do the same, and to get your ballot in (because its APRIL, and no one else is thinking about voting).

Here are some other views. For a foul-mouthed and vicious support of the measure, I can always turn to the Stranger. For a sonorous, ill-informed view from people who have personal drivers to worry about handling that traffic stuff, here's the Seattle Times. Amusingly, the Times editorial board declares that Now Is Not The Time to have this discussion, while their columnist Ron Judd (the only reason to read page 3 of the Sunday newspaper) excoriates politicians who hide behind the Now Is Not The Time excuse to avoid taking action (You'd they'd co-ordinate better on message, but actually, this is one of things I LIKE about the Times). Oh, and the Stranger of course takes the Times to task for getting stuff wrong.

Yes, it's transit (well, some roadbuilding as well, but mostly transit). Yes, it's taxes. Yes, its freakin' APRIL. But vote Yes on the Proposition. And we can get back to the discussion of alphabetized fantasy worlds.

More later,

E is for Eberron

Ah, Eberron. I have tales about Eberron.

Eberron was the result of a fantasy setting search, where WotC through the doors open to suggestions from the fandom. They expected a few hundred entries at most, but got well over 10,000 one-page campaign pitches, and the judges of the project (most of them strong-backed managerial types) spent about a month hauling around huge binders filled with them, reviewing them in every meeting, meal, and spare moment. So to those that did not get the nod, of course you didn't - they were probably completely exhausted by the time they hit your description of the campaign you've been running for fifteen years.

The winning result was described to me by one of the judges as "A dwarf in a trenchcoat with a gun", and indeed, the campaign was trying to do things that had previous campaigns had shied away from. A big part of that was embracing the idea of technology, moving into a more modern era where magic is commonplace. Another was to establish national and societal rivalries in a post-war environment where one of the nations had been magically vaporized. Steampunk is often thrown at the world, but the vibe more like the interwar years of the 20s and 30s.

Eberron

Another word that was used to describe the setting was "noir", but I don't think that carried through most of the line. Noir is atmospheric, without a doubt - a world where it always raining, and when it doesn't rain, the sun bleaches the life out of everything. A world of secrets and hidden agendas. A world where it is always 2 AM and you're looking for a glass of beer in a cocktail bar. But noir also has a moral point that is very counter to the positive good law reward system built into Dungeons & Dragons. In a noir world, making the correct or moral decision is often punished. Sam Spade sends his girlfriend up the river for her crimes. Rick lets Ilsa get on that plane and fly out of his life. Forget it, Jake, its Chinatown. This is incredibly hard to pull off in a campaign of punishment of good where one of the core mechanics of its game system is to reward the players for doing the right things. So the approach to the technology of the world enticed, but I didn't think it delivered on the dark side of the coin.

I played in Eberron with my Thursday night crew - first with Relique, my warforged paladin (Ah, warforged, another nice and problematic thing they added to the D&D system) and then with Gomex "Go-Go" Gnozaria, my gnome artificer (I was trying to get beyond my traditional "dwarf fighter" at the time). It was a fun world (we took the Buck Rogers approach of never using the same mode of transportation twice), and I really should check out what they did when they distilled it down to 4th Edition.

More later,

D is for Dominaria and/or Dominia

Other options were Dinotopia, Dreamlands, and in particular the Dying Earth. I AM a later-day fan of Jack Vance's work, and like the RPG that came out of it, but that likely deserves its own write-up.

Instead, I'm going with a short bit on Dominaria, the setting for Magic: The Gathering, which is slightly different than Dominia, which is the setting for Magic: The Gathering. Confusing? Only a bit. Dominia is the name for the MTG's multiple planes of existence, and entire multiverse of worlds. Dominaria is the name of a single plane, still huge, which acts as the hub for its stories and background. Other planes include Mirrodin, Kamigawa, and Ravinca. Comic-book fans, think of Dominaria as Earth-1, where most of the DC universe is set, and the other planes as Elseworld comics and you have a bit of a handle on this. Non-comic book fans, don't think of it as Earth-1; it will just make your head hurt.

I'll make a brand new start of it - Dominaria, Dominia!

The Dominaria/Dominia split in part reflects both the desire for a coherent universe (united by the MTG Gameplay mechanism) and the desire for individualism in the various sets (no one has to follow the previous set's background material). If you come up with a setting that does not seem to fit the base world (the Asian-themed Kamigawa or the urbanish Ravinca), then it gets sharded off into another universe. Everything is Dominia, but not everything is Dominaria.

The end result does a good job within each block of new cards, allowing the game to be presented anew without anyone having to know a lot of back story. By the same token, it creates a lot of temporary worlds, where they are visited, then discarded (until the cycle returns for a new version should the original prove popular enough). It is an interesting approach to a universe, from a corporate standpoint, in that it tries to balance the older lore and the newer concepts and does so without getting too much in the way of the creation of the card sets.

More later,

C is for Calidar

I suppose I could write about Cerilia, the continent of the Birthright campaign, but I would prefer instead to mention a world that I know much less about, but about which I am much more curious. I am talking instead about Calidar, the latest brainchild of Bruce Heard.

Bruce, for a long period of time, was a stalwart caretaker, designer and developer of the D&D Known World (back in the days before it became Mystara). He is one of the unsung heroes (well, lesser sung) in the development of that line. At the time he was officially wrangling the freelance talent at TSR, but worked hard to create an extremely potent line of products, not only in the quality of the writing and design, but also in the unique appearance of such things like the maps.He pushed hard for the exploration of the Hollow World, and wrote articles for DRAGON involving his not-a-spelljammer-at-all ship, the Princess Ark.

Huh. It IS a small world after all.

Indeed, in the years since, he looked to WotC for permission to continue his work on the now-defunct line. Much to his frustration, the company rebuffed him. Now this makes a modicum of sense for WotC - if permission is granted, WotC either has to make sure the license reflects well upon the company (which is an expense on their point) and if it is too successful, they could be staffing up their competition (Hel-LO Pathfinder!).

Most men would be crushed, or at least deterred, but Bruce is not most men. He instead fell back, recalculated, identified what he liked about the original Known World, and started his own Kickstarter for Calidar. It is funded, and he is working on getting bits and pieces of it turned over to the editor even as I type.

I'm not contributing to this one (unlike parts of Midgard or Golarion), but I look forward to see what Bruce comes up with. And the rest of you lot should be keeping your eyes open as well.

More later.

B is for Blackmoor

I could do China Mieville's Bas-Lag (which has a gaming connection with Wolfgang Baur mentioned here) or ERB's Barsoom (which has a connection back to the original D&D booklets with mentions of Red Martians and Banths, but mysterious disappeared in later incarnations), but we really have to go back to the dawn of time for Blackmoor.

Blackmoor was Dave Arneson's original campaign, and its origin is well-covered in Jon Peterson's Playing at the World. It was the cauldron of creativity where he fully distilled a game featuring individual characters as opposed to battling armies. Many of the features that would become Dungeons & Dragons began in the Blackmoor campaign.

Of that, as a young man, I knew nothing. In the tender year of 1975, Freshman year of college, I knew (through TSR and the fledgling Dragon) that there were two big campaigns - Gary's Greyhawk and Dave's Blackmoor (Tekumel and the Empire of the Petal Throne was larger than either, but it had its own game rules, and as such was an alien creature). I assumed that since I had acres of maps for my own new campaign, there had to be rafts of material of the two original campaigns just waiting for print (oddly enough, years later, that was EXACTLY the case with Ed Greenwood and the Forgotten Realms, but that's a different letter). Greyhawk had gotten its own small book, which said little of the World of Greyhawk itself, and I was already running D&D by the time the Blackmoor booklet turned up.

An original Blackmoor map

And it was a bit disappointing for someone looking for more details on the world itself. While the Greyhawk booklet launched a lot of new concepts into the game, Blackmoor was oddly less cool, as if the concept of what made up D&D had already gelled. It was the sophomore slump of a booklet. It brought us the official Monk, but also the problematic assassin, a hit location system that was never used, a bunch of giant creatures or specialized critters (like the Sahaguin), and much of its running time was dominated by the Temple of the Frog. Here was the first example I had of a specific dungeon, and I found it a TPK (in particular that frog spawning pool with, like 1,000 giant frogs, which were overpowered to start with). It succeeded in making me more comfortable with my own extremely lethal early dungeons, but didn't get much that felt new. Only later in life did I get the idea that this was small sliver of the larger campaign.

Blackmoor itself, after all these years, still feels portable to me. It was Arneson's original campaign, and as such was just as large as it needed to be. It was welded to the north of the C&C group's Great Kingdoms, the prototype of what would become Oerth, then made independent in the First Fantasy Campaign, then got a name check in the World of Greyhawk, then was re-imported into the D&D Known World, and continues on in the hands of others. For such a foundational world, it feels like it has deserved better. Here's a site with a lot more backstory than I can give here.

More later,

A is for Amber

So I've decided to make a last-minute plunge into the A to Z challenge, and wanted to talk about worlds. Fantasy worlds, yeah, and mostly gaming fantasy worlds, or at least worlds that have a gaming components, but in general largely broad-scale settings for campaigns and stories.

And a lot of them start with "A"; Azeroth (WoW), Athas (Dark Sun), Ansalon (Dragonlance), and Abeir-Toril (Forgotten Realms). But I'm going to go with Amber.

I found Amber in my high school years - a series of slender books,written by Roger Zelazny, first serialized in Galaxy magazine. (and which got me reading Galaxy in the first place). It was a great high concept - a multiverse of similar shadow-worlds, differing by details from world to world, and at its center Amber itself, supposedly real and unchanging, ruled by a family of quasi-immortals. Familial conspiracy and swordplay (gunpowder doesn't work in Amber) and tarot cards. What is not to love? The name itself captured both the immortal nature of the setting and how it serves as a trap for those within.

Years later, I discovered that Zelazny was working with the philosophy of Plato's Cave, the idea that reality is just a shadow of a greater, deeper  reality. Taking old stuff and reforming it in fiction - cool idea.

Zelazny's Map of Amber, from Galaxy Magazine

Gaming connection? Eric Wujcik put together an Amber Diceless RPG, which was notable for its lack of dice as a resolution mechanic, instead working on ranking system (If you are the best swordsman, then the second-best swordsman will never beat you at swordcraft). In the few cases I've seen it, the games either take a wondrous leap of the imagination on the part of the players embracing the world, or ends up with players trying to redefine all other conflicts in terms of what their characters are good at (which is probably a lesson for us all).

The original five books of the Amber Chronicles are extremely good and endure re-readings and the passage of time. A second five-book set doesn't hold up as well for me, though I'm not sure if it is because it is revisiting a magical place (making it less magical) or simply that I am not longer the high-school kid who, looking for more fantasty after Middle Earth, found Amber.

More later,

The (Sudden but Inevitable) Return of No Quarter (Part V)

Missed me? Yeah, it is that time of year again, when I take a cruise through this year's collectible quarter series. And this year, like the previous four, we are in the midst of the America The Beautiful series, which is also called the National Parks series, and this year, we actually have five National Parks in the running, and none of the National Monuments, or National Forests, and National Nature Preserves, or what have you.

And in the years I have been doing this, the quality and skill of the carvings has increased. The nonsensical jumble of icons of the early state quarters seems a thing of the past, and the sculptors have gotten the hang of showing depth in the very shallow surface of the coin. There are fewer really bad coins out there, which makes for better coins but boring commentary.

As in previous years, we rate this year's crop with the following rating system:
Way Cool = A
Not Bad = B
Kinda Lame (Meh) = C
Very Lame = D
Makes Video Arcade Tokens Look Good = E

Interestingly enough, there is a bill in front of the GOP-controlled House called the Ensuring Public Involvement in the Creation of National Monuments Act (EPICNMA) which intends to limit the powers of the Presidency to create new "units" to the National Park Service and to subject new measures to Congressional approval, since that organization does such a fine job at such vital matters as Federal Judges and jobs bills.

But that's ongoing. Let's turn over our papers and begin.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park - Tennessee

I could make the obvious Beverly Hillbillies joke, but to be honest, the home state of the Clampett clan is not identified in the program (though Granny talks about being brought up in Tennessee, so there's that). I want to instead point out that this coin actually goes to effort of putting a building on the coin, a challenge for all these national parts and forests which concentrate on the natural wonders.

But this is a good example of the advancement in quarter-sculpting tech. This coin has no less than five different planes shown on it - The empty sky background, the far mountains, the tree line, the cabin, and in the extreme foreground, the split rail (or snake) fence. A sense of motion is provided by the hawk on the wing, though this adds yet another element. This is a tall order for such a small area to pull off, and the result feels a little more cluttered than it should. It get points for pushing the technical envelope.

Not Bad = B

Shenandoah National Park - Virginia

A similar challenge shows up for the Shenandoah National Park. Like the Smokies, this is beautiful country, and I recommend that, should one get the chance, they stand on one of the peaks and just watch the undulating hills spread out before them like a green blanket cast over your kids toys that you don't want to pick up. But the trouble is, how do you bring that to the coin itself?

Virginia solves the problem with fewer planes to deal with - a wide sky, the mountains, and a promontory in the foreground from which to view the wilderness. There is also a hiker, almost unnoticed, to the right of the coin (house right, not stage right), approaching the promontory before him. The rocks themselves overshadow him (and the little rain cloud over his head - hey, is he depressed? Is he thinking dark thoughts? Should we be calling a ranger for an intervention? Is there a number to call? Quick, he's getting near the edge! Stop him before it's too late!).

Not Bad = B.

Arches National Park - Utah

This is my favorite for this year, and shows that you can do a National Park Quarter in a simple, straightforward fashion, portray the area, and still make it all work. Now, Arches benefits here from an iconic image - no one is going to mistake this for St. Louis or a McDonald's. And which Arches has a number of arches on its grounds, this one, Delicate Arch, is the star that gets all the press time. This arch is the cute blonde girl who sits with her friends at the lunch table and smiles shyly but you know really doesn't have any time for you (or am I just projecting, here?)

And the Arches coin is presented in a straightforward, iconic style, literally taking a picture of the site and transferring it over to the coin. The horizon runs nearly across the center of the coin, dividing it into ground and white space, and the arch rises into that space. A good job.

Way Cool = A

Great Sand Dunes National Park - Colorado

No, I didn't know about this place either. It was a National Monument in 1932, but didn't make National Park status until 2004 (it was promoted to National Park status by President Bush, who also added seven other "units" to the National Park Service, to which there was no outcry from either his party or Congress, of course). Great Sand Dunes lacks the icons of a Yosemite, a Yellowstone, or even and Arches. It is a cool place, geologically. They are the tallest sand dunes in the country, and formed by the winds lifting the soil out of the Rio Grande before they lose interest and drop the sand out here.

(And I was surprised they didn't go for Dinosaur National Monument, but the cool stuff from that is apparently in Utah, and, of course, Utah already has its iconic look with the arches. Those snooty, snooty arches).

But the problem is, what makes the place interesting is that these are sand dunes. Really big ones. When means they are both ever-shifting and they are sand colored. Both of those traits are extremely difficult to capture on a coin sculpture, and as a result, at first glance, it looks like any other western park quarter. We don't know how big the dunes truly are - they could be a mountain range in the distance, since we tend to show that a lot.

However, perhaps seeing the problem, the sculptors engaged in almost a bit of whimsy here. In the foreground is a father and child, which sort of humanizes and redeems the coin in a way that the Shenandoah quarter does not (You're still worried about the guy on that coin, right?) The child has the ultimate symbol of this place -  a little plastic sand bucket. The symbols of beach vacations everywhere, even in Colorado.

Meh = C

Everglades National Quarter

So, here's a reverse situation - all a lot of states have to show is a big mountain, a huge promontory in a pine forest or towering over the other promontories. What do you do when your National Park has a maximum natural elevation of eight feet, max? Welcome to the Everglades, America's best swamp land.

The quarter plays off its strengths, and pushes its waterfowl. In this case, it reveals that it is the winter nesting ground of the kaiju monster Rodan. OK, actually that is an anhinga (yeah, I had to look it up), also known as the snake bird or water turkey. Both of which sound like cooler names, but you know the Monster Manual will use anhinga because they need more monsters beginning with the letter "A". Sharing the space with the anhinga is a spoonbill, which most people know from the fact it looks like a stork playing the castanets. It is actually a very good choice in the face of all the other mountains/promontories/sand dunes that the other states have to deal with.

And we're lucky that the Everglades got in the front half of the lineup, here. If it was any further back in the calendar, sea-level rise would force them to settle with a blank picture, and the notation "Not Forever-glades".

Way Cool = A

And that concludes this year. In general, they're getting better as they go along. Next year We get such stand-out vacation spots as Bombay Hook, Kisatchie, and Homestead National Monument. And I become very relieved that Wikipedia exists.

More later,

Play: Buttoned Down

 The Suit, based on The Suit by Can Themba, Mothobi Muloatse and Barney Simon, direction, adaptation, and music by Peter Brook, Marie-Helene Estienne and Franck Krawcyk.  Seattle Rep, through 6 April.

I know, you expect me to rail against the idea of a tour company, any tour company, treading the boards of a theater with "repertory" in its name. But to be frank, the fact that they have launched no less than three well-produced home-grown productions across my bow this year has left me mellow to the point of acquiescence. And so we have The Suit.

It is an interesting, if short, play. For a tale that from it credit seems to require most of Europe and parts of Africa to adapt, its plotline feels slight. A young bride (Nonhlanhla Keswa) commits adultery, her lover leaping out of a window and leaving his suit behind. The husband (Ivanno Jerimiah), as punishment, insists the suit be treated as an honored guest, to be seated at dinner, to be fed, to be taken on walks. At first the punishment feels odd but mild, but proves hopeful and effective for a brief moment, but ultimately breaks both individuals. Jordan Barbour picks up the spare as almost everyone else that impacts the couple’s world, serving as friend, lover, confidant, and as narrator.

But wound around the tale is the story of South Africa’s apartheid, of the institutionalized oppression of a people. It lives at a point of time that could not easily move to another location, and as fixed as its characters, but neither compares nor contrasts with the action of the play itself. It is the weather, grey and omnipresent. Where the play shines, though, is in its music. A trio of musicians (Arthur Astier, Mark Christine, and Mark Kavuma) provide both baseline and comic relief. Keswa has a rich, vibrant, amazing, wonderful voice that brings the audience alive. And Barbour at one point lays out a passionate version of Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit, which seeks a linkage between his far country and ours.

The stage itself is simultaneously stark and intimate, chairs and props serving multiple duties, populated by the principles and the supporting band (and at one point, members of the audience, building that connection). Throughout, the presentation strives to build the connection between audience and actors, and thereby deepen the tragedy.

The tale itself has an opening bracket but no closing, akin to Taming of the Shrew, the start of the tale, but nothing to follow, no final words. It is open-ended in its tragedy, powerful in its finality. It is a short story put into the form of a play, a one-act that is elevated by its music and and its magic. And that’s enough, for the moment.

More later,

Film: Art Project

Tim's Vermeer, Directed by Teller

Yeah, I know. I seem to be nothing but reviews at the moment. I suppose that this is because I am in a
review sort of mood. Plus the fact that my life is otherwise rather boring at the moment, though it is boring in a good way. Getting stuff done, hanging out with people, playing games, reading. Boring can be very good sometimes.

And in this case last week I decided on a weeknight (gasp!) to go a movie (Gasp!) by myself (GASP!) up in the U-District (meh). In this case, it was a tidy little film of the type that I didn't want to drag friends out to - Tim's Vermeer, about a guy who paints himself a Vermeer.

The Music Lesson by Vermeer

And the film was playing at the Sundance theater, and the last time I had been to that building it was for the Firefly sneak peak, so we're talking, what, nine years or so? Yeah, I'm not one for much repeat business. But I do note that the theater has been upgraded to a high-end, comfortable-chair, over-21-so-we-can-serve-alcohol venue. I arrived early, and as a result spent about an hour upstairs in the lounge by the gas fireplace, eating a pizza, nursing a cuba libre, and reading Wodehouse's Code of the Woosters. So I was pretty relaxed even before the movie.

Ah, right, the movie. Tim Jenison is successful inventor and founder of NewTek, which did Video Toaster and Lighwave 3D. Creative, ingenious, and having both time to pursue his ideas as well money to aid in any pursuit he takes an interest in. And he decides to paint a Vermeer.

And he's not forging a Vermeer, but rather using the Vermeer (The Music Lesson) as a model in an attempt to figure out Vermeer's technique. Vermeer is best known for his photo-realistic style and his soft, almost golden light. How did he capture these effects on the canvas? Jenison, an avowed non-artist, seeks to duplicate it.

The artist David Hockney put forward the theory in his Secret Knowledge (2001) that the more realistic painters of the 16th and 17th century achieved their results by use of increased technology and research in optics and lenses. Indeed, my book of Vermeer prints from 1997 makes mention of the camera obscura as a technique, a simple device that consists of a dark room with a hole in an end. The reflected light present the image of the outside world in a ghostly, inverted image.

What Jenison has done is take these theories down to the ground level and examines the possible applications of this technology. First he fits the aperture of the camera obscura with a lens to sharpen the image. Then, he ingeniously uses a small mirror to duplicate the images, one line at a time. There is no sketchwork, no underpainting. merely duplication. He is coloring the image he sees at the edge of the mirror onto the canvas. Finally (as he discovers during the course of the film), he replaced the blank wall the image is focused on with a convex mirror to sharpen the image further. It is an optical three-bank shot that allows him to photocopy the image by hand.

There's more to it than that, of course. He could have taken a reproduction of The Music Lesson and copied it directly in this fashion. Instead, he recreated the scene in the picture and then painted that in order to confirm that the distortions visible in the final product are the result of the methodology. Which means he created a studio with a northern exposure, had the costumes shown in the painting made, built the furniture, tracked down suitable pottery and musical instruments, and built a virginal (an early harpsichord). He ground his own lenses and mixed his own paints in the manner noted. And then, having done all that, started to paint, a long and detailed process of painting what he saw and matching the color along the mirror's edge.

The movie is that journey, of Jenison's attempt not just to reproduce, but to get it right. To create a proof-of-concept that this was a legitimate "lost technology" that could have been used by painters of the era. And the presentation captures and holds the attention. Jenison himself comes across as reasonable, engaged, and down-to-earth. He is balanced by Penn Jillette's narration (Teller directs), which provides the level of excitement bombast necessary to declare, yeah, this is a big deal.

Vermeer himself is a bit of mystery here throughout - there is record of his birth (I think - his father carries a different surname), and of his entering the Guild of Saint Luke, the painter's guild in the Low Countries, but no record of his apprenticeship in Delph. That may just mean  he spent his apprenticeship elsewhere, as those were more portable days. And while he was made the head of the Guild, he did not found a school or train others to follow in his style. At the time, he did not enjoy the popularity of the Dutch Masters of the era, and while his work was rediscovered in the 19th century, in my research I keep seeing the teeth-grating definition that he was a "provincial" artist of "genre" works.

I any event, a good film, and one that you should get out to see, or to at least queue up for the Netflix release.

More later,

Film: Engineering Project

The Wind Rises written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki.

I have an off-again, on-again relationship with Japanese animation. As a child, I was not exposed to Macross or Star Blazers, but I got more than a double dose of Kimba, the White Lion through Paul Shannon's Adventure Time. In college I remained immune to the rising force of manga, though I read all of the english translations of Akira. I have good friends who are anime fans and work on translations, and through those I get a semi-regular dose of animation on the small screen, but it has been years since I have been in a theater for the medium (Akira again, at the Oriental Theater in Milwaukee).

But last night was an excellent occasion to renew the habit. The Wind Rises is reported to be the last film of writer and director Hayao Miyazaki, who has built up the powerful Studio Ghibli over the years. And it is a retrospective, not of his life life, but rather a fictionalized account of Jiro Horikoshi, who designed the Mitsubishi Zero fighter plane. And it is magical fictionalization, grounded in the reality of the modernizing Japan of the Showa period, but taken leaps of dreams and imagination.

Jiro Dreams of Biplanes

We meet Jiro as a boy, nearsighted but dreaming of flight. In his dreams, he is met by the Italian aircraft designer Giovanni Battista Caproni, who becomes his spirit animal, guiding and exhorting him to pursue his dream. We follow the youth through school (and the Great Tokyo Earthquake), to his job at Mitsubishi (and the collapse of the banks) to visiting Germany (and the rising militarism of the '30s). And his desire for flight is matched in description of both the rising Japanese desire for modernity and the relentless technological advancement created by war. He meets and re-meets his bride, perfects his aircraft, and suffers the loss both personal and national.

And through it all Hayao's dream supports him. He is the portrayed against a backdrop of glum, if not grim, fellow Japanese. No one else is smiling, yet he is amused, buoyed by his dreams. He performs small acts of heroism, but for the most part dodges the worst of his world. The other major characters have their ups and downs, their rages and tears, but Jiro remains a calm island. The exception to the glum companions comes late in the film, where he lectures a group of younger engineers, and there we see the laughter and wonder of others sharing the same mission.

Miyazaki gets engineering right in presenting it as a form of creativity. As a former civil engineer, I do not dream of flying (well, I rarely do), but I do dream in maps, in floor plans. Within my topological dreams I know exactly my location, even when the ground shifts. I assume this to be natural, but it seems to be the way I order my mind. I look at buildings and see lines of force and stress. And even with my shift into fiction and games, I still see that structure within words and paragraphs. It is a clockwork as beautiful as a biplane's fabric wings. So yeah, Miyazaki unites both the soft nature of creativity and the hard universe of numbers. Jiro's winged dreams match up with Miyazaki's own celulloid achievements. It is autobiography by transposition.

But I disagree with the hand-wave given to the results of Jiro's work. Caproni, his spirit guide, writes off the military nature of his creations as a thing that gives him the ability to create beautiful planes. And Jiro is of similar mind, even though Miyazaki has to admit the darkness at the heart of Jiro's beautiful creations. The darkness remains at the perimeter, haunting always.

Should this be Miyazaki's last work, it seems to pack the feel of autobiography. I don't know the director's backstory, but it feels like pointing out the unification of imagination and technology matches up well in the area of movie making, another dimension of flight and dreams. It is a long film, alien in many ways to Western sensibilities (indeed, the fascination with steam engines as an analogy of development of Japan approaches the fetishistic, and is probably will be the source of many college papers). The rhythms of the movie are not those of Western film, with its quiet bits, the way it draws attention, and subtlety of the players all mixing into a core experience. If you get the chance to see it on the big screen, do it.

More later,

Play: Masochism Tango

Venus in Fur by David Ives, Directed by Shana Cooper, Seattle Rep through March 9.,2014.

Is this a season of sex at the Rep? Bo-Nita echoes Lolita, A Great Wilderness deals with gay conversation therapy, and here we now have a cogent and brilliant deconstruction of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, complete with the requisite fetishware.

It's a good play, perhaps the best of the season so far. And I say it even though this one is not one of the local-born plays that the Rep has been delivering with such wondrous efficiency this year. And I say this despite the fact that it is a play about an playwright and an actor. Plays about writers and actors portraying actors are all so very, very meta and always send up a red warning flare for me, that the theatrical version of I-5 construction is coming up, and we're in for slow going.

But we're not - the action moves smoothly and the actors dance through their roles with verve and believability, right up to the end. Michael Tisdale is Thomas, the playwright looking for the perfect actress for the female lead in his adaptation of Sacher-Masoch's work. He's tightly-wound, frustrated, intellectual, and a bit of a control freak. Gillian Williams is Vanda, the aspiring actress that blows into the auditions late after everyone has gone home and seems to embody all the negatives of aspiring actors. Until she steps into the role she is playing and suddenly embodies the part, as if the vodun spirit of Sacher-Masoch's work is riding her.

OK, let me back up a moment for the original, pluralized fur-bearing Venus from Sacher-Masoch. Sacher-Masoch gave us the term masochism, much like the Marquis De Sade gave us sadism (are there any other isms that come from writers, or do we just get the sexual ones?). Sacher-Masoch uses the term "supersensual" to describe his protagonist, Severin, who is so struck by the aloof Wanda that he agrees to be her slave for a year, and goes through all manner of degradations, humiliations, and dominations (I'll cop to the fact that I have not read said text and I am leaning on Wikipedia for this summary, though the full text is here), until finally he gets it all out of his system. Indeed, Sacher-Masoch makes the case that one cannot be dominate or submissive with the other gender, but must be equal, to be companions. It is a hallmark moment in the original work, but we don't get to that point in the play, because the play is not really about that.

The thing about the original Venus (and about the version that Thomas in play adapts and presents to us the audience) is it from the masculine POV. That is, the text deals with Severin's compulsions that drives him forward, and lasts until the point that he declares himself "cured". He effectively tops from the bottom, while the heroine (named Wanda in the original) is almost a bystander. And that's one of the things that play DOES rattle about with - the question of who is really in charge here - Severin or Wanda? Thomas or Vanda? Director or Actor? Man or woman? Creator or muse?

It is heavy going in places, and could just collapse of its own weight. However it is spared from that fate by a script that is bright and engaging, and characters that are incredibly likable. We immediately connect with both the neurotic Thomas and the brassy, earthy Vanda. The humor is there, accessible, positive, and likable. The early bits have that casual attractiveness of an episode of the Big Bang Theory (nerds and hotties and the goofy attraction therein), which you need for later when you are deep in the forest and things are getting dark. This is all foundation work.

Michael Tisdale is good as Thomas, but Gillian Williams is amazing as Vanda, an incredibly demanding role that requires her to turn on a dime from struggling, desperate actress to cool countess and back to modern commentator. The audience is sometimes a half-step behind both of them as they barrel through the assumed roles and assumptions. And the end? I don't quite buy it, but the logical part of my brain has by this time been swept aside by the emotional. Supersensual, indeed.

Worthwhile and engaging. Yeah, worth seeing, and worth comparing against A Great Wilderness. Go have fun.

More later,

Postcard from Bellingham

This past week, the Lovely Bride and I celebrated our 31st Anniversary. For our 30th, we snuck off to Maui. For our 31st, we headed north for Bellingham.

We've actually made it a thing for the past few years - doing local weekend getaways - Alderwood down on Hood Canal, Snohomish Lodge, even downtown Seattle. It is a way to break away from the regular duties, and to hang out, play games together, and read.

So, this time, Bellingham. The vibe I got of the town was very much similar to Madison, another railroad town with a university present. Actually, it is four different towns that eventually grew together, which explains both the multiple old-building shopping areas and the street grid, which bounces off at all angles. The place has a strong progressive vibe to it plus an old-time industrial feel, and the current stress seems to be between those pushing for more commercial/tourist activity versus acting as a transportation hub (looking at the recent concerns about a proposed coal-loading platform).

We stayed at the Belleweather, a recent creation on the coast, a peninsula with new buildings including hotel, restaurants, and shops. We had a water view, which meant a view of the marina along one side. The place was nice, but there were weirdnesses - a huge bathroom with an deceptively small tub, a gas fireplace without a couch in front of it (instead two stiff-backed chairs), and those weird louvered windows between the bathroom and bedroom (which work as a concept only if you don't have the toilet visible as a result). The staff was positive, though, and the main room was dominated by Biscuit, the resident yellow lab. It was good but not great, and to be frank, a Sunday morning fire alarm did little to improve things for us (which was when we discovered the phone didn't work).

Henderson Books - Bigger on the Inside

Bellingham is the home of the Whatcom Museum of History and Art and the Sparks Museum of Electrical Invention, neither of which we visited. Instead we pampered ourselves with hot stone massages (at Zazen, also on this peninsula, and recommended), and book shopping. This is probably one point it reminded me of Madison. Michael's on Grand was recommended on the net, and  was a sprawling bookstore in disarray, where you had to do a lot of digging to find anything you are after. Good for treasure hunting, but the history section looked like a small hurricane had hit it. However, Henderson Books directly across the street was neatly arranged, well-organized, and had exactly what I was looking for (Books on the War of 1812 from Canadian or British publishers). So yeah, if you're looking for something specific, head for Henderson.

On restaurants, the ones on the peninsula were totally OK, but the best ones we found were in the city proper. Anthony's has an outpost here, and its Hearthfire was large, noisy (we were fortunate to be in a sub-room), and had good ribs and a crab mac and cheese the LB liked. The local Italian place had for me a good lobster ravioli/shrimp for me, but the LB's veal chop marsala had a burnt sauce. And breakfast at the hotel was a sad thing - mushy oatmeal and an under-seasoned omelette from one of those automatic machines, and a negligible buffet. It was bad enough that on Sunday, after being roused by the fire alarm, we still chose to seek breakfast elsewhere.

The good places in Bellingham were more local oriented as opposed to traveler/tourist formatted. The Boundary Bay Brewery and Bistro was pretty damn brilliant. The LB chose it solely for the BLAT (Bacon/Letuce/Avocado/Tomato), but the young lady at the front desk of the day spa raved about their beers, so I ordered a sampler. Six 5 oz. glasses on a place mat informing you of their natures (as I child I would get a place mat with a maze and maybe a word jumble - this was better). The best of their regular brews were the Scotch Ale and the Blonde, but the ESB and Red Ale were excellent, and the Oatmeal Stout went nicely with a well-prepared lamb burger. I'm not a fan of IPAs, I have decided, but discovered by the end of the meal that this sample had vanished as well.

Art at the Harris Avenue Cafe by Gretchin Leggitt.

Her site is at http://gretchenleggitt.com/

Anyway, after a Saturday Breakfast Fail at the hotel, we cast out for on the net for a replacement for Sunday, and ended up in Fairhaven, which was one of the OTHER towns that melded to form Bellingham. Fairhaven itself has the small-town charm of old buildings re-purposed to art shops and restaurants, and one of these was the Harris Avenue Cafe (which is attached to Tony's Coffee & Espresso, and in cold weather, you come in through the coffee shop). And it was wonderful. I had an amazing italian sausage omelette that was folded enough times to resemble origami.The LB, daunted by the eggs on the menu, went with oatmeal (which was real, thick, and fruited), toast, and asparagus (the waitress said everything on the menu was available). And she raved on the asparagus (grilled, not steamed), the oatmeal and toast. Yeah, it was a good turn for the final day in Bellingham.

Both Boundary Bay and Harris Avenue were crowded, and the crowd was a mix of townies and students, baseball caps and fashionable scarves. For Bellingham, I would say hair colors not found in nature, tattoos, and piercings are a good sign for the quality of the food. And that's among the clientele. The more traveler-oriented spots were OK, but just OK. The stuff in the older buildings, re-purposed for new businesses, hung with local decor or art (Gretchen Leggit had her art at the Harris, which made me find her site, which I then recommend as well), is where to find the good stuff. It is worth hunting down when you are in Bellingham.

More later,

Play: The Power of the Word

A Great Wilderness, by Samuel D. Hunter, Directed by Braden Abraham, Seattle Repertory, through February 16, 2014.

One of the benefits of having season tickets at the Rep is that you end up going to plays you'd never really consider if they were standing alone. I mean, imagine this conversation.

Me: Hey, it's a Sunday afternoon - want to go a play?
You: Sure. What's it about?
Me: It's about a man retiring from his job running a gay conversion therapy camp in Idaho.
You: You mean ...
Me: Yeah, convincing young men not to be gay.
You: Oh.
Me: No, really, it's pretty good.
You: I bet.
Me: And it deals not only with gay conversion but end of life issues.
You: Yeaaaahhhh. I'm sorry, I just remembered I have an anvil in the oven and can't make it.

And yeah, on paper it looks like this could go horribly, horribly wrong, a cringeworthy very special Lifetime movie with a moral lesson for us all. But it is not like that because writer Hunter plays fair by his characters and refuses to let them fall (mostly) into caricature or give them the easy way out. He builds their nature brick by brick and makes them accessible, even likable. And that, given the subject matter, makes them all the more challenging.

OK, here's the set-up (with spoilers). Walt (Michael Williams, brilliant in the role) has been running a camp for troubled (read gay) young men up in Idaho for thirty years, and is finally listening to his ex-wife and fellow camp founder  Abby (Christine Estabrook) and is about to move to a retirement home, a phrase he hates. Walt agrees to take on one more young man, Daniel (Jack Taylor, also honest and engaging) , who disappears soon after arrival, even before Walt's ex and her current husband Tim (Rep alum R. Hamiliton Wright) arrive. Then Daniel's mom Eunice (Mari Nelson) shows up, along with the park ranger (Gretchen Krich) who is leading the search. Responsibility for the young man's disappearance spills into the fate of the camp and the responsibility of what Walt has done over the years. Much cognac is consumed. Oh, and then there is a forest fire.

Walt is erudite, thoughtful, and caring, plagued by failing facilities and a frustration with accepting his age. He is also very well-meaning. He keeps a huge volume on hand in his cabin on a stand, but it is dictionary, not a bible. In fact, no one prays onstage, no one quotes scripture at each other. These are very secular Christians, a more real-world type that dodges the hypocrisy leveled at those who abide by chapter and verse. Walt is frustrated by people assuming that his conversion methods involve shouting and electroshock. He's a much more gentle creature whose intentions are good even if his goal is questionable.

Walt uses words and feels those words leaving him as a sign of his own mortality. Abby. by comparison, has her own words and considers them her property, her way of enforcing her will on the surrounding world. Tim is Walt's replacement in her life, and there is a mirror between the two men, of what might have been had Abby and Walt remained together. Eunice is stressed out and burned out by dealing with her son, yet is not challenged as she slips into depression building her own fort and defense with her words. Janice, the ranger, is the most cartoon-like of the characters, coming off as a bit Fargo-esque, and uses words without thinking of their effects.

Were this an Albee play, all would be trapped in that tiny cabin and the stress kicked up by multiple rounds of accusation and counter-accusation until something snaps and everything goes to hell. But Hunter allows the characters the room to move, to leave, to go off-stage, to regroup, and to think. The delivery is low-key and human,as opposed to theatrical. And that makes this an excellent play.

It has its own weaknesses. The ending is abrupt, and I don't know a way to address it. There is no rising action, no swell of music, no look-to-the-future optimism or ironic fatalism. Just a sudden blackout that confuses and makes you want to know more. The audience does not know when to applaud. As we done? Where did we go with all this? What was this all about?

Where I ended up was with John the Baptist (what?). I know this is weird, but there are hints throughout the text. Walt lives his whole life and finds that someone else gets the revelation he has been seeking. Someone else gets the surety of faith. He discovers, much like John that he was put on earth to be the opening gig for Jesus. Ultimately, this play is a question of reviewing one's life and trying to determine if it has meaning. Its a big-ticket question wrapped in a play that I have trouble describing otherwise.

And it is worthwhile, an excellent example of theatre pushing the envelope in both presentation and subject matter without going over the top. It is a very good play, but I think a very tough sell.

More later,