Happy 107th, Robert E. Howard!

Robert E. Howard was born 107 years ago today in Peaster, TX, and I thought I'd acknowledge his birth by (1) posting my candidate for most iconic image of Conan ever and (2) quoting a bit of Howard's writing to go with it.

Both image and text are from "Rogues in the House," not my favorite Conan story (the bit where Conan kills his former doxy's otherwise innocent boy-toy sticks in my craw a bit, although I think I can see what Howard is trying to achieve there and teach the story accordingly). My favorite Conan story is "The Tower of the Elephant." But Frank Frazetta's cover for Conan, the first volume of the Ace series of Conan stories (the first Howard book I ever bought), retains all of its power to this day:

It's those reds that do it for me, I think. Here we see Conan fighting Thak, the ape-man raised by Nabonidus the Red Priest. Thak's people are apes on their way up Howard's evolutionary slope (while humanity, especially that of the civilized variety, is on its way down). Conan defeats Thak, but I've always loved his eulogy for his fallen opponent:

Nabonidus was staring down at the still figure as if he could not believe his own eyes. Black, hairy, abhorrent, the monster lay, grotesque in the tatters of the scarlet robe; yet more human than bestial, even so, and possessed somehow of a vague and terrible pathos. 

Even the Cimmerian sensed this, for he panted: "I have slain a man tonight, not a beast. I will count him among the chiefs whose souls I've sent into the dark, and my women will sing of him."

When I teach "Rogues," I point out that Thak is possibly the most human character in the narrative—even Conan, who is ethically superior to Murilo and Nabonidus, is referred to by Howard as "beast-like" and "ghoul-like" when he kills his betrayer's new boyfriend. It speaks well of Conan that he recognizes this in the narrative and even better of Howard, a champion of the abject and abjected who never stopped evolving himself.

Holiday Dice Pr0n

I found these beauties (Dwarven Dice from Q-Workshop) under the tree on Christmas morning and thought I'd share them with you all as part of a general holiday greetings! Best wishes for a wonderful 2013!

Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997) Now Online

Robin Laws just noted on Google+ that the entire text of John Clute's 1997 Encyclopedia of Fantasy is now online as part of the beta text of the third edition of Clute's Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. While both books are technically aimed at academic users, they still make good reading for fen.

BareBones Fantasy RPG: House-Ruling Character Races

Last week I had a chance to test-drive the new BareBones Fantasy roleplaying game from DWD Studios. I will post an account of that session soon (overall verdict: excellent!), but I wanted to get the following house rule written up and published . . .

Add the following bullet points to the character race write-ups provided on p. 8 of the rulebook:

DWARVES

1 free skill level in either Enchanter or Warrior.

ELVES

1 free skill level in either Scout or Spellcaster.

HALFLINGS

1 free skill level in either Scholar or Thief.

HUMANS

1 free skill level in any skill.

Chosen during Step 2 ("Select Race") of character creation (p. 5), each of these free skill levels comes in addition to the one provided in Step 3 ("Select Skill"). However, characters cannot double up in a given skill before play begins and Development Points are earned. The free skill level provided in Step 3 must therefore be taken in a different skill than the one selected in Step 2.

Examples: Mike wants to play an Elven mage, so he takes a level of Spellcaster during Step 2. In Step 3, he cannot raise Spellcaster to level 2 but must instead take a level in another skill. He chooses Warrior. Bill wants to play a Human aristocrat, so he selects Leader as his free racial skill during Step 2 and then Scholar as his free skill in Step 3.

I developed this house rule in response to my players' concerns about a bottleneck in character creation. Because five of the game's eight skills can only be used with training, any character who wanted one of those skills had to devote their free skill level to it. The player who chose Spellcaster benefited from this bottleneck since his trained skill was also his primary attack skill; the player who chose Cleric was able to use his Smite ability to similar effect (when wielding one's deity's weapon of choice, Cleric skill may be used in place of Warrior skill). But the players of the Dwarf Scholar and the Human Leader weren't so lucky: they had to spend their free level in Scholar and Leader in order to be able to use any of those skills' sub-abilities and thus ended up whiffing their attack rolls nearly 66% of the time. No one put a level into Enchanter (since the game was a one-shot, not the Enchanter's preferred venue), but I suspect that beginning Enchanters are in the same boat as Leaders and Scholars.

By adding an extra skill level, character concepts involving Enchanters, Leaders, and Scholars are much more viable at the start of play. I decided to attach the extra level to Step 2 and character race to heighten the importance of archetypal origins. Dwarves' choice between Enchanter and Warrior and Elves' choice between Scout and Spellcaster pay homage to the races' folkloric traditions. Thief does much the same for Halflings, looking back to Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit; Scholar owes more to the Fourth Edition Halfling and that race's tradition of wandering. Humans got a second free choice (to go along with the one they got in Step 3) out of deference to the longstanding RPG tradition of human versatility. Because characters of all races still get the free choice in Step 3, however, no one is locked into a racial archetype. I.e., you don't leave the underkingdom without learning something about either enchanting or fighting—but you can also focus on leading or studying or stealing as well.

There's an obvious counter-argument here: beginning characters are supposed to whiff attack rolls much of the time. While I recognize that argument's force, I felt that the bottleneck didn't distribute the whiffing fairly across characters. Players who devoted skill levels to Cleric and Spellcaster were able to focus their efforts and give themselves 66% success rates (by combining the +10 from the free skill level with the +20 from the primary skill bonus); players who spent their skill level in the three remaining skills had to fall back on their untrained Warrior skill in combat. Adding the free skill level in Step 2 evens the playing field, especially once the prohibition against raising any skill to level 2 before play is considered. Finally, it only costs 3 Development Points (half of the average per-session reward) to buy a skill at level 1 so the house rule really only speeds up the characters' improvement by two hours' worth of play.

Thor Bids Thee . . .

A Happy Halloween!

Sadness Is . . .

. . . finding the Blu-Ray boxed set of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films in your mailbox at work and knowing that you can't go home to watch them for another eight hours.

Happiness Is . . .

. . . reading Forge of Darkness, Steven Erikson's new book about the prehistory of his Malazan setting . . .

. . . and finding the UK edition of Joe Abercrombie's Western-cum-fantasy Red Country sitting in your mailbox at work.

Fantasy Reading List for My Summer 2013 "Intro to Fiction" Course

Every so often on this blog I mention or allude to the fact that I teach in the English Department at a flagship state university. My primary research and teaching area is medieval literature (with a specialty in early English drama). But I also routinely teach fantasy fiction. In Summer 2013, I'm going to be teaching a fantasy-focused section of our "Intro to Fiction" course. Syllabi for this course usually rely on a published fiction anthology filled with mainstream "literary" narratives. When genre writers do appear, it's inevitably their least genre-marked material that shows up: the primary example here is the ubiquitous selection of Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" instead of any of her equally excellent fantasy or SF stories. I've decided to buck this trend and will be teaching a syllabus entirely devoted to genre fiction. For the sake of coherence, I'm limiting myself to story and novel-length fantasy narratives. Here's the most recent draft of the course reading list:

Lord Dunsany, The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories



I had a number of Dunsany collections to choose from, but settled on this one from Dover. It's relatively inexpensive, and it contains many of my favorite Dunsany tales: "The Sword of Welleran," "The Fall of Babbulkind," "The Kith of the Elf-Folk," and "The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth."

Robert E. Howard, Conan the Barbarian



Again, lots of choices here for editions. I settled on this movie tie-in volume partially because it's cheap but primarily because the table of contents allows me to hit all of my favorite Conan stories in a way that the otherwise wonderful Del Rey collections do not: "Tower of the Elephant," "Queen of the Black Coast," and "Rogues in the House" sit alongside "People of the Black Circle" and "Red Nails." Since Del Rey publishes this text as well, it's quite possible that the texts are identical to those in the REH Library series.

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit



Considerations of time were the primary factor in my decision to let The Hobbit stand in for Tolkien's work: there's just no way to teach The Lord of the Rings on the summer teaching schedule without basically abandoning the pretense of reading other authors. That said, The Hobbit is the book that turned me on to fantasy, and Peter Jackson's movie will have students primed to read the novel.

Patricia A. McKillip, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld



I needed a novel from the 1970s to fill in the large gap between Howard and Tolkien's 1930s texts and the books I was going to be choosing from the 2000s. McKillip is one of my favorite writers, and this 1974 novel is one of her best.

Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories



Carter's 1979 collection of stories was the other book I picked to cover the 1970s. I selected it in large part because I've never read Carter's work, and this course seemed like a good opportunity to do so.

China Miéville, The Scar



My favorite New Weird novel: it's a big fat middle finger aimed at quest fantasy, and yet I love it just the same. If only this new UK paperback cover design was the American design as well! Sigh.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices



Le Guin was definitely going to be on the syllabus. I chose this book, the second in Le Guin's new Annals of the Western Shore series, because it brilliantly does everything Le Guin was trying to do with Tehanu and the second trilogy of Earthsea books but without any of the baggage that comes from revising an existing set of beloved books.

Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners



Like Carter, Link is a writer I've been meaning to read for some time. This is her major collection of stories, sitting right in the midstream of the slipstream between genre and literature. It's worth noting, though, that I have an alternate in mind if it turns out I don't particularly care for Link's stories:

Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves



Russell has just exploded onto the scene recently, and whatI know of her work gives it a slightly more American feel than Link's work (i.e., Russell appears to be drawing on regional folklore as opposed to Link's more suburban and/or cosmopolitan feel). In the end, I'll go with whichever collection I like best.

So there you have the reading list. I've tried to strike a balance between American and British writers (four of each), short story collections and novels (four of each), and men and women (four of each). The books also make a decent historical survey of modern fantasy fiction: Dunsany is odd man out, sitting by himself in 1908, followed by clusters of work from the 1930s, 1970s, and 2000s. I'm looking forward to teaching the class and hope you've enjoyed this sneak preview of its contents!

Blood & Treasure Has Arrived . . .

. . . and it is one big book. Seriously, this thing would wear "husky" jeans if it was a human! I've gotten so use to the smaller format used by games like Savage Worlds or Wordplay that it's shocking to see a full-sized rulebook again. That said, I am very excited to have a hardcopy to hand.

Blood & Treasure: Test-Driving Character Creation

I recently discovered John Matthew Stater's wonderful Blood & Treasure roleplaying game and have been enjoying its skillful blend of the Third Edition SRD and AD&D. Here's a test character that exemplifies much of what I love about B&T:

JORY WALKER

LEVEL 1 HALF-ELF SCOUT

STR 11 (+0) DEX 16 (+2) CON 12 (+0) INT 10 (+0) WIS 14 (+1) CHA 12 (+0)

HP 6 AC 15 ATK +0 FORT 15 REF 11 WILL 14

Languages: Common, Elven, Goblin

Skills: Climb 11, find traps 15, hide 11, listen at doors 14, move silently 11, remove traps 11, riding 11, survival 14, trickery 15

Abilities: Darkvision 30 ft., 30% magic resistance to sleep and enchantment spells, knack for trickery, backstab (x2 damage)

Feats: Magical aptitude (daze 1/day)

Armor: Studded leather (+3 AC)

Weapons: Short sword (1d6 damage), dagger (1d4 damage, range 20/40), short bow (1d6 damage, range 90/200)

Gear: Quiver with 20 arrows

Treasure: 68 gp

First of all, Jory's class demonstrates the flexibility of B&T's approach to classes: "Scout" is a wilderness variant of "Thief" that swaps out the skills "decipher codes" and "pick pockets" in exchange for "riding" and "survival." Each class in B&T has a variant in the core rulebook (e.g., you can be an "Aristocrat" instead of a "Bard" or a "Beastmaster" instead of a "Druid"), and Tanner Yea of Pulpwood has put together Heroes of Lore, a free supplement containing dozens more. These variants open up the class structure of the game without losing too much focus (or necessitating the creation of entirely new classes to handle minor variations in archetype). B&T also opts for the three saves of 3E, one of my favorite features in Wizards of the Coast era D&D. Skills are based on the save system: each skill uses a class save as its base and then modifies it in accordance with a relevant attribute—another instance of streamlining. Finally, B&T includes a short list of (entirely optional) feats; these are nice additions to characters, providing for some additional customization without encouraging the optimization culture of the post-2000 game. Characters only get a single feat every four levels (with humans picking up an additional feat at level 1), so even the most powerful of characters (a 20th level PC) will have no more than five feats in total. I'm looking forward to creating more B&T characters and seeing what John Stater comes up with next for the game.

The Wonderful Wizards of Nehwon

One of my daughter's friends recently expressed an interest in learning to play RPGs, so I've been putting together a campaign that's both appropriate for and appealing to a group of girls under the age of 10. The friend is a big fan of the musical Wicked, so I settled on L. Frank Baum's Oz as a setting and F. Douglas Wall's Adventures in Oz as a ruleset. AiO is a wonderful little game with an elegant core mechanic, an experience system that supports Baumian stories (characters earn Oz points to improve die rolls and character abilities by helping friends and making new ones), and a surprisingly flexible set of character creation rules. Wall's blog includes stats for non-Oz characters as diverse as Twilight Sparkle (from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic) and Gord the Rogue (as a tribute to Gary Gygax). My daughter has made up her character, a glass bunny named Liana, and I'll be posting Liana's stats and character portrait soon (i.e., once I scan my daughter's drawing). In the meantime, I thought I'd take a shot at translating some sword-and-sorcery heroes into AiO terms . . .

Name: Fafhrd
First Appearance: "Two Sought Adventure"
Template: Wanderer
Size: 3

Basic Skills

Athletics: 3 (feats of strength)
Awareness: 2
Brains: 2
Presence: 3
Sneaking: 1
Wits: 2

Traits: Deadly Weapon, Poet

Friends List: Grey Mouser, Ningauble of the Seven Eyes

---

Name: The Grey Mouser
First Appearance: "Two Sought Adventure"
Template: Wanderer
Size: 3

Basic Skills

Athletics: 3 (acrobatics)
Awareness: 2
Brains: 2
Presence: 1
Sneaking: 3
Wits: 2

Traits: Deadly Weapon, Humbug Magic

Friends List: Fafhrd, Sheelba of the Eyeless Face

Since Fafhrd and Mouser are more or less equal as combatants and adventure heroes, I gave them identical Athletics score. I was tempted to shave a point off Fafhrd's Brains to increase another score, but I decided in the end that people assume to their eventual dismay that the northerner is just another a dumb barbarian—and left his Brains at 2. The key differences between the two heroes, then, are Presence and Sneaking. Fafhrd's striking looks and height give him the edge in the former while the Mouser's slight frame and generally furtive nature argue for an increaser in the latter. Both men have the Deadly Weapon trait (which allows them to do physical damage in addition to the Wits damage that is the bread-and-butter of the AiO combat system). Fafhrd's bardic upbringing grants him the Poet trait; Mouser's mystic apprenticeship, the Humbug Magic trait. Each man appears on the other' Friends List, testifying to their status as boon companions. I've put Ningauble and Sheelba on the Friends Lists as well: Fafhrd and the Mouser can spend Oz points to get assistance from their sorcerous patrons, but of course there's always a catch.

The best part about writing up Fafhrd and the Mouser as AiO characters is that Leiber's own rules for Nehwon allow for the heroes to shift dimensions into Oz. I'm not sure if Oz would survive their sojourn there—but then again one could just as easily argue that Oz might put a premature end to the heroes' careers!