Random musings on books, code, and tabletop games.
Chris Kubasik of Tales to Astound has two sets of Weapon Cards for Classic Traveller (for the 1981 and 1977 editions) that simplifies Classic Traveller combat by consolidating the information needed for each weapon.
There is also a page with a PDF of pre-generated characters and a blank character sheet.
In reading Flame & Crimson I was reminded that Ron Edwards of Adept Press published a supplement Sorcerer & Sword for his RPG Sorcerer (both copyrighted 2001) that has a chapter discussing Heroic Fantasy, as he calls Sword & Sorcery fiction. It's an interesting read that mentions some authors and books that Flame & Crimson doesn't. I've listed the authors and works from that chapter below, with check marks (✓) for the ones I've read. Edwards listed some things more specifically that I have listed more generally. He breaks it down into several eras:
The originals: 1920s through 1950s
Robert E. Howard — The original Conan ✓ stories (Edwards has a specific list of stories, but I think that all the original R.E.H stories are worth reading), the Kull ✓ stories, the Bran Mak Morn ✓ stories, and the Solomon Kane ✓ stories, and Almuric ✓
C. L. Moore — Jirel of Joiry ✓
Clark Ashton Smith — Hyperborea, Zothique, Xiccarph, The Last Incantation
Fritz Leiber — The Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories ✓
Gardener Fox — The Kothar and Kyrik books (though he notes that these are at least 33% spoof)
Norvell W. Page — Flame Winds, Son of the Bear God
The fans: 60s to early 70s
Michael Moorcock — The Elric ✓ stories and the Corum ✓ stories (Edwards specifies the earlier stories from the 60s; I think all of the Elric and Corum stories are worth reading)
Poul Anderson — The Broken Sword ✓, Hrolf Kraki's Saga
Andrew J. Offut — (editor) Swords against Darkness, vols. 1–5
Gerald W. Page (GWP1) & Hank Reinhardt — The Heroic Fantasy collection
Karl Edward Wagner — The Kane ✓ stories and novels
Betrayal: somewhere in the late 70s and beyond
(This is Edwards' name for the era; these authors are ones he considered as still writing good Sword & Sorcery.)
Jessica Amanda Salmonson — Tomoe Gozen ✓, The Golden Naginata ✓, Thousandshrine Warrior ✓ (TG); (editor) Heroic Visions, vols. 1–2; Amazons, vols. 1–2
Andrew J. Offutt and Richard Tierney – The Demon in the Mirror ✓, The Eyes of Sarsis ✓, Web of the Spider ✓
David Mason (DM) — The Sorcerer's Skull
David Drake — The Dragon Lord ✓, The Mantichore
David C. Smith — The Oron series, the Master of Evil trilogy, The Sorcerer's Shadow
Victoria Graham — The Witchstone
Tanith Lee — Kill the Dead ✓, Night's Master ✓ (The first of the Tales from the Flat Earth ✓), Cyrion ✓, Volkhaavar ✓, Companions of the Road
Michael Shea — Nift the Lean ✓
Tim Lukeman — Rajan ✓, Koren ✓
Gordon D. Shirreffs — Calgaich the Swordsman
Darrell Schweitzer — We Are All Legends
Charles R. Saunders — Imaro ✓, The Quest for Cush, The Trail of Bohu
Carl Sherrell — Raum ✓ (TKB adds: there's a sequel, Skraelings ✓)
Karl Edward Wagner — (editor) Echoes of Valor, vols. 1–3
Keith Taylor — Bard, Bard II
Also mentioned (sometimes for tone and mood rather than specific stories or books):
M. John Harrison — The Pastel City ✓ and Viriconium Nights ✓ (TKB adds: the whole Viriconium series was republished in one volume, Viriconium ✓, and although the last two books are somewhat weird the first two are definitely Sword & Sorcery)
Neal Barrett, Jr. — Kelwin
David Jarrett — Witherwing ✓
Jack Vance — Some of the grimmer tales from The Dying Earth ✓
H. P. Lovecraft — the looming presence of Outer Dark horror
T. Ligotti — “Masquerade of a Dead Sword” (TKB adds: this story is in Songs of a Dead Dreamer)
After reading Flame and Crimson I went and bought several of the Sword & Sorcery books it discussed. Here is the first one I finished:
Far Away & Never, by Ramsay Campbell, copyright 1996, Necronomicon Press, ISBN-10: 0940884860.
Enjoyable collection of stories, avoiding the flaws of many of the later sword & sorcery authors.
The word-based magic in “The Stages of the God” and “The Song at the Hub of the Garden” had a flavor of its own, and “The Ways of Chaos” made me want to read Ghor, Kin-Slayer: The Saga of Genseric's Fifth-Born Son (G1, G2). [1]
There is a very interesting six-part series of articles (I, II, III, IV, V, VI) written by military historian Bret Devereaux at A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry that analyzes the Siege of Gondor in the Peter Jackson film and in the Tolkien book, including logistics, operations, cavalry mechanics, the physics of supernatural creatures and their weapons, and the role of motivation and cohesion. As is not surprising, the sequence in the Peter Jackson film makes compromises with the story to better suit film, while the sequence in the book is better grounded in the reality of historical battles.
There is also a review of the Gondor Heavy Infantry Kit, which depends on the discussion of armor in the Lannister Infantry Kit review.
And, there is a three part series (1, 2, 3) on War Elephants.
His Blog Overview gives a good description of what he's doing on his blog and his credentials as a professional military historian.
G. W. Thomas says about Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard:
Clark Ashton Smith created much as an evil god might create. He stands high above his Fantasy worlds and he laughs. He laughs at the poor souls who must suffer his realms of terror and beauty. His is a sardonic humor that torments and feels no kinship with those who suffer under his machinations. Robert E. Howard, by contrast, makes you feel the hero’s skin, let’s you live inside it as Conan or Kull or Bran Mak Morn feels the hatred of the enemy, the bite of swords, the wickedness of evil.
I think this is why I sometimes have difficulty getting into Clark Ashton Smith's work. I suspect that if I had encountered Smith about the same time I encountered Lovecraft, at around 10 to 12 years old, I wouldn't have that difficulty. It's probably why it is easier to get into Robert E. Howard's work.
Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery, by Brian Murphy, copyright 2019, ISBN 978-1-68390-244-7.
A very good survey of Sword and Sorcery fiction, well worth reading. I'm going to have to read it again and pull out all the books and authors it mentions.
I found it much more interesting and useful and indeed inspiring than I found Appendix N, Jeffro Johnson's survey of the sword and sorcery literature from the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. Both cover a lot of the same works, but I found Jeffro's book somewhat unfocused and in a few occasions a little mean spirited, but worth reading for someone interested in D&D.
Last edited: 2020-11-30 20:46:08 EST
I had the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (online) and the Encyclopedia of Fantasy (online) in print, and learned many things from them in hours of enjoyable browsing. I'm glad to see them online, and link them here for reference.
There is an addenda to the Encyclopedia of Fantasy.
Back sometime in March 2018 I installed Tuxera NTFS for Mac. It was the first NTFS for Mac that I found. I used it casually for a while and it seemed ok.
Sometime later, probably in October 2019, I decided I needed to move 110 GB of files off my Macbook Pro laptop's internal drive and onto a external drive. I also wanted to access this drive from Linux, and thought I'd just use a NTFS-formatted drive so it would be readable there.
I copied the files over using rsync and there seemed to be no problems, until I (in a fit of paranoia) ran the Unix cmp command on all the files on the original disk and the matching files on the NTFS-formatted drive. There were lots of differences. Uh oh.
I didn't see anything on the Internet complaining about this.
So, sometime in October 2019 in I installed Paragon Software extFS for Mac. (I see now that they have a NTFS for Mac; I haven't tried it.)
I wanted to try the same thing and see if it worked more reliably with extFS. I originally wrote short shell scripts for this, for consistency, so I could just change the volume name and run them again. Again there were lots of differences. Uh oh.
Again, I didn't see anything on the Internet complaining about this.
All I was doing was running rsync -avz with the appropriate
directories; it should have worked.
I formatted the drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and recopied the files, and this time they all compared ok.
I decided to just use Unison to sync the files to a couple of my computers for backup and local use instead of connecting the external drive to each computer in turn. This is working ok for me.
Maybe this was user error on my part, but it happened consistently with both of these file systems.
I ran across some old articles: Shannnon Appelcline's “A Brief History of Roleplaying”, and am saving references to them here for later reference.