fantasy
Miéville on Tolkien – again
Amazon’s book blog Omnivoracious has got China Miéville as a guest blogger this week. He’s got two posts and a podcast up, but the best so far is this article on ‘Five reasons Tolkien rocks’.
It’s not a turn around, but Mieville is pretty famous for ripping into Tolkien, primarily in this 2002 article for the Socialist Review entitled ‘Tolkien – Middle Earth Meets Middle England’ where Mieville says
But if, as radical critics of both bourgeois respectability and Stalinist agitprop, we defend science fiction and fantasy, does that mean we should be rallying under the banner of ‘Socialists for Tolkien’? Hardly.
It’s not that I disagree as such, I just don’t take it so seriously. So it’s nice to see this new article focusing on things like
I mean, say what you like about him, Tolk gives good monster. Shelob, Smaug, the Balrog…in their astounding names, the fearful verve of their descriptions, their various undomesticated malevolence, these creatures are utterly embedded in our world-view. No one can write giant spiders except through Shelob: all dragons are sidekicks now. And so on.
I think he’s mellowing.
Edit: and just after I post this, I read a very interesting and cool Miéville interview done by Jeff VanderMeer. I liked this bit especially:
I’m very aware, by the way, that loads of readers of this may think I’m being a humourless or po-faced dick about it.
Quite possibly China!
Mieville talks about his new book – The City & The City
One of the few books I’m genuinely excitted about at the moment! Can’t wait to get a copy…
Cattle Finding & Combat – a WFRP actual play
I was in Brisbane again for work this week and managed to play a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game with some people I’d met via RPG.net. This was very nice of them as I was essentially hijacking their D&D game night to demand we played a game I was keen on.
It was a simple one-shot scenario – cattle are missing and the sheriff won’t do anything about it (he’s a drunk) so our heroes agree to take on the task. We did standard WFRP random character generation, which led to much hilarity and ended up with a dwarf bodyguard, an elven apprentice wizard, a human pit fighter (me) and another human whose career has escaped me! › Continue reading
Holy crap – 16% of all book sales were for Stephanie Myer
Or that’s what it says here. Of course it’s worth noting that these are probably jsut US sales figures, but still…
Old School – a review of the Quick Primer for Old School Gaming
Like lots of people, I got my roleplaying start with the Red Box basic set for Dungeons & Dragons back at the ripe old age of 7 or 8. Weirdly enough, I never actually played a roleplaying game until high school, and then only once. I was at university before I took up the hobby in earnest with second edition AD&D and only really got into it with the advent of third edition in 2000.
In those early days I made up a lot of characters and read a lot of books. But that was the limit of my ‘old school’ gaming. So it was with some interest that I cam across the Quick Primer for Old School Gaming today. It’s a free, thirteen page download by Matthew Finch who wrote the Original D&D ‘retro-clone’ Swords & Wizardry and it goes into the differences between ‘modern’ gaming and ‘old school’ gaming.
I’d normally find this sort of thing slightly patronising and annoying, and indeed the Swords & Wizardry site has pretty strong elements of that, to whit:
To reawaken the hobbyist-gamer and put to rest the consumer-gamer, to break out of the miasma of RPG consumer-think, and to re-ignite the original wide-horizon view of fantasy roleplaying and its potential.
Blah.
But the PDF itself is actually a fairly fun and compelling read. It lays out different examples of play and how a modern game would run them and how an ‘old-school’ game would run them, with a modern game focusing on the skills and stats of the character sheet and the old school game focusing on the player’s imagination. One example searching a room – in the modern game the room is searched by a dice roll against the search skill and in the old-school game, it’s searched via role-play. As much as I hate to admit it, that’s been the way my modern games have gone sometimes and the Primer provided a quick way to reflect on that.
There are clearly some limitations to this – as Sophie would be quick to point out, a lot of the modern games she plays encourage exactly this sort of free-form roleplaying – yesterday’s 3:16 actual play is a case in point (it would be interesting to here how The Forge/Story Games crowd would react to being told that their games were really a return to the glory days of original Dungeons & Dragons!). But it’s clear what Finch is talking about here – old D&D versus new D&D – and so it’s silly to get too hung up on the limitations of his definitions.
I’m going to be playing in a first edition AD&D game on Australia Day for the first time in a long time and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m going to use the primer to get in the mood and frame of mind and hopefully it works!