Tarkus in the catbird seat

So, sometimes we walk the cats, and sometimes the cats walk us.

Spooky Van Gogh

So, I just finished reading an interesting book, VINCENT'S TREES (ed. Ralph Skea, Thames & Hudson), which I got at the Clark during our visit to Williamstown back in June. Van Gogh has long been one of my favorite artists, and I've loved trees for as long as I can remember.* A favorite artist tackling a favorite subject: seemed like a natural fit as something I'd like.

I did, though it's been a book I've nibbled at rather than plunged in and read straight through. There's a lot to go back and forth over, to look at time and agaia. I knew he painted a great many outdoors scenes in addition to the bright sunflowers he's so famous for, but until this book pointed it out I hadn't noticed how many of them feature trees. I also hadn't known his artistic career was so short (about a decade), nor how prolific he was during that time (about nine hundred pictures).

I've long considered Van Gogh a good test of Ian Richard's theory** that what you know about an author (or in this case artist) influences what you see when you experience their work.  For example, looking at one of Van Gogh's landscape at first you might notice the bright colors, swirling energy, and sheer exuberance. Being told that, a year or so later, Van Gogh walked into one of those fields and shot himself, most of us now find sinister elements on a second look. The picture itself hasn't changed, but what we see when we look at it might.

One thing I had not appreciated is how spooky I found some of the pictures. There were some that I though wd do v. nicely to illustrate M. R. James or serve as the cover for one of his books: figures standing in the middle distance looking at us but too far away to see their features, or indeed whether they even have any. Here are a few examples:

There's even a mild hint of Lovecraft in one piece: I thought the following wd make a pretty good representation of a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath while quiescent. 

Finally, so long as we're on the subject, here are my two favorite Van Goghs, both of which I used to have posters of that I hung in many an apartment and office over the years.

--John R.

--current reading: TOUCH NOT THE CAT by Mary Stewart (to see what her non-Arthurian, non-fantasy work is like).

--current viewing; an online watch-as-they-play CALL OF CTHULHU scenario set in the Crystal Palace.

*I must be one of three people who still remember the little cherry tree we had in our backyard at Monticello, or the sprawling mimosa in a neighbor's yard.

**a core element of the so-called New Criticism.

An End to the Penny

--Please put a penny in the old man's hat

--Ain't got a penny
--A halfpenny will do
--Ain't got a halfpenny
--God bless you!



So, here's a piece of English news with applicability for us over here in the States: the Royal Mint has stopped making pennies. Not that they've abolished them --there was too much of an outcry when they suggested that-- they're just not making any more. Too many already in circulation, too few actually in use, especially with people shifting to electronic transactions via their smartphones and other devices. They'll make more if and when they're needed, assuming that time ever comes, but this clearly marks a milestone.

The piece includes the astonishing statistic that sixty percent of all pennies only get used once, presumably before vanishing into a drawer or change jar.

Something of the same thing can be seen happening over here, where the cent* is now worth so little that most make their way into tip jars and I've even seen people who don't even bother to pick one up when it drops to the floor. And so far as I can tell belief in the 'lucky penny' is dying out. In practical terms, they cd simplify our coinage by dropping the cent and nickel together and let us get by with just the dime and quarter.

The coin collector in me is sad, considering how the cent and half-cent were among the first and most important US coinage (along with the dime and half-dime). The half-dime and half-cent vanished long ago. Despite the Lincoln lobby it's time for the cent and nickel to follow, perhaps into commemorative status or an array of ever-changing limited run designs, like they did with the quarters.



Here's the link:

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/aug/07/royal-mint-paused-creation-of-1p-and-2p-coins-last-year

--John R.



*we call them 'penny' and 'cent' interchangeably but they're really cents, not pennies.

Some Solo Gaming

So, I've been wanting to brush up my 1st edition AD&D knowledge, which I find has gotten overlaid with bits and pieces from other iterations of the game during all those years I spent working on 2nd edition (over forty modules, books, and boxed sets) and editing 3rd edition (about another twenty works, including co-editing two of its three core rulebooks).

My solution is to play a short solo adventure using 1st edition rules. Choose a suitable adventure, generate a party of adventurers, and run them through it. If it goes well I might resume solo gaming as a regular thing, the way I use to in the old days.

After some mulling over likely options, I narrowed down the choice of adventure to one of three:

U1. THE SINISTER SECRET OF SALTMARSH. This wd have been my choice, except that I'm hoping I can play through the recent expanded version with our regular Monday Night Game once we've finished our current adventure and don't want to spoil it by rereading the original after all these years.

I1. DWELLERS OF THE FORBIDDEN CITY by Zeb Cook. This is one of the few B/X/I series adventures I never played through back in the old days. I have a high opinion of Zeb's early work,* but I wanted to start with 1st-level characters, since I think the game is at its best (certainly its most challenging) at low levels. Thus his 4th to 7th level Forbidden City would have created unnecessary complications. Accordingly, I've tentatively lined up this as the next adventure if I continue the game on into higher levels. Either this or X2. CASTLE AMBER (a long-standing favorite of mine).

B2.5 CAVES OF THE UNKNOWN. The adventure I settled on is the one I think, of all the modules and mini-modules I picked up at last year's NTRPGcon, best captured old-style AD&D the way I used to play it. Plus it did pitch itself as an expansion of the classic B2. KEEP ON THE BORDERLAND, and thus an easy segue if needed to draw on RETURN TO THE KEEP ON THE BORDERLANDS as well.

To save time, I took characters I'd come up with years ago for RETURN TO THE KEEP  and reverse engineered their stat blocks from late second edition back to 1st edition.

lesson number one: I'd forgotten how simple 1st edition character's stats were, before all the complications with skills worked its way in. Two or three lines is about all it takes to get down the essentials.

It took v. little time to form a party, selected the right rumor for them to hear, and send them off on a mission: recover a dead adventurer's body and gear from the bottom of the sinkhole in which he fell to his death. Well, it's a start . . .

More later.

--John R.


*esp. the two Master of the Desert Nomads adventures, my favorites of all his works. Its monsters were for me its strong points, as also seems to be the case with FORBIDDEN CITY (which introduces the Aboleth and yuan-ti, among others). The aboleth had to wait more than a decade to come into their own, with the Underdark-themed campaign adventure NIGHT BELOW (1995), one of the best things I've had the pleasure of editing during my rpg career.

Congratulations are In Order

So, this past weekend they announced this year's winners of the Mythopoeic Award.

The winner of the Inklings Scholarship award goes to Verlyn Flieger for her essay collection THERE WOULD ALWAYS BE A FAIRY TALE.

And the winner in Myth and Fantasy Studies (the non-Inkling award) is Dimitra Fimi for CELTIC MYTH IN CONTEMPORARY CHILDREN'S FANTASY.

Congratulations to the winners and also to the finalists.

--John R.

A Lost Boardgame (DICTATORS AND DIPLOMATS)

So, on the same page as the TSR version of THE CREATURE THAT ATE SHEBOYGAN, the 1992 TSR catalogue shows another boardgame that never saw the light of day: SUN WARS. I knew nothing of this one, so I consulted with two friends who were at TSR at the time, who agree that this must have been the project whose brief was to create a game to use all the little plastic pieces left over from a previous failed game: BUCK ROGERS: BATTLE FOR THE XXVth CENTURY.*  I suspect that this one never got beyond the basic idea and wd be surprised to learn that it got as far as a prototype, though you never know with TSR.


More interesting is the game whose name is given in the catalogue as FLASHPOINT and its designer as Douglas Niles.  I knew that about this time Troy Denning had designed an excellent boardgame called DICTATORS AND DIPLOMATS,  because I got to playtest it. What I hadn't realized, and only recently discovered, is that the game I played and the one in the catalogue were one and the same, despite having different names and being credited to different designers.  It's thus the only one of these games that I'm sure got all the way through design.

And it was a v. good game, with the players each having different victory conditions. For example, Japan wins through economic dominance, while another country might use military means to achieve its goals. And, just to make things more interesting, the players didn't know each other's end goal, at least in the playtest, though you cd get an inkling by paying attention to what the other players were doing. It felt almost as if the different players are playing interlocking games at the same time with each's actions impinging on the others.

Unfortunately, it went the way of all flesh when TSR decided to get out of the boardgame business. A shame. I think it might have fared much better in today's kickstarter world. I'm still glad I got the chance to play it, not least because this is the only time I really got to meet Troy Denning, who'd left TSR not long before I arrived, to spend his time henceforth more with novels than game design. He's remembered today mostly for DARK SUN and as the designer of D&D 5th edition (The Black Box), the last successful edition of D&D (as opposed to AD&D) by TSR.**

--John R.


*TSR had a tendency to overprint, especially when it came to anything related to Buck Rogers

**Successful that is both as a coherent game system and in sales, esp. when paired with the Rules Cyclopedia.

Tolkien Oral History Project

So, I was pleased to take part in Marquette's new oral history project, where they encourage Tolkien fans and scholars to record brief reminisces as to how each came to discover Tolkien, what attracted them in his work, and what Tolkien has meant to them.

Here's my own entry --somewhat shorter than the average, but it was either stop where I did or talk for days:

http://cdm16280.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16280coll11/id/461

And here's a link to the main site, with the first set of two hundred and fifty interviews (out of what they hope will be a total of six thousand):

http://cdm16280.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p16280coll11


A brainchild of Marquette's Tolkien Archivist Wm Fliss, this is quite unlike the oral history project Lyle Dorsett launched at Wheaton in the 'eighties, where he sought out people who had known Lewis and Tolkien and got their memories down on film. Instead the Marquette recordings are anonymous, asking only the person's age and what part of the country they're from. The effect is a kaleidoscope of voices, young or old, male or female, dedicated scholar or devoted fan, that memorably brings to life the vast range of Tolkien's audience. I found listening to a generous selection quite moving and hope the ongoing project also picks up international voices as well.


It's off to a v. good start.

Here's hoping there will be much more to come.

--John R.

current viewing: SMILEY'S PEOPLE (Alec Guinness)