Vornheim: The Reviewening

I will start by telling a little customer service story.  I haven’t traditionally been a huge Jim Raggi fan, but I gotta tell you, he’s good at customer service.

I ordered Vornheim from the LotFP online store about 5 weeks ago.  Last week I was getting a bit antsy about it not being in my hands, so I wrote Jim an email through the store support contact.  I received a reply promptly (accounting for time difference) which apologized for the inconvenience, laid out the standard timeline for shipping to my location, described some potential reasons for the delay and offered to buy me another copy from a north American vendor (since he’s sold out)  if the product did not arrive within a certain amount of time.

I’ve worked in customer service, people.  I was a customer support call center manager.  This is HOW THIS SHIT IS DONE.  Armed with the information that a) the delay was within the range of expected shipping time, b) Canadian customs sometimes slows stuff down arbitrarily and c) I had an alternative if I was unhappy with the wait, which the vendor would pay for himself – I was happy to wait a few more weeks.  And lo and behold, Vornheim arrived late last week.

So from one customer support professional to another – fabulous job, James Edward Raggi IV.  Top f’ing notch.  It’s pretty likely that Jim knew that he wouldn’t have to buy/ship me a copy from a North American vendor, but he made the offer, and that is huge.  Much of customer service is managing expectations and providing options, and that was deftly done here.

On to Vornheim.

This book is smaller than I expected.  There is a certain expectation I have for physical dimensions of RPG supplements, and this book does not conform to that.  But that isn’t bad.  This is a very convenient size for an rpg book.  I could fit it in a coat pocket if I wanted to.  And the contents make me want to.

When I actually read the book, it’s incredibly DENSE.  There is more practical, useful, interesting stuff in this book than in all the 4e books I purchased.  There is NO wasted space.  The INSIDE OF THE DUST JACKET has a map on it.  It’s like working in a well-designed ship galley kitchen.  Everything is right there within reach and no space is wasted at all.

This is the chocolate brownie of role-playing supplements.  It’s small, chewy and tasty.  Getting a bigger piece would almost be overkill.

I quite like the multi-column random tables.  They are a great use of space, since they can be used straight across with a single roll or rolled on multiple times.  The dice-drop tables are also handy.  I’ve spent some time deciphering all the things they could be used for, and I feel that I’ve only just scratched the surface.

The book is also fairly edition-neutral, which is a good thing.  I’m mostly playing D&D Next right now, and I can use the stats and tools pretty much straight across.  A handy-dandy “Later Editions Conversion Table” is also included, plus the dice-drop charts support ascending or descending AC, depending on your preference and system.

I’m a little bit less in love with the included adventures.  They are interesting and all, but I can’t help but feel that the space they use would have been better served with more tools.  And make no mistake, this book is a toolkit.  There are tools for quickly building street maps, tools for populating businesses, for naming taverns, for organizing relationships between NPC’s.

Portable, incredibly useful, interesting art, helpful tables and not a single square inch of wasted space.  This book is fundamentally different than what you see coming out of any major RPG design company.  I can only wish that Gary Gygax was as good at book design as Zak S is.

The only downside is that it took a long time for me to get it.  But Jim Raggi dealt with that problem in an admirable fashion.  Thanks, Zak and Jim – now I have to reevaluate what I expect from BOTH and RPG supplement AND an RPG seller.

Discussing The Steel Remains

Over at The Silver Key and Dweomera Lagomorpha about some of the recent trends in fantasy literature.  This started as a post on Brian's website, but it outgrew that, so I moved it over here.

The thing that's really clarified this discussion to me is the comment by Richard Morgan that Brian quoted -  something along the lines of this not being fantasy for 13-year-olds.

I think that fundamentally what we see as "high fantasy": the Lord of the Rings, the Ranger's Apprentice, Harry Potter - this is a very 13-year-old view of the world.  The clear good/evil dichotomy, a heroes always win assumption, sexless "romance".  It's a very "immature" perspective. Of course, many of these books explore other things - the Lord of the Rings deals extensively with friendship, loyalty, leadership and honor - but the context, the world and it's assumptions - they're simplistic.

Lots of fantasy book reminds me of a terrible Arthurian movie from the early '90's called "First Knight".  It's medieval england, but everyone is clean, the good guys wear shiny armor and crisp blue uniforms, and the bad guys wear black furs.  It's flat - it leaves no lasting impression.  It's the middle ages as seen by the SCA.  Excalibur, on the other hand, is not clean, the heroes are not clear, good things don't always happen to the good guys.  It's more "adult" and a better movie for it.

As we get older, we realize things about the world: we realize that being a good person does not mean necessarily that good things happen to us, we learn that there are many perspectives on things, we hopefully learn about sex, and hopefully we don't learn too much about violence, but we know that there are lots of things in life that a 13-year-old has no awareness of.

So when Morgan talks about The Steel Remains as "adult" - he's right.  It depicts a world much more like the one we know as adults.  Sure - the violence is a bit much, and the sex scenes are maybe a bit gratuitous. In terms of the world that it presents - complete with grit, sex, religious extremism, selfishness and violence - it's a grown-up world.  It's not automatically better because of that, but it feels more tangible to me - the taste of it is clearer.  Yes, the Lord of the Rings is also very deep and powerful, with a clear and detailed world.  But The Steel Remains didn't take 12 years to write (or require 30 years of world-building).

The Burning Land IS a better example of how to create an adult fantasy (although you could easily argue that it's Historical Fiction, which is a bit of a different genre).   It's a bit less gratuitous, a bit more focussed, and with characters that I empathize with a bit more.  It uses the same ingredients, though - Morgan just likes more of the sex and violence and less of the finely-researched historical detail.  He's a better futurist, anyways, while Cornwell is a better historian.  They both write books that are more "adult" than a lot of fantasy, which is why I read and enjoy their work.

New Fantasy Books

Glen Cook, I can't thank you enough.  The fantasy genre was a bland pretty place before you came along.  All that high fantasy was getting pretty old - sure there was the Thieves' World series, which was introducing a darker, grittier version of the fantasy genre to people, but it wasn't until Glen Cook's Black Company series that shit got real.

Well, not real - but different.  Darker.  The Black Company is the first fantasy series that I'm aware of that draws heavily on the military stories coming back from the Vietnam war.  Books like Chickenhawk, Fields of Fire and the excellently-titled Conduct to the Prejudice of Good Order deal with the experience of war in a way that previous fantasy fiction hadn't.  War, and the experience of making war and of living life as a soldier were brought to the fore by these books, and many of the themes started making the jump into fantasy around the start of the '80s.

That's not to say that they weren't around before that.  Much of REH's Conan stuff was pretty darn gritty, and actually holds up pretty well today.  Red Nails ain't no picnic, that's for sure.  So the darker themes have always been there, sometimes lighter, sometimes heavier.  We seem to be getting into a darker shade of dark phase here, though.

I just picked up Joe Abercrombie's "The Heroes" and "The Steel Remains" by Richard Morgan.  Just as a caveat - I like this kind of fantasy.  Eddings and his "indoor plumbing" fantasy worlds were fine when I was 13, but I frankly enjoy stuff with a little more hair on it's chest these days.  Hell, I read hours of board books to my 2-year-old, I don't need more kiddie stuff when I actually get some time to read myself.

I had slightly mixed feelings about Abercrombie's last novel - "Best Served Cold".  The only character that I really liked, Caul Shivers, turned into a total bastard by the end of it, and I never really came around to rooting for Mercatto.  She didn't really seem to learn much in the course of the novel.  But "The Heroes" is a much better story.  It actually reminded me a bit of Jeff Shaara's "The Killer Angels" in terms of categorizing the effects of war on various individuals involved, from new recruits to veterans on both sides.  It was a much more interesting novel, and the better of the two.

As for the Morgan, I really, really like the Takeshi Kovaks series and I'm reading 13 right now, with Market Forces queued up on the ebook reader - so I'm a fan.  I wasn't blown away by "The Steel Remains" though.  It was interesting - kept me entertained and turning pages right through to the end, but I can see how it wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea.  You don't see gay male characters much in fantasy - I can think of only 2 other series off the top of my head, so that might put some people off, and the violence is pretty Morgan-ish, but I've read his other stuff, so it wasn't that far off.  It just never really grabbed me like the Kovaks books did.  Looks like it's the first of a trilogy, though - so we'll see where it goes.

So good times in fantasy if you like yours with a bit more spit and a bit less polish.  If you want a decent middle road, the new Ian Esselmont, Stonewielder, might be a good pickup.  That guy has steadily improved since his underwhelming first book, and now I find I'm enjoying his stuff more than Erikson - which is quite a thing for me to say.

Half-Made World: A Book Review

Wow.  This book came out of nowhere and blew me away.  It's without question the best new author pickup I've had since I randomly picked up Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville.  Half-Made World has a lot of Mieville-esque elements to it, in fact.  The novel is 1-part western, 1-part steampunk and 1-part horror, with a solid dash of fantasist, stirred just the right amount.

To an RPG gamer, especially one raised on the tradition of D&D, this book brings an interesting twist to the concepts of Law and Chaos.  The fantastic, "half-made" west of the novel is a place where many of the traditional ideas of the western are taken from the realm of the psychological and made real.  The world literally gets less real, less "formed" as one moves further west, and the western ocean is a sea of raw chaos from which gods, spirits and creatures form spontaneously.

Contesting for this potential country are the opposing forces of the Gun and the Line.  The Gun is represented by the Agents - criminals and anarchists with supernatural powers who rely on subversion, sabotage and stealth.  They prefer to avoid direct confrontation, and instead work through cats-paws and unknowing dupes.  The chaos and lawlessness of the old west is a clear influence on the Gun, and the fact that their powers are granted directly by the spirit-infused weapons they bear makes the metaphor even stronger.

The Line, on the other hand, is represented by the Engines - massive locomotives possessed of malign intelligence that plot and scheme to spread their railway tendrils and industrial-hell stations across the land.  Thousands of Men of the Line serve them - hammered into faceless cogs by the infernal sound of the engines.  Black-clad, gas-mask wearing and using steampunk weapons like motor-guns and heavier-than-air helicopters, the Line are methodical, unstoppable and terrifying forces of "progress".

The two forces clash in the "unfinished" west as they both try to capture an old man, once general of the fallen and near mythical Red River Republic - the Camelot of the west, that once defied and fought off both the Gun and the Line, until it was torn down by both Powers.  The main characters, a female doctor from the settled north and a rebellious Agent of the Gun, flee from the Line into the far west, where they encounter the last remnants of a fallen history, and things far worse cast up out of the chaos of the western oceans.

The book has great characters, a setting that manages to be both fresh and familiar, and a great mythic-horror-western feel.  Lots to recommend here - I haven't heard of Felix Gilman before this, but he's on my must-read list now.

Fantasy Webcomic Lessons

There are some great webcomics out there on the underwebs.  In addition to being entertaining and cool to read, they can be a great source for DM inspiration.  Here are some of my favorite gaming webcomics, along with a cool gaming lesson I got from reading the comic:

Order of the Stick: The classic gaming webcomic.  OotS teaches us, above all, the value of the villain.  Xykon the Lich is exactly the kind of bad guy that the whole party can really love to hate.  Better yet, he presents a real threat.  Xykon is a capable adversary and comes back to (un)life, so you can use him over and over!

Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic: The name says it all.  This is a long-running fantasy comic that has run a number of plotlines over the years.  Starting off as a Dungeon-Keeper-esque monster comic, it's since evolved into an interesting collection of fantasy stories.

There are a ton of different ideas you can get from this comic, but the one that really jumped out at me is the way that the adventures have large-scale impact on the world.  Kingdoms rise and fall, village and cities are destroyed and the world changes.  Making sure that the actions of the players have an impact on the world is a great way to keep them engaged in the game.

Erfworld: What if you lived in a turn-based strategy game?  Erfworld is funny, violent and all-around great.  The funny aspect of Erfworld really caught my attention.  My best memories of gaming are the funny moments, intentional or, more often, unintentional.  The best lesson I got from Erfworld is that you can tell an awesome story AND keep your party snickering at the same time.

Goblins: Goblin PC's, lots of violence, and a character called Minmax.  What's not to like?  A couple of things from the Goblins comic really stand out for me.  The first is that a little metagaming is not a bad thing.  The characters in this comic (and OotS for that matter) discuss game rules the way we discuss things like gravity or oxygen - they represent the natural laws of the world, and therefore, must be talked about.  So let the players chat about rules and metagame - no need to even assume it's out of character...

The other really cool thing about Goblins, is the reminder that random tables are AWESOME.  Complains the goblin has a magical shield that causes a random effect when it is struck by a weapon.  It creates the most excellent fight scene in the comic so far, and random effects can have equally awesome impacts on your game, if you can let them (but then, I played a Wild Mage when Tome of Magic came out).

Challenges of Zona: This is a bit of a weird one.  It's got sex, violence and classic rock and roll, though!  The best lesson I learned from Zona is that heroes should be heroic.  There needs to be something that sets the characters apart from the common ruck of humanity - something that makes focusing on their adventures exciting and worthwhile.  Zona, Mentl, Tula and even Yatta-Ta (of Ir Anis) are capital-H heroes, which is what I think that characters in RPG's should be.

Girl Genius: Setting, setting, setting.  The three rules of fantasy real-estate!  The great characters, cool art and generally excellent steampunk/mad science story notwithstanding, it's the setting that really sets (hehe) Girl Genius apart from other webcomics.

 Alternative history/fantasy Europe, ruled by a powerful, ruthless Baron?  Check.

Crawling with monsters and worse, mad scientists?  Check.

Huge castle built by generations of the most insane and villainous of all the mad scientists?  Check.

Castle AI fragmented, homicidal and insane, with thousands of death traps at it's command?  Check.

Awesome?  Check and double check.

Anything I missed?  What are your favorite fantasy webcomics, and what gaming lessons did they teach you?

Towers of Midnight: Book Review

Have you ever sat down and eaten an entire pint of Haagen-daz?  Not really on purpose, but you just keep finding excused to keep eating, and pretty soon the entire pint is just... gone.

I did that with Towers of Midnight.  I kept meaning to go to bed.  Just a few more pages and I'll put it down.  It's getting late... better stop.  But I didn't stop.

I read this book until 2:30 in the morning, then got up and read for another hour to finish it.  It was mental.  I had to drive 8 hours the next day, and I was exhausted because I literally could not put this book down - that's something hasn't happened to me with a Wheel of Time book for a looong time.  So - that's a good thing.

But what was it, exactly, that kept me so engaged?

Some if it is definitely the feeling that a marathon is almost over.  I read the first Wheel of Time book when I was in junior high - 20 years ago or so.  After a run like this, it's hard not to try and sprint across the finish line.

Towers of Midnight was also a pretty compelling read, even though it had all the problems of the middle book in a trilogy.  There was a definite "Empire Strikes Back" vibe to it - lots of cool things happening, but you know that you won't get the real payoff until the next installment.  Still and all, this book accelerates the final race towards the conclusion of the series - wrapping up plot lines, bringing things together as much as possible.

In a fast-paced book like this, where the action comes quickly and time is at a premium, Sanderson's talents are really valuable.  He's better at straight action scenes, things like swordfights and mage battles, than Jordan was, which makes for some great scenes, like Perrin's battles with Slayer, and Egwene's fight against the Black Ajah in Tel'aran'rhiod.

There are some things that Sanderson doesn't do as well Jordan, though.  And Sanderson's voice is becoming a louder part of the book.  He's working off of Jordan's notes and partially-written manuscript, so it's inevitable that he has to fill in more gaps as time goes on.  In those gaps, we see more and more of Sanderson, which isn't always a bad thing, but the feeling of reading a book by a different author is getting stronger.

You really start to see the differences in this book when we read war scenes.  The big battles in the book are good, but I felt like they lacked something that Jordan brought to them.  Which isn't that surprising, as Jordan was a Vietnam veteran with combat experience.

The other real crack that shows here is Sanderson's take on Matt Cauthon.  Matt is a character that I always got the feeling Jordan really liked and identified with.  He was a more light-hearted, slightly comic character - a counterpoint to the damaged Rand and self-involved Perrin.  Unfortunately, Sanderson doesn't really do Matt justice.

Sanderson's Matt has all the essentials of the character.  He ogles women, swears a bit too much, and trusts his luck, but - like the war scenes, something's missing.  It doesn't feel like Sanderson really loves the character, so Matt's comes across a bit flat.  His Rand is much, much better, though - and his Perrin is pretty much the same as Jordan's.

Ultimately, the book is a great success.  It finishes off a lot of loose threads and sets the stage nicely for the last book in the series.  There is a bit more Sanderson here than in The Gathering Storm, but that doesn't detract from the book, so much as it changes it a little.  It's still a ripping story that moves at a great pace, has all your favorite characters and really sets up the coming finale.  If you like the Wheel of Time, you'll probably have a few quibbles with this book - but it's a great read.  Of course, if you've been reading these freaking books for the last 20 years, you don't have any choice but to read the damn thing.

Way of Kings: A Review

Way of Kings is the first book in the new Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson.  The name may ring a bell for fantasy fans.  That's because Sanderson was tagged by Robert Jordan's widow to be the writer that finished Jordan's... sprawling (let's just go with that) masterpiece, The Wheel of Time.

So, no pressure there, Brandon!  Just about 10 million people waiting to see if you can pull off wrapping up the approximately 50000000 dangling threads that Jordan left hanging there for ya.  Hell, the Fates couldn't spin that freaking story into a comprehensive narrative.  But I'll tell you this - I've read the first book of his wrap-up, and I enjoyed it more than ANY of the series, except the first 3, which were still reasonably-paced and before Jordan added a bunch of characters I don't give a shit about.  I'll give you a hint - I want to read about Matt.  And Perrin if you have to.

But anyways, I've wandered off-topic.  Sanderson has major chops as a fantasy author, and I've read pretty much all his other books, except for Warbreaker, which I just could not get into.  Generally, Sanderson does quite a few things well.  The biggest being, he doesn't stick to vanilla medieval fantasy settings.  Pretty much all his books are set in odd, magical or alien environments, with unique and neat magical powers that are both interesting and consistent.  He also writes fairly character-driven stories - there is very little of the "bring the maguffin to mount anti-maguffin" in his work.

So what you can expect from a Sanderson novel is - neat, imaginative world that is very different from a standard fantasy one, and interesting characters that have to deal with this world.

Which is what you get from Way of Kings.  Except... Sanderson seems to have caught a slight case of "Holy shit my publisher will let me write a really long book" from working on The Wheel of Time.  Way of Kings is long.  Like, 1000 pages long.  And it's supposed to be the first of... TEN.  So strap yourselves in, folks.  If you don't get really into this world and story within the first couple hundred pages, put that motherfucker down and leave - you don't want to get invested in something like this in a half-assed way.  This is a series for readers.

But really, if you're a fantasy fan, you'll probably find a lot to like here.  The series title refers to the "magical" energy source of the world, Stormlight.  This energy is brought to the world by massive storms, called Highstorms, that periodically sweep across the world, wreaking destruction but also bringing energy, which can be captured in gemstones.

It's clear that Sanderson has given a lot of thought to what a world affected by Highstorms would look like.  The storms have stripped much of the world of topsoil, and most wild animals are insect or crustacean-like, able to take cover and survive the Highstorms.  Grain is grown inside hard-shelled "rockbuds", and huge, lobster-like "chull" are beasts of burden.  So, cool enough setting that just exploring it is fairly interesting.

Sanderson also manages to create enough interesting characters to keep you engaged.  The self-loathing Assassin in White, the honorable and disenchanted Khaladin Stormblessed, the rigid warrior Dalinar Kholin and a number of others drive the plot forward as the fight to survive and to understand the magic and the world they live in.

Sanderson is also quite good at making the actual nature of the world and it's history mysterious to the reader and the characters, and it's a fun and engaging ride to learn truths (and lies) with them.  The book keeps up a fairly good momentum, rarely dropping into what my buddy Loren calls "the swamp" where you are forced to keep reading even though you're rather just stop, because you want to see if it gets interesting again.  So, no swamp, good characters, neat world.

The only real complaint I have about this book is that it's got a lot of the whole Ancient evil from the past returns to destroy the world thing going on.  Although that's been done to death, generally, Sanderson's well-thought-out world and past a mystery thing help keep it fresh enough not to seem too repetitive.  We are as much in the dark as most of the characters as to the nature of the threat, the "Desolation", so finding out bits and pieces from each character's narrative ties everything together and keeps you reading.

If you don't mind getting into a long haul, you should check this book out.  It's a good one.  And Sanderson, unlike Jordan, when he was alive, actually gets books finished and out - the only author in fantasy that keeps up an output like Sanderson is Steven Erikson - probably the subject of my next review!

Now I Understand (a book review)

I used to like RA Salvatore.

I know.  I KNOW.  I mean, The Crystal Shard came out in 1988, when I was 13 years old, so I have some excuse.  But by that point I'd read Tolkien and Howard and Lovecraft and Herbert, so I really have no excuse.

I read all the Forgotten Realms books, the Spelljammer books, the Dark Sun books...  plus a ton of other books.  So maybe I do have an excuse.  See, I read a LOT.  Like, 2-3 novels a week, on average, and it used to be a lot more.  I can go through a short novel in one sitting, 3-4 hours and bam.  A Steven Erikson takes a bit longer, and the addition of my daughter to my life, while TOTALLY AWESOME, also cuts into my reading time (and sleeping time, and eating time, and... time).

But back to RA Salvatore.  I bring him up because I have a beBook Reader (http://mybebook.com/) and I picked up RA's new novel, Gauntlgrym, for it.  I've read his books on and off for years, mostly to just fill in the gaps between interesting books, but also because I've always had a fond place in my heart for the Forgotten Realms, and for Bruenor Battlehammer (but not for that fucking Mary-Sue Drizzt).

Before I go any further, I should point out that I have been a fervent, sometimes even vicious, defender of 4e D&D since it's arrival.  I think that many of the complaints that people have about the game are straight-up stupid, and have not shied away from pointing that out.

BUT!  Upon reading Gauntylgrym, I gained new insight into some of those complaints.  I felt the nerd-rage, I steamed about the arbitrary and seemingly nonsensical changes.  I DRANK THE KOOL-AID.  On top of the normal problems that I have with an RA Salvatore novel - the 1-dimensional characters, the juvenile attempts at creating a "gritty" world, the unbelievably over-detailed fight scenes, the CONSTANT use of the word "Blasted".  Besides all that, there is the 4e stuff that is just arbitrarily dropped into the novel.

OK.  OK, I know he's writing with somebody else's IP, so he has to toe the line here, but the Spellplague, this massive, horrible world-changing event, gets maybe 2 lines in the novel.  And tieflings get added pretty much out of nowhere.  He mentions them "no longer lurking in the shadows".  But there are about 1000 of them in the book.  That's some serious motherfucking shadows, to loosely paraphrase Jules Winfield.

Also, there is a Primordial.  Titan-like gods would presumably have been noticed by the inhabitants of a planet that they occupied, one would think.  And he throws in a couple of 4e attack-power descriptions, like "the axe snapped down like the jaws of a wolf".  Fuck. Off.  Seriously - I like the idea of the 4e attack powers, but I can describe them just fine without you pounding them into my head.

In addition to those niggling issues, the book jumps forward through big chunks of time, presumably to catch the timeline up to current Realm cannon, but the jumps are handled so abruptly and clumsily, it feels like I'm reading about the first time I drove a stick shift.  Fine, fine, fine.. sudden forward lunge, fine, fine, stall.

And the book can't help but stall.  There are just so many annoying minor characters/antagonists, like the bisexual elf warrior-chick who wears earrings that show that she murders her lovers, and the crazy dwarf warrior who says everything in rhymes and laughs "Bwahaha" all the time.  He actually types it out, "bwahaha", a bunch of times.  You have to read through chapters of this mess, with idiotic, unpronounceable names, tissue-thin motivations, and loving details of all the foot-movements and stance-shifts of each interminable combat scene.

So, non-4e fans.  This book made me feel your pain.  It managed to make me dislike several things that I previously liked - 4e, Forgotten Realms, RA Salvatore novels.  Man, talk about multi-tasking.

More About the Slog

For those of you who aren't the sort of voracious fantasy novel readers that I am, the Rules of the Slog might be a somewhat obscure reference.  It's from the new R Scott Bakker novel, The Judging Eye, which is the first book of his second series, the Aspect-Emperor.

If you have not read R Scott Bakker, and are a fantasy fan, they're a very good read - the first 3 anyways.  The new one is a STUPENDOUS read, especially the portion about the dungeon-crawl into the Mansion of the Nonmen.  Really - this is Old-School at it's best.  A few high-level characters, Achamian, Kosoter, Cleric (actually an insane Nonmen wizard), a few mid-level henchmen, and a bunch of low-level grunts, the Skin Eaters, collectively.

The battle scenes in this book are fast-paced, gory and very, very fatal for most participants.  Enemies come out of the dark in shrieking waves, magic is brutally powerful, except when it fails totally, and high-level wizards are engines of destruction who are also terrifically fragile.  If you want to read pretty much exactly what OD&D dungeon-crawling is like, pick up this book!

The rules of the slog are the guidelines of the Skin Eaters, veterans of many trips into hostile territory, populated only by hordes of implacable enemies (aka, adventures).  They are fairly simple rules, enforced with a ruthless lack of compassion.  Rules like: No weepers on the slog.  Fail a morale check with these boys, and you don't get to go home...

For our new Rules Cyclopedia game, I'm working on our own set of "Rules of the Slog".  No, obviously we can't go killing the help - the orcs will take care of that for us, but I think I can come up with some excellent rules of thumb for those unfamiliar with this particular gaming genre.

1) HAVE A PLAN:  Pretty self-explanatory, you would think.  But actually put into place a lot less than you would expect.

2) DON'T PANIC:  If you run, you pretty much just die tired.  I'd rather have a TPK than get cut up piecemeal.

3) STAY IN FORMATION: That means you, thief!  I know you can backstab for tons of damage, but you wear leather and have 3 hp!  So stay the fuck behind the plate-mail and shield boys, OK?

4) IF IT LOOKS LIKE A TRAP, IT IS A TRAP:  The old neckbeards who wrote these modules were evil fucking bastards.

5)  TALK, THEN KILL:  This one is missed pretty often in the era of balanced encounters and milestones.  If you talk to them, you may not actually have to kill them, and better yet, they may not try to kill you.

6)  YOU ARE SQUISHY:  All character, the entire campaign long.  You never really get tough in a save-or-die environment.

I'm sure I'll think of more later.

Incorporating High Level NPC's

When I started this blog, I wanted to talk about two of my favorite things (but not brown paper packages, tied up with strings).  Those things are RPG's and fantasy novels.  Fantasy novels are great mind-fodder for any RPG player or GM.  They often have wonderful characters, settings, antagonists and ideas for you to crib, incorporate, rework or generally just assimilate into your games.

One series that I'm particularly fond of is the Malazan Book of the Fallen, by Steven Erikson.  The amazing scope, breadth of history, compelling characters and epic plots of the books really have to be read to be believed, but I think it's safe to say that, other than the Wheel of Time, another sort of series altogether, the Malazan Book of the Fallen is the most ambitious fantasy series ever written.  Lord of the Rings was ground-breaking and fantastic, but Erikson is a much more sophisticated writer.

One of the things that I like the most is the way that the books incorporate characters of various different power levels.  From the demigod-like ascendants, all the way down to the frequently deranged swamp-dwelling High Marshals of the Mott Irregulars (they are ALL High Marshals in the Mott Irregulars), pretty much every level of combat prowess or arcane power is represented.

I think that any DM who would like to work high-level NPC's into their game can learn a lot from Erikson's books.  In many cases, these high-level characters are powerful forces whose actions effect the less-powerful like natural disasters or forces of nature.  When titans clash, the wise get the heck out of Dodge.  

High-level NPC's don't just have to be mentors, rulers or antagonists.  They can also be inscrutable wanderers who occasionally devastate a continent for reasons only they know.  Or warring heroes whose battle destroy towns or countries.  It's possible to set all kinds of adventures around these kind of events.  Rescues, attacks that take advantage of the overall chaos, or even serving and supporting one of these powers, with or without their knowledge.  

So if you want some inspiration on creating a world where level 30 characters exist, then give the Malazan Books of the Fallen a read, and tell Kharsa Orlong I said hi.  From a fair distance.