When playing Dungeons & Dragons or other fantasy RPGs, have you ever wanted to play a space wizard? A gnome with a jet pack? Or a fighter with a flaming laser sword and a force field?
These options are all available to you in the new Starfinder RPG (Paizo, Amazon). Paizo has built the new science fantasy game to explore the distant future of their Pathfinder universe. Though I’ve been excited about it for over a year, since it was first announced, I’ve only just gotten the opportunity to play a full game of it.
So now that the game is more than an abstraction … now that I’ve actually rolled the dice and taken some damage … does it still hold up like I was hoping? Honestly: Even better.
But rather than just singing the praises of the game (which I’ve and others have already done here and here and elsewhere), I’m going to dive a bit deeper into how the game is similar – and different – from the Pathfindergame that we know and love.
Reportedly, Ernest Hemingway bet Howard Hawks that the director couldn’t make a good movie out of his worst book. Hawks took the bet and we ended up with Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not (it’s not Bogie’s best, but I vote Hawks the winner of the bet). Suppose I told you I could show you that one of what’s commonly considered among the worst Conan stories isn’t really that bad – and that it’s a pre-genre police procedural? Ready to take on the challenge?
In 2015, Black Gate‘s Discovering Robert E. Howard series showcased the breadth and diversity of REH’s writings. Boxing stories, westerns, science fiction, Solomon Kane, El Borak: Howard was an immensely talented author who wrote in a variety of genres. My first entry in the series was about Steve Harrison, Howard’s take on the hardboiled private eye with a weird menace twist. As you can read in that essay, Howard didn’t care for the genre and he abandoned it almost as quickly as he entered it. Today, I’m going to look at his lone police procedural. Yep – Robert E. Howard wrote a police procedural before the term was even in use. And it features Conan!
The general consensus is that Howard hit the mark with his fourth Conan story, “The Tower of the Elephant,” published in March of 1933. His first was “The Phoenix on the Sword,” which appeared in Weird Tales in December of 1932 and was a rewrite of an unpublished Kull story, “By This Axe I Rule.” Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, rejected the second, “The Frost Giant’s Daughter,” which to me, reads more like a chapter in a longer work than a self-contained story.
“The God in the Bowl” was probably written in early 1932 and was Howard’s third Conan story. Wright rejected this one as well and it did not see print in any form until an edited version by L. Sprague de Camp was published in 1952’s Space Science Fiction, Volume 1, Number 2 (the story has nothing to do with either space or science fiction…). De Camp did less chopping on this one than most of his Conan edits, but fans could finally read Howard’s original text in Donald Grant’s The Tower of the Elephant in 1975.
We’re living in the age of fake news. The Internet abounds with sites reporting child abuse rings hidden under pizzerias, skeletons of giants excavated in Israel, and cures for AIDS being suppressed by Big Pharma.
Just recently I got taken in for a minute by the reported death of Desmond Tutu shared by a Facebook friend. That story was on a plausible-looking African newspaper site. Only after I looked around the site did I realize it was the only story on it and the newspaper didn’t exist. Roll eyes. Run virus scanner.
But fake news isn’t new. In previous generations even the mainstream press regularly used it to boost sales, running outlandish stories to sell papers. Perhaps the most famous is the story in an 1890 issue of the Tombstone Epitaph about cowboys shooting down a pterodactyl, which led to the theory that it was the legendary Thunderbird and the creation of several faked photos. Other writers have created various fake stories to boost sales for their own newspapers.
One of these writers was no less a literary figure than Edgar Allan Poe.
Minster Lovell Hall with St. Kenelm’s Church to the left
As usual in the summer, my family and I are in Oxford, where I ensconce myself in the Bodleian Library and research my books. It’s been a rainy summer, in stark contrast to last month’s frying heat of Lanzarote, and so we haven’t been able to get out and about much. Good for my wordcount, bad for my travel addiction.
So when the clouds finally broke last weekend we rushed out onto an easy six-mile country ramble along the River Windrush to visit Minster Lovell Hall, a 15th century manor house set in the lovely English countryside.
A good proportion of exponents of German longsword might have bought this.
Greetings academic editors, writers and publishers! I am an educated lay reader of academic history books.
I hear academic publishing is… differently profitable at the moment, so perhaps you want to have a think about how to engage more people like me.
Really there must be a lot of us — people who want to get at the detail, the evidence, the debate, and so find ourselves buying weighty academic tomes.
We’re military history buffs who want to get into not just of equipment and tactics, but logistics and administration and sooner or later get dragged into context. You can’t, for example, be fascinated by Count Belisarius without wanting to know more about Byzantine History. Take a look at Osprey, an entire publisher devoted to satisfying that need !
We’re architectural history hobbyists — people who tick off castles and great houses the way twitchers do rare birds — who want to put flesh on the crumbling bones of some corners of history not covered by reliable mass market books. And we’re local historians trying to make sense of musty documents, mounds in fields, and half forgotten traditions.
We’re also Historical Reenactors looking for very specific information on how things were or might have been. We’re Historical European Martial Artists (yes, HEMA is a thing! Modern people do study Medieval Martial Arts!), looking to contextualise the original martial arts manuals around which our lives revolve.
And we’re writers, looking for inspiration, or just building a storyworld for our characters to inhabit.
Many Black Gate readers must fall into at least one of these categories, and we sometimes get a million hits a month…
I am, of course, all of the above with the exception of “local historian” (since all of western history is my backyard). I’m also a former technical author — conveying technical information to novices used to be my trade — and an author who thinks about writing. So it might be worth your while — O mighty academic editor, writer or publisher! — to hear what I have to say.
Upfront, you don’t need to dumb down or jazz up. The whole point of academic books is that they are academic! Rather you need to stop shooting yourself in the collective feet. Working from the outside in, here’s how…
The barbarian is pretty obviously Robert E Howard’s authorial self-projection into the Hyborian Age. Big, bellicose and amoral, but honourable and never mean. He’s mighty-thewed death on two legs, women fall into his arms, kingdoms fall at his feet. He male bonds when he falls into good company, and despite being a barbarian fish out of civilised water, he commands the loyalty of his men and the respect of those nobles worthy of respect.
He’s everything Robert E Howard was and wasn’t and might have been had the big Texan lived long enough to fight in WWII. (Imagine Howard as a veteran of Iwo Jima, and the great literature he would have written…)
And yet, Conan survived the oh-so-ironic later 20th century. One whiff of Thrud should consigned him to the company of Captain Future and Doc Savage: The emperor barbarian has no clothes on! He even weathered Terry Pratchett’s slash and burn through the genre.
Was it just that Howard invented Sword and Sorcery?
No. Conan’s literary longevity is more than just about being first with sandals on the ground.
Last summer I went to visit some of my in-laws and the World’s Coolest Nephew in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, and disappointed our dear editor John O’Neill by missing the Piracy Museum.
Well, I just got back from another trip to Lanzarote, and this time I made it there! The Piracy Museum is housed in the 15th century Castillo de Santa Barbara and is a delightfully cheesy tourist trap. You get cardboard cutouts of pirates, a mock up of a ship complete with a cabin boy taking a dump, televisions playing old pirate movies, and of course a big Jolly Roger. You even get a bit of history.
I recently met a woman whose father-in-law had been a federal prison guard at a medical prison that held the “Blind Sheikh” back around the time of the 9/11 terrorist attack. The Blind Sheikh (Omar Abdel-Rahman) was an associate of Osama bin Laden and the planner behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing — one of the early “masterminds” of Al Qaeda. In other words, a real life counterpart to the nastiest, most nefarious villains in our fictional thriller novels and cinema fare.
She told me that her dad-in-law spoke to the Sheikh a couple times, as could be expected: casual banter will occasionally happen between guards and the imprisoned criminals they are guarding. She said the Sheikh seemed friendly enough to her father-in-law, but she added, “The Sheikh told him that we worship three gods. That was a big issue he had with us, that we worship three gods. So much of it was cultural misunderstanding.”
When you’re writing that first draft, standard advice is: Don’t go back to edit!
Make like Omar Khayyám:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
Or if you prefer, Guderian:
Ticket to the last station.
Yes, the ideal first draft is a blitzkrieg: rampage onward with the story, ignore pockets of resistance, you can catch them on the second draft.
However, you are neither a medieval Persian ruminating on life, nor a Panzer general. For all we like to skin it with the aesthetic or the macho, writing is its own activity. The truth, so I’ve learned, is more complex.
Go on a Traveller RPG forum and ask for book recommendations, and somebody will suggest Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta’s War series — a series that has just spawned a rather good sequel, Vatta’s Peace.
The Vattabooks are, of course, a really good read. They’re gritty and realistic — it helps that Moon’s ex-military. They’re also fast-paced and well-written, they have vivid characters you enjoy hanging out with, and a strong female protagonist (or two). The same can be said of her other big SF series, affectionately known among my friends as “Scary Horse Aunts In Space” (*) but it’s the Vattabooks that come up because they feel a lot like Traveller, meaning they fit my definition of Star Punk:
Set in [a] spacefaring civilization… where… technology has somehow failed to eliminate the human element, where you still need a human to pull the trigger or pilot the scout ship, and where nanotechnology, 3D-printing and vertical farms have neither eliminated trade, nor ushered in a crime-free post scarcity society. They all involve individuals or companions — adventurers, traders, investigators, contractors — pursuing goals of only local significance. (*)
Except for not being an ensemble piece, the series really could be a superior Travellercampaign! It even kicks off with Ky operating as a free trader having left Naval Academy due to a scandal — did somebody fail her survival roll during character generation? It expands to encompass family corporations, commercial espionage, romance, family drama, conspiracy, politics, atrocity, piracy and ultimately set-piece space battles.
However, it rarely loses sight of the business of space travel. Our intrepid hero must deal with crew, repairs, finance, quirky local custom, in addition to the issues around using a civilian ship in armed conflict against pirates and other enemies… this is like a story from the 1970s, but with a tighter plot, modern diversity and values, and much better writing.
The setting — the worldbuilding — is also very Traveller-like in that the technology is limited in such a manner as to create a near-future-but in spaaace feel. Moon achieves this mostly by deploying the third of the options identified in the my last article: she turns the technology against itself.
When playing Dungeons & Dragons or other fantasy RPGs, have you ever wanted to play a space wizard? A gnome with a jet pack? Or a fighter with a flaming laser sword and a force field?
How is Conan not a Mary Sue?
